Global Warming---clean thread

[jpeps]

"Solar Cells Linked to Greenhouse Gases Over 23,000 Times Worse than Carbon Dioxide According to New Book, Green Illusions - PR Newswire - The Sacramento Bee"

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/04/453640 ... house.html


BTW/ I'm in favor of taking environmental pollution seriously, which means examining all the data.

[RetroTechGuy]

"Solar Cells Linked to Greenhouse Gases Over 23,000 Times Worse than Carbon Dioxide According to New Book, Green Illusions - PR Newswire - The Sacramento Bee"

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/04/453640 ... house.html


BTW/ I'm in favor of taking environmental pollution seriously, which means examining all the data.

Solar PV (photovoltaic) has long been a dirty manufacturing process.

Typically, we haven't worried about the waste products because we did it in someone else's back yard (e.g. developing Asian countries).

I'm hoping that we get some of the ink-jet technologies, using polymer PV coatings going. The plastic substrates aren't terribly dirty, the polymer spray won't last as long as crystalline silicon (due to UV degradation of the plastics and the inks), but should be sufficiently cheaper to make it very competitive.

Solar thermal is also a good route, and can access a larger fraction of the available energy -- though it is a "messy" process to effciently convert heat to electricity (still, one could argue that the heat was "free", so...). The conversion should be no more messy than coal -- but the plant size will be much larger (and require a thermal battery to provide night time power).

Wind has similar issues that we need a better energy storage system, to cover for times when the wind doesn't blow. And, of course, there is the common "not in my back yard" when it comes to placement of such power plants.

PV has its place, but I don't think it's the best choice for large, stationary power plants.

And, as I've said over and over and over again, while I oppose the validity of the "global warming" hypothesis, there are many other reasons to reduce energy consumption and waste.

[RetroTechGuy]

BTW,

Here is a synopsis of a paper comparing the cost/energy gain for ethanol versus biodiesel.

http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Hill-zFa ... diesel.pdf

(the other thing to keep in mind is that farm equipment doesn't run on ethanol, it runs either diesel or gas, so by farming ethanol, you trade fossil fuels for ethanol. Biodiesel could be fed directly back into the manufacture process)

[disciple]

BTW/ I'm in favor of taking environmental pollution seriously, which means examining all the data.

In particular it would mean looking at the actual pollution, rather than comparing the "global warming potential" of gas emissions to CO2

[aarf]

And news followers will have noted that the Bering Sea currently has the most ice ever, the Antarctic
the thickest ice ever, Australians have just had their coolest summer in 100 years and their winter
highland snow has already arrived, whereas it normally comes in July. And yet the UN is trying to
convince a now-awakening public that this cooling means warming.

from "A Scam to Levy More Taxes"
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion ... 83626.html
not saying I totally agree just airing a view. no mention of earthquakes.

[disciple]

no mention of earthquakes

How do earthquakes fit in?

[aarf]

no mention of earthquakes

How do earthquakes fit in?

the earth it mostly metal, when you heat metal it expands. the crust is solid so when it is being expanded something must give. if the heating and cooling is being magnified one would expect more earth movements, no? solid earthquake data would seem to be easy to obtain and analyse. planatary alignment would also need to be considered in the analysis as gravity forces are not insignificant.

[Flash]

From http://iceagenow.info/2012/03/bering-se ... nt-1979-2/

The Bering Sea stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Arctic ice cap, where sea ice extent was below average in both January and February. Ice cover was down drastically on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Arctic, including the Kara, Barents, and Laptev Seas, where air temperatures were 4 to 8 degrees Celsius (7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm.

See also here.

What's being left out of the other reports mentioned? For instance, Australia may have seen its coolest summer in 100 years (measured how?), what about the rest of the planet? Australia is a tiny fraction of the total area of Earth. The smallest continent, in fact.

As for the book Green Illusions, While I like a lot of the writer's thinking, I think he deliberately overstates the impact of the gases he talks about. None of them are vented in large quantity. SF6 in particular is used as a high voltage insulator. I don't know of any other use for it in semiconductor manufacturing. There just isn't much of it in a high voltage tank, and such tanks are not opened very often. I suppose the SF6 they contain is simply vented when a tank is opened, but I don't know. It may be pumped into a holding tank instead. I don't know what the other two gases mentioned are used for, but I don't think they are strictly necessary for the production of solar cells. Other ways could be found to do whatever it is they do, and in any case I doubt that very much of them is released into the atmosphere. Nevertheless, it would behoove the industry to stop using them.

At one point Zehner says:

...It is hard to conceive of a justification for extracting taxes from the working class to fund installations of Stone Age photovoltaic technologies high in the gold-rimmed suburbs of Arizona and California...

"Stone Age?" First, what's wrong with that if it does the job silently and reliably? Second, has he ever parked his car in a Walmart parking lot in Phoenix in July? All classes, not just the working class, would be happy for covered parking in Arizona and Southern California, I assure you. Why not kill two birds with one stone and cover those parking lots with solar cells?

[aarf]

also from links at flashes site :
http://iceagenow.info/2011/09/sea-level ... e-decline/
[quote] Sea Level Continues Inexorable Decline
by ROBERT on SEPTEMBER 16, 2011
The two-year-long decline is continuing at a rate of 5mm per year
“The latest sea level numbers are out,

[RetroTechGuy]

"Stone Age?" First, what's wrong with that if it does the job silently and reliably? Second, has he ever parked his car in a Walmart parking lot in Phoenix in July? All classes, not just the working class, would be happy for covered parking in Arizona and Southern California, I assure you. Why not kill two birds with one stone and cover those parking lots with solar cells?

Why not cover them?

I'll answer that in one word: Indium (and perhaps you want to look up something like "peak indium")

We need a better technology for PV.

Unless you're thinking solar-thermal, over the parking lots.

[RetroTechGuy]

From http://iceagenow.info/2012/03/bering-se ... nt-1979-2/

The Bering Sea stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Arctic ice cap, where sea ice extent was below average in both January and February. Ice cover was down drastically on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Arctic, including the Kara, Barents, and Laptev Seas, where air temperatures were 4 to 8 degrees Celsius (7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit) above the norm.

Of course, the air has virtually no heat capacity. The ocean dominates the issue -- it has the mass, the depth and the heat capacity. In second place is the soil (the active soil depth is usually taken as about 10 meters).

You can empirically confirm this low heat capacity by walking outside in the evening, when there are no clouds. On winter nights this nearly immediate cooling will be extremely apparent. Thus, if this atmospheric heat is not stored elsewhere....it had radiated into space...

So, measuring air temperatures in order to claim we are heading towards thermal runaway is truly faulty.

Second, by what means did they measure "sea ice". Over how many centuries are they comparing data (they need considerable data, if they wish to call it "anomalous").

Since we're talking "anomalous", keep in mind that the solar cycle is about 11 years. The Hale cycle is about 22 years (alternating solar cycles), and the Wolf-Gleissberg cycle is about 80 years (70-100 years). So we've had satellites doing this work for about 1 Hale cycle (certainly less than 2).

We know that the sun has been more active for the last 100 years, than the previous 1,000 (and perhaps much longer -- some estimates in the range of 10-15,000 years).

So we need to define "anomalous", before examining and assigning relevance to the data.

[RetroTechGuy]

Dr. Hug performed a laboratory measurement of energy absorption under doubling of CO2:

http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm

The reader can easily confirm that the IPCC's concern has been the 15um band. Dr. Hug's experimental results demonstrate the gross overestimate of activity which has been promoted by the IPCC.

Note: the other CO2 bands compete with water vapor, and have effectively no contribution (as water vapor is the strongest "greenhouse gas", and has already absorbed the available energy in those bands).

The 15um band is "saturated" (i.e. virtually all of the available energy has already been absorbed) -- see the well known Beer's Law. So CO2 doubling has virtually no effect.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/realc ... usion.html

(if you want to worry about something, worry about methane, whose absorption band lies in the center of the atmospheric window)

[Bruce B]

(if you want to worry about something, worry about methane, whose absorption band lies in the center of the atmospheric window)

I recently read that the melting of the ice at the north pole area, (maybe south pole also), causes a considerable amount of methane gas to be released.

Opinion if you please.

~

[disciple]

Well, if you subscribe to the theory that (1) the globe is warming, because of (2) natural cycles and increased sunspot activity, then it's still all the sun's fault.

[RetroTechGuy]

(edit: oh crap! Crud, crud, crud... I thought I was replying to my own post, but instead edited out the methane discussion! If someone happened to "scrape" the content into a file, PM me and I'll put it back up... Otherwise, I'll try to rebuild it from memory when I get a bit of time. I moved the Beer's Law discussion into the next post).

[RetroTechGuy]

(Note: moved this to a new entry, and will see if I can recover/restore the methane post, with all the data for the previous message).

Here's a nice image of atmospheric energy transmission (1km path):

http://www.coseti.org/images/atmosphe.gif

Note that 1km of air flattens the 15 um band transmission, where CO2 absorbs.

No-one asked why this graph was interesting, but let me explain anyway.

Beer's law tells us how to evaluate the transmission through an absorber.

http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/hwb/chemistry ... beers1.htm

The transmission % is the final intensity over the initial intensity.

Each layer has the same ratio, even though the power drops each time.

Suppose the transmission was 5% (0.05 of Initial). If I stack 2 layers, the intensity input to the second layer, is the output from the first layer.

So the transmission would be: 0.05*0.05 = 0.0025 = 0.25%

The atmosphere is nominally 10 km thick (you can run some calculations to see how much gas lies in the vertical column, and compare to the gas in the 1 km path in the image), so the atmospheric transmission would be (transmission fraction)**10 (10 layers, 1 km each).

The 15um band is clearly (visibly) not 5% on that graph, but lets use that number for the sake of argument. The transmission at that CO2 concentration would be:

(0.05)**10 = 9.77E-14 of the initial intensity (0.00000000000977%). Thus the power absorbed would be (1-9.77E-14) of the initial intensity.

The effect of CO2 doubling is to essentially double the path length (there are then twice as many CO2 molecules per unit length).

So again using the example above, the transmission would then be:

0.05**20 = 9.54E-27

But the power difference is essentially nil, either way.

Peak solar (outside the atmosphere) is about 1350 W/square-meter (less makes it to the Earth). Suppose that all of that energy lies in the 15um band (no visible at all). What would be the energy difference between the 2 calculations?

Well, we break it into 2 blocks. The first 10km, and the second 10 km (the added effective thickness). The power remaining after the first 10 is 1.32E-10 W/square meter. Assume that the second half absorbs all of the remaining energy, how much extra energy would be absorbed?

[Flash]

Absorption is only half the issue. The other half is re-radiation, and that's why CO2 is said to be a "greenhouse" gas. Like H2O and methane, it re-radiates, then re-absorbs that re-radiation, in its absorption bands. This keeps the infrared radiation trapped within the atmosphere since it's absorbed by CO2, H2O and methane in the atmosphere before it can fly off into space. Since the atmosphere is densest nearest Earth's surface, all that infrared radiation flying around tends to heat us up.

[RetroTechGuy]

Absorption is only half the issue. The other half is re-radiation, and that's why CO2 is said to be a "greenhouse" gas. Like H2O and methane, it re-radiates, then re-absorbs that re-radiation, in its absorption bands. This keeps the infrared radiation trapped within the atmosphere since it's absorbed by CO2, H2O and methane in the atmosphere before it can fly off into space. Since the atmosphere is densest nearest Earth's surface, all that infrared radiation flying around tends to heat us up.

But the atmosphere really doesn't store that energy. You can empirically test this by noting how cold the air is in the evening -- and how quickly it cools (this is likely to be very obvious in Arizona - the sun has gone down, what are your atmospheric temperatures now, compared to what they were at noon?).

So here's an exercise. What is the heat capacity of the atmosphere? How large is the heat capacity of the first 10 meters of soil, in comparison. How large is the heat capacity of the first 700 meters of the ocean, in comparison? (there are arguments about the thermally active depth of the ocean, but most use ~700 meters, while others argue from 300 to 3000 meters)

If energy is being stored, in which of these will the most energy be stored?

Regarding "re-radiates, then re-absorbs that re-radiation" that does not double the energy. If I absorb 1 watt, then re-radiate, then reabsorb, there is still only 1 watt total. There is no multiplier for "stored energy" (temperature is an artifact of "stored energy").

We again note that the CO2 already effectively scrapes all the energy in its 15 micron absorption band. We have been trying to pin the "crime" on CO2, after all.

And, unless this energy is stored elsewhere (e.g. the ocean or soil), then it is ultimately lost (quite quickly, I might add).

And, of course, what happens when that radiation is absorbed by the ocean is it tends to create water vapor, which then transports enormous quantities of energy into the upper troposphere, and then releases it (i.e. rain -- phase change). Otherwise, there should be a reportable temperature increase (and not one produced by fudging the numbers, as has been going on recently -- Trenberth has been trying to explain the "missing heat" inconsistency with his model versus actual measurements).

Without an actual understanding of the water cycle, the computer models are worthless (these models do not correctly model/predict water vapor or clouds).

BTW, you might find some of Dr. Roger Pielke's positions interesting:

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/m ... lusions-2/

This one is interesting as well:

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2 ... quirement/

There is a major risk, of course, in making CO2 the only villain in climate change, and in making definitive forecasts of what the climate will do in the coming decades. The risk is that if the IPCC forecasts do not occur as projected, then the credibility of the climate science community will be lost for a long time. This would be tragic as we need an effective climate policy to deal with the threats that climate variability and change pose to society.

[RetroTechGuy]

BTW, since the term "greenhouse" always comes up, here is how a greenhouse actually works:

http://www.thediygreenhouse.com/how-do- ... uses-work/

Thermal Mass

Of course, the air is not the only thing that gets heated by the sun. Everything else in the greenhouse gets heated to a different extent. Wood, water, soil and bricks get heated slowly and release heat slowly. Iron and aluminum warm up fast, and release heat fast. This is particularly important at night, when the stored heat or ‘thermal mass’, slowly releases the heat, keeping the temperature in the greenhouse warm even when the sun is not there to heat it up. That is why it is so important to design the greenhouses carefully, using materials that have the ability to store and release large quantity of heat slowly. Wooden frame, brick greenhouse floor, open plant trays full of soil, all store and release heat slowly, and are more useful to keeping the greenhouse temperature optimal at night than iron or aluminum, which heat fast, but lose the heat fast as well.

Without warming the soil or water tanks, the greenhouse could get very cold overnight.

[jason.b.c]

global warming is a joke....!!!! sorry people....