The New York Times, and a whole bunch of bloggers, lament American's move to make flying more costly and less convenient. We seem to have a grand national amnesia when it comes to carbon and flying. Cap and trade isn't going to do any good unless we do less of things like drive and fly--and most of the city loving coastal types I know want to do much, much more flying, because international travel is incredibly important to them. Yet a few long haul flights a year are the carbon equivalent of driving an SUV in an exurb.
Either we get upset about doing less driving and flying, or we get upset about climate change. We cannot simultaneously fix both problems.
Ah, but what if we get other people to fly and drive less?
"We cannot simultaneously fix both problems."
That's the talk of the old politics. Obama is going to rescue us from that.
You say "we cannot" but I join with all progressive, non-reactionary Americans in chanting "Yes we can!"
Si, si se puede!
Mwahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Let's stop worrying about "climate change" and keep flying and driving affordable. I don't want to live in a world where only pompous plutocrats like Al Gore can fly, while they buy carbon "indulgences", all so we can try to keep the earth's average temperature from going up 1 degree over the next century. Let the climate change, if it even will to a noticeable degree. People will adapt, or they'll move. Focus energy on real environmental problems (e.g., the air pollution in China that Fallows describes in the current Atlantic).
Either we get upset about doing less driving and flying, or we get upset about climate change. We cannot simultaneously fix both problems.
The trade-off is simpler than that.
Less driving and flying will not "fix" climate change. If you believe the IPCC, Kyoto and such have a negligible effect on future temperatures. If you believe that the solar-cycle drove the warming from 1970 to 1998, then it is completely out of your hands.
Either way, you can get upset about "climate change" if you want to, but it won't help ...
You're right: flying, as currently practiced, is bad for the environment. But I have hope that we can find a technological solution that allows us to move long distances in a reasonable amount of time without as much damage to the planet.
This isn't necessarily just about climate change. We're also going to have to change the way we travel because oil is becoming more scarce. (So, whoever finds this technological solution is likely to make a lot of money.)
"Let the climate change, if it even will to a noticeable degree. People will adapt, or they'll move."
Move!? Move where? We're talking about global climate change, not local. And while some locales will be affected more than others, the change is a global one.
Interesting ... Standard Carbon, whose business is allowing people to buy carbon offsets, suggests the same carbon offset for airliner or car travel (1 lb of CO2 per mile; a little more if using an SUV) See their calculations here. Of course, you can put on a lot more miles in a day of flying than a month of driving.
Let's stop worrying about "climate change" and keep flying and driving affordable.
It's not clear that's possible. The costs of flying and driving are not being driven up by actions against global-warming, but by the high price of oil. Actually, the price of driving for most people can be reduced considerably by greater fuel efficiency and more passengers per vehicle. Those two things together could cut the fuel costs of driving by 50-75% (drive a 35MPG car with two people instead of a 17MPG car with one). But it's much harder with flying -- airplanes are already pretty full (been on a lightly loaded flight lately? I haven't). And although newer planes like the 787 are somewhat more efficient, the difference is nowhere near as great as switching from an SUV to a Prius.
what do you meeeeeaaan I can't have anything I want! /petulant
actually we have grand national amnesia about a lot of things, plus the best blinders money can buy about what it really costs to do something.
"our current ailine industry wasn't designed for $130 a barrel oil" - some industry guy on TV.
Yeah? Didn't they think it wouldn't eventually happen? There is a finite amount of everything on this planet, which means the price is going to change. Everyone will have to change too. Ultimately changes in the market will effect the amount of CO2 produced more than any scheme of taxing or credit. Because the energy production of elements that produce CO2 when consumed will go up in price due to the difficulty in getting the elements.
We WILL have to convert for a lot of reasons, but mostly because you can't get something for nothing...
I have no trouble with airlines cutting flights or even consolidating if it means they might stay/become solvent. They're not entitled to make money, but they're sure as hell entitled to try.
The add-on fees, however, are cowardly BS. If they're too chicken to tack $15 to the cost of a flight then they deserve to be ridiculed. Charging for the FIRST checked bag is contemptible.
There's nothing wrong with high-speed rail. And high-speed rail need not be fossil-fuel dependent. There's also the fun fact that high-speed rail can be much, much faster than travel by plane, though I don't know how long it will be before such a thing becomes economically feasible - it's very capital-intensive.
Kinda sorta. The price of oil has been driven upward by the increasing demands for energy of China and India. However, environmental concerns have kept US oil reserves out of production for decades. If we had brought on line our reserves in Alaska and off shore, world supply would be higher today and the price of oil would be lower. The cost of gasoline (as opposed to oil) is higher than it need be because of a shortage of refinery capacity. Again, it's been primarily environmental concerns that have kept us from building more refineries. So, it's true that the current impetus for higher energy have little to do with global warming worries. It's also untrue to say that environmental concerns have had no effect on prices.
Complaints about fees for checked bags don't have anything to do with the environmental impact of air travel. The question is whether airlines encourage everyone to carry on their bags or facilitate checking them, and how that is handled has no apparent evironmental impact.
A number of airlines charge fees for a second bag, the weight of which might have some impact on jet fuel usage, and most of the blog comments I saw regarding this issue accepted that as reasonable.
What's next? Decrying standup comics who do routines about lousy airline food as environmentally insensitive?
"However, environmental concerns have kept US oil reserves out of production for decades. If we had brought on line our reserves in Alaska and off shore, world supply would be higher today and the price of oil would be lower. "
Those reserves, other than ANWR, were not economically viable to exploit until the recent price spike. ANWR was only viable assuming there was not going to be another price collapse al la the late 90s. Under no conceivable circumstance could any of that oil possibly be on the market today.
Actually, you can. The solution works just like any other liberal solution:
Coastal elites keep flying, and cars are taken away from the working people.
Expensive? Well, raise taxes on the middle class, and pass more tax breaks for hedge funds.
It's pretty easy being a liberal.
ScentOfViolets:
Actually, there is. High-speed rail requires land in very expensive areas.
Uh-huh. Do elaborate on why this is such a deal-killer. Especially since the same objection has applied to various airports in the past.
Vactrain, to the rescue!
The add-on fees, however, are cowardly BS. If they're too chicken to tack $15 to the cost of a flight then they deserve to be ridiculed. Charging for the FIRST checked bag is contemptible.
Why?
Decent rail service would help by eliminating flights under 500 miles or maybe even 750 or 1,000 if we had decent high speed.
We have Horizon Air flights between Portland and Seattle every hour for most of the work day. It si already faster to take the train even with the slow Amtrak we have now when you factor all the waiting time required to fly. The problem is the schedule isn't very conventient.
"People will adapt, or they'll move. Focus energy on real environmental problems (e.g., the air pollution in China that Fallows describes in the current Atlantic).
Posted by Fred | May 22, 2008 2:58 PM"
Unless you live in Bangladesh, then you're fucked. But you don't care about drowning dark-skinned people anyway.
ScentOfViolets: Very simple. you can buy the land you need for an airport quite easily. You just need a patch of land around three miles long and a mile wide. You can hunt around and find that sort of land within driving distance to a major market. Any patch that size will do.
It is a significantly different problem to build a rail line where you need many times the land, and it all has to line up in a relatively straight line.
The only countries to build a truly large-scale independent-track HSR system like France and Japan have done so by taking the land at gunpoint and displacing great multitudes.
Which isn't so bad if you're the liberal surveying it all from your Gulfstream, but is pretty unpleasant when you're newly homeless and broke.
ScentOfViolets: Very simple. you can buy the land you need for an airport quite easily. You just need a patch of land around three miles long and a mile wide. You can hunt around and find that sort of land within driving distance to a major market. Any patch that size will do.
It is a significantly different problem to build a rail line where you need many times the land, and it all has to line up in a relatively straight line.
The only countries to build a truly large-scale independent-track HSR system like France and Japan have done so by taking the land at gunpoint and displacing great multitudes.
Which isn't so bad if you're the liberal surveying it all from your Gulfstream, but is pretty unpleasant when you're newly homeless and broke.
Stephen, that's exactly what I was thinking of. Gerard O'Neill claimed you could have them go fast enough to have free fall inside the cabins. They also consume far less energy than other forms of transport.
But that's techno-utopia stuff, right up there with passenger Zeppelins. Sigh.
Uh-huh. You mean what other people call 'eminent domain'. Something that's been used a lot for roads, another one of your 'area intensive' transportation schemes (Not that any airport construction in history has ever had to resort to this either, right?) I'm guessing that you're one of those 'taxes are taken at the point of a gun' folks as well.
In Chicago they had the 'el' (elevated train.)
In disney they had the monorail.
I wonder if they could just do an elevated high-speed train line which ran along the route of a major existing highway.
Njorl: "Under no conceivable circumstance could any of that oil possibly be on the market today."
Given that drilling in ANWAR was first shot-down in 1995, do you think it takes longer than 13 years to get first-oil?
Depends who "they" are. Disney could probably do so. The government? Fat chance.
The government, we note, owns the highways.
The TGV has an average speed of ca 150 mph. Is this really an alternative to flying for a country the size of the USA? And how do you want to avoid that the railway network just turns into a bottomless pit into which your money disappears?
The problem with high-speed rail is not the costs of acquiring the land. It's the the incredibly long time to complete the Environmental Impact Statements. Take the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor. The corridor was approved for study in 1992, and the two tier EIS is still not done. The EIS was started in 1999, and Tier II is expected to be done in 2010. That's for a project that's over existing rights of way, albeit some of which that has fallen into disuse.
The National Environmental Policy Act requires EISes for major projects. It was adopted in the 1970s-- partly because of backlashes over the Interstate Highway System construction. It makes it incredibly hard to start a new rail project. It's apparently much easier to expand existing roads, however.
If drilling in ANWR takes too long, then doing the environmental studies for high speed rail takes too long. (Building itself is estimated at another 3 to 5 years.)
The high speed rail lines could be put in existant right of ways. Since we had rail before roads, most of the corridors already exist. That isn't the problem, really. High Speed rail requires more infrastructure than regular rail, so you would need to put in THOUSANDS of miles of new infrastructure. It would be very expensive, and who is going to buy? We already don't take the best care of current infrastructure. I don't have the figures on how much per mile high speed rail costs, but it is a lot.
Plus, the only way to make it pay, is to force every one to use it, and that would require taking out the airlines, and who will foot the bill for that?
Plus+ rail takes less time because the security is lower, d'ya think once it starts being used heavily that wont change?
Plus, the only way to make it pay, is to force every one to use it
Nonsense. High-speed rail, built right, has the potential to be quite popular. Start, go, stop. There are at least two major corridors in Colorado where this kind of system could be feasible (I-25 between Ft. Collins and Colorado Springs, I-70 between Denver and the ski areas). The problems with most US public transportation outside of the densest cities is that to accommodate the sprawl and the many political boundaries mapped out therein, you have to accommodate lots of stops.
As a basic example, one of my coworkers, fresh out of college, spent his first six weeeks at the company commuting by bus from a location about nine miles up the highway out front. This required about forty minutes out of his morning and evening. Once he had been working long enough to have his first car payments saved up, he immediately went out and bought one. This cut his commute time to fifteen minutes. In this example, the bus commute time is aggravated by not only the frequent stops, but the fact that there are about seventeen stoplights in that corridor, many of them synchronized. A commuter vehicle can stay in sync and make only two or three stops, while a bus traveling the same route cannot.
Light rail is often only marginally better, in spite of having right-of-way and tunnels, again because of stopping for passengers. Some of my friends in Oregon have commented on a similar 2.5x time discrepancies for popular routes when using the light rail as compared to a car.
Well, this is the century of the Fruitbat, is it not? It's time to get with the times. And part of that is knowing that you have to take care of infrastructure, unglamorous as it is, whether it's putting in new roofing shingles or filling in the potholes on route 66.
As I recall it, this thread was initiated in part by the notion that at $130/barrel(or more), there really won't be any reliable airline service in the not-too-distant future.
Ugh - Megan - why take such an obviously unfair and non sequitor swipe like this?
This may seem like a shock so several posters, but NY city has, you know, lots of people. Most of whom aren't even rich! They don't jet off for weekend shopping trips to Paris. Their carbon footprint is a fraction of persons who live in low-destiny ex-urbs. It is true that rich people usually have an insanely high carbon footprint compared to less wealthy people, but that's true everywhere - even in Bentonville!
This is just an example of bullshit populism, where someone point out a supposed hypocrisy of "teh eh-leets!". But what you pointed out isn't an example of "rules for thee but not for me". You're comparing middle class ex-urban dwellers to the wealthist persons in America.
I also find it amazing how any discussion about global warming around here seems to send some of the regulars into screeds recycled from industry-financed bogus papers to try to pretend there is doubt, when in fact there is overwhelming concensus among scientists.
One more point on alternatives - Airbus claims it is close to developing the world's first passanger airplane that runs on hydrogen. Of course, airbus hasn't exactly been a model citizen when it comes to delivering on its promises of late...
We can build some better f-ing planes.
Re: Yet a few long haul flights a year are the carbon equivalent of driving an SUV in an exurb.
Why? It's not like very many people have a private jet. Instead they fly in jam-packed planes, the air equivalent of buses and trains. Of course planes produce CO2, but they do so as mass transit, not personal vehicles.
Scent,
In 1999 I used to take American Airlines from Boston to SFO regularly. The price for a Monday through Thrusday ticket in coach was $2400. I just checked what the price is now - $409. At $400 or even $500 a barrel there would still be plenty of planes in the sky.
By the way, you're missing the point Megan. As a coastal elitist, I welcome the higher prices. With every dollar increase in ticket prices, the prior marginal consumer ceases to fly. That means less crowded airports and flights and fewer delays for those of us who can afford to pay the higher fares.
Leaving aside the truth of the "concensus" contention, scientific issues are not decided by a show of hands, but by dispositive data, which are not forthcoming. (NB: Computer models are not data.) Plate tectonics, ulcers resulting from H. pylori infections, the possibility of heavier than air aircraft, and of radio transmissions, are a few of examples of notions that contradicted the "concensus" of scientists.
Considering how flaky and nascent climatology is as a science, a little humility (and skepticism) about its predictions is more than justified.
This doesn't make any sense. Maybe you should lay out what your assumptions are.
Of course planes produce CO2, but they do so as mass transit, not personal vehicles.
Yes, but they produce A LOT more CO2 than a car or a bus or even a passenger train. As in, orders of magnitude more. Getting a 20 ton hunk of metal to achieve liftoff requires a lot more energy than getting it to move 100 miles an hour along the ground. That energy is produced by burning very high energy fuel in very large quantities, which means lots of CO2. Furthermore, planes eject most of their CO2 output into the upper atmosphere, which is worse than ejecting it close to the ground where it is more easily absorbed by plants and oceanic water. Megan's statistics are correct - a single long haul flight for a family of four is equivalent to the average American's yearly energy usage in terms of CO2 output. It is, therefore, extremeley hypocritical of anyone who takes regular flights unnecessarily to fret about global warming.
America is facing a transportation crisis, if not now, 20 years in the future for sure. Our network is not all that efficient in terms of resource usage, demand is rising, and energy, particularly energy derived from petroleum, is going to get more and more expensive. Absent economical hydrogen-powered engines or the like, there's no way the current system is sustainable. Objections that high-speed rail or the like is going to be expensive and difficult to implement are correct; however, in the long run, a transportation system in which planes are used only for long-distance travel and cars only to service areas in which public transport is not feasible will be both cheaper and more environmentally sustainable. Once built, high-speed rail would greatly reduce the need for short- and medium range flights in the northeast corridor, along the west coast, and in the Midwest between Pittsburgh and Minneapolis.
We also need to start planning our cities in a way that makes them more walkable/bikeable. You shouldn't have to get in your car every time you want to go anywhere.
Why are people still discussing the CO2 theory of global warming as if none of the following recent data never happened:
1) oceans are cooling
2) troposphere temperatures are unchanged; and
3) surface temperatures are falling
All of these fly in the face of the computer models that supposedly proved CO2-led warming is happening now.
Is this some kind of cognitive dissonance zone?
I don't understand why the coastal elites are always flying off somewhere when they supposedly live in the best places on earth (at least that's what they tell us every day in San Francisco, despite all evidence to the contrary)....
Maybe there really are better places??? Sacre bleu!
Before you say something it might be nice to know what the fuck you're talking about.
An A380 can take 853 people 15,200km using 81,000 gallons of fuel. 853 / 81,000 = 94 gallons per passenger. 15200 km x .62 = 9424 miles
9424 miles / 94 gallons = 100 miles per gallon
"Orders of magnitude" - do you even know what that means?
Sorry Meghan, that should read:
Before you say something it might be nice to know what the f**k you're talking about.
An A380 can take 853 people 15,200km using 81,000 gallons of fuel. 853 / 81,000 = 94 gallons per passenger. 15200 km x .62 = 9424 miles
9424 miles / 94 gallons = 100 miles per gallon
"Orders of magnitude" - do you even know what that means?
My carbon footprint was rather high today. Must've been burning about 12 to 14 gallons of diesel an hour....chisel plowing. So ya'll would have something to eat. Or, more precisely, so the cows would have something to eat, so y'all would have your milk, cheese, and yogurt.
So a TV guy said the airline industry isn't designed for $130 a barrel oil. Well, neither is this country's Ag industry. With oil this high, jetting off somewhere will not be a big concern for most. Putting food on the table will be.
Unless this gets fixed, the future will look nothing like what we've become accustomed to.
Bob
Xeynon,
For a shorter range jet - look at an RJ like the Embraer 190. It can take 100 people 2200 miles using 4000 gallons of Jet-A. That works out to be about 51mpg.
Contango! Oil futures are now more expensive than the current spot price. This has asset bubble written all over it, especially now when we have all this conventional wisdom talk about how we have to rebuild our cities. Remember when the internet was going to change everything?
I also find it amazing how any discussion about global warming around here seems to send some of the regulars into screeds recycled from industry-financed bogus papers to try to pretend there is doubt, when in fact there is overwhelming concensus among scientists.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Society has successfully eliminated popes and priests as the source of dogmatic edicts about the ways in which the earth turns, and then filled the void of thier absence by appointing scientists as their priests and obtaining overwhelming majorities by excommunicating the heretics.
jmo,
You might want to read what I wrote more carefully. I wasn't talking about gas mileage, I was talking about the impact of CO2 output. Jet fuel produces more CO2 per gallon burned than gasoline does. Furthermore, almost all the CO2 produced is released high in the atmosphere, where its impact is greater than that of CO2 released on the ground. Very few planes fly under the ideal conditions your math uses - flights aren't always full, often must idle on the runway before takeoff or circle before landing, and frequently must take indirect routes or contend with weather conditions which reduce efficiency. None of these is quite so much of a problem with a high-speed train. In addition, planes release a number of other harmful gases in addition to CO2. I haven't done the math for a trip between, say, DC and NYC by high-speed train vs. plane, but "orders of magnitude" is almost certainly an exaggeration, and I'll concede I should have stated that I was speaking figuratively. Nevertheless it remains an indisputable fact that current aviation technology is not as green as the alternatives for short and medium distances.
It's clear to me, if to no one else, that the human race has almost no impact on the planet. Worrying about the miniscule effect of the industrial revolution when there are so many other problems that need immediate attention strikes me as irresponsible. I admire and respect people like Bob Geldof and Bill Gates for understanding that the biggest problem we must deal with is the lack of infrastructure in places like Africa. If you want to do some good, tell people to stop wasting their time on feelgood crap like environmentalism and work to help out the unnecessarily poor of the world, who are the ultimate victims of environmentalism.
Hmmm.
"I don't want to live in a world where only pompous plutocrats like Al Gore can fly, while they buy carbon "indulgences", all so we can try to keep the earth's average temperature from going up 1 degree over the next century."
I have to point out that Al Gore does NOT *buy* carbon credits.
Al Gore is part owner in several companies that deal in carbon credits and as such he gets his carbon credits for *free*. They are a perk and as such don't cost him a dime.
Which is pretty much how all the "elites" will do it.
Hmmmm.
"... understanding that the biggest problem we must deal with is the lack of infrastructure in places like Africa."
Actually that isn't true.
African countries have been the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid, charities, international loans and loan writeoffs. That's in addition to income earned from mining, oil drilling, agriculture and tourism.
The problem with Africa is that it lacks responsible government. If Africa had responsible government then the infrastructure would follow easily.
Hmmmm.
"For a shorter range jet - look at an RJ like the Embraer 190. It can take 100 people 2200 miles using 4000 gallons of Jet-A. That works out to be about 51mpg."
Are you suggesting that MPG is somehow related to the number of people being transported?
Well in that case a Suburban can carry 10 people and gets 10 MPG normally. But with your twist it really gets 100MPG.
Someone call CBS!
Hmmmm.
"Unless this gets fixed, the future will look nothing like what we've become accustomed to.
Bob"
Yeah. And McCain wants to add a "cap and trade" system for CO2 to combat global warming. That'll add enormously to the cost of energy *and* the cost of farming. No way a cap and trade on CO2 could be put into place without including farmers.
People simply don't understand how much of their lives get delivered by truck. The whole internet economy is based largely on truck deliveries. This means that the whole internet economy could self-destruct if fuel prices climb so high that shipping or delivering products become too cost prohibitive.
Just imagine hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market equity wiped off the face of the earth in the span of a week. Ebay is particularly vulnerable, IMO, to this as many items aren't very high value to begin with.
Then, as you pointed out Bob, there is food production and distribution. I did some software programming for Tropicana in logistics and distribution. Rail and intermodal can do a lot. But it's a rare case where a train can deliver to a street address.
The other problem is that any new source of oil will take years to exploit fully. In the case of ANWR it might be 15 years before we see a single drop.
Right now Americans are worried. Soon enough Americans will be really pissed off. And next winter a lot of Americans are going to be really cold and extremely angry about it.
The question that's going to face congress is who is going to pay the political price for it.
Let me point out that in some places the trains do not run past 10 p.m. or earlier because of noise pollution. Here are the west coast, communities such as Del Mar, La Jolla, Carlsbad, etc. don't want to hear the noise of a train at night, so the last train north is a bus leaving San Diego at 10:30 p.m. otherwise you'll have to thumb (or drive).
Let me point out that in some places the trains do not run past 10 p.m. or earlier because of noise pollution. Here are the west coast, communities such as Del Mar, La Jolla, Carlsbad, etc. don't want to hear the noise of a train at night, so the last train north is a bus leaving San Diego at 10:30 p.m. otherwise you'll have to thumb (or drive).
Let me point out that in some places the trains do not run past 10 p.m. or earlier because of noise pollution. Here are the west coast, communities such as Del Mar, La Jolla, Carlsbad, etc. don't want to hear the noise of a train at night, so the last train north is a bus leaving San Diego at 10:30 p.m. otherwise you'll have to thumb (or drive).
Let me point out that in some places the trains do not run past 10 p.m. or earlier because of noise pollution. Here are the west coast, communities such as Del Mar, La Jolla, Carlsbad, etc. don't want to hear the noise of a train at night, so the last train north is a bus leaving San Diego at 10:30 p.m. otherwise you'll have to thumb (or drive).
memomachine said:
"African countries have been the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid, charities, international loans and loan writeoffs. That's in addition to income earned from mining, oil drilling, agriculture and tourism.
"The problem with Africa is that it lacks responsible government. If Africa had responsible government then the infrastructure would follow easily."
The African people have not received anything like hundreds of billions of dollars, and with a few exceptions, most African countries are economic basket cases. Just consider the numbers. There are roughly 750 million people in Africa, and if (as you hope we will think) they have received humdreds of billions in aid, then each individual African should have received at least several hundred dollars as his share. That's probably about 10 times or more than what most of them could hope to earn in a year. Does anyone think that that's actually happening?
It is true enough that most African countries lack "responsible" (which I take to mean Western-style) government. If all they needed was money, they would be in much better shape today. Here's a few points to consider:
1) The West has been generous and well-meaning with respect to aid, but the local governments have generally demanded that they have control of all the aid, most of which ends up in their pockets. This is a problem that's not confined to Africa -- right now, the Burmese dictators are shamelessly making the same demand. The West has difficulty saying no to tyrants.
2) If you wish to argue that giving money to the corrupt governments will eventually create an infrastructure, perhaps you could cite an example of a place where that has worked.
3) Western governments, in addition to their cravenness when confronted by corrupt politicians, are generally driven by interests that simply don't make sense for people that don't already enjoy the benefits of Western progress.
For example, a lot of African countries have been told by Western governments that their aid will be cut off if they attempt to use the abundant coal resources that they have, because the Western environmentalists have the luxury of doing without coal, already having a viable non-coal-based infrastructure in place. One notable example of this that I've heard about is a hospital that turns out all its lights at night, because the electricity is incapable of providing illumination and refrigeration simultaneously. The only power source that they are allowed to use is solar panels.
For another example, a lot of African countries have been told that their aid will be cut off if they use DDT to help prevent malaria, because the snooty types at the UN (in New York and Geneva) don't have to worry about malaria any more.
Yeah, yeah, I know that DDT and coal aren't actually illegal, but try telling Mugabe that he'll have to live without the flow of cash into his pockets if he tries to use them.
I probably shouldn't have allowed myself to be distracted by this, because it is totally off-topic.
Scent,
You say, "And high-speed rail need not be fossil-fuel dependent."
I am very interested to know how high-speed rail would be powered without using fossil fuels.
"Unless you live in Bangladesh, then you're fucked."
Aren't you already fucked if you live in Bangladesh?
"But you don't care about drowning dark-skinned people anyway."
Since Bangladesh was created in a war between "dark-skinned people", it would seem that it's the dark-skinned people who don't care about their similarly-complected fellows drowning. Why didn't Pakistan invite the Bangladeshis to move out of their perennial Monsoon disaster zone and into the Pakistani highlands? If they did, and the Bangladeshis fought them for the right to live in South Asia's equivalent of the 9th Ward of New Orleans, than maybe the Bangladeshis don't care about themselves drowning.
But, of course, it's whitey's fault. Your constant dogmatic imputations of racist intent are the mark of a humanities major from a middling school.
person of choler -I am very interested to know how high-speed rail would be powered without using fossil fuels. That seems pretty obvious. It's easy to convert to nuclear. Or solar or wind. Or anything else that produces electricity.
Bring on the trains. I love them. And make sure they have terminals below the airports so that you can take a long flight followed by a medium train journey.
"For a shorter range jet - look at an RJ like the Embraer 190. It can take 100 people 2200 miles using 4000 gallons of Jet-A. That works out to be about 51mpg."
Are you suggesting that MPG is somehow related to the number of people being transported?
Well in that case a Suburban can carry 10 people and gets 10 MPG normally. But with your twist it really gets 100MPG.
Yes -- what matters is the number of 'seat-miles per gallon', not the miles per gallon of the vehicle. So a full 8-passenger suburban on the highway IS actually much more efficient than any jet. This suburban is rated for 20MPG on the highway:
http://www.edmunds.com/new/2008/chevrolet/suburban/100895787/researchlanding.html
That's 160 seat-miles-per-gallon -- more than double what is promised with the new efficient Boeing 787 and more than triple the 50 seat-MPG of current aircraft. A full minivan at 25 MPG is even better -- ~200 seat-MPG. Hybrid and/or diesel versions of these vehicles would do better still (jet fuel and diesel are basically the same thing, so we really should be comparing diesels to jets for a fair comparison of fuel efficiency).
And cars don't dump their exhaust into the upper atmosphere (which makes the greenhouse impact). The bottom line is that there is a great deal more room to improve the seat-MPG of cars (in part with higher MPG vehicles, but mostly by getting more butts in the seats). This is not the case with air-travel, which is already operating close to max fuel efficiency.
memomachine -- efficiency is what matters. If you had a choice between taking 2 Priuses (8 people) at 50 miles per gallon or one SUV at 25 mpg (say a Tahoe hybrid) the Tahoe would break even. If you are driving them around empty the math works the other way.
Ergo a full plane flying country is much better in terms of CO2 production than a fleet of Priuses (Prii?) to take the same amount of people.
Furthermore if we were to take your snark as true coin we should immediately rip up all the train tracks in the country because those things get about only about 1mpg.
aMouseforallSeasons wrote:
"The more things change, the more they stay the same. Society has successfully eliminated popes and priests as the source of dogmatic edicts about the ways in which the earth turns, and then filled the void of thier absence by appointing scientists as their priests and obtaining overwhelming majorities by excommunicating the heretics."
Except that science has two awesome features previous sources of authority did not have - the scientific method and empiricism. Science is, after all, not a cult or an order, but a highly successful method of studying the world.
If someone were to provide convincing evidence overturning the scientific consensus, that isn't dismissed, it is rather celebrated and that person has his or her name added to the history books.
I do agree with you that we shouldn't be dogmatic about our current conclusions of science in general. With climate change, the science had grown more, not less, convincing. And at this point, there really is no serious alternative being offered, and those who offer lesser alternatives have invariably been on conflicted positions (their research was funded by organizations hoping climate change wasn't true, not the scientific reasons, but policy/economic reasons).
Occam's Beard wrote:
"Considering how flaky and nascent climatology is as a science, a little humility (and skepticism) about its predictions is more than justified."
Well, if you believe this statement you wrote, there seems to be literally nothing that could change your mind. You’re wrong about climatology being a nascent science. You also misunderstand why the consensus has emerged around climate change - quite simply it is the best logical inference based on overwhelming scientific evidence. No proposed alternative has close to the explanatory power of current climate change models.
Could our understanding of CC be wrong? Certainly! But saying something could be wrong isn't the same thing has offering an alternative logical inference that is better supported by the data. And considering how much money has gone into funding just that, I think it is pretty telling that Exxon has since decided its money is better spent on peer-reviewed climate change science, rather than ideologically pleasing, but unsupported, alternatives
I love the name, BTW.
The US cannot reduce global carbon emissions. The US can only reduce US carbon emissions.
If the US were to reduce US carbon emissions, while China (the largest carbon emitter) continued to increase carbon emissions at their current rate, the absolute quantity of carbon released into the atmosphere would continue to increase, though somewhat more slowly than it might otherwise have increased, at least in the short term. In the longer term, the shift in production from the US to China (which uses energy less efficiently) would probably increase the absolute quantity of carbon released into the atmosphere, all other thing being equal.
Global issues are not amenable to sub-global solutions.
A vote of support not just for the price increase, but for the way it was levied in the form of a baggage charge. It was hardly the cowardly thing to do, as some suggest; how many times has an airline raised its ticket prices by $15 and nobody's even noticed, let alone protested? This move will draw a lot more fire, but it's the right thing to do: it essentially offers a rebate on an across-the-board price increase for those who can be bothered to lighten their loads. This incentivizes good environmental behavior, which is exactly the right way to get people to conserve.
It's not that I think they're moral crusaders or anything; lighter planes will cost them less to fly. But this is a case where their bottom line coincides with environmentally responsible behavior change.
Was it Gordon Brown or some other British VIP who was jetting off someplace and explained that their CO2 was balanced by offsets?
Those offsets, it was reported, were from people in farm villages in India substituting peddle-powered water pumps for Diesel-powered pumps.
Is this Monty Pythonesque or what? Some Lord Blimp in England gets to fly on an airplane, and what is keeping that plane up in the sky, or at least in some proxy sense, is regiments of people in India peddling like mad to get their water. At the high point of English colonialism, no one hadn't taken things that far.
"I bet you are one of those 'taxes are taken at the point of a gun' people."
Well, I would note in his defense, that your freedom will be taken from you---at the point of a gun, if necessary---should you fail to pay those taxes.
Not saying I think it should be otherwise, but let's remember that, in the end, the bullets in a cop's gun help keep the peace.
If we are really serious about addressing a potential devastating environmental catastrophe we should be worrying a heck of a lot less about the gradual accumulation of hydrocarbons on the atmosphere and the resultant slow climate change and a lot more about identifying near earth astroids and finding a way to alter their trajectories. Somewhere there is a rock flying around that has earth in its sights that will end civilization on this planet of ours and possibly life altogether. Though we don't know when precisely that will happen, when it does happen (and it will happen), it will be immediate and the devastation will be total. That is if we do not show the foresight to give ourselves advance warning and develop the tools to avert it. The global warming crowd is not wrong to be concerned about environmental change, they have just wrong-headedly chosen to focus their passions on the less pressing threat.
The global warming crowd is not wrong to be concerned about environmental change, they have just wrong-headedly chosen to focus their passions on the less pressing threat.
Given that the last time such an event happened was 65,000,000 years ago, don't you think it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "pressing threat"?
Moreover, NASA seems to me to be quite aware of the situation - every time an asteroid comes remotely close to Earth we're reminded how much data they're compiling on asteroid orbits. In addition, should one come along that's on anything close to a collision course with Earth, we've got a rather vast arsenal of nuclear ICBM's we could use to blow it apart or at the very least divert its trajectory enough so that it didn't hit us. So why, exactly, is this a more serious threat than something that very likely could cause widespread starvation, displacement, and conflict within the next century if not addressed?
I am amazed that we have gone through this whole discussion without anyone hitting on the obvious soution to the problem - CAFE standards for airplanes. Soon we can be flying in planes with twice the fuel effeciency of those in use today.
/sarcasm off
Neil
Two people have mentioned this and I would really like to know about it.
They say planes are worse because they release the CO2 into the upper atmosphere. Now, what is the rate at which gasses diffuse in the atmophere? I would assume the rate of diffusion is very high, such that it doesn't really matter where you relase the carbon as it will mix rather quickly with the rest of the atmosphere.
And Slocum, I think the correct metric should be grams of CO2 per passenger kilometer. But you need to keep in mind that the average aircraft is flying 85%+ full. While the average Suburban is traveling maybe 12.5-25% full.
Xeynon,
I call it a pressing threat because we simply do not know when it will happen next. Maybe tomorrow, maybe 10,000 years from tomorrow. However, when it does happen we will likely be caught totally unawares, and we will have no recourse. NASA is quite aware of the situation, which is what makes it so terrifying. By their own estimation they have only cataloged a rather tiny fraction of the near earth rocks. And often when an asteroid comes close to earth we are caught largely by surprise. Given this there are remarkably few resources devoted to updating the threat database. The reality is that we do not know enough to identify most collision trajectories in advance. We also lack the capacity to divert anything that is inbound. Our ICBMs lack the lift capacity to loft a nuclear device beyond low-earth orbit, far to close to effectively deflect a large rock traveling in the neighborhood of a thousand miles per second. Of course the scientific consensus is largely united behind the notion that a nuclear warhead would not be effective for diverting an asteroid even at greater distances. Most believe that at most it would fragment the rock. The pieces of which would proceed on the same trajectory, with the same total tunage, at the same velocity. I believe that this warrants more attention than global warming because it would not change the game. It would end the game and at present there is nothing to do to prevent it. Global warming is not trivial, but neither is it the only threat we face. And it is not an existential threat.
They say planes are worse because they release the CO2 into the upper atmosphere. Now, what is the rate at which gasses diffuse in the atmophere?
People who make a living studying these things have done the math, but whatever the rate is, releasing the gases high in the atmosphere and giving them a chance to absorb unfiltered solar radiation before they diffuse increases their impact.
And Slocum, I think the correct metric should be grams of CO2 per passenger kilometer. But you need to keep in mind that the average aircraft is flying 85%+ full. While the average Suburban is traveling maybe 12.5-25% full.
Nobody's advocating a fleet of Suburbans driven by single drivers as the alternative to air travel for short or medium distances - of course there are alternatives to flying that are worse, inefficient small passenger vehicles among them. It's buses and trains (the latter of which can be run without reliance on carbon-based fuels) to which the comparisons should be made.
Someguy,
Like I said, 65,000,000 years and counting. Yes, there is a threat, but it doesn't seem like one that's worth staying up at night worrying about, any more than we stay up at night worrying about the sun blowing up or space aliens from the planet Zork invading or the Rapture. It could happen, but some events, no matter how catastrophic, are so improbable that it's a misallocation of resources to worry too much about them.
And while ICBM's might not be suitable, I'm sure there are missiles we could use to put a nuke in space if need be. Also, I don't see why breaking up an incoming asteroid would be all that much worse than diverting it, since far more of its mass would burn up on entry into the atmosphere and thus when whatever was left did impact it would do so with far less total kinetic energy.
I also think you're understating the impact that climate change could have. The ecology of the planet and the related logistical networks on which our civilization is based are a bit more fragile than we think. Widespread crop failure as a result of drought or flooding, one very likely consequence of a global temperature rise, could quite easily cause a global conflict and hence inadvertently an existential threat.
"Given that drilling in ANWAR was first shot-down in 1995, do you think it takes longer than 13 years to get first-oil?"
Posted by David
No David, the right to drill in ANWR was shot down. Nobody was going to drill then. They might have said they would start right away, but it would have been a lie. Oil people don't like to lose money.
Re: People who make a living studying these things have done the math, but whatever the rate is, releasing the gases high in the atmosphere and giving them a chance to absorb unfiltered solar radiation before they diffuse increases their impact.
Except that's not how the greenhouse effect works. It isn't unfiltered solar radiation that CO2 absorbs, it's infrared radiation being re-emitted from the Earth's surface after that surface has first absorbed it as visible light. So I have to wonder why it matters where the CO2 is at: whether it is at one mile up or five, the key fact is that it's there absorbing infrared photons and heating up the atmosphere. I don't see how altitude matters.
Re: Widespread crop failure as a result of drought or flooding
Absent a global catastrophe (massive vulcanism, nuclear war, or an asteroid strike) you're not going to get worldwide crop failures. You may get local or regional crop failures. Also, conflict is an unlikely result of such an event. There have been previous calamities which crashed agriculture over large areas and warfare generally ceased because nations could not afford to fund and feed armies and had to expend all possible resources simply to keep people alive. Starving people don't make wars, or revolutions.
Here are a few links:
http://www.grida.no/Climate/ipcc/aviation/006.htm
A nice short doc:
http://www.campaigncc.org/Howdoesairtravel.doc
which has this relevant bit:
Note the 1.9 multiplier, btw. I don't know exactly what this means, but I would guess that roughly, high-altitude CO2 emissions count for 1.9 times as much per gram than corresponding low-altitude emissions.
So I have to wonder why it matters where the CO2 is at: whether it is at one mile up or five, the key fact is that it's there absorbing infrared photons and heating up the atmosphere. I don't see how altitude matters.
I'm not a climatologist or a physicist, so I don't know the precise scientific answer to this question. But what I said earlier - that gases higher up in the atmosphere retain more energy from the sun - is an accurate paraphrase of the scientific consensus.
Absent a global catastrophe (massive vulcanism, nuclear war, or an asteroid strike) you're not going to get worldwide crop failures. You may get local or regional crop failures.
I didn't say worldwide - I say widespread. And widespread failures could create serious political instability. Yes, it's true that starving people won't have the energy to fight; however, people fighting over what resources they do have to avoid starvation will. Witness the food riots that have recently occurred in Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. You don't think that widespread food shortages in, say, Pakistan, could be the straw the breaks the back of Musharraf's government? It's impossible to predict exactly what the geopolitical effects of climate change will be, but they aren't likely to be good.
Forget about climate change for a second, though. Conflict for resources, and particularly petroleum, is likely to intensify over the coming decades. It's still the most efficient source of energy we have, but there's less and less of it out there every year, and more and more people who want it. The laws of basic economics tell you what happens in that situation. Prices go way up. When prices go up, bad actors are likely to attempt to horde the commodity, which leads to conflict. Alternative energy is not economically competitive now, but it's coming closer and closer and is almost certainly still a good longterm investment.
Assuming global warming is potentially catastrophic, as many claim, will it really have made much difference in 2100 whether we burned up every drop of oil under this planet's surface by (say) 2080 rather than 2060? If it will, then I guess it makes sense to care about flying less, driving fuel-efficient vehicles, etc. If it won't, then I guess we should not even bother worrying about things like that, and simply channel a lot of effort into finding a viable alternative energy source ASAP.
I'm a chemist, and compared to chemistry, climatology scarcely is a science. We chemists are surprised all the time by experimental results, even in simple systems. Add in a complicating factor, such as biology, and forget it. We're effectively thrashing in the dark. Hence phase IV drug recalls (Vioxx, anyone?) after the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars over more than a decade to study this one compound.
Humbling, isn't it? And chemistry generally admits of relatively well-controlled experiments, with variables that can be manipulated.
Now consider "climatology." No controlled experiments - none. Not possible, in an observational science. Can't manipulate variables; in fact, it's not clear that we know what all the variables are, much less their magnitudes. (Recall Kelvin's gross miscalculation of the earth's age from cooling rate, because he didn't know about radioactive decay. Oops.)
And still less do we know the cross-terms between those variables, i.e., how they interact. For example, in modeling the effect of increasing CO2 partial pressure on the greenhouse effect, how does one know how much plant growth (e.g., algae) will increase and mitigate the increase in CO2 partial pressure? Who knows?
And that brings me to computer models generally. Wonderful, they generate great graphics for movies. For science, not so much. Computer modeling is routinely used now (structure-based drug design) to suggest which compounds should fit into which enzyme's active site. We know the structure of the compounds, and of the active sites, in great detail (sub Angstrom resolution, at least). And yet we still can't reliably predict which compounds will work.
Such results are considered a hint, a guide, a suggestion as to what might work. No one jumps up from a graphics display and yells "Eureka! Now we can start building the plant to manufacture this stuff, our next blockbuster drug!"
Instead, the computer modeler gets up from the graphics display, turns to the synthetic chemist, and wearily says, "This one looks like it might be worth a shot." And if that compound is the lucky one in 100,000+, a decade and half a billion dollars later, it might make it to market. Once there, it might not even be recalled. Whoohoo! Thanks, computer modeling!
So I don't take computer models as Holy Writ, even in chemistry, and certainly not in climatology. But if climatologists do, and think we should trash our economy on the basis of their predictions, let's have them put some skin in the game.
Let them make a short-term prediction that we can live to verify (none of this century from now crap - come on, guys, we're not that stupid). A short-term prediction, say over a five year span, should be easier than a longer period one, right? After all, perturbation theory works best on small perturbations.
Then if they're right, I'll reconsider. And if they're wrong, they're fired from their positions, and banned for life from receiving Federal grant support. We'll see who trusts his predictions enough to make public policy prescriptions under that scenario.
And last,
Sure there is. Make falsifiable predictions, the hallmark of the scientific method, and have them borne out. (Note I said "predictions," not after the fact rationalizations of the "we would have predicted that" sort. Everyone is a stock market zillionaire on that basis.) The only predictions I've seen have concerned hurricane incidence and severity over the last few years, and they've been laughably wrong.
Let me turn it around: what could possibly change your mind? At this point, in the absence of falsifiable predictions, it's all opinion and speculation. Data "consistent with" an explanation is a far cry from "consistent only with" that explanation. If I were reviewing papers in climatology, I'd insist that the authors hedge their conclusions to reflect that difference.
I think you're missing the point about how statistical modeling works. It is more like polling than controlled experiments. Polling will tell you absolutely nothing about what the very next voter will do, but it will tell you the long-term patterns and likely outcome of an election.
Computer models of climate science, which do such wonderful things as help is plan whether or not to take an umbrella to the office, have proven that, over the long term, they do have explanatory power. But to insist that since they don't get the very next instance right, they're useless, is silly. The central insight of statistical science is powerful and not obvious. That's why there can be whole industries based on taking people's money and providing them with lousy odds in return.
And so climate science does make falsifiable predictions, pretty much all the time. But they're not one-to-one predictions like dropping a rock. But asking for that level of specificity of climate science is like rejecting that the roulette wheel is good for the casino because the casino can't predict the very next number on which the ball will land.
To use your example, the reason computer models are used to examine molecules and interaction is because they do provide a better (but not perfect) method of exploring those very things. You just need to examine their pattern in the long run and determine if using it increased the odds of finding something useful, and if it was useful enough to justify the cost of the machine. The fact that they're pretty much unbiquitous implies the answer is "yes".
As far as what would convince me that CO2 emissions and climate change were not related, I would need a theory based on logical inference that had better explanatory power for the observed data. None exist. They could exist - and if you or anyone else discovered it, they would be instantly famous and probably rich - but so far it doesn't, and for the last 2 decades, everything we've learned bolsters the current climate change theory.
szr,
There is a significant difference between "CO2 emissions and climate change are related"; and, "CO2 is causing climate change". There is also a significant difference between "global warming is occurring" and "AGW is occurring".
The globe has been warming since ~1600 AD, the trough of the Little Ice Age. We are told that this time, unlike all previous experience, CO2 is driving temperature, rather than the other way around.
The globe has been stable to cooling for the past ten years, though CO2 emissions continue to increase. There is growing "consensus" that the stable/cooling regime will persist for another decade.
I'd like to point at that this line "the scientists were wrong in the past, what makes you think they aren't wrong now" is the standard crank line, and that it is bolstered by a lot of the standard crank examples.
For example, the 'scientific consensus' wasn't that powered flight wasn't impossible, it was that given certain assumptions about the source of power (steam), it wasn't possible. Lord Kelvin didn't make hard and flat erroneous predictions, his proposition was that if the age of the Sun/Earth was wrong, some new phenomena was involved (from the wiki):
And so it goes. Sure, the race does not always go to the swiftest, to make a paraphrase. But that's the way to bet (spare me the 'scientific consensus' about 'global cooling'; that's a complete myth.)
Ed.
All I can say is there are few who hold your sanguine views on the issue. In part because if you look at the actual global temperatures, there's been a huge rise which corresponds with CO2 emissions increase, including over the last ten years.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, 1998 to 2007 still had the hottest average temperature on record. This year it is expected to be down slightly due to La Nina, but that's most likely variability.
And there is no question that humans are the single biggest continutor of CO2 emissions, with burning of fossile fuels being the single greatest source. CO2 concentraion is about 40% higher now than before the industrial revolution.
Is it possible that volcanoes or solar flares suddenly picked up intensity at the exact same moment as humans began large-scale releasing of CO2 into the atmosphere? Yes. Is it likely? Well, I'll have the borrow my friend Occam's razor to answer that one.
Fair enough, and good points. Let me address them in turn.
I understand that. I also understand that Dewey beat Truman. That’s kind of my point. The pollsters then conducted their poll by telephone, which introduced a systematic bias that they hadn’t realized. Oops. How much more complicated is climatology than political polling? Anthropogenic global warming activists would have said that we shouldn’t hold the election of 1948 because their models show that Dewey would win anyway.
Statistical modeling is like polling, but look at how bad recent exit polls have proven to be, and how divergent different polls can be. The LA Times poll predicted (uniquely) that Gray Davis would survive the recall vote. I wonder what Gray is doing now…
I agree with you, but you’ve sharpened my point a bit. I’m not talking about getting the very next instance right, which of course is silly. Let climatologists propose a statistically-based test, over a reasonable period, say five years. But hold them to it, and make them personally accountable if it fails. They leave the realm of science and enter that of public policy by asking us to gut our economy, and change their way of life, based solely upon their predictions. They’d better be goddamned sure they’re right. The very least they can do is bet their careers on it. If they’re not willing to do that, then we know what they think their predictions are worth.
It’s kind of like saying, “you’ve got a booboo on your wrist, it might be melanoma, we better amputate your arm.” An extraordinary prescription requires an extraordinary level of substantation.
Let’s not conflate statistical modeling with probability theory. There’s a reason why the field and its textbooks are called “probability and statistics.”
They're certainly a cheaper method of exploring things, and the drug industry is desperate for any edge. The ubiquity of computer modeling isn't dispositive of its utility, however. A few years ago, it was combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening of natural products, both of which are out of favor now.
But the point is that use of a computer does not a sound result guarantee. Steven Spielberg used computer modeling to produce Jurassic Park. What you get out depends on what you put in. Even if computer modeling in chemistry were totally successful – and it’s not – that doesn’t bear on its reliability in climatology.
The problem here is perspective. You’re talking about retrospective explanations. I’m talking about prospective predictions. As a test, I reject retrospective explanations out of hand, because they’re intellectually dishonest. Retrospectively, everyone would have appreciated the compelling story of Microsoft stock in 1980, and would have held it to the present day, and similarly would have seen that Enron had problems and shorted it.
Predict what will happen in the future, not what happened in the past. Using the latter to test statistical models introduces a fundamental problem of circularity: the model was devised to fit the data, so of course the model predicts the data that were used to generate it. How could it not? Race tracks are full of people who have systems like that. (Note here’s where the difference between probability and statistics kicks in.) Tell me what will happen over the next five years, put your ass on the line for it, and then if you’re right, I’ll reconsider.
Ed Reid,
There are various time-scales that relate to climate: Some are on the order of a year (seasonal), some are multi-year (like el Nino), and some are longer than that. The increase in the greenhouse effect due to the continuing build-up of C-O2 is a gradual and gentle effect, that can only be detected by looking at a longterm trend. In the end, the slow & steady trend will overcome; but there's no surprise in having periods of "stall" or even decrease.
In particular, the predictions of a stable/cooling period for even another decade all project that when the relevant oscillation has ended, there will be a more rapid increase that will get the Earth's climate "back on track". It's unfortunately true that there is simply no self-consistent framework for understanding the climate that is both compatible with physics and with a non-global-warming scenario. This matter has been studied for over 100 years.
szr,
About subspots: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
Subspot activity began to rise in '95, peaked in '02 and has been declining. We know that '98 has an unusually hot year, and that temperatures haven't been rising since '02.
Occam's razor indeed.
SoV, the point re Kelvin was not that he was wrong, but rather the difficulty of knowing all the variables, or even knowing whether one knows all the relevant variables.
In short, the adequacy of the model is unknown, and perhaps for now unknowable.
On the sunspot topic, can someone who doesn't believe they have an effect explain to me the 'coincidence' of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age?
Sigh. Those predictions have already been made.:
So, you've got predictions going back thirty years (actually longer) predicting a positive correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration.
Going to admit you're wrong?
Ergo a full plane flying country is much better in terms of CO2 production than a fleet of Priuses (Prii?) to take the same amount of people.
No, that's wrong. A full airplane gets about 50 seat-miles-per-gallon. A Prius on the highway with one passenger does about the same. A full Prius is about 200 seat-miles-per-gallon or about 4x more fuel-efficient than a full jet. The fuel economy of jets is really pretty lousy.
It's buses and trains (the latter of which can be run without reliance on carbon-based fuels) to which the comparisons should be made.
Buses and trains have their own efficiency issues. They have to maintain a schedule and run mostly empty during non-peak hours. Trains, at least, can reduce the number of cars, but buses can't be shrunk during non-peak times. But if you cut back on the schedule, then people can't rely on the train and stick with cars. And train/bus travel is much less time efficient, requiring connections and non-direct routes.
Cars, on the other hand, go exactly where you want to go exactly when you want to go. I think the future is much brighter for high-efficiency personal transportation than mass transit.
No, the point was that you were factually incorrect about what Kelvin actually said. And wrong in a typically crank way. Wrong in a way reminiscent of those people who said that just because the scientific consensus maintained that smoking causes cancer, emphysema, etc doesn't necessarily mean the consensus view was correct.
It would be different if this consensus was some sort of fad that had sprung up over the last five years, of course (anybody remember Catastrophe Theory?) But that is simply not the case here.
Question to Neal and szr. You guys seem knowledgeable about atmospheric physics. Why does concern focus on CO2 rather than water vapor? The oscillator strength of water vapor in the IR and microwave region is huge, owing in part to hydrogen bonding smearing out the bands.
Meanwhile, CO2 only has two sharp bands in the IR(don't know about the microwave region), and there's a lot less of it than water vapor (0.05% vs. ca. 2.5%, assuming H2O partial pressure of 20 mm Hg). Anyone who's ever run an IR spectrometer in air in single beam mode knows water vapor gives big honking absorptions around 3000 and 1600 cm-1, with CO2 providing a dinky little spike around 2500 cm-1, IIRC).
So why isn't water vapor the big concern?
(This isn't a snark. It's a request for information.)
SoV, thank you for your kind response. I now see that I was wrong.
Occam:
That's a fantastic question, and as far as I know, who with an interesting answer. Water vapor is actually the most significant greenhouse gas. But the temperature of the air limits the amount of water vapor it can hold. One concern with CO2 emissions, which unlike vapor, are not limited by the atmospheric temperature in the same way, is that they'll cause a positive feedback loop.
BTW, I agree with you regarding scientists putting skin in the game. Here is one example that I think would satisfy both of us.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/aug/19/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment
szr,
"And there is no question that humans are the single biggest continutor of CO2 emissions, with burning of fossile fuels being the single greatest source. CO2 concentraion is about 40% higher now than before the industrial revolution."
Anthropogenic carbon emissions represent less than 5% of total annual carbon emissions; the most common estimate is 3%. However, it is generally believed that anthropogenic carbon emissions are responsible for the increase in atmospheric concentration; and, that the increase in atmospheric concentration represents about one third of the anthropogenic carbon emissions, the balance having been removed by natural carbon sinks.
However, ponder this. Global average temperature has been increasing since ~1600. Atmospheric CO2 concentration has been increasing since ~1900. Therefore, the warming over the interval ~1600 - ~1900 was the result of causes other than increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration. Then, for some reason(s), the driving force of the warming transitioned from those other causes to increasing CO2 concentrations.
Therefore, if GW is actually AGW, CO2 emissions would have to be reduced to below the emissions levels circa 1900 to stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Allowing for the increase in human and domestic animal populations (CO2 emitters all), fossil-sourced CO2 emissions would have to be reduced toward zero asymptotically to achieve concentration stabilization. (NOTE: That is a far cry from 7% below 1990 levels.)
If the vessel to which you are adding something already contains more of that something than is "ideal", continuing to add that something more slowly will not resolve the issue. If the vessel is a common vessel and you and/or some others stop adding that something to the vessel while others continue to add that something to the vessel, your actions will not resolve the issue. Only once everyone has stopped adding that something to the vessel would stabilization occur and the potential for removal of a portion of that something to restore the ideal concentration become plausible.
Sigh. When you have something substantive to contribute to the discussion of global warming, fine. If you've got a specific point, fine. But if all you've got is 'how do you know they're not wrong', well, expect to be treated as the typical crank denialist.
If you're really serious about wanting to know more, I suggest you look up someone like William T. Hyde.
For your other question about CO2 vs water vapor or other greenhouse gases, try this link for a simple answer:
http://www.slate.com/id/2182564/
szr, thanks for your response. It makes sense that the water vapor is in dynamic equilibrium with liquid water, in essence buffering the water vapor partial pressure, and in contrast to CO2.
I had thought of the problem that if CO2 were responsible for raising the temperature, that that would also volatilize more liquid water, generating a positive feedback loop.
But since the atmosphere is not generally saturated with water vapor (at least at sea level; is that true in the upper atmosphere?), wouldn't fluctuations in water vapor partial pressure (on whatever timescale) swamp the small effect from CO2?
I mean, it seems that even a variation from 2.5% to 2.4% in water vapor (on a molar basis) would clobber the entire contribution from CO2, much less the anthropogenic component, assuming for this purpose equal efficacy as greenhouse gases (again, on a molar basis).
It's nice to be able to get some substantive information!
SoV, in the increasingly unlikely event you ever get around to writing your dissertation, I'd be happy to come out of retirement to serve on one more orals committee - yours. Tearing you a new one - which is easily done to almost anyone in orals context, merely by pushing them to the limits of their knowledge, and then boring in - would be a transcendant joy. For me, at least.
I suspect your other committee members would feel the same way, unless you're a lot more charming in the department than here.
Re: But what I said earlier - that gases higher up in the atmosphere retain more energy from the sun - is an accurate paraphrase of the scientific consensus.
That makes no sense. The ability of CO2 or any other gas to absorb EM radiation is not altitude dependent. There may be some temperature dependence, at very high or very low temperatures (there are lots of weird and wonderful things that happen at ultra-low temps) but that's not what we're talking about here. Sorry, but this sounds like people with axes to grind blowing pseudoscientific smoke. I am not a global warming denialist, but I do retain the right to a proper skepticism of things that sound like finely grated and spiced BS. There's a certain Luddism and elitism in the environmental movement, a hatred for the common folk, and this sounds like an example of it. How dare those rubes fly like gods and upper crust types!
Re: And widespread failures could create serious political instability.
Political instability yes. We are already seeing that in Haiti. But widespread international warfare-- no. A country that is suffering crop failures needs every last cent to buy food from sources abroad (and usually ends up on the world charity list where good behavior is a requirement).
Re: Conflict for resources, and particularly petroleum, is likely to intensify over the coming decades.
In the coming decades we will be replacing petroleum with other sources of energy. and what use would conflict be anyway? You can't make more of the stuff with bombs and bullets.
Re: The laws of basic economics tell you what happens in that situation.
Yep. People who can afford it buy it and people who can't go without, or find nifty substitutes. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. I'm betting we end up seeing innovations from rather unexpected sources. While the wealthier world may well maintain its oil addiction, China, India et al (countries with educated people who can do the science and tech work) will probably come up with the breakthroughs that will serve as the foundation for the future.
Re: Why does concern focus on CO2 rather than water vapor?
Water vapor does not stay in the atmosphere: it condenses and rains or snows out. Any given molecule of CO2 will probably be in the atmosphere for around a century, average. Additionally water vapor also has a reverse effect on the Earth's temperature since clouds (especially low, thick clouds) block sunlight and prevent warming.
Either we get upset about doing less driving and flying, or we get upset about climate change. We cannot simultaneously fix both problems.
But of course we can continue to make air travel affordable and increasingly commonplace while simultaneously dealing with climate change.
Air travel accounts for what, maybe one or two percent of carbon emissions? There's no reason we the globe can't fight climate change and allow for continuing increases in air travel, if we take our carbon savings from other areas.
Given the fact that unlike with car travel there are few acceptable alternatives to air travel, I reckon this is exactly the course of action the world will take.
I confidently predict in eighty years' time the global economy will be consuming lots more airline fuel, and very likely a lot less fuel to run ground transport and heat and cool buildings.
Tearing you a new one - which is easily done to almost anyone in orals context, merely by pushing them to the limits of their knowledge, and then boring in - would be a transcendant joy. For me, at least.
I dunno. Confiscating SoV's ability to shout "No, YOU cite ME" and simultaneously taking away access to Google would reduce exercise to a procedure of possibly three minutes. All else equal, I generally prefer my transcendant joys to be somewhat longer than that.
Mouse, in general, I would agree with your comment about the length of transcendant joys, but the intensity of the joy can offset its brevity. And in an doctoral oral exam, there's a title applied to candidates who don't answer the committee's questions: Mr.
And the only way for a doctoral candidate to abbreviate the oral exam is to accept that title thereafter.
Don't most airlines transport mail or packages in addition to passengers luggage (which they presumably get paid for)? Will the airlines just take up the space by transporting more mail/packages instead of our luggage, i.e., they'll be transporting the same total amount of goods?
It seems like the notion that this is a ``carbon tax'' is just an slick way to offset American airlines incompetence in the guise of doing something environmentally sound (delays last year cost american airlines billions in fuel costs alone!)
"I mean, it seems that even a variation from 2.5% to 2.4% in water vapor (on a molar basis) would clobber the entire contribution from CO2, much less the anthropogenic component"
At most wavelengths where H2O has significantly greater absorption, all radiation upward is absorbed or scattered. Increasing H2o levels have little effect because there is nothing left of the upward radiation in the H2O absorption region.
The narrow absorption band of CO2 happens to overlap a little with a large window in the atmospheric absorption of H2O.
Now if you were to dramatically raise H2O levels, you would make that atmospheric window very dark. By the time that happens, enough to make CO2 levels meaningless, it would be time to find a new planet. I don't think anyone reputable thinks that is on the forseable horizon though.
Jmo - They say planes are worse because they release the CO2 into the upper atmosphere. Now, what is the rate at which gasses diffuse in the atmophere? I would assume the rate of diffusion is very high, such that it doesn't really matter where you relase the carbon as it will mix rather quickly with the rest of the atmosphere.
I'm not sure how they got that calculation, but CO2 is pretty scarce (~380 parts per million) in the lower atmosphere. It's rapidly consumed by plants. And more concentrated CO2 improves the efficiency of carbon fixation, increasing the rate at which is is fixed. (to a point. Excessive CO2 atmosphere hurts plants.)
Occam's Beard - Thanks for the breakdown on the philosophical problems with climate change. You've expressed my concerns much more eloquently than I could.
Ed Reid - If the vessel to which you are adding something already contains more of that something than is "ideal", continuing to add that something more slowly will not resolve the issue.
Well, CO2 is also removed from the atmosphere.
Ryan W.,
"Well, CO2 is also removed from the atmosphere."
True. However, it has been being added to the atmosphere faster than it has been being removed since ~1900. Arguably, if we continued to add CO2 more slowly than we were adding it before 1900, the atmospheric concentration might begin to decrease slowly. However, we are a long way from adding CO2 more slowly than we were prior to 1900; and China is currently increasing its emissions faster than the developed countries could reasonably reduce theirs.