Let's solve the problem

Hillary Clinton wants to give $100B a year to developing countries to compensate them for 'our contribution to the carbon dioxide problem'.

Wait a minute! For the kind of money, why don't we just extract all of the industrial carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? There is about 3 trillion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, with about 35% of it added during the industrial age -- so let's extract 665 gigatons of CO2 out atmosphere. 2050 seems to be our event horizon by which we must solve the problem or die, so let's take 40 years (from about the time this was written) to extract all 665 gigatons of industrial CO2, or about 17 gigatons per year.

It takes about 100 KW-hour to extract 1 ton of CO2 out the atmosphere. My retail residential electricity is about US $0.12 per KW-hour. A nuclear reactor costs about $3500/KW to build, and a Hyperion Power nuclear power module costs about $2000/KW -- converting that to KW-hours over the 7 year lifetime of the module gives me US $0.033 dollar/KW-hour. Now we're talking. This works out to be less than US $55B a year to extract all of the CO2 emitted during the industrial age.

Now that we've extract the CO2, now we need to break it down. In the presence of an iridium catalyst and 800 degrees C, CO2 pyrolizes to carbon and oxygen in an exothermic reaction -- that is, once you start it the process is self-sustaining.

If we're spending money, we can also produce hydrogen from water. That will raise the price from US $55B/year, but hey, we just spent a trillion on corrupt banks and politicians, so what's a few billion more? In the Bosch reaction, we can reduce the CO2 and hydrogen to carbon and water using an iron catalyst in another exothermic reaction. Or using the Sabatier reaction we can transform the CO2 and hydrogen to methane and water, but that leaves us with the problem of what to with the methane. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and burning it just produces the CO2 again.

Now the next question, is whether we really want to extract all of the "industrial" CO2 from the atmosphere. In Earth's ancient past as recently as 49M years ago, the atmosphere contained 4x to 7x the amount of CO2 today. Turtles and lizards cavorted at the poles. Something natural happened then to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere to plunge the Earth into ice age conditions. Where did that CO2 go? Is it lurking somewhere in the carbon cycle to pop out and cause real greenhouse conditions again? Are we so sure that the 35% increase in CO2 we've measured is due to the industrial age?

According to the Minkowski cycles we're due for another ice age in the next millenia. Will extracting the CO2 trigger the next ice age?

What is the real problem?

Politics and obscuration confound much of the global warming debate. In the long term there isn't much doubt that global warming is occurring. After all, technically we're in the last ice age still. Just by the Minkowski cycles we'll see a warming trend for the next hundred years (and then temperatures will plummet like a rock). Politicalization has led to the misleading fudging of data. For example, a few years you could read about the megatons of CO2 emitted in the Mammoth Lakes area. Those numbers have been revised downward to mere tons. Given the extent of killed forests, and the level of CO2 in the soil over many square miles, I have severe doubts about the new smaller numbers.

Politics has also obscured that only a minor part of CO2 comes from the burning of fossil fuels. According to studies that the Woods Hole Institute performed, over half of the CO2 increase can be attributed to "land use change" -- that is, the burning of the rain forests in the Amazon and Indonesia. Of the remaining portion CO2, most of it comes from the production of cement. When you heat limestone to produce cement, it releases prodigious amounts of CO2. The development of China and the 3rd world is responsible for most of this change.

Fudging of data and revising history also impacts our estimation of the volcanic contribution of greenhouse gases. As another example, the overturning of the lakes in Africa percolated with volcanic CO2, was estimated to have released more CO2 than the entire industrial output of the the United States, and yet the UN report estimates volcanic contribution as a minor part of the CO2 increase. To be fair, perhaps they attribute volcanic contribution as a steady-state variable that does merely maintains the level of CO2 without increasing it -- a fallacious assumption.

Likewise politics overcomes common sense in the discussion of "biofuels". In no shape, way, or form, does bio-diesel, ethanol, or natural gas, help reduce CO2 emissions. When you burn something that contains carbon, it produces CO2.

Water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2, and there is hundreds of times more CO2 in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic CO2 pundits claim that it is the altitude of gas that contains but fail to explain how CO2, a heavier gas and H20, reaches the greenhouse altitudes.

Anthropogenic CO2 pundits claim thousands of scientific papers support their assertions, but a quick survey of papers on climate show that the vast majority of them refer to each other, and precious few contain original data. I found it painful to find many of the papers commented on how one mathematical model differed from the results of a computer model, and those papers were cited as evidence of global warming. Number of papers and claims of consensus in no way constitutes scientific method, but isn't anyone bothered by the low quality of the cited papers?

Now for the really scary stuff: many of the Earth's previous ice ages are marked with elevated levels of CO2. It appears that the Earth avoided a fate of a giant snowball only because of its greenhouse gases. Part of the carbon cycle is the accumulation of carbon rich sediments becoming limestone, and subducting under the continents, to be emitted again through volcanic action. We know that the carbon content of the sediments has varied widely over millions of years. This means in geologic times volcanoes can belch a huge bolus of CO2 any time now.

Another consideration is that Antarctic ice is cold enough to sequester CO2 for millions of years. At times Antarctica is cold enough to freeze CO2 out of the atmosphere. I expect some deep ice to be positively fizzy with the stuff. Now let's suppose that an iceberg the size of an average U.S. state breaks off -- you don't need global warming for that event as increased snowfall in Antarctica due to to global cooling will do it too. That huge iceberg drifts north, and dumps its load of freshwater and dissolved CO2 in warmer waters, killing all life in the region.

In the last decade we've seen the Sun go through unusual patterns of activity and inactivity, and yet the publicly available data on the Sun shows remarkable stability in its radiance. The Earth's magnetic field appears to be dying. We don't know a lot about the coupling of the Sun and its variability and the Earth's magnetic field and weather, but there is obviously a connection.

Really big things are happening in the natural world. Politics, lies, and obscuration interfere with our investigating what is really happening. Some of those things can kill us all. We really do need to spend some time and money on some basic research.

As you can see I don't post often. I hope to do better. My next post is going to be on just getting rid of the CO2. If its such a problem, how much will it cost to just extract it? Its interesting to note how many solutions depend upon sequestration when pyrolizing CO2 with a catalyst to pure carbon and oxygen is an exothermic reaction.

Can't blame the Sun

One of my assertions that my friends have heard many times is that the Sun is in a violent period right now. Within the last few years more gigantic X class flares have been recorded than anytime previously. I even found a German paper that documented solar activity and shows that the Sun is about 15% brighter at some frequencies than twenty years ago. Of course, mankind has not had the instrumentation to measure and monitor solar flares for more than a couple of decades. Proxy measures such as the measurement of isotopes of beryllium in Greenland ice in fact suggest that fantastically more energetic solar flares have occurred within mankind's history.

Total irradiance of the Sun, though, has varied only 0.1% over many 11-year solar cycles. This doesn't seem like much, but the ice caps on Mars are disappearing. Some interaction between the planets and the Sun is occurring that we do not completely understand. UV from the Sun varies by factors of 2 to 10 times over the course of a Solar cycle. That the Martian ice caps are melting and subliming suggests the Sun sways our climate much more than previously thought.

I am not professional climatologist, and I'm being presented with conflicting views and evidence. Scientists generally attribute only small variations in climate to the Sun because of small variation in irradiance, but the Martian ice caps are melting. The Northern hemisphere suffered a miniature ice age in the 1600s to 1700s, a time that corresponds to diminished solar activity, called the Maunder Minimum. The current Martian icecap melting and the Maunder Minimum means the generally held view of scientists that the Sun's variations don't affect us much is just plain wrong.

On top of that, the Earth is just now coming out of an ice age. Even if it weren't for greenhouse gases the Earth would still be getting warmer.

Despite apparent evidence that Sun is playing a larger role in global warming than the general scientific community seems willing to admit, that should not influence our policies on global warming and the control of greenhouse gases. If the planet is warming for any reason it seems colossally stupid to exacerbate it with greenhouse gas production.

Introduction: The World is Not Ending

Every generation of humankind thinks it will be the last. With global warming, world terrorism, energy crisis, and the threat of pandemic diseases, this generation might actually be correct; if not for our own power to peacefully resolve our problems. Much of what stands in our way is merely the noise of incompletely advertised facts that will interfere with effective solutions. For example, if we solve the problem of industrial output of carbon dioxide, we may still face trouble from the burning of the rainforests and pollution of the oceans. Our addiction to oil not only warms the planet, but funds despotic regimes and their use of terrorism. The warming itself and the incursion of civilization into previously forested areas contribute to the rise of new diseases.

Our problems are interlinked, and so are the solutions. We must expand our thinking from just the passive to the active. In addition to reducing carbon dioxide emissions we also develop oil-free methods of producing energy, and the means to extract the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Not only can we stop damaging the planet, but we can also repair some of the existing damage, free ourselves from the threat of terrorism, and rescue civilations from despotic regimes.

Much of the debate about global warming lacks solid data, or data that is too easily mis-interpreted. Some assertions are just plain wrong. Global warming is occurring, but not all of the warming is due to industrial causes, and the major part of the industrial causes would be surprising to most people.

My blog documents my exploration of the assertions surrounding the crises of the world. I do not agree with the Bush administration, but just as strongly I do not agree nor believe all of the assertions of Al Gore. I have been tracking global warming since 1977. In the 1990s I worked on proposals for NASA's mission to planet Earth series of satellites, including a heat budget satellite to establish the baseline for the study of global warming.

Even if global warming is not entirely due to industrial output of greenhouse gases, it seems really stupid to dump more into the atmosphere while the Earth is warming.

Wish us all good luck and success in this endeavor.