Apparently it was the National Review that first made the "Sandusky comparison."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...or-defamation/
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Apparently it was the National Review that first made the "Sandusky comparison."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...or-defamation/
The paradox of this comprehensive article is that it is based on solid scientific evidence that presents a negative scenario of environmental change that future generations will struggle to live with, and a utopian belief in the ability of politics to prevent the worst case scenarios from taking place. The paper on the one hand acknowledges the fact that hydrocarbons are not only still in the driving seat of the energy machine but are likely to be so in the foreseeable future because of the development of unconventional hydrocarbons, yet on the other hand makes claims for the development of renewables that are out of touch with reality precisely because the greater proportion of investment in energy technology is going back into hydrocarbons rather than renewables:Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Most renewable energies tap diffuse intermittent sources often at a distance from the user population, thus requiring large-scale energy storage and transport. Developing technologies can ameliorate these issues, as discussed below. However, apparent cost is the constraint that prevents nuclear and renewable energies from fully supplanting fossil fuel electricity generation.
First of all until the recent development of shale in the US (as an example) brought the industry to your doorstep, most petroleum resources have been in remote locations or offshore, where they still are. Second, 'developing technologies can ameliorate these issues' assumes the level of investment in renewables technology not only taking place, which it isn't, but in finding the solutions, which so far doesn't look so good either -an example of the utopian argument that goes nowhere. When they discuss the logic of carbon taxes they simply can't cope with the hostility to new taxes that has been fundamental to the opposition to climate change science where the science is in reality not the issue but the taxes are -and which is considered to have been a signal feature of the change of government in Australia which is repudiating climate science and specifically carbon taxes.
The appeal to our sharing of the earth's atmosphere as a 'human right' also ignores the campaign against human rights that is taking place in a country like the UK where it is part of the anti-European agenda being driven by disaffected Conservatives and the United Kingdom Independence Party. Although I don't think it has long term effect, the debate on the validity of human rights is under challenge more today than I can recall in recent years.
The bleak reality is that politics is not a long-term project outside of grand ideological statements, the 'international community' has been arguing about this issue for decades and we are no closer to meaningful co-operation now than we were in 1992, sorry to sound cynical but that is how I see it.
In the US, the obsession with energy security and a decrease in imports from the Middle East with fracking is indeed changing the energy landscape and, paradoxically for Obama, his approval ratings are low at a time when his energy policies appear to be a runaway success. As we have discussed before I think the dangers of fracking are on balance emerging in some areas as greater than the benefits, but this isn't going to change and surely this is the bleak conclusion of the way in which we live.
One small point: figure 1 is based on data from the BP Statistical Review of Energy but refers to the source as 'British Petroleum', but this company changed its name to BP Amoco in 1998, and BP plc in 2001, precisely because it merged with two American, one British and one German company and thereby ceased to be a 'British' company. I would expect small facts like this not to appear in a paper of this calibre and assume other similar errors have not been made.
Using the worlds deserts to produce biofuels would be great. There would still be plenty of carbon going into the atmosphere though.
http://www.energypost.eu/exclusive-r...biofuels-ever/
Exclusive report – Boeing reveals “the biggest breakthrough in biofuels ever”
January 27, 2014 - Author: Karel Beckman
http://www.energypost.eu/wp-content/...-Abu-Dhabi.jpg
Oil companies watch out. Biofuels are on the verge of a breakthrough that will transform the oil market. Not only that: it will also green the planet. In an exclusive interview with CleanTechnica.com and Energy Post, Darrin L. Morgan, Director Sustainable Aviation Fuels and Environmental Strategy at Boeing, reveals that researchers at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, funded by Boeing, Honeywell and Etihad Airways, may have achieved “the biggest breakthrough in biofuels ever”. Alarmed by the poor quality of fuel made from shale oil and tar sands and frustrated by the blunt refusal of oil companies to provide fuel of better quality, Boeing and its partners have over the past four years sponsored research into alternative fuels that has led to spectacular results. They found that there is a class of plants that can grow in deserts on salt water and has superb biomass potential. “Nobody knew this”, says Morgan. “It is a huge discovery. A game-changer for the biofuels market.” Karel Beckman has the story.
We are sitting on a shaded patio in Masdar City – the famous sustainable living project in Abu Dhabi – with a small group of people and listening to what seems a truly sensational story. It is Wednesday 22 January, we are in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s Sustainability Week – Siemens is about to open its new Middle Eastern headquarters for 800 employees that same afternoon right next door in Masdar City – and Darrin Morgan of Boeing takes the opportunity to reveal to two journalists and a science writer a new development in biofuels which he is convinced will change the world. “The 20th Century saw Norman Borlaug’s Green revolution”, he says. “This is the next step after that.”
Morgan is not some green dreamer. He is Director of Sustainable Aviation Fuels and Environmental Strategy at The Boeing Company in Seattle in the US. He has worked on Boeing’s biofuels program for 10 years. And he is convinced that researchers at the Masdar Institute, sponsored by Boeing, Honeywell’s UOP and Etihad Airways, have achieved a breakthrough in biofuels that will make it possible for countries all over the world to turn their deserts into biofuel-producing agricultural lands. We are on the verge, says the Boeing man, of a totally sustainable solution that does not require any arable land and that is going to replace a very big chunk of the oil currently used in transport.
But before we come to that, Morgan tells the story of how it got that far. A story that’s fascinating in itself as it reveals some troublesome facts about the existing oil market, increasingly based as it is on unconventional oils like tar sands and shale oil.
Ahead of the game
For a number of years now, says Morgan, Boeing has been actively looking at how to help develop the biofuels market. They learned a lot as they went along. Morgan: “One of the lessons of early generation biofuels was: ignore stakeholder consequences at your peril.” He mentions corn ethanol as a “perfect example” of how NOT to do things. “There were policies in place before there was a clear understanding of the system. Look what happened. This is not a good environmental story and it is not a good economic story. This is so not what we’re looking at.”
“The biofuels that are now approved for use in aircraft are technically superior to kerosene jet fuel. There is no question about that”
“We took a play from that book and realized that is not the play we want to have”, he continues. “We realized we need to get ahead of the game in terms of understanding the right paths.”
To do so, Boeing realized that they needed to involve stakeholders – “to help us direct our thinking on where to go, to learn how to use sustainability as the criterion to drive us.” The company entered into various partnerships around the world, with NGO’s like WWF, and with agricultural and biological researchers and developers. “We have partnerships around the planet now. Some are formal research collaborations, like this one with the Masdar Institute. Some are more like stakeholder engagement processes.”
Morgan says Boeing and its partners have “a common goal: we want to have a strong market for sustainable biofuels”. There are two good practical reasons why the company takes sustainable biofuels seriously, he explains. First, they have discovered that the biofuels that are now approved for use in aircraft are technically superior to kerosene jet fuel. “There is no question about that”, says Morgan. “It surprised us. We had not expected that. We had expected the opposite. But the hydrotreated fuels we now use work very well for us. The biological sources of these fuels end up making jet fuels that are much better than petroleum jet fuels.”
Shale oil and tar sands
At the same time, Boeing found that while biofuels turned out to be much better in quality than expected, the quality of the existing oil supplies was going down. This, says Morgan, is the result of the poorer quality of the new types of unconventional oil that are coming onto the market like shale and tar sands – and the unwillingness of the oil companies to do anything about it.
“There is a trend going on in parts of the world, especially in North America, where there are alternative forms of crude being produced. The backpage story out there is that there is stuff in those fuels that appears to be causing problems in terms of contamination of jet fuel. There are additives that go into those types of crude that are getting through the refining system and into our supply and are actually causing problems for us. Our existing supply chain is increasingly being fed by these heavy forms of crude that are less jet-friendly, to put it simply.”
“We are such a small market, the oil companies are not particularly motivated to help us with our problems”
The new forms of crude “cause inefficiencies and problems in the system”, says Morgan. “That’s not a good trend. But we can’t do anything about it. The crude is where the crude is.” The aviation industry did ask oil companies to help them with their problem, but the oil suppliers, Morgan says, were not very helpful. “We are such a small market, the oil companies are not particularly motivated to help us with our problems. That’s fine. That’s their decision. So we realized we got to get ahead of this.” Later, Morgan says: “You know Shell, in the Netherlands, is just not supportive of biofuels. That’s fine, they don’t have to be, they have their own interests. But we have ours. We are going to move this.”
http://www.energypost.eu/wp-content/...-Tony-Rodd.jpg
So Boeing decided to enter upon a different path: a search for biofuels with higher sustainability and lower cost. “Those two things are really the same”, notes Morgan. “The things that are causing first-generation biofuels to be expensive, like the use of valuable arable land and water, are also making them less sustainable. The leadership of the company decided we would go down the road of decreasing costs and increasing sustainability.”
“We are not going to go into biofuels”, he adds. “But we are going to steer those partnerships, those technologies, more towards aviation than they would otherwise be, because our incumbent energy providers wouldn’t do that. If we do nothing, the outcome will be tar sands and shale oil and that’s not a good outcome. But if we do something we can drive the technology towards a more sustainable pathway and get something that will be cost-effective and will cause biofuels to be better than they otherwise would be.”
Talking with NGO’s “and others who are deeply concerned about the effects of biofuels”, says Morgan, “we realized we need to get serious about sustainability. We need to live it. We actually need to use this as design criteria. Biofuels are not hurdles to be overcome, they are design criteria.”
Sustainability pledge
In 2008, Boeing and others set up the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group (SAFUG) of which by now a-third of all airlines are members of. The CEO’s of these companies “signed up to a pledge which states that they will work through strong sustainability criteria for their sourcing”. The sustainability standards used by SAFUG are “probably the strongest out there”, says Morgan. “They are recognized in the EU as a legally applicable standard. We have set the bar very high. We do this for sustainability reasons. But also to get lower costs.”
Which bring us to the research that has been going on at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi. “It is probably the best example of what we are looking for”, says Morgan.
“These plants tend to liberate these sugars relatively easily, so you need relatively low temperatures in the production process. Nobody knew this. It is a huge discovery that was made here”
What researchers at the Masdar Institute have been studying is a category of plants called halophytes. These plants have naturally evolved to be able to live on salt water. Not only that: they are also able to live in arid lands, in deserts. “If you look around you here [in Abu Dhabi], most of the plants you see are halophytes.”
Clearly if it is possible to grow plants in deserts around the world, and use them for biofuels, that would be an ideal solution. It would solve the major problems of traditional biofuels – use of fresh water and arable land – at one stroke. “Twenty per cent of the world’s land is either desert or becoming desert through overuse or mal-use”, Morgan notes. “And 97% of the world’s water is salt water. So if you can use those two factors that turns the scarcity problem that plagues all biofuels on its head.”
Boeing and its partners Honeywell UOP and Eithad Airways founded a research consortium called the Sustainable Bio-Energy Research Consortium (SBRC) which was invited by the government of Abu Dhabi to set up shop in Masdar City. Since 2009, the researchers at Masdar have studied the possibilities of halophytes. Remarkably, the consortium discovered that not much work had been done on halophytes up to that time. “We started to ask, who is working on this, because there is a lot of biomass potential out there. The science was there. The science said this can be made into biofuels pretty well. But if you looked at the patents, who is doing this, not really anybody. It was a whole new realm that nobody was looking at.”
And the researchers made a very pleasant discovery. It turned out, Morgan says, “that the types of halophytes we are working on are very amenable to being converted into sugars.” This is crucial in terms of the potential the plants have to produce energy cost-effectively, Morgan explains. “Plants contain lignin that keeps them stiff. The cellulose in the plant has to be separated from the lignin to liberate the sugars. Production costs are heavily influenced by how easy or difficult it is to do this. This is the name of the game for next-generation biofuels.”
“What the scientists here have found”, he adds, “is that the halophytic family tends to be low in lignin and high in the right type of sugars, which can be converted into hydrocarbons. These plants tend to liberate these sugars relatively easily, so you need relatively low temperatures in the production process. Nobody knew this. It is a huge discovery that was made here. We found it and repeated it.” This was about six months ago.
Combination with aquaculture
The consortium then decided to set up a pilot production facility which is now being built in Abu Dhabi right next door to Masdar City. There is yet one more element to this to complete the story, because what the researchers decided to do in this pilot project is also unique: they decided to combine the production of biofuels from halophytes with aquaculture.
Morgan explains the reason behind this. “With the earth’s oceans increasingly being emptied of fish, aquaculture is growing fast all over the world. The problem with aquaculture, however, is the waste it produces. This goes right into the ocean and creates a lot of environmental problems.” This “fish waste”, he says, is essentially a fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium suspended in salt water. “And guess what halophytes need to grow? Fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium suspended in salt water.”
“Integrating those two systems you get sustainable acquaculture that does not pollute the oceans and biomass that can be used for fuels”
“So the concept we took up here”, says Morgan, “is to build a pilot facility that integrates aquaculture with the growing of halophytes. Integrating those two systems you get sustainable acquaculture that does not pollute the oceans and biomass that can be used for fuels. We are now figuring out the optimal combination of the two systems.”
Morgan expects that the two-hectare pilot facility will up and running in a year. If all goes well, they will then develop a plot of land of 500 acres in western Abu Dhabi for the initial scale-up. “After that, if the results are what we expect them to be, you will start seeing thousands and thousands of hectares being developed”.
He notes that while the technology is being developed in Abu Dhabi, it has potential for the entire world. In fact, everywhere where there are deserts.
Does this mean we could see the world’s deserts turn into agricultural land producing sustainable biofuels that will be able to replace oil in transport? “Yes”, says Morgan. “I believe this will be the big gamechanger for biofuels. Nobody has looked at this before.” And it would not just be relevant for the air transport sector. “It will be much bigger.”
So far, Boeing and its partners have not given much publicity to their expectations. They did announce the results of their research, but in fairly technical terms. “We have been quiet about it”, says Morgan. But he is too excited to keep quiet any longer. “To me this is the biggest breakthrough out there. The 20th Century saw Norman Borlaug’s Green revolution, this is the next step after that.”
Articles on Boeing’s exploration into biofuels are curiously lengthy and uniformative. Here’s another
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/27/...ough-big-deal/
1. What problems are Boeing engines experiencing? Boeing says the chemicals used to extract oil from shale and fuels refined from high bitumen crudes “cause problems for their engines.” What trouble? Is the public is danger? Or is it just an efficiency issue?
2. What halophyte is Boeing experimenting with?
The plus side of biofuels is that they are renewable. Growing them sucks carbon from the atmosphere. Burning them puts it back in. The rub is in the balance. With corn based methanol fuels, production, refinement and transportation put more carbon in the atmosphere than the corn removes. This is partly because fossil fuels are used in production, refinement and transportation.
Many land use issues also arise with the use of biofuels. In the U.S. the price of corn has gone up. Fields that should have been rotated to restore vital nutrients are replanted year afte year with corn. Soils are losing their fertility. One might think growing a crop of halophytes in the desert poses no environmental issues. However, deserts number among the most delicate ecologies on the face of the planet. What, for example, will irrigating halophytes with salt water do to the water table below and distant fresh water wells?
It's cold outside, so much for global warming, eh?
The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See
The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See - YouTube
The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19fj.../ku-xlarge.jpg
http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-larges...521998493/+nak
"The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity to California customers. At full capacity, the facility's trio of 450-foot high towers produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road."
http://ivanpahsolar.com/
The Guardian today has published an article on a report from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California on Nuclear Fusion, which has the potential to solve our energy problems. It is still in its experimental stages but progress is encouraging, but I don't know enough about this aspect of energy to know if nuclear fusion is any safer than other kinds of nuclear energy. One trivial point is that the lead author of the report is called Omar Hurricane. I could say something but I won't.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...-energy-source
Two and a half billion dollar bird roaster:Quote:
Originally Posted by dderek123
http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/wild...unt-rises.html
One could also say a skyscraper is a half-billion dollar bird hazard. But of course that's confuses intended function with unintended (though foreseen) effects. A skyscraper is a half-billion dollar corporate home, a source of jobs for construction workers, maintenance crews, security crews as well as a source of income for investors and stock owners.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird-skyscraper_collisions
http://www.terrain.org/articles/15/kousky.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/wo...?smid=pl-share
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4134773/ns.../#.Uv1RLfbjmHk
The same confusion lies behind the headline claiming Ivanpa Solar Electric Generating System is a half-billion dollar bird roaster. In fact, it's coal and oil that's is currently roasting birds and the rest of the planet along with them. Of course, that's not the reason we mine, pump and burn fossil fuels. It's mined and pumped for the money you can sell it for. It's burned for the energy.
Every energy source that has the power to supply a chain of cities with electricity also has the potential to be destructive to the same degree. The trick is too regulate production and use to minimize risk and optimize safety.
The hazards that oil, gas, coal, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar (and all other methods in use for the large scale production of power) present to birds, fish and ultimately humans are not something that we can afford to ignore. Solar and wind are new and present new hazards. Something that needs to be addressed. But certainly the use of fossil fuels has no high moral ground here, as the global threat it imposes looms over all of us.
Bird slicer and dicerQuote:
Originally Posted by dakota87
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...ih6AkUyTwts2mg
Planetary deep fryer->
The bird should be marinated prior to cooking
http://aviewfromtheright.com/wp-cont...vered-bird.jpg
It's an end goal - unlimited clean energy - but long, long way to go.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Yep the goal is to economically produce more energy than you put in to the fusion process. Right now they get about 1% of the energy back that is put in. They're making progress but still there's a long way to go.Quote:
Originally Posted by martin48
Without a doubt gas and oil are some of the most energy dense fuels available. There are about 33 to 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in one gallon of gasoline. Still, we spend energy seeking it, drilling for it, pumping it out of the ground, transporting it, refining it and transporting it again. When we finally burn it, we burn it inefficiently. The net energy produced per gallon of tar sand oil is about zero kilowatt-hours.
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20...dilbit-bitumen
Sorry Trish you should have been more specific -unconventional hydrocarbons, heavy oil, oil sands, tar sands yes; 'oil and gas' -as in conventional hydrocarbons, no. Still one of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet. Your link also says "As the supply of sweet, light crude diminishes, it is being replaced by unconventional alternatives, including tar sands", yet most Middle Eastern crude is heavy in sulphur, to get the lighter sweeter crudes you need to travel west to North Africa, esp Libya, and Nigeria. What your link could also have added is the staggering amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing, in some cases probably more than it is worth wasting, as it leaves communities high and dry, and given the amount of dry land in the United States, you and your government might want to review this aspect of the industrial operations currently taking place...
All correct. Thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Perhaps instead of "fracking" we should use the more technical "hydraulic fracturing" as you have done since the very term underscores the vast volume of water it requires. The water is mixed with chemicals and pumped at high pressure down into strata below the water table. The process can force the mixture through fissures up into the ground water. It can also cause the shifting of ground masses to redirect underground springs. The used mixture is brought up and stored in vast lagoons that may leak into the water table from above. Eventually it is pumped at high pressure back down into the lower strata for permanent storage. This process entails the same hazards as hydraulic fracturing itself. As you say, the volume of water involved is more than the surrounding community can afford to waste, not to mention the danger of pollution. Moreover, companies refuse to reveal the chemical composition of the mixtures they use claiming such knowledge is proprietary.
The New York Times published a review of a book by Elizabeth Kolbert The Sixth Extinction by Al Gore, on Feb 10 which looks at the impact humans have had on plant life.
"Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.
Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.
In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.
For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste. If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes. According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems. It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”
The earth’s water cycle is being dangerously disturbed, as warmer oceans evaporate more water vapor into the air. Warmer air holds more moisture (there has been an astonishing 4 percent increase in global humidity in just the last 30 years) and funnels it toward landmasses, where it is released in much larger downpours, causing larger and more frequent floods and mudslides.
The extra heat is also absorbed in the top layer of the seas, which makes ocean-based storms more destructive. Just before Hurricane Sandy, the area of the Atlantic immediately windward from New York City and New Jersey was up to nine degrees warmer than normal. And just before Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, the area of the Pacific from which it drew its energy was about 5.4 degrees above average.
Our oceans, a crucial food source for billions, have become not only warmer but also more acidic than they have been in millions of years. They struggle to absorb excess heat and carbon pollution — which is why, as Kolbert points out, coral reefs might be the first entire ecosystem to go extinct in the modern era.
The same extra heat pulls moisture from soil in drought-prone regions, causing deeper and longer-lasting droughts. The drying of trees and other vegetation leads also to an increase in the frequency and average size of fires.
Food crops are threatened not only by more pests and the disruption of long-predictable rainy season-dry season patterns, but also by the growing impact of heat stress itself on corn, wheat, rice and other staples.
Earth’s ice-covered regions are melting. The vanishing of the Arctic ice cap is changing the heat absorption at the top of the world, and may be affecting the location of the Northern Hemisphere jet stream and storm tracks and slowing down the movement of storm systems. Meanwhile, the growing loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating sea level rise and threatening low-lying coastal cities and regions.
Viruses, bacteria, disease-carrying species like mosquitoes and ticks, and pest species like bark beetles are now being pushed far beyond their native ranges. Everywhere the intricate interconnections crucial to sustaining life are increasingly being pulled apart.
This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions — and the species we’ve lost — and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life. Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action. “Right now,” she writes, “we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”
Kolbert expertly traces the “twisting” intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it. When mastodon bones were first studied, in 1739, many scientists reasoned that the large and unique bones belonged to an elephant or hippopotamus. But in 1796, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier presented evidence of an entirely new theory: The bones belonged to a lost species from “a world previous to ours.” Cuvier collected and studied as many fossils as he could, eventually identifying dozens of extinct species, and over the next several decades, with the contributions of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, extinction evolved as a scientific concept.
Since the origin of life on earth 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has experienced five mass extinction events. The last of these events occurred some 66 million years ago when a six-mile-wide asteroid is thought to have collided with earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous extinction event dramatically changed the composition of biodiversity on the planet: Marine ecosystems essentially collapsed, and about 75 percent of all plant and animal species disappeared.
Today, Kolbert writes, we are witnessing a similar mass extinction event happening in the geologic blink of an eye. According to E. O. Wilson, the present extinction rate in the tropics is “on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate” and will reduce biological diversity to its lowest level since the last great extinction.
This time, however, a giant asteroid isn’t to blame — we are, by altering environmental conditions on our planet so swiftly and dramatically that a large proportion of other species cannot adapt. And we are risking our own future as well, by fundamentally altering the integrity of the climate balance that has persisted in more or less the same configuration since the end of the last ice age, and which has fostered the flourishing of human civilization.
As early as the 1840s, scientists noticed large gaps in the fossil record — time periods in which earth’s biodiversity declined rapidly and could not be explained by a static system. Some scientists theorized that abrupt climate changes had caused past mass extinction events. But in the modern era, three factors have combined to radically disrupt the relationship between civilization and the earth’s ecosystem: the unparalleled surge in human population that has quadrupled our numbers in less than a hundred years; the development of powerful new technologies that magnify the per capita impact of all seven billion of us, soon to be nine billion or more; and the emergence of a hegemonic ideology that exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics.
“People change the world,” Kolbert writes, and she vividly presents the science and history of the current crisis. Her extensive travels in researching this book, and her insightful treatment of both the history and the science all combine to make “The Sixth Extinction” an invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances, just as the paradigm shift she calls for is sorely needed.
Despite the evidence that humanity is driving mass extinctions, we have been woefully slow to adopt the necessary measures to solve this global environmental challenge. Our response to the mass extinction — as well as to the climate crisis — is still controlled by a hopelessly outdated view of our relationship to our environment.
Fortunately, history is full of examples of our capacity to overcome even the most difficult challenges whenever a controversy is finally resolved into a choice between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. The anomalies Kolbert identifies are too glaring to ignore. She makes an irrefutable case that what we are doing to cause a sixth mass extinction is clearly wrong. And she makes it clear that doing what is right means accelerating our transition to a more sustainable world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/bo...ref=books&_r=0
http://observationdeck.io9.com/bill-...day-1523345002
Bill Nye to "debate" climate change on Sunday
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19fq.../ku-xlarge.jpg
Bill Nye is apparently the new person to go to talk about scientific issues. Good work for an engineer!
Meet the Press, a Sunday morning political talk show on NBC, will feature a "debate" on climate change this Sunday, the 16th. On the side of science! will be Bill Nye, who you've heard of probably. On the side of ??? will be Representative Martha Blackburn (R-TN).
"It's not a debate when one side is wrong." - Bill Maher
Finally, UK Government accepts climate change! Forget all the scientific evidence, it's flooding in our Home Counties and an election on the way that done it. Shocking scenes like this have convinced the British public!
PS - For US readers, the above is irony
Reminds me of the epilogue of my favorite British comedy routine.Quote:
Originally Posted by martin48
A man with bad teeth and a powdered wig: "That's humor, or humour, my dear North American friends. Don't you get it old chap! What he's really saying is that they have ignored all of the scientific evidence in favor of that which has impacted their lives. Or put another way..it has finally hit close to home in a manner such that they can no longer ignore the data. Nothing? Not even a smile? You Americans are thick as ever".:D:D
David Cameron is playing fast and sluice with climate-led flooding facts:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...ameron-3150493
A bleak assessment from James Lovelock The Guardian in March 2008-for those of you still under 40, you might want to make long term plans to move to Greenland...
James Lovelock: 'enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan'
The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do? By Decca Aitkenhead
In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.
"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."
There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardi....climatechange
It is interesting to compare the two contentions,
1. We are beyond the tipping point,
and
2. Global climate warming is not anthropogenic.
Both claims entail the conclusion that there is nothing humans can do to stay the oncoming disaster. It therefore makes no sense to spend money on wind turbines etc.
Of course the current climate change is anthropogenic. The question is, “Have we reached the tipping point to inevitable catastrophic climate change?” Even if we haven’t, my general pessimism leads me to believe that humans, motivated by inertia and profit, will likely do nothing of real consequence until it’s too late.
But suppose it is too late. Should we really not build wind turbines? Of course wind turbines alone won’t allow us to consume energy at our current rates. But they don’t spew carbon into the atmosphere. They won’t make a bad situation worse. Everything we ought to have done to avert the catastrophe will lessen its future severity.
If we are beyond the tipping point, whether the change is anthropocentric or not, it is imperative to the survival of our modern civilizations to adjust our energy consumption, to use our energy more efficiently and to utilize energies that don’t aggravate our climate problem. I’ve said in this thread elsewhere that nuclear is an option we cannot ignore. But we need to solve the problems of nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation first. It seems to me that we should be able to extract more energy from hot nuclear wastes, effectively recycling our nuclear fuels.
If we really are beyond the tipping point it may be time to consider global engineering efforts like pouring reflecting particulates high into the atmosphere to correct the energy imbalance that we’ve already caused.
I think you are right. Lovelock seems to me to see things in terms of the whole planet, and he may be right about many things, but practical solutions to contemporary problems can have an impact for people living today and over the next say, 50 years, though I will not survive that long (unless...). As you say, even for people who can't bring themselves to believe in climate change and global warming, there are practical things that can be done to make life more pleasant, while protecting the environment that we have left. One example is provided by the Netherlands' 'Road to the River' project which is dealing with the fact that much of the Netherlands is below sea level, and requires long term planning to enable fields and rivers to flood the land having moved people to new locations. No such planning exists in the UK where recent flooding has seen rational people descend into futile arguments about specific measures that were or were not taken, without a more holistic view of the problem. I fear the same lack of long term planning is not being addressed in those states, like California, which are facing genuine long term water shortages. It is mad, because there are often solutions, and it doesn't mean throwing one's hands in the air and saying but the earth will shrivel up and die, in a billion years time. Even I can't live that long.
For those of you who are interested, the latest issue of Geographical is devoted to climate change and has a useful set of articles on a range of issues, there is a link here. It costs I think £4.99 in the shops.
http://www.geographical.co.uk/Home/index.html
The March of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22002...ate-disruption
California's Mega Drought:
California's Mega Drought | Kicking Back with Ana and Dave - YouTube
George Carlin - What would happen if we didn't have electricity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZWA_cw9tss
The New York Review of Books ran a review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s newt book The Sixth Extinction. The review was written by Verlyn Klinkenborg. I haven’t read the book, but it made onto my short list today. The review was thought provoking. Here are a few excerpts (from the review...not the book).
Klinkenborg, presumably channeling Kobert eloquently describes how we have unhinged the synchronicity of nature’s dynamic processes.
“Nothing we will ever do will ever change the speed at which tectonic plates shift and continents wander. But everything we do now shifts the speed at which other natural processes occur__natural processes that once shifted at roughly geological speed. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and the oceans) has changed again and again in earth’s history, but almost always at a rate imperceptible to humans. The same is true of the mix of species on this planet. Catastrophes apart, species haven’t become extinct very often. They disappear at a roughly measurable, roughly steady background rate.
The way we live now__and have lived for the past couple of centuries__has accelerated climate change and the extinction of species into a wholly different dimension.”
In the second half of the review Klinkenborg takes up a question Kolbert leaves in unresolved suspension.
“...’Why should we care.’ Kolbert has compressed that chapter into... ‘It doesn’t matter whether people care or not.’ ...Caring and not caring are merely indiscernible emotional effluents emitted by the dominant species on this planet. How much we care or don’t care about the well-being of other species is overwhelmed__utterly overwhelmed__by how much we care about ourselves.
...
The general tendency of our species is to decrease diversity. We do so by destroying habitats, overconsuming natural resources, and spreading invasive species, willingly or not.
...
Kolbert is right. Whether you care or not is immaterial. The question is this: Have we arrived at this point because of something inherent in our nature? Or has something peculiar in our circumstances brought us here, something we can still hope to alter?”
Klinkenborg reports on an observation Kolbert makes in her book. By quickening the pace of processes that once moved on geological timescales, we have effectively quickened the pace of continental drift.
“As the continents drifted into their present positions, Pangaea slowly broke apart, new barriers arose and they became separated from each other.”
With the isolation enforced by the geographical barriers of this break up, species diverged.
“But species no longer need to move only under their own power. We carry them about the world with us, on planes, in the bilges of ships, unintentionally, on purpose, in business and in pleasure. It’s as though the continents have reconverged, reconstituting Pangaea. As Kolbert puts it, ‘humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed.’ "
Our activities have triggered and continue to trigger the mass extinction of species at rates unseen since the demise of Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. When we so indiscriminately prune the evolutionary tree, we not only terminate species, but we also remove them as pathways to new and diverse evolutionary experiments. We effectively clog the arteries of future evolution.
“...we’re not only altering earthly existence now. We’re also altering the very potential for earthly existence.”
Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Is this the right newt book?
As ecologist Paul Ehrlich put it: "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."
This global warming is a BYATCH, ain't it Obama kool aid drinkers?????
March 17 - 2014: FIVE INCHES OF SNOW ARE FORECAST FOR WASHINGTON DC...
BRRRRRRRRRRR! Hot - hot hot!
January 2014 Worldwide hottest month on record since 1880. Envision the difference between climate and weather.
http://www.weather.com/news/science/...trend-20140220
In the Revolutionary War the Conservatives were called TORIES, they considered those tea party guys to be traitors to their King.
And by their King, I mean El Rushbo, who else?
Climate Change: Evangelical Scientists Say Limbaugh Wrong, Faith and Science Complement One Another:
http://www.christianpost.com/news/cl...nother-103470/
Abby Martin Interviews Guy Mcpherson: Human Extinction by 2030
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU9nf7V_4O4
What is Wrong With Our Culture [Alan Watts]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDu...dDl3aZQZKM_BIw