Burn all the coal, oil – No danger of sea level rise this century from Antarctic ice melt One of the world's most firmly global-warmist scientists says that even if humanity deliberately sets out to burn all the fossil fuels it can find, as fast as it can, there will be no troublesome sea level rise due to melting Antarctic ice this century. Dr Ken Caldeira's credentials as a global warmist are impeccable. He is …
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> I don't see your problem - if you run one of those things with depreciation and running costs that vehicle tax is just noise.
OK, I run a 5.0SCV8 rather than a 4.2V8 but I really don't see why driving a more expensive car shouldn't mean that I have to pay more car tax. I don't necessarily like the way the current car tax system works in that I think it promotes false economies (has anyone ever got the quoted consumption figures from an i8?) but if I can afford to put fuel in the thing I can afford to contribute more. Personally I'd rather they just put the whole thing on as fuel duty as that is bloody difficult to avoid and they're already paying to collect that tax.
I'm sure I'll get lots of down votes.
The tax is in the wrong place though - it should be on fuel. If I do 1000 miles a year in a big V8 I produce far less pollution than a salesman doing 50k a year in his 2.0 litre, yet I pay far more tax.
Tax fuel directly - higher mpg cars will pay less anyway because they are more efficient and high-milers will pay more as they produce more pollution.
And as I only do 5 or 6k a year I could afford a big 4.2V8, which we have established is what I want.
Tax fuel directly - higher mpg cars will pay less anyway because they are more efficient and high-milers will pay more as they produce more pollution.
So many people have been calling for exactly that for so many years. Reassign the tax onto fuel in a collection-neutral manner (i.e. equal tax take) and you will see more of the money, as there is less admin.
The only real issues I see come from haulage and similar. I'm pretty sure that haulage co's would go out of business if the tax was just put on fuel, as they would end up paying a higher proportion, so this would need some form of rebate.
"The only real issues I see come from haulage and similar."
Even with fuel taxation as the sole source, HGVs would still be heavily subsidised when the amount of roadbed damage they do is factored in (damage is proportional to somwhere between the 4th-5th power of axle weight with velocity adding a multiplier)
1 20 ton bus carries 40 passengers and does at least 10,000 times the damage to a road that a car with 4 passengers does.
You might want to think about that when you see hauliers agitating for higher road masses.
You might want to think about that when you see hauliers agitating for higher road masses.
BUT, if we increase the taxes on haulage, the cost of all our goods increases.
Of course, this neglects the simple fact that more freight should be carried by train, which is a much more efficient and effective method of transportation. This would require huge investment, though, both in the infrastructure and in new warehouses closer to railways, as the rail infrastructure has been run into the ground already, and warehouses are currently located for easy road access, not rail.
"If I do 1000 miles a year in..."
You may pay more road tax but he more than makes up for it in fuel taxes.
As for your engine, a Holden Maloo 6.2 is a mid-size V8. Anything smaller than 5.0 litres is a small one (the only reason there isn't a 454 (7.2 litre) in the holden is because it won't fit).
(I mention the Maloo because there's one listed in Motor Trader this week)
"Personally I'd rather they just put the whole thing on as fuel duty"
Remember that promise to ringfence vehicle tax for road maintenance?
Vehicle tax brings in around £5 billion per year. Road maintenance costs £15 billion.
"Cars are being subsidised" cry the greenies - conveniently forgetting that motor fuel excise duty brings in £45 billion per year (with VAT on top of that along with another excise duty levied for crude oil).
Now they've made that promise, if the government keeps to it it's entirely possible they'll refuse to fund anything from fuel duty - which means that a promise to ringfence a tax for road upkeep results in a 2/3 reduction in available money.
Bait and switch? Yup, they're good at that.
"Personally I'd rather they just put the whole thing on as fuel duty as that is bloody difficult to avoid and they're already paying to collect that tax."
Well to be exact the service station owners are paying to collect that tax...The government cost is an inspection and enforcement regime that discourages cheating....
AKA doing expensive things with unpleasant unintended consequences, in the absence of evidence of benefit, because we like people to think that "something is being done" about the latest scare (and our scaremongering mates will make a nice little earner from doing those expensive things).
Also see: "some crimes, terrorism and paedophilia for example, are so serious that mere innocence, or simple want of evidence, should be no defence".
So a presumption of innocence flies out the window? The party claiming harm bears no burden to prove his claim? All potential participants must prove a negative (that there cannot possibly be any harm, realized now or in the future)?
Good luck getting anything done.
>So I can get the 4.2V8 I really want without paying 500 quid a bloody year<
I like this irreverent 1 liner post, because it raises a genuine gripe, and asks the question:
What is this pain for?
I think pretty much everybody bought into the 'reduce pollution because it is just crap' argument.
Cleaner air is giving everybody a better life.
Ask residents of the developing world cities...... this is the key concern they have.
Eliminating air pollution would have an immediate impact on the life of the planet, covering all ecosystems.
But somehow we've been led away from this concept, to presumably believe that by taking pain, we are going to somehow save the planet from rising temperatures.
This, even though fossil fuel usage is constantly rising - coal oil gas usage statistics are easily available from various official orgs.
So even if our pathetic attempts at limiting our carbon footprint were successful...... the end result is completely countered by the reality on the ground.
THIS is an inconvenient truth (amongst others).
So we witness the plaintive cries of island representitives, exhorting us to change to renewable energies, to save their islands.
While the simple truth, is that, if their islands are going under....... then they are going to go under.... regardless of whether we make our own 'feelgood gesture'.
This may be horrifying.... but the truth often is.
So in saying this, am I being somehow heartless?
Perhaps reckless, in apparently promoting a 'do nothing attitude'?
Well NO....... I'm just taking an engineers view.
.... and more that that, I'm taking a geo-political power-broking view.
While the UK may have appeared to embrace the new thinking.... in reality all moves were made on the basis of political neccessity, whilst actually being buffetted by the serious business money of the primary energy providors.
Why do you think that tidal energy lagoons were hampered at every single step from mysteriously funded lobby groups?
..... and then, after Russia had achieved its gas supply aims, could then consider military expansion.... and why suddenly Lagoon power began to get approval.
We should have had lagoon power (to the max) at least a decade ago.... it was a no brainer.
(this is another subject.... but I can assure you that this is a no brainer - sand cement, rocks and turbines - even the DTI report accepted this was 50's technology)
What we learn from this, is that Governmental decision making is not based upon theoretical saving of the planet, because the likelihood is that they know damned well that this goal is beyond their power, and therefore, what will happen will happen.
Ditto that for all governments.
Add to this, the questionable, yet easy to deliver concepts, such as increased heat melts ice - which is true but...... what are the details?
... and we end up with a major proportion of the population worried about 'heat melting ice'..... like as if buying an electric car is going to change everything.
It won't..... but it did present a useful business opportunity..... just as was the case with the wind generating business et al.
The only thing that will change energy provision, will be the arrival of 'fusion power'.
Howver what worries me, are the geo-political consequences, of a militarised Russia without any earning potential, aligned to the complete collapse of the giant polital powerbroking energy providers (particularly in the US).
THIS is the 'real politics'.
...... and regardless of mindless downvotes..... it is the ultimate inconvenient truth
Lagoon power, wind power and solar are all greenwash.
They cannot provide sustainable sources of energy for the UK population and reduce carbon emissions by more than 10% on existing consumption.
When you factor in electric heating (gas/oil heating will be verboten eventually) and electric cars (for the same reasons) then you need to handle demands at _least_ 5 times higher than they are now.
Trying to go low/no carbon on those sources is simply impossible without killing off a substantial chunk of the population and/or reducing to a subsistence lifestyle.
>Lagoon power, wind power and solar are all greenwash.<
While it is evident that land based wind power is overwhelmingly an inefficient, polluting, waste of resources, the same certainly can't be said of lagoon power, or solar power (in sun drenched regions).
While the latter is probably less relevant to the the UK; this technology is still being developed, with increasing conversion rates.
Mass produced new build, and replacement roofing systems, reduce the energy production implementation costs, as a substantial chunk of the costs is anyway required for a new roof.... or consider totally unproductive desert regions, converted to energy production.
It's just a high tech version of the Greek water tank painted black, that produces a large quantity of hot water at the end of the day, for free.
For the UK, energy production from lagoon power can provide a huge proportion of the UK energy needs..... with electricity generation being calculated to the minute of every day, for thousands of years.
While actual percentages (of consumption) vary according to growing demand..... maximum implementation, at the time of the DTI studies put those percentages in the region of 20 - 25%.
Energy costs were the lowest of all sources..... but were artificially raised, because the nuclear lobby complained that they had to provide a 'dismantling bond', therefore so too should the lagoons... even though the lagoon materials would simply return naturally to the sea from whence they came.
While the flora and fauna would change in that specific area..... so what?.... Life would adapt, with winners and losers.
Overall, the argument for lagoons isn't a green argument..... it's just a sensible use of natural resources, taking advantage of the enormous power availability provide by the moon's gravitational force.
"Where's my justification for driving inefficient old lardy gas guzzlers to the red line in every gear now?"
Because it's a bit of a giggle?
That's my excuse for checking my revlimiter on every upshift and overtaking when any safe/practical opportunity arises.
Compared to industrial pollution (of any stripe), all the petrol powered cars in the world are a drop in the ocean. I believe that there is a stat out there that suggests that the fifteen largest ships in the world pollute more than every car on the planet combined.
OK, doesn't help local air pollution, but modern engines are already most of the way there (petrol engines at least - diesels have long been known to be seriously nasty in air quality terms but there was never political will to do anything about it for reasons that escape me) and electric cars are coming on-stream faster and faster - even Porsche recently announced a concept for a fully electric saloon; and Porsche tend to turn their concepts into realities (See Boxster, 918) so we're getting there...
Steven R
Yeah, the grin factor is my real reason, naturally (and preferably with the drive wheels at the back)
I remember a government TV ad a while ago suggesting that we could save the planet if we all walked instead of taking the car, can't remember the details but I did challenge them on the truth/usefulness of the ad, digging up some stats and doing the maths to prove how ineffectual their suggestion actually was. The ad was dropped before I got a (bullshit) reply.
'rev limiter' - I think that is when my good lady is sitting in the passenger seat but I've a friend who swears that it actually means when the valves start bouncing (old-skool '80s bikes, gotta love 'em!)
Ah, valve bounce, the *real* rev limiter.
I find it's valuable to check the car revs to the limiter; a friend of mine didn't realise his head gasket had gone. Had he actually used the entire rev range once or twice a day, he might have spotted the complete lack of power above 4000rpm.
Instead he got a warped head from driving with no coolant till the car just stopped. Woops.
Oh well!
Steven R
These are typically the sort of people who overtake in 5th.
Not realising they could overtake a lot faster, and thus more safely (as you should spend as little time in the oncoming lane as possible) if they dropped two cogs before pulling out.
Mind you, I showed a mate how to use the powerband of his Mondeo properly a couple of years ago - he was actually *scared*. I wasn't doing anything outlandish, just accelerating up to 70 on a slip road, but he thought the engine was going to explode and grabbed the steering wheel.
Suffice to say harsh words were had on the subject of his knowledge of road safety....
Now I'm pretty agnostic about this MMGW thing but...
The author appears to have taken a figure of 8cm for ice loss (figure S2) and deemed this is directly proportional to an 8cm rise in sea levels?
That does not make any sense, in fact little in the paper seems to corroborate this article and vice versa?
> in fact little in the paper seems to corroborate this article and vice versa?
Indeed, and completely unsurprising with a L. P. article. Here is the BLOODY ABSTRACT: "The Antarctic Ice Sheet stores water equivalent to 58 m in global sea-level rise. We show in simulations using the Parallel Ice Sheet Model that burning the currently attainable fossil fuel resources is sufficient to eliminate the ice sheet. With cumulative fossil fuel emissions of 10,000 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC), Antarctica is projected to become almost ice-free with an average contribution to sea-level rise exceeding 3 m per century during the first millennium. Consistent with recent observations and simulations, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet becomes unstable with 600 to 800 GtC of additional carbon emissions. Beyond this additional carbon release, the destabilization of ice basins in both West and East Antarctica results in a threshold increase in global sea level. Unabated carbon emissions thus threaten the Antarctic Ice Sheet in its entirety with associated sea-level rise that far exceeds that of all other possible sources."
Just HOW does that translate into the article?
Translation 1: Burn all the fossil fuels as fast as we can (it'll take centuries or millenia).... and in 100 years, no major sea level rise. 1,000 years, 90' rise. 2,000 years or so, 180' rise. So that's extremely bad, but no problem whatsoever for today's voters.
Translation 2: Screw you, future people! Burn ALL the things!!!
Lewis is simply relying on the observation that "believers" on both sides won't bother reading the sources. It's almost pointless arguing with believers because their belief is religious (as i believe Lewis managed to point out a few weeks back, overlooking what it said about his own faction!).
Religious belief is the promise to believe despite any evidence or lack of it. Scientific belief is the promise to follow where the evidence leads. One requires ignoring inconvenient data, the other requires questioning what you believe faced with contradictory evidence. I'm going to put my faith in the scientific version, it corrects mistakes a few millennia quicker
The caption (not written by Lewis - this will teach him to provide enough context...) reads: "Fig. S2: Sea-level change within the next century. Given is the ice volume change from Antarctica in meters sea-level equivalent within the 21st century." [boldface mine - TFMR]
Actually, the caption goes on to say, "The values are consistent with the IPCC-AR5 projections for the Antarctic Ice Sheet which range from -6 to 14 cm within the 21 century." Thus, according to the paper, IPCC, and Lewis Page the sea may rise a bit or actually recede a bit by the end of the century. Hmmm...
@TFMR
That is a total misreading of the paper and the results. I'm not jumping on the MMGW bandwagon but whereas a sceptical view in science normally looks at all the facts and reasoned arguments there is more cherry picking in this to try to prove a sceptic POV than anything else.
From a neutral POV (yes, I really am) the sceptics here seem to be the in the 'religion realm' on this one. I was looking to get clarification on something else on this report an dcame across http://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise-predictions.htm which shows a sea level rise already in the last 20 years of 6cm. This graph may be bunkum, I don't have the time to check it out, but they say it is based on satellite observations.
Now it could be that some of the early wild claims by the Global Warming brigade which led to claims that led to films like "The day after tomorrow" needed a sceptic to bring them back to earth and ground them in reality. However having picked to be on the sceptic point of view many seem to have jumped over to the 'denier' realm and refuse to even concede that there may be some issues that need looking at.
The article glosses over the other effects of CO2 burning
- Acidification of the seas, temerature rises in the seas and extinction of species and corals, the recently understood effect of oceans sucking up heat..possibly correlated to El Nino effects spitting it back out...etc. the journo must have come from the Daily Mail, or Fox News. Shocking.
@AC
Yes, the only problem with your link is that SkepticalScience aren't Skeptical, and it isn't Science. Its a blog setup specifically to promote the authors belief in MMGW: Whether you agree with global warming or not, that's just a fact.
Check your sources being one of the principle rules of critical thinking.
I was referring to the graph, not the blog. I presume they aren't just making up random graphs but I would accept that the raw data could be disputed or the error bars might be omitted. If the graph is in dispute then I would look at the alternative?
However the graph is corroborated here http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/sod/lsa/SeaLevelRise/ and on Wikipedia (FWIW)
I would be happy to see an independent unbiased site that provides better data for this, but truly unbiased sites (that everyone agrees are unbiased) are difficult/impossible to find.
The 8cm is the contribution from melting of Antarctic ice. There would be other contributors like Greenland, along with thermal expansion that goose up the numbers.
As pointed out by someone else, the error bars in their paper make the contribution from Antarctica actually between -6cm and +14cm. So even their model shows that Antarctica could actually add ice in the 21st century. Either way, the worries of multi meter sea level rises in our children's lifetime don't seem to be corroborated by their paper.
I have. I admit I just read it and I did not go into the details of the Parallel Ice Sheet Model or the GENIE Earth system model (I once looked into that to the extent of the open literature, but I assume there have been significant advances since). So I can't review the methodology, which I would do if I were doing a peer review. I will offer some observations to those who cannot be bothered.
1. I do not see Lewis making any misrepresentations. He takes just one aspect of the results, and not the main one from the authors' PoV, but his understanding of that aspect is correct. Lewis, the authors of the paper, and IPCC (I mentioned that in an earlier and shorter post) all agree - imagine that! Kudos to Lewis for digging into "supplementary data" - the main paper does not deal with such small scales - a mere century is not worth much attention, after all.
2. The larger scale (think millennia) Fig 3 provides an interesting reference number: "Between 2010 and 2014, there has been an increase in cumulative emissions of about 40 GtC." [GtC stands for Gigatonne of Carbon - TFMR]. That's about 8GtC/yr during these last 5 years (NB: there isn't much history of anthropogenic carbon emissions). The authors then run a range of models that go up to 80GtC/yr at peak. The burn rate is not uniform, but they assume that within 500 years we will have nothing to burn, anyway (this is me being Lewis-y, apart from the 500 years figure that comes from the paper). To their credit the post-2010 cumulative emissions cover a wide range - they don't just focus on the worst-case scenario.
3. They make assumptions that the effect will last tens of thousands of years. I can't say without further reading how well-justified the assumption is. The justification is based on another assumption that if you pump a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere the mitigating effect of the oceans will be weaker than what is observed. I seriously doubt we know enough of the relevant properties of our oceans to state this as a fact. I suspect it is a result of some other (uncertain) model, but I cannot state that as a fact. I also don't know whether the models take into account, e.g., that the resulting carbon will block sunlight sufficiently to reduce warming (don't be surprised, such things are often omitted).
4. In any case, they have a very short observation period to get any input for their models, or to estimate parameters. They extrapolate their results to many millennia though. Under their assumptions and models, if you keep pumping 8GtC/yr on average for 500 years (that's 4000GtC cumulative emissions in their parametrisation), the Antarctic will lose a significant proportion of ice, and the sea level will be rising at a rate of ~2m/century for the 1st millennium from now, and slower after that (this is from the same Fig 3 mentioned above). Given that fossil fuels have been in use for a lot less than 500 years and there is no reason to assume they will remain our main source of energy for that long, I am not terribly worried.
5. This extrapolation does not make the paper completely useless academically, far from that. It should not, however, support any "We are DOOMED, I tell you!!!" screams or used to justify any spending of taxpayers' money beyond research grants that are a drop in the ocean (pardon the pun) anyway.
Quote from Dr. Caldeira:
"We took a model and emitted all of the carbon dioxide available in fossil fuel resources, and that model — which has a very low climate sensitivity, and what I would consider a hyperactive land biosphere — produced 9-degree Centigrade warming globally and 20 degrees around East Antarctica.
Now that’s 16 degrees Fahrenheit globally, and something like 36 degrees around Antarctica, which could be enough to threaten the ice sheet."
I think that means it will get hot. And the polar caps would melt. That's enough of a problem for me.
If it takes 1000 years for it to happen is it still "enough of a problem for you"? You don't imagine that sometime in the next few hundred years technology to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans might come along that could reverse such changes long before we reach such dire circumstances?
You don't imagine that sometime in the next few hundred years technology to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans might come along that could reverse such changes long before we reach such dire circumstances?
I feed my kids nothing but soda and meat pies, because I imagine that sometime in their lifetime technology to magic people healthy might come along that could reverse the effects of such a diet long before they experience any dire consequences.
Even a simple calculation shows we have nothing to worry about in the next century(1). It's not the CO2 that melts the ice, it's increased heat trapped in the system by GHG, and that comes from solar insolation.
Using Wikipedia figures for the total size of the Antarctic ice cap(2), and solar irradiation, bung in the latent heat of melting, and a few calculator button presses tell me that even if we had a machine(3) that could perfectly couple 100% of energy coming in from the Sun to the ice cap it would take ~6.5 years to melt it. The relatively weak coupling via atmospheric and ocean current warming is going to be orders of magnitude below that.
(1) Due to the Antarctic ice cap. Other problems may arise.
(2) Bloody huge.
(3) Estimated to require not more than 1 Mt of Unobtanium in its construction.
Blimey, that ice cap is large! I wanted to see the counter-intuitive details for myself and got the comparable figure of 2.3 years thusly:
Ice sheet has 2.65e22 g water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet
334J/g latent heat of melting water
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/latent-heat-melting-solids-d_96.html
174e15 W solar radiation at upper atmosphere, 30% reflected back to space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy
(2.65e22 * 334) / (1.74e17 * 0.7) / (86400 * 365) = 2.3 years
and very dark years at that, with all daylight being diverted into the big magnifying glass focussed on Scott Base.
I just can't get over how big that ice cap is - and how much energy it takes to melt water (in fact about as much as then raising that melted water to 80 degrees). It's just the biggest imaginable heatsink...
Yes, one would expect that humanity as an abstract concept can cope with a sea level rise of 3m per century that the study quotes. However when you get to specifics... most of the affected people worldwide will be poorer people who will get displaced and have nowhere to go unless their respective countries and/or neighbours give them some free land*. Most of them would end up unwanted and rejected by their 3rd-World neighbours and target moves to Europe, US and Australia**. Massive migration could create quite a lot of conflict and headaches even in areas unaffected directly.
Ah well, perhaps we can relocate them all to the then ice-free western Antarctica
*and human nature being what it is, I suspect that the reaction from the owners of said land will be 'sod off poor peasant, if you can't pay for my land go somewhere else'
**much like Syrians fleeing from war are unwanted and unwelcome in Saudi Arabia etc which is much closer both physically and culturally, and end up fleeing towards Europe with some tragic consequences
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