Re: how to save the world from global warming

BlagooBlanaa wrote:
Global warming will be reversed but only if we can figure out how to
capture and make use of solar energy cheaply enough to compete in the
market with oil, and then use this new energy source to increase our
industrial system to include everyone on Earth while displacing oil
use. The resulting rising living standards along with rising technical
capacities will allow us to reverse all causes of global warming and
stabilize our environment for the long-term.

when dickhead?

Now sweetheart.

the solution needs to be started now

Never said anything different blagoo - that you think I did says more
about your mental processes than anything else. lol.

sea levels are already rising

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

Yep, 20 cm in the last 120 years, but this is nothing compared to the
20,000 cm rise from Meltwater Pulse 1A 14,000 years ago! lol. We'll
survive long enough, despite the overwrought verbiage of alarmists like
yourself..

there is a lag of at least 100 years in the hysteresis curve

<shrug> The Earth routinely goes through phases of glaciation and
melting with very large fluctuations in sea level amounting to 1,000x
the current level changes. So, we'll certainly survive the changes
we're inducing today and with the right investment in alternative
energy technologies we'll do enough about it to reverse the rise in CO2
in the next 30 years by pumping out the CO2 and using it to make
hydrocarbons..

Global warming is caused partly by rising CO2 levels that increase the
thickness of the blanketing gases in our atmosphere. We extract carbon
compounds from deep within the Earth - carbon which represents stored
solar energy over very long periods - and burn them, and the carbon
dioxide remains in the atmosphere, removed by natural processes that
can't keep up with the industrial processes pumping them out. By

CO2 concs were an order of magnitude higher in times past -

Well, that depends on what time period you're looking at. Today CO2
levels are around 370 ppmv - this is an increase from 270 ppmv only 200
years ago. And represents a marked increase of the peaks of CO2
typical due to ice-age cycling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

Now, when we go back more than 400,000 years ago - to something like
100 MILLION years ago - we see levels rise to 2000 ppmv - which is not
quite 10x greater than today's levels. Then, 300 million years ago,
levels drop to nearly today's level, and then rise sharply and peak
again 500 million years ago at 6000 ppmv - 25 times the average today,
before beginning a fall off to lower levels in earlier epochs still.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png

where do you
think the fecundity that allowed the production of fossil fuel deposits
originated?

You are being pointlessly argumentative.

Fossil fuels were stored up over a long time, both biosphere
productivity and CO2 levels varied over wide ranges over the past 500
million years.

The big issues are loss of arable land and existing population centers in
the SHORT TERM

Everything I've proposed can be done within the next 30 to 50 years.

- over the next 100 - 1000 years

This is beyond the 30 to 50 year time horizon I posited in my last
remarks.

the CO2 itself shouldn't cause a thermal runaway ala venus

haha... The Earth had CO2 levels 25 times higher than today's levels -
which are far far below the levels of Venus, and not nearly enough to
cause a run away greenhouse effect any time soon.

Fact is, we'll unlikely see CO2 levels 1/10th as large anything like
that in our past, so again, your concerns are overwrought. We should
do something about CO2 levels certainly, and one way to do that is
interrupt the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by making a
competitive solar powered system of making hydrocarbons - as I've
indicated - drawing CO2 out of the air along with H2O as feedstock.
With a growing world economy, and energy use rising to 11x current
levels we will be able to pump CO2 out of the air 11x faster than we're
currently putting it into the air - so with 9% economic growth, we'll
be able to drive the CO2 levels to wherever we want in 30 years or less
by this process by using synthetic fuels made from atmospherice CO2 and
H2O and sunlight..


unless plant
growth is prevented from taking advantage of the abundance of CO2.

Increasing use of fertilizer made from atmospheric nitrogen and
hydrogen derived from the electrolytic reduction of water using solar
electricity will, combined with increasing quantities of fresh water -
Water even in dry regions is 10,000 ppmv whilst carbon-dioxide is 370
ppmv - so, extracting CO2 from the atmosphere has the advantage of
producing copious quantities of fresh water. Only a fraction of it is
needed as a hydrogen source, and the cost of extracting and
concentrating this feedstock from the atmosphere is only a tiny portion
of the total energy needed to liberate the hydrogen from water - and
only a small fraction of the hydrogen is needed to make ammonia from
nitrogen in the air - so, you see a solar powered system - made cheaply
enough - will help drive CO2 levels down quickly by increasing the
productivity of agriculture by making low-cost abundant fertilizers and
fresh water.

which it probably won't since a certain overabundant species has destroyed a
lot of the forests that could actively sequester CO2 as cellulose...

That is why ultimately, I propose the production of farms and forests
on orbit - and returning the bulk of the Earth to nature, where people
can live supplied from industry moved to orbit.

capturing solar energy cheaply and on a large enough scale, and using
that energy to extract carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere and re-create
hydrocarbon fuels to sell, we can create an industrial process that
gives us control over the carbon-dioxide level of the atmosphere to
drive it wherever we need to have it.

nothing so far can beat photosynthesis in terms of a large scale process you
are talking about

Photsynthesis is not nearly as efficient as it needs to be in order to
be cheap enough to compete with oil. We're working on a concnetrating
photovoltaic system that uses arrays of water filled lenses to
concentrate light onto a sparse array of photocells. In production
this system can produce electricity at 7cents per peak watt. The water
filled lenses have their focus within the lens medium, so the water
also acts to keep the PV cell cool. We are experimenting with
electrolytic cells that produce hydrogen directly from the water, along
with molecular filters built right into the cells, so that you obtain
what you desire, from methane to octane and everything in between,
without a lot of large scale stuff being built. CO2 is easily absorbed
by water, and with the right molecular sieve attached to the right
electrolytic system, much can be done in the field. We are about three
years away from large scale commercial application of this system.

unfortunately nothing so far can beat the large corporations in destroying
the largest utilisers of photosynthesis - the forests

Again you're being pointlessly combative. Our industry has outstripped
the capacity of Earth to sustain it. This has little to do with
corporate structures - statist nations like the former Soviet Union was
even more destructive of the environment - but at this point in
history, we're learning about what doesn't work. The simplest solution
is to tap into resources off-world and export our industrial processes
off-world, and leave the Earth as a vast residential park, with people
supported by industrial processes on orbit powered by energy from the
Sun.


Global warming is also caused by increasing luminosity of the Sun
itself. Hydrogen fuses into Helium at the Sun's center, and the
Helium, being heavier than Hydrogen, falls to the center and begins to
fuse into heavier elements as well. Since Helium fuses at a higher
temperature than Hydrogen, the Sun gets brighter and brighter. In 900
million years the Sun will be so bright, that if nothing is done, the
Earth will be uninhabitable. NASA scientists have proposed a solution
to this problem, use a series of specially constructed, tiny atomic
bombs set off in sequence so as to divert a large asteroid into an
orbit that swings by Earth and Jupiter every 3,000 years - the asteroid
is slowed by the Earth but the Earth is sped up slightly by the
asteroid - which kicks it into a slightly higher orbit. The asteroid
swings by Jupiter, which speeds up the asteroid, but slows Jupiter
slightly - restoring the kinetic energy given the Earth - in effect
taking it from Jupiter. Since Jupiter is 100,000s times larger than
the Earth, its orbit is barely affected, but over three billion years,
the Earth is kicked into higher orbits, so that its temperature remains
constant, despite the increasing luminosity of the Sun. The
interesting part about this is that we will have stabilized the Earth's
environment for nearly 3 billion more years - and once the orbital
parameters are set up, the whole system need not be tampered with. So,
its something we can leave to posterity even if we're not around to
tend to it!

what a load of *** -

No, this is an important problem. If 100 ppmv of CO2 in the atmsophere
can cause changes in earth's biosphere, then slight variations in solar
luminosity can cause equally profound changes - and such changes occur
regularly

over 20 years;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

over 11,000 years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunspots_11000_years.jpg

and over longer periods - as I mentioned the Sun was half as bright
when life began on Earth - than it is today - but even so, changes in
the Earth's orbit lead to the so-called Milankovitch variations - which
are correlated with our ice-ages;

These variations in insolation are not due to solar changes but rather
due to the Earth moving closer or further from the Sun, or changes in
the relative amount of radiation reaching regions of the Earth. These
have caused variations of as much as 25% (locally; global average
changes are much smaller) in solar insolation over long periods. The
most recent significant event was an axial tilt of 24° during boreal
summer at near the time of the Holocene climatic optimum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Milankovitch_Variations.png

So, humanity being able to take charge of these variations within the
next 100 years by passing asteroids by our planet on a regular basis to
achieve desired effects on our orbit - in response to knowledge we
develop about the sun, can maintain optimal conditions for life for the
indefinite future.


it is the next 90 years you need to worry about!

All this will be done within the next 30 to 50 years. And it certainly
won't be done with biodiesel and ethanol alone - though that will make
a contribution certainly - the trouble is the infrastructure needed to
make use of these fuels dwarfs anything I'm proposing using
concentrating photovoltaics and solid state electronics combined with
micromachines - and the land is better used to grow food, and will
ultimately return to nature as all industrial processes, including
commercial agriculture, is placed on orbit due to improved efficiency.

the life cycle of a main sequence g type dwarf is irrelevant to this
discussion

Our ability to avoid ice-ages and extend the interglacial period for 3
billion years in the face of solar and orbital variations is something
we can do TODAY - and will be achieved in the next 30 to 50 years -
along with gaining control of the chemistry of our atmosphere as well
as deflecting errant comets and asteroids from collision with Earth.

These are things we will put in place in the next 30 years and we will
see the results within the next 50 years.


The GAIA principle says that life responds to challenges the
environment throws at it. Well, in respnose to the increasing
luminosity of the sun, life created photosynthesis which took CO2 out
of the air and created carbon compounds with it. Then geology took
that carbon and sequestered it in pools of liquid hydrocarbons deep
within the Earth. This moderated the rising temperature by reducing
CO2 levels. Rising oxygen levels gave rise to animals, and animals
gave rise to intelligence, and intelligence made use of stored energy
to drive the first generation of industrial development for Earth. The
resulting industrial intelligence observed its effect on the
environment the release of carbon stores had as well as the fact that
the Sun is getting brighter, and devised a means to preserve life well
beyond the 900 million years left to us naturally. Sweet.


life only exploits niches

Technical life extends its range through technical means. So, its the
next step in development of life. This means we will develop
technologies for extending the interglacial period and making the solar
system a harbor for life we grew up with through the creation of space
stations on the same scale as particle accelerator vacuum chambers
created at a cost less than that of farm land.

blah blah blah


Your name is blagoo - not mine! lol.

instead of regurgitating a text book, why not suggest more concrete methods,
even if they are nutty

I have suggested concrete methods that make economic sense. Use
atmospheric CO2 and H2O along with solar energy with very low-cost
solar driven equipment to make hydrocarbons on a massive scale and sell
them at a price that puts extracted oil out of business. Expanding
industrial capacities driven by low cost fuels created from CO2
pollution and sunlight permits the creation of an economic cycle that
frees us of our dependence on foreign oil and ends the need to extract
oil. Expanding this energy use to surpass current energy use will
allow us in a period of a few decades to pump down CO2 levels to any
level we like. By controlling the mix of extracted fuels, synthetic
and bio fuels, and hydrogen, we can control to a very fine degree how
much CO2 is in our air - regardless of our energy use.

I have thrown out some proposals - you have just shot regurgitated *** out
of a textbook.

I have thrown out a very specific proposal and I'm spending a
significant portion of my time, energy and money on making it happen.

Come up with an original thought, or *** off.

If you were in arms reach of me I'd kick you in the nuts you arrogant
stupid puke! lol.

.