Re: [geo] Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all
Nando etal: 1. I take a different message from the original article by Axel Kleidon - still without a date to be published. The first material below is found at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-energies-are-not-renewable-after-all.html?page=1 2 A draft version of the Kleidon article, submitted about three weeks ago, and noted in the above article, is found at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2014 3. The article's message for me is not about wind and waves. It is about the biosphere. Near the end (and I think that should be read first by many of us), Kleidon calls for a doubling of NPP. This is a call consistent with the CDR half of Geoengineering of main interest to you and I: Biochar. I believe his conclusion is only marginally consistent with other parts of CDR or Geoengineering. 4. I recommend all of his five diagrams - but especially the last several, which are new me. All are expressed in TW rather than GtC/yr terms - but the carbon implications are all spelled out. 5. I concur with your final comment below, as well - but believe we should look at Kleidon's analysis primarily from the aspect of our global biosphere. Ron - Original Message - From: Nando d.na...@gmail.com To: agask...@nc.rr.com Cc: andrew lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com, geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com Sent: Saturday, April 2, 2011 8:25:22 AM Subject: Re: [geo] Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all My reading of the article suggested that the authors of the study were principally claiming that wind has an impact on climate, so it is already being used. What wasn't clear from the article was what type of impact reducing the energy level of winds all over the globe through the prolific use of wind turbines might have. In a warming world, I understand we should expect stronger winds. On a simplistic generalized level that might not be relevant to local climate, slowing those stronger winds down might have an ameliorating effect on climate change. Hence the claim that The magnitude of the changes was comparable to the changes to the climate caused by doubling atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide might not be as bad as it is made to seem. As usually, I'm grasping at straws, but as a layman, that's what stood out for me. Nando On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Alvia Gaskill agask...@nc.rr.com wrote: Wind and wave energy are the result of the conversion of solar energy into kinetic energy, i.e. the motion of molecules. Once converted into kinetic energy it's a use it or lose it proposition. Extracting kinetic energy from the atmosphere or the ocean doesn't mean it won't be replaced by more energy from sunlight. Planting more trees will also intercept winds, albeit without the electricity generation. Who funded this research? The same people who want to prevent contact with alien civilizations? I note that the Royal Society was also a party to that one too. Note to Royal Society. When you actually find something under the bed I should be afraid of, wake me up. - Original Message - From: Andrew Lockley To: geoengineering Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 8:10 Subject: [geo] Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all Wind and wave energies are not renewable after all • 30 March 2011 by Mark Buchanan • Magazine issue 2806 . Subscribe and save • For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels and Climate Change Topic Guides Editorial: The sun is our only truly renewable energy source Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels and we could do as much damage to the climate as greenhouse global warming WITNESS a howling gale or an ocean storm, and it's hard to believe that humans could make a dent in the awesome natural forces that created them. Yet that is the provocative suggestion of one physicist who has done the sums. He concludes that it is a mistake to assume that energy sources like wind and waves are truly renewable. Build enough wind farms to replace fossil fuels, he says, and we could seriously deplete the energy available in the atmosphere, with consequences as dire as severe climate change. Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, says that efforts to satisfy a large proportion of our energy needs from the wind and waves will sap a significant proportion of the usable energy available from the sun. In effect, he says, we will be depleting green energy sources. His logic rests on the laws of thermodynamics, which point inescapably to the fact that only a fraction of the solar energy reaching Earth can be exploited to generate energy we can use. When energy from the sun reaches our atmosphere, some of it drives the winds and ocean currents, and evaporates water from the ground, raising it high into the air. Much of the rest is dissipated as heat, which we cannot harness. At present,
[geo] warming drastically underestimated
Hi I've checked and I don't think this article has been published to the groups before. Apologies if I'm incorrect. Broadly speaking, it supports my view that climate sensitivity to rising CO2 is drastically underestimated. You should note that the article doesn't look at methane releases and other climate cycle feedbacks, and only considers (apparently) anthropogenic feedbacks - so despite its hawkish stance, it's actually rather conservative. I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the apparent conservative bias in the research literature. I can't put my finger on one single study that gives a realistic scenario for warming with ALL the feedback nasties included (even roughly). Has such a study been done? Because if not, it would seem a terrible omission. A http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118363WT.mc_id=USNSF_51WT.mc_ev=click The magnitude of climate change during Earth's deep past suggests that future temperatures may eventually rise far more than projected if society continues its pace of emitting greenhouse gases, a new analysis concludes. The study, by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Jeffrey Kiehl, will appear as a Perspectives article in this week's issue of the journal *Science*. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor. Building on recent research, the study examines the relationship between global temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tens of millions of years ago. It warns that, if carbon dioxide emissions continue at their current rate through the end of this century, atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas will reach levels that existed about 30 million to 100 million years ago. Global temperatures then averaged about 29 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels. Kiehl said that global temperatures may take centuries or millennia to fully adjust in response to the higher carbon dioxide levels. Accorning to the study and based on recent computer model studies of geochemical processes, elevated levels of carbon dioxide may remain in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. The study also indicates that the planet's climate system, over long periods of times, may be at least twice as sensitive to carbon dioxide as currently projected by computer models, which have generally focused on shorter-term warming trends. This is largely because even sophisticated computer models have not yet been able to incorporate critical processes, such as the loss of ice sheets, that take place over centuries or millennia and amplify the initial warming effects of carbon dioxide. If we don't start seriously working toward a reduction of carbon emissions, we are putting our planet on a trajectory that the human species has never experienced, says Kiehl, a climate scientist who specializes in studying global climate in Earth's geologic past. We will have committed human civilization to living in a different world for multiple generations. The Perspectives article pulls together several recent studies that look at various aspects of the climate system, while adding a mathematical approach by Kiehl to estimate average global temperatures in the distant past. Its analysis of the climate system's response to elevated levels of carbon dioxide is supported by previous studies that Kiehl cites. This research shows that squaring the evidence of environmental change in the geologic record with mathematical models of future climate is crucial, says David Verardo, Director of NSF's Paleoclimate Program. Perhaps Shakespeare's words that 'what's past is prologue' also apply to climate. Kiehl focused on a fundamental question: when was the last time Earth's atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it may by the end of this century? If society continues its current pace of increasing the burning of fossil fuels, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are expected to reach about 900 to 1,000 parts per million by the end of this century. That compares with current levels of about 390 parts per million, and pre-industrial levels of about 280 parts per million. Since carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in Earth's atmosphere, it is critical for regulating Earth's climate. Without carbon dioxide, the planet would freeze over. But as atmospheric levels of the gas rise, which has happened at times in the geologic past, global temperatures increase dramatically and additional greenhouse gases, such as water vapor and methane, enter the atmosphere through processes related to evaporation and thawing. This leads to further heating. Kiehl drew on recently published research that, by analyzing molecular structures in fossilized organic materials, showed that carbon dioxide levels likely reached 900 to 1,000 parts per million about 35 million years ago. At that time, temperatures worldwide were substantially warmer than at present, especially in
Re: [geo] warming drastically underestimated
Hi folks, This may be a another relevant NSF funded study on this thread. I could be wrong. http://www.essc.psu.edu/~brantley/publications/kump.pdf CHEMICAL WEATHERING, ATMOSPHERIC CO2, AND CLIMATE Lee R. Kump, Susan L. Brantley, and Michael A. Arthur Department of Geosciences and Earth System Science Center, The Pennsylvania State University To quote from the summary; The geologic record shows not only that climate change has influenced chemical weathering and erosion, but that changes in chemical weathering and erosion have affected climate. Factors such as continental growth and configuration (continentality), tectonic uplift, biological innovation, and solar luminosity have conspired in the past to cause substantial changes in the weatherability of the continents, leading to climate fluctuations,. On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Andrew Lockley and...@andrewlockley.comwrote: Hi I've checked and I don't think this article has been published to the groups before. Apologies if I'm incorrect. Broadly speaking, it supports my view that climate sensitivity to rising CO2 is drastically underestimated. You should note that the article doesn't look at methane releases and other climate cycle feedbacks, and only considers (apparently) anthropogenic feedbacks - so despite its hawkish stance, it's actually rather conservative. I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the apparent conservative bias in the research literature. I can't put my finger on one single study that gives a realistic scenario for warming with ALL the feedback nasties included (even roughly). Has such a study been done? Because if not, it would seem a terrible omission. A http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118363WT.mc_id=USNSF_51WT.mc_ev=click The magnitude of climate change during Earth's deep past suggests that future temperatures may eventually rise far more than projected if society continues its pace of emitting greenhouse gases, a new analysis concludes. The study, by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Jeffrey Kiehl, will appear as a Perspectives article in this week's issue of the journal *Science*. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor. Building on recent research, the study examines the relationship between global temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tens of millions of years ago. It warns that, if carbon dioxide emissions continue at their current rate through the end of this century, atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas will reach levels that existed about 30 million to 100 million years ago. Global temperatures then averaged about 29 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels. Kiehl said that global temperatures may take centuries or millennia to fully adjust in response to the higher carbon dioxide levels. Accorning to the study and based on recent computer model studies of geochemical processes, elevated levels of carbon dioxide may remain in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. The study also indicates that the planet's climate system, over long periods of times, may be at least twice as sensitive to carbon dioxide as currently projected by computer models, which have generally focused on shorter-term warming trends. This is largely because even sophisticated computer models have not yet been able to incorporate critical processes, such as the loss of ice sheets, that take place over centuries or millennia and amplify the initial warming effects of carbon dioxide. If we don't start seriously working toward a reduction of carbon emissions, we are putting our planet on a trajectory that the human species has never experienced, says Kiehl, a climate scientist who specializes in studying global climate in Earth's geologic past. We will have committed human civilization to living in a different world for multiple generations. The Perspectives article pulls together several recent studies that look at various aspects of the climate system, while adding a mathematical approach by Kiehl to estimate average global temperatures in the distant past. Its analysis of the climate system's response to elevated levels of carbon dioxide is supported by previous studies that Kiehl cites. This research shows that squaring the evidence of environmental change in the geologic record with mathematical models of future climate is crucial, says David Verardo, Director of NSF's Paleoclimate Program. Perhaps Shakespeare's words that 'what's past is prologue' also apply to climate. Kiehl focused on a fundamental question: when was the last time Earth's atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it may by the end of this century? If society continues its current pace of increasing the burning of fossil fuels, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are expected to reach about 900 to 1,000 parts per million by the
