What Do We Think About Climate Change

I believe we should look at the era pre 1850 as a bit more industrialized than we normally tend to do, a lot of inventions and development were done before and up to that period, some of it can have had even a minor influence on the atmosphere. Some people even this early, didn't like staem engine locomotives, and some even tried to get the rules written so that the locomotives should be designed to "consume it's own smoke".... Why so if they were not already then bothered with the smoke/ fumes?

The coal mining industry started (Quote Wiki):

"The oldest continuously worked deep-mine in the UK and possibly the world is Tower Colliery at the northern end of the South Wales valleys in the heart of the South Wales coalfield. This colliery was started in 1805 and at the end of the 20th century it was bought out by its miners rather than being allowed to be closed. Tower Colliery was finally closed on the 25th January 2008.

The first commercial coal mines in the United States were started in 1748 in Midlothian, Virginia, near Richmond, Virginia.[3]"​

The intention with mining coal was probably not to use it to make fences, rearrange the hills?

Steel works; prior to this period, steel works, blast furnaces, hot air, the heat had to come from somwhere? They also had to heat the coal (airless) to make it usable in a blast furnace...

Coal mines since 1748 and 1805, means that coal were used for heating and steam and industry (steel making?) pretty early. Will it be a safe assumption to make that for many of these earliy digs were actually (relatively) easy to haul out a sizeable ammount of coal? I mean it was an earlier pretty unused natural resource that found a new use.... Heating,Steel works, Steam engines...

"
"Early modern blast furnaces: origin and spread

Luisenhuette at BalveThe direct ancestor of those used in France and England was in the Namur region in what is now Belgium. From there, they spread first to the Pays de Bray on the eastern boundary of Normandy and from there to the Weald of Sussex, where the first furnace (called Queenstock) in Buxted was built in about 1491, followed by one at Newbridge in Ashdown Forest in 1496. They remained few in number until about 1530 but many were built in the following decades in the Weald, where the iron industry perhaps reached its peak about 1590. Most of the pig iron from these furnaces was taken to finery forges for the production of bar iron.[17]

The first British furnaces outside the Weald appeared during the 1550s, and many were built in the remainder of that century and the following ones. The output of the industry probably peaked about 1620, and was followed by a slow decline until the early 18th century. This was apparently because it was more economic to import iron from Sweden and elsewhere than to make it in some more remote British locations. Charcoal that was economically available to the industry was probably being consumed as fast as the wood to make it grew.[18]

The first blast furnace in Russia opened in 1637 near Tula and was called the Gorodishche Works. The blast furnace spread from here to the center of Russia and then finally to the Urals.[19]


Representation of blast furnaces and other ironmaking processes from the 19th century
[edit] Coke blast furnaces
In 1709, at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, England, Abraham Darby began to fuel a blast furnace with coke instead of charcoal. Coke iron was initially only used for foundry work, making pots and other cast iron goods. Foundry work was a minor branch of the industry, but Darby's son built a new furnace at nearby Horsehay, and began to supply the owners of finery forges with coke pig iron for the production of bar iron. Coke pig iron was by this time cheaper to produce than charcoal pig iron. The use of a coal-derived fuel in the iron industry was a key factor in the British Industrial Revolution.[20][21][22] Darby's old blast furnace has been archaeologically excavated and can be seen in situ at Coalbrookdale, part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums.

A further important development was the change to hot blast, patented by James Beaumont Neilson at Wilsontown Ironworks in Scotland in 1828. This further reduced production costs. Within a few decades, the practice was to have a "stove" as large as the furnace next to it into which the waste gas (containing CO) from the furnace was directed and burnt. The resultant heat was used to preheat the air blown into the furnace.[23]

A further significant development was the application of raw anthracite coal to the blast furnace, first tried successfully by George Crane at Yniscedwyn ironworks in south Wales in 1837.[24] It was taken up in America by the Lehigh Crane Iron Company at Catasauqua, Pennsylvania in 1839.""​

Steam engines: Man that's a wast area to dive into.....

Pre 1775 there was at least 600 Newcomen engines, ant that was at that time the state of art steam engine. So how many other "brands" were there?

1780-1800: Newcomen engines continue to be built in large numbers (about a thousand between 1775 and 1800), especially for mines but increasingly in mills and factories. Many have Watt condensers added after the patent expires (see below). Several dozen improved Savery engines are also built. ​

All info from cut/ pasted from Wiki...

 

Blast furnaces and steam engines do not produce anywhere near the kind of CO2 that a cement plant does. Cement didn't come into wide use until the 1930's

One of the funny aspects about CO2 is its ability to be liquified and again frozen at relatively high temps at high pressures. Dry ice is stable below about 270' of ocean. I am not so sure that the deep ocean currents themselves do not remove excess carbon from the atmosphere through the solidification of CO2 in the same way we see deposits of methane hydrate. We would not necessarily see deposits if the CO2 were spread in very thin sedimentary layers. This layer would eventually form limestone.

This could explain the balance and negative feedback cycles that Jimbo is talking about.

 

Hehe, well the Romans had some experience, and, in a period of time, they actually did put their mark on the rest of the world.

http://www.archiplanet.org/buildings/Roman_Colosseum.html

 

Knut,

This sounds as though you are advocating for the adoption of the circa 1850 anthropogenic CO2 levels as above the threshold of 'climatological significance'. This is a very problematic position technically as this level was at least 2 orders of magnitude less than present releases, and well below the level of natural variation. Few (if any) AGW leaning scientists have been quoted as supporting this position, instead being content to consider that threshold crossed in the mid 20th century, which is a more reasonable position. Such a position opens several cans of worms WRT cause and effect relationship between CO2 levels and heating, such as the early 20th century warming and late 20th century cooling. We are not even discussing the current flat/cooling trend mostly because these trend can only really be evaluated retrospectively, and the trend is still quite young.
But we have to admit that the possibility exists that we are in a cooling trend despite rising CO2 levels.

Jimbo

 

Obama finally revealed as wouldbe destroyer of the USA.

See video. You want socialism? Man, America is shafted.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

 

We will not be so lucky, simple mortal fools....

Cheers.

 

Something on oceans acidification, perhaps surprising to some:

"My personal experience with acidity in the ocean stems from many pH measurements that led to the discovery of half a dozen elementary ecological laws that, if confirmed, would turn the whole acid ocean debate on its head. It would in fact send most publications on this subject to the dustbin. That was in 2005, and mainstream scientists have not reacted since. So let's review what these discoveries are about:

The most important ecological factor in the sea has been overlooked: the guild of decomposing bacteria. They are very active and cause disease and infection. The health of sea water depends on their numbers as all marine organisms live in a delicate balance between the food that plankton brings (soup) and the chance of dying from decomposing bacteria (sewage). Each sea organism thus lives in a precarious balance between the good life (thick soup) and a long life (thin sewage), which are in conflict with one another. This is what I named the plankton balance.

Alkalinity in the ocean depends substantially on the plankton balance in which the pH results from autotrophs (plants) using hydrogen ions and driving the pH up, while decomposers return hydrogen ions, thus driving the pH down. The daily rhythm can amount to 0.4pH units (250%), and the difference between estuaries and the open sea as much as 1-2 units (1000-10,000%). It is important to keep this in mind, as one can find healthy calcification in shells in these conditions. When seas become eutrophied (overnourished), they also become more acidic due to high levels of decomposing bacteria and their work. Particularly coastal seas show this.

The most important limiting factor in aquatic ecosystem is the dearth of hydrogen ions (H+), which has also been overlooked. The more acidic the water, the higher biological productivity becomes, and the denser the amount of life. In the sea this is borne out by the observed fact that highly productive upwelling areas are more acidic. In other words, acidic seas are a good thing.

A serious scientific mistake was not recognising that decomposition cannot completely break organic matter down into inorganic salts. There are conversion losses and the second law of thermodynamics forbids this. So there is an intermediate organic molecule that is neither a nutrient for plants (dissolved salts), nor food for bacteria. My measurements showed that the sea is awash in this mysterious substance that I named slush. In fact the biomass in slush is far larger than all life on Earth combined. Reader please note that this is a very serious omission by mainstream science, and cannot be disproved! The other 5 laws tie in closely with this.

Life on this planet would never have been possible, if slush could not be decomposed further. The only way for this to happen is when plants team up with decomposing bacteria in the act of symbiotic decomposition, where the missing energy is supplied by the plant to allow decomposers to complete the last step in decomposition. This explains how corals can grow where nutrients are severely limited, and it explains why seaweeds are more productive with symbiotic decomposition than without.

The most important benefit obtained from symbiotic decomposition is firstly hydrogen ions, since these are in shortest supply, and secondly nutrients, and finally CO2 in a form ready to use. The hydrogen ions lower pH on the skins of marine plants (and some phytoplankton), as well as on the skins of coral polyps. In this cocoon of reduced pH, these organisms can be more productive than without.

The above discoveries are not trivial and affect everything we know about the sea and the planet, requiring urgent attention from mainstream scientists. As you may now understand, I smelled in the whole issue of ocean acidification as recounted by so many scientists, a dead rat. How can it possibly agree with my 40 years of observation underwater, and my latest discoveries? To say the least, it is highly exaggerated, and quite possibly entirely wrong."
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid.htm


"Data from across the scientific disciplines support the hypothesis that marine calcification and dissolution are largely controlled by carbonate chemistry, elevating the concern that increasing CO2 poses a considerable threat to the health of our oceans. But these data are sparse, and extrapolating results from controlled experiments to the natural environment is risky."
http://www.ucar.edu/communications/Final_acidification.pdf



Cheers.

 

And....

"The oceans have remained alkaline during the Phanerozoic (last 540 million years) except for a very brief and poorly understood time 55 million years ago.

Rainwater (pH 5.6) reacts with the most common minerals on Earth (feldspars) to produce clays, this is an acid consuming reaction, alkali and alkaline earths are leached into the oceans (which is why we have saline oceans), silica is redeposited as cements in sediments, the reaction consumes acid and is accelerated by temperature (see below).

In the oceans, there is a buffering reaction between the sea floor basalts and sea water (see below). Sea water has a local and regional variation in pH (pH 7.8 to 8.3). It should be noted that pH is a log scale and that if we are to create acid oceans, then there is not enough CO2 in fossil fuels to create oceanic acidity because most of the planet’s CO2 is locked up in rocks.

When we run out of rocks on Earth or plate tectonics ceases, then we will have acid oceans.

In the Precambrian, it is these reactions that rapidly responded to huge changes in climate (-40 deg C to +50 deg C), large sea level changes (+ 600m to -640m) and rapid climate shifts over a few thousand years from ’snowball’ or ’slushball’ Earth to very hot conditions (e.g. Neoproterozoic cap carbonates that formed in water at ~50 deg C lie directly on glacial rocks). During these times, there were rapid changes in oceanic pH and CO2 was removed from the oceans as carbonate. It is from this time onwards (750 Ma) that life started to extract huge amounts of CO2 from the oceans, life has expanded and diversified and this process continues (which is why we have low CO2 today.

The history of CO2 and temperature shows that there is no correlation.
Ask your local warmer:

1. Why was CO2 15 times higher than now in the Ordovician-Silurian glaciation?

2. Why were both methane and CO2 higher than now in the Permian glaciation?

3. Why was CO2 5 times higher than now in the Cretaceous-Jurassic glaciation?

The process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere via the oceans has led to carbonate deposition (i.e. CO2 sequestration).

The atmosphere once had at least 25 times the current CO2 content, we are living at a time when CO2 is the lowest it has been for billions of years, we continue to remove CO2 via carbonate sedimentation from the oceans and the oceans continue to be buffered by water-rock reactions (as shown by Walker et al. 1981).

The literature on this subject is large yet the warmers chose to ignore this literature.

These feldspar and silicate buffering reactions are well understood, there is a huge amount of thermodynamic data on these reactions and they just happened to be omitted from argument by the warmers.

When ocean pH changes, the carbon species responds and in more acid oceans CO2 as a dissolved gas becomes more abundant."


Prof. Ian Plimer, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at The University of Melbourne and Professor of Mining Geology at The University of Adelaide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Plimer

Watch this Ian Plimer's video on the new 'religion':
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/...heraldsun/comments/beware_the_new_faith#43508


Cheers.

 

Thanks Guillermo, Today seems to be a day to read and be interested in others thoughts, ideas and views...

 

Cosmoclimatology theory of climate change

The Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Institute "investigates the connection between solar activity and climatic changes on Earth." It has numerous publications documenting Cosmoclimatology and reviewing the Influence of Solar Cycles on Earth's Climate. Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder published a book The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (2007) describing the Cosmoclimatology theory that cosmic rays "have more effect on the climate than manmade CO2".

Preliminary experimental verification has been conducted in the SKY Experiment at the Danish National Space Science Center. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, is preparing comprehensive verification in the CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) Project.

More info at: http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate/cosmoclimatology/cosmoclimatology


Don't miss this:
http://www.spacecenter.dk/research/sun-climate/other/the-milky-way-shaped-life-on-earth

From there:
"This reveals a link more subtle than any straightforward idea of, say, a warm climate being life-friendly or a cold climate deadly. The record shows that in all icy epochs the biosphere kept lurching between exceptionally low and exceptionally high productivity. The suggested reason is that, although ice is unfriendly to life, winds are stronger when the world is cold. By stirring the oceans, they improve the supply of nutrients in the surface waters so much that productivity can be higher than in a warm climate. And this, in effect, enlarges the fluctuations in biological productivity."

Mind provoking! Wonderful!


Cheers.

 

And continue this line of thought by looking at Antarctic research where it IS cold and has strong winds almost continuously (called the roaring 40's) and is a very prolific and productive region of ocean...

 

Guillermo,

Thanks again for providing the links to such intriguing websites and articles!

Jimbo

 

Guillermo,

In one of your previous posts, you provided a link to a video of a lecture by Ian Palmer:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/...heraldsun/comments/beware_the_new_faith#43508

I found this presentation particularly interesting as it help crystallize in my mind what is happening in the environmental movement and what motivates these people. I began to see for the first time that although they are 'left-leaning' in their outlook and in the way that they would like to see all the governments organized, nevertheless they are not truly socialists.

Socialists want (to some extent or another) to collectivize wealth so that no one is left in poverty in a generally prosperous country, regardless of the root cause of their situation. So the basic goal of the socialists is to help people. Now we can argue over beer whether or not such collectivization is the best way to do this, but there is no argument as to the goal.

Environmentalists have socialistic leanings, but the goal is not to help people, but instead to help the environment. They assert that helping the environment first will help people in the end, a sort of green 'trickle down'. The trouble is, whenever the goal of helping the environment comes into direct conflict with helping people, the environmentalists will always choose to help the environment, often with the direct cost of hurting people, with no 'trickle down' prospect in sight for people in many of these cases.

I agree with Mr. Palmer's point that environmentalism has become a religion, replacing the 'traditional' religion's function in the minds and lives of those devoted to environmental causes. This makes it easy to understand why environmentalists ignore and even become hostile when presented with evidence which contradicts the dogmas presented to them by their favorite guru on the subject, as these are like priests or pastors in their mind, and disagreeing with their guru is a very personal attack, an attack on their faith.

Note that even many scientists are infected with this type of thinking, and because of this they become biased in their work without even realizing it.

Jimbo

 

I do too.

A lot of people who use to blame traditional religions just easily embrace and become prisoners of nowadays new forms of religious thinking. And they even sacrifice their victims in the altars of the new golden calfs. Humans are just humans, at the end of the day....


Cheers

 

Just an update.

The Artic ice cap 24 hours ago. Daily images from the site of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (http://www.nsidc.org/), an organization not suspect of gathering in the lines of the skeptics. 2008 behaviour seems to indicate a neat bouncing back of the Artic ice cap. On the other hand Antartic sea ice was at its maximum extension in 2007 while the Artic was melting, and again going strong.

It seems to be quite clear now that Artic ice extension has nothing to do with atsmospheric CO2 (much less the anthropogenic one), neither with air temperature, but with sea water's temperature.


Cheers.