Obligatory Global Warming Rant

Seems like everyone has a blog about global warming. Most people don't know what they're talking about. I thought I'd just add one more.

It's pretty obvious that global warming is real. The causes...debatable.

I'd weigh in that anthrocentric causes are contributory, but not the only source. Global warming has been a consistent trend since the end of the last ice age. Other planets have been showing surface temperature increases. There are just all sorts of variables going on.

The problem is this: reducing co2 and ch4 emissions isn't going to stop it. There's already too much co2 and ch4 present in the atmosphere. Global warming will continue and be amplified by greenhouse effects for at least 100 years. If we stopped putting out co2 completely, today. Which is damn unlikely.

It's funny. When I was growing up, there were people worried about a new ice age, until we came up with a theory on why Venus is so damned hot.

Largely speaking, global warming is good for the environment and species diversity. It tends to expand the tropics, but makes existing deserts more...desertified. Polar ice caps melt and anything that depends on it is history until the start of the next ice age.

Which can also be a natural backlash to global warming. More moisture in the atmosphere means more cloud cover reflecting solar energy. A big volcano or inevitable meteoric impact can tip the balance quickly. The land bridge between north and south america guarantees eventual oceanic circulatory failure, and is the cause for multiple ice ages for the last two million years.

We don't know whether the increased cloud cover will simply cause some self regulation mechanism to kick in. Expanding tropics can add more oxygen, and increased water temperatures can increase plankton and other oxygen producing life by increasing the depth of the epipelagic zone in the oceans.

But in the short term, most of the problems caused by global warming are anthrocentric. We have decades to take action in relocating populations (which humans have done all along), we have decades to take technological initiatives to ameliorate problems such as fresh water shortages, through large scale desalinization. We'll have to get used to Florida being an archipelago, and the Republicans will have to get used to a losing a depopulated Florida as a swing state ;)

Most of the losers in the game will be inconsequential poor populations who have to abandon their low lying traditional areas and islands, and rich property owners with coastal property. For me, if I live another hundred years, the ocean will be about 1/2 to a mile closer to my home. I win! ;)

Increased numbers of hurricanes are inconsequential. Most of damage caused by hurricanes would be solved by better building codes and more care to human made infrastructure like dikes. The idea that a nation has to do everything in its power to save cities like New Orleans or Miami will seem quaint. The country survived pretty well without New Orleans for over two years, and it's still not a really functional contributor to the national economy.

What it all comes to, is coping with reality, whatever it may be, and spending money. Lots and lots of money. If someone still wants to do something about atmospheric co2, they'll have to work on global scale carbon sequestration, and budget trillions of dollars to accomplish that.

I'm down with reducing co2 emissions and such only for one reason: it forces technological change and makes us rethink technology. Electric vehicles are a good idea, for lots of reasons, in the long run. The techno kludge of modern batteries will be replaced by something better, probably supercapacitors (which are catching up to battery storage in cubic capacity, and should exceed it in less than 20 years with none of the drawbacks). Supercapacitors can be filled as quickly as a gas tank.

If you can increase electric storage capacity two or more orders of magnitude per pound, even jets can run on electricity. Maybe even rockets. You get electric storage well above chemical storage of energy as in combustion, it changes everything at every level. You get electric energy cheap enough, and transmutation of elements becomes economically feasible.

The hydrogen economy that so many hippy types want, is a shell game promoted by the oil industry. The oil industry burns excess hydrogen on smokestacks now, and they'll be able to produce it the cheapest using petroleum for the next two to three decades, thus delaying the inevitable switch to electric power.

Gasoline has a chemical formula of c8h18, meaning that there are 18 hydrogen atoms in a single gasoline molecule. Is there any genius out there who doesn't think it's easier to get those 18 hydrogen atom than it is to insure a consistent gasoline molecule and a blend of detergents and other additives? And there are many hydrocarbon molecules in petroleum, some with higher densities of hydrogen per carbon atom. And the simplest byproduct is good old co2. Makes me wonder how long the oil industry will release massive amounts of co2 before the hydrogen geeks figure out that they're really contributing to global warming and need to force the oil industry to turn the carbon into some sort of useful sludge.

The dream of getting hydrogen from water is flat stupid, because it takes electricity to do it and the hydrogen gained as a storage medium takes more energy to attain then the energy you get out of it. I mean, water only has two hydrogen atoms. How inefficient. Also, you can't store hydrogen long term without refrigeration.

The auto industry supports the hydrogen economy, because you can always adopt existing engines to run on hydrogen. Not to mention always being in cahoots with Big Oil.

It's stupid to deny global warming exists. Polar ice caps and millenia old glaciers are melting everywhere. The anti-industry and anti-technology left discovered, and has grabbed it as their own cause, so you're seeing the natural political short-term outcome of that. The more the right denies it exists or fights it, the more the left owns the issue. Once it's an accepted fact that 50 year olds have grown up with, and some consequences of it become more visible, some realistic action will be proposed, and it'll be an issue used by both sides of the aisle.

But the early and beneficial fallout of this era will be increased investment in electrical storage and non-combustion power, and I predict solar roofing panels as cheap as current petrochemical and silicon based ones. Maybe they'll even pave roads with solar cell materials.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13659/

Supercapacitors would help with storing the sunny power for a rainy day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

If they could exceed battery storage density, and they should since the capacity is increasing dramatically since they first appeared 10 years ago, they can be filled with electricity as fast as a gas tank is filled with gas.

In any case, if you look at how technology changed from 1900 to 2000, you can expect it to change more by 2100, and it'll be used in ways that are impossible to know at this point. But look at the tip of the iceberg we see right now.

The pressures from the left are the trigger for a massive shift in technology that will define this century. The left will not give up their Macs and iPhones ;)

It won't stop, and probably won't slow global warming though, assuming that nature doesn't just balance out. And it's ironic that in a few centuries or millenia, we may be trying to figure out how to massively increase co2 in the atmosphere to stop a new ice age, or maybe we'll be even smarter and separate the North and South American continents (largely the reason we have ice ages at all) and end ice ages for a long long time, and bite the bullet on the environmental damage from that move.

Of course, the bigger elephant in the room is the possibility of methane clathrate melting in the ocean because of rising ocean temperatures. That would be a pretty severe, as in global extinction, possibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate

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

If humans are going to survive in the really long term, they're going to have to be able to think really really big and be able to mobilize vast resources to deal with things like that sooner or later. We're so not ready for that. But the more mild global warming problem we currently face might yield some political mechanisms to fire up if those clathrate deposits start to pop ;)