Climate Change - Man made or not?

[treedave]

I wouldn't worry about the warming, if it melts the ice on Greenland (as the thickness is decreasing at a measurable rate), the extra freshwater will upset the salinity levels causing the gulf stream / Atlantic conveyor to fail, thus causing is to have weather on a par with Moscow, but with more rain. Anyone for Ice storms?

 

Then again it might not:001_tongue:

[Jack-Arb aka Tiago Sinclair-Julio.]

The Greens Are Going Crazy

 

It's hard to ignore the fact that the Greens are going crazy, not just in the United States, but around the world.

 

Hi Dagmar,

 

I do agree with you when you say that lots natural events are blamed on humans and global warming cuased by us. But to say the greens are going crazy I think its not fare. Whats crazy about makeing people aware that oil is running out and that we should try and become less dependent on it. Waste less etc.... Do you realise that cheap oil era is over, oil production as peaked we've reached the top of the mountain now it can be a slow decrease down or a sudden drop...

 

Why would the Canadians want to start extracting hard to refine oil mixed with sand. If they could buy it on the cheap from the middle east...

Britain already imports more than it produces from the northsea and by 2020 theres none left in the northsea...

And to think that theres areas bigger than the northsea left to be discovered its madness cause we have such advance methods of finding oil. All the oil that took millions of years to make we've used in less than 2 centuries, that what we need realise or we find a replacement or its going back 200years to the good old days before oil.

 

 

good night

[Dagmar]

I wouldn't worry about the warming, if it melts the ice on Greenland (as the thickness is decreasing at a measurable rate), the extra freshwater will upset the salinity levels causing the gulf stream / Atlantic conveyor to fail, thus causing is to have weather on a par with Moscow, but with more rain. Anyone for Ice storms?

 

Then again it might not:001_tongue:

 

The scare: An article in the New York Times in late July 2008 by an author promoting a forthcoming book about "global warming" calls the Greenland ice-sheet "one of `global warming's' most disturbing threats". The article says: "The vast expanses of glaciers - massed, on average, 1.6 miles deep - contain enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by 23 feet. Should they melt or otherwise slip into the ocean, they would flood coastal capitals, submerge tropical islands and generally redraw the world's atlases. The infusion of fresh water could slow or shut down the ocean's currents, plunging Europe into bitter winter."

 

The article continues that ocean warming eats the ice sheet from beneath, causing glaciers to calve and melt faster, changing patterns of migration and hence of hunting, which, it says, has a positive effect: warm-water cod have returned, and shops can now offer locally-grown vegetables. Recession of ice along the shore has exposed pockets of lead, zinc, and bauxite. More than 30 billion barrels of oil may also be reachable if there is further melting. Yet the thrust of the article is Apocalyptic.

 

The truth: The "Greenland is melting" scare is an old one, and long discredited. It was first given widespread currency by Al Gore, not a climatologist, in his sci-fi comedy horror movie about the climate - a movie that is now an international joke for serious, serial, scientific inaccuracy. In October 2007, a UK High Court Judge ordered the Department of Education to issue a disclaimer about several inaccuracies in the movie before innocent schoolchildren could be exposed to it. The learned Judge's finding about Gore's claim that sea level would imminently rise by 20 ft was blunt:

 

"This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr. Gore's `wake-up call'. It is common ground that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water, but only after, and over, millennia, so that the Armageddon scenario he depicts is not based on any scientific view."

 

The UN's climate panel, the IPCC, also fueled the scare when its bureaucrats, after the scientists had submitted the final draft of its 2007 report, inserted a table that had not been in the scientists' draft, in which they had ingeniously right-shifted four decimal points so as to exaggerate tenfold the supposed contribution of melting ice-sheets and glaciers to sea-level rise:

 

Metres per century 1961-2003 1993-2003

 

1. Thermosteric expansion 0.042 0.160 2. Glaciers and ice-caps 0.050 0.077 3. Greenland ice-sheets 0.050 0.210 4. Antarctic ice-sheets 0.140 0.210

 

5. IPCC's sum of lines 1-4: 0.110 0.280

 

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley earned his share of the Nobel Peace Prize by writing to the IPCC on the morning of publication, demanding - and getting - a correction of this maladroit and unscientific attempt to lend support to the unscientific fantasies of Gore.

 

Gore's movie said -

 

Gore: "Two canaries in the coal mine. The first one is in the Arctic. Of course the Arctic Ocean has a floating ice cap, Greenland on its side there. I say canary in the coal mine because the Arctic is one part of the world that is experiencing faster impact from global warming. This is the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. It just cracked in half a year ago. The scientists were astonished."

 

But what do the scientific studies and the peer-reviewed scientific literature (as opposed to the layman Gore or the error-prone IPCC) have to say about Greenland, and about sea level generally?

 

Temperature records show that the Arctic was in fact warmer in the 1930s and 1940s than it is today -

 

Northern Hemisphere snow cover reached a new record in 2001 -

 

A new record in 2001 for Northern Hemisphere winter snow cover

 

But this new record was easily surpassed in 2007, when, for the first time since satellite records began 30 years ago, winter sea ice extent at both Poles reached record highs. Somehow most of the media that had mentioned the record loss of summer sea-ice in the Arctic in 2007 failed to mention the record growth of winter sea ice at both Poles that very winter.

 

The ice cap at the North Pole has certainly been thinning ever since US nuclear submarines took the first measurements in the 1950s. However, a paper by NASA scientists last year says the reason has nothing to do with "global warming". The warmer Arctic has been caused by the current warming phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, driving warm tropical waters poleward and also causing winds to take a more southerly direction.

 

Also, a very recent paper has shown considerable and hitherto-unsuspected undersea volcanic activity at 73 degrees North latitude on the mid-Atlantic ridge in the Greenland-Iceland gap, with temperatures at the outlets of the volcanic vents at 570 degrees F.

 

Among the many facts that the article in the New York Times is careful not to mention is one central fact: that in the early 1940s it was warmer in the Arctic than it is today.

 

Chylek et al. (2004) confirm that temperatures along Greenland's coasts are about 1 degree Celsius below their 1940 levels, despite half a century of "global warming". They say -

 

"Current coastal temperatures are about 1øC below their 1940 values." Furthermore, "at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2øC per decade since the beginning of the measurements in 1987." Ocean currents and volcanic activity are not the only natural influences on Arctic temperatures. The apparently random fluctuations in Arctic temperatures in the past 125 years are more closely correlated with changes in solar activity than with the ever-upward increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. It is scientifically perverse to make an unqualified attribution of the observed thinning of the Arctic ice-cap to anthropogenic "global warming" when, compared with the early 20th century, the Arctic has been cooling. One story that did not make it into the New York Times article - sealers were trapped in Arctic ice in April 2007

 

Source:http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/scarewatch/nyt_sea_level_rise.html

[Dagmar]

I do agree with you when you say that lots natural events are blamed on humans and global warming cuased by us. But to say the greens are going crazy I think its not fare. Whats crazy about makeing people aware that oil is running out and that we should try and become less dependent on it. Waste less etc.... Do you realise that cheap oil era is over, oil production as peaked we've reached the top of the mountain now it can be a slow decrease down or a sudden drop...

 

Why would the Canadians want to start extracting hard to refine oil mixed with sand. If they could buy it on the cheap from the middle east...

Britain already imports more than it produces from the northsea and by 2020 theres none left in the northsea...

And to think that theres areas bigger than the northsea left to be discovered its madness cause we have such advance methods of finding oil. All the oil that took millions of years to make we've used in less than 2 centuries, that what we need realise or we find a replacement or its going back 200years to the good old days before oil.

 

 

 

My point is that the loony elements in the green movement have a wholly negative view of the human race and would have living in flea infested yurts dining on vegan food like dark age peasants! We will not need to turn the clock back, plenty of innovation is being undrtaken and results are being reported - but not widely.

 

For instance;

 

Fuel cell improvements raise hopes for clean, cheap energy

By John Timmer | Published: July 31, 2008 - 07:30PM CT

 

With pressure mounting to transition away from fossil fuels, fuel cell research has grown significantly in the last several years. In the simplest sense, fuel cells are a battery that you refuel slowly, regulating a chemical reaction and harvesting that energy in the form of usable electrical current. Current solutions use exotic materials to regulate the reactions and often require fossil fuels to generate the chemicals, defeating the purpose of the exercise. Today's release from Science includes three articles that detail methods that may help us overcome the problems with current-generation fuel cells.

 

Cheap catalyst splits water

Widespread use of fuel cells will rely on cheap sources of hydrogen and oxygen. Researchers at MIT have now made an oxygen-producing catalyst that operates on water in a neutral environment (pH 7 at atmospheric pressure) and can be coupled with solar cells; it's essentially a man-made equivalent to photosynthesis.

 

Platinum has been used as a catalyst for this reaction in the past, but the costs associated with platinum (it closed today at over $1,730 per ounce) have prompted efforts to eliminate its use. The new research describes the formation of a catalyst composed of a combination of cobalt, potassium, and phosphorous—all cheap and easy to obtain. The researchers found that two different inert electrodes would, when placed into a dilute solution containing cobalt and buffered with potassium phosphate, spontaneously form a coating of the catalyst. When provided with relatively low electrical potentials, such as those obtained from a solar cell, the catalyst would liberate oxygen gas by splitting the water that was acting as a solvent.

 

The key breakthroughs here are the elimination of precious metals from the catalyst, the in situ formation of the catalyst, and the benign operating conditions of the reaction. All of this adds up to big cost savings in splitting water into is component gasses. Platinum's cost is all too apparent to anybody that has ever been to a jewelry store, but less apparent is the costs associated with producing catalyst materials, a process all but eliminated in this research.

 

Using less metal

Another use of platinum may go to the wayside in favor of an organic alternative, courtesy of Australian researchers. The metal is often used as a cathode that forms the interface between air and an electrolyte, used in both fuel cell and air/metal battery applications. This electrode's job is to reduce oxygen from the air and diffuse it into the electrolyte, so that it can be put to work in further chemical reactions that generate electricity. Here, platinum has issues beyond its exorbitant cost. It suffers from inactivity in the presence of carbon monoxide gas and diffusion of the platinum particles in the carbon substrate to form agglomerates that harm performance.

 

Electrically conductive polymers have been tested, but the performance simply wasn't sufficient to justify replacing platinum. But developments in gas-phase deposition techniques have now allowed for higher-quality electrically conductive thin-film polymers to be produced, opening the door for fuel cell applications. In this case, the researchers focused on a conductive polymer called poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), or PEDOT. The need for both a high surface area in contact with the incoming gas and to avoid moisture ingression led scientists to coat the PEDOT on every hiker's best friend: Gortex fabric. To further enhance conductivity, a 40nm gold coating was added.

 

The PEDOT electrode is homogeneous, eliminating catalyst agglomerations that plagued the long-term reliability of platinum based electrodes. It's also insensitive to carbon monoxide poisoning, another performance-robbing problem with platinum. The optimal PEDOT coating thickness was found to be 400nm, and performance was on par with that of the standard platinum-based electrodes. Researchers ran the electrode for 1,500 hours with no loss in performance. With the cost of the platinum in a fuel cell being equal to the total cost of an equivalent gasoline engine, this breakthrough has huge potential to drive down the cost of fuel cells, although researchers were quick to point out that similar breakthroughs are needed to get rid of platinum at the anode side.

 

Solid oxides get to chill

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) represent a completely different approach to the problem. They're one of the leading options because, compared to many other green technologies, they have relatively high efficiency, high energy storage density, and produce only water as a byproduct. While SOFCs have not made substantial in-roads in the consumer space, they are being adopted as emergency power systems for hospitals, 911 dispatch centers, and other critical entities.

 

The primary limitation of SOFCs is high operating temperature. SOFCs operate by diffusing O2- across a ceramic electrolyte. Current generation systems use Y2O3 doped ZrO2 (YSZ) electrolytes that require operating temperatures above 700°C because the diffusion is a thermally activated process. A variety of alternatives to YSZ have been suggested, but they offer only modest improvements in operating temperature. In this week's Science, researchers from Madrid and Oak Ridge National Lab describe a novel SOFC membrane that operates at room temperature.

 

In these ceramics, solid state diffusion of the oxygen can be thought of as occurring through a series of atomic jumps, where ions leap from one lattice site to the next provided the next site is vacant. The easiest way to increase ionic conduction is to increase the number of vacancies—raising the temperature is typically the easiest way to do that. This temperature effect gives rise to the high operating temperatures in conventional SOFCs. The materials in this study are unique because they stabilize incredibly high fractions of vacancies at room temperature.

 

Instead of using monolithic YSZ, the authors used thin-film growth techniques (molecular beam epitaxy) to grow 5-60 nanometer thick, alternating layers of YSZ and SrTiO3 (STO). They found that these two materials form an interface where the anions (O2-) become highly disordered, causing an anomalously high numbers of vacancies. These unique interfaces form a superhighway of O2- conduction.

 

Electrical measurements showed that the primary conduction pathway in the materials went through the YSZ/STO interface, but the YSZ layers showed some conduction as well. This work conclusively shows that the conductivity is thermally activated and thus is a result of ionic motion, rather than charge migration. This data is incredibly important because previous reports of high ionic conductivity ultimately turned out to be a result of electronic conduction through defective membranes, making the materials useless as fuel cells.

 

Despite the substantial promise of these materials, it is probably premature to start placing orders for your room-temperature SOFC; drawbacks include processing that is not amenable to mass production, fast conduction in only two dimensions, and a lack of long-term stability information. Despite these concerns, this work is likely to represent a major step in the march towards wider SOFC commercialization.

 

The same general note of caution applies to all of these developments, as it's possible that some of these techniques won't scale, or will only find a home in some specific applications. Still, they highlight how focused research and development can produce significant improvements in clean energy technology.

 

Nobel Intent writers Todd Morton and Adam Stevenson produced this report.

 

Sciencexpress, 2008. DOI: 10.1126/science/1162018

Science, 2008. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159267

Science, 2008 DOI: 10.1126/science.1156393

[firewoodman]

suddenly i feel out of my depth.

 

what i do feel is although most of us (on here) believe this is a natural event there is not much man can do to stop it but we are fully capable of making it worse.

 

dagmar you have Impeccable spelling and an impressive vocabulary, i feel educated now:thumbup1:

[Mr Ed]

 

dagmar you have Impeccable spelling and an impressive vocabulary, i feel educated now:thumbup1:

 

 

More like excellent copy paste skills...

[firewoodman]

you read my mind

[Jack-Arb aka Tiago Sinclair-Julio.]

Hello Dagmar,

 

The size of each of your post's makes them difficult and uninteresting to read, and because they are written quite in depth on a complex subject most people find it hard to follow.

 

Is it your words or is it someone else's word's maybe if you would put it in a shorter version with your own views with your words it would be more interesting for others.

 

Dont intend to offend you, Im just affraid people will be put off from writting there views if there are posts that most people heard little about them.

 

bye tiago

[skyhuck]

Hello Dagmar,

 

The size of each of your post's makes them difficult and uninteresting to read, and because they are written quite in depth on a complex subject most people find it hard to follow.

 

Is it your words or is it someone else's word's maybe if you would put it in a shorter version with your own views with your words it would be more interesting for others.

 

Dont intend to offend you, Im just affraid people will be put off from writting there views if there are posts that most people heard little about them.

 

bye tiago

 

I found Dagmar's posts most informative, they ain't that long, do you not read books? do you stick to comics?

 

Also Dagmar backed up her points with real data.

 

Is it a case of she ain't saying what YOU want so you don't like it?

[Steve Bullman]

More like excellent copy paste skills...

 

you seem to be implying that dagmar was trying to pass these words off for her own yet it said clearly at the top who the author was

 

"Fuel cell improvements raise hopes for clean, cheap energy

By John Timmer | Published: July 31, 2008 - 07:30PM CT"