Geoengineering at 600 PPM CO2. Could Fake Mountains Or Space Elevators Help With Mitigation?

Geoengineering is already going on, at an unimaginable scale: we are ABOVE 600 parts per million of CO2 EQUIVALENT…. That is the Antarctica metastable point! Below 600 ppm CO2 equivalent, Antarctica freezes over. Above, it melts. The lunatics say reaassuringly that it all happened before. Yes, well, no, man didn’t happen before. The geoengineering in place is properly astounding. The talisman of electric cars won’t repeal it…

The paltry 420 ppm of CO2 usually rolled out considers only CO2 not all the man-made GreenHouse Gases such as CH4, NOx, Fluorocarbons, etc. which have a much stronger infrared retention factor per mass.

So far all the geoengineering schemes proposed were silly as they wanted to mitigate the temperature rise. But CO2 per se is dangerous: it acidifies oceans, to start with. The safe thing to do is to emit less CO2. And nuclear energy is the obvious way to do that. Potentially all electric production could be nuclear. All the objections to nuclear energy can be overruled by using more advanced technology: reactors can be made safe, non proliferating and eating their own waste.

The prominent greenhouse gas is water vapor. Water vapor is Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Man-made GHG and CO2 leverages the H2O. Crafty geoengineering would act on the H2O. A recent paper pointed out that what matters is high altitude H2O. “We introduce a climate intervention strategy focused on decreasing water vapor (WV) concentrations near the tropopause and in the stratosphere to increase outbound longwave radiation...” They claimed it’s injected only in a few equatorial places (I think it’s more complicated than that). An idea would be to turn the vapor into rain before it could go stratospheric… If it really goes up only in a few spots. Here is an example of the sort of offending equatorial cloud which sends a lot of H2O into the startosphere:

Those researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest trying what they call “intentional stratospheric dehydration.” According to study lead author Joshua Schwarz, a research physicist at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado… a place just above which I once charged a mountain lion in the snow while it was sneaking on elks… It happened accidentally; I was charging downhill in snow, and pretended to be unphazed when I arrived perpendicular to the fierce predator’s own trajectory… Long story… I had my German sheperd Mandy bouncing behind… Anyway back to science… the concept would involve seeding small particles known as ice nuclei into the stratosphere using high-altitude aircraft.

One small region above northern Australia appears to be particularly important in controlling the upward movement of air and water vapor. In general, there is massive injection of H2O at high altitude above the equator, as thunderclouds can go up to 18 kilometers there, and then the water migrates polewards towards the tropics. 

“If we could do something just in that little area, maybe we could reduce stratospheric water vapor in order to let more infrared radiation out [into space] — that’s the basic idea,” Schwarz said.

Giant artificial near stratospheric mountains disposed strategically with nets in between may be a passive way to do that. I would say, somewhat tongue in cheek… Except that this could come naturally in connection with SPACE ELEVATORS (the material for building space elevators on Earth exist, or nearly so…)

Patrice Ayme

Clouds forming above 7000 meters high Machapuchare a peak in Nepal, which would be in a sub tropical area, if at sea level:

The interest of drying the stratosphere would to decrease the CO2 production through nonlinear self feeding exponential effects by say melting permafrost, and methane ice… To dehydrate the stratosphere part of the atmosphere one would have to precipitate the big equatorial injectors before they could do what they are doing now:

The preceding was inspired by Ian Miller: Has Geoengineering a role in Climate Change? Posted on March 20, 2024:

In a previous post I looked at the effect of tree-planting to help counter climate change. This time I shall look at geoengineering. The United Nations Environmental Assembly considered a resolution on solar radiation modification, which called for the convening of an expert group to examine the benefits and risks. The resolution was withdrawn because the non-experts could not agree on whether to form the panel. Well, that was a huge achievement! It is claimed that research has identified potential risks, such as unpredictable effects on weather, biodiversity loss, undermining food security, and infringement of human rights across generations by passing on huge risks to generations that will follow us. In short, the risks that something will happen are the same as what we know will happen now. These changes are locked in, and are not risks. However, not all proposals are sensible.

Proposals include injecting millions of tonnes of aerosols into the stratosphere. The critics say this would alter global winds and rainfall patterns, leading to more drought and cyclones, exacerbate acid rainfall and slow ozone recovery. That would depend on what is done. It is not necessary to fire acidic material or ozone depleting material up there. The one criticism that is reasonable is that this expensive operation would have to be carried out continuously. Missing in action was a proposal to insert potential “dust” particles into aero-jet engines to make long-lasting contrails. A possibility would be something like diethyl zinc. Zinc oxide should remain volatile within the engine. There may be other problems, such as fuel storage but at least consider it.

An alternative is to make low-level clouds brighter by spraying microscopic seawater droplets into the air. This was rejected because there is no peer-reviewed evidence that it would work. Given nobody is trying, and looking at the attitude of potential reviewers, that rejection is ridiculous. As an example of “expert opinion”, one comment was, “Even if it worked, it is hardly environmentally benign.” That is a fairly good sign such a project would be rejected. On the other hand, not doing it makes sense: it would also be too expensive, so it would never happen.

One project was to spread tiny glass spheres over large areas of sea ice to brighten the surface. This failed – they sped up the loss of sea ice. A little thought on the physics would have indicated the spheres would refract the light and concentrate it in spots and enhance absorption when the sun was at an angle, which it usually is where there is sea ice. Another proposal was to spray the ocean with microbubbles or foam. If you cannot see what is wrong with that proposal, you are not thinking clearly.

So what do they think is the answer? Apparently 500 scientists signed an open letter calling for non-use of solar geoengineering, and argue that model studies suffer from uncertainties. Their answer to the problem is to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently they have not noticed that we have made no progress on that at all, and we are accelerating in the wrong direction.

…

What seems to have happened here is that the concept started with activity and not thought. The obvious was proposed to get research funding, which probably shut out those proposals that came later and had more thought. As for the self-styled “experts”, the proposal to pass the buck to someone else is unfortunately only too familiar. And no, I do not think geoengineering is the answer. There is no single answer, although a massive expansion of nuclear generation in molten salt reactors comes the closest to one.

Plutocrats Hate Trains, They Want Subsidized Private Jets! Hate Them Back! Cut Pluto Subsidies! Night Trains!

Hey, there is only so much money to go around! All the money should go to plutocrats! No taxpayer money for public trains! All the money for private jets! If plutocrats took the train, even private extra luxury “wagon lit”, they, the elite, the world government, would have to come in proximity to multitude of common people! Plutocrats can’t stand common people, because common, vulgar people are not philanthropists, those common low lives can’t help people, they can’t even help themselves, and must be taken care of all the time, just like pigeons, by the philanthropists who own the planets… So the least philanthropists should have is private jets, to travel in style….

Yes, plutocrats must travel private, among their equals to enjoy the planet privately, as per their exclusive nature. That means private, exclusive air travel. Private jets employ more than one million people in the USA, contribute to more than 1% of CO2 emissions, and receive gigantic subsidies. When a billionaire jets around, it‘s free for him, her and their hard owning family! Common, vulgar taxpayers pick up the tab for their superiors. In exchange the superiors shall finance some woke movements here and there: the cost of social peace…

Europe and the USA invested enormously in trains in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Trains were used to transport We The People and remain the main transporters of goods in the USA. 

But then the plutocrats took over all the subsidies you could possibly imagine, and they destroyed the train networks, including inner cities electric lines which existed even in the inner San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles… Trains subsidies disappeared, but private jets got enormous subsidies. A modern electric train (or maglev), major city center to major city center, is faster and more convenient than planes for trajectories less than 800 kilometers (500 miles).

Once the ecological and overall cost numbers are plugged in, the train becomes competitive even for passengers, from San Francisco to New York (with new lines). Right now, New York salads in winter come from California by train…

Trains in the Briançon station. Briançon is the highest city in Europe, and also the most isolated, from all the very high mountains in all directions, often for hundreds of kilometers. Its easiest access from Paris is by night train (complete with beds). Several of the world’s largest ski resorts are around Briançon, including Montgenèvre, the world’s oldest ski resort, opened in 1907 (still expanding, with 70 lifts and 400 kms of runs; the fifth largest ski resort in the world…).

For two decades or so, there was only one night train left in Europe, the Paris to Briançon line. The French central state tried to close it. The region Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur saved it.   More than one hundred miles of the line is single track through the high mountains. The line survived because the easiest way to Briançon is along a 200 kilometer valley along which Hannibal’s army suffered enormous losses. Hannibal’s international army got crushed by boulders from great heights… Other ways to get to Briançon  involve steep passes above timberline. With the night train one steps in at 8pm and the train arrives in Briançon, at 7am, after a good night’s sleep. No extravagant security checks. One can get inside the train two minutes before departure. No going to the airport, confronting traffic jams: the train station is in the center of Paris.  Any other way to go to Briançon is hazardous and haphazard (the high speed train across the Alps in valleys to the north, from France to Italy, is indefinitively cut by a rock avalanche…)

Train travel is ecologically correct, but it is NOT subsidized… whereas air travel is heavily subsidized. First of all, there is no tax on jet fuel. Secondly airports are enormously subsidized (by central government, regions and local cities). Third states provide for air traffic control, security, etc. 

For decades unsubsidized trains had to compete with heavily subsidized air travel. 

All over the world, electric trains could be used much more. An optimized electric train could go from the left coast to the east coast of the USA… In ten hours. But in California plutocrats  sabotage high speed rail….  

The French high speed train operator quit: during the time it started negotiations with California, it was able to start negotiation, build and complete a high speed line in  Morocco

The truth is, plutocrats want luxury air travel only in the USA, private and subsidized! Train, rubbing shoulders with common folks, is the enemy! 

Plutocrats have infected the planet. Macron gave the Legion of Honor to a number of extremely wealthy white males, whose single merit was wealth. One of them is David Rothschid, Macron’s ex-boss at Banque Rothschild. Macron did the Deep State trick of going from highest position in government financial inspection to private tricks organizing mergers and acquisition.

Plutocrats are destroying this planet with the wrong economic activities, at their service, whom they use taxpayer money for. The COP28 in Dubai convened that fossil fuels have to be given up, something that everybody knows, but that was an information operation to hide further investments in what they claim they want to quit. If COP28 wanted progress in the CO2 crisis, it would have announced massive research investments in new energy (say thermonuclear fusion where progress is now just a question of research activity to figure out details, that is, a question of money).

Bringing night trains all over Europe, subsidizing the ecological economy and stripping subsidies to plutocrats and their fancy toys should be the new directions, instead of forcing We The People out of cars…  And promoting wind farms at sea of dubious sustainability, let alone telling a growing country like France that she will have to spend 30% less electricity in ten years, as  the idiotic PM, a woman of prestigious diplomas and haughty socialism, but no common decency, or basic intelligence, planned to do.

Instead I suggest that the French PM be kicked out, just like the presidents of US woke universities (woke is an ideology invented in France which the French PM adheres to…)

Night trains back, private jets out… A night train between Paris and Berlin has just been reopened… From little gestures like that, genuine progress will be made… And not to be neglected, the arrogance of plutocrats will be brought down a notch.

Want to save the planet? Bring down the rule of plutocracy!

Patrice Ayme

CO2 Crisis Recap November 2023

The banana trees around Geneve, Suisse, are holding fine as the shortest days of the year leave them little light. Fifty years ago, there would have been one meter of snow on the ground. Switzerland, an elevated land, used to look like Sweden, but now, at least in the balmiest areas, it looks like Provence, with palm trees, pins parasols, and rows of cypresses. It’s eerie…

None of this surprises me, I expected as much, but to see it for real is baffling. It looks like a movie set. I have graduate degrees both in Physics and in Mathematics, and studied science all my life. I am a science fanatic. So I accept facts. But those facts, although predicted, are amazing. And that’s only from two degrees centigrade of warming…
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/09/15/truth-is-our-religion/
The CO2 crisis, besides the fatal aspect it presents for all of humanity, because civilization is a fossil fuel civilization, is a fascinating case of applied physics, mathematics and philosophy. 

Saying CO2 acts as a catalyst for water vapor, is a semantic stretch, but somewhat reflects the complexity of the CO2 crisis. What happens is that the rise in CO2 brings a low elevation greenhouse rise, which in turns brings a water vapor rise, which augments further the greenhouse effect.
CO2 level evaluation graphs can be found in Patrice Ayme’s essays. The Earth cooled and CO2 went down three million years ago, due to geotectonic. That corresponds to the start of the evolution of domineering human species. So the rise of man follows shortly after a spectacular cooling of the climate:

Camels in The Highest Arctic, Again, Soon.

Part of the problem we have is that, since fossil fuels provides more than 80% of the world’s energy and 100% of its plastics, they have a lot of partisans… who are very sophisticated in how to fight enemie
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/07/06/failed-solutions-to-pollution-climate-crisis-are-no-accident-but-invisible-plot/
Those who insist to find fault in uncontroversial science, while correctly disparaging present efforts to mitigate the CO2 crisis, diminish the latter by sounding like crackpots. Today’s CO2 mitigation efforts are deliberately heading the wrong way:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/07/08/real-reason-for-massive-electric-vehicles-push-diverting-worthy-anti-fossil-fuels-efforts-down-rabbit-holes/

Implementing heat pumps, fuel cells, indigenous solar, nuclear, hydrogen or ammonia were the most worthy avenues. Battery Electric Vehicles are more of a distraction.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2022/07/08/real-reason-for-massive-electric-vehicles-push-diverting-worthy-anti-fossil-fuels-efforts-down-rabbit-holes/

Illustrating the CO2 crisis: This sort of landscape will be a memory all too soon… And all too sad. The banana trees around Geneva were holding, last I checked.. [Prof. Wayne Burleson, Lac de Tanay, Vouvry, Suisse Romande.]

Climate denialists are interesting, because they are like any denialists: they use anti-ideas to the max… Like: climate always changed… right, true, but irrelevant… It turns out we know exactly why the climate changed over the last 300 million years… Plate tectonics had much to do with it. The controversial part is the collapse, the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. There was a cooling, two sorts of cooling, maybe three… Long story…

Three millions years ago, the two main heat transfer currents from the equator to the poles failed, and one of them, call it the Panama current, failed completely, as it was replaced by solid land… The other is being constricted, one giant quake at a time, between Australia and Eurasia….

But there go the denialists, grabbing at fumes…. And blocking a constructive debate focused on smart solutions. Yes we won’t get rid of fossil fuels overnight, but the non-deployment of hydrogen is a result of the denialism. Yes there are hydrogen rockets and there could be hydrogen planes…

Let’s not deny that…

Patrice Ayme

Scientists Have Been Co-Culprit Of The CO2 Crisis. Case Of France.

An old and extremely odd position of climate specialists has been what I call the “Magical Stop”. It is because it is ridiculously anti-scientific. It was reiterated in the New York Times a few weeks ago (NYT banned my comment). According to this magical stop, stopping CO2 emissions would stop the disaster… Right away… Of course idiotic: CO2, ANTHROPOGENIC or not, last thousands of years in the atmosphere, and there is much more in the ocean, ready to come out, after re-circulation or ocean warming.
I had a monster clash about that at UC Berkeley seven years ago, lost friends, including at least two prestigious scientists and Berkeley professors… and never recovered them. Well, f… them all…
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/new-climate-lie-magical-co2-stop-possible/

Unrealistic solutions have been rolled out. Anti-nuclear positions, for example. Antihydrogen also. “GREEN” Hydrogen is immediately deployable, by using “green” energy to produce it, and then mixing it with natural gas (CH4). That was already done in France a century ago.

And also the criminal idiocy that economic degrowth was a solution…. Degrowth is the idiocy that if we use much less energy, including less electricity, we will reduce our CO2 footprint. It is pretty much the policy of the EU and especially France. It has brought a relative collapse of French GDP (say relative to GDP growth in Switzerland or Germany). And this is just a warming up (of the collapse). French government plans is to reduce electric consumption, while forcing everybody in electric cars…

WOKE FRANCE’S ELECTRIC PRODUCTION Decaying, Just Like The Country Itself In The Name Of Degrowth:. In 1999, the inflection point below, the Kremlin financed ecologists made a secret pact with the ruling French Socialists to deconstruct French nuclear energy… in the name of what would be later called wokeness (it helped that KGB Putin had just come to power):

France is full of scientists who believe in “degrowth”. It is already applied. As the graph above of Electric Production clearly shows. The only effect is that France gets weak, and the impact of whatever good French ideas there are, is decreasing into nothingness on the world stage… Or even the French stage because, thanks to deindustrialization, French fate is decided in China and the USA, and tomorrow, India..

***

The chief scientist above in the link is one of the climate fossil fuel propagandists in the guise of being the opposite. Just one of the contracts of his mother institution, UC Berkeley, with just one single oil company, was worth more than 60 million 2023 dollars… Making us believe that such enormous contracts do not influence those who get them depends upon our complete deprivation of common sense.

***

Patrice Ayme: Is UC Berkeley or the associated huge Lawrence-Berkeley lab getting financing from fossil fuel companies?

ChatGPT: As of my last update in January 2022, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have faced criticisms and protests regarding ties to fossil fuel companies. In the past, there have been instances of partnerships, funding, or research collaborations with companies involved in the fossil fuel industry.

***

Follow the science, says those who know too little… But often following science means just following scientists, and scientists, like everybody else, tend to follow the money...

Scientists have pretended that the CO2 crisis and the fossil fuel energy crisis are not as severe as they are. So-called renewables are having a neglectable impact so far and for a very long time to come. Only nuclear and hydrogen could have a significant proximal impact. Nuclear waste, from nuclear being one million times more energetic by mass than fossil fuels, is one million times less bulky than fossil fuel waste…

Another lie from well compensated scientists has been the expected rise of temperatures. Last I checked we were 1.8 C above the pre-industrial level, worldwide, but scientists pretend that’s not the case, by looking at carefully selected long term averages… If they averaged over 20,000 years, they would establish that we are still in an ice age….

Scientists want to feed their families, live in nice houses and be respected… They can get all this if they please the powers that be. So they do. With reassuring fables…

Patrice Ayme

Climate Science, Full Of Hot Air Didn’t Want to See Coming EXPONENTIAL HEAT

CO2 corruption rules. Scientists, whatever that means, are first government employees: universities, even private universities, are mostly financially dependent upon governments. And the governments have been fossil fuels dominated for two centuries now. Fossil fuels are powerful, in part because they are tyranny friendly, intrinsically, as fossil fuel research, production, and transportation is capital intensive, but requires few workers, especially at the highest levels.

For the last 45 years the Greenhouse Crisis has been clear and blatant, yet fossil fuel usage has only grown, greatly thanks to the manipulation of the fossil fuel lobby. The storage of CO2 in the atmosphere is so great in 2023, that, absent a deliberate effort in the proximal future to lower drastically the CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere, sea level will go up at least ten meters. Yes, that’s a personal theory, from what happened in the Eemian, around 120,000 years ago, when sea levels were 6 meters higher..a dnthe CO2 ppm equivalent was significantly less (a third less). Now, right, the Eemian warming was forced by orbital characteristics… but for reasons too long to expose here, I believe that the orbital forcing induces the CO2 forcing. Right now we have a man-made GreenHouse Gaz forcing on a scale not seen in… thirty million years (at least!)

Many, manipulated by the fossil fuelists, say: no problem, no panic. However Earth’s climate is the largest machine around. The mass of Earth’s atmosphere is approximately 5.1 × 10^18 kilograms. That is 5 million gigatons. Moreover, it is entangled with the oceans, with a mass around 300 times greater… And certainly the upper layers of the ground are also involved. So the climate system has huge inertia. In the F = ma equation, m is the mass of the climate, F the forcing, and a the acceleration, is what people do not see much of. What they will experience is the speed of change, which one gets by integrating a. Another problem is nonlinear effects which will augment the F, the force, as the Earth’s heats up. That’s the self-feeding, exponential character of the catastrophe.

The anti-nuclear lobby is a striking example of the lunacy commandeered by the fossil fuel lobbies. Recently the head of IAEA had to recognize that there was no problem with releasing tritium off Fukushima, but still, he recognized that he had to beg for forgiveness, due the masses of people who suffer from radiation fear. So they freak out about tritium… because they know nothing and they impose on all respect for their demented, immoral ignorance… That means they force everybody to respect irrationality.   

And even more striking example of the machiavellianism of the fossil fuel lobbies has been the present course pursued by mainstream ecology: mainstream ecology utterly failed. And that’s no accident: that’s exactly what the fossil fuel tyranno-industrial complex wanted. The proportion of decarbonated energy is the same as 45 years ago… but of course, as energy usage augmented enormously in south and east Asia, in absolute value the emissions are higher than ever: 55 gigatons of CO2 per year (if one includes steel and cement production, plus deforestation, as one should). 

On top of that other GreenHouse gasses, methane, CH4, Nitrogen oxides, NOx, Chlorofluorocarbons of all types, etc. add another third in CO2 equivalence.

That gets us above 600 ppm of CO2 equivalents, a percentage of forcing not seen in at least 30 million years. At the time, there was ice only on the highest mountains in Antarctica. More exactly it seems that around 600 ppm of CO2 is the tipping point for glaciation in Antarctica, and we are motoring through it at roughly 1% of added GreenHouse gases per year…

Oh, shut up, they bleat self-admiringly, we are so “net zero”, don’t you listen to our mellifluous discourses? Don’t you know we are net zero in 2050? Alternatively, we can destroy industry right away, and we will be a neat zero right away! (The latter being the “solution” in Europe and most prominently, in France!)

The treacherous ecologists with their middle age windmills, and hate for nuclear energy, have fostered the offshorization of employment and regulation to enslaving tyrants. Unbeknownst to themselves, they do as their masters want.

Nor are they alone: actually these ecologists are of course nothing, they just grate like Greta. 

Ecology has served as a pretext to deindustrialization and offshorization, the process which advantages the plutocrats and transformed the Roman Republic into the Roman dictatorship.

The extremely highly educated, but just as ridiculous and treacherous French PM was recently insisting France had to totally deindustrialize in the next seven years. Just to cut the emissions (4 tons/year/person). Actually France uses 11 tons… in “China” and its ilk… Which means that PM Borne and her predecessor have sent 7/11 of the French economy to China. Borne est bornée….

Just as ecologists have been paid (in fame and money) to promote ineffective “solutions” to the GreenHouse Gaz (GHG) crisis, scientists have been paid to pretend that the crisis was a crisis, but not that bad of a crisis. 

I begged to differ totally. Not only are we on a +7 degree C trajectory for 2100 CE, but should nonlinear factors come into play, we could get higher than that.  

To my satisfaction, I made even more enemies at Berkeley than I already had, when I attacked one of the main climate high priests who pretended a magic stop to climate heating was possible… the sort of magic fossil fuels lobbyists want everybody to believe, so that putting an end to fossil fuels burning would be an instant stop, an act of utmost sorcery straight out of Harry Potter, just on a much grander and altruistic scale… didn’t they all learn witchcraft, reading Harry Potter? It works! At least in the popular imagination:

New Climate Lie: Magical CO2 Stop Possible

[UC Berkeley got 50 million dollars from British Petroleum shortly before this admirable bout of magical thinking …]

So what’s going, ladies, gentlemen, and species in between, or beyond like yours truly? 

We are above 600 ppm of equivalent CO2 in GHG.

Indeed on top of the CO2, we have the other man made GreenHouse Gasses, methane, CH4, Nitrogen oxides, NOx, Chlorofluorocarbons of all types, etc. 

They add another third in CO2 equivalence.That gets us above 600 ppm of CO2 equivalents, a percentage of forcing not seen in at least 30 million years. At the time, there was ice only on the highest mountains in Antarctica. 

What exactly the levels of CO2 were in the distant past is still a matter of debate, it seems. However, it seems pretty certain that around 600 ppm of CO2 is the tipping point for glaciation in Antarctica…and we are motoring through it at roughly 1% per year… Now, granted, there is inertia in the system… But that’s part of the problem: when a monster avalanche starts, it looks cute in the beginning, a little cloud. 

The exponential surge may have started (helped by coming El Nino). The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.

The North Atlantic ocean has been hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.

This climate Armageddon is going to get way worse. California should start thinking about daming the Golden Gate… A big bad Golden Dam…

A solution? Besides hefty carbon taxes and cutting all and any subsidies to fossil fuels… Besides launching a hydrogen economy (which can use much of the existing fossil fuel and natural gas infrastructure)… Launch a Manhattan style project to develop nuclear fusion. It has become just a question of money, using high temperature superconductors.

Some of the preceding was published in the New York Times, and the usual silly objections by the ignorant to thermonuclear fusion were also published in retort. I will reply to them in a separate essay.

Patrice Ayme

If We Boiled The Oceans… What Would Happen To The Atmospheric Oxygen?

If we boiled the oceans, the Earth’s temperature would be so high that the permafrost would entirely melt, releasing CH4, and then the carbon in the permafrost would burn (22% of the Northern hemisphere is covered with permafrost.). Permafrost is a mixture of water ice, frozen CO2, and frozen organic material (“carbon”)… including lots of pathogens… Permafrost covers roughly 65% of Russia’s territory…

The resulting recombination of permafrost with oxygen could spectacularly reduce the O2 in the atmosphere. The usual number advanced for permafrost mass seems to evaluate only the first two meters. Even computed that way, by minimalizing how much permafrost lurks below, there’s a huge amount of carbon stored in permafrost — an estimated 1,500 gigatons, or twice as much as the atmosphere contains carbon (under the form of CO2, mostly).

Recombining the first two meters of permafrost with oxygen, would produce around 5,000 gigatons of CO2, one hundred times the present yearly emissions of CO2. Mass of O2 in the atmosphere is roughly one million gigatons. So recombining that O2 with the disappeared permafrost, we get that roughly .3% of O2 would disappear.

However in some places, in the northern Lena and Yana River basins in Siberia, drilling has shown the permafrost to be up to 1,493 meters thick. Permafrost stops in depth due to geothermal heating. I have not seen an evaluation for the total permafrost mass, nor does it seem to have been attempted. If the permafrost were 200 meters deep in the average, then, under full recombination with O2, an order of magnitude around 30% of the present atmospheric O2 would disappear.

This says that there is a danger of global hypoxia under catastrophic anthropogenic warming…

Now on the positive side, an average depth of 200 meters may be way pessimistic. But even 20 meters would be a serious problem, potentially reducing atmospheric CO2 by 3% in the fullness of time… And twenty meters seems likely as a lower bound….

In remote northern Siberia, the world’s largest permafrost landslide, the Batagay megaslump, aka the Batagaika Crater… Up to one kilometer wide, 60 meters deep, the melter permafrost above reveal frozen layers 650,000 years deep.

This reveals that ancient permafrost survived past episodes of intense global warming… constituting a global warning, then, because it’s not surviving this one!

Batagaika Crater survived multiple warm episodes known as ‘interglacials’, including exceptionally warm and wet conditions during a ‘super-interglacial’ 420,000 years ago. Moreover, it has also survived warmer-than-present conditions about 120,000 years ago, during the Eemian, when summer air temperatures in the Arctic may have been as much as 4–5°C warmer than now. So many have said reassuringly: see, permafrost will never melt… However, the fact is that the Batagaika Crater is presently melting… and never melted before!

Thus I expect the theory of professional climate reassurers to be all wet, as I expect warming in Northern Siberia to exceed +10 Celsius… pretty soon. (Because I expect +4C overall, and there is a multiplication effect in the Arctic…)

Global planetary hypoxia: keep an eye on it…

Patrice Ayme

Unsustainable Exponentiation Of Temperature

ANTHROPOCENE DETERIORATING CLIMATE: CO2, GHG, Questions And Answers:

Nigel: Based on your posts I have great admiration for your depth of research and the quest for truth so I implore you to let me brief you on this climate change subject some more..

PA: Thanks, I appreciate the compliment a lot, and it encourages me to persist in my ways, whatever they are. On all subjects, I try to get all perspectives, keep what I perceive to be right, what is false, and then rebuild a logic around those truths. My positions on everything, including climate, often lead people to label me in ways far removed from, or even opposite to, my balance point. On the human caused climate change, my positions are nuanced and wildly diverse, yet they make a coherent whole. Yes, we are on an eminent +7C trajectory. Should we panic and blow hot air? No. 

Nigel: I am not in denial but am well informed…Yes the climate is changing (Always has) and mostly for the better and we may need some adaptation but we have time and it’s far from an emergency…

Patrice Ayme: I am looking directly across the Golden Gate bridge. I have no doubt that someday, California will have to dam the Golden Gate. Otherwise the most productive agricultural area of the USA will become an interior sea,  flooding twenty million people. 

A recent (2023) paper revealed a tidal way of melting for ice shelves, which had not been discovered prior. Thanks to this new activity, the many authors from many prestigious research centers double the rate of ice shelf melting. It was completely obvious, BTW, that this was happening, as ice shelves breathe with the tides.

I have observed that we are on a cataclysmic 7 degree C trajectory for 2100. France, which has very ancient precise readings, has the long term average at +1.7 C above the famed baseline from 1880 CE. Right now the entire planet is well above 1.5 C. This year, from El Nino, it’s likely going to come closer to +2C, as warm deep water is pushed up to the surface. One has to understand most of the planetary heating is in the polar regions. 

It is an emergency, but that does not mean we should run around like chickens… as we have been. If nuclear power had been developed as it should have been, with new types of reactors, electricity could be 100% carbon free, with safe, non-proliferating and non-polluting fission reactors. In France, Kremlin sponsored ecologists made a secret deal with the Socialist (PS) government of Lionel Jospin, in 1999, to stop nuclear energy, especially the research. Generations of know-how disappeared (French gov launched its nuclear program in January 1938, oldest in the world).  

Nigel: We are exiting an ice age and this has happened before and in the life cycle of humanity we have at least 3 measured periods when temperatures were far higher than the current predictions. 

PA: There are three episodes with temps equal or slightly superior (with three pulses less than 2 C above the present…). .. Around 120,000 years ago (Eemian), temps were not really higher than the present, except for one very short pulse 3C above the present…. but global sea level was 6 meters higher. The climate is full of surprises: there was a warm glaciation (!!!) 450 K years ago… But now we are guaranteed at least +4C within a century, and that’s not been the case for at least 3 million years, and probably much more.

Temp fluctuations in the past rarely happened at the present pace, and when they did (Dryas), that didn’t last.

Nigel: CO2 is at the lowest it’s been for 250 million years and we will be good with 3 times the current amount.

PA: Two centuries ago, we were around 250 ppm CO2, now we are getting close to 600 ppm EQUIVALENT CO2 (CO2 + CH4 + NOx + CFCs + etc.).Cattle in France contributes as much from its CH4 emissions as residential heating (12% of total CO2 equivalent each). Barring volcanism or impact, CO2 levels varied over millennia, or even millions of years (consider the end of the Cretaceous).

Nigel: The other fact is that our industrial impact on CO2 levels is insignificant 

PA: Going from 250 ppm to 600 ppm CO2 equivalents in 140 years is not insignificant. To boot, the main greenhouse gas is H2O, not CO2. The GreenHouse Gases (GHG) act through FORCING. It forces more H2O up, and that’s nonlinear. The exact function, called sensitivity, is unknown.

 

Observe that in the graph above the temperature curve seems to accelerate higher than the CO2 curve. That’s caused by the other GHG gases…. which add 1/3 of forcing. A better graph would have represented the GHG (which vary according to NOx and CFCs…)

***

Nigel: …and our biggest threat is we will destroy our prosperity and ability to fund adaptation by a panic to focus on so-called Net-Zero. So it’s drill baby drill and stop the nonsense on wind and solar and move to nuclear as quickly as possible to avoid pollution. Also reduce globalization and change to a fish farming strategy to save the oceans.

PA: I do not disagree with any of these points. Biden himself opened Alaska to drilling in a way Trump did not dare to do. My position is that massive research is needed. If prosperity is cut down, research will become impossible, which is the worst outcome.

Solar works (in combination with green hydrogen or derivatives). Wind is much more problematic, as the wind belts will migrate in the polar directions.
Nigel: On the trends of fires floods sea levels rise and weather induced tornados and such we see all danger trends reducing and our adaptive capability increases.. there is some work to do on forest fires but it’s NOT the climate but mainly our management approach.

Forests are burning and will burn. The Australian fires were so terrible that they changed the Pacific ocean surface temperature, and caused 3 La Nina in a row, desiccating California. The ravages of old growth forests in California have been heart breaking… even without fire. I documented them on this site with my own pictures. Years before the fires (which I predicted)

Climate Catastrophe: California Forests Dying. Giant Fires Coming In 2018

Nigel: The planet is doing just fine and will continue to do its variable thing…. 

PA: The biosphere could die from hypoxia (second worst case scenario) 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/global-hypoxia/

It has already started: huge zones of the oceans are too low in oxygen for advanced animal life. It could get worse if the permafrost rots on a hypermassive scale.

Nigel: …it’s us I am worried about as we are moving from science based thinking toward self destructive religion based group think.
More at https://co2coalition.org Home – CO2 Coalition
I suggest you take the quiz… they have a debate in a few weeks I can plug you into to learn more.

My suggestion is you study this scientific based data and we chat more..

PA: An uncle of mine, a famous astronomer, was studying the subject, up at the Jungfrau observatory, in the Berner Oberland… a century ago!

I talked to him, long ago, about the subject of CO2 precisely ( he was mostly an astrophysicist). Founder of the Institut d’Astrophysique, Daniel Challonge was a member of the French Communist Party, and was forbidden to travel to the USA… Although he was the gentlest of souls. He founded the observatory, the Observatoire de Haute Provence, which discovered the first exoplanets (the two PIs, astronomers from Geneva got the Nobel)…

I have been science obsessed all my life. This (grand) uncle, a professional, was friends with my two grandfathers who were amateur astronomers. My own father, a geologist from Algeria who found Algerian gas and oil, was skeptical about the rise of-temperature (of course, he was born in Africa, and roamed the Sahara!) But he died from an African disease before the heat wave which killed thousands in France in 2003, the hottest since precise records started in 1540 CE. The heat caused a crop shortfall in parts of Southern Europe. The death toll has been estimated at more than 70,000, half of them in northern France. The records were beaten since, several times.

This year is guaranteed to shatter records, because of El Nino and the exponentiation of climate change.
Much more effort should be made towards nuclear, especially thermonuclear fusion. It can clearly work, but the efficiencies have to be boosted, and for that government sponsored fundamental research has to be lavishly funded. Star power is also the key to solar system colonization.

My uncle Daniel Challonge has a 30 kilometer diameter crater named after him on the Moon. So science, yes, I know, never leave a moment without it….

This being said, I understand, and even approve, the frustration of those infurauted by ineffectual and often unjust policies to mitigate the climate crisis.

Decarbonification and global trade were used in Occident as Trojan Horses for deindustrialization, the latter a device for disempowering of the Plebs in Occident. This global conspiracy happened once already, in ancient Rome. It’s a basic plutocratic ruse to turn We The People into pigeons.

Patrice Ayme

Smoking Us Blind With Carbon Capture And Storage, The Demo-Rats Are…

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is supposed to capture carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources and pump them deep underground where the CO2 can be imprisoned under huge pressure, or, if pressurized into cracked basalt, as found in Iceland, CO2 quickly combines into rock. Indeed, CO2 can be dissolved into water as bubbly, acidic champagne. Basalts contain high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions that chemically react with CO₂ to make rocks such as calcite, dolomite, and magnesite. Stuff champagne, get rock. The process takes as little as two years. This is all true, and it is used on a very small scale in Iceland… a place full of pressurized CO2 and basalts…

Carbon Capture and Storage was a big winner in the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, signed into law during August 2022. But that version of CCS is a complete fake-out… Because the USA is not Iceland…. In the US, CCS is used to AUGMENT CO2 production. No way the clowns around Biden don’t know this.

 

C.C.S. is widely used by the FF industry, to boost the production of oil and natural gas. Natural gas processing facilities separate carbon dioxide from methane CH4, they are always mixed, similar bacteria producing  both. Some of these plants then pipe the “captured” carbon dioxide into what are known as enhanced oil recovery: it is re-injected into oil field reservoirs to increase their pressure and extract additional oil that would otherwise stay trapped underground.

 

Observe the cynicism of that conspiracy: CCS is presented as a climate solution, when actually it makes the situation worse!

 

Carbon Capture And Storage (CCS) is one more Public Relation way to sell Fossil Fuels (FF). 

On closer inspection, it’s just CO2 reinjection for FF, an old FF industry trick.

 

There are other ways to insure the survival of FF, such as so-called renewables without anything to store the energy they produce… except for ecologically, economically and financially expensive, inefficient batteries… which cannot be scaled up at the scale required, from lack of primary materials!  

 

Pseudo-ecologists have pushed for that renewables-battery trick, knowing full well it could not work at a sufficient scale for a positive climate impact, while extolling the virtue of Putin’s oil and gas, and hating nuclear solutions (except nuclear based in Russia or China).

 

Renewables, as they stand, are useless for transportation: no plane will move enough from windmills and solar panels on its back: the plane needs fuel. And that fuel can be obtained from renewables with pretty much only hydrogen. 

 

A gigantic infrastructure of renewables, and only renewables means intermittent energy, thus requires a full FF infrastructure capable of ensuring 100% production when there is no sun and no wind (a condition so frequent that it has a name the barometric swamp). If one has 100% of an extremely expensive equipment, one will use it.

 

CCS makes no sense at the most basic physics level: FF extracts Carbon C from the ground thn combines it with oxygen in the air, making CO2 and heat. CCS proposes then to return the C, with added oxygen into the ground. On the face of it, that looks circular: get C out, combine it with O2, then return CO2 into the ground. The latter step requires energy… On the face of it, as much energy as extracting C to start with, as it is to the same place it goes (and that makes no sense… except, as said above, if it is to pressurize a oil or gas field…).  

 

It is true that CCS works for special reasons in a particular place in Iceland. But they also have a new volcano in the area there: Iceland is a very special place (which produces enormous amounts of CO2 from its volcanoes). It is entirely possible that the capital of Iceland will disappear under a lava flow… propelled by CO2. But what is totally impossible is that CCS helps the world survive the present CO2 crisis…

 

That the Biden administration imposes on us this smoke and mirror is reminiscent of its promotion of women’s rights in Afghanistan… Carbon Capture and Storage is an example of conspirational, Machiavellian, plot. There is no way that its promoters do not know that this Fossil Fuels masquerading as “green”, or CO2 abating… Because CO2 augmentation is the way it is used right now, and no other usage is profitable.

Ah, but I forgot, there are no conspiracies, our masters told us, and if we think there are, we need to have our heads examined….

Patrice Ayme

This latest Iceland volcano produces up to hundred of thousands of tons of lava a day, all CO2 propelled. CO2 volcanic production prevents snowball Earth tendencies…. Notice the public on the slope, watching… In the Meradalir valley, 40 kilometers west of Reijavik…

CLIMATE EMERGENCY: Global Heating Is Accelerating Considerably: Alpine Evidence.

GLOBAL HEATING is accelerating. How can we see this? In the Alps, glaciers are melting at an incredible rate. Just looking out, as I can in the French Alps, it’s clear all glaciers below 3.500 meters will be gone in a matter of years: one can see that their upper slopes, which feed them, are bare. Just look at the accompanying photo.

Now this disappearance of glaciers below 3,500 meters was the pessimistic prophecy of glaciologists for… 2100! It’s happening now! If extended globally, this means a global heating of seven (7) Centigrade…. Way outside of the worst IPCC/GIEC predictions… And it is happening, I repeat… now! 

The obvious plot to underestimate GLOBAL HEATING is increasingly contradicted by the facts:

Glacier du Casset. From where the picture was taken to the top of the mountain in the clouds, 2,200 meters, 1.3 mile. The glacier was going as low as the first pink granite rocks in the valley bottom. It has retreated arounf 1,000 meters in denivellation. More importantly, its feeding slopes are bare, so it will entirely die. The peak of the mountain is higher than the 3,500 meters below which glaciers are supposed to disappear according to glaciologists in… 2100! This would correspond to a retreat of nearly 2,000 meters in denivellation, thus a temperature rise of 14 Centigrades!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The pink snow is caused by deposition of Sahara sand.

“Experts” keep on talking as if a global temperature rise of 1.5C could be held… But France has officially already experienced a two (2) Centigrade rise. So how come France is already at +2C and the rest of the world at +1.3C? France is smack in the temperate zone (45 degree latitude). I would suggest that the French experts on temperature are more honest.

California Sierra Nevada forests are destroyed by heat. Pests and drought rise the heat wave. One has to see the astounding amount of destruction to believe it. Last year I took an hour to cover half a mile on a trail, so many trunks of giant trees being in the way, in confusing entanglements. Sometimes I had to walk on trunks, 20 feet above the ground.  

Meanwhile, in the Western Mediterranean, the sea reached considerably higher levels. In Corsica 30.7 Centigrades (5C above what the temperature used to be). The temperature is so high that several emblematic species of Mediterranean corals are threatened with extinction. As they can’t migrate north, they will forever disappear from life on Earth. In Greenland, temperatures have been 10 Centigrades above “normal”. There is no more “normal”. 

Abnormality is the new normal.

This accelerating pace of global heating is completely outside of the misleading picture that the IPCC gives. It is more than alarming. It looks as if the IPCC, anxious not to displease the established order, is deliberately tweaking the data by underestimating the present global heating..

The IPCC is certainly distorting its models of how temperature will evolve: the models all include Carbon Capture schemes… But those do not exist, except on a small scale, when the CO2 is already in pipes (as is done in Iceland). Carbon Capture at the needed scale will be possible only when we have nearly free energy (say H fusion). Not something happening before 2100…

84% of world primary energy production is from fossil fuels (The rest is mostly hydro and nuclear). That’s not negotiable. It is a fact, and a very hard one. Governments have to ask themselves how they will lower that number. It will not be with electric plugs and batteries. Nor fake carbon accounting a la California, counting as stored carbon, forests which have already burned…. Nor will primary energy become mostly carbon free thanks to a bit of sun, and a bit of wind. 

The International Energy Agency says coal burning in 2022 will tie with its old record of 2013. Next year, in 2023, the record in coal burning, worst contributor to the CO2 crisis, will be surpassed. Please thank all the opportunistic, lying pseudo-ecologists, sun-struck and wind blown…

We have to thank the politicians who walked away from nuclear and hydrogen (Obama on day one for the latter!)
They walked away because they were paid… Not just by oil majors, and major oil exporting countries, and the financial sectors attached to them, and oligarchs, but even paid by the Kremlin…

The planet is firmly united, in the matter of major corruption by self-declared leaders, imposed by the powers that be… who got where they are because, for them, the best way to forget about the precarity of their own human life is to visit hellfire and subjugation onto others. If imposing suffering is good, receiving it, not so bad, our dear leaders reason in their maleficent hearts. The metaphysics of pain and power dominate the fate of the biosphere.

Patrice Ayme

Real Reason For Massive Electric Vehicles Push: Diverting Worthy Anti Fossil Fuels Efforts Down Rabbit Holes

Friend Ian Miller pointed out on July 8, 2022:
“Politicians are keen on EVs because they gave Musk huge grants. There are insufficient raw materials to make EVs a total solution, and they are doing very little for the alternatives because, well, they backed Musk.”

Fortunes and massive insider trading by politicians and allies were indeed made by giving subsidies to “renewable investment” that would have had no value if not given enough government support and money. However, that’s itself a coverup for the much more sinister reason hidden below the murky waters of plutocratic thinking and plotting…

My own interpretation is that any expert conversation shows that EVs can’t be a proximally optimal solution to the climate catastrophe… and suck up funding for real solutions. And THAT is the main reason why EVs are pushed: besides all the corruption, etc., EVs are pushed precisely because they solve nothing much in the dependance to fossil fuels but SUCK up the funds to implement real solutions…

EVs are fossil fuels in disguise, a Machiavellian plot.
One more plot… In plain sight, and the reason people do not see it, is that they have been told there are no plots. One can’t see what one has been brainwashed to believe does not exist. Manipulating people is about manipulating their minds. Advanced thinking is about proof of existence of concepts. Mathematicians spend a huge amount of time on existence proofs. If one is certain something does not exist, one can’t see it.

One of the many Tesla Lithium mines in Western Australia, far from prying eyes… Tesla also needs Cobalt mines, best left to kids who are best snaking down rabbit holes, and since they are Congolese, nobody know when they die… And Manganese, Nickel, Copper, Graphite, etc… All running out… The slaves will have to dig harder, so that pseudo-ecologists can display their virtue better, between 2 jet set vacations… Look at the tini tiny cars, for scale…

To a great extent, Electric Vehicles are fake news. Make no mistake: long term electric motors will replace ICE, Internal Combustion Engines, and that will be good for the climate. However, as it is, making EVs the number one priority, as is the case, is a delaying trick to keep on going with fossil fuels as replacement solutions in primary energy production are not researched, or deployed… EVs having sucked up all the government funding.

Yes children going down rabbit holes in Africa, digging for poisonous elements: the truth about EVs… (Smartphones too, but quantities are different…)

Nice trick.

Patrice Ayme