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

“Failed Solutions” To Pollution-Climate Crisis Are No Accident, But Invisible Plot…

All too many “Democrats” apparently believe that democracy consists in talking about Trump non-stop… Leaving no space for any other subject… Such as traditional “solutions” to various problems which have repeatedly failed to find, or implement.

This is not an accident. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a plot in favor of the statu quo, which is unsustainable.

By talking obsessively about irrelevant subjects, relevance can’t be deployed.

The global heating crisis is a scientific-technical problem. Some technical partial solutions already exist, for example heat pumps. Weirdly, the Biden administration spends many billions on electric cars, a tech of overall little positive impact on climate, short term, but very little on heat pumps, a tech which has a considerable advantage in the GreenHouse Gas Crisis (GHGC).

To solve the GHGC we need deployment of better available tech (heat pumps, hydrogen), and deployment or research in new fission, thorium, fusion… As China is doing.

The term “global warming” to describe GHGC is partial and rather meek. From space temperatures above 62C were observed in India in 2022. That’s global heating, not just warming. Also most of the CO2 goes into the ocean, where it chemically reacts to turn into carbonic acid. So acidification, not just heating, is a problem.

The best long term climate Federal policy would be to augment considerably the research budget in new energy research. As it is, 84% of world primary energy production is fossil fuels. Getting help from “green” hydrogen (produced by “renewables” and, or from cooling nuclear plants) could be done readily by using the present gas networks, and mixing some hydrogen in (a century old technique). Biden had promised ten billions in new energy research, but that morphed into EVs…

 

The true level is above 600ppm, including ALL man-made GreenHouse Gasses. Thermonuclear fusion will save us, but we don’t have it yet. And the less we research, the furthest in the future it lays.

Meuphys from Atlanta intervened with the partisan perspective:

There was no universe in which Republicans in a 50-50 Senate would have allowed that much to be spent on climate change solutions. Their doms in the fossil industries would have stopped paying their allowance! What is needed here is a strong federal mandate, one with teeth… the kind we will never have when the GOP has the votes to sustain a filibuster.

@ Meuphys Thanks for the comment. However, one has to see below the surface. A (nasty) Republican, Nixon, created the EPA, the Environment Protection Agency. Dems and Reps are playing a good cop, bad cop routine about the climate. So is the rest of the world’s leadership.

A point that I am trying to make is that present “solutions” to the pollution crisis (including GreenHouse Gasses, GHG) are not working: they are too expensive and too slow in worldwide deployment. What we need is fundamental research by the Federal government of new solutions, of which there are plenty of potential ones. Private industry can’t develop these solutions: too risky, especially in an uncertain regulatory environment. By the way, the Chinese government is doing just that: it is operating brand new experimental nuclear reactors of several types: pebble, thorium, etc.

Massive investment in electric cars, at the detriment of the rest, is the poster child of these failed approaches… Still “Democrats” have been doubling up on them… probably for financial reasons… Including pleasing the fossil fuels industry which welcomes solutions to its existence that do not work! In other words, while the support of fossil fuels to Republicans is obvious, the one to “Democrats” is even more important, because it is hidden behind windmills which do not work most of the time, and batteries that can’t be made on the necessary industrial scale to make a dent on the climate crisis.. 

On the first day of the Obama administration, research on hydrogen and fuel cells was terminated. That was weird: the US got to the Moon thanks to fuel cells. The Trump administration found that the Alameda-Contra Costa fleet of hydrogen fossil fuel buses worked beyond the most optimistic expectations in all ways.There are less than 100 such buses in the US, and the problem has been cost of procurement, due to small numbers. Differently from electric, such buses can be refueled in minutes. 

“Liberals”, “Neo-Liberals”, “capitalists”, “free marketers”, economists, etc all laud the “Invisible Hand” of the market. What about the “INVISIBLE PLOT”?

Yes, we, the powers that be, want to change nothing much regarding fossil fuels, where power is from! 84% of primary energy is from fossil fuels. Hydrogen and nuclear have been carefully not developed. Dams are under attack. Without hydrogen & dams, “renewables” need fossil fuels

Going all nuclear and hydro (they are interrelated, as hydron can store nuclear) could have produced 100% carbon free electricity for the entire planet. Not a full solution, but a partial one. Instead, we are on target for Armaggedon, and Putin is our prophet.

Patrice Ayme

STANDARD CO2 WARNING, v 2022

There is immense inertia in the planetary climate system. Thermal inertia. Sea current inertia. CO2 sinks inertia. And so on. So the “climate changes” we have seen so far, are mostly changes of systems with small inertia. They are little warnings, rather than the full extent of what we are going to get.
In other words, all the effects we are seeing so far are just the shiny tip of the gigantic melting iceberg, and when it is disturbed enough, it will do what icebergs do, rotate, shatter or splatter suddenly.
In particular, small ice bound systems like part of Arctic regions, individual mountains, or mountain ranges have small thermal inertia, so the CO2 forcing is affecting them more readily. They are forecasting what is going to happen. Small inertia climate systems are on track for a 7 centigrade rise by 2100… And that means, therefore, a similar impact on large systems. Large impacts will simply enfold more slowly, but also more irresistibly.
California may end up like Costa Rica, as the equatorial climate cell extends northward… Meanwhile it should go through the desertic tropical climate zone…
In practice one should take vigorous countermeasures. Thanks to a craftily engineered confusion between total energy use and electric energy generation, most people do not realize that sun and wind renewables contribute little to the total energy generation (which is mostly fossil fuel, with significant nuclear and dams). So the non CO2 total energy generation needs to be augmented considerably… But that will not happen enough with the present strategy.
The CO2 crisis is way worse than realized…

Patrice Ayme

CO2 concentration keeps climbing up… In all locales (Barrow is at the northern tip of Alaska; Mauna Loa is in Hawai’i). Before the industrial, CO2 revolution, it used to be around 280 ppm…. It will become nonlinear self-accelerating at some point, from massive permafrost melting and reversal of oceanic sinks… By incorporating other greenhouse gases, CH4, NOx, CFlx, etc… one is around 600 ppm… This forcing in turn acts on H2O gas, the biggest greenhouse gas: it’s complicated…

The Antarctic Peninsula (the northwest tip near to South America) is among the fastest warming regions of the planet, almost 3°C over the last 50 years. Remote East Antarctica, by contrast, has until now been less impacted.

However, in the third week of March, research stations in East Antarctica recorded unprecedented temperatures. It rained on the coast! (Some of which is north of the polar circle… So it can be predicted East Antarctica may collpase…)

The warmth and moisture was driven primarily by an atmospheric river – a narrow band of moisture collected from warm oceans. Atmospheric rivers are found on the edge of low pressure systems and can move large amounts of water across vast distances. Nearly all the precipitation of California in winter of 2022 came from just two atmospheric rivers, one in October, and one in December, the latter making it the wettest December ever.

An atmospheric river in East Antarctica is rewriting record books and expectations about what is possible. Atmospheric rivers in Antarctica? Is Antarctica the new California? This is the new normal, in any case.

“We need to take action now or 1.5ºC will become out of reach, it will be physically impossible to get there. The report is very clear: we’re not talking about business as usual if we are to address #climatechange“ – #IPCC Working Group III Co-Chair Jim Skea at 4 April’s press conference for the release of the latest, 2022 #IPCC #ClimateReport on the mitigation of #climatechange.

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The 2022 California snowpack results confirmed what those of us monitoring the state’s drought had feared: California’s snowpack is now at 39 percent of its average, or 23 percent lower than at the same point last year. This signals a deepening of the drought — already the worst in the western United States in 1,200 years — and another potentially catastrophic fire season for much of the West.

More from the same NYT article of 4/4/2022, saying what I hgave long been saying, namely that our models are lagging reality, just as the beatific models of tyrants’ characters, in particular Putin, lagged reality:

Many people have a rather simplistic view of drought as a lack of rain and snow. That’s accurate — to an extent. What it doesn’t account for is human activity and climate change that are now dramatically affecting the available water and its management. As more frequent and large wildfires and extended dry periods batter the land, our most important tools for managing water are becoming less and less accurate. At the same time, our reliance on these models to try to make the most of the little water we have is becoming more and more problematic.

Droughts may last for several years or even over a decade, with varying degrees of severity. During these types of extended droughts, soil can become so dry that it soaks up all new water, which reduces runoff to streams and reservoirs. Soil can also become so dry that the surface becomes hard and repels water, which can cause rainwater to pour off the land quickly and cause flooding. This means we no longer can rely on relatively short periods of rain or snow to completely relieve drought conditions the way we did with past droughts.

Many storms with near record-breaking amounts of rain or snow would be required in a single year to make a significant dent in drought conditions. October was the second-snowiest and December the snowiest month on record at the snow lab since 1970, thanks to two atmospheric rivers that hit California. But the exceptionally dry November and January to March periods have left us with another year of below-average snowpack, rain and runoff conditions.

This type of feast-or-famine winter with big storms and long, severe dry periods is expected to increase as climate change continues. As a result, we’ll need multiple above-average rain and snow years to make up the difference rather than consecutive large events in a single year.

Even with normal or above-average precipitation years, changes to the land surface present another complication. Massive wildfires, such as those that we’ve seen in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains in recent years, cause distinct changes in the way that snow melts and that water, including rain, runs off the landscape. The loss of forest canopy from fires can result in greater wind speeds and temperatures, which increase evaporation and decrease the amount of snow water reaching reservoirs.”

Back To The Jurassic In A Hurry: 500 Part Per Million Of Greenhouse Gases

Greenhouse gases (GHG) used to be 280 parts per million. Now they are around 500 ppm (including CH4, Nitrogen oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, etc.). This is more GHG than in at least thirty  million years, when the Earth was much warmer, and it is similar to CO2 densities during the Jurassic.

So we are presently transiting to a Jurassic climate. The transition to the Jurassic climate is happening at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than changes in the past. This implies that most forests of the Earth , desiccating and incapable to adapt fast enough, are going to burn… worldwide. This generalized combustion has a drastic potential consequence: generalized hypoxia.

So we should talk about climate catastrophe rather than climate change, and global heating rather than global warming: recent fires got helped by temperatures dozen of degrees higher than normal, in part from compression of the air due to record breaking winds. This is why parts of the Pacific Northwest which never burn are now burning. This will extend to Canada, Alaska, Siberia and already did in recent years. The catastrophic massive release of frozen methane hydrates could happen any time (it already does, but not as bad as it is going to get). It has up to one hundred times more warming power than CO2 (fires release it by billions of tons).

What is the way out? Well, hydrogen is the solution, in two ways, but has not been deployed as it could be. A decade ago, thermonuclear fusion, on the verge of becoming a solution, was starved for funding, and so was green hydrogen (the then energy secretary, Obama’s Steven Chu, prefered investing in batteries, it was more lucrative for his little greedy self).

Green hydrogen enables to store energy for renewables, avoiding blackouts which cut electricity to pumps to fight fires

We, Spaceship Earth, went from 275 ppm of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) in 1750 CE to 500 ppm in 2020. That doesn’t mean we double the Greenhouse, because the main GHG gas is… water vapor (H2O). What we can guess the best at this point is the EXCESS radiative forcing since 1750 CE, and that’s already nearly 3 Watts per square meter… Equivalent to a million and a half nuclear reactors at full power…

Climate forcing is a fascinating subject, with vast areas without a high level of scientific understanding (LOSU). However we know enough to realize forceful mitigation has to be engaged in immediately.

Joan Katsareas from Philadelphia, PA wrote back: “Thank you @Patrice Ayme for sharing your knowledge of the causes and extent of the climate crisis. I will be seeking out more information on hydrogen as a solution.”

@Joan Katsareas Thank you for thanking me, that is much appreciated. Hydrogen is indeed the overall solution we need at this point. Actually Australia, in collaboration with Japan, is building a gigantic, 15 Gigawatts, project in north west Australia, AREH, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, to convert renewables from sun and wind into hydrogen products which will then be shipped to Japan. The same needs to be done all over, it would collapse the price of “green hydrogen” (99% of the US hydrogen is from fossil fuels).

In the case of thermonuclear fusion, the  international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) being built in France was slowed down by ten years, from reduced funding, and uses obsolete magnets (superconducting, but not High Temperature Superconductors, which can now be engineered with more compact and powerful fields). A massive effort would bring a positive energy thermonuclear reactor within 10 years… But that effort has not been made… except in China, the usual suspect, where a project, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), aims at an energy gain of 12 and a total power equivalent to a fission nuclear reactor. Its detailed engineering has been launched for a while (it’s supposedly symbiotic with the European DEMO project, which will produced as much as a large power station and will be connected to the grid. That too has been delayed, to the 2050s, although it’s feasible now).  The USA needs to launch a similar project, right away.

We face ecological constraints incomparably more severe than those of the Roman state. Rome did not solve its paltry problems, and let them fester: they had to do mostly with a dearth of metals, and the Franks solved them readily. This hindered the Roman economy. The situation we are facing, the threat of a runaway greenhouse is a terminal existential threat.

Look at Venus, we can look at our sparkling neighbor when the forests have finished burning, and the smoke dissipates (we were told it could be months). Once Venus probably had a vast ocean, and probably, life. But it died from a brutal greenhouse generated by Large Igneous Provinces (LIP). The same happened on Earth, on a smaller scale, more than once, in particular with the Permian Triassic mass extinction, which destroyed 95% of known species..

Now the rumor has it that indeed some life may have survived in the atmosphere.  This is not a joke. Consider: Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds. The detection of a gas in the planet’s atmosphere could turn scientists’ gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life on Venus? Ah, science, all those possibilities… We never imagined we would ever think possible.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: I argued in the past, before anybody else, that the dinosaur-pterosaurs-plesiosaurs extinction, and extinction of anything bigger than 20 kilograms was due to volcanism (I was at UC Berkeley when the two Alvarez were, and they seemed too full of themselves with the iridium layer, and I like to contradict certainties…)

How would LIP volcanism set forests on fire? Well, by the same exact mechanism as now: through a massive CO2 driven greenhouse, what may have terminated the Venusians…

In this perspective climate cooling, for millions of years, visible in the graph above, would have disrupted those species which were not equipped to generate enough heat, and then the LIP accelerated into a vast holocaust…

The end with general burning and acidic oceans is hard to duplicate with a bolide, so the impactophiles have argued that the bolide magically impacted the most CO2 generating rock imaginable… Maybe. But an enormous LIP does all that CO2 production/destruction of the oceans, effortlessly… A friend of mine who is the biggest of the big in this academic domain, he decides who publishes, replied to me that the 66 million year old Dekkan LIP is too small… To which I replied that we don’t know what lays below the ocean… 

Climate Change and International Transport

We need a hydrogen economy. However, on day one of his presidency, Obama ripped out all financing for hydrogen, including for hydrogen fuel cell research… It became clear later that the boy was advised by the frucking frackers: recently, thanks to Obama (not Trump!), the USA produced 30% more petroleum, 13.3 million barrels a day, than the country which produced the most aside from the USA (Saudi Arabia at its peak)

US fuel cells had enabled the US to go to the Moon (and provided fireworks for Apollo 13). I doubt Barry the Boy knew this (he is best at knowing very little besides how to feed people with what they want to hear).

Here professor Ian Miller, a chemist and physicist of renown, points out that shipping is an ecological disaster (one cruise ship in Marseilles, idling in port, pollutes as much as two million cars at speed limit). And the solution? Hydrogen (or Ammonia, roughly the same, but more civilized)…

Making “green” hydrogen is a must. Just use PV solar panels for energy (or even wind, which I like less). Storing it as ammonia is a no brainer for safe storage and transportation. Actually, last I checked there was such a giant project in North-West Australia to send “green” energy to Japan… Probably to calm the likes of yours truly about Japan’s much more real plan to replace its nuclear industry with Australian coal. So Japan and Australia get financed by states and countries which go clean… while they go fish whales and pollute North America, killing American frogs, smothering the planet… While pretending to go green by killing non-killing nuclear energy.

All boats could use sails, as supplementary power, either as rotors, or the turbosail invented by Cousteau and associates, or even computer controlled kites. Those have not been developed because of the subsidies and tax-free status given to shipping (although full scale prototypes have shown they work.. up to 25% reduction of energy). One can expect considerable reduction in energy demand (also achievable by reducing speeds).

[2018 Viking “Grace”, a 2800 passengers, 500 cars ferry between Finland and Sweden. the single rotor sail on top is supposed to diminish carbon emission by 900 tons a year; the ship is otherwise fueled by natural gas, CH4, which as close to hydrogen as it gets in a naturally occuring fuel… Thus less polluting…]

In any case, just like the fracking Obama, great fracker-in-chief, the Paris accord was self-satisfying hogwash (consider Japan, Germany and their coal reintroduction)… Paradoxically energy guzzling Texas led by rabid “Red” governor Perry (now Trump energy sec.), did way better in going green (lots of wind)… The problem with Paris is that countries are supposed to self-improve, at a pace of their own choosing. The virus is doing better to reduce CO2 production, quicker.

Maybe all we can hope for is to balance one catastrophe by another?

PA

ianmillerblog

You probably feel that in terms of pollution and transport, shipping is one of the good guys. Think again. According to theEconomist(March 11, 2017) the emissions of nitrogen and sulphur oxides from 15 of the world’s largest ships match those from all the cars on the planet. If the shipping industry were a country, it would rank as the sixth largest carbon dioxide emitter. Apparently 90%of trade is seaborne, and in 2018, 90,000 ships burn two billion barrels of the dirtiest fuel oil, and contribute 2 – 3% of the world’s total greenhouse emissions. And shipping is excluded from the Paris agreement on climate change. (Exactly how they wangled that is unclear.) The International Maritime Organization wants to cut emissions by 50% by 2050, but prior to COVID-19, economic growth led to predictions of a six-fold increase by then!

Part of the problem is the fuel: heavy bunker…

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It Should Be An Economy, Instead It Is An Ecocaust

… Not to say an Ecocide, and US Politicians have made it so:

Eco-nomy means house management, it’s not eco-caust, burning the house. So how come it’s happening nevertheless? Because brains are washed with petroleum media.

The world is dominated by a monopoly, the financial plutocracy, which is entangled with another, the fossil fuel plutocracy.

For example fracking was financed by Wall Street. Both are even entangled with Literal Islam (Wahhabism, etc.)… thanks to a conspiracy by FDR on the Great Bitter Lake in 1945 with the Abdulaziz, founder of Saudi Arabia.

Is it greed, or outright thievery by, and addiction from, fossil fuel pushers? Because finance and oil control media: how else to explain nuclear killed nobody at Fukushima, while fossil fuels kill ten million a year, and still everybody is indignant about the former?

Obama The Great Fossil Fueled! As one can see Obama/Democrats made the fossil fuel orgasm of the USA possible as never before (with preliminary work from Bush Senior to Bush W) to make US fracking profitable to Wall Street

Or how to explain Obama killed hydrogen… which was massively used in Europe already in the 1950s (“urban gas/gas de ville)? Hydrogen, and its derivatives (ammonia, etc.) would enable the storage of renewables, and could be used all over in transportation. Instead Japan, Germany, are closing nuclear, and switching to coal. Germany fear periods, which can last two weeks, with no wind and no sun.

The correct solution should be “green hydrogen” (hydrogen from renewables). Expanding these new technologies will cause a formidable economic expansion. Fossil fuel economy and finance are fundamentally fascist economic activities: they require only oligarchs, a few workers. Renewable economy is the exact opposite

Patrice Ayme

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And yes, it will all burn, this is how climate will change!

A simplified version of the above comment was finally published by the NYT, after much tergiversations, apparently, as a comment to Paul Krugman… Except the New York Times sat nearly 48 hours on my comment before publishing it, long after the other comments. That tells me they read it very carefully, while making sure nobody else would read it (hide your sources, if you want to pass for a genius, as Einstein would say). Now the Paul Krugman editorial was pretty good, and he said things I have said for years… So I reproduce big chunks of it below, as after all, this is mostly what I have long said (and which was many times carefully read at NYT, before being censored…). As usual, Trump is accused (more or less implicitly, of Obama’s policies (look carefully at the graph above!), or policies of the US Deep State, in place for a century). Here is Paul Krugman:

Greta Versus the Greedy Grifters
Why a 17-year-old is a better economist than Steve Mnuchin.

I’ve never been a fan of Davos, that annual gathering of the rich and fatuous. One virtue of the pageant of preening and self-importance, however, is that it brings out the worst in some people, leading them to say things that reveal their vileness for all to see.

And so it was for Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary. First, Mnuchin doubled down on his claim that the 2017 tax cut will pay for itself — just days after his own department confirmed that the budget deficit in 2019 was more than $1 trillion, 75 percent higher than it was in 2016.

Then he sneered at Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist, suggesting that she go study economics before calling for an end to investment in fossil fuels…

… burning fossil fuels is a huge source of environmental damage, not just from climate change but also from local air pollution, which is a major health hazard we don’t do nearly enough to limit.

The International Monetary Fund makes regular estimates of worldwide subsidies to fossil fuels — subsidies that partly take the form of tax breaks and outright cash grants, but mainly involve not holding the industry accountable for the indirect costs it imposes. In 2017 it put these subsidies at $5.2 trillion; yes, that’s trillion with a “T.” For the U.S., the subsidies amounted to $649 billion, which is about $3 million for every worker employed in the extraction of coal, oil and gas.

Without these subsidies, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would still be investing in fossil fuels….

But maybe Mnuchin thinks that the I.M.F. should also take some courses in economics — along with the thousands of economists, including every living former Federal Reserve chair, dozens of Nobel laureates, and chief economists from both Democratic and Republican administrations, who signed an open letter calling for taxes on emissions of greenhouse gases.

In short, Greta Thunberg may be only 17, but her views are much closer to the consensus of the economics profession than those of the guy clinging to the zombie idea that tax cuts pay for themselves.

But could the economics consensus be wrong? Yes, but probably because it isn’t hard enough on fossil fuels.

On one side, a number of experts argue that standard models underestimate the risks of climate change, both because they don’t account for its disruptive effects and because they don’t put enough weight on the possibility of total catastrophe.

On the other side, estimates of the cost of reducing emissions tend to understate the role of innovation. Even modest incentives for expanded use of renewable energy led to a spectacular fall in prices over the past decade.

I still often find people — both right-wingers and climate activists — asserting that sharply reducing emissions would require a big decline in G.D.P. Everything we know, however, says that this is wrong, that we can decarbonize while continuing to achieve robust growth….

The bigger issue, however, is sheer greed.

Given the scale of subsidies we give to fossil fuels, the industry as a whole should be regarded as a gigantic grift. It makes money by ripping off everyone else, to some extent through direct taxpayer subsidies, to a greater extent by shunting the true costs of its operations off onto innocent bystanders.

And let’s be clear: Many of those “costs” take the form of sickness and death, because that’s what local air pollution causes. Other costs take the form of “natural” disasters like the burning of Australia, which increasingly bear the signature of climate change.

In a sane world we’d be trying to shut this grift down. But the grifters — which overwhelmingly means corporations and investors, since little of that $3-million-per-worker subsidy trickles down to the workers themselves — have bought themselves a lot of political influence.

And so people like Mnuchin claim not to see anything wrong with industries whose profits depend almost entirely on hurting people. Maybe he should take a course in economics — and another one in ethics.

Biosphere Annihilation: Why Greta Thunberg Can’t Really Say It As It Is

Attacked with violence, the wise will not just turn the other cheek, or civilization will collapse: this is what happened when Rome collapsed. All over fake speech rules (yes it’s not just Trump [1]). The answer to the tribal (thus racist) and ageist “OK, Boomer!”? “KO, ZEROES!”

It’s a higher form of bias to think everybody has GOT to be biased. Worse: claiming bias is of the essence justifies the principle of bias (as it can’t be avoided). Some people are world, others are tribal.

Climate activist, 17 year old Greta Thunberg declared that ALL the climate requests that people supporting her point of view had were IGNORED at Davos. Truth is that financial and fossil fuel plutocracies are entangled, and in world command. So of course they will not listen. Their agenda is deep, Machiavellian: the elites didn’t get in command by being brutish, stupid and obvious. Just the opposite.

The elites know very well that the climate crisis, even the mass extinction crisis, is real. How could they not know? New York is thinking of putting an anti-sea barrier, with a cost of at least 150 billion dollars. London already has one. And detail discussions are conducted: should the barrier fight sea level rise, or storm surges amplified by sea level rise? So of course, Wall Street knows: it just has to look out of the window.

And the situation is much more dire than Common Wisdom has it:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/running-out-of-oxygen-culture-of-greater-inquiry-vs-culture-of-greater-idiocy/

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So what do the elites truly want, deep down inside their sick psyches? Sick psyches, I said? Look at the widely admired Michelle Obama: she loves to spend $30,000 a week at “The Ranch”, a place where plutocrats can deepen their ties and conspiracies. Some Plutos going to “The Ranch” are not so happy, as the irreplaceable Michelle the trophy horse, goes there with two dozen secret service agents, complete with guns, earbuds, and looking at everybody suspiciously… courtesy of the gullible US taxpayer. 

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/michelle-obama-and-wall-street-fat-cats-may-collide-at-malibu-spa

So what do the elites want in the matter of climate, down their tortured and torturing psyches, so sick even they can’t get there? I will tell you, because the depths are my abode, and I have said it before: mayhem. Because mayhem brings a call for fascism, and fascism needs leaders. Obama, please notice, was strong on the notion of “leaders” (Trump also is, but he is no as blatant, as he spent quite a bit of time disparaging some leaders, hence the leader principle central to the leaders religion..) Clearly, mayhem the CO2 catastrophe will imminently, and eminently, deliver.

Part of the way the elite rules is how it speaks and how it says we are supposed to speak, LYING ALL DAY LONG.

• • “Don Kemerling The kid has got an ego expanding faster than the universe. In fact, the people at Davos, except for Trump and Mnuchin, were presumably working after reading the report released by their World Economic Forum beforehand.
    It paints a picture of problems. If leaders deal with the problems realistically, and with the welfare of civilization in mind, it’s possible to deal with environmental problems effectively. The chances are small, I think, that catastrophe will be avoided, but the worse catastrophe will be social upheaval that cuts off necessary supplies to cities, where most people now live, and causes panic and violence in the streets.
    http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf
  • I ran into a person a while back that predicted he would “die in the climate wars.” This attitude is not productive, but very destructive.”

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Much to think about what you said, Don. I will read the Global Risk Report. But I am familiar with the general drift. My position is not that one should prepare for the best, because the best doesn’t need any preparations, one can go on as before. 

I actually respect Greta ever more, although she grated on my nerves initially… for the purely selfish reason that I have been saying this for decades, and not enough people paid attention. Then she goes to strike her school, and everybody looks at her admiringly, all the more as she goes around saying she is a mental retard… (with the implication that even a mental retard can see the planet is burning… so how come the Davos crowd can’t? Answer: because that’s what they want!

Instead, of preparing for the best of all possible world as Stephen Pinker, Gates’ employee, claims we should, the wise will prepare for the worst. And what is the worst? 

Is the worst a return to the Jurassic climate, with seas seventy meters higher? No. First, that return is part of the problem. Just a part. Another part is the speed of the change: back to the Jurassic, in a few decades. That will prevent species from evolving enough to adapt to a changed environment… except if they are insects, parasites, bacteria and viruses.. Some of which go through many generations in just one day.

Those small, fast evolving critters will in turn destroy unadapted large species of plants and animals. This is already happening, with gigantic forests now killed and ready to burn in mountainous or polar regions. In turn, while these forests burn, gigantic amounts of CO2 join the atmosphere. In the last few weeks fires in Australia produced one billion tons of CO2, 3% of the total CO2 produced by direct human burning in 2019. And the fire season is not finished in Australia.

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Many scientists have claimed it would take 5,000 years to melt the largest glacial ensembles in Antarctica. I have no idea what evidence they had, aside from pleasin the powers that be. I read their papers, couldn’t see it. On the contrary, there is geological evidence that the two kilometer thick glacier above Hudson Bay melted in a few years. Moreover, it’s easy to describe a mechanism which would make West Antarctica, the Wilkes and Aurora basins melt in a few years. 

When could that massive melting start? No one knows for sure if measured by time. But, clearly a global rise of temperature of 4 degree Centigrades would do it (I have written that down; basically one degree corresponds to 200 kilometers of climate drift towards the poles; moreover the rise is double in polar regions. So + 4 C global would mean the climate of South Georgia… where glaciers melt when contacting the sea).

But the worst of the worst has already started: hypoxia, the collapse of oxygen production, from killing the phytoplankton. No sweat, professor Denning told me, we have plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. However, massive oxidation (from rising temperatures, methane release). So the 10^15 tons of oxygen  may not be as set in stone as they appear. Much of the oceans is already going hypoxic, and are dead. It’s apparently the case that oxygen density varied between 7% and 32% during the age of animals…

It takes courage to be Greta. And Greta fights with what gives birth to ideas: emotions. The ruling emotion right now is meek lamentation around the weak euphemism “climate change”… when actually what is going is the worst mass extinction in 66 million years. 

So long live the Great  Greta Thunberg! I forgive her for not being alarming enough! She has to pace herself! She has to be political, and not hurt infamy too hard, too fast! When macron stuck his neck out, and claimed the oxygen density was at stake (did he read me?), he was widely ridiculed by establishment scientists part of the elite system in a basal way. But Macron was right, and right to sound the alarm. OK, I have this ongoing argument with professor Denning on hypoxia, and still didn’t write down my mightiest arguments…

Yet, time is of the essence, and I am apparently not yet angry enough… Thanks the Dark Side, we have Greta to show all that anger is honorable, as it should be. Let’s roar while we still have enough oxygen to do so!

Soon Greta will be able to say it as it is: the heat, the seas, the fires, will rise… while oxygen goes down…

Patrice Ayme 

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[1] Watch what a French left “Consortium” inquiry reveals about Biden in Ukraine.

Biden installed in Ukraine as prosecutor general, a man without a law degree, condemned to prison for corruption, Lutsenko, calling him “solid”. To prevent Hunter’s prosecution for embezzlement…

Thanks Coal Black Hearts: New Ocean Heat Record

The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, demonstrating “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet. 2019 is also the second hottest year ever, after 2016 (heated up by an El Nino). A lot of facts are irrefutable and accelerating, nowadays, but, just as when World War Two was coming, the more so, the more glumly the ostriches bury their heads in the sand.

The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 93% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other (in)human activities.

Oceans absorb most of the CO2. However they do this much less now, basically because the upper layers are getting saturated, and stagnant, as ocean upwelling is short circuited by hot water on top.  

This slowing of ocean mixing has another effect. It stifles the transport of nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate from deeper waters to the surface, which diminishes the growth of phytoplankton, which store carbon in their tissue as a product of photosynthesis. The sinking biological material takes the carbon (from CO2) with it to the deep ocean when the organisms die. It’s another way that carbon can be removed from the ocean surface… However, this is faltering, all the more as carbonic acid (from CO2) gnaws on plankton. Altogether, oxygen production and CO2 absorption by the oceans are diminishing. All such diminutions could lead into mass extinction: actually vast swathes of oceans are now going oxygen free. Fishes such as Marlins now avoid deep diving (their speciality) in many areas, because they would suffocate if they did.

The probability of an exponential explosion in temperature is heating up: that graph above is starting to look like an exponential, thus growing proportional to itself.

The latest analysis commented here, shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record. The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night. It’s also equal to exploding 3.6 billion Hiroshima size bombs… in the last 25 years.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing used statistical methods to interpolate heat levels in the few places where there was no data, such as under the Arctic ice cap. An independent analysis of the same data by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shows that same increasing heat trend.

It’s ironic that the news that the oceans are heating up ever more, ever faster, come from China (is China becoming more democratic?) China’s coal production, nearly 4 billion tons, has never been so high:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-output-coal/china-june-coal-output-hits-record-high-as-miners-ramp-up-ahead-of-summer-idUSKCN1UA07O

Coal is the most CO2 generating fuel (as it has little hydrogen, that is, methane). Basically, 4 billion tons of Chinese coal burns into 12 billion tons of CO2. 

Some will scoff that yours truly is panicking. But I am not. I find the situation extremely interesting in all sorts of way, from the physics, to the ethical and psychological. It’s extraordinary to have a seat at the theater playing the greatness madness, ever. Simply, the catastrophe is becoming ever more likely. 

According to my computations, one degree centigrade of temperature increase corresponds to moving towards the poles by 200 kilometers. When that touches the Polar Circle at 66 degrees latitude, each degree will correspond to a reduction of the polar regions of 20% Hence their albedo, the reflecting power of white snow. Some have computed that the disappearance of sea ice would reduce Earth albedo so much that global temperatures would go up one full degree centigrade, just from that. 

Well before that, the Methane Clathrates should release catastrophically. 

See the pretty Methane Ice pictures in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/2-c-is-too-much/ 

The vast, and shallow Siberian ocean is full of them. Methane, CH4, has a greenhouse warming potential more than 25 times CO2. I compute that CH4 and other man-made gases contribute nearly 20% to global warming. 

Estimate of the ocean energy budget.
The energy budgets are relative to the 1958–1962 base period. The integrated net radiative imbalance from Allan et al. (65) estimated from the TOA is included in yellow and is multiplied by 0.93 to be comparable with the ocean energy budget. The TOA radiation is adjusted to the value of OHC within 2013–2014. The dashed gray lines encompass the 95% confidence interval.The shallower, the warmer the ocean is getting. The little volcanoes at the bottom degree the three largest volcanic eruptions during the period, which lowered the global temperatures considerably. Pinatubo decreased temps by half a degree centigrade…

Coal has never been doing better: the fraud known as Dr. Merkel is shutting down the German nuclear electricity production, because when she goes to bed, she sees Fukushimas in her head, and to better show the world how to smother us all with lignite, the worst coal.  

India also needs ever more coal: oil  and uranium, it has none (and, differently from Germany, is not as advanced; so India is excused). Speaking of which… Scared by Fukushima, like a child by a big, bad ogre, an irrational Japan is giving up on nuclear power. 

Japan got into World War Two of completely irrational reasons: besides the fact that it was a horrible thing to do, it could only lose. Same problem with Germany, Italy. But there are countries where deep irrationality is a national tradition… under a cover of cold reason. Japan has no good reason to discontinue nuclear (instead of developing new tech)… Only a reason to move out of Fukushima style (generation II) nuclear reactors… Especially without proper emergency generators. Japan, Germany and the like could have developed thorium reactors… So could France, Britain…  Coal kills already thousands of Japanese a year, whereas peaceful uranium kills basically none… 

Anyway, so Japan is moving out of 1950s nuclear technology, so Japan will need… Coal. Yes, if you don’t like the 1950s, go back to the 1850s. Any logic makes sense, for idiots. Ever more coal. But Japan has none. 

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So where is Japan going to get all this coal to smother people and kill the oceans? Where from, the equipment for this Pearl Harbor against life itself?  Hey, equally short-sighted Australia! Coal, direct from the incontinently Burning Continent! Auschwitz used to be a discreet affair, but now the generalized Holocaust (Holo-Caust = Whole-Burn), is as public as it gets. It just doesn’t matter, all these wars which happen, after all the forests burn, when one has no brains, happiness will be reached by “just adding a few shrimps on the barbie” (as long as there are still shrimps). 

Faust sold his soul to the Devil, to get himself stuff, but Australians don’t have such luxury anymore. Aussies prefer to burn their forest, houses, lands to give money to the plutocrats they adore: hey, not everybody has a soul to sell!  

Patrice Ayme