Carbon Credits Anyone?

A friend was kind enough to send me a couple seedlings to replace two of the tall pines I lost in the hurricane a couple years ago. Since everything grows like weeds here in East Podunk (it's the wet spot of Texas, after all), if they don't die in the first month, they'll be furiously sucking up carbon for the next forty years or so.

Since I have achieved a carbon-neutral lifestyle by other means, I have no need for the carbon offsets that these trees will provide. If anyone would like to buy the offsets, which I figure to be not less than five hundred pounds per year per tree, I will let the offsets go for £500 per tree per year. (The two trees should be worth about 20 minutes per year on a Gulfstream V, so if you know any earth-conscious celebs, please forward the link.)

I expect you may be wondering what "other means" I've found to become carbon-neutral. It's quite simple, really. As we all know, growing trees absorb gobs and gobs of carbon from the atmosphere, but that carbon is returned to the atmosphere when wood or wood products are burned or allowed to decay. However, when they're buried, that carbon is sequestered for all time.

So what I do is that when I shop, I always look for products with the most possible paper or cardboard packaging. And then, rather than recycle, which would just keep that carbon in circulation, I throw it away so that it can be hauled off to the local landfill where it will be buried and its carbon forever--or at least for the foreseeable future--removed from the atmosphere.

If we'd all just do little things like this to help the Earth, I'm sure the Global Warming catastrophe could be avoided. So please, do your part--buy my excess carbon credits and always buy the product with the most unnecessary packaging. The Earth and I are counting on you.

The Global Warming Collection

In my continuing project of cataloging my posts on recurring topics, I offer these my Global Warming posts:

In Hot Air on Global Warming, we marvel at the astounding reasoning behind some of the UN's World Meteorological Organization's pronouncements on Global Warming.

In Thoughts on Global Warming we conclude that regardless of the scientific merits of the human induced Global Warming theory, we're all done for.

In What's Up With the Weather? we express our sense of wonder that the much ballyhooed 2006 Atlantic hurricane season seemed to be falling far short of expectations.

In The Weather Revisited we wonder at the marvelous understanding that allows such precise short term projections about the weather, and doubt not that long term projections are only somewhat less reliable.

In A Discordant Convergence Global Warming met MTV.

In An Inconvenient Truth, we examine one of Al Gore's more bizarre assertions--that cigarettes are a significant contributor to global warming--and then digress into musings about the relationship between Global Warming and Peak Oil.

An Inconvenient Truth?

According to The Drudge Report:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"

I used to think that Al was serious about this stuff. Now I think that he's trying to launch a career as a comedian, playing some sort of clueless straight man who says the most idiotic things with perfect seriousness.


While it's true that every cigarette that gets smoked releases a small amount of carbon dioxide (although certainly not enough, even in the aggregate to constitute a "significant" contribution to atmospheric CO2), something that seems to have escaped Mr. Gore's grasp is the fact that those tobacco plants suck CO2 out of the air in the process of making the noxious weed. You can burn all the leaves you want, but the net effect on atmospheric CO2 will be zero, so long as you grow new leaves to replace the ones you burned. Hasn't this guy ever heard of recycling?

Which leads me to another thought about Global Warming and related Environmental nonsense. And that thought concerns the notion that oil is a fossil fuel. Because if it is, we ought to be able to pump all we want out of the ground, burn it all, and just get back to where we were (atmospherically speaking) before all those dinosaurs died. Certainly we couldn't mess things up to the point that the Earth would become inhospitable to life; the most we could do is restore the balance to the point where life began.

But what if oil isn't a product of the decomposition long buried dead stuff? What if the abiotic theory is right and oil is continuously being manufactured deep in the earth through processes unrelated to long dead dinosaurs? That would mean that all the oil we burn really could increase atmospheric CO2 to levels that the Earth has never seen before. For all we know, that could result in a world of heretofore unimagined fecundity where even areas that are now virtually uninhabitable could be transformed into veritable Edens. Or perhaps it might have the opposite effect. We can only speculate.

But the thing about all this that I find amusing is the political alignments. Political Greenies invariable insist that oil is a fossil fuel because that's a necessary part of their Peak Oil theory. We have to do something, and we have to do it NOW because the oil's running out. (Does anyone else remember the commercial that ran during the 1970s "energy crisis" where the kid was walking on the beach talking about how "they say there may not be any oil left at all when I get big"?)

On the other hand, those on the opposite side of the political debate seem to like the abiotic oil theory (partly, I suspect, because it seems more consistent with the empirical data and partly because of the lack of any evidence to support the fossil fuel theory, but mostly because it's politically expedient). But if the abiotic theory is correct, it is at least plausible that we might do some serious damage to the Earth's ability to sustain life by adding all that extra CO2 to the atmosphere. At a minimum, we'd be taking the atmosphere into uncharted territory, and for all we know, uncharted territory could look sort of like Mars or Venus.

Strikes me as amusing, anyway. But I'm easily amused.

Other thoughts on Global Warming can be found here and here and here and here and here.

A Discordant Convergence

I've written a few posts in the past about about a particularly virulent strain of political science that goes by the name of "Global Warming." Like this one and this one and this one and this one.

And I've also posted something that touched on the unfortunate decline of MTV from its innovative and creative start into something so wretched that I can't bring myself to watch it long enough to form an adequate description. That would be this post.

So when I saw this, it was just too much to let pass without comment:

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore addresses the audience about global warming at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards in New York August 31, 2006. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn (UNITED STATES)

Could either possibly sink any lower?

The Weather, Revisited

A little over a month ago, I commented on this year's Atlantic hurricane season falling far short of what was advertised. Last year, we were repeatedly told that Global Warming was to blame for the record hurricane season, and that this year we were in for more of the same.

After anther quiet month and Ernesto's failure to regain hurricane status before hitting Florida, the good folks at Colorado State have revised their predictions, and now say that we can expect a below average Atlantic hurricane season this year. If I remember last year's Talking Heads correctly, the Colorado State crew was not among those hyping the alleged Global Warming connection, so they're not the ones with a whole lot of explaining to do.

But I would like to hear all those who were insisting that Global Warming would bring us an unrelenting hurricane apocalypse admit that they were just blowing hot air. Come on, admit it, guys. You don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Back when Ernesto was on the other side of Cuba, computer models had it anywhere from New Orleans to Greenland in a week. Here's what the computer models were saying four days ago:



Of course, a couple days before that, they all had it heading straight into the Gulf of Mexico:



Which is a long way from where it's going now:



Obviously, we couldn't get that level of precision without really good data and a very clear understanding of the processes involved. And if our understanding of the weather is such that we can devise computer models that can predict a storm's track over about a week with a margin of error of only a couple thousand miles, just imagine the precision involved in models that predict the weather a few decades down the road.

What's up with the weather?

Last year we kept hearing about global warming and increased surface water temperatures making for more and more powerful hurricanes. Last year at this time, our seventh named Atlantic storm--Gert--was just petering out.

The first half of this year is supposed to have been the hottest on record. And we've had a lousey two named storms. So where the heck are the hurricanes?


Edited to add: Well speak of the Devil.... Here come's Chris now. Click on the link and scroll down to "Another dangerous Loop Current Eddy in 2006" for the good stuff.

Thoughts on Global Warming.

After reconsidering my previous musings on global warming, I've come to the conclusion that the situation is hopeless, regardless of the science.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global temperatures may increase by 1.4 to 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100. Furthermore, if current trends continue, 100% of the people in the world in 1990 will be dead by the year 2100. Out of the six and a half billion people alive today, no more than a handful--perhaps a few hundred in the whole world--will survive even a 1.4 degree increase in overall temperatures over the next hundred years. Scientists say that regardless of whether the first trend can be slowed or reversed, the second trend cannot be stopped by any means currently known to science.

Selah.

Hot Air on Global Warming

Reuters says [live link to same story] that, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organization, "[g]reenhouse gases blamed for global warming and climate change have reached their highest ever levels in the atmosphere." According to the article:

Carbon dioxide, which the WMO says accounts for 90 percent of warming over the past decade, is largely generated by human activity involving the burning of fossil fuels -- including in industry, transport and domestic heating.

and

Methane, generated by intensive farming and landfills as well as the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal and which accounts for around 20 percent of the greenhouse effect, has risen 155 percent in the modern age.

All this time, I thought that the gaseous form of the incredibly dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide was the number one culprit. And apparently I'm not alone in that apparent misconception, with Wikipedia attributing about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect to this nefarious chemical (not including that found in clouds), but only somewhere between 9-26% to its nearest competitor, carbon dioxide.

Of course, with 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water, it's sort of hard to blame atmospheric H2O on human activity. But nevermind that, with CO2 constituting 90% of the greenhouse gasses and CH4 another 20%, we're still giving it 110%. Go team!


I think this one is even better than the BBC story that I first ran across here about Greenland's glaciers retreating and exposing "for the first time in millions of years" such things as a ruined church last used in the 1400s marking the remains of a Viking farming civilization.