Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

If you believe that human activity is the cause of global warming and that we have to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, there is a solution that is significantly cheaper than the Kyoto approach and which offers a few other benefits.

The bulk of the conversion of carbon dioxide into plant material and oxygen on earth does not happen in the tropical rain forests, the cultivated crops or trees. It doesn't even happen on land. Most of the photosynthesis that removes carbon dioxide from the environment takes place in the littoral water of the worlds oceans. That is in the green water near enough to shore that the nutrients are close enough to the surface for sunlight to penetrate and keep the plankton growing and nourished. Out in the blue water ocean, far from shore, the nutrients sink to the bottom, far too deep for the sunlight to penetrate. The mid ocean areas are biological deserts. Very little fish life exists there compared to what you find closer to shore.

So how do we remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate for the additional tons of the stuff that the Chinese are dumping into the atmosphere? It seems to me that the easiest way to achieve that is to spray nutrients on the surface of the blue water ocean in order to encourage plankton growth in areas where the tiny plants could not grow before.

Where do we get cheap nutrients that we can pipe a few hundred miles out to sea? The easiest place is coastal cities. Simply pipe their sewage a few hundred miles out to sea and spray it on the surface. In a whole lot of third world countries, moving the sewage that far out would result in immediate health improvements. Among other things, it would improve the quality of local ground water and river water. In addition to reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide, plankton blooms also lead to increases in fish.

You're probably right about actually doing anything right now about global warming.

However, global warming will likely exacerbate problems, such as water issues including rising sea levels and changes in precipitation patterns. Then there's the spread of malaria, etc. More important is to build the capability to deal with such issues, both today and tomorrow. For example, global warming or not, air pollution will have to be dealt with, especially in China. Visit Beijing in the depths of winter, and that's actually an improvement over years past.

Uh, did you not see Gore's chart about CO2 in the atmosphere? Nice sine wave forever and then in the 20th century? Up and up and up and up.

There's no debate: it is real and happening. The scientific community has weighed in and that's the word.

Now let's see who denies it: folks financed by the oil and auto industries.

Here's what they won't tell you because -probably- they don't want to scare people: we've blown WAY past the tipping point and now we're on a feedback loop. It's now pretty much too late to do anything real about it (especially with China building a new coal fired power plant every other week)

But you keep believing it isn't real or keep looking for that 'event' that tells you it is real, but when this whole thing goes 'Road Warrior'? Know that I will be laughing all the way.

You know as well as I do that the Pentagon (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html) has already run the numbers on this and they aren't happy.

I am upset at many environmentalists because of their hypocrisy.
They want us to lower greenhouse emissions. Great, but they do not want Nuclear power, so they continue to force us into coal.

I don't care what they say. All the conservation, solar panels, and wind power simply will not meet future demand. Oh, we also have issues with wind power and hydro!

We cannot dam up rivers, and we can't have too many windmills.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Interesting article.

Re: The Dude

"Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents."

That "secret report" obtained by the Guardian (one of the world's premier intelligence sources...) reads an awful lot like the script to The Day After Tomorrow.

Thomas,
"...global warming needs a clear and identifiable System Perturbation attached to it, something that says small changes over many years just won’t do it."

Well put. This is why GW's advocates are relying on dramatizations of GW's effects. Movies like "The Day After Tomorrow," or "An Inconvenient Truth," and even daily media conjecture on the topic, all stage fictional perterbations in an attempt to compel their makers' pet-project, the Kyoto Accords (II, III, etc.), to the top of the nation's agenda.

If their solutions didn't entail the bureaucratization of my personal "carbon-footprint," and enormous governmental meddling in Americans' personal energy economies, I'd be more inclined to believe that GW isn't just a "back-door" attempt to institute the European statist model in Kansas and Tennessee.

Yes, yes. Jump to "Road Warrior."

I bet you miss nuclear end-of-the-world scenarios, Dude. Good thing this thing came along to help you indulge your inner TEOTWAWKI. Then again, something always comes along.

But ask yourself why you need it so much...

An overwhelming sense of powerlessness leading to delight in fantastic scenarios of others' pain just ain't healthy.

There are two potential fixes for global warming. Either we prevent warming, signing future Kyoto agreements to lower emissions, or we reverse warming, launch a shade umbrella for the planet that effectively creates a planetary thermostat or seed the oceans so that they suck down more CO2, or any of a bunch of other alternatives.

We could do nothing for 30 years and solve the problem in five with amelioration techniques that become possible with new technology (for instance a space elevator that makes launching a planetary shade cheap enough to be affordable). But there's a real allergy among left-enviros to the ameliorative approach so you get the usual name-calling, some of which you can see in comments here.

We're probably 5-10 years away from having the systems in place to wipe out petroleum as a transport fuel with only minimal government intervention (mostly R&D and subsidizing a "thin" network of fuel pumps so that new fuel cars can travel across the country).

We're currently in a market based rush to replace our illumination with compact fluorescents which are going to give us a huge energy savings. CF has been around for plenty of years but it just recently got affordable and the entire illumination industry is restructuring itself to sell a lot fewer bulbs without any sort of government mandate.

I say, by all means research how to drop the temperature of the planet a degree or three. Calculate (as engineers calculated what was needed for space elevators long before the materials were available) what is required. And instead of spending $400B per year, devote a fraction of it to getting those advances in materials, cheap launch, biotechnology, what have you so that we can have good economic growth and pop the temperature down if we actually need to. With this approach, at worst we've got a lot of cool tech spinoffs.

The world economy will largely be Decarbonized within 20 years.

Even with low efficiency solar cells, the Sun delivers more than 10,000 X our annual energy needs (electricity, transport, heating)
Global solar installed power generation capacity is doubling approx. every 2 years.
And this is Without a huge governmental push from any type of war footing perspective (name your war - War on Terror or War on Globl Warming)

EG: The Google founders just invested in a $100M print-solar-cells-on-a-roll, manufacturing plant which will double world's capacity.

Yes, Solar is starting from 0.1% of global energy generation.
But, as we know from the computer industry, exponential changes add up, a la Moore's Law:

Roughly speaking, at current under-subsidized rates, solar will likely experience 5 doublings of installed capacity per decade:
.1%, .2, .4, .8, 1.6, 3.2% (10 year point),
6.4, 12.8, 25.6, 50%) (20 years point)

Wind is also experiencing a similar doubling rate of installed capacity.

And we haven't even begun much with tidal, wave or geothermal.

Geothermal heat mining:
MIT estimates that applying deep (10km) oil field stimulation techniques to geothermal, could create geothermal sources ANYWHERE on earth. It is estimated that at that depth the earth generates 250,000 X our annual energy needs.

One of the questions people fail to ask in the whole global warming issue, is that even if human activity is the root cause of warming, is it a bad thing and why? For example, looking back in the 1700's and 1800's, there were times of incredible cooling. In fact, looking at historical records here in Virginia, from the revolutionary war, the Chesapeake Bay was FROZEN OVER at Annapolis. Not just a little bit of ice, but completely frozen over so that troops could go from one side of the bay to the other. I don't know about you, but I think the affect on the environment and economy would be MUCH more dramatic if that sort of winter was to hit us again. Again, in the 1800's, there were winters in Norfolk where ALL the rivers in Virginia were frozen to their mouths, and there was even ice at the mouth of the bay. Norfolk had temperatures of 10-15 below zero, and drifts of snow several feet deep.

Just thoughts...