Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Furcifer]

for example? virtueally every industry is able to save energy by more efficiency for example.

You don't think truckers are running the most fuel efficient trucks they can possibly afford? Razor thin margins resulting in dangerous driving practices are already common, additional fuel charges would be debilitating.

 

[Furcifer]

The big problem is that the rate of CO2 emissions is driven largely by how well economies are doing.

So you acknowledge reduced emissions in a slowed economy, but you think you can reduce emissions without slowing the economy.

And emissions are continuing to rise but carbon taxes are lowering emissions. Even though you just said the economy slowed and that's what lowered the emissions.

I have trouble believing intelligent people can't immediately spot the problem caused by the lack of good science and empirical evidence when it comes to global warming.

 

[Furcifer]

(BTW - exactly what distinction, in your understanding, is there between "genetics" and "bioengineering"?)

Specifically what's outlined in the .pdf I linked earlier. "Genetics" or crossbreeding is "bioengineering", although "bioengineering" now includes such things as gene modification.

Did you mean "ethanol?"

Sorry, yes ethanol.

but rather than slip into a derail on a subject where the evidence doesn't seem to support your opinions¹,...again,

It's not a derail. It's part of the hypocrisy prevalent in issues of Global Warming. You have one group complaining about the lack of food because of Global Warming and then you have another group burning food because of Global Warming.
Clearly, because the science isn't conclusive, there are no conclusive answers to the issues. Global Warming is just being used as a platform to push through political pet projects.

how about we clarify and first deal with the issue of the miracle grains you seem to be praying for to make everything better.

Bioengineering is no miracle, but I can see how someone without the proper background in science could easily be mislead into thinking it is.

Sounds like unsubstantiated extremist rhetoric more than reasoned and factually supported consideration,...got reference?

It's common knowledge. 40% of the US corn crop was turned into ethanol last year. Corn that could have fed people that were starving.

Again I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy. The same people complaining about rising food prices and future shortages are the same ones insisting that it needs to be turned into fuel.

I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of alarmists so worried about the future they can't even see how they're screwing up the present.

 

[BenBurch]

It's not just a matter of economizing to reduce CO2, though, it is a matter of economizing because oil fuel is becoming more and more expensive.

This was one of the triggers of the global recession, and is one of the structural impediments to a more robust recovery.

So, everything that CAN be done to reduce consumption SHOULD be done for that reason alone.

Now, electric power is another matter; Very few purely oil-burning power plants these days, coal rules this. But even coal, though we have a lot of it, is getting harder to mine and is of lower quality generally, and so is getting more expensive. And from a utility's point of view it is cheaper to encourage efficient consumption than it is to build new plants even before you start talking about scrubbers or CO2 capture and storage.

 

[DC]

You don't think truckers are running the most fuel efficient trucks they can possibly afford? Razor thin margins resulting in dangerous driving practices are already common, additional fuel charges would be debilitating.

maybe, but as i see on the street, they are not using the most efficient ones avaible. and still doesn't mean we should not work on what they can afford.

 

[lomiller]

No this is a lie. I never made any qualitative comparison, I said because trains cannot deliver to stores there will always be trucks.

you said :

It depends. You can't deliver to stores by rail, they have to go by truck anyways.

Clearly things do not have to be shipped by truck across country, so your statement is false. End of story.

 

[lomiller]

I see some people are having trouble understanding the effect of population density on energy use, especially when you're dealing a raw goods and not finished products. I think a simple example may clear this up.

I lived in the country, not exactly rural but not the city either. For several years I had a paper route. I think, at least I hope, this is something most people can relate to.

Unfortunately where I lived there weren't many houses and they were very far apart. You can think of this as population density. It was low.

In the city however houses are closer together. In order to have a route you are required to have a minimum of 50 customers.

In the country that meant I had to walk about 5 km round trip. The same route in the city however would typically require less than 2 km as a typical city block has around 50 customers.

It should be easy to see from this how population density can affect energy usage. It takes more energy to walk 5km than it does 2km and still have the same number of customers and make the same money.

Saturdays were a pain because the Saturday paper was much heavier than Monday or Tuesday. Because they were heavier it required more energy to transport them.

You can imagine if I was delivering wood instead of papers it would have been considerably more energy intensive!

I hope this example demonstrates how unrealistic it is to expect some economies reduce their energy usage and emissions in this world economy.

Irrelevant. You are confusing rural/urban population splits with population density. Less than 2% of Canada’s population it involved in farming the rest can chose to live closer to where they work. If they travel farther to work then people in Europe it’s by choice or because their city is poorly designed not “because they have to”

 

[CapelDodger]

This is a lie. I've never advocated doing nothing, because quite clearly we are "doing something".

What is being done is not equivalent to what you advocate. You may wish (or even believe) that things were arranged differently, but there it is.

You have explicitly stated ( I keep track) that not enough is known yet to justify any action, summon up reasons why any action suggested is unworkable, and insist that we just need to wait for our native ingenuity to come up with something all by itself. (Not that you seem convinced that there's a significant problem to be solved in the first place.)

This is entirely inconsistent with the "super exponential" growth and "business as usual" claims made here continuously.

It is entirely consistent. Efforts to reduce emissions from what they would otherwise be does not automatically eliminate growth nor change its nature to simple exponential, let alone linear. The efforts made have not been nearly significant enough to affect business as usual, given that the least effort has been made in the three largest emitters - China, the US and India. China and India have been following the long-established path of coal-fuelled development while the US is stuck in the Oil Age. Things are changing now, especially in China, but to no great effect yet.

Imagine demanding empirical evidence the billions being spent are actually reducing emissions.

You could look at the windmills and solar plants and believe your own lying eyes. Or you could tell us why they were a bad idea in the first place.

 

[Halsu]

Since math isn't your strong suit I'll do it for you
Canada has 3.6 people /km²Sweden has 20 people /km²Norway has 12 people /km²
20 is much higher than 12 which is much higher than 3.6. (you can look this up here )

Even if we include the US, it still isn't a pretty picture, the population density in North America is 32 people per square mile, in Europe is 135. (because 135 is much higher than 32)

You're shifting goalposts now. You were talking about GTA and New York in relation to Norway and Sweden, and that's what i replied to.

 

[Furcifer]

Clearly things do not have to be shipped by truck across country, so your statement is false. End of story.

Strawman. Nobody even suggested things have to be shipped by truck across the country. Trains deliver goods across the country every day.

The notion that things could be delivered to stores by train is absurd, if not for the logistics simple for the fact the cost would be astronomical.

 

[CapelDodger]

Out in the real world :

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/11/us/DROUGHT.html?ref=us

(if the Bible Belt qualifies as "real world")


Meanwhile :

Climate change reducing ocean's carbon dioxide uptake
http://www.news.wisc.edu/19551

But whether the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate is still up in the air. Previous studies on the topic have yielded conflicting results, says University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Galen McKinley.

In a new analysis published online July 10 in Nature Geoscience, McKinley and her colleagues identify a likely source of many of those inconsistencies and provide some of the first observational evidence that climate change is negatively impacting the ocean carbon sink.

(which is definitely real world).

And in the reality-show world :

http://climaterealityproject.org/

Yup, Al Gore's back and some temperatures are due to rise.

 

[Furcifer]

Irrelevant. You are confusing rural/urban population splits with population density. Less than 2% of Canada’s population it involved in farming the rest can chose to live closer to where they work. If they travel farther to work then people in Europe it’s by choice or because their city is poorly designed not “because they have to”

Nonsense. It's doesn't matter if 0.0001% of people are involved in farming, the wheat still has to get from the field and that requires the use of fossil fuels. People have to get to the fields and that requires use of fossil fuels as well. The same thing goes for the numerous other commodities produced in Canada.

People travel farther to work in Canada because work is farther away. That isn't by choice, it's a rather simple matter of geography.

 

[Furcifer]

You're shifting goalposts now. You were talking about GTA and New York in relation to Norway and Sweden, and that's what i replied to.

No I gave an example using the GTA and New York, I was comparing Canada to other countries.

Are you really comparing cities to countries and then saying I'm moving the goal posts? I clearly compared Canada to Sweden and Norway (see post #2851)

I also extended that to continents; North America and Europe. Either way it's pretty obvious North America is considerably bigger than Europe and has considerably less people. This factors directly into the amount of energy or fossil fuels used on per capita basis.

Using Sweden as a benchmark against countries like Canada and the US is absurd. The economies are substantially more energy intensive, from their sheer size to the types of products they produce.

 

[macdoc]

Snort.....90% of the GDP and population is concentrated in a very small region. Your position is unsupportable.

I could travel 600 km for the same price in EU as in Canada even tho fuel was more costly the vehicles were far more efficient.....and I could do it faster - at 160+ not puddling along at 110.

Canada's small population does not support the density for passenger rail but certainly has and does support rail for industrial purposes.
Light rail is a no brainer for the GTA cept for the idjits under Harper and the likes of Ford.

There is ONE reason Canada earns Dino of the Day awards at climate conferences and it's not because of geography.....it's because of anti-science Harper and his cronies who would rather inflict Dutch disease on the rest of the nation while subsidizing fossil fuel companies to the tune of billions each year.

We could have done like Norway and nationalized the resource just as other nations have done, and like Norway put on a $50 a barrel carbon tax and been wealthy.

Instead Alberta has pissed it away and Ottawa has abetted it.
Geography be damned.....it's policy that's the issue in Canada.
We, like Norway have the wealth.....we just have, unlike Norway, idjits at the helm.

Some provinces are doing their part as are some states....but as long as the fossil fuel companies are offered a free ride on using the atmosphere as a sewer AND being subsidized to do ........we shall remain a well deserved laughingstock.

Classic is the recent gutting of climate science research......but ohhh don't touch the oil sands corporate welfare

 

[Blue Mountain]

Irrelevant. You are confusing rural/urban population splits with population density. Less than 2% of Canada’s population it involved in farming the rest can chose to live closer to where they work. If they travel farther to work then people in Europe it’s by choice or because their city is poorly designed not “because they have to”

I'm not sure it's possible for everyone to live closer to work. The greater Vancouver area is both very built-up and very expensive the closer you get to downtown. So if you're working in the downtown, you may not be able to afford decent accommodations close to your place of work--especially if you want to raise children.

 

[Trakar]

Specifically what's outlined in the .pdf I linked earlier. "Genetics" or crossbreeding is "bioengineering", although "bioengineering" now includes such things as gene modification.

And in fact all "such things" (breeding, genetic design and modification and even grafting and chemical and radiative mutation) have been a part of "bioengineering" for at least the last half century or so. I was just curious about why you seemed to be trying to make such a distinction between issues that have long been considered related and under the same general banner.

Sorry, yes ethanol.

No problem, it's basic and simple chemistry, but I can see how someone without the proper background in science could easily confuse and misunderstand such issues.

...The real problem is environmentalists placing more value on CO2 than human life. Real human life, not theoretical future people.

...Sounds like unsubstantiated extremist rhetoric more than reasoned and factually supported consideration,...got reference?

It's common knowledge. 40% of the US corn crop was turned into ethanol last year. Corn that could have fed people that were starving.

non-sequitor, and factually challenged as well as potentially disingenuous.
According to the USDA, 36% of US Corn was initially channelled into the Ethanol fuel industry, but 1/3 of this amount (12% of all US corn) comes back in the form of DDGS's (distillers dried grains with solubles) which is used as livestock feed. According to the USDA's own accounting practices this means that 22% of US Corn in 2010 was used in the production of ethanol fuel.(whiskey and steak!)

You seem to like PowerPoints here's one from the Oregon Department of
Agriculture

"Are Biofuels Driving Food Prices? - Myth vs Reality and other interesting factoids" - http://cwcleancities.org/pdfs/conf_june_08/food_price_factors.pdf

The simple truth is that the corn-ethanol diversion is just that. The corn used for ethanol production is not the same sweet corn that ends up on the dining room table. There are special interests that wish to continue the lie that ethanol production increases grocery store prices (but doesn't explain why corn prices fell by half despite increases in ethanol production last year, and also raises the question of why grocery prices didn’t fall when corn prices fell). The USDA’s Economic Research Service concluded that, out of every dollar Americans spend on food, only 11.6 cents goes all the way back to the farm. After we take out the farmer's expense we find that about 33 cents of every food dollar are spent on energy-intensive factors – transportation, packaging, and food processing. That’s why food price increases tend to follow energy price increases. Commodity speculation is another cause of rising prices, as the World Bank noted in 2010. Combined with the costs and profits of the middlemen (food production manufacturers and grocers) the other ~55 cents is split between market speculators and and these middle men, and that is where almost all of the year-year changes in food price originate.

 

[Furcifer]

Here's some information from the Government:
Canadian Energy Facts

Together with the USA, Canada is one of the world’s most energy intensive economies and societies on a per capita basis. In part this is due to our size, climate and the weight of energy-intensive industries (e.g. aluminum, pulp and paper) in our economy.

Interestingly, climate plays a large role in our energy consumption. It's a particularly hard sell; trying to get people to spend money now to spend more money in the future. Global Warming is a potential bonanza for Canadians, more arable land with better growing seasons, a net reduction less HVAC days and of course uranium.

Of course the alarmists have blinders on to what exactly we're doing here in Canada, the world's leader in clean renewable hydroelectric. Not to mention producing 1/3 of the world's supply of uranium. Despite having an energy intensive economy with a small population we are also responsible for producing a very large portion of the world's clean energy. Much more than our fair share. 58% of the electricity we use comes from hydroelectric another 16% from nuclear.

The bulk of our emissions comes from driving around this massive country and I'll be damned if we're going to be taxed yet again bringing wood and other minerals to the the US, China and India.

Seriously World, do you want wood and uranium to build and heat your homes or do you want crappy furniture from Sweden to put in it? The choice is yours, choose wisely.

 

[Trakar]

Nonsense. It's doesn't matter if 0.0001% of people are involved in farming, the wheat still has to get from the field and that requires the use of fossil fuels. People have to get to the fields and that requires use of fossil fuels as well. The same thing goes for the numerous other commodities produced in Canada.

Fossil fuels are not the only means of accomplishing transportation or mechanical tilling, planting and harvesting operations.

 

[Furcifer]

No problem, it's basic and simple chemistry, but I can see how someone without the proper background in science could easily confuse and misunderstand such issues.

No problem, allow me to explain them. Ethanol is also known as grain alcohol, and can be found in many adult beverages. The empirical formula is C2H6O and can be used as a fuel in in combustion engines. Methanol, also known as wood alcohol is also used as a fuel. Unlike ethanol, methanol cannot be made from corn and is typically made from the synthesis of methane gas.

The simple truth is that the corn-ethanol diversion is just that. The corn used for ethanol production is not the same sweet corn that ends up on the dining room table.

Sweet corn is a very small portion of the corn grown in North America. People routinely make the mistake of comparing sweet corn to the corn grown for grain and that grown as silage. The corn used for ethanol isn't sweet corn you're right, but that doesn't mean the corn used isn't edible.
You've obviously been misinformed if you believe anyone is claiming sweet corn is used to make ethanol.

 

[Furcifer]

Fossil fuels are not the only means of accomplishing transportation or mechanical tilling, planting and harvesting operations.

Coming from an area of Canada that produces 96% of Canada's corn and relies heavily on farming I can tell you this is patently false. What works in the family garden isn't possible on a commercial scale! You've been mislead.