Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Global Warming - Low Carbon Fuels

Guardian UK: Six changes to fuel consumption that could combat global warming - A new report shows how widespread adoption of low-carbon fuels could stall climate change
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3 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

Natural Gas (AKA Methane) is not a Low carbon fuel. Its only considered that in relation to Coal. It still puts out 50% of the CO2 coal puts out, plus it leaks about 5% of its total as raw methane which is a super greenhouse gas 85X as powerful as CO2. In short , its a bridge to nowhere. The other irony of switching to low carbon or no carbon energy is without a push to clean up what's already up there a rapid switch might actually cause the warming to actually accelerate in the short term. Although, its little known and somewhat counter-intuitive side effect of burning high Sulfur energy fuels like coal and oil is they put up SO2 as a pollutant and SO2 is a very effective global cooling gas. ( It very effectively reflects sunlight.) Some recent research has indicated that a side effect of burning coal and oil high in sulfur has actually lowered the cooling effect by as much as 60%! So, remove these fuels without re-mediating the over 400 ppm of CO2 that's already up there and you might get a rapid increase in the warming in the short. We need to do both things at the same time to slow the warming. 1. We need to switch to renewables low in carbon ASAP, but at precisely the same moment in time we need to deploy the technologies necessary to clean up what we've already put up there. Keep in mind the average CO2 load in the atmosphere pre-Industrialization was 190 ppm ( in the middle of an Ice age) to 280ppm ( in the middle of an inter-glacial warming.) We need to take atleast 120 ppm out of the air fast. Good luck to us. :(

10:36 AM
Jim Sande said...

Thanks GK, you are keeping us up to speed. How do we take 120 ppm of CO2 out of the air?

11:38 AM
Glynn Kalara said...

Good question? There are lots of break through technologies for accomplishing this, but the PTB have no incentives to deploy them, yet. I believe we need to start the process of placing laws and taxes ( like a Carbon tax) that put those incentives into the mix. We have to disincentivize the present destructive mix of Energy products were using. The problem is the whole corrupt economic ad political structure built on top of the present Energy extraction model is blocking the way.

12:26 PM

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