I stated that poorly: it's not just the low efficiency of plants, it's low efficiency plus the relatively low power density (1.4 kW per meter ^2) of Sunlight. Together these would require huge surface areas devoted to farming (in other words a very large factory) to make significant amounts of biofuels. In contrast artificial production systems like the subject of the Sandia work can run at much greater power densities and 24 hours per day, and so the factory can be far smaller. It will not be limited by available farm land and available Sunlight.

Long before this technology becomes anything more than a laboratory curiosity, the whole question of whether to do anything about CO2 will become academic.

With modern 21st century Science increasingly limiting the the assumed power of GHGs, and CO2 in particular, to alter the climate, we just won't care in half a decade.

Further there is a natural sequestering agent present in the world that will strip the atmosphere of any "surplus" CO2.

In the only true ecological disaster, the Plant kingdom was so successful that it ate most of the atmospheric CO2 out of the atmosphere until it was reduced to such a trace gas that it strangled and stunted Plants. It also allowed the rise of a form of life that actually consumed Plants, the Animals, who used the pollution generated by the Plants, free Oxygen, to breathe and power their consumption of Plants.

The Plants will do so again. Especially as the screwy unique thesis for long enduring CO2 persistence in the atmosphere, as dreamed up by GW doomsayers, is replaced its a return to classical laws of gaseous-liquid solubility and equilibrium, i.e Henry's Law, Henry's Law applies to CO2 as it does for for EVERY other gas-liquid mixture. the special conditions that would make CO2 unique and exempt, have by now been disproved by Science. All that remains is to officially lay the erroneous theory into the grave, as the IPCC has already committed to do, where all incorrect Science eventually is placed.

When the demand for CO2 producing technology declines precipitously, as is already well on the way to being irreversibly committed, the Plant kingdom will do a fine job of eating up the excess CO2 to the point they resume strangling and stunting their own growth.

Mean time enjoy this more green, fecund,and luxuriant world.

==Mean time enjoy this more green, fecund,and luxuriant world.==

Actually turns out that there's diminishing returns on adding additional CO2 to plants. And we've practically exhausted the rate of increases in the R curve.

So no adding more CO2 won't make the world a greener place.

If anything water and nitrogen are far more crucial to plant growth. And global warming will play havoc with those.

What global warming? Every thirty years or so there's a hue and cry about human caused climate change that goes nowhere when the climate's natural cycles reverse.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070814/NATION02/108140063

http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/unsoundscience3.pdf

And CO2 doesn't drive climate, anyway:

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Evans-CO2DoesNotCauseGW.pdf

Not the trolls again!

"Stop! Pay Troll." - Adventure

Fee! Fie! Foe! Foo!

I cannot believe that this damned spam filter refuses to let me make one little Adventure reference.

Engineer posted: "That's what's great about this invention: all the advantages of hydrogen, without the schlep of a dangerous and difficult-to-handle fuel[hydrogen]".

I kept thinking that we really want to move away from hydrocarbon fuels in order to improve the local air pollution problem inherent in most large urban centers. This is 50% of the mission of GCC, and 100% the mission of CARB: reduce and eventually eliminate vehicular emission, by going low-carb...and then no carb at all. Plus, direct H2 consumption as an universal fuel for all occasions, will be far more efficient than gathering up the CO2 from the atmosphere, then use to produce the CO, and then use F-T synthesis to combine the H2 and CO into liquid hydrocarbon, and then refine this synthetic "crude" oil into desirable fuels for final consumption. Too many steps that will rob energy efficiency and increase the final cost of the fuel significantly.

E-P,

Too true; spam/naughty filters can stifle speech.

The point of my "Adventure" reference (a text game from the 1970's, for those who didn't recognize it) is that I have been around long enough to have seen many of these environmentalist fear campaigns over the decades. I attended the first Earth Day festivities in 1969 and saw the "Ice Age" (news media) hysteria in the 70's. There was just as much "scientific consensus" then as now.

Science, by the way, doesn't work by consensus. You make advancements by challenging the status quo. Any theory must explain known facts, be testable, and be predictive. CO2-caused-climate-change falls on its face on all three conditions. It doesn't explain the ice core data that shows that CO2 levels follow temperature trends. It goes counter to the natural temperature cycles that caused cooling from the 30's to the 70's while anthropogenic CO2 emissions were increasing. And the troposphere does not show the warming that was predicted to prove the theory. Since it isn't explanatory, testable, or predictive, it must be political.

The constant thread through the decades is the claim that man is a disaster for the earth and has to give up modern economic activities to lessen man's impact. Thus, all the fear campaigns have one consistent theme: state control of economic activity. If you liked the famines in the Ukraine or China (from the "Great Leap Forward"), then you will love economic policy based on political aims.

What I observe through the decades is that the current "environmental emergency" is no different from any of the others: take a perceived problem, cause a big panic, and get the legislatures to enact policy (and route taxpayer money to those who promote the scare). The urgency demanded for policy change is an attempt to stay ahead of the facts. The lack of warming in the last few years is an "inconvinient truth" for policy change.

This web site's stated purpose is "sustainable mobility." Any progress toward that laudable goal is an appropriate topic here. Recycling carbon sounds like a good idea if it works toward "sustainable mobility." Sequestering carbon looks to be a purely political notion.

So you can call me a "troll" or a "denier," if you want. Name calling is a good sign of intellectually bankruptcy.

I heard that over the past 7 years, the U.S. CO2 emissions have gone up 20%, Japan has gone up 13% and Europe has gone down 4%. It was a TV article on the BBC I think, so I have no reference for it, but if this is true then it shows me that CO2 emissions might be reduced without major economic impact. If it makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels, then this would be good.

sjc, I, too, am in favor of decreasing our (US) exposure to foreign fuel supplies as a national security issue. I have no objection to producing our fuels ourselves. I don't much care what form they take. Except...

Roger, reducing pollution is also a worthy pursuit. I remember the orange air we had in California in the late 60's. We have made great strides and I wouldn't want to go back to those poisonous times.

As far as CO2 goes...

As I understand it, a country's CO2 emissions are estimated from its consumption of fuels. The NYTimes (2/16/07) reported:

"According to the United Nations, the United States accounted for 21.2 percent of world manufacturing in 2000. As China surged ahead in recent years, the American share of world manufacturing barely budged, falling to 21.1 percent by 2005, the most recent year available. American factories produced a record $1.5 trillion in goods that year."

It would appear that the US is making good use of the fuel consumed. If Europe is consuming less fuel, it may mean that Europe is lagging in productivity. Not a good thing for them.

"Further there is a natural sequestering agent present in the world that will strip the atmosphere of any "surplus" CO2."

You think the plants will do it? Not likely. Like most ecological illiterates, you think in terms of cause and effect. However, you're forgetting Liebig's Law - that the most limiting resource controls abundance. In the case of plants, carbon dioxide is somewhat limiting - but it is co-limiting with nitrogen. Biomass requires nitrogen just as much as it does CO2;

In enriched CO2 atmospheres, plant biomass increases between 5 and 10%, then asymptotes as it runs into nitrogen limitation. There's not enough nitrogen in ecosystems - biologically available nitrogen fixed by bacterial n-fixers - to scrub any but a small amount of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

"It doesn't explain the ice core data that shows that CO2 levels follow temperature trends."

In the past, when temperature followed solar forcings, this was the case. Now, as opposed to in the past, warming is forced by carbon dioxide and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases. That's sort of the whole point. No climatologist has ever argued that carbon dioxide has always caused warming. If that's your misconception, you're welcome to it - but don't stick it in our mouthes.

In the future, if any of you conspicuously political laymen wish to challenge the current scientific paradigm regarding the climate warming trend, use published scientific articles and data. Disingenuous arguments based on willful misconceptions just make you look bad.

I was 60% of the way through ripping Arthur a new one last night, when Windoze crashed and lost all my work.  But it's dinner time and I've got some time to write, so here it goes again.

I ... saw the "Ice Age" (news media) hysteria in the 70's. There was just as much "scientific consensus" then as now.

No there wasn't, and you wouldn't have known it.  What's happened in the mean time can be summed up in two words:  The Internet.  The "new ice age" articles of the 70's had no significant climate modeling behind them; how could they, when computers were so slow and whole categories of scientific data from ice cores to satellite measurements of temperature and ice cover and borehole reconstructions of recent temperature history did not yet exist?  And almost nobody reading the magazines would have known that the whole thing was essentially a media craze, because all the data was in journals in research libraries to which few people had access.  Today, it's the Internet which allows anyone to look at the scientific literature and see that it's AGW denial which exists only in the media; there is no science to it.

The "new ice age" came essentially from one thing:  reconstructions of glacial history associated with Milankovitch cycles.  By the cycles, we are indeed about due for renewed glaciation (which observations did not support then, or now).  This led straight to the question of why we don't see glaciation despite Earth's orbital state predisposing the climate in that direction.  The research into this is what grew into today's IPCC reports.

(cot'd)

Arthur gets up to the level of one major falsehood per claim:

Any theory must explain known facts, be testable, and be predictive. CO2-caused-climate-change falls on its face on all three conditions.

That's what the propagandists say for the press, and the press quotes them for the sake of "balance".  But there's no truth to it.

It doesn't explain the ice core data that shows that CO2 levels follow temperature trends.

Yes it does.  CO2 in natural systems has large feedback effects; heating reduces the CO2 capacity of seawater and causes droughts, both of which lead to more CO2 going into the air rather than the oceans or biomass.  A heating trend can be started by other influences but sustain itself through CO2 feedback.  Of course, the same thing could be started by emitting CO2.

It goes counter to the natural temperature cycles that caused cooling from the 30's to the 70's while anthropogenic CO2 emissions were increasing.

Emissions of sulfates and other reflective particulates were also increasing until the passage of the Clean Air Act.  In China, they're still going up.  These particulates reflect sunlight and cause cooling ("global dimming").

The particulates have an atmospheric lifespan of days to weeks; CO2, from decades to centuries.  As soon as pollution controls or depletion of coal cuts the particulates, the signal from CO2-induced warming will be unopposed.

(cot'd)

And the troposphere does not show the warming that was predicted to prove the theory.

That's a flat-out lie.  The signal from ground-based thermometry showed it clearly, but there was contradictory data from radiosondes and satellite measurements.  Something was clearly being measured wrong.  It turned out that some of the data did indeed have systematic errors:

• The radiosonde design had changed over the years in ways not well documented; the temperature sensor in some was exposed to solar heating and was shielded in others.  This caused an error in daytime measurements only; older daytime measurements were higher than actual temperature, causing the warming signal to be obscured.
• Satellite measurements were not adjusted correctly for orbital changes.  The corrected data shows warming.

If the "scientists" claiming that AGW is a hoax were doing science, why didn't they discover these problems first, and show that correcting them made the signal disappear?  It's because there is no science on the denial side.

Since it isn't explanatory, testable, or predictive, it must be political.

That is the exact status of AGW-denialism:  explains nothing, fails all the tests, and fails to predict the droughts, ice loss and warming.  It has traction only because it has committed financial and ideological supporters, just like the evolution denialists.  Projection is their common trait.

(fin)

E-P,

Now I'm getting plagued by the "anti" filter.

I have been cordial to you and you have been insulting to me. I will continue to be cordial to you; I hope you will reciprocate.

“No there wasn't, and you wouldn't have known it.”

You don’t know me. While I don’t have a higher degree, I was in a science curriculum in the early 70’s and worked in a succession of laboratories afterwards. You have no idea of what I saw, read, or learned. I was living in the LA area when Ehrlich and company were pushing their notion of a pollution caused global cooling. Smog is very local and the photo-chemical elements break down at night when the sun sets. It never seemed reasonable to me that limited dispersion of man-made pollutants could result in a global climatic reaction. It still doesn’t. I still lived in CA in 1991 when Mt Pinatubo ejected enough garbage into the atmosphere to make summer sunlight feel less hot on the skin. The contrast in what nature can do with what man can do left a lasting impression.

“That's what the propagandists say for the press, and the press quotes them for the sake of "balance". But there's no truth to it.”

You don’t think theories should explain observed data, withstand tests, and not be overthrown by new data? How odd. I thought I was representing a textbook standard definition.

“That's a flat-out lie.”

E-P, I may make mistakes but I do not deliberately lie. That’s insulting. Since I’m not doing field work myself, I have to rely on the published results of others. It would appear to me that researchers are aware of instrumentation issues and can allow for them. Seidal (2001) reports a decline in temperature of half a degree a decade:

http://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/related_papers/2001_seidel_etal_tropopause.pdf

Ah ha. The "spam" was in pulling out the quote from the paper. Let's try a piece of it...

"The utility of the radiosonde data for detection of trends in the tropopause is limited by changes in instrumentation and observing methods."

Okay that survived.

Now, let’s be civil. We share an Adventure.

E-P, I may make mistakes but I do not deliberately lie.

When you state with apparent assurance something that isn't so, you are projecting an unwarranted impression that you know what you are talking about. In that sense, you are lying about your own competence.

==saw the "Ice Age" (news media) hysteria in the 70's. There was just as much "scientific consensus" then as now.==

Media hysteria. Yes absolutely.
Scientific consensus. Not at all.

Infact the US National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying that the evidence was far too ambiguous.
http://greyfalcon.net/cooling

And even our good friend Richard Lindzen agrees.
http://greyfalcon.net/lindzencooling.png

Well, to be fair, there is a difference between a lie and a false statement.

Gauging intent is rather hard to do though.

Incidentally it's understandable that one might consider the troposheric data to be the opposite of what it really is considering John Christy likes to lie about it on national television.

He was rather prominent about it in "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

_

And when I say lie, I actually mean it.
John Christy, once a legit researcher, has gone to the dark side!
(i.e. Teamed up with S. Fred Singer in making blatantly false publications)

Which does beg the question if RoySpencer/JohnChristy merely made an innocent mistake, or if they intentionally skewed their research
by doing things like reversing the day-night cycle, and completely ignoring orbital decay.

Given their present behavior, I'm guessing it wasn't a "mistake".

Quoth Arthur:

I have been cordial to you....

You perhaps have been cordial in tone, but as for civil... you have been nothing of the sort.  You have come here spouting long-refuted canards, and continued despite repeated corrections.  Civility includes having integrity and respect for the integrity of others; if there is any truth behind what you claim you should be able to support it, and if there is no truth you disrespect us as much as if you served dog vomit at dinner and called it truffle paté.