Read more by Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth: Marine Life Survived 8X Current CO2 Levels

Read more: Musings from the Chiefio: China Makes Western CO2 “Control” Pointless

Researchers yesterday estimated that the bill for the 12-day jamboree will top £130million – and will generate as much greenhouse gas as an entire African country.

More than 15,000 delegates and 45,000 green activists are due to descend on the Danish capital over the next two weeks in a meeting described by British economist Lord Stern as ‘the most important since the Second World War’.

They will be joined by at least 5,000 journalists – including 35 from the BBC alone – and 100 world leaders, including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama.

The UN has confirmed flights, rail and bus travel, food and energy from the conference will generate at least 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

That’s more greenhouse gas than produced by Malawi, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone over the same period.

The Danish government says it will offset emissions by planting trees or investing in green projects.

Daily Mail: ‘Copenhagen climate change summit to produce as much CO2 as an African country’

In 1947, the Soviet Union had, as its petroleum ‘experts’ then estimated, very limited petroleum reserves. Stalin’s response was to set up a task force of top scientists and engineers in a project similar to the Manhattan Project – the top-secret US program to develop the atom bomb during WWII — and initially under the same secrecy, and charged them with the task of finding out what oil was, where it came from and how to find, recover and efficiently refine it.

In 1951, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins was first enunciated by Nikolai A. Kudryavtsev at the All-Union petroleum geology congress. Kudryavtsev analysed the hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum, and pointed out the failures of the claims commonly put forward to support that hypothesis. Stalin’s team of scientists and engineers found that oil is not a ‘fossil fuel’ but is a natural product of planet earth — the high-temperature, high-pressure continuous reaction between calcium carbonate and iron oxide — two of the most abundant compounds making up the earth’s crust.

A team consisting of Russian scientists and Dr J. F. Kenney, of Gas Resources Corporation, Houston, USA, have actually built a reactor vessel and proven that oil is produced from calcium carbonate and iron oxide, as detailed on the Gas Resources website www.gasresources.net/AlkaneGenesis.htm

Further, they wrote a paper which was published in 2002 in the prestigious Proceedings of the United States National Academy of Science (PNAS), where they proved that for the alkanes comprising petroleum, except for methane, to be formed from biological matter would be in contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Also see Generation of methane in the Earth’s mantle: In situ high pressure–temperature measurements of carbonate reduction).

A US Public Service Radio interview with Dr Kenney may be heard on the Gas Resources website at www.gasresources.net/Kenney-NPR.mp3 Russian and Ukrainian scientists found that a continuous reaction occurs naturally at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields.

Oil is still being produced in great abundance by this natural process. Oil is thus a sustainable resource — by the same definition that makes geothermal energy a sustainable resource. With this knowledge, Russian and Ukrainian scientists developed geotechnical science to better predict where to drill for oil. This explains why Russia is today one of the world’s major oil and gas producers and exporters.

Some may ask “How come all of this isn’t public knowledge?” For part of the answer, you are invited to read an excellent article entitled “Cognitive Processes and the Suppression of Sound Scientific Ideas”, by J. Sacherman (1997). More of the answer was provided long ago by Russian writer (War and Peace) and philosopher Leo Tolstoi when he wrote:

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Some may say “Well, even if oil is a renewable resource, mankind should not burn it because the CO2 so produced causes global warming.” My answer to that is that the idea that mankind’s production of CO2 causes global warming is merely a hypothesis, and this has been proven to be simply not true, many times and by many different scientists, yet still the believers hang on doggedly with what amounts to religious zeal, displaying cognitive dissonance, as described by both Sacherman and Tolstoi, as mentioned above.

Physics tells us that the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere is absorbing all the infrared radiation that it is possible for CO2 to absorb, and adding more CO2 won’t make the slightest bit of difference. (See The Lynching of Carbon Dioxide — The Innocent Source of Life and The Great Global Warming Hoax?)

The current US energy strategy, driven by the erroneous beliefs that oil is a fossil fuel and that its supply will soon be exhausted, is illogical. Given the fact that oil is produced naturally, likely at rates far in excess of what mankind could ever conceivably consume, it makes absolutely no sense for any nation to buy it at exorbitant prices from foreign sources if it is cheaper to find, drill for and pump its own — and that is precisely what the US should be doing immediately, and so should Australia and New Zealand.

If the US switched from being a net consumer in the world oil market to becoming a net supplier, the price of oil would plunge, perhaps to around $US30 per barrel, with the result that the world’s economies would boom as never before. Most importantly, people would have confidence to invest in their futures, safe in the knowledge that oil would never run out.

A bonus would be that all subsidies to producers of alternative fuels and energy supplies could be removed, with the result that such production would occur only if it was economically viable, which would mean that most such producers would either cease, or greatly scale down, their businesses.

All development of wind farms would cease forthwith as, apart from being unsightly blots on so many landscapes, they are so hopelessly uneconomic and wind is such an unreliable energy source. Our electricity producers can now burn as much coal and oil (with scrubbers in the smokestacks) as needed to produce all the electricity we can afford to purchase, and each of us in our own small way can now burn as much petroleum product as we can afford to put in our cars and boats, safe in the knowledge that (a) oil is never going to run out and (b) all the extra carbon dioxide so produced will not cause global warming, but will green our planet earth and help plants, and hence food, to grow faster, thus helping to feed the billions! And we can stop clearing virgin rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations, leaving orangutans’ habitats pristine.

Please feel free to contact your local political representative and urge him or her to repeal the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation, put a stop to the lunacy of trying to reduce mankind’s carbon dioxide ‘emissions’ and put a stop to talking about oil as a ‘fossil fuel’. Let us not forget that whatever happens on planet earth in a physical sense must do so in accordance with the laws of physics.

The sooner people wake up to the non-science of ‘global warming’ and ‘oil is a fossil fuel’ and ‘burning coal and oil is an environmental sin’, the better off we and our children and our children’s children (etc.) will be. Then, real environmentalists can get back to focusing on reducing the terrible chemical pollution that is happening all over the world.

I leave you to ponder another quote from Leo Tolstoi:

The one thing that is necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.

Peter J. Morgan can be contacted at forensic.eng@xtra.co.nz

Peter J. Morgan B.E. (Mech.), Dip. Teaching

This article was first published by BrookesNews.com on 31st August 2009

Robert H. Essenhigh
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210
Energy Fuels, 2009, 23 (5), pp 2773–2784
DOI: 10.1021/ef800581r
Publication Date (Web): April 1, 2009
Copyright © 2009 American Chemical Society

Abstract:

The driver for this study is the wide-ranging published values of the CO2 atmospheric residence time (RT), τ, with the values differing by more than an order of magnitude, where the significance of the difference relates to decisions on whether (1) to attempt control of combustion-sourced (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions, if τ > 100 years, or (2) not to attempt control, if τ 10 years. This given difference is particularly evident in the IPCC First 1990 Climate Change Report where, in the opening policymakers summary of the report, the RT is stated to be in the range of 50−200 years, and (largely) on the basis of that, it was also concluded in the report and from subsequent related studies that the current rising level of CO2 was due to combustion of fossil fuels, thus carrying the, now widely accepted, rider that CO2 emissions from combustion should therefore be curbed. However, the actual data in the text of the IPCC report separately states a value of 4 years. The differential of these two times is then clearly identified in the relevant supporting documents of the report as being, separately (1) a long-term (100 years) adjustment or response time to accommodate imbalance increases in CO2 emissions from all sources and (2) the actual RT in the atmosphere of 4 years. As a check on that differentiation and its alternative outcome, the definition and determination of RT thus defined the need for and focus of this study. In this study, using the combustion/chemical-engineering perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) mixing structure or 0D box for the model basis, as an alternative to the more commonly used global circulation models (GCMs), to define and determine the RT in the atmosphere and then using data from the IPCC and other sources for model validation and numerical determination, the data (1) support the validity of the PSR model application in this context and, (2) from the analysis, provide (quasi-equilibrium) RTs for CO2 of 5 years carrying C12 and 16 years carrying C14, with both values essentially in agreement with the IPCC short-term (4 year) value and, separately, in agreement with most other data sources, notably, a 1998 listing by Segalstad of 36 other published values, also in the range of 5−15 years. Additionally, the analytical results also then support the IPCC analysis and data on the longer “adjustment time” (100 years) governing the long-term rising “quasi-equilibrium” concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. For principal verification of the adopted PSR model, the data source used was the outcome of the injection of excess 14CO2 into the atmosphere during the A-bomb tests in the 1950s/1960s, which generated an initial increase of approximately 1000% above the normal value and which then declined substantially exponentially with time, with τ = 16 years, in accordance with the (unsteady-state) prediction from and jointly providing validation for the PSR analysis. With the short (5−15 year) RT results shown to be in quasi-equilibrium, this then supports the (independently based) conclusion that the long-term (100 year) rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is not from anthropogenic sources but, in accordance with conclusions from other studies, is most likely the outcome of the rising atmospheric temperature, which is due to other natural factors. This further supports the conclusion that global warming is not anthropogenically driven as an outcome of combustion. The economic and political significance of that conclusion will be self-evident.

The Telegraph: ‘Trees are growing faster and could buy time to halt global warming’

The experiment involved “fertilising” a 300-square-kilometre (115-sqare-mile) area of ocean inside the core of an eddy — an immense rotating column of water — with six tonnes of dissolved iron.

As expected, this stimulated growth of tiny planktonic algae or phytoplankton, which it was hoped would take out of the atmosphere carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas blamed for climate change, and absorb it.

However, the scientists from India’s National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) and Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) did not count on these phytoplankton being eaten by tiny crustacean zooplankton. (AFP)

Terra Daily: ‘Climate scientists admit defeat in ocean experiment’

By controlling emissions of fossil fuels we may be able to greatly delay the start of the next ice age, new research from the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen concludes. The results have been published in the scientific magazine, Geophysical Research Letters.

From an Earth history perspective, we are living in cold times. The greatest climate challenge mankind has faced has been surviving ice ages that have dominated climate during the past million years. Therefore it is not surprising that back in the relatively cold 1970′s prominent scientists like Soviet Union climatologist Mikhail Budyko greeted man-made global warming from CO2 emissions as a way to keep us out of future ice ages. And there are still those around who feel that continued high fossil fuel emissions are good for this reason. But is the extreme global warming that would result from this a reasonable, and indeed necessary, price to pay to keep ice ages at bay?

In a paper published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters ‘Long time management of fossil fuels to limit global warming and avoid ice age onsets’, Professor Gary Shaffer of the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and also leader of the research team at the Danish Center for Earth System Science (DCESS), outlines a way to keep the Earth out of both Hot- and Icehouses for a half a million years into the future.

Building up ice sheets

Ice ages start when conditions at high northern latitudes allow winter snowfall to persist over the summer for enough years to accumulate and build ice sheets. Such conditions depend mainly on summer solar radiation there and atmospheric CO2 concentration. This radiation is modulated on time scales of 20.000, 40.000 and 100.000 years by changes in the Earth’s orbit and orientation. Critical summer solar radiation for initiating ice sheet growth can be significantly lower for higher atmospheric CO2 with its greenhouse warming effect.

Professor Shaffer made long projections over the next 500,000 years with the DCESS Earth System Model to calculate the evolution of atmospheric CO2 for different fossil fuel emission strategies. He also used results of a coupled climate-ice sheet model for the dependency on atmospheric CO2 of critical summer solar radiation at high northern latitudes for an ice age onset.

The results show global warming of almost 5 degrees Celsius above present for a “business as usual” scenario whereby all 5000 billion tons of fossil fuel carbon in accessible reserves are burned within the next few centuries. In this scenario the onset of next ice age was postponed to about 170,000 years from now.

Carbon can postpone ice age

However, for a management scenario whereby fossil fuel use was reduced globally by 20% in 2020 and 60% in 2050 (compared to 1990 levels), maximum global warming was less than one degree Celsius above present. Similar reductions in fossil fuel use have been proposed by various countries like Germany and Great Britain.

In this scenario, combustion pulses of large remaining fossil fuel reserves were then tailored to raise atmospheric CO2 content high and long enough to parry forcing of ice age onsets by summer radiation minima as long as possible. In this way our present equable interglacial climate was extended for about 500,000 years, three times as long as in the “business as usual” case.

Valuable climate regulation

“It appears to be well established that the strong ice ages the Earth has experienced over the past million years were ushered in by declining levels of atmospheric CO2. Our present atmospheric CO2 level of about 385 parts per million is already higher than before the transition to these ice ages” Professor Shaffer notes and adds that “The Earth’s orbit is nearly circular at present meaning that the present minimum in summer radiation at high northern latitudes is not very deep. We have already increased atmospheric CO2 enough to keep us out of the next ice age for at least the next 55,000 years for this orbital setup”.

He concludes that “Fossil fuel reserves may be too valuable for regulating climate far into the future to allow the reserves to be consumed within the next few centuries. The price of extreme global warming to avoid ice ages is a high and indeed unnecessary price to pay.”

Embargoed for release: 10-Feb-2009 19:00 ET
(11-Feb-2009 00:00 GMT)

Embargoed for release: 9-Feb-2009 17:00 ET
(9-Feb-2009 22:00 GMT)

The leaves of soybeans grown at the elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels predicted for the year 2050 respire more than those grown under current atmospheric conditions, researchers report, a finding that will help fine-tune climate models and could point to increased crop yields as CO2 levels rise.

The study, from researchers at the University of Illinois and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere and make sugars through the process of photosynthesis. But they also release some CO2 during respiration as they use the sugars to generate energy for self-maintenance and growth. How elevated CO2 affects plant respiration will therefore influence future food supplies and the extent to which plants can capture CO2 from the air and store it as carbon in their tissues.

While there is broad agreement that higher atmospheric CO2 levels stimulate photosynthesis in C3 plants, such as soybean, no such consensus exists on how rising CO2 levels will affect plant respiration.

“There’s been a great deal of controversy about how plant respiration responds to elevated CO2,” said U. of I. plant biology professor Andrew Leakey, who led the study. “Some summary studies suggest it will go down by 18 percent, some suggest it won’t change, and some suggest it will increase as much as 11 percent.”

Understanding how the respiratory pathway responds when plants are grown at elevated CO2 is key to reducing this uncertainty, Leakey said. His team used microarrays, a genomic tool that can detect changes in the activity of thousands of genes at a time, to learn which genes in the high CO2 plants were being switched on at higher or lower levels than those of the soybeans grown at current CO2 levels.

Rather than assessing plants grown in chambers in a greenhouse, as most studies have done, Leakey’s team made use of the Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment (Soy FACE) facility at Illinois. This open-air research lab can expose a soybean field to a variety of atmospheric CO2 levels – without isolating the plants from other environmental influences, such as rainfall, sunlight and insects.

Some of the plants were exposed to atmospheric CO2 levels of 550 parts per million (ppm), the level predicted for the year 2050 if current trends continue. These were compared to plants grown at ambient CO2 levels (380 ppm).

The results were striking. At least 90 different genes coding the majority of enzymes in the cascade of chemical reactions that govern respiration were switched on (expressed) at higher levels in the soybeans grown at high CO2 levels. This explained how the plants were able to use the increased supply of sugars from stimulated photosynthesis under high CO2 conditions to produce energy, Leakey said. The rate of respiration increased 37 percent at the elevated CO2 levels.

The enhanced respiration is likely to support greater transport of sugars from leaves to other growing parts of the plant, including the seeds, Leakey said.

“The expression of over 600 genes was altered by elevated CO2 in total, which will help us to understand how the response is regulated and also hopefully produce crops that will perform better in the future,” he said.

Prometheus: ‘Carbon Dioxide and the Global Economy’