

Global warming predictions are overestimated, suggests study on black carbon - 1gor
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov08/SoilBlackCarbon.kr.html

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yummyfajitas
"... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models
solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of
describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very
poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of
fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world
that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we
do not yet understand. _It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-
conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes
and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the
clouds_...."

Freeman Dyson

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ivankirigin
Dyson also describes a solution to any warming that is relevant to the
article: better land management.

It takes a few years for carbon to cycle - into the air, then plants, then
soil, then back.

Capturing carbon at some stage could be as simple as changing the plants that
grow in certain areas. This doesn't require crippling an economy.

Surely there is some process by which biomass can be converted to black
carbon, and perhaps generate power. Such a technological solution is but one
of many, and the real answer to global warming and peak oil:

1\. invest in research into alternative energy generation and storage that, at
scale and independent of oil prices, are cheaper than coal

2\. invest in research into technological solutions that cheaply remove
massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.

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DaniFong
I'm not sure about the all the science behind this (it's a very big field...),
but those at real climate have addressed some of the issues here, for example:
[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freema...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/freeman-
dysons-selective-vision/#more-568)

 _Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers
will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah,
the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in
atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it
is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore
if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves,
repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem
here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending
would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as
the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils
combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep
up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on._

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ivankirigin

      the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined
    

I don't believe that. Add the sea, and I doubly don't believe it. There's no
reason it need be trees. It could just as easily be plankton.

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Retric
There is a lot less biomass in the ocean than you might think. Huge areas of
the ocean are nutrient to the point they don't support significant life.

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DaniFong
Additionally, one of the issues with increased CO2 content in the oceans is
acidification. The oceans can't absorb more CO2, even in biomass, without this
occurring.

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dflock
This is based on soil studies of a limited number of sites in Australia. It
implies that as these soils contained more black carbon (soot) than thought -
which takes 1-2k yrs to convert to CO2, rather than 100 yrs for organic carbon
- soil will contribute less to global warming.

This makes sense but surely to include this in global climate models, you'd
need good soot content estimates for a variety of soils worldwide? Either a
good global average derived from a wide range of measurements, or an actual
global soil map included in the simulation?

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1gor
>soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10
times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from
human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils
are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact.

(from the article)

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fallentimes
It seems the only thing every side can agree on is that pollution is bad. If
you can reduce pollution & consumption without incurring additional costs (not
just monetary), please try to do so.

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mseebach
I think the divide isn't really between "believing" in global warming or not -
but between blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism
and capitalism, and placing as a premise for a solution that we can't allow
our progress to slow down to fix this, and we CERTAINLY can't ask China and
India to slow down theirs.

The former is (roughly) the Kyoto/Copenhagen bunch, the latter is the "spend A
LOT - NOW on nuclear energy (we need a lot of energy, and it will keep
growing) and research in energy storage (fuel cells etc.) and biotech (get rid
of the C02 we already have)".

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pg
_blaming "western" progress, industrialism, consumerism, globalism and
capitalism_

Industry in communist countries tended to be a lot more polluting, actually.

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patrickg-zill
The reality is, that even with computers 100 times more powerful than we have
now, the problem remains: we don't have the ability to accurately come up with
a working mathematical model of "how it works" - much less run that model
through a computer.

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ksvs
How did gibsonf1 miss this one?

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yters
I highly recommend James Hogan's Kicking the Sacred Cow. He very persuasively
shows the baselessness of some of science's most strongly believed "facts."
This applies not only to global warming, but also things like Darwinism, AIDs,
environmental scares, even the big bang and relativity.

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eru
How about the round earth?

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tocomment
Random global warming thought; can anyone here believe that we'll have a
technological singularity in 20 years, and be worried about global warming?

I just realized that's why I'm not worried about it. I.e. technology will
probably save us. Am I too optimistic?

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gaius
20 years?! We can't even make an AI as smart as an _ant_ yet.

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ibsulon
Kurzweil suggests that these technological improvements happen on an
exponential scale -- that the gap from 0 to ant is greater than from ant to
human.

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yters
I like basing my life on theories that are not complete speculation.

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Allocator2008
I wonder what affect the studies on black carbon will have on the projected
prevalence of the man-bear-pig?

