Saturday, April 15, 2006

Tim Curtin insists on topping himself.....

Not only does he start by blowing two orders of magnitude in his favor....

Industrial production of CO2 at 100 million tonnes in 2005 growing at 10% pa (your figure) will overtake fossil fuel emissions of 25 billion tonnes of CO2 growing at net 0.005% pa (the actual rate of growth of CO2 at Mt Louai in Hawaii) by 2067.fossil fuel emissions of 25 billion tonnes of CO2 growing at net 0.005% pa (the actual rate of growth of CO2 at Mt Louai in Hawaii) by 2067
Only to catch himself half an hour later
Re Eli again, a correction, I mistyped the CO2 growth rate at the Hawaii station, it is 0.5% p.a. ( which is what I used in my extrapolation). Apologies.
But he can't figure out how to spell Mauna Loa (nice picture here).

He can't figure out that when the hare of the day (Happy Easter to all) said:
Yes, if you have one buck to your name and your money grows by 10%, while Bill Gates' money grows by 5%, your money is growing faster than his. And at the end of the day you got $1.10, and he got several hundreds of million $ in extra interest.
The 10% rate of increase did not refer to the growth of CO2 production for industrial gases. That looks to be ~3% or so (at least in the US).

As Chris O'Neill pointed out on Deltoid II even the correction is a bit shifty
BTW, the atmospheric CO2 is growing at 2% of the atmosphere's anthropogenic CO2 per year. If you want to model atmospheric CO2 with an exponential growth curve, try to remember that it didn't start at zero as an exponential growth curve does.
But wait, there is more, on an absolute basis, the rate of increase is closer to 0.7% than 0.5% (2.6 ppm/381 ppm current) and if you look at it as a percentage of preindustrial (280 ppm), then it is close to 1%.

Ian Gould is starting to make the point that most of the CO2 used for industrial purposes, ends up, guess where, in the atmosphere......

However there is another important question to ASK Tim Curtin: Where did that 100 million ton figure from, and in what sense it is using production. A lot of CO2 is produced in various industrial processes (brewing beer being my favorite) but very little of it is captured for industrial purposes.

Stephen Berg ASKS an important question:
Why are we squabbling over such a minor detail when there is a lot of work to be done to save our planet from ecological catastrophe?
To which the obvious answer is that when folk like Tim Curtin start throwing sand in the air, you need to show their propaganda up for what it is so that folk like Stephen Berg will see them for what they are, and what they are is not making any kind of contribution to an honest discussion.

Off to deliver......

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this, Eli!

-Stephen Berg

Anonymous said...

Re: Tim Curtin's "I still await your retraction re the volume of global industrial CO2 production, or are you like Lambert a non-apologiser?"

It doesn't matter what is what. As I asked earlier, why are we squabbling over such a minor detail when there is a lot of work to be done to save our planet from ecological catastrophe?

Stop trying to prevent action by using distraction tactics! Your kind will have the guilt of this ruined planet if you succeed and the world dies. You'll have more blood on your hands than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and other genocidal dictators put together.

-Stephen Berg

Anonymous said...

I may have overstated my position in my above post. However, not by a lot. Millions of species will become extinct and millions more people will perish as a result of climate change, resulting from human activity, if we do not act now and with fairly hefty regulations.

These "skeptics" are attempting to prevent this political and individual action from occurring, so they deserve a large proportion of the blame for the stalling tactics we see from elected officials in North America and Australia.

-Stephen Berg

Anonymous said...

Re: "Contributors include Charles Keeling and none could be termed skeptics, but they do whether they meant to or not show the beneficial impacts of atmospheric CO2 even at levels way above today's 380 ppm."

You're sounding like the "Greening Earth" loonies who are just out to allow for the continued rate of coal and oil production. They try to paint a rosy picture on the continued use of coal and oil, when the real picture is far more bleak.

As for "the beneficial impacts of atmospheric CO2 even at levels way above today's 380 ppm", they are few and far between, while the consequences of this would be far greater. The scales would tip far more in the direction of a problematic scenario rather than a beneficial scenario.

By the way, who the heck is Sue Blackmore?

-Stephen Berg

Anonymous said...

This article of Blackmore's sounds fairly sensible, actually:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sue_blackmore/2006/03/billions_are_going_to_die_but.html

That is, if climate change is not combatted. If it is fought and is held off, we'll be OK.

The Archbishop's comments on the radio programme are very good, as well.

Stephen Berg

Anonymous said...

Tim Curtin, please read this:

An excellent article denouncing the "skeptic" PR machine:

"The Global Warming Denial Lobby

The people out to 'poison the debate on climate change.'"

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2006/05/02/PaidtoDenyGlobalWarming/print.html

-Stephen Berg