Climategate II

[DJ Droood]

For some reason, The Board decided to lock my previous Climategate thread..the participants seemed happy enough, but maybe we were boring the Moderators or something. Please try to say something new and interesting in this thread. (although it may already be locked or deleted...I'll check back after I walk my dog.)

[Merlyn]

I think it got too technical. This might be miss-understood.
But if we don't fully understand it, we become easy prey. Explaining it at the scientific level causes problems, I agree.
The political end of it is just as complex.


Merlyn

[DJ Droood]

I think it got too technical. This might be miss-understood.
But if we don't fully understand it, we become easy prey. Explaining it at the scientific level causes problems, I agree.
The political end of it is just as complex.


Merlyn

I disagree! As a climate science moron, I have learned a great deal from the back and forth in the banned discussion. Although I don't like to use the term in a spiritual context, I would have to label myself a scientific "agnostic". What little I know comes from TV shows, or maybe a magazine while waiting in the dentists office.

I am compelled to listen to other, more knowledgeable voices and try to figure out an approximation of "the truth". And I'm afraid the political end of things is deeply involved. "Green" means power and money.

[Merlyn]

Wen we get into the deeper science, and complex technical explanations, I didn't think it fair not to explain my decades of direct involvement and employment by agencies like the VDEQ. For the most part this is Greek so to speak.
But if you are interested in why I see this like I do, and want to get a few deeper things going then ok.
Citing conflicting web sites isn't getting anywhere, and I can agree with that. Early on I picked out a few sites which explained some real, recent and in-depth reasons for glacier melt. Later in, I got a bit carried away with the political chatter, but this is a very real part of your topic.

What is an emission's compliance officer seeing with a span gas meter?
What we see by the % of different things is how well the engine is burning the fuel, and how well the catalytic converter is working.
Early on, automobiles (one of the foremost topics of climate-gate) used an air pump (smog pump), but this required additional fuel and lowered MPG.
This air pump was used to cause "after-burn" in the catalytic converter of the auto. This effectively burned all of the unspent HC (unburned particulate matter)
(CO2 is a molecule which trees convert back onto O2 and is a natural part of our atmosphere)
(HC is unburned fuel often seen in coal burning by electric plant$)
The catalytic converter heats up to temperatures of 300-400 degrees. However government mandates at the time and still, wanted higher MPG, now get this... NOT less pollution.
So.. science produced another solution, (this is not as efficient as an air pump) known as a closed loop O2 system. The ceramic O2 sensor in your exhaust measures the amount of fuel, always trying to take it leaner (less fuel). This requires a very good catalytic converter with the precious metal combination known as palladium.
This acts much like a battery, as a coating on a ceramic honey comb in the exhaust system. It heats up and without the added air, burns the unspent fuel HC.
It also takes the toxic gases like carbon monoxide and changes the molecular structure to water and CO2, both natural in our environment.
It can't do so however at the normal, and optimal fuel mixture for the engine. So it does so by leaning the mixture and insuring enough oxygen is in the exhaust, thus the Oxygen sensor. This all, as I mention, is less efficient than a smog pump in stopping pollution, but does well enough.

Industry does very little by comparison for this. The "clean coal" you have been hearing about is just now being field tested.
Historically, industry has been given the option to pay to pollute, with the grand idea that this tax on pollution will be invested into capping emissions.
This money however is often robbed in the late night political hand shaking, and after 20 years has not been used to produce "clean coal" technology.
So... why advertise clean coal now? Because they were supposed to have already done this decades ago!

Thus the political circus begins. And to this point it is finally getting at least somewhere in the US. (just took 20 years )
However on a world wide scale we have no national government to make it happen, but the UN would just love to help us...
We have to realize that cap and trade isn't why the coal companies invested in clean tech. It is because emission laws required it 20 years ago, and they have paid to pollute all this time. They were hoping the government program would help, but have been obligated none the less to do it on their own or be shut down, because nuclear power passes this test.
Nuclear power however is a disaster in secondary affects. The waste is dumped in the ocean, and kills aquatic life, which is the very first tropic level (what everything else lives on).
Kill the oceans and we kill the larger critters, like us. Secondary pollution is easy to leave off any graph. If it is not direct, then it is considered secondary.
Carbon monoxide is an example of a direct health hazard. Sulphur emissions was considered not a direct hazard. We learned however that the secondary affect of sulphur was acid rain, and it ended up killing forests, polluting steams and lakes and killing just about everything in your lake Ontario, along with all the other stuff they dump in there.

Now, climate change and greenhouse gas.
Color of soot, natural and man made CO2, HC and such can affect the atmosphere, and do so in ways, however, by comparison to other factors, they are more local, and sometimes wide spread.

Primary pollution and secondary, direct and indirect causes all play a role in what is a small fraction of the atmosphere. This is important none the less, but the politicians need to learn what is really happening, before making movies and collecting for "non-profit" groups, known to tip the help now & then..
Real change is inconvenient for government, and imagine a world wide dictatorship of politically correct politicians who know as little as Al Gore and until confronted, live with a very large carbon footprint.
And then... there's the issue of tax...
http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/20 ... ent-obama/


Merlyn

[Aelfarh]

Maybe is worth to understand what is happening in a technical way first. In the “ideal” world a combustion process will only produce CO2 and water. For example the burning of Kerosene

C10H20 + 15O2 = 10CO2 + 10H2O

But that’s never going to happen due to the efficiency of combustor chambers is not 100% (that second Newton’s law, blimey!) , either if we are talking of a otto engine, a diesel engine a gas turbine or a boiler from the one at your house to the big HRSGs that are used in the industry. As some fuel is not burned, then some additional pollutants emerge. Potential pollutant emissions include oxides of nitrogen (NO and NO2, collectively referred to as NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), unburned hydrocarbons (UHC, usually expressed as equivalent methane), oxides of sulphur (SO2 and SO3) and particulate matter (PM). Unburned hydrocarbons are made up of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which contribute to the formation of ground level atmospheric ozone, and compounds such as methane and ethane, that do not contribute to ozone formation, but contribute to the green house effect. , NOx and possibly CO are the emissions of significance when combusting natural gas for example. Therefore industry is focusing on the NOx emissions as main target.

Depending on how old the machine is, these NOx emissions can go from 250 ppm to 9 ppm (as the latest gas turbines developed). This can be found on the technical literature of the machine itself.

Now, when we are referring to CO2 emissions in technical papers as the one published by the IPCC, we are talking about Carbon dioxide equivalency, that is a quantity that describes, for a given mixture and amount of greenhouse gas (GHG), the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming potential (GWP), when measured over a specified timescale (generally, 100 years). That is to have a sole basis to measure instead of different variables taken into account.

So, when you read on your magazine while waiting in the dentist’s office about CO2 emissions, don’t be fooled by the term, it includes all the other GHG into account.

PS. I’m not kind of exhibit my credentials, but my arguments, but since it seems very important to Merlyn, I’m a professional engineer with a MSc in turbomachinery and had being working in mechanical equipment, including combustion engines as diesel and gas turbines and direct fire equipment as HRSGs (heat recovery steam generators) and other boilers, for the industry, up to date. So yes, I have a little idea of what I’m talking about.

[Merlyn]

Soot collection from coal driven electricity is becoming a reality, but only in a field testing state in the US.
However, in places like India, geothermal is uses to create electric power.
Geothermal is what is in my home as well, and has absolutely none of the greenhouse gas emissions.
Further, if every home was fitted with solar technology, the grid and need for expanding it would not require the secondary affects of burying and dumping nuclear waste.
Given that boilers and such are emitting dense and local amounts of GHG and finding their way to the glaciers, simply because that is where they are in use, and melting them, is no reason to make "value added" graphs which do not include the spectrum of GHG. Mostly because GHG causes secondary hazard, not primary.
Putting out disinformation has hurt the cause, in the name of a ponzi scheme known to do little or nothing to solve the problem.

If cap and trade was a functional idea, coal plants would already be green, the soot would have stopped long ago.
But then there is the inconvenient truth about what is melting the glaciers. Blaming GHG on places which are not directly causing the problem and taxing those places does nothing for the solution. We know this because no one was willing to agree on this scam in the recent climate summit. Also places like China simply refuse, after getting a free pass to pollute for so long.

I very much agree that NOX emissions is perhaps the driving factor in GHG. But then again that is not the CO2 monster used to pin-point tax on a problem which simply isn't there.
If the science is going to be sold as reason to make change, then let it be real change, not a cap and trade scam. And let the real reasons for glacier ice melt be clearly known.

We once were worried about an Ozone hole... remember that? Now we worry about too much Ozone, so which is it? this kind of confusion causes breakdown in negotiations.
Meanwhile, sulphur emissions are allowed to continue. If government wants to stop pollution, all it takes is a stroke of the pen, but then other countries wipe out what ever progress we make. So... the cap and trade scam to make us believe that we will sell other countries new technology, and prevent the problem, but then we continue to pollute, and again no progress is made.

Then of course there is the global warming debate, which just failed to happen. They can say "it is coming again" but then, will it?
In the mean time People like Aelferh need to make progress in turbo machinery. Let's take a look at the airline industry as one example.
How long will the airline industry continue to put pollution directly into the atmosphere? How long will ships pump pollution directly into the ocean?
The answer has got to come from the industry itself, not the tax payer.

The tax payer gets ripped off every time.
Thus, climategate.

People like Al Gore need to step aside and know that a few hours of time spent is far from enough to know anything.
Giving pet projects some tax break isn't enough and completely unfair, as coal towns sit as ghost towns, and the truth about secondary pollution is left unchecked. We have paid for these solutions, and the money is just "gone".

Incorrect data has been made as reason for the wrong solutions. And the speculation of global warming failed. This has caused a serious problem, and do we think that was a mistake? Or was it deliberate?
Blame it on the scientists, eh?
We have leaders who just went to a grand summit, and claimed to care, yet their actions speak louder than words. I spent a long time working for change, and as example; after a long speech during a lecture on emissions control, I stood up, as really one of two who asked any questions at all. I put it this way.
"Today I charged a customer to replace his catalytic converter and tune his engine so he would not pollute, yet, he made an observation. He said that after spending over $1,000.00 to repair his car, he drove away from the shop and literally could not breath due to the black soot being pumped from the trucks on the road. Why is it that diesel is allowed to go completely unregulated?" The answer the VDEQ gave me was this; "sulphur is not a direct hazard".

Now compare this in your mind to CO2 which is a natural and necessary part of our atmosphere. And then perhaps next time you ride a metro bus take a look out the window at the black soot being spewed from the exhaust, now aimed up, instead of directly at the riders at the bus stop. That was their solution.

I would like to see real change, and change which directly address secondary pollution as vigorously as primary hazards.
If we ask ourselves, truthfully, the solutions have been scientifically proven, in production and real. Yet, nothing gets solved.
This is perhaps the most frustrating thing.

P.S.
I guess a bit of irony always goes with thing.
We have a nuclear plant in lock down in Texas right as I post this.

DEVELOPING: A Texas nuclear plant is on lockdown, the Carson County Sheriff's Department said.
Several officers are at the Pantex Plant investigating.
The plant reportedly activated its Emergency Response Organization at 8 a.m. Friday in response to a possible security situation. Pantex employees have been moved to a safe location.

if you really expect to gain an overview of this broad and stunningly under published topic. We live our lives in a world that is many times more radioactive than it ever was naturally. The sources of nuclear pollution (uncontrolled radioactive material) were initially confined to bomb tests, but with the advancement of our understanding of the things we can do with radionuclides, we began to produce them by the tonne. Production means contaminated waste. What a headache.
Reactor accidents have contributed to increased background radiation. Big time. How many square miles of land do we just have to walk away from never to return before we get it? The monuments to our foolishness stand for all (or no one) to see: the apartment buildings, stores and shops as well as the houses of whole communities sitting empty. The parks and playgrounds desolate. And all of it contaminated.
But there are small accidents that occur regularly where a nuclear excursion (such a polite term) results in the release of some radioactivity as well as injury or death. What many are unaware of is the number of shipments of radioactive materials that occur by common carrier every day. This huge shipping slate means accidents can occur (have occurred) that result(ed) in the release of small quantities of radioactive elements. And that doesn't include the large sources that get loose around the countryside here.
In the breakdown of the USSR, many tonnes of nuclear materials went missing. Some frightening portions were weapons grade fissionable material. (Read nuclear bomb.) But there are many sources (source: a bulk quantity of radioactive material that was produced to act as a portable generator for radiation energy) that got away. Highly radioactive materials are unknowingly being stripped and recycled as scrap. Over there, and even over here, too.
We need to get up to speed on this stuff. All of it. And we need to spool up quick. There are two serious problems with radiation: it's seriously dangerous (and for a long time in many cases), and it's invisible. The latter makes it easier to ignore. Working around the stuff can get you dead in seconds. And you may not even know it until after the fact. Dramatic, but true.
Radiation due to uncontrolled radioactive waste and other unconfined radioactive material is a growing threat. It quietly adds its contribution to cancers and the genetic damage we as a people suffer from. Radiation is all around us. It sits in dim corners. It flows in our waters. It rides the currents of air all over the globe. It does so unfelt. Unheard. Unseen. And we sleep very well at night without thinking about it. Click, read, learn and become an activist.

If we are looking for solutions for GHG are we looking in the right places?

Stranger still, the "breaking news" headline of the nuclear plant in Texas just disappeared 15 minutes after it was on the news...

A NUCLEAR weapons facility in Texas is in lockdown in response to a potential security situation.
Few details about the situation at the facility near Amarillo, Texas were immediately available. Employees were sheltered in place.
The Pantex plant is the only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility in the United States.
The Carson County Sheriff's Department said Pantex is on lockdown, but would not release any information other than they have a number of sheriff's officers at the facility and are investigating, according to KFDA.

Now here is a question for you;
Nitrous oxide is nearly 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/news/ ... gen_Threat
This of course going back to the overpopulation issue as it relates to climate change.
Or should we change this from climate change to "environment change now"
Environment change .... Hummmmmmmmmm

Just as a thought has anyone ever thought of checking the % of O2 in the atmosphere?
And was the atmosphere, O2 rich long ago?
How does this comapre to now?
More food for thought.
Merlyn

[DJ Droood]

Soot collection from coal driven electricity is becoming a reality, but only in a field testing state in the US.

Soot collection...where are we going to put all that??....here is an alarming stat from "Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization" by Jeff Rubin

America puts 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere yearly, which is equal in mass to 76 million Abrams tanks...capturing, moving and storing that amount, or 1/4 that amount...yearly... will be..challenging....

[Merlyn]

Capture means we can then re-use it. That is more efficient.
After-burn means we cannot. Either one will clean the air.

The tons of particulate HC is one problem.
The CO2 is a gas, and has no real weight unless we make it a dry ice.

The misunderstanding of carbon emissions runs large.
But more importantly, the emissions which are not on the graph, so to speak, are a lot more harmful by comparison to CO2

Carbon dioxide (chemical formula CO2) is a chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom. It is a gas at standard temperature and pressure and exists in Earth's atmosphere in this state. CO2 is a trace gas being only 0.038% of the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is used by plants during photosynthesis to make sugars, which may either be consumed in respiration or used as the raw material to produce other organic compounds needed for plant growth and development. It is produced during respiration by plants, and by all animals, fungi and microorganisms that depend either directly or indirectly on plants for food. It is thus a major component of the carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is generated as a by-product of the combustion of fossil fuels or the burning of vegetable matter, among other chemical processes. Small amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted from volcanoes and other geothermal processes such as hot springs and geysers and by the dissolution of carbonates in crustal rocks.

As of March 2009[update], carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is at a concentration of 387 ppm by volume.[1] Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide fluctuate slightly with the change of the seasons, driven primarily by seasonal plant growth in the Northern Hemisphere. Concentrations of carbon dioxide fall during the northern spring and summer as plants consume the gas, and rise during the northern autumn and winter as plants go dormant, die and decay. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas as it transmits visible light but absorbs strongly in the infrared and near-infrared.

Carbon dioxide has no liquid state at pressures below 5.1 atmospheres. At 1 atmosphere (near mean sea level pressure), the gas deposits directly to a solid at temperatures below −78 °C (−108.4 °F; 195.1 K) and the solid sublimes directly to a gas above −78 °C. In its solid state, carbon dioxide is commonly called dry ice.

CO2 is an acidic oxide: an aqueous solution turns litmus from blue to pink. It is the anhydride of carbonic acid, an acid which is unstable and is known to exist only in aqueous solution. In organisms carbonic acid production is catalysed by the enzyme, carbonic anhydrase.

CO2 + H2O ⇌ H2CO3
CO2 is toxic in higher concentrations: 1% (10,000 ppm) will make some people feel drowsy.[2] Concentrations of 7% to 10% cause dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour.[3]

And HC

In organic chemistry, a hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting entirely of hydrogen and carbon.[1] With relation to chemical terminology, aromatic hydrocarbons or arenes, alkanes, alkenes and alkyne-based compounds composed entirely of carbon and hydrogen are referred to as "pure" hydrocarbons, whereas other hydrocarbons with bonded compounds or impurities of sulfur or nitrogen, are referred to as "impure", and remain somewhat erroneously referred to as hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbons are referred to as consisting of a "backbone" or "skeleton" composed entirely of carbon and hydrogen and other bonded compounds, and have a functional group that generally facilitates combustion.[2]

The majority of hydrocarbons found naturally occur in crude oil, where decomposed organic matter provides an abundance of carbon and hydrogen which, when bonded, can catenate to form seemingly limitless chains.[3][4]

Read the rest here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon

In discussing Green house gas, knowing the difference here is important. They are "like" but very different.
If the climate summit had focused on Hydrocarbons, and the disinformation about Co2 had not been created, the entire discussion would have been much different.
Are we splitting hairs?

Not really.
If we are going to speak in terms of pollutants, and ones which cause various problems, we do need to be specific. If not then you get what we have here...
A failure to communicate. When we say "tons of carbon in the air" we need to be on point, not just blowing hot air.
If CO2 was a culprit then we all would be culprits as we exhale CO2 with every breath we take.
Hydrocarbons cause an entirely different problem.
Also we then consider the % of each compound in the air. This includes water vapor, and it is water vapor which we see in the daylight that makes the sky blue.
It condenses and falls as rain, and in this way cleans the air to a point. If there is more CO2 in the air than the natural cycle can remove, and trees can absorb it falls into the ocean. This does not cause global warming, but rather another problem entirely. The HC that ends up in the ocean, and other places is called acid rain.
This should not be confused with CO2, but often is.

So really the root of the misunderstanding is value added data and not being specific.
It is easy to blame CO2 and ignore the secondary pollution of HC. But frankly HC is the problem to be reckoned with.

Petroleum
Main article: Petroleum

Oil refineries are key to obtaining hydrocarbons. Crude oil is processed in several stages to form desired hydrocarbons, used as fuel and in other products.Extracted hydrocarbons in a liquid form are referred to as petroleum (literally "rock oil") or mineral oil, whereas hydrocarbons in a gaseous form are referred to as natural gas. Petroleum and natural gas are found in the Earth's subsurface with the tools of petroleum geology and are a significant source of fuel and raw materials for the production of organic chemicals.

The extraction of liquid hydrocarbon fuel from sedimentary basins is integral to modern energy development. Hydrocarbons are mined from tar sands and oil shale, and potentially extracted from sedimentary methane hydrates. These reserves require distillation and upgrading to produce synthetic crude and petroleum.

Oil reserves in sedimentary rocks are the source of hydrocarbons for the energy, transport and petrochemical industry.

Hydrocarbons are economically important because major fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural gas, and its derivatives such as plastics, paraffin, waxes, solvents and oils are hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons — along with NOx and sunlight - contribute to the formation of tropospheric ozone and greenhouse gases.

This is why NOx is important to understand.
Properly controlled combustion of HC can avoid the creation of NOx
As mentioned before, this was addressed by EGR in cars, (Exhaust Gas Recirculation) this effectively reduced NOx. However this system and EGR valves are not always a part of lean burn technology. That is because we have put MPG as more important then actual emissions.
Now.... which do we want? Believe it or not, an older S-10 (1984) with a smog pump, showed zero emissions of HC while a newer car is allowed up to 1%
Why does the government insist on MPG and ignore HC?






Merlyn

[Kernos]

As host, I asked for it to be locked. IMO, some users were ruining the thread by trolling and "kitchen-sink"-spamming with unrelated, confusing comments and links. The thread became completely off topic (Climategate). These folks have shown little insight into the scientific method, the peer-review process or about what "global' in global warming means. It is frankly embarrassing to see on a Druid board, and has chased many, more knowledgeable and effective people from this forum from disgust and frustration.

This forum is for serious discussion of Environmental issues. If you want to talk about so-called ClimateGate. Talk about it. It is an interesting example of how scientific discourse occurs, the problems with including personal emails, notes, musings, bar-room talk etc in FOI requests, the politics and humanity of Science.

If you want to talk about particulates, start another thread. If you want to talk about other greenhouse gases than CO2, start another thread. If you want to talk about global warming, start another thread. If you want to talk about pine-tree smog and health, start another topic ... But most written in this is unrelated to ClinateGate. These subjects are complex and cannot be understood without focusing on a topic.

Any post in this thread about Climate, that is off-topic, will be reported as off-topic. I it should not be a soapbox for others resentments.

[Merlyn]

Unreal.
Ok,

Can you split my topics from this thread and make it about GHG, particulates and pollution?

[Kernos]

No. You will need to ask a mod or admin to do that.

[Merlyn]

Never mind.

[DJ Droood]

wow..ok, well, do what you think is best.

[Merlyn]

The world's most famous climate change expert is at the center of a massive controversy as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain its assertion that the Himalayan glaciers will melt completely in 25 years.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, said this week that the U.N. body was studying how its 2007 report to the United Nations derived information that led to its famous conclusion: that the glaciers will melt by 2035.

Today, the IPCC issued a statement offering regret for the poorly vetted statements. "The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures," the statement says, though it goes short of issuing a full retraction or reprinting the report.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/ ... ting-away/

And yes, as Kernos very importantly points out,
the peer-review process;

The IPCC report had indicated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers within 25 years. The study cited a 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. The WWF study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted another expert, who speculated that Himalayan glaciers could disappear within forty years.

The speculative comments were not peer reviewed, and other reports have indicated that the glaciers are not retreating abnormally.

And so climate gate is far from over.

Reports indicate that there also are concerns in the United Kingdom surrounding 10 million British pounds in funding for TERI, and questions about TERI's objectivity.

I am sure the money trail will be found.

Merlyn

[DJ Droood]

The world's most famous climate change expert is at the center of a massive controversy as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain its assertion that the Himalayan glaciers will melt completely in 25 years.

I saw this in the paper a day or two ago and I thought, "hey, this would be great fodder for the Climategate II thread."...then I remembered.....

[mwyalchen]

I am sure the money trail will be found.

Merlyn

And I'm sure it won't be.

Whereas the link between the big oil companies and prominent climate change deniers is well documented; and a good few of them are the same people who were paid to claim that tobacco wasn't poisonous.

Merlin, you're doing a very good job of muddying the waters here. Maybe you should ask if they'll pay you too.

[DJ Droood]

How is everyone's winter shaping up, btw? The cold snap seemed to disprove "global warming" for many people, but I have to tell you, it has been an unusually warm Jan here in central Canada...many days hovering around 0c, which is above normal...might have rain on the weekend! -15c is more the norm.

[Merlyn]

Well it's going to snow again here, in the temperate zone, but it is pretty normal for us to get an Indian summer before the end of February.
Nothing really out of the ordinary like it was in the 90s.
I don't think big oil had the reins of this scam. It seems pretty obvious that those who were predicting the end of the world, never ventured out past their computer monitor to actually see a glacier How does a person try to link every possible occurrence of human greed to oil? But perhaps you are right and the oil industry hired on the climate alarmists to rail against them so they would have something to do, I'm sure they get bored too.

But so much for chit chat, the subject of this thread is re-defined and directed to be all about the peer review process, which frankly was not even considered let alone followed as protocol for these kinds of predictions.

Now, in the realm of things left unsaid, and not brought up in climate gate is the fact that not only is C02 rising, but 02 is being depleted.

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho who compiled the research, reports that within the past several years, scientists have found that oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere has been dropping, and at higher rates than just the amount that goes into the increase of CO2 from burning fossil fuels, some 2 to 4-times as much, and accelerating since 2002-2003. Simultaneously, oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have also been falling. Although the causes for the sudden acceleration in oxygen depletion are yet unclear, changes to natural ecosystems through deforestation and the expansion of agriculture could be playing a significant role.

http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com/news- ... -10954.htm

Oxygen used to be about 20% of the atmosphere but today in some places, it is as low as 16%

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Oxygen_Depletion

With the intense distraction on oil, and the rise in CO2 we seem to have missed a rather important point....
warming, melting and oceans rising, all make good fodder for science. But then there is the more Druid thing..... TREES!

Taking care and proper forestation just isn't good fodder for intense international debate, doesn't make real good movie fodder unless you consider the Ents in the Lord of The Rings.

This subject of climate change is left in the shadows, but frankly I think it should have been a main point. But then who cares about trees?
Oddly left out from any of the climate summit talks, the solution....
And trees may not fit into the scams, fear mongering, alarmist disinformation and large cash deals of climate gate, but if we are going to consider our environment, and change, the lack of O2 is a real and present problem.
Does it take peer review to make this an issue? Then perhaps it becomes obvious that climate gate had little to do with peer review..

Merlyn

[Aylyn]

I think trees do feature in the climate debate, a lot. The German term "Waldsterben" (Forest Die-off) has even made it as a loanword into other languages. We have been discussing the death of our trees and reforestation since the 80s.

Fact is, however, that trees are nice and have a direct impact on localized climate, but if we are looking at O2 production worldwide then the largest producer of O2 is the ocean, where billions of photosynthetic algae create it. Trees can only replace a small part of the CO2 we are losing, so it is not an overall solution.

Bot that I say it is not worth it...

[Merlyn]

Hi Aylyn,
This really does bring up the point of ignoring O2 in the climate gate debate. Pushing for an alternative to coal (producing CO2) to nuclear energy puts the ocean at risk.
That is why I brought this up earlier. Yes the ocean is the main issue in two factors, absorbing CO2 and producing O2.

Merlyn