How do your candidates stack up on the greenhouse gas emergency we are beginning?

Alas.

Images: NOAA, Breakthroughs. This is an older image. There is more open water.

I have been trying to inform, educate, and more than occasionally, "shock" people to their "senses" regarding things that are happening, will happen, and are inevitable.

Inevitable?

That bespeaks Destiny, Determinism, Fatalism. Is there such a thing as Fate? What is Earth's fate? More of interest, what is the fate of life on Earth? It might enlighten you as a reader to know that the author, twenty-eight some years ago -- was an anthropogenic global warming "doubter." (Not a denier.) Just a skeptic.

Then I began doing the numbers.

It changed me. I also began thinking about Earth's far future, when our ocean's boil away. I "knew" then that was a danger we were not likely to be able to approach no matter how much CO2 we could dump into the atmosphere because we would realize how stupid we were being -- and how dangerous the CO2 was.

That is, no way could we be putting enough forcing CO2 into the atmosphere to cause a runaway condition to occur. The energy, from the Sun, the current "insolation" at the top of the atmosphere is at least 10% less than what is necessary to cause a runaway water vapor forming condition. To get even close suggests global sea surface temperatures in excess of 87 F for the vapor to form and do its heating and running away. I do not think it possible for humanity to do this -- because man would have succumbed to starvation along with all other animal species long before even the partial pressure of O2 dropped to where we and most mammals suffocate. (O2 Partial Pressure of Less than 17%.) There is a temperature lag. But there will be no partial pressure lag.

I never imagined that greed and stupid stupid stupid people could ever engineer a control of the entire planet -- as has been done. This CO2 pollution should have been called to a halt long before it was necessary to come to invoke the solution through a global realization that this could lead to a runaway greenhouse, like Venus was long long ago, and the death of all higher complex oxygen-breathing animals.

Like Venus? When Earth reaches that path, this planet will be more inhospitable than Venus is now. You could live and walk on the satellites of the huge outer gas giant worlds. It would be easy in a space suit. But I do not think you could engineer a 30-minute excursion on the surface of Venus. There is no place to put the heat.

I still think the numbers support the fact that the Sun is not yet hot enough to force the runaway greenhouse, with water as the main propellant. Adding enough CO2 might tip the scale though. I'll continue to work the numbers.

Image: Fish and Wildlife Service. Polar bear resting but alert. Credit: Susanne Miller/USFWS.

Visit www.fws.gov/

See what US Fish and Wildlife Service are still dancing around for the endangered species listing of polar bear. What a short-sighted farce engineered by the current administration.

Fact. Think. Unless tomorrow ALL of the CO2 above 300 ppm were instantly removed from the air -- polar bear and so many other species are extinct. Think. You can't save the polar bear. I once thought we could. But now I know we had better begin looking at our own species survival as well as protecting as much of the planet's life as we can. But you can't do it with the current financial/economic system and population growth. I happen to be an advocate of high tech social solutions. But it is based on social justice and equity. Energy is required to take the step to a higher level of organization in a civilization. But obtaining and using that energy should not destroy the world. Forethought is a lot more complex than compounded interest. The global financial system needs to be dismantled -- indeed, destroyed. The alternative is a complete social overhauling of the tribal nation-state form of government. Pyramids must be leveled. Economic schemes are self destructive.

Errors in judgment can be made by young or old. To permit the continued destruction of the planet as a life system by Big Carbon is an error in judgment by our species. It is aided and abetted by the financial scams (banks and financial markets based on compounded interest from Babylon.) of a global economy running only on population growth and exploitation of that growth along with the resources in the environment. CO2 emission should be stopped no matter how much they pay lawyers and government officials and Congress. And it has to happen globally.

There is certainly enough rope to support (by neck) the ones who need to be supported if they continue to exploit our atmospheric "commons." (First, hang them by the feet to help empty their pockets, then turn 'em over and hang them proper.)

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~tk/climate_dynamics/climate_impact_webpage.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/the-forecast-in-the-streets/#more-518

Take a read of this part of www.realclimate.org, Click "more" to Link to the comments. Read them. Some of you are there in the words of others. You might recognize yourself. If it does not scare you a little, then no one can get through your illusion.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/the-forecast-in-the-streets/#more-518

Age of Consequences? Ah. Yes, I want to hold those to account that continue to expand the global consequences. Stop all the carbon from being used for everything but food. Those found promoting or contributing to the Carbon signature must first be held upside down to empty their pockets, and then hang them right side up.

http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,4154/type,1/

Download and read the report in PDF form here:

http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071105_ageofconsequences.pdf

This Age of Consequences report is a serious and sober attempt to bring in the social scientists, sociologists, and historians to gather a perspective on the coming catastrophe and to examine the the consequences of what we have done and are continuing to allow.

The RealClimate summary analysis points out -- the warming is coming -- it is inevitable -- and it will devastate this once beautifully balanced planet.

I have mentioned here on Xomba, in other postings, that we will have to actually build machines to "inhale" the atmosphere. These will have to be very large machines. Within 10 years of operation -- within ten years of their inhaling and processing of the atmosphere -- these monsters must treat at least one fourth of the total volume of air. The "treatment" is removal of all CO2 in that quarter of the Earth's atmosphere and sequestration of it. Permanently.

We have to accomplish this CO2 removal and sequestration using energy from non-fossil-carbon sources or from sources that do not produce CO2, or that sequester it totally. We cannot allow nor afford to put another molecule of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere, since to do so further exacerbates the Anthropogenic Global Warming which will, if not reversed, end all life as we "know" it on the planet.(1)

Some of you have read my calls for a whole new planetary social system, and for social justice. That is, to get it started, the punishing and removing of people from places and positions that promote the dumping of fossil carbon into the "commons" of our atmosphere. I still make that call. The entire social order will have to be changed to make it possible

More to the point, the "Age of Consequences" uses extremes that aren't nearly as threatening as the real events will be. The table RealClimate reprints from the publication in the "history" chapter provides comparisons from the past scaled to what we can expect in the very near future.

Event --------------- Potential Deaths
Volcanic eruptions ---Tens of thousands (104)
Earthquakes ----------Hundreds of thousands(105)
Floods ---------------Millions(106)
Droughts ------------Tens of millions(107)
Epidemics ------------Hundreds of Millions(108)

The realclimate.org author notes that the horsemen of climate change -- floods, drought, and epidemics, are on the big end of the number of deaths list. There seems to be a missing piece of the apocalyptic parallel -- and you should name it.

Catastrophic Climate Warming looks inevitable. It may not turn out to be inevitable. But it surely will be both inevitable and irreversible if the current track being pursued by world financial institutions and families of wealth, as well as multinational corporate exploitation of the environment continues unabated. And what drives this? Quite simply, population growth without limit.

Are there solutions?

Yes. Better late than never. Every version of p-B11 to fusion must be crash-coursed. Tokamak via ITER is the only one US needs to steer completely away and clear of. Bussard's vision of IEF needs crash development. As does pulsed focus fusion -- and reverse field fusion.

Time is wasting. Lets have accountability.

(1) Certainly some could argue we "know" and are "used to" red-tides, vanishing coral, an open northwest passage and more violent storms, diseases, food shortages, death of many species of wildlife and vanishing sectors of our "recreational lives" -- including seasonal things such as skiing, skin and scuba diving in jellyfish waters, fishing --even in the ocean -- being limited or sports fishing vanishing -- like the trout fishing vanishing in the coming drought of the Western US. These are things that the planet can't get used to or adjust to even if you think you can.

There will be a time when all the money in the world will not buy you food that does not exist, or return your inundated lands. These are things you "know" and can get used to, right?

Okay? Last graphic. This is a terrible graphic from NOAA because it has to be so large to be legible. So I have to place it at the bottom of this posting to show the whole picture, and then it can be wide enough to read and translate the graphical to the geographic where you now live. It shows "government futures" for 401 to 500 years from present. I do not have much faith in that prediction. The top part of the graphic shows doubling CO2 and the bottom model shows quadrupling CO2.

The only faith I would have in the graphics is that they overestimate the ocean's moderation of air temperature; and the models delay the time to reach these temperatures to a much later time in the future than I believe will be the case. That is another subject, a part of which scientists like NASA's James Hansen also debate. One gentleman, Carl Johnson, makes a strong case that the current ~390 ppmv leads to a 25o F. air temperature increase in less than 150 years. I hope this NOAA version is correct, but feel the model they are using relies much too heavily on the ocean's ability to moderate temperature past the point where H2O begins to further warming of the ocean surface. It is a dangerous situation we have forced upon the life of our world.

Image: NOAA, Fluid dynamics lab.

The main reason I have difficulty even getting close to this model is that there is NO hot pacific pool shown -- and there should be -- north and east of Australia along the equator. For me this damages the credibility of the model. In the present, the "warm pacific pool" occasionally launches itself into a water vapor dominated greenhouse runaway, according to NASA researchers.

Do you realize what 20 to 25 degrees higher temperature will do to the world's food supply and animals?