Yeah that reminds me, I should really stop writing in this topic, at least for a while. It's so hard to stop. I'll post again when I've found something interesting. Or shall I perhaps make a summary of the top 10 most convincing articles that I've found?? God, the temptation... no I'll try to resist. This time it's real... at least for a while.

You misunderstood me - I was describing 50 years in the future what you would feel like if you were still moderating this thread. /joke fail.

Ah...so often the case on the Net...;)

If I'm still modding this thread in 50 years it's a safe bet it'd be from the grave....and I'd have long ago gone postal ....;)

Sorry if you did I did skim through some of the earlier pages but not all.

Quote actually on a foot note in one of the sources for thorium information I noticed that their was a line that read: "New Chinese coal power plants are design to be retrofitted to nuclear". I am attempting to locate a verifiable source for that information, however that kind of information is always something that gets lost in the big headlines. Not sure if I will be able to locate it. But currently today China is the leading nation in developing LFTR and recently they have increased their funding for the project over 1 billion. One must suspect they are making headway, in the meantime us in the wast are sitting on the side lines with our hands under our asses while china is getting poised to be the world leader in clean energy.

Recession are built into our economic system, they will happen no matter what because it is what the system is mean'T to do. As for War well we already had our first Energy war with Iraq, if we don't kick our dependence on fossil fuels more are to come. And I dunno if this will make you laugh or if you understand the real threat of it, but soon water wars are looking to be likely soon as well. Some nations are in regions were water is rare are already having border disputes over them, wouldn't take to much to set fire to the powder keg.

I've read that in 2012, global CO2 production was about 34 billion tonnes/year. I think it's metric tonnes (the metric system, using meters and gram as basis).

In Europe and China, the CO2 production per capita is about 7 tonnes/year.

In the USA, the CO2 production per capita is about 20 tonnes/year.

Now... if every one of the 7 billion people on the planet would reach the European level, global production would rise to 49 billion tonnes/year.

But the USA are what most people want to imitate... it has plentiful cheap energy which powers a big prosperous economy. If people want that then we might reach a level global of CO2 production of as much as 140 billion tonnes/year.

So... what do people here think will happen if the global economy inflates to the point that globally we would actually produce 140 billion tonnes of CO2/year ?

(to place things in perspective, the atmosphere contains about 3 trillion tonnes of CO2 at the moment).

Wow, I take some time out to indulge in a bit of climactic research and look what happens... the thread veers off course and the road gets bumpy.

Just as well Jafo smoothed things over... cos I forgot to bring my 'comfort cushion' to soften the impact on my saddle sores.

I'm afraid the cat's lready out of the bag, so to speak.  While the cost would be prohibitive, I don't know that it would even be possible.  Given man's constant rape of the planet, I think it has gone through too many significant changes to be able to accept such an undertaking. 

I recently read of one scientists idea to prevent space junk from falling back to Earth, whereby a space vehicle employs a tractor beam to hook up dozens of pieces of junk and tow them farther out into space.  I'm sort of wondering if a similar idea might not apply to the CO2.  I'm thinking it'd be a lot cheaper than trying to bring it back down.  I mean, how is Mother Earth going to contain all this CO2?  What about leaks?  Hmmm, me thinks it'd be safer towed out into space like the space junk.

Nah, the cost of lifting hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 into space is too much. Every kg of CO2 would be as costly as 1 kg of gold. We don't have that much gold on our poor Earth, or maybe you have some big stash of loot lying around somewhere? 

lasts about a day, it seems.

I'm not so sure about that, given how high in the atmoshere it is.  Up there it would be somewhat lighter... and therefore easier to tow out into space.  Thing is, up or down, it's all theory and will likely never happen

Now here's a thought!  What if we bottled it for gas BBQ's?  True, some of it would end up back in the atmosphere, but burning it off that way would make it less dense, easier to manage.  Yup, recycling it through BBQ gas bottles a few times and it would eventually shrink enough to be enveloped by a hot air balloon and contained permanently

Yes, burning CO2 up until there's nothing left sounds like a marvellous idea.

But perhaps it's better to burn C in the first place, to prevent CO2 even from forming !

I'll stop posting now for a while

Hehe, ain't it just as well they burned witches at the stake and not politicians... otherwise nobody woulda seen the sun, stars, moon, etc, since 1666.

Same probably applies to car salesmen, lawyers and..... don't even think about getting me started on bankers.

Set one of them of fire at yer own peril.

Sorry to intrude again!

I ran the equation a few times.

The equation is written in short:

Energy = 390 + 3 * (5.35 * Math.Log(Concentration / 100) - 5.9) W / m2

390 = reference heat, required for a temperature of 288 K.

3 = climate feedback (water vapor and insulation from clouds)

5.9 = so that the contribution becomes 0 at 300 ppm (you reach reference heat).

The atmosphere has a mass of about 3.16 trillion tonnes at 400 ppm. So you can write:

Mass = (Concentration / 400.0) * 3.16 * 1.0E+15 / 1.0E+12

I've run the equation for several concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

CO2 = 300 ppm; Heat = 390 W / m^2; Temperature = 288 K; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 2370

CO2 = 600 ppm; Heat = 401 W / m^2; Temperature = 290 K; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 4740

CO2 = 1200 ppm; Heat = 412 W / m^2; Temperature = 292 K; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 9480

CO2 = 2400 ppm; Heat = 424 W / m^2; Temperature = 294.1 K; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 18960

CO2 = 4800 ppm; Heat = 435 W / m^2; Temperature = 296 K; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 37920

Mankind puts about 30/2 = 15 billion tonnes of CO2 / year into the atmosphere as of 2012. Producing 1 trillion tonnes takes about 66 years (30 = what's produced, but half goes into the ocean and the other half into the atmosphere).

It's pretty hard producing so much coal, oil and gas every year, humanity seems to be close to the maximum production rate. So in the absence of any shocking new developments that would accelerate the production of CO2 (a possible candidate for this is coal gasification), let's say that this production stays more or less constant in the future. Then we can make a timeline:

2.4 -> 4.7 trillion tonnes takes 152 years. (we are roughly at 30% of this time line)

4.7 -> 9.5 trillion tonnes takes 317 years.

9.5 -> 19 trillion tonnes takes 627 years.

19 -> 38 tillion tonnes takes 1254 years.

Although I doubt humankind can ever produce 37 trillion tonnes of CO2 (that's about 12 trillion tonnes of carbon), there are not enough recoverable reserves... unless there are new developments which gives access to more carbon.

I'll take some comfort in these numbers, that disaster is not imminent, mankind will have a long time to consider the consequences of its actions. Before climate change becomes a very big problem, other types of pollution might already have taken their toll... because the levels of CO2 production required to get a big temperature rise are mind-boggling.

One aspect of CO2 burning is the release of trace amounts of radioactivity. If we'd burn many trillions of tonnes of coal, even trace amounts become significant. (edit: although it's contained in the ashes and aren't lethal levels, so it's mostly a local storage problem).

Sulfur emissions may also become a big problem, as mankind turns to lower and lower quality of coal.

Edit:

The numbers change if we consider a water vapor feedback that increases with increasing temperature. This is what happens if the water-vapor feedback would increase from a factor 2 to 3.

CO2 = 300 ppm; Heat = 390 W / m^2; Temperature = 288 K; Water vapor feedback = 2; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 2370

CO2 = 600 ppm; Heat = 402 W / m^2; Temperature = 290.2 K; Water vapor feedback = 2.18; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 4740

CO2 = 1200 ppm; Heat = 417 W / m^2; Temperature = 292.8 K; Water vapor feedback = 2.405; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 9480

CO2 = 2400 ppm; Heat = 435 W / m^2; Temperature = 296 K; Water vapor feedback = 2.675; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 18960

CO2 = 4800 ppm; Heat = 457 W / m^2; Temperature = 299.6 K; Water vapor feedback = 3.005; CO2 mass (Gigatonnes) = 37920

This may seem exaggerrated, but water vapor pressure more than doubles when temperatures rises 10 degrees.

Of course this asummes that albedo (from clouds) remains constant. It's not know whether there will be more or fewer clouds if temperatures increase.

I wonder about changes of the upper boundary of the atmosphere. The height of the troposphere (where upper clouds form) ranges from about 7 km (during winter at the poles) to about 20 km (in the tropics). How does such a change in the troposphere affect temperatures?

5 days.  I'm impressed.

IT'S A NEW GEOMAN RECORD

Really!  Don't think I've heard that one.  How does it go?

Now this is an interesting article about stellar variability:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2245

You can download the PDF, it's free.

It compares the sun with other sun-like stars to get a statistical constraint on the long-term variation that is possible for our sun. They show how different long-term variations of the sun between 0% to 0.5% would compare to the brightness of other stars.

My interpretation of the article is that the 0.5% long-term variation they show, is more than enough to make the variability of the sun consistent with the observations from other stars.

If we combine this with a 0.4% 11-year variation, we get a total variation of 1% in brightness.

If we add a factor 2 feedback (a factor 3 climate feedback corrected for an albedo of 0.7) then this becomes 2% in terms of total added energy to the climate system.

For the temperature that means a variation of: (root(root(1.02)) - 1) * 288 = 1.4 degrees celcius.

I think this is enough to cause a fairly significant climate change actually... earlier I've stated that the sun is a "constant", but that was somewhat wrong.

What this means for the future... well I dunno. The article mentioned that the long-term variability of the sun seems to be at a max, so the sun will probably mitigate future warming, at least during the next half cycle. But that's highly speculative.

edit: Note that the 11-year variation is dampened by the oceans, which take a long time to heat up and cool down. This would make the variation in global temperature extremes smaller than 1.4 degrees.

You know that time...

When you're at a party and you just keep talking...

and everyone just keeps nodding their head but not really saying anything back....

It is a shame that global warming will not make the sun shine any longer.

For the last 3 days, the skies were cloudy with the occasional shower. I mean... really dark grey clouds, those that block the sun completely. And it's still winter, so the sun is still very weak. It rises after 8 AM and sets before 6 PM... and that's already an improvement over december. And it's cold. It's such gloomy and depressing weather, I hate it.

Who knows, maybe I'll move south one day, in search of my own global warming. Then I can enjoy limitless sunshine and warm weather for the rest of my life.

It never hurts to dream.

You probably provided a link somewhere back showing how it is less cloudy due to global warming...

No, stay where you are.  According to the global warming theorists, you should have unabated and increasing warmth if you stay put.  Just think of it, instead of minus C temps at Xmas, you'll be able to go to the beach and swim... and in Summer you'll be able to save on cooking costs because  global warming 'll mean you can do it on the pavement/road outside.  Best get out yer 200 SPF sunscreen, tho.

Yes... well at least we won't get another ice age. Imho that's worse than a few degrees of warming. Freezing my ass off has never appealed to me, I don't like the cold. And if that means that the Netherlands won't be able to have world-class skaters anymore... so be it. I'll gladly trade them for more sunshine.

You wouldn't say that if you'd had to endure plus 40c heat for days at a time... and when the heatwave is over it's still 38c for another week or so.  At least with the cold you can put on layers of warm clothing.  Once you get down to the barest minimum in the heat.... well there's nowhere else to go.

Yeah man, but it's a dry heat!

Not where I am [Ipswich Qld]!  It is quite humid most of the time, so it's a sticky heat that can become rather uncomfortable, to put it mildly.  That comes with living in a 'river city', I guess.