A 1,000 Years of Gas Stoves: In a Week

 Thanks to the attack from Canada, we now have more harmful chemical reactions in the NY area ever! The smoke combined with UV rays from the summer sun result in a panoply of organic reactions including the explosion of reactive oxygen species, major causes of multiple cancers!

It seems the Canadians cannot even put out a candle no less the massive fires pumping poisonous reactants to our area. Yet we have Albany banning gas stoves while we are sitting in a massive chemical reaction.

Anything good? Yes the earth's albedo just exploded and we are sending UV down and IR up, keep this up and global warming comes to an end and so does all life on the planet. Thanks to that guy with the weird socks in Canada,

Staten Island and Floods

In a New York Review of Books the author states:

Of the three major disasters in New York City in recent memory—September 11, Sandy, and now Covid-19—Sandy had the lowest death toll and is not generally understood to have ushered in a new chapter in the city’s history, as September 11 was and Covid-19 already is. But it was a harbinger of greater disasters to come. It is easy for climate change to be overshadowed by our current crisis, but the two are of a piece, both global crises stemming from our fraught interaction with the natural world. When any action on climate change seems so intractable, stymied by political gridlock or insistence that the economy must come first, it’s startling that such relatively swift and disruptive—if highly imperfect—measures to address Covid-19 have been taken in order to protect public wellbeing. The most obvious explanation for the differing responses to the two crises is that Covid-19’s devastation is more immediate and visible. In New York City, Sandy, as a tangible proxy for climate change, has had a similar mobilizing effect—it has been the motivating factor behind most of the city’s coastal preparedness plans, which, as a result, are farther along than similar efforts in most other American cities.

The fact is that the shore line on Staten Island is one where housing should never have been placed. It is the barrier to the outer harbor and over centuries has been the brunt of many hurricanes. In the early 1950s, while living on Staten Island, I saw first hand the damage to the many home built along South and Midland Beaches from the shore to Hylan Blvd. The land was under water. That should have been a clear warning.

But alas, no. Instead the City made it worse. The City built the road along the water front on an almost twenty feet rise making the homes behind the road now in a basin. When the water would come across the road in a severe storm it would fall into the basis and not be allowed to retreat. The result was a disaster. It was not global warming, climate change, but the abject stupidity of the City in doing what would in effect in my opinion be a death trap.

During the late 50s and early 60s I was a Lifeguard at Midland Beach and Ocean Breeze. I came to understand on an hourly basis the tides and storms, the ebb and flow of the Ocean and the damage it could cause. Designing and implementing roads must take into account the nature of the Ocean movements. It is like the Jersey shore, the outre banks are moving piles of sand, not the solid rock of the Maine coast, and if the land under one's house is continuously moving one must take and accept the risk.

In my opinion Sandy was not a tangible proxy for climate change, It was in my opinion and blatant example of poor engineering and planning. One cannot stop the Ocean, and one cannot assume that putting people on a veritable swimming pool under the right circumstances will have an acceptable outcome.

History and understanding what came before is essential to any form of reasonable planning and implementation. Not everything is due to climate change.

 

Communicating Science

Science can at times be exceedingly complex. At others somewhat simple. Take lung cancer as an example. It took decades to have people know that smoking caused lung cancer. Why? Well in my opinion having lived through the period and never having smoked, it was twofold. The media promoted the habit as something that made one "cool". Second, medical scientists used complex statistical analyses which no one could understand. One could scare people but that did not work. Frankly it required a ready acceptance of DNA and the impact of genetic mutations that allowed many, not all obviously, to see that they got it. Not that they really got it but the paradigm had shifted and once you knew about DNA you had a new paradigm, independent of statistics, to grab hold of.

Needless to say, this also applied to various cancers, almost to an extreme. Patients come in armed with their DNA demanding pre-emptive care. You then have to tell them that germ line DNA and the DNA in a tumor are different but if you have a BRCA mutation your risk is indeed higher. However there may be no reason to look for a BRAF V600 in the excised mole after the pathologist deemed it benign. Yet this current state of affairs demonstrates the taking hold of a real paradigm shift, the double helix, even if the patient understands nothing more than its existence.

The same holds with X rays and excessive use. Likewise, for HIV and its transmission. However if one were to take measles, and other communicable disease preventable by vaccines, one can see a dual paradigm, namely believe they work or believe they are harmful. In this case I suggest the paradigm of immunology and the antibodies is lacking. Most individuals have no clue. Yet perhaps as we see immunotherapy in cancers, we may expect a shift there also.

Now to climate change or whatever the current term is. Carbon dioxide and methane can be shown to retain solar heat as it strikes the earth. That may be a fact but the paradigm for it is lacking. The promulgators tried to use the term "greenhouse gasses" but as a paradigm it has not caught fire.

Let us consider some early work on this topic[1]. The authors note:

Methane (CH4) is the most abundant organic gas in Earth’s atmosphere. .. Since the early 1970s a variety of roles of methane in atmospheric chemistry and climate have been identified. For example, methane affects tropospheric ozone, hydroxyl radicals and carbon monoxide concentrations, stratospheric chlorine and ozone chemistry and, through its infrared properties, Earth’s energy balance…

They continue:

Atmospheric methane exerts influence over Earth’s climate in several different ways, both direct and indirect. The more direct roles involve interaction with planetary infrared radiation, warming Earth’s surface and near-surface atmosphere and cooling the stratosphere, i.e., the roles of an effective greenhouse gas. The most important infrared spectral feature of methane molecules is their 7.66-μm absorption band; quantitative models of the impact of methane’s role in Earth’s energy budget focus on this band. …calculated that the presence of 1.5 ppm of CH4 in the atmosphere causes the globally averaged surface temperature to be about 1.3 K higher than it would be with zero methane and that larger effects would apply to polar latitudes.…have computed the global heating due to an increase of CH4 concentrations from various deduced preindustrial levels to contemporary values and the future heating effects of several methane scenarios. For example, the infrared radiative heating effect of a methane increase from 0.7 ppm (preindustrial revolution) to 1.7 ppm (1988 concentration) is about half as large as the comparable effect of simultaneously increasing C02 from 275 ppm to 345 ppm. Future growth in atmospheric methane concentrations, while not clearly predictable, is likely to contribute more to future climatic change than any other gas except C02. …In the paleoatmosphere of 4.25 billion years ago when the Sun was perhaps 30% less luminous, relatively high concentrations of atmospheric gases such as C02 and CH4 could have served to maintain Earth temperatures above freezing (evidence suggests that Earth was not frozen over) …. Methane concentrations of about 100 ppm could have decreased the amount of C02 required for maintenance of a warm Earth by about a factor of 2 … The direct radiative effect of atmospheric methane also extends into the stratosphere; at altitudes above about 20 km, CH4 molecules act to cool the atmosphere through radiative losses to space. There are also several interesting and potentially important indirect ways that methane can affect climate. One that has not received much attention is that the atmospheric oxidation of CH4 produces CO which is converted further to C02. Methane oxidation produces about 8 x 1014 g CO/yr …. CO molecules survive two to three months on average before conversion to C02 by (R16). In this way, about 0.34 x 1015 g C/yr as C02 is produced globally. By comparison, total human release of C02 due to combustion and cement use is about 5.3 x1015 g C/yr. Thus, we calculate that the atmospheric production of C02 from atmospheric CH4 is about 6% as much as the direct annual release of C02 from anthropogenic sources. Other indirect effects of increasing atmospheric CH4 Eire the chemical production of tropospheric O3 (a greenhouse gas) and increases in tropospheric water vapor. The latter effect is not proven, but it is a common and plausible assumption in climate model sensitivity and a result of some general circulation models that as temperature rises, atmospheric relative humidity will remain rather constant. Accordingly, absolute H20 amounts would increase. In this way the effect of a greenhouse warming from CH4 or other causes leads to an amplification of perhaps 50% due to increased H20 vapor concentrations … Tropospheric O3 increases that can result from CH4 increases in the presence of NO2 … are also able to affect climate, especially if ozone concentrations should increase in the upper troposphere where O3 is a particularly effective greenhouse gas.

 

Needless to say this is not a paradigm. Furthermore, this is one of the better non-paradigms. The issue is simple. The sun sends radiation to the earth, the CO2 and CH4 absorb it and the outer electron levels jump with the increase in energy and they decay converting it to heat, most of which falls down to the earth. Thus these gasses are energy converters, taking one level and turning it into another thus increasing temperature. Secondly when the heat is reradiated outward it is reduced again by these molecules which absorb and reflect back in a somewhat endless process. There is a little quantum mechanics here but at high school  level.

Now along come the teenagers. As Nature notes[2]:

As each of the UN conventions faces continuing challenges, the IPCC can at least be assured of support from the next generation. It has garnered a following among the growing international youth climate movement. Members keenly absorb every new report, including participants in the school strike for climate, led by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg makes a point of namechecking the IPCC and quoting paragraph and page numbers in speeches, as she did in an address to the French parliament at the end of last month. As government delegates get ready for Delhi, Nairobi and New York, they must prepare to answer why, if children can understand the meaning of the IPCC assessments, adults cannot do the same? The youth climate movement’s members are brave, and they are right. It has been almost three decades since the three UN conventions — on biodiversity, climate and desertification — were agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. And it has been 31 years since the IPCC was created to advise decision makers. Yet environmental promises have not been matched by meaningful action. Younger generations know, perhaps better than the adults, that the world might not have another three decades to prevent climate impacts that will be even more serious than those we face now. Politicians must act now.

Politically, when one has a group of uneducated children evoking politically pontificated pronouncements the masses will rebel. If, however, you had a simple and understandable paradigm you can win. The paradigm; why ae roses red? Simple, the white light is reflected off the leaf and everything but red is absorbed so what we see reflected is red. Why is the earth getting warmer? Simple, we have CO2 and CH4 absorbing light from the sun and converting it to infrared for warming and then blocking it from leaving.

If one can get the simple paradigm across then most people can understand and respond. The solution then is the reduction of these gasses via technology not politics. Unlike Nature, younger generations really do not "know" since it is most likely they have not been taught.

The challenge is for Scientists to explain simply and correctly, give people paradigms to hold on to. People like good paradigms. Scientists should not try to explain as if we must understand every detail. Furthermore, Government reports all too often miss everything trying to be totally inclusive of every "good" idea. To paraphrase Amadeus, "too many words".

---

[1] BIO GEO CHEMICAL ASPECTS OF ATMOSPHERIC METHANE, R. J. Cicerone, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado and R. S. Oremland, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Vol. 2, No. 4, Pages 299-327, December 1988

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02425-7

Ask your Mechanic About that Melanoma

A typical Public Radio piece on climate change etc notes:

When ... arrives for a checkup with his lung specialist, he's worried about how his body will cope with the heat and humidity of a Boston summer. "I lived in Florida for 14 years and I moved back because the humidity was just too much," ... tells pulmonologist ..., as he settles into an exam room chair at a ...HealthCare clinic. ..., who is 57, has COPD, a progressive lung disease that can be exacerbated by heat and humidity. Even inside a comfortable, climate-controlled room, his oxygen levels worry .... ... reluctantly agrees to try using portable oxygen. He's resigned to wearing the clear plastic tubes looped over his ears and inserted in his nostrils. He assures ...he has an air conditioner and will stay inside on really hot days. The doctor and patient agree that ...should take his walks in the evenings to be sure that he gets enough exercise without overheating. Then ... turns to ... with a question she didn't encounter in medical school: "Can I ask you: Last summer, why was it so hot?" ..., who studies air pollution, is ready.

It continues:

Yes,"... nods, "because of global warming, the plants are flowering earlier in the spring. After hot summers, the trees are releasing more pollen the following season. And the ragweed — it's extending longer into the fall."

 Now I respect my medical colleagues but medicine is not climatology. In fact the two are so far apart one cannot imagine. Now for the plant side, this is a bit uncertain. I keep records for New Jersey and New Hampshire for 35 years with a set of sentinel plants. So as an empiricist I must deal with the facts, what I see and measure. Not really clear and this year my sentinel plants bloomed two week later!

Now as to giving climate advice to patients, getting patients to understand what one tells them about their health is difficult enough but unqualified anecdotes on top of this is just nonsense in my opinion.

So my advice is stick with what you know, empirically! Beware of that rational stuff, except in pure math.

Trees

A recent paper in The Scientist notes that trees can rid us of a significant amount of CO2. No real news there. I have a tree density of in excess of 150 trees per acre. That is in New Jersey. Unfortunately neighbors have removed almost all trees in favor of grass, the lawn type.

The article notes:

Not counting agricultural areas, cities, and existing forests, the globe can accommodate an additional 0.9 billion hectares of forest, the study found. That much forest area, if allowed to mature, could result in the storage of an estimated 205 gigatons of carbon, or about two-thirds of the carbon that humans have added to the atmosphere since the 1800.....Thomas Crowther, who led the study, tells the Associated Press, adding that it’s also the most effective solution available. “Forests represent one of our biggest natural allies against climate change,” ....., a carbon storage researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA who was not involved in the research, tells Science, adding that “this is an admittedly simplified analysis of the carbon restored forests might capture, and we shouldn’t take it as gospel.”

 I could not agree more. I grow ginkgo trees, have 40+ seedlings set out this year alone. Ginkgo trees absorb an excess of any other tree, they came into existence when CO2 was much higher. We should probably aggressively enforce the tree laws in our towns, keeping trees and strongly penalizing the folks who cut them down.

Holy Cow!

Yes, I know it's a bull, but pretend. Now Science has an article on methane from cows and the putative increase in global temperatures. OK, first here is a cow.

The article states:

In 2007, the amount of methane in the atmosphere (CH4) began to rise after a 7-year period of near-zero growth. Recent research shows that a second step change occurred in 2014. ...Yet, between 2007 and 2014, the amount has risen by an average of 5.7 parts per billion (ppb) per year, and by an average of 9.7 ppb per year since 2014. If this rise continues unabated, cuts to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will need to be even steeper to achieve the Paris goal.

Yep, the cows keep doing what cows do and swamps keep doing what swamps do and we get worse and worse. Humans must cease using any carbon bit even that may not help! But the article has statements like:

While the scientific community continues to debate the causes of the CH4 surge, the consequences are clear. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C assume that the amount of CH4 in the atmosphere will decrease by 35% between 2010 and 2050.

Namely there is really no consensus. They also note:

The causes for the recent rise in atmospheric CH4 remain a subject of scientific debate, even for the initial period of increase from 2007 to 2014. Process-based estimates of CH4 emissions from inventory data, wetland models, and other information offer conflicting explanations, but measurements of the distribution of CH4 in the atmosphere and its 13C/12C isotopic ratio at a global network of stations hold clues.

Let's see. We don't know and the data is conflicting. Yep, real science here, no need to check. They continue:

Biogenic emissions mainly come from wetlands and agriculture, particularly ruminant livestock. Multimodel wetland studies do not confirm an emission increase since 2007. However, livestock inventories show that ruminant emissions began to rise steeply around 2002 and can account for about half of the CH4 increase since 2007. CH4 is destroyed in the atmosphere by reaction with hydroxyl radicals (OH) and other atmospheric constituents. Reduced chemical destruction of CH4 could both increase atmospheric CH4 and decrease its proportion of 13C. Actual OH changes over the past years are controversial, as is the role of sinks in global inversion studies.

Now let me try to simplify. The methane levels are increasing. The increases are not man made but come from decaying biomasses and cows. We think. There is nothing we can do here. CO2 is the other gas and we allegedly generate that so there is something we can do there. But it may not be enough, we don't know but Governments should mandate this.

Holy Cow, Batman, the Logic is compelling!

Economists are Not Technologists

Carbon emissions, carbon dioxide, methane etc, are technical facts. The impact on the climate is also a technical fact, with some degree of uncertainty, but put that aside for the moment. How does one solve this problem? One would assume with additional technical means. Lee carbon intensive production, carbon capture, and the list goes on. Input, less output equals net accumulation.

Now economists are always at taxing problems out of existence. But reality seems to show otherwise. Let's consider a simple example. If the workforce at Harvard, the real workers doing such things as cleaning and cooking, not thinking stuff, commute from afar, and thus produce carbon emissions, will taxing them reduce emissions? Only if you terminate them and have the other folks clean up after themselves. How can taxing reduce emissions when demand is essentially inelastic? I think that is something from economics.

The only solution is technical. Really.

But NY Times writers again note:

...people use too much dirty energy because they don’t have to pay the true costs it imposes on the world: pollution-related health problems in the short term and climate change in the long term. Economists refer to these costs as externalities, because they are not naturally part of the market system. “We have a climate problem,” ..., “because markets fail, and fail badly, in the energy sector.” The only solution, he argued, was for governments to raise the price of emissions. Economists and other policy experts have long focused on this idea of carbon pricing. It can take the form of a carbon tax, ... Or the pricing can be embedded in a system of permits known as cap-and-trade, as President Barack Obama and other Democrats proposed in their 2009 bill to address climate change. Either way, the underlying concept is simple. When a product becomes more expensive, people use less of it. Carbon pricing is an elegant mechanism by which market economics can work on behalf of the climate rather than against it.

Just collecting more taxes from the people who can afford it the least is not the answer. We have the answer but the problem is economists and not carbon.

Now the most, in my opinion, shameful of all the ones I have seen so far is the MIT presentation of an economist bemoaning climate change. They note:

As dire as those scenarios seem, Stern also expressed some optimism, saying that policymakers are now much more likely to believe that we can can combine continued economic growth with zero-emissions technology — a change from common views expressed at, say, the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen. “What we’ve seen I think in the last five years or so is a change of understanding of the policy toward climate change,” Stern said, “from ‘How much growth do we have to give up to be more responsible and sustainable?’ to ‘How can we find a form of growth that’s different and sustainable?’” However, he warned, a world with a net of zero carbon dioxide emissions within a few decades will be absolutely necessary for society to maintain its current form. “The net zero is fundamental,” Stern said. “That’s not some strange economist’s aspiration. The net zero is the science. If you want to stabilize temperatures, you’re going to have to stabilize concentrations. Stabilizing concentrations means net zero.”

Again it is the economist bemoaning something that the technologists can mitigate. But alas no technologist saying what can be done. Net zero carbon dioxide means just what? Plants consume this essential nutrient, do we kill off all plants, my backyard would be in revolt. 

More Taxes

I guess economists really have no idea as to technology. They just have a hammer and everything is a nail. The hammer is taxes.

One of the left wing economists is talking about that deal being pushed about. He says:

Bottom line: Forget all the MMT hocus-pocus. Any major new spending program will be paid for with conventional taxes, preferably right now. And the opportunity cost will be lower private spending. That’s not to say that all proposals for new government spending are unjustified. But in the case of global warming we don’t need more spending; we need more carbon taxes. K.I.S.S.

Yep, that's it folks. Just tax, tax, tax, and it will solve everything.

We can tax people with cancer, it will cure it, we can tax the poor, it will make them rich, we can tax, well you get the point.

If it is a technology problem, that carbon stuff, the solution is a technical solution. We have dozens. Taxing will not solve the problem. Implementing the technology, improving it, enhancing it, enabling it, will solve the problem. Hammer, hammer, hammer. Try a test tube.

You Can't Make This Up

From the National Post we have the following:

The voracious use of toilet paper in the United States — with the average American using almost three rolls each week and major manufacturers spurning alternative fibres — is destroying Canada’s forests and causing widespread environmental damage, two international environmental groups say. A report on tissue paper use gave failing grades to the leading toilet paper, tissue and paper towel brands for using only virgin fibre pulp, mostly from Canada’s old boreal forests. “Forests are too vital to flush away,” says the report, called The Issue With Tissue, released Wednesday by Natural Resources Defense Council and Stand.earth, international nonprofit environmental organizations that cooperated on the study.

Yep, back to the old sandpaper material I remember from the Navy. This is part of the Green New Deal stuff we are hearing about. How about the bucket and left hand routine, corn cobs, oak leaves?

What I do not understand is that trees are plants. In fact I have in process some 72 Ginkgo seedlings which are to be transported to New Hampshire next year for my tree farm. Yes, I may not live to see their full growth, takes 300-400 years, but those trees outlive Hiroshima! Try a wipe on that paper!

Now tree farms are everywhere. It takes about 30 years to get a mature white pine suitable for harvesting. That is in New England. Now there are millions of acres and each tree needs just a small fraction for maturity, some 1,000 square feet. Thus 40 trees per acre for good growth. Play the math, it works, most of northern Maine is covered this way, not to mention much of Canada.

So plants have been farmed by humans now for well over 10,000 years and we are pretty good at t. I guess, except for TP! Oh Canada!

And the Economists Keep Rolling On!

The Worthwhile Canadian Initiative site lay forth the most obfuscated discussion of carbon tax ever. Some of the folks there are not bad but there is not an engineer in the batch. Folks, it is a technology problem, not an economics problem. Tax Cancer, Tax War, Tax Poverty, just keep using your tax "hammer" and all we do is annoy people and enrich the politicians.

This problem is readily solved with technology. We solved yellow fever and so too can we solve this.

God, let us pray that the economists somehow disappear. Please dear Lord!

And in a Technology Review article, hardly a technology rich rag in my opinion, an author risks being ostracized by stating:
 
That suggests the entire nation should run on wind, solar, and maybe some geothermal electricity. It’s an absurd strategy for rapidly and affordably reaching the low-to-no-carbon energy system required to limit the threat of climate change. Everything we know from recent research indicates that nuclear, carbon capture, and hydropower are essential, and that carbon pricing could be among the most powerful tools for driving the transformation.

At least this is a start.

If All You Have is a Hammer....

Here they go again: (supported by those Harvard folks)

I. A carbon tax offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary. By correcting a well-known market failure, a carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future. II. A carbon tax should increase every year until emissions reductions goals are met and be revenue neutral to avoid debates over the size of government. A consistently rising carbon price will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development. It will also accelerate the diffusion of carbon-efficient goods and services. III. A sufficiently robust and gradually rising carbon tax will replace the need for various carbon regulations that are less efficient. Substituting a price signal for cumbersome regulations will promote economic growth and provide the regulatory certainty companies need for long- term investment in clean-energy alternatives. IV. To prevent carbon leakage and to protect U.S. competitiveness, a border carbon adjustment system should be established. This system would enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their global competitors. It would also create an incentive for other nations to adopt similar carbon pricing. V. To maximize the fairness and political viability of a rising carbon tax, all the revenue should be returned directly to U.S. citizens through equal lump-sum rebates. The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially by receiving more in “carbon dividends” than they pay in increased energy prices.

Now just think.

I. There is no real evidence that taxing reduces anything. Especially if demand is inelastic. Please consider your cleaning staff dear Harvard. There is a great deal of evidence that technology solves this problem. Again, not something any economist seems to grasp.

II. So keep taxing until we drive down the poor folks who cannot afford it. Truly beastly.

III Now you folks are talking about our Government. They never saw anything they cannot regulate. Starting with the Whiskey Rebellion!

IV I thought these folks were against tariffs. Enough said here.

V The Government giving back! What iota of evidence do we have here. At best it is income redistribution.

And my poor grandson is studying economics! This whole proposal makes no sense, at least from a real world perspective.

The Chinese will solve this while we are taxing our civilization out of existence. Where is Marx when we need him?

Now imagine if we applied this theory to say cancer. Cancer is bad. We want to eradicate cancer. So tax every person who gets cancer, if they get sicker, raise the taxes, if they die, confiscate all they have left.

Will that cure cancer? What do you think. Remember, do not ask an economist! 

And one more thing, the above Manifesto reminds me of the many that were produced by the Marxists during the turn of the last century. Guess some folks never learn.