Nuclear Storm Gathers as Climate Change Experts Meet

Much as I have mixed feelings on nuclear power, as in good when controlled properly - who you gonna trust?, it has to be said that France has one of the lowest carbon footprints of any developed country, largely due to the nuclear industry.

France uses over 90% Nuclear power with a proven safety record. THEY have led the world in Commercial Nuclear power. I agree, a company I know of is working with a French company on plans to do commercial n. power. I have to say, after the accidents in 3 mile and Chernobyl, they have made them meltdown proof, now the fuel disperses heat so well that even if all the safety devices failed, it would not overheat or at least in advanced boiler reactors it does. The thing with other countries is only because they do not want inspectors in there. Yes the U.S. is working with many nations on trading technology and fuel but it is an international cooperation with several nations. Iran and North Korea want to be all secretive about it.

I think that to form an agreement on this that there should be representatives from every involved nation. These leaders must not be able to be persuaded by bribery. When any power plant needs refueling, this team of international inspectors goes in to replace the fuel and to dispose of the old fuel. Everyone knows what is going on, no country is left to wonder if there are nuclear weapons being made. The fuel should be made in one place or by one group only and have representatives of All nations involved so that no country can get it without everyone knowing. I think that every place that does nuclear anything for commercial power should have a mixed group of international reps. watching so there is no mix up as to who is doing what. If a country makes a nuclear something without the correct process in place they should blow it up or disable it safely somehow.

All of this Iran Korea crap is because they don't want anyone watching what they are doing. If it was for power use only and for peaceful purposes they shouldn't have a problem with inspections. That tells you they're up to something right there. Much safer than it used to be. The spent fuel cannot even be used for terrorist purposes because at least in the states, it gets mixed with molten glass and put into a 4 foot thick lead vault that is hundreds of feet in the ground. If a malicious person ever opened it, it would kill them.

The global warming hoax was started by the nuclear industry in the UK trying to combat the power of the coal unions. Mrs Thather was ironically the author of the hoax, which has been taken over by the Gore left. There are some poeple who stand to profit massively if nuclear power starts up in the usa and elsewhere. The price of Uranium shot up over 10-100 times recently due in part to the GW hoax. A few options on Uranium could make you very rich. Maybe we should ship some of these nuke plants to Mars to stop the GW on Mars.

To my opinion there is a global warming. For a huge part of humans it is quite difficult to accept that we all are to blame.

I admit, it's much easier to deny than to admit and start doing something. Take it from the other side, grace to Gore you can start a nice "green" business and get rich.

Or why do you think that some oil companies are also busy in the alternative energy domain: to have a solution in their portfolio when the last drop leaves the wells.

For the companies working and earning money in the nuclear world it is quite comprehensible to find new opportunities to sell their stuff.

you will not hear me supporting Nuclear energy as the one solution, but I need to admit that regards exhausts they are way cleaner than coal fired versions.

Right on Gwen....thanks.

I read once that a standard coal fired power station emits more radioactivity per day than a nuclear facility of a similar power does in 3 years (assuming no accidents!)

I would submit that an oil fired power station is probably similar.

People forget that in coal and other minerals there is always low level radiation and when one regards the huge amounts of coal or oil being burnt, that the statement above is actually true....

I see no future without nuclear energy unless we are all willing to go back to the dark ages....

I do hope that wind, Sun & Tidal energy systems can be increased and improved too....

People also forget the enormous amounts of fossil fuel required to build and run the plants, and mine, enrich, fabricate, and transport nuclear fuel - typical of the industry's campaign of misdirection promoting nuclear power as "green," because the reactor containment building itself emits no carbon. Ho ho. Look at the entire fuel cycle and realize that commercial nuclear power will not survive beyond our era of cheap and abundant fossil fuel, special treatment, and lavish government subsidies.

Realize also that according to the Department of Energy the US today imports over 60% of its enriched reactor fuel - about the same proportion as imported oil - and that the price has gone from under $5 to around $70 a pound in the last 5 years. Noone has organized a cartel, yet, but we are already vulnerable to OPEC- style disruptions of price and supply; if the nuclear industry increases the mumber of reactors as projected, operational, health, and security risks, and collateral environmental damage from fuel wrangling will increase proportionately. And if that's not enough, there are the risks that go with fuel reprocessing.

Just say no. It is self-destructive and not rational to invest so much in a fragile and dirty technology that leaves us so vunlerable to so many forms of internal and external manipulation. Conserve first, while investing in technologies to clean up curerent energy sources, then push renewable power.

I have heard that sometime in the next 10 years that Fusion should be a viable alternative....is this just wishful thinking on my part or do you CR4 people hold out such a hope too?

We hold out hope!...........hope?

It's been 10 years out for the last forty years, I'm afraid.

www.areva.com Here an interesting company. #1 Commercial producer in the world and leader from start to finish. They mine it, they build it, they start it, they refuel it, they bury and contain it. Very good reputation too!

first hand knowledge: There is a lot of natural gas, argon, electricity powered by natural gas, grinding, welding, sanding etc. The argon was on the planet before they bottled it for welding use.

It takes a lot to build one yes, but I can guarantee that it is less than what it takes to manufacture the boats and Ships that Greenpeace uses to police the whaling industry. What else are you supposed to use...sticks? Look I also support the renewable resources we are working on but they are not advanced enough to be cost efficient and the companies building them will be charging out the ass for the power to absorb the construction and research costs. The greatest renewable resource I know of to date is the 3 gorges dam project in china, it is going to produce what 10 or 12 nuclear plants would. There are approximately 12--460 ton power units being placed in it. this thing is going to put out a huge amount.

This is what we have right now that we can use. Areva has done the research and when the world shut down the future of nuclear power 30 years ago, Areva kept working to make it a safe and efficient technology. I think its better than trying to store gas in the ground, one quake and it's going to burp back out. The initial cost of nuclear is a lot but once it's up and running a while your not going to pay to build it again. The worst thing we can do is nothing. What we need to do is find out how to make a useful energy out of criticism and procrastination.

If I could afford it I'd buy some skylights and solar panels for my house,I'm wanting some. I'd prefer to be self sufficient, but a good portion of my paycheck is paying for someone to get their ass wiped, someone that doesn't feel like working, and someone who jumped the fence to America to work for a farmer and get my free healthcare,someone that's to dumb to use a condom five times, and to police a region of the world that has never gotten along with anyone.

Coal fired power plants are also one of the main sources of mercury in the environment.

If you wish to have anybody pay the slightest attention to you statements then I suggest you register and log in rather than posting things like this anonymously.

Could it be your embarrassed to put your name to what you are saying?

G'day mate, how's the Oz water shortage effecting you guys? Global warming not an actuality? It must be warm with your head stuck up yer bum. I agree with the anonymous thing, by the way.

Gidday

"G'day mate, how's the Oz water shortage effecting you guys? "

We have had some heavy rains of recent but they have all been confined to within about 15 Km of the coast so the catchments have received precious little. The large population centres are on water restrictions and the government has cancelled all the irrigation allowances in the Murray Darling basin. That is going to severely restrict agriculture and the production of food. The current wheat crop is down dramatically and some farmers are not even planting any more.

The water levels in the Snowy Mountains Scheme have only ever been this low when the scheme was being constructed and the reservoirs were actually starting to fill with water. They are anticipating that they will need to start shutting down hydroelectric power generation in the not too distant future.

Whilst things havn't got any worse over the last few weeks but they havn't improved either and the drought is just as bad as ever.

So the rain is down there (or should I say up?)

Can you send some of it back to us. It hasn't rained for almost 40 day's now.

Water levels all over the alpine regions are very low, in some parts it has hardly snowed this year.

Mayby if we call it a hoax it might start raining again? Denial as problem solving technique.

Brilliant! A new user group, Denial of Problem -I've even got an Icon for it.

It seems you don't like the religion of earth-worship challenged. Personal attacks from either side are not useful to either side.

Globally, there are places drier than normal, and places wetter than normal; places hotter than normal, and places cooler than normal. Yes, there may be a trend in one direction or another. But that trend can be changed depending on how long a set of data you are dealing with. There have allegedly been times in history warmer than today in the absence of coal fired power-plants or SUV's, believe it or not.

-Andrew

Exactly, global warming is happening, the only question is how much we are contributing, and there will be no agreement on this issue until it's to late. So are you going to say 'well, I don't think we are responsible, but I think we should act responsibly', or are you going to do the equivalent of throwing your crap over the nearest hedge and pretend it's alright. Put in those terms, I believe your moral duty is clear.

Well, I don't think we are responsible, but we should be good stewards of what we have been given. Our differences occur in our definitions of "good stewards."

"Globally, there are places drier than normal, and places wetter than normal; places hotter than normal, and places cooler than normal. Yes, there may be a trend in one direction or another."

Most of what you have said is only partially true and you will find that the places that are hotter outnumber the cooler ones considerably.

The problem is not that the earth is in a state of change but rather the rate that the current changes are taking place. Climates, weather patterns, ocean currents and seal levels have never been stable over the entire history of the Earth. However, all the evidence points to all the previous changes taking place of millennia not the decades we are currently see the changes take place over.

The fact that things are happening a couple of orders of magnitude faster than nature has produced over the last several billion years is the worrying point. If nature never caused changes as rapid as we are now seeing, in the previous 4 billion years, why would it suddenly change now? The only answer is that we must have done something to change the status quo and upset the mechanisms that had hither too governed these things.

I agree that the pace of change has increased dramatically since the industrial age began. I think the problem with many doubters is the difficulty comprehending the contribution of CO2 production has relative to the volume of the atmosphere. I was thinking recently about how one might show how the quantity of CO2 emissions released each year, or over the decades of the industrial age relate to what most still view as unlimited atmospheric space.

For example, CO2 emissions are always stated in tons per whatever unit. When I think of a ton, and here I am assuming that I am typical, I envision something heavy, like a car, or a pile of earth. Pretty small compared to the entire atmosphere. But one ton of CO2, at, what is it 36 grams/mole, represents a LOT of molecules. In fact, it's enough molecules relative to the atmosphere to measurably change CO2 concentrations.

If the scientific community could convey the enormous volume that CO2 emissions occupy in relation to the volume of the atmosphere, even at STP, the impact of pumping millions of tons of this gas into our atmosphere every year for decades might make more sense to the average person who views our atmosphere as one humongous (not technically speaking) volume that we could never effect with some gas emissions.

I don't have the background for this, but could one of the many qualified contributors to CR4 calculate the volume that one ton of CO2 might occupy?

I don't have the background for this, but could one of the many qualified contributors to CR4 calculate the volume that one ton of CO2 might occupy?

No problems. CO₂ has a density of 1.98 Kgm^-3 at Standard Temperature and Pressure so

1,000 Kg ÷ 1.98 = 505 m³

So there you have it a tonne of CO₂ takes up at least 505 cubic meters at sea level which is roughly the volume or air in a reasonably large family home.

An interesting point to note is that CO₂ is considerably denser that the atmosphere on average which has a average density of 1.2 Kgm^-3 at sea level.

Guest, you are a bit to much focussed on the CO₂ issue: CO₂ is just a way of explaining the world that our actual industrial system invoke a lot of harm to the environment. There are other gasses that have way more influence than CO₂, methane (CH₄) is an example. The amount of spoiled CH₄ is also huge.

Changing the fuels from fossile base to renewables would benefit the complete environment, as these fuels are more expensive people will think twice before driving next town as the bread there is slightly better. Reducing the exhaust of vehicles, industry and houses benefits everyone. Reducing the oil usage would make it available for a much longer period.

Do you follow the discussions that Masu starts each week?

Thank you Masu. And for others, i agree global warming invovles other factors, but my question was aimed more at conveying difficult factual information to the general public.

For example, the US Energy Information Adminstration reported in Novemer 06 that the the estimated U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2003 (including nonfuel uses of fossil fuels) totaled 5,800 million metric tons (MMTCO₂) and that total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions for the world in 2003 are estimated at 25,033 MMTCO₂. Based on Maus's estimate, in 2003 alone, the world released enough CO2 to completely fill over 25 million homes!

Now that's a number the public can relate to.

in 2003 alone, the world released enough CO₂ to completely fill over 25 million homes!

Actually it is a lot worse than that because 23,000 MMT is 23,000,000,000 tonnes of CO₂ and that 23 Billion homes or about 4 homes worth for every person on earth.

Pretty frightening eh!

It's not as simple as looking at the rate we are producing the stuff as it is all part of the carbon cycle which is dynamic and the carbon dioxide doesn't stay it the atmosphere but it removed through numerous paths. The functions are also not linear and to analyze the effect or releasing vast quantities of CO₂ is extremely complex and open to interpretation.

"the problem with many doubters"

Why is it that when this particular theory of man-induced global warming is questioned, the questioning parties are labeled "doubters?" Aren't scientists supposed to ask questions? Some famous and much-maligned (in their time) doubters include people who proved that the earth was round, and that we revolve around the sun, just to name a couple off the top of my head. I'm in good company if I question the current "scientific consensus."

"4 billion years," i dont think soooo.

Off by a significant factor:

Silurian was the last great environmental change- about 417-443 million years ago, thats less than half a billion, not 4 billion years ago.

The Silurian was a time when the Earth underwent considerable changes that had important repercussions for the environment and life within it. The Silurian witnessed a relative stabilization of the earth's general climate, ending the previous pattern of erratic climatic fluctuations. One result of these changes was the melting of large glacial formations. This contributed to a substantial rise in the levels of the major seas. this gave us Coral reefs made their first appearance during this time, Which absorbed much Co2 and also launched a flurry of fish evolution and the Silurian was also a remarkable time in the evolution of fishes. 3.5 billion is a significant error.

"The only answer is.." is not the only answer, but it is the only answer that is recieving any attention these days. Just like the corpuscular theory of light inthe days of Fresnel...

The anthropogenic arrogance is not becoming to open, honest inquiry.

New Litmus test for thinkers: Did mankind do it?- yes ok you can talk now, no, your head is up your ...

Jeez, Soviet era Lysenkoism at its finest. right here and now.

I, too, Agree with your comment about non signed in posts, and agree with the guest about the intolerance of all the Gaia worshippers passing off their leftest pagan theology as settled science and denigrating inquirers with ad hominem attacks.And graphics to illustrate the attacks. So much for free inquiry here, folks, just conform to the leftist pagan paradigm and all will be fine...

milo

Hi Milo,

While 4 billion years if an exaggeration for a stable atmosphere it is about the age of the earth and when you see temperature changes that are measured in degrees per century they a catastrophically large when compared to any change that would have taken place during the 4 billion history of the Earth.

I have been thinking about when the earth could have during its history, ever have had temperature changes greater than we are currently seeing. The only instances I can think of would be mega volcanic eruptions and the impact of large asteroids or comets both of which would have caused a net lowering of the earths temperature than a rise. After these cataclysmic events there may have been periods that showed rapid rises in temperatures but it would all depend on how rapidly the system could recover.

Can anybody think of any reason that the earths temperature would have changed at rates in the order of degrees per century any time in its four billion year history?

Dinosaurs flatulance? Before they where killed of for Dino Burger's?

I respectfully suggest that you take a geology class. And a upper level ecology class, taught as a lab science, not as a political action session. Actually the earth warmed by several degrees as the americas were being colonized by Europeans. I was taught that we came out of a little ice age at that time...Now that the GAIA worshippers have hijacked climatology, that interpretation is no longer P.C. But it was official 'science' and on display at the Smithsonian as late as the late 1980's.

Precession.(Planetary wobble.)

Absorption of energy by newly emergent life forms to power their chemical reactions. Change in planetary albedo as life forms increased coverage of planetary surface.

Change of the atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing as a result of the O2 released by the newly emergent life forms.

The planet never has been steady state, and trying to get the mass of humanity to understand geological time (and processes) is like asking a hummingbird to tell us about about centuries.

milo

I totally agree that there have been times in the past (before man) where there was abnormal heating or cooling. And this could be just one of those... However, it seems a little more than a coincidence that this particular warming trend syncs up with man's unbridled greenhouse gas emissions. From what I've read, there's not much we can do about it now because once nature is affected to a particular point, nature itself goes into greenhouse gas production overload - for example, the methane from melting tundra.

At the same time, I do not believe crude is worth anywhere near it's current price. I think we're getting spanked by OPEC because of GWB's foreign policy. And the Bush administration is doing a great job of keeping OPEC sentiments out of the US news.

Besides all this, coal really sucks! For no other reason than it's one of our major sources of mercury in the environment. On the other hand, what is more self-sustaining than a breeder reactor? Fuel it once, and you're good to go. Furthermore, there have been some real advancements in low-danger and low-cost nuke plants, such as the hibachi design.

I think it's a given among most scientists that global warming is happening, no matter what the cause. On the other hand, solar, wind, tide, and even nuclear power are all starting to come of age. Whether you think it's hot or not, I'd really like to just leave coal where it is, stop using it, and turn to all the other possibilities.

* The last "Mini Ice Age" was merely 15 thousands years ago, roughly the 'Clovis' era, which is in geological terms, practically yesterday. It progressed to full-effect in just a couple hundred years, not even thousands. The causes may vary from unbalanced release of 'winter-effect' (IR reflecting) gases into the atmosphere, to abnormal global wind-regime.

A tinier "Mini-Ice-Age" happened even more recent in the middle ages.

The drag about an 'ice-age' is that once more ice is present at the poles, and migrating south and north, the more reflective the earth surface is in general, so 'ice-ages' tend to become self-propagated, and all it takes is to tip the temperature balance, a little tiny bit.

I have it fullsize somewhere.

while parts of the world may be receiving less precipitation than usual, the Canadian Rockies have one of the deepest snow packs in years. Your perspective is simply a variable of where you live. :)

Having lived the best part of 4 years in submarines within 150 ft of a nuclear reactor able to power a community, I can attest that properly designed nuclear power is probably safer than most other power sources. My largest exposure was registered in error when I forgot to take the monitoring device off my belt before getting a dental x-ray! Every other reading was lower than background on the beach. New design reactors are even safer and some new designs will "burn" rad waste from other reactors. Aside from the criminally bad design of Cherynoble which caused as much damage as fallout from a primative atomic weapon, the hysteria over nuclear power has no grounding in reality. If we were to do an safety impact study on fire, automobiles, and nuclear power, which would post the most casualties? If burning our atmosphere is a cause for concern, then nuclear power is a clear alternative.

Hi DaveMeador,

It's not the reactors that are the worry it is the waste they produce ant the fact that to date there is no effective way to get rid of it or render it stable enough to be left unattended.

It is incredibly naïve of us to think we can look after this stuff and monitor it for hundreds of times as long as any sort of technical society has existed to date.

What would happen if for some unforeseen reason we were unable to monitor and look after this highly dangerous stuff some time in the future?

I agree that there is a use for nuclear reactors and submarines is a place where there is no other practical solution but until we have a well established way of safely disposing of the waste generated by these reactors we should use them only where there is no other alternative.

Masu--

You are making the assumption that the nuclear waste problem that we have now will never be solved. It will never be solved if we never try because we are convinced that it will never be solved. See Lord Kelvin quote. A quick google search shows a lot of new approaches. More will follow as we gain experience and competence. Even fusion has radioactivity problems: the containment vessels get very radioactive from the high neutron flux from the fusion process. There are always problems and engineers have a good track record of solving them.

Dave Meador

"There is no effective way to get rid of it or render it stable enough to be left unattended"

That sounds like a pretty big problem...

The facts are that all the waste from Commercial power nuclear programs would fit in the first 80 yards of a US football field. thats an area of 4756m^2; See slide 17 here

http://iweb.tms.org/NM/FrP-NM-0705-2.pdf

On a planet of 7.1X10^22 m2 total surface area, certainly we can find a place to sequester this stuff...

But that calls for engineering. And there is no political will to do this.

So we will watch our economies wind down due to the fears of those that value beaver dams over people dams.

milo

"The facts are that all the waste from Commercial power nuclear programs would fit in the first 80 yards of a US football field."

Do that and you will have the biggest nuclear accident that could possibly imagine. Storing the spent nuclear fuel in such a small area would create an out of control chain reaction and a catastrophic melt down.

You cant just dump this stuff and think it will look after itself for the next half a billion years, it needs constant monitoring, heavy shielding, separation to stop it form starting a further chain reaction and total and complete isolation from the biosphere.

It also doesn't take into account the contaminated material that goes with handling the high level radioactive waste.

Plutonium is one to the most toxic substances known to man and if any gets into the biosphere it will almost certainly cause premature deaths.

Yes there are places where nuclear fission is the only currently viable source of energy but until we have a proven, workable and tested method of disposing of the waste it is grossly irresponsible of us to keep producing more and more of it.

There are concepts in the pipeline and when there is a workable solution to the waste problem then it is time to reconsider the use of uranium fueled nuclear fission but until then the use needs to carefully assessed and only used when absolutely necessary.

Did not suggest making one big unprotected pile; Attempted to use simple arithmetic to illustrate scale issues. The idea that there is no place at all possible to put such a small mass is laughable when one looks at the math. Especially when compared to the volumes of toxins produced and dispersed by current combustion technologies.The problem is not at all as unmanageable as presented in the popula media. And to think that future generations will be powerless to deal with any issues arising despite our best engoineering is just pure precautionary pessimism. It is clear that FEAR overrides ability to think about this problem professionally. The guy who invented fire heard all these same argumments about burning down all of the forests. I'll stop discussing this subject, its clear that FEAR, not engineering, is the driver of this discussion. Maybe we can change the name to CRFear.

milo

Fear has nothing to do with it, it's all about responsible engineering.

Responsible engineering means that you do not manufacture highly radioactive and dangerous waste without some way to render it safe to the biosphere.

If I were to build a plant that produced thousands of tonnes on nitroglycerine as a waste product and didn't include some way to render it safe and dispose of it, I would be hung drawn and quartered as an engineer. It's the same thing with nuclear waste, it is irresponsible to produce it until there is a proven and safe method of rendering it inert to the environment.

Currently spent nuclear fuel requires constant monitoring and attention. What would happen if for some reason the waste could no longer be attended? Can you guarantee that it will never enter the biosphere for the next 500,000 years? What happens when it dose end up in the biosphere?

An outbreak of avian influenza would be catastrophic and could severely impact the industrialized nations and their ability to carry out tasks that we currently take for granted. What would happen if all the highly trained people that are currently employed to look after the spent nuclear fuel, were all taken ill with bird flue? Can you guarantee that the spent fuel will remain safe?

There are too many ifs and unanswered questions and when you are talking about spent nuclear fuel there can be no what ifs, you must be absolutely certain at all times.

This is not stuff that remains dangerous for a life time it stays dangerous for at least 100 times longer that the pyramids have existed and it has to remain secure all that time. By the time the nuclear waste we are currently generating is safe the pyramids will be nothing but dust so how the hell can you guarantee the safety and security of the spent fuel?

I agree with your comment about it being about responsible engineering. However I believe that your comments are somewhat off base. First of all, when we talk about stockpiling nuclear waste, it does not mean placing the fuel on a pile together. The fuel cells are generally placed within a protective (lead-lined) container that is then placed in a protective environment. As for developing a catostrophic reaction, I for one do not see that happening.

There has been a lot of reasearch done since the 1950's on making the spent fuel as safe as possible. Vitrification is one process used where the fuel is mixed with silica, rendering it nearly impervious to leaching. Now if you placed these vitirified cells deep in a mine a mile or more beneath the surface, what is the risk of any radiation leaking to the surface? BTW the initial studies done on vitrfication were carried out in Australia.

Nothing can be guaranteed in this world and anyone who demands that a guarantee be put into place before nuclear energy is allowed is simply trying to block the nuclear energy from developing by using unrealistic reasoning.

Can you guarantee that the sun will remain stable and not cool too much or heat up too much? Of course not. Similar aruguments that you posted above are just as unreasonable.

Remember all of the nuclear fuel we have today came from the earth via the mines. It is reasonable therefore to suggest that taking the spent fuel rods, vitifying them and then storing them back down underground is a possible way to handle the spent fuel. Certainly such a place would be very secure. The issue of transportation is not all that relevant because we already are transporting highly radioactive fuel cells to the reactors from the refineries.

I agree with you as well on the issue of dealing with the spent fuel. It seems that whenever someone hears the word "Nuclear", the first thing they think about is catastrophic nuclear explosions, strange creatures mutated from the radiation running around, enormous stockpiles of radioactive waste lying out in the open leeching to the atmosphere, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island...it's ridiculous. True, Chernobyl was a disaster but that was due to a VERY badly designed reactor and it was three in the morning, so the operators were most likely tired as well. And Three Mile Island was not as bad as some people may think.

The amount of waste produced by nuclear reactors is not as much as people may think, and is far better in terms of tonnage than other reactor systems. Take the spent fuel rods from Canadian CANDU reactors. If you took all of the spent fuel rods created during the ENTIRE history of use of every single CANDU reactor ever built, and laid them out in a soccer field, it would cover the field to a height of about 1.5 meters. That's all the waste ever produced from dozens of reactor chambers over more than 50 years.

On average, a single 1000 MW nuclear power plant consumes about 30 metric tonnes of fuel in a year. In comparison, a single, 1000 MW coal-fired power plant uses about 2,000,000 (yes, two million) metric tonnes of coal, PER YEAR. That's a factor of nearly 67000 bigger.

The waste from a nuclear reactor is in a solid form that can be easily contained and stored. For a 1000 MW coal fired plant, the more than 6 million tonnes of shit it spews out gets vented to the atmosphere with little or no control. That "shit" includes CO2, mercury, radioactive isotopes (there are various radioactive compounds contained within standard coal. Not necessarily enough to be worried about using your old coal-fired barbeque, but definitely something to worry about in these quantities) and various other greenhouse gases. And that's not even including the solid ash waste, though that can usually get used as an ingredient of concrete. Oil and natural gas power plants have similar, if not higher, amounts of pollution.

I've done some studies both in and out of university classes on comparisons between the various power production methods. The above data was a sample of it. I can post more if people want me to. I compared nuclear to coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, wind, geothermal and solar in terms of fuel usage, pollution (all types), cost, land use and general restrictions of the technology (such as geothermal being location-specific and solar panels becoming paperweights at night). Would anyone like me to post some more detailed data on this?

Go for it. a few electrons of facts and data are worth examining if we are to ever have a coherent non fear dominated discussion of the engineering side.

milo

Hi folks,

Rather than having several separate posts I will answer several questions that have been raised in recent posts with a single post.

In response to the guest's post number 45,

• First of all, when we talk about stockpiling nuclear waste, it does not mean placing the fuel on a pile together.

The date and actual location have slipped my mind but you are obviously unaware of the near catastrophic consequences at a British nuclear weapons storage facility. In order to increase the security that surrounded the weapons they were moved from their separate isolated storage facilities to a centralized location. Unfortunately the idiots that did this did not read all the precautions the engineers that designed the weapons stipulated. The problem came about as to keep the mass of the nuclear warheads with the limits an aircraft could lift they needed to cut down on the shielding. Whilst this didn't pose that much danger to those handling or flying with the weapons it did mean that they needed to be placed in separate storage facilities so the leakage of neutrons would not accelerate the radioactive decay in other weapons.

The end result was a dangerous rise in the temperature of the plutonium cores in the weapons and while there was no threat of a runaway nuclear fission or fusion reaction there was a distinct possibility that the raised temperatures could cause damage to the core casings and even a minor uncontrolled detonation of the conventional explosives in the core. If this had happened then there would have been a catastrophic release of plutonium and other highly radioactive and toxic substances into the atmosphere of a country with a very high population density.

Admittedly this was way back in the early days of nuclear weapons but it demonstrates that mistakes can, have and will be made and when you are playing with things like nuclear fuels, spent of otherwise, the consequences can be cataclysmic.

• Vitrification is one process used where the fuel is mixed with silica, rendering it nearly impervious to leaching. Now if you placed these vitirified cells deep in a mine a mile or more beneath the surface, what is the risk of any radiation leaking to the surface? BTW the initial studies done on vitrfication were carried out in Australia.

I am aware of the vitrification to which you refer and yes the initial concept and research was carried out in Australia. It was also found that the process has some major flaws one of which was crazing of the surface and micro fractures within the structure. The resultant massive increase in surface area meant that the long term stability was greatly reduced and the chance of leaching greatly increased. To date I have not heard anything to indicate that the problem has been has been solved.

• Nothing can be guaranteed in this world and anyone who demands that a guarantee be put into place before nuclear energy is allowed is simply trying to block the nuclear energy from developing by using unrealistic reasoning.

Of course noting can be guaranteed, however, we can look at and calculate the probability of an event occurring and any decent engineering analysis involves looking at the probability of failure and consequences that failure will have.

So, what's the probability of the Sun changing the level of output dramatically in the next few hundred thousand years. While it's no impossible it is about as close to zero as you can get therefore not something that we need to concern ourselves over greatly. Besides if it were to change there would be little we could do.

Ok, lets look at the probability that the security and monitoring of the rapidly increasing stock pile of waste nuclear cores were to become exposed to the biosphere. First off this stuff is likely to remain dangerous and require constant monitoring and action on the part of the people looking after it. If we consider how far back we can go you will find that the written part of our history doesn't go much further back that 5,000 years. The spent nuclear fuels are going to need to be monitored for something like 50 times that long.

So. What's the probability of a mishap due to the monitoring and handling of spent nuclear fuels over that period? Well from past performance I would say it was pretty close to 1.

So, in one case we have a probability that is close to zero and nothing we can do about it anyway while on the other the chance is pretty much a certainty and we can do something by not creating the stuff in the first place.

• Remember all of the nuclear fuel we have today came from the earth via the mines. It is reasonable therefore to suggest that taking the spent fuel rods, vitifying them and then storing them back down underground is a possible way to handle the spent fuel.

You are forgetting that the whole process of nuclear fission involves the concentrating of unstable isotopes of uranium and then placing enough of it in a single place that a very unnatural fission chain reaction takes place. The byproducts of this chain reaction are a whole stack of unstable atoms like plutonium that are not only highly radioactive and toxic but do not occur anywhere in nature. As a matter of fact I don't know of anywhere in nature of the universe where highly accelerate nuclear fission like that in a nuclear reactor takes place.

In response to Kiljaeden in post number 46,

• The waste from a nuclear reactor is in a solid form that can be easily contained and stored.

So far there is not a single long term storage facility for spent nuclear fuels in the world. There is one under construction in the United States but you can bet your bottom the Not In My Backyard syndrome will pretty much skittle any plans anybody comes up with to build one.

You also can't just concentrate the stuff, stick it in a deep hole and forget about it. When spent nuclear fuel is no longer suitable for use in the core of a reactor it doesn't mean the fission process is finished it just means that it is not happening fast enough for the reactor to extract the amount of energy they need. If you take a spent nuclear core and leave it as it comes out of the core the fission will continue and generating massive amounts of heat, radiation and other nasties. You must break down the spent fuel into small safe volumes that will not generate too much heat and radiation and that requires keeping a considerable amount of space between the spent elements.

Currently all the storage facilities are way beyond the capacity they were intended to hold. The spent cores require constant monitoring and cooling system that prevent the continuing fission process from getting out of hand. There have been numerous close shaves when cooling plants have failed and for unknown reasons the fission process has suddenly increased in sections of spent fuel.

In conclusion. As I have stated in other posts it's not the operation of the reactors that I am concerned with, modern reactor design has made them very safe and tolerant to system failure and operator error, However, the spent nuclear cores is a different matter and due to sociopolitical and engineering problems there is no safe and human monitoring or input free way to ensure the spent cores remain isolated from the biosphere for the hundreds of thousands of years they remain dangerous.

Therefore the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the continued use and creation of more highly radioactive waste from fission reactors can be nothing more than idiotic.

The only concession to the above statement is what is referred to as a Thorium Fission Reactors. Basically they are a fission reactor that utilizes an external neutron source to trigger the fission. Unlike all current fission reactors they are intrinsically stable and therefore safe by nature and immune of out of control reactions like the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents. They also have the ability to accelerate the radioactive decay in existing spent nuclear fuel rods rendering them safe in decades rather than hundreds of millennia. Unfortunately, there seems to be little interest in developing these reactors which in itself I find idiotic considering their potential benefits. You can read more about them by following the link above which will take you the thread I started on them.

I was once an advocate for wide spread nuclear power, but my experience with human nature and the greed and lack of concern for others wellbeing that seems to be part of human nature has tempered my stance on the subject. Remember, it only takes one short taking, money grabbing, amoeba brained idiot to mess the whole thing up for all of us.

It appears that you tend to zero in on one aspect and then take the position that the aspect is what will occur without giving due credence to alternatves. There was also an incident in the US in the 70's similar to Britain where a similar situation arose. I think we have to understand that we do learn from such occurences. Since then I do not beliieve there have been any other similar incidents.

Mistakes have are and always will happen. The challenge is to have a process that will minimize those mistakes ie fail safe.

With regards to vitrification, again you seem to identify a weakness in such a method, but that weakness is only risky if the stockpiled spent fuel is placed into a position where leaching will occur. Even if said leaching does occur, it will be at a considerable reduced rate compared to spent fuel that has not been vitrified. As any geologist can tell you, silicified rock is about the hardest rock you will encounter and is one of the most resistent to erosion - even with cracks and fissures in them.

Furthermore if you store vitrified spent fuel a mile underground (old mine) what is the real risk to the surface environment?

You should take a course or 2 on statistics because your understanding of probability is lacking. First of all, over time we know that the sun's radiation has fluctuated significantly so your assertion that the probablity of that happening is zero is simply not true. Secondly you believe that the probability of a mishap due to the monitoring and handling of spent fuel is 1 is simply not valid either. The probability is determined by the number of mishandling incidents over the total number of handling incidents so for the calculation to be close to 1, there has to be an incredible number of mishandling incidents that resulted in a leak of radioactivity inot the environment. This simply has not happened.

While there are some by-products created in the decay process, we still are talking radioactivity here. Furthermore, there are reactors such as the CANDU type that can use spent fuel from other reactors as fuel thereby reducing the overall problem of what to do with spent fuel.

Yes the process within a reactor is accelerated, after all that is how the heat is created to generate the steam that runs the turbines. However once the fuel has been removed, it is no longer being bombarded by neutrons. And of course there are reactors that produce less transuranic waste than others.

Dear Guest,

• Mistakes have are and always will happen. The challenge is to have a process that will minimize those mistakes ie fail safe.

That's exactly my point and when coupled with the time the spent nuclear fuel needs to be isolated from the biosphere there is around a snowballs chance in hell that it can be achieved. My concerns are:

1. Storage Time: Currently the spent nuclear fuel contains materials that need to be kept form being released into the biosphere for something like 250,000 years. That's one hell of a long time and considering the furthest back we can push our written history is around 5,000 years makes it currently about a close to impossible as you can get. Admittedly techniques may be developed to render it safe much faster but at this juncture no such technology exists.
2. NIMBY Syndrome: The Not In My Backyard syndrome has made the construction of centralized nuclear waste storage facilities politically impossible. Currently there is note even one long term storage facility on Earth with all the spent fuel being held in what was originally designed to be temporary short term storage. Yes, there is a facility under construction in the USA, but will they take the spent fuel for Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, China, India, ……. Some how I think not!
3. Security & Antisocial Behavior: It is a fact that there will always be a small minority that wish to overthrow or undermine the social, political and religious beliefs of others. Should spent nuclear fuel fall into the hands of a group with such tendencies the consequences could be cataclysmic.
4. Sociopolitical Failure: Social and political systems do and never will remain stable or constant for more than about a millennia. When you compare that with the time spent fuel remains dangerous you come up with a big problem. A classic example of this is the collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of the navy. There are currently several nuclear powered submarines that have been neglected to the point they have flooded and now sit partially submerged in shallow ports near population centres. This is about as bad as you would ever like it to get because no only are the cores being kept secure they are sitting is salt water that is slowly corroding through the shielding they are surrounded by.

Let me now answer some of the questions you penned in your response.

• Furthermore if you store vitrified spent fuel a mile underground (old mine) what is the real risk to the surface environment?

A lot more than you think. Mines, especially deep ones have a nasty tendency to fill with water. There are a handful that do not have this problem but they are fairly rare and to keep a mine free of water you need to have some sort of system to remove water that has seeped into the mine. If for some reason the mine were to become flooded then you can almost guarantee that some of it will find its way into the water table and form there into the ecology of the surrounding area.

• You should take a course or 2 on statistics because your understanding of probability is lacking.

I have, admittedly it was a long time ago but that's not the point. The figures I gave were greatly simplified, but the point I was trying to get across is the length of time that spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous is way beyond the comprehension of most people. As I have tried to show we are talking about 50 times that long and to even think we have any chance of ensuring the safety of spent nuclear fuel with what is currently available can be nothing more than preposterous.

My point is there is currently no way to guarantee that the spent nuclear fuel will remain isolated from the biosphere while it remains dangerous. Technological advances may some time in the future develop ways of rendering the spent fuel safe or storing it in a stable safe way but currently there is no way to guarantee the safety of spent nuclear fuel. Until such times as we have a way of safely handling, storing or disposing of spent nuclear fuel to continue making more of it can only be described as irresponsible.

Remember it only takes one short sighted money grabbing idiot to wreck it for everybody. We can't even ensure that children's toys don't contain dangerous substances so what chance have we got of ensuring the global security of all the spent nuclear fuel for a quarter of a million years?

Ok, I have wasted enough of everybody's time and much of what I have stated has been posted in other threads. May I suggest following this link to the Table of Contents for MASU on Machines blog where you will find links to a series of discussions on technologies that may enable us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Many of the threads are dormant but they are all still active and participants will be notified of any new posts.

Just to clarify my position further I am only speaking of the current uranium fueled fission reactors used in the production of electricity. Research reactors, reactors that are used where there is no other practical solutions, to a certain point CANDU reactors and the proposed Thorium Reactors I mentioned are a completely different thing.

May I also suggest registering with CR4 so we have a way of knowing who we are conversing with.

I have noticed in this thread that there is no mention of specifics on the nuclear fuel cycle. Spent nuclear fuel does not remain extremely radioactive for thousands of years. It is in fact several hundred. The reason why people want to store it for so long is that during its breakdown cycle to a more stable element it transforms through a series of heavy metals, which are considered somewhat chemically toxic. It is those barely-radioactive heavy metals that give the fuel such a long storage time. The more radioactive a compound is, the faster it breaks down to a more stable element; that is in essence what radioactivity is, a nucleus giving off excess nucleons in order to have a more stable nuclear binding energy.

The one element that has the most stable nucleus is iron, as it has the highest binding energy per nucleon in its nucleus of any element. That is one of the reasons why many planets have iron cores. All elements want a more stable binding energy, though within a certain range of iron they are inherently stable enough that they won't decay (or spontaneously fuse, for smaller elements) to get to it unless they have an energy input. Very heavy elements, like uranium, are radioactive so that they can try to get to more stable elements, and eventually to iron. The closer they get to iron, the less radioactive they are and the longer it takes for them to decay.

I believe I can find my old nuclear physics textbook somewhere. Would someone like me to post up the Uranium decay cycle?

Hi Kiljaeden

• Spent nuclear fuel does not remain extremely radioactive for thousands of years. It is in fact several hundred.

According to and I quote directly from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission USNRC site:

• Because of their highly radioactive fission products, high-level waste and spent fuel must be handled and stored with care. Since the only way radioactive waste finally becomes harmless is through decay, which for high-level wastes can take hundreds of thousands of years, the wastes must be stored and finally disposed of in a way that provides adequate protection of the public for a very long time.

This would seem to be in direct contradiction of your statement that it only remains problematic for centuries. Quoting further from the USNRC site.

• Spent nuclear fuel is highly radioactive and potentially very harmful. Standing near unshielded spent fuel could be fatal due to the high radiation levels. Ten years after removal of spent fuel from a reactor, the radiation dose 1 meter away from a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 20,000 rems per hour. A dose of 5,000 rems would be expected to cause immediate incapacitation and death within one week.
• Some of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have short half-lives (for example, iodine-131 has an 8-day half-life) and therefore their radioactivity decreases rapidly. However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.
• A second hazard of spent fuel, in addition to high radiation levels, is the extremely remote possibility of an accidental "criticality," or self-sustained fissioning and splitting of the atoms of uranium and plutonium.
• NRC regulations therefore require stringent design, testing and monitoring in the handling and storage of spent fuel to ensure that the risk of this type of accident is extremely unlikely. For example, special control materials (usually boron) are placed in spent fuel containers to prevent a criticality from occurring. Nuclear engineers and physicists carefully analyze and monitor the conditions of handling and storage of spent fuel to guard further against an accident.
• A barrier or radiation protection shield must always be placed between spent nuclear fuel and human beings.
• Water, concrete, lead, steel, depleted uranium or other suitable materials calculated to be sufficiently protective by trained engineers and health physicists, and verified by radiation measurements, are typically used as radiation shielding for spent nuclear fuel.

Which pretty much confirms my statements that:

1. Spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous for a very long time and we are talking hundreds of thousands of years not hundreds of years as you have indicated. Yes the short half life fission products like Iodine-131 will decay but there are other fission products like Plutonium-239 have phenomenally long half lives in order of 25,000 years.
2. While the risk of an unintentional criticality in spent nuclear fuel is small it is not zero. Therefore, spent fuel requires and is mandated for special storage facilities and requires constant monitoring for a not insignificant portion of the time it remains dangerous.
3. While the spent fuel is no longer viable for use in power generating reactors somewhere between half and two thirds of the fissionable products remain and as a result will generate a considerable amount of heat that requires some means of removal and dissipation.

The final point that I would like to confirm is the current lack of a permanent storage facility and again I quote from the USNRC site.

· There are two acceptable storage methods for spent fuel after it is removed from the reactor core:

• Spent Fuel Pools - Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is safely stored in specially designed pools at individual reactor sites around the country.
• Dry Cask Storage - If pool capacity is reached, licensees may move toward use of above-ground dry storage casks.

Which confirms my statement that at this juncture there are no permanent storage facilities available worldwide and currently spent nuclear fuels are stored in Spent Fuel Pools that are located at the site the fuel is used.

These storage facilities were initially designed for short term storage while the spent fuel still producing copious heat output and prior to being transferred to long tern storage. As a result of the lack of suitable long term storage these temporary facilities are nearly all stocked way past their original design limit. This over stocking on several occasions now has lead to a sudden and unexpected increase in the rate of fission in the stored fuel and nearly caused a serious breach of the storage facility.

All this just reinforces everything I have previously stated and the statement:

• Spent nuclear fuel does not remain extremely radioactive for thousands of years. It is in fact several hundred.

is incorrect.

Further information is available from the USNRC web site by following the link below

• United States Nuclear Regulatory Comission Home Page

Just a couple of comments...

When you state the lifetime of a particular radioactive material, you state its half-life. And I think the half-life of spent uranium is more like several thousand years. That means it's lost half of its radiation. To reduce what's left by half, takes another several thousand years, and so on. Other radioactive elements created by uranium and plutonium have even longer half-lives.

Almost all radioactive elements ultimately decay to lead, and not iron. Iron is the most stable element when considering nuclear fusion - Star fusion reaches its limit at iron and that's why there is so much of it around.

Plutonium is around twenty thou (depending on the isotope), but if you mention lowering it's toxicity level in human terms, it's about 700,000 no kidding whatsoever. This is, like, talking of geological timetables.

G'day Vermin, Yuval & others

Spent nuclear fuel is not only dangerous but it remains dangerous for a very, very, very long time and not only needs to be isolated from the biosphere but monitored for a not insignificant portion of that time.

We live in a world that is driven by accountants that have been pushing the idea of user pays down our throats for decades now. So lets push the user pays principal down the throats of nuclear plant operators.

If they had to cough up for the quarter of a million years worth of labour with an appropriate inflation figure no self respecting account driven manager would touch the idea of a uranium fueled nuclear reactor with a ten foot barge pole.

There seems to be this it's out of sight out of mind attitude towards spent nuclear fuel and frankly it scares the living daylights out of me.

In John Wyndham's book The Day of the Triffids he warned of how our creations can turn on us and backfire badly. Just imagine what would happen if there were a breakdown in society due to a disease or some other event that limited our ability to monitor and keep under control all the spent nuclear fuel currently in temporary storage facilities. It wouldn't be long before the control over the temporary storage facilities began to fail and ultimately allow highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel to come in contact with the biosphere.

So, what are the chances that in one of the countries that are currently storing spent nuclear fuel suffering a breakdown in society that limited their ability to monitor and ensure the safety of such storage facilities? Well, considering the length of time involved and past history of the human race, which is incidentally about 2% of the time needed to render spent fuel safe, it's pretty much a certainty, a very DEAD CERTAINTY!

As scientists we should not be accepting defeat on this issue but rather moving towards finding a solution? It's always easier to simply say "we can't do it" but as scientists, that is unacceptable.

Vitrification is a very promising method for disposing of nuclear waste. Mix the waste with a silica compound and then store the result in a deep dry cavity. Why don't we store the stuff down where it was first mined? Some of those mines are 1 to 2 miles underground.

I agree entirely. I am in fact trying to get into R&D on nuclear reactors in Canada. During my university days I did several studies, some of them outside of classes, to compare the various forms of power generation such as coal, oil, natural gas, wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and nuclear. I used 1000 MW of reliable power production as a baseline for comparison, and I compared them in terms of fuel consumption, land use, pollution and cost, as well as any additional restrictions (such as geothermal being somewhat location-specific). The coal and oil fired plants, which is predominantly used right now, were done purely to show just how BAD they are. Of all the possible alternative options, nuclear is the cleanest and least land-using option by a LANDSLIDE.

My experience in submarines was very instructive as to how to maintain an environment capable of keeping the inhabitants healthy. We had to deal with air pollution (CO, CO2, H2, hydrocarbons, O2, ozone, and a host of noxious byproducts of cooking and natural smelly biological processes, not to mention cigarrette smoke. We could not use freon-propelled products, shoe polish, and could not paint anything unless we were able to air out the boat for a week or two to get rid of the VOCs. We had our own little world ecology. One thing we did not do was to burn our atmosphere to provide power. I consider it a preview of what the world at large will someday have to face.

Dose your system get rid of the CO₂ and if so how?

With lasers and microwaves, by using even more energy.

Sorry, I'm a bit sceptic but catalisators do nothing against CO₂, they reduce the NO_x and burn the CO.

Right on Gwen.

Lasers microwaves and catalytic converter for automotive hardly on topic for discussion of nuclear. Do nothing for CO2, the chemical byptroduct of combustion. Unless the laser is used to form/print a coral reef by converting Co2 into carbonate. Post is self aggrandizing promotion and not informative.

"Davin may be a great guy but he 's not on topic"

milo

Some facts missing in this discussion:

1. Reactor types: There are now existing reactors that will mostly burn their own waste! These are the successors of the CANDU, look at the website of AECL.

These are inherently more safe than any other concept and at the same time commercially competitive but not invented neither by SIEMENS, nor by AREVA nor by GE. (All 3 have nothing to compete except their history and sales people). (And the joint AREVA-SIEMENS cooperation has been terminated, may be by the Finnish reactor's economic desaster.

These can also burn Thorium as there is a lot of excess reactivity by a small amount of heavy water surrounding the fuel rods. And much less enriched fuel is needed - a big cost advantage that balances the disadvantage of heavy water use. (Enrichment is much more costly than raw yellow-cake uranium).

If - after much longer burning - the spent fuel is reprocessed, then the transuranium elements have to be separated from the fission products. Then the transuraniums are processed into special fuel rods and burnt in the same reactor that produced these highly radioactive elements. (This step is not existing today).

The transuraniums cause the 500,000 years safe storage requirement!

The fission products are still ugly but these are requiring "only" 5000 years of storage time.

More information is available in the reports from the ICENES conferences (International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems), 2007 in Istanbul, 2009 near Lisboa/Portugal.

2.Natural Warming and Cooling: Earth is seeing substantial warming and cooling by many reasons and many periods! Very likely some recent human effect too.

There was the "little ice-age" in 1600 to 1700, there was the warm period of the Viking explorations to "Greenland" and "Vinland" from 800 to 1200A.C.

So if you go back in time there has been minimum one very warm period (in Europe) around 6000 years ago. And there have been glaciations (pretty cold) and interglacials (pretty warm), minimum 7 different periods within the last 2 (maybe only 1.2) million years. These have been much more intense than anything we can do with Earths climate and much more intense than we want to have the climate.

Further back there was a period extending back to 20 million years where the climate (in central Europe) was nearly tropical. We find the fossils of crocodiles and all savannah species in the chalky remains of "Noerdlinger Ries". This is a 30 km crater that was casted by a big meteorite. At the very center there was a central spring and the animals came there to get water. Some did not survive. We now find their fossilised bones. Have a tour there, it is a nice landscape, The first US astronauts - planning to go to the Moon - did some of their training there in order to be able to distinguish shocked material from smoothly deposited material.

So as no complete, accepted and proven theory on global warming and cooling exists I would be very careful to put my fingers and money and effort into Nature's much more powerful forces.

If we tinker with global warming we should be prepared to counteract maybe global cooling! Nature is nonlinear!

And we should be prepared to build sufficient seawater desalination plants to survive on produced sweet water and think about careful irrigation in agriculture. We have enough water, but we are wasting nearly all of it.

And we should be prepared to move out of northern and southern latitudes down to below 35 degrees and have an agreement with the people that live there. This will be necessary if and when the next Ice-Age is coming.

RHABE

"So if you go back in time there has been minimum one very warm period (in Europe) around 6000 years ago. And there have been glaciations (pretty cold) and interglacials (pretty warm), minimum 7 different periods within the last 2 (maybe only 1.2) million years. These have been much more intense than anything we can do with Earths climate and much more intense than we want to have the climate."

The problem with past climate changes being compared to the current situation is the vast difference in the time scale.

Yes, there have been cataclysmic events that have changed the earth's climate almost instantly, but since we haven't had a cataclysmic event (unless you count mankind as a cataclysmic event) the time scale of the changes is all wrong.

Normally climatic changes like the start and finish of ices ages happen very slowly over several to hundreds of millennia while what we are currently seeing is happening over a couple of centuries.

Ice cores from Antarctica have been shown to contain tiny pockets of air that was trapped when the snow that sealed the bubbles off fell. As a result scientists have been able to extract the air from these bubbles and analyse it to give us a good idea of how the atmosphere has changed over the last 80,000 years or so.

One thing that stands out is the level of carbon dioxide CO₂. Never over the last 80,000 years has it been this high. Even more frightening is the current rate that the CO₂ is rising which is over 60 (sixty) times greater that at any time covered by the ice core's history.

That's not good and it clearly demonstrates that we are in totally uncharted waters. Not only that, but the cause of this unprecedented rise in atmospheric CO₂ can only be in some way due to our actions and not some natural phenomena.

Hi Masu,

you are right with your statements, I know about the principles and the data.

CO2, methane and dust seem to be major earthbound mechanisms.

But there is considerable doubt if the ice-core analytical results are correct.

The correctness relies totally on the assumption that there is no liquid water around the bubbles that is dissolving and redistributing gases.

And this assumption is positively not correct as near the grain boundary of the ice-crystals there remains liquid water down to incredibly low temperatures.

I have no idea about the errors produced by this effect as water in this condition is a very peculiar material and solubility too.

This is the scientific side of the situation.

To add more complexity: I do not believe that sufficient states join the effort to aim at low CO2 emission. So we will not change much. So we have to prepare to live or die with the consequences.

The today often misinterpreted effect of sea-level rise on Pacific atolls cannot be as often feared as the atolls survived the sharp rise in sea-level at the end of the last ice-age. (Two times as there was the younger Dryas.)

"Normally climatic changes like the start and finish of ices ages happen very slowly over several to hundreds of millennia..."

This I doubt seriously.

Any fast change to the cold that persists in a situation when glaciation is stable will catch the Earth in the next Ice-Age.

This may be one of the erratic weather situations everybody knows or should know. These occur not frequently but with a probability of ? once every 1000 or 10000 years.

If the snow falling in this unusual winter is not melting in the next summer in the lowlands above 60 to 70 degrees latitude then the missing absorbed energy from the sun will plunge us into maybe very longtime very cold situations.

We do not know much about the interactions of different warming and cooling mechanisms.

So cooling may be pretty fast!

Same with warming having minimum one fast effect: if the glacial barrier in North- America at the end of any of the ice ages is braking down then this has major consequences:

This is affecting the St.Laurence river that carries the water from the great lakes to the Atlantic. During ice-ages this water is flowing southward into the Gulf of Mexico.

Breakdown is fast - we know from the carried pebbles, found in the sediments between Canada and Greenland. 7 of these layers enriched with pebbles are known in the sediments of the last approximately 1 million years. Size of pebbles is from very coarse near the coast to fine near Greenland.

Related sea-level rise and fall-back into the cold is very fast (1 year or shorter).

So there are enough mechanisms for fast changes.

More on Carbon-Dioxide:

related water vapor in the atmosphere - depending on who is making this prognosis - a factor of 3 to a factor of 20 more in warming effect compared to CO2.

But water vapor is no trace gas in our atmosphere and the climate specialists rely on data that were collected only for trace gases (in the IPCC).

So: be prepared - nobody knows!

RHABE

Masu I believe you have it all wrong and that RHABE is right on the mark with his comments. Changes in the climate in the past are not only linked to cataclysmic events but rather are the result of a number of factors, not the least of which include radiation from the sun, cosmic radiation, the water content of our atmosphere to name a few.

Your comment regarding ice ages are well off the mark. The last major ice age that occurred started about 17,000 years ago and essentially ended around 10,000 years ago - lasting only 7,000 years during which time the continental ice sheet over southern Canada was estimated to be over a mile thick and was large enough to carve out the Great Lakes.

What we are seeing, according to the data issued by the IPCC is a rise in the average temperature of the world within the last 100 years of LESS THAN 1 degree Celsius!

There remains some controversy with the Antarctica ice core data where some scientists disagree with the conclusions arrived at by the studies.

As a scientist I am deeply disturbed that other scientists believe that only 1 minor component of climate change is responsible for global climate fluctuations - it just doesn't make sense. Furthermore most of the studies have focused on a correlation between CO@ and global temperatures and accepting this relationship as proof - sorry such a complex system cannot be that simple.

One compound that seems to be entirely missing from the discussions is water vapour. Since 1980, the water vapour content of the atmosphere has increased approximately 1% per year, well ahead of the increase in CO2. The greenhouse gas effect of water vapour is significantly higher than that of CO2. Hence I pose the question - has the increase in observed temperatures over the past 30 years attributed to increased CO2 or increased water vapour?

If one takes a close look at the role of the UN in all of this discussion, understands what the mandate of the UN is, PLUS examines the mandate of the IPCC (a UN-sponsored group), then one must question the validity of the process followed and the conclusions that were arrived at.

There are too many things happening with our climate that cannot be attributed to a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere - this winter for instance!

At times like this I often refer back to one of my geology profs who, in the midst of our discussions on ice ages, simply stated that in order for another ice age to occur in Canada, the arctic ice cap would have to melt! Why? Well with the ice cover, the climate in the far north is very arid hence precipitation levels are low. With the ice removed, humidity increases followed by more snowfall and greater accumulations. Another point to bring up is the last ice age in North America was not matched by one in Siberia which escaped glaciation. In addition a part of the arctic waters remained open during the ice age which likely fueled the snow accumulations resulting the the glaciers in North America (with the exception of a small area in the Yukon that escaped the glaciers as well.

My point is essentially to say that there are way too many factors that must be properly taken into account when we try to examine climate change in the modern world. The process must be open, unbiased and based on all scientific criteria that we understand plays a role in climate modulation. This has not been followed and conjecture and postulations based on incomplete work should not be taken as fact but rather simply another piece of the puzzle that is being examined.

I haven't had time to read everybody's posts in detail and I will over the next couple of days, but there is something the I would like to comment on immediately.

Geo Guy, you stated;

What we are seeing, according to the data issued by the IPCC is a rise in the average temperature of the world within the last 100 years of LESS THAN 1 degree Celsius!

Australia, which is a continent, has in the last half century shown a rise in temperature of 1° C and that's not a predicted increase that's an actual measured increase.

That's a measured rate of increase of 2° C per century which when compared to the changes around ice ages at least an order of magnitude greater, and scientists are now reassessing their calculations of how much the earth is likely to warm and so far it looking worse than had been anticipated.

One possible explanation into why Australia is seeing such a rise while the rest of the world isn't is Australia's total lack of any permanent ice. As a result any increase in the amount of incoming solar energy being absorbed by the atmosphere goes directly into heating it and the surrounds. However, on all the remaining continents where you do have a permanent ice fields the increased energy goes into turning the ice into water so the energy doesn't go into heating the atmosphere and surrounds.

Retreating ice is something we are seeing planet wide and you can bet your bottom dollar that the minute you run out of ice to melt the temperature is going suddenly start increasing at a dramatic rate.

Unfortunately Australia is not the world. Plus you cannot extrapolate a 50 year measurement by doubling it to creat a 100 year change - you should know better than to do that.

While we are discussing changes to temperatures, we cannot ignore the fact that the methods used to document temperatures 100 years ago are vastly different and less accurate than what we use today - hence a part of the difference can likely be accounted for in the standard error of the data. Furthermore, the world has developed a lot in the last 100 years so you cannot discount the rise in temperature related to the urbanization of vast areas - especially Europe. Finally if you look at the el Nino periods that occurred between 1900 and 2000, yoiu will note there are several occurrences during which time the earth's average air temperature spiked significantly - those increase contribute to the mean of an increase of less than 1 degree C. Yet during the same period, and especially from 1956 forward, CO2 increased significantly (as did water vapour) in the atmosphere. Given the info above, I find it hardly credible that CO2 has contributed to temperature increases as espoused by the IPCC.

With regards to Australia, I believe the sun's radiation plays a far greater role in its temp than does the lack of ice. One simple test is to evaluate the mean temperature of Australia at night - if that data does not reflect the increase that has been observed during the day, the rise in the daytime temps are more likely due to the sun's radiation and not heat trapped by CO2. Scientists have done such as study at the Chacaltaya glacier in South America where they have concluded that the melting cannot be attributed to warming due to CO2 in the atmosphere. While during the day they found the air temperatures were warmer than usual, at night those temperatures fell to their normal levels. They surmised that if the melting was happening because of a warmed atmosphere due to radiation being trapped by high CO2 levels, then the air temperatures should remain warm at night - but they didn't.

One final comment I have is regarding the melting of glaciers - this has been happening for 10,000 years as those glaciers are the remnants of the last ice age. However, recent investigations have discovered significant snow accumulations on Mt. Blanc in France and Mt. Logan in Canada - by significant I mean the elevations of the peak of both those mountains have been increased by tens of metres - hardly a sign that CO2 is trapping reflected radiation in our atmosphere and causing glaciers and snowfields everywhere to melt.

Climatologists like to point at Greenland as an indication of glaciers melting. While the fringes of greenland are in face disappearing, snow is accumulating in the centre which shouldn't be happening if the atmosphere has been warmed by increased CO2.

The earth is like a giant living organism - it gets warm and it has built-in system to cool itself off again. As I pointed out previously, the disappearance of the polar ice cap in the Northern Hemisphere will likely precipitate a period of cooling and not warming as you have indicated (ask Europeans, Chinese and North Americans who suffered through incredibly cold weather in recent months to see if they still believe in global warming).

I'm going to have to answer things in several posts over a few days rather than one, so please bear with me.

Now Geo Guy stated in post 70;

"While during the day they found the air temperatures were warmer than usual, at night those temperatures fell to their normal levels. They surmised that if the melting was happening because of a warmed atmosphere due to radiation being trapped by high CO2 levels, then the air temperatures should remain warm at night - but they didn't."

I've been looking at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's web site which has a neat little section called Time Series Graphs that you can use to graphically represent the weather statistics for Australia from 1900 to today.

Ok, this chart shows the Annual Minimum Temperature Anomaly for Australia. Basically it shows the difference between the measured median overnight minimum temperatures and the absolute median overall minimum temperatures. The black like is a 10 year average of the anomaly while the bars show the annual anomaly.

Guess what folks? The anomalies clearly show that for about the last 50 years or so there has been a measurable and quiet distinct increase in the overnight minimum temperatures.

Since this chart covers the whole of Australia as compared to a single site, I would have to place more credence on the Australian results.

I think the following graph of Annual Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly is a more relevant measure or temperature rise as the thermal mass of the water tends to dampen down anomalies.

Again it clearly shows that there is a warming trend and while it is only about half the land based increase it is still none the less a definite increase.

I haven't included them, but I have also looked at a whole stack of similar graphs for Australian land based median, maximum, minimum,...... temperatures and they all show roughly a 1°C increase.

Being only for Australia these figures can't confirm the global warming hypothesis but they do certainly fit and I would hazard to say that similar results will be found for the other continents.

I am not sure where you got your images Masu...for instance the Annual Max Temp Anomaly map I came across is as follows:

..which is significantly different than the one you posted.

Another point is the plots are time series and as such can be affected by outliers and localized anomalies which may not apply to the entire land mass. Accordingly a gradient map of temperature data might be a better way to project what is happening in Australia

Now if we look at the annual diurnal temperature range for Australia from 1911 to the present, a distinct downward trend can be observed:

The main point I want to make is that climate data is projecting conflicting images and that alone suggests there must be a lot more work to do before anything can be declared to be definitive.

For one more bit of info on Australia let's look at the 30-year average contoured maps for both the max and min temps for the periods 1911- 1940 and 1976-2005:

Apart from some minor local variations there is no significant difference between the two minimum temp maps.

Unlike the images you posted, the above maps suggest that nothing really significantly has changed with respect to annual min and max daily temps in Australia over the past century. In fact if you look closely, the northeastern part of the continent (Telfer & Newman) were significantly warmer at the turn of the century than they are now - suggesting coolling, not warming is taking place there.

Several of the images in your post did not show up for some reason so I can't comment at the moment.

Could you possibly repost them.

I managed to get some of the images to appear but several are still not showing up.

However;

• "Now if we look at the annual diurnal temperature range for Australia from 1911 to the present, a distinct downward trend can be observed:"

Which is exactly what I would expect if the atmosphere is not cooling as much at night due to the reradiated infrared radiation being absorbed by the atmosphere rather than being radiated out into space.

Also have you ever lived in the tropics? They are clearly much warmer than the temperate regions yet their daily temperature range is usually considerably less.

Anyway, I was commenting on your statement;

• "They surmised that if the melting was happening because of a warmed atmosphere due to radiation being trapped by high CO2 levels, then the air temperatures should remain warm at night - but they didn't."

Which refers to minimum overnight temperatures remaining constant rather than the diurnal range. If the CO₂ warming hypothesis is correct then the blocking of the reradiated infrared radiation would prevent more heat from being lost into space therefore produce a reduced cooling effect and reduced diurnal range as well as increased maximum, minimum and median temperatures.

So in response to the statement that the overnight temperatures

• "should remain warm at night - but they didn't."

for Australia on the whole at least is incorrect. The chart clearly shows that overnight minimum temperatures have increased over the last 50 years or so. Also the decrease in the diurnal range indicates that the atmosphere is not cooling as much overnight, therefore something must be acting as insulator and preventing the infrared radiation being reradiated back out into space.

Which is exactly what you would expect to see if increased atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gasses were slowing the rate that the incoming solar radiation is being reradiated back out into space.

Finally the first three maps below show the minimum, median & maximum temperature trend from 1910 to 2009.

So, when you are looking at the trend of the mean temperatures rather than the diurnal range there seems to be considerably more red than blue on the charts. So I can't see any other way of interpreting these charts other than to say that Australia has been experiencing a warming trend over the period of 1910 to 2009.

Finally the chart below which I believe is the one you are referring to shows the diurnal temperature range for the period 1910 to 2009. Yes this does show that on the whole the diurnal range has decreased over the given period. However, isn't that exactly what one would expect to see if the atmosphere is acting like a blanket and preventing the heat absorbed during the day from being reradiated back out into space at night?

Keep in mind, the atmosphere is warmed from below not above. For the most part the incoming solar radiation doesn't warm the troposphere but rather passes through it with little effect then when it hits the ground which is opaque causes it to warm. The ground then reradiates this energy in the form of infrared radiation which the atmosphere is less transparent to and thus warms the atmosphere from the bottom up. So if you were to increase the atmosphere's ability to block this infrared radiation and prevent it from reaching space you would result in the atmosphere have a net gain of energy over time. This then causes the temperature to rise until a new equilibrium is established.

Also the added insulative effect would reduce the rate at which the atmosphere can cool overnight and therefore produce a decrease in the diurnal range. One would then expect this decrease in the diurnal range to remain until a new equilibrium is reached.

In other words, the lower the diurnal range the greater the insulative effect. More insulation without a reduction in the energy input can only mean a overall energy gain and warmer atmosphere.

While I salute your efforts, I must insist that using one set of data (1911 to present) assumes a linear relationship which is far from the truth. The best way to interpret what has happened between 1911 and the present in Australia (or for any other place) is to examine segments (10-year is what I suggest) - only by doing that can you really get a "feel" for what is happening through the intervening 10-year cycles of weather patterns.

Secondly, Australia cannot be used as a barometer for what is happening elsewhere. It is a relatively small land mass surrounded by circulating ocean currents which have a greater impact on climate than in any other place in the world.

Finally your analysis about water vapour is clearly well off the map. You should delve deeper into the subject so that you can better understand it....nuff said

In post 68 Geo_Guy stated;

"One compound that seems to be entirely missing from the discussions is water vapour. Since 1980, the water vapour content of the atmosphere has increased approximately 1% per year, well ahead of the increase in CO2. The greenhouse gas effect of water vapour is significantly higher than that of CO2. Hence I pose the question - has the increase in observed temperatures over the past 30 years attributed to increased CO2 or increased water vapour?"

CO₂ is just one of a series of so called green house gasses that are believed to be contributing to global warming with the three biggest being CO₂, CH₄ and H₂O.

Now you are absolutely correct in that both H₂O and CH₄ have a much greater infrared radiation blocking effect than CO₂.

However CH₄ is unstable and will combine with atmospheric oxygen to form CO₂ and H₂O so while it is initially much worse than CO₂ the effect is transient and ultimately gets us back to the CO₂ problem.

Water vapour is a little difference because as soon as the atmosphere cools below dew point, as it does whenever it rises, it turns back into water and with the droplets forming clouds. This has two effects:

1. The release of the latent heat of vaporization heats the inside of clouds and therefore makes them rise further. This will continue until either the source of water it is drawing from stops supplying moisture or the top of the clouds reach the tropopause where the temperature stops decreasing with altitude.
2. When the atmospheric water forms clouds it dramatically increases the amount of insolation that is reflected back out into space before it reaches the ground and ultimately warms the atmosphere.

Now don't get me wrong, CH₄ and H₂O are both greenhouse gasses that must be taken into account when looing at the global warming problem, but their effects are moderated by factors like the oxidation of CH₄ and cloud forming from H₂O that reduces their overall effect when compared to CO₂.

I must admit that when I first heard of global warming I was extremely sceptical and thought that there was no way the human race could possibly cause the earth to heat up. However, there is now way too much evidence to deny that the earth is warming and that at least one of the major factors behind this warming is due to our actions.

I truly hope that I am wrong and that the earth doesn't warm and have the potentially catastrophic effects scientists are warning of. However, if we just ignore it and continue with our wasteful ways until it's too late then things could be disastrous indeed. On the other hand if we do get off our collective backsides and do something about switching to any number of renewable energy technologies and global warming doesn't happen then we still end up with a more sustainable, cleaner and better planet on which to live.

I believe your analysis is somewhat over simplified. Water vapour as a component of GHG's is a much bigger player and has a far greater influence on climate than what you portray. When you account for water vapor, CO2's contribution to the overall greenhouse gas effect drops from 72% (when water is ignored) to 4% while water comprises 95% of the total.

Yes water can form clouds which has two effects: 1) heat is trapped below the clouds; 2) solar radiation is reflected back into space. Now on a long term basis, the net effect is a cooling of the planet (more radiation is reflected back plus the heat that is trapped will eventually dissipate. However, clouds are rarely covering the entire atmosphere for prolonged periods of time. In addition, water vapour is continuously condensing and being generated by evaporation - my point was that studies found that over the time period that appears to be critical vis a vis global warming attributed to increased CO2 in the atmosphere, the water vapour content of the earth's atmosphere increased at a far greater rate than did CO2.

To discount the role of water vapour entirely as a contributer to increased ghg's and by default, an apparent rise in global temperatures, is to ignore the obvious.

I for one am very skeptical about the so-called science behind the IPCC's dire warnings for a number of reasons. The group is a political one and not an independent scientific body whose mandate, when it was created by the UN was to find a link between man's activities and global warming. If people do not believe the IPCC has a political agenda, then they either "cannot see the forest because of the trees" or refuse to believe the obvious.

We have heard of climategate - the leaking of the e-mail messages, now it appears that the studies and models used to determine global temperature patterns were cherry-picked. For instance it is alleged in a new report that scientists have skewed global temperatures by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world - in particular from those in colder colder altitudes and northern latitudes such as in Canada where the only temperature data they used to measure temperatures north of the arctic circle in Canada was from Eureka, despite the fact the Canadian government has a data from over 100 stations located north of the arctic circle. In the 1970's, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed temperature data into the NOAA database and yet NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

I believe there is enough conflicting evidence out there for someone to yell "Stop the Presses" - we need more study and analysis before we proceed in the direction we are headed.

Ok, let me put it this way, thousands of scientists across the world both independently and as part of numerous scientific organisations that have impeccable credentials and that have shown a link between global warming and mankind's haphazard burning of fossil fuels are all wrong and the conspiracy theorists are for about the second time in written history.

Yea, right, pull the other one while whistling "Waltzing Matilda".

I seem to remember a similar thing happening when scientists discovered that there was a hole in the ozone layer over the south pole. Yet the hole was real and the cause was our use of Chlorofluorocarbons in spray cans and refrigeration units.

Actually, I don't think there has ever been a boarder consensus of scientific and technical minds agreeing on anything previously and with the possible exception of the Manhattan Project although that was done in secret, so much intensive research over so many scientific and engineering disciplines.

Hang on a minute, I just realized something. With the exception of Myanmar (Burma) the United States of America is the only nation on earth that is still using imperial weights and measures. Now since it appears that the USA is also the only nation on earth not experiencing global warming then global warming must be due to the widespread use of metric or SI weights and measures. I would, therefore, strongly recommend that all the nations, with the exception of the USA and Myanmar who obviously are far better informed than the rest of the world, revert to utilizing the older Imperial system of weights and measures in order to reverse the global warming trend and save the world from disaster.

"I believe there is enough conflicting evidence out there for someone to yell "Stop the Presses" - we need more study and analysis before we proceed in the direction we are headed."

Undoubtedly there will be ongoing research as without it there is no way of knowing whether what we are doing is working. However, while the research is going on wouldn't it be expedient to start implementing the use of renewable energy sources? After all if we do and there isn't any global warming we not only end up with a cleaner and more stable technical world, but make a motza selling all that now unwanted oil and internal combustion engine technology to the developing nations.

Ok, I'm being frivolous, but you have to admit that there is a hell of a lot of evidence from a very wide range of sources and scientific disciplines that point to global warming being real and a consequence of our extremely inefficient and wasteful use of fossil fuels.

Dear Masu and GeoGuy,

it is not useful to quarrel, try to resolve the origin of the differences:

A. No doubt Australia experienced one of the worst draught "forever".

B. No doubt that water vapor is not within the trace gases that are reported by ICCP, but has the most influence. No doubt that there is feedback between water-vapor and CO2 (both ways!).

C. I have no information if "water vapor" is only the mean dissolved (thus invisible to us) water content of our atmosphere or if total water content is measured.

I too have no information about the time lag in water rise to CO2 rise.

D. Excursions (heavy) from usual weather are a fact that may be treated statistically: the mean is exceedingly unlikely, some deviation from the mean is most likely, a big deviation from the mean happens sometimes.

(For example the wet autumn conditions in the Sonoran desert between 1870 and 1900, the dry conditions in the Rocky mountains near 1200 - beneath the rivers the remains of big trees are found.)

As we do not know about statistics in weather and about real origins of change we can only speculate.

E. No doubt that there are above 20 mechanisms (known to me) that are responsible for some warming or cooling.

F. No doubt that climate is something like a complex control system with very many coupling coefficients between individual influences.

G. No doubt that previous climatic excursions have been much larger than anything we may be able to overcome.

H. No doubt that many countries are quite content if there is some warming.

So my conclusion is:

We cannot influence the climate in a way that it stabilises at todays situation. (Lack of knowledge, lack of will, lack of money).

Those who try to be careful with energy will win in the long term - but not at a price that will drive everybody into nonexistence.

Efforts to get more oil or gas out of known fields should be supported and results the taxed to support what?

Todays prices for solar energy in Europe above 35th degree are ridiculous - never can compete, so useless and (burning) relocating taxpayers money.

Many more research activities have to be done to gain clarity.

RHABE

G'day gals, guys & gurus,

I've been doing some further reading on the so called "greenhouse gasses" and their part in global warming.

Now the earth's atmosphere is for the most part warmed from below as normally it's transparent to what is called the insolation or the incoming solar radiation which for the most part comes from our sun. However, when this radiation reaches the ground which is opaque it causes it to heat and this heat is then reradiated back upwards in the from of infrared radiation.

This is where the greenhouse gasses come into the equation as they are relatively opaque to the infrared radiation coming up from the ground and therefore trap some of that energy and warm the atmosphere more than it would have been without them.

Ok, I'm sure you know all that so lets get into the important bits.

The four most important greenhouse gasses are

• Water Vapour (H₂O): Water vapour is the most important and is responsible for between 36-72% of the greenhouse effect.
• Carbon Dioxide (CO₂): Carbon dioxide while not being responsible for between 9‑26% of the greenhouse. However, it's overall effect is more important when it comes to global warming and climate change, but more about that later.
• Methane (CH₄): Methane by itself is far more efficient at absorbing infrared radiation than H₂O and CO₂ but due to it's much lower concentrations is only responsible for 4‑9% of the greenhouse effect.
• Ozone (O₄): Ozone contributes to between 3‑7% of the greenhouse effect.

Ok, that's the rough importance of each of the major greenhouse gasses, but that only looks at it from the ground up or the reradiated infrared radiation not the insolation.

To get the overall picture we need to look at the effect each has on the insolation and this is where the effect of water starts to complicate things.

Water vapour is definitely far more efficient at trapping infrared radiation than CO₂, but is compounded by the atmosphere becoming saturated at which time the water condenses and forms liquid water droplets in the form of clouds. Now this increases the infrared blocking effect even more but increases the earth's albedo which means that more of the insolation is reflected back out into space. As a consequence there isn't as much energy reaching the ground and therefore less infrared radiation being reradiated back upwards.

The overall effect of water vapour is quiet complex, however, NASA have studied this in considerable detail and the net result is that any increase in the greenhouse effect due to an increase in cloud cover is more than offset by the amount of insolation being reflected back into space. As a result the net result is a cooling rather than warming effect.

Now before anybody jumps in and says that's only for clouds and doesn't allow for water vapour, yes I know, but have a look at the following image which shows the worldwide average cloud cover for last October (2009).

So getting back to the problem, if you try and push any additional water vapour into the atmosphere and there is any cloud present (which is most of the time according to image) then you will more than likely not increase the water vapour content but cause the clouds to grow. In fact the latent heat of vaporization which heats the inside of the clouds may suck in even more of the underlying atmosphere and reduce the water vapour content.

The effect of atmospheric water and associated cloud cover has on the greenhouse effect is extremely complex and I will be reading up on it more over the next few weeks. However, from what I have read so far while H₂O is the most important greenhouse gas increasing it's atmospheric concentration doesn't produce a similar increase in the greenhouse effect and may even produce a net cooling rather than heating effect.

Regards, masu

This just in... South Park's diagram of the various areas in the US that are affected by global warming--

Once more my question from above:

Does anybody know if the "water vapor" in the climate discussion is the total water of the atmosphere or only the dissolved water (non-clouds)?

RHABE

water vapor by definition is the gaseous state of water as opposed to liquid (condensed water) and ice (frozen water)

? Do the specialists in climate research follow this definition ?

RHABE

If they are scientists they will use that term. Any papers or references to water vapor as including clouds (which are droplets of water liquid) are incorrect. This is a very basic scientific term.

G'day gals, guys & gurus,

This is in response to a couple of posts so I have included links to them.

In response to Geo Guy's statements in post #80 where he stated:

• "While I salute your efforts, I must insist that using one set of data (1911 to present) assumes a linear relationship which is far from the truth. The best way to interpret what has happened between 1911 and the present in Australia (or for any other place) is to examine segments (10-year is what I suggest) - only by doing that can you really get a "feel" for what is happening through the intervening 10-year cycles of weather patterns."

If you look at the original graphs you will see a black line which is, wait for it the, 10 year averages while the bar graphs are the annual medians. By the way, even if you stretch it out to a 15 year average you still see a dramatic warming trend over the last half century or so.

• "Secondly, Australia cannot be used as a barometer for what is happening elsewhere. It is a relatively small land mass surrounded by circulating ocean currents which have a greater impact on climate than in any other place in the world."

Yes that is true and I don't have the time to dig up everything, but I did find the following chart which shows the global mean sea surface temperature along with the 10 year average.

Which unfortunately looks very much the same as the Australian data.

• "Finally your analysis about water vapour is clearly well off the map. You should delve deeper into the subject so that you can better understand it....nuff said"

In what way is my analysis incorrect? If it's wrong pleas explain why it's wrong so that we can all develop a better understanding.

Finally in reference to the term "water vapour" Geo Guy stated in Post #84;

• "If they are scientists they will use that term. Any papers or references to water vapor as including clouds (which are droplets of water liquid) are incorrect. This is a very basic scientific term."

I agree, water vapour only refers to the gaseous state which is transparent to visible light and relatively opaque to infrared radiation.

However, we have to look at the total effect that increasing atmospheric water vapour levels has and this includes the increase in cloud cover and the amount of isolation that is reflected by the clouds.

Also Geo Goy, where did you locate the information that indicated that there has been an increase in atmospheric water vapour levels? I'm not doubting it as any increase in temperature would result in a reduction in the relative humidity which would result in an increase in evaporation rates and higher total moisture content. However the only statement I have been able to find is this:

• "Water vapour concentrations fluctuate regionally, but human activity does not significantly affect water vapour concentrations except at local scales, such as near irrigated fields."

Which is not backed up with any hard data, but seems to contradict the statement that atmospheric water vapour has increased.

Anyway, I'm off to start working on my ¹/₃₅₀ scale model of the Star Ship Enterprise NCC‑1701‑A so I'll catch you all later.

Let's step back a bit as simply posting graphs of data will not resolve any differences. What should be followed in the entire process is basic scientific theory and one of the best definitions I have seen for this term can be found at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_thinking

Now if we apply this definition to the IPCC finding, we will find that the reports fall short of proper scientific process. They appear to use the peer review as a method to substantiate the accuracy of their findings; however peer review by itself is insufficient. Furthermore if there is evidence that the peer review process was in any way manipulated, then that support should be discarded. Finally science will evolve only as a result of continuing questioning and debating the validity of proposed hypotheses.

It has been my position (which has been reinforced by recent disclosures over the past several months) that the IPCC and it's partner the WMO are being driven by a political agenda and do not reflect true scientific thinking in its purest sense. From the beginning when the UN established the IPCC's mandate to find evidence to link man's activities to global warming (thereby introducing a bias within their framework), the release of e-mails suggesting every effort was being considered/made to stifle objective views, and the recent disclosure that selective cherry picking of temperature data from urban locations (warmer than average readings) and the exclusion of data from high latitude locations which if included would tend to reduce the effective mean temperature, and the inclusion of temperatures taken during high el Nino periods all suggest manipulation in order to achieve desired results.

As a geological engineer with over 35 years of varied experience, which has included gathering, assessing and interpreting a multitude of data from a variety of sources, as well as assessing and developing a variety of models, geological, financial, economic, pricing etc., I feel that I am more than qualified to question the validity of the assertion that man-made CO2 is the reason for the temperature fluctuations that have been observed globally.

I have spent a great deal of time over the past five years or so investigating global change and have read and assessed arguments from all different angles. I have arrived at the conclusion that the process of climate change on this planet is so integrated with a great number of inputs, that I cannot find anything to support the rationale that manmade CO2 is the cause. That is not to say that man has not generated CO2 and that some of the CO2 increase that has been observed is not due to man's activities. I've gone past that step and looked far and wide for valid proof of that contribution being the cause for temperature rises and apart from a correlation existing between the two, there is nothing out there. Now one of the basic principles any scientist is taught during their education is that correlation does not prove causality. Hence to prove that man made CO2 is the cause for a rise (however slight that rise may be) in global mean temperatures, a lot more work must be done. I contend that work hasn't been done, and in thanks to those scientists that refute the findings of the IPCC, discussions and debates are continuing. I believe most governments realize this and that is why, in the end, a conclusive agreement in Copenhagen was not arrived at.

Instead of posting graphs and data on this page since other graphs and versions of data can also be posted refuting the interpretation suggested by my posts, I just simply want to post a number of links which I encourage people to follow, read the information and come to their own conclusion with regards to the process followed and the conclusion made by the IPCC over the years. From my perspective, the jury is still out and will be out for sometime as man's knowledge on the subject is rudimentary and I am willing to state that many of the assumptions made in the climate models are based on that rudimentary knowledge. If I was to put my perspective into a single statement it would be this: "Why would I accept a 50-year forecast from a groups whose membership includes many meteorologists who on a daily basis have a difficult time forecasting the local weather 7 days out?"

Even Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, one of the leading sirens of the climate change community, had to concede late last month that, when it recalculated global temperatures for the past decade using the latest data and techniques, the average over the past 10 years had risen just 0.07 degrees centigrade, less than half the 0.2 degrees they and the UN had previously claimed and when the natural phenomena of El Ninos and La Ninas were excluded, the change was exactly 0.0 degrees.

Before I post the links I promised you, here is a graph of the same data only interpreted from two different perspectives:

:

The links:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE58H0L620090918

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/

http://www.co2science.org

http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/

http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/Closer_Look/index.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WaterVapor/water_vapor3.php

http://zfacts.com/p/203.html

G'day gals, guys & gurus,

I finally managed to get enough time to have a look at some of the sites Geo Guy has so diligently supplied in post #87 and I am not a happy vegemite.

The very first link which takes you to the Made in South America web site uses data from the University of Dayton's database on mean temperatures.

Now I had a look at the data and to my horror I found that the temperatures quoted for Sydney Australia for January 2010 were abysmally incorrect. Now I would have though that a reputable institution like UD would have been a source for reliable data so it spent several hours checking and rechecking my data, believing that I must have made an error. Eventually I found that what they had done was transpose the data for Sydney Australia with Melbourne Australia which is about 600 km further south.

I have no idea how far back this error goes and I really haven't got the time to sift through the thousands of temperature readings in an attempt to correlate their data with actual data.

However, and this is a really big however, when the first set of real hard data I looked at was shown to be totally screwed up what does that say about the rest of the data?

I will leave it up to those reading this to draw their own conclusions, while I contemplate whether continuing would be a wast of time or not.

Now before I go any further I would like to make it clear that this is in no way directed at Geo Gou, he has been very thorough in the information he has posted, but it does show how careful you have to be.

One last question I would like to pose to Geo Guy and any others reading this is;

What would it take to convince you that global warming is a reality and that the primary driving force behind it is our burning of fossil fuels?

Regards, masu

Greetings Masu - from a chilly Canadian winter!! :)

There are two distinct and somewhat separate issues you have raised: 1) global warming (I prefer to call it climate change); 2) Man being the primary driving force behind climate change.

As for the first one, I would be a real idiot if I was to say that climate doesn't change and that the earth's climate is cyclical varying from cool to warm on a somewhat regular basis. In recent years I would affirm that I believe that the earth was experiencing an uptake to its temperature, however based on what we have experienced here in Canada over the past couple of winters, the earth looks as if it is returning to a period of cooling.

Now, regarding the premise that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver behind climate change, I am not sure if there is anything you can provide that would prove that is the case beyond a reasonable doubt. From my perspective there are way too many issues that have not been properly dealt with by those who have arrived at that conclusion. I personally feel that as a whole, scientists do not have a good handle on all of the parameters that contribute jointly to climate change on this planet.

I could write a book on what I believe are observations that cannot be attributable to a rise in temperature of about 1 degree over 100 years resulting from the burning of fossil fuels - even considering fossil fuels as a catalyst. I would dare say that the earth's climate, or more accurately, the processes that interact with each other to create and manage our climate are just as complex as the human body, if not more so. As a race we have spent more time, effort and money examining the human body to understand what makes it "tick" than we have spent on understanding our climate and there is still a lot to be learned about the human body! From that perspective we are to believe that we know everything there is to know about our climate? I hardly think so.

If you would like me to elaborate more, I am more than willing to do so. It will be lengthy (as I said I could write a book on the subject) but I believe will clearly explain why I am not "on the band wagon" when it comes to fossil fuels driving climate change.

Here some additional useful links: why the data are not correct.

http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/

http://www.agu.org/journals/rg/v026/i004/RG026i004p00624/

Get the full text pdf, necessary to follow the arguments.

http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Study+Acknowledges+Solar+Cycle+Not+Man+Responsible+for+Past+Warming/article15310.htm

RHABE

Thanks for the additional info RHABE

Geo_guy

G'day RAHAB,

I believe I have seen the information in your link before and if so it was addressed in some detail by an Australian scientist from the CSIRO. I can't put my finger on it at the moment but I will have a look for it over the next week or so and if I find it I will post it here.

Regards, masu.

Dear Masu and GeoGuy,

p.86 "temperature rise 1910 to 1945"

p.92 "that the earth's climate is cyclical varying"

First question: what is the origin of the temperature rise between 1910 and 1945?

Second question: is climate really cyclical? Glaciations occurred 7 times (?) within the last 1.5 Myears but not in the preceding 20 Myears?? Why?

To my opinion your discussion about man-made or natural climate change is not to be decided today but maybe in 100 years. For sure: there are much bigger natural changes than man-made changes until now. And: nobody can be sure that man-made changes will have a drastic effect superimposed on natural changes or not.

The only valid (my opinion, nothing else) question today is: will we ever be capable to influence climate in a way to achieve "stability" regardless the natural inputs.

I estimate that we are far away from this, but I am not sure.

As CO2 control will soon be diagnosed as either ineffective or too expensive, what else may be suitable for cooling?

Iron input to oceans may be much more effective? Anything else thinkable?

Greetings from an unusual winter with a lot of snow. As long as I have memories there have been unusual cold winters nearly one in ten years. This weather, not climate.

(Germany 49° North)

RHABE

Greetings RHABE

In response to your query, I would venture that episodes of el Nino between 1910 and 1945 contributed to this rise

http://www.stormfax.com/elnino.htm

There is also a record of increased solar radiation during that period:

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/natural_causes_climate_change.html

With regards to glaciation,the first recorded period of glaciation is believed to have occurred 2.0 to 2.5 billion years ago.

http://www.homepage.montana.edu/~geol445/hyperglac/time2/

Finally, there is an entirely new area of expertise entitled geoengineering which a term coined to represent climate engineering. Many if not all of this research is being focused on how to offset climate warming (which in my humble opinion is wrong as we should also anticipate the cooling component of climate change).

There is a site entitled geoengineer.org that you may want to visit and peruse the latest information on the subject.

Cheers

Geo_guy

Hi Geo Guy,

I will have a look at the links.

I did not know about the this early 2,5 G-years ago glaciation.

My oldest one - talked much about now - is at the Precambrian-Cambrian ages that is linked to the Cambrian evolution.

Then in my knowledge there is a big gap - never heard about glaciations until near 20 million years ago.

Then abrupt cease of any glaciation until around 2 million years ago.

I can only correlate these events/periods with the two Americas merged or apart, with the Strait of Gibraltar being open or closed and the Mediterranean with water or a deep salt-sea.

So what is your opinion about the onset of glaciations around 2 million years ago (after a period of 18 million years without any (?) glaciation.

And from this onset on there have been minimum 7 periods with massive glaciation!

There has to be an overwhelming mechanism that determines what will happen!

RHABE

Hi RHABE

The Precambrian is 2.5 billion years ago so your info coincides with mine. As for other glacial periods, here is a graph of the ones that occurred during the Phanerozoic (up to 550 million years ago.)

It can be postulated that we have no definitive indication of earlier glaciation due to the fact the precambrian rocks have been highly altered thereby removing most of the evidence.

As for the reason for the glacial periods to have occurred, the general premise is that those periods are related to cooling brought on by lower radiation, the wobble of the earth's orbit, changing weather patterns resulting in the currents of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans mixing...and the most important ingredient is you need to have snow accumulation (an effect of increased evaporation near the polar regions) that is greater than what melts during the summer period (likely due to lower sun radiation). Winter and summer conditions over the continents would tend to move together (cooler summers & warmer winters).

It is interesting to note that two scientists, V.A. Berezkin (1937) and A.P. Crary (1955) recognized that the arctic ocean was warming back before melting polar ice was an issue.

The above is a very generalized comment as there are numerous theories and parameters associated with periods of glaciation

Hi Geo Guy,

thank you for the graph, very interesting.

In the reasons for glaciation that you mention, I have no problems to accept all these.

But what is missing is the longterm "switch" with a timescale of some millions of years.

Why long periods with no glaciation switching back and forth to glaciation periods?

Geologic change: Panama, Gibraltar with related chnages of currents in the oceans is my favorite - but I have no proof nor model.

RHABE

Hello Rhabe

I am not sure if there is a so-called "switch" that turns glaciation on or off. Rather the events are a culmination of a number of inter-related events. While there may be some underlying pattern driving the process, I don't believe scientists have identified it yet. Perhaps glaciation is being driven by the principles of the theory of Chaos? I don't know.

We do know glaciation tends to occur in the higher latitudes, that evaporation is needed which will feed the snowfall needed to form the glaciers; that we don't require a really deep freeze for glaciers to form and grow. Ocean currents and weather patterns (highs vs lows) play a much greater role in glaciation than does air temperature.

From a geological perspective, there is the issue of global wobble which is unlikely to follow a sinusoidal pattern hence some cycles are shorter than others. We also has the reversal of the earth's magnetic field, a phenomenon first identified in the 1920's and is something that happens over tens of thousands of years. It is interesting to note that the same thing happens with the sun's magnetic field, only the changes there have been observed to happen over 10 to 20 years.

My point with this is the switching happens with a gradual weakening of the magnetic field which we know has an impact on solar radiations. Once the switch happens, the field strengthens abruptly. I do not know how such an event impacts on climates change but ny gut feel is it has the potential to be significant.

Finally as to ancient glaciations, they are related to the position of the various continents at that period in time. For instance Australia is considered to have been situated close to the south pole and hence was glaciated at one time.

This is a bit off topic for this discussion but I wanted to let you know that the issue is not a simple one.

Cheers

Geo Guy

I checked the link to the sunysuffolk website and was not really convinced: it has surely nothing to do with solar irradiation as it went down for some decades now.

The 11 year average is also not realistic for climate discussions: climate is the weather averaged over 30 years.

So whether it is a harsh winter now or a hot summer next year, it has no influence on the nominal climate.

check out real institutes which monitor and predict the weather, this graph is showing the average temperature in Sint Joost ten Noode, the district of Brussels were the Royal meteorological institute is located.

The full document can be found here: http://www.meteo.be/meteo/view/nl/2791820-Oog+voor+het+klimaat+NL+versie.pdf

The results show that something is going on.

These institutes start to know a lot on the weather and climate, they have serious networks of measurement devices.

In the beginning they said that nothing was going on, till they started to analyse the data they were capturing for almost two centuries now.

It is time to invest in clean technologies to power the world, as in some years we will go by bike due the fact that cheap oil is over.

You must look to the debate from above: who is in one side of the camp and who is in the other, and dare to look to their personnal interests. You will be astonished on the reasons for some to join a side.

We do have an influence on our environment as even weather shows a 7 day pattern now. (in the real world of coarse)

It is the most simple route to follow: Climate warming is a hoax and I just do as my grandfather did, pollute and spill.

Dare to say: let's think twice before I use the plane to go on holyday, there might be interesting place to visit by train or car. Is it really necessary that woods are removed from mountain slopes to eneble skiing?

In Europe we started to implement the small droplet system: if everyone does to his potential a bit for a cleaner future we will somehow get there. For ages we assumed that the others would do it and this was a real mistake.

What the hell would a 5KW PV system do for the world? nothing but some millions of these installations spread over roofs in the whole of Europe would really make a difference. Grid owners are now working to handle the power they get for "free" from their customers.

Hi Gwen

You make some good comments. What seems to be happening is there is a multitude of data and right now there is a lot of concern about the reputation of the data that is out there. In addition the data set that is being used consists of good accurate readings (in recent years) to readings with a larger margin of error (those made around the turn of the century) to data that is derived from scientific hypothesis.

It has now become public that scientists who contributed to the IPCC's last report cherry picked data in order to create the warming trend plus they used information given to them by environmental activists without going through the usual scientific vetting. What many people like myself who have had a "gut feel" that something was wrong with the prognosis issued by the IPCC, it appears those feelings are somewhat verified with the recent disclosures.

Now that doesn't mean the status quo should remain and man should continue to burn fossil fuels in an out of control fashion - pollution in any form is bad and certainly something should be done about it. However the end never justifies the means!