Does Man Cause Climate Change After All?
And Is CO2 The Culprit Or A Symptom?
Old Thor is a dyed in the wool skeptic. Tell him the sky is blue and he will shake his head, look down his prodigious nose and make you wonder whether the sky isn’t blue after all and perhaps you were imagining things.
Well this climate change hysteria had Thor worried. There is something wrong with the arguments, but he just couldn’t figure it out. Once the politicians got involved he was sure something was wrong. Having whole parliaments declare their belief in CO2 driven global warming with the same breath and with the same fervor that they declare their belief in God (if you forgive the profane word) totally tipped him over the edge.
Trouble is he couldn’t come up with a better explanation.
First off it was much worry about the predator prey models for various CO2 absorbing micro organisms, which according to the horned one should adapt to increased CO2 levels by increasing their population size. Thankfully we have no shelf space left or we would be spending the next year or so looking at endless jars of sea water fermenting in a CO2 enriched environment under sunlamps. This wouldn’t be so bad except guess who would end up with the job of counting the plankton when Thor declares the resulting soup “cooked”.
Following this he went off on a Fourier Analysis binge attempting to decompose planetary temperature cycles into periodic terms, but got stumped on the fact that the cycles although obvious would not be integer multiples of some starting frequency. Trying to express a general time series in terms of any non orthogonal set of basis terms is decidedly annoying, even with Gram Schmidt. To find a unique “best” such basis virtually impossible given there is an infinite number of the damned things.
So in the end the whole lot sat on the back burner while Thor started working out whether the strategy of trading shares by flipping a coin to decide whether to long or short rather than thinking would be profitable. Turns out the coin is smarter than most of us by the way as long as it uses a stop loss, which is somewhat humiliating, but that is another story.
An Epiphany.
Anyway Old Thor eventually decided to look at some CO2 vs temperature curves. These he has decided mean that the climate guys are trying to say “That over a 20 year period there has been a roughly linear increase of C02 of 30 ppmv corresponding to an observed temperature rise of 0.5 degrees C in the same period.”
So the initial question he asked was “How much energy per CO2 molecule does that work out to be?”
To do this we first work out how much energy went into the air in general. So if 
is the change in kinetic energy, and 
is the change in temperature and 
is Boltzmann’s constant, we have
Which works out to be
per molecule of air
To work out how much the extra CO2 has contributed we need to work out the total energy and divide it by the average of the extra CO2 over the period. To get the total energy we multiply the above by a million. Seeing as this must have come from the CO2 We need to divide it by the parts per million of CO2 concentration. This is easy thankfully. We know we have an additional 30 parts per million by volume from the graph.
This gives us and amount of additional energy contributed to the air of 
Joules per molecule of additional CO2.
Despite his age and disconcerting habit of cavorting with mythological beasts, not saying he is off with the faeries half the time mind you, old Thor was converted to the Newtonian heresy long ago and generally agrees that energy is conserved. As such he has no fundamental philosophical issue about the spontaneous creation of energy or spontaneous loss. It simply doesn’t happen. He also likes simple math. So before he starts looking at additional energy absorption or reflection due to variation in atmospheric gas composition he likes to keep it simple and asks how much energy is released from carbon based fuels per molecule when the CO2 enters the atmosphere. In other words how much energy was released when the additional CO2 was released in the first place.
This turns out to be 890 kJ per mole or 
J per molecule for methane
CH4+2O2 ->CO2 +2H2O + Energy
To summarize, the energy released due to burning is
and energy attributed to CO2
The ratio of energy released from burning to that attributed to CO2 is
Which in the scheme of things and making allowance for the back of a beer coaster math is bloody amazing. In a mathematical sense numbers when dealing with gasses range from the order of 
to 
range. Which is huge. Errors are similarly large if you get things wrong, so to obtain even an order of magnitude similarity let alone something like 4 is amazing. Keep in mind stored energy, and radiated energy needs to be factored in which would bring this even closer to unity.
To understand this you need to understand that when you do any work at all energy is released or stored. Stored energy for example occurs if you build a sky scraper and lift things up in the air. Energy is stored as potential energy in all the cement that has been lifted against gravity. When you make a plastic and change the chemical composition you store energy in the chemical bonds that you can release if you burn the item.
But apart from stored energy, all energy consumed must go somewhere and that generally means into the atmosphere as heat.
Think of every light globe, fridge, car radiator etc all pumping out heat.
So Is CO2 The Problem?
Here is where Thor is now sees a problem. You see the relationship is energy release driving temperature and also driving CO2. Think of burning coal, it releases heat and CO2. Its not CO2 driving heat, although some atmospheric absorption changes are possible. Consider though that you replace the coal burner with a nuclear power station. The heat that results from energy will still be pumped into the air although the amount of CO2 will drop.
Due to the closeness of the energy released and apparent gains due to temperature in the calculation above the first thing to look at should be general man made energy. If you want to factor in other terms such as solar energy being stored due to some “greenhouse” effect you still need to account for the general energy release. In simple terms if the temperature rise is not due to general energy release you need to explain where the energy that was released along with that CO2 went.
By the way the “greenhouse” effect bit is why the micro organisms should increase. Apart from the heat in a normal greenhouse, a trick used to increase plant size (tomatoes in particular) is to pump CO2 into a greenhouse which the green things duly scavenge. The natural question is then “Why does additional CO2 in the atmosphere not drive additional photosynthetic micro organism growth?”
So think CO2 as a by product.
In simple terms if the above holds CO2 trading schemes will not work. Even if they drive people to other energy sources, you will still have the problem that the energy released by any source is going to eventually end up as kinetic energy of the air.
Wind, Hydro and Tidal may arguably be exceptions as they act as energy sinks, although this is non trivial. The issue being that the energy in the Wind and Tides has built up over time and harnessing it is simply another way of concentrating energy and releasing it all at once.
In fact thinking about it all energy from Wind, through to Hydro Electric, through Geothermal and Solar all attempt to concentrate energy that has been stored over time and release it. In the case of coal the energy was stored long ago.
Where it gets worse is that no matter how efficient you become the energy requirement per person has a lower bound. That is to say there is an absolute minimum amount of energy used to boil water, move an object, lift the tiles onto a house roof. This is as a function of each individuals technological level and is constrained by physical law not politics. With an exponentially growing population of increasing technological requirements you are not going to be able to stop it.
King Canute couldn’t hold back the tides, perhaps you humans should learn to surf….
Final Words.
Well we don’t have a real conclusion here yet because old Thor still has not satisfied himself about the normal variation in temperature anyway. That weird flat spot called the Holocene still worries him.
It does look like you have your causality all screwed up though. Wouldn’t be the first time.
What can be said on the matter is that you need to focus on the right problem and so I will digress into things you do need to worry about.
As far as his errant milk drinking, beer swilling, dog loving, pork eating, war mongering Anglo Germanic Celtic Nordic etc misfit children are concerned, it is your reproduction rate that keeps him up at night. More specifically the lack thereof. You need 2.1 children per couple just to break even allowing for deaths etc before adulthood. The Caucasian populations are running at about 1.6. If you treated yourselves as an animal species you would be classed as “Near Threatened” across most of your territories and “Threatened” in your major cities. To put this in practical terms it means that each generation your populations are down by a quarter. The immigrant groups in your territories are running in the 3 to 5 children per couple, so their numbers effectively double each generation. This also compounds itself because it means that the probability of you even meeting another Caucasian to have children with also drops each generation.
In simple terms if you are of European descent your children’s children’s children etc won’t be here in a thousand years to worry about climate problems. While no more white guys seems a good idea to some, it also means Western legal principles, styles of government, arts, culture, science and philosophy goes as well. That may not worry you, but is does worry the horned one.
Western governments are funded by Ponzi schemes of immigration where you hope to fund the baby boomer retirement by bringing in immigrants to pay taxes to pay for baby boomers whose tax money has been lost or misspent
Have you thought about who is going to pay for the immigrants retirement? Another wave of immigrants? or do you expect them to pay for their own retirement and yours as well? Using developing world populations to feather your own nest is not a good way to make friends methinks.
Western industries are in melt down. If a war started tomorrow between say you India or China would the West even have the industrial capacity to make the boots uniforms and tanks? Don’t forget it was industrial capacity that won WW1 and WW2, not brilliant tactics. Could you do the same today?
With these issues on the plate at this moment in history climate change is not at the top of the list. Get your long term survival, territorial control and independence in order first. This is a planet where you lot are dying out and every other racial/cultural group with the possible exception of the North East Asians are rapidly expanding and moving into Western lands, legally or illegally. If you don’t reverse or at least hold it constant the outcome is inevitable. Just imagine that you were an animal species. Picture a map with the density of different groups in different regions over time . It is a one way migration into Western lands.
In other words you are stressing yourselves out trying to create a really nice world, for someone else to live in.
Whether you like it or not, its a game of rats in a cage at this moment in history, a game that will only get more intense as populations rise. At this moment in time the West is the group losing territory and reducing in numbers.
When you can guarantee that as a people you will still be here in a thousand years, that you will be dependent on no one other than your selves for your knowledge, your technology, your medicines, your land, your defense, your resources and your food, then you can worry what the weather will be like.
Don’t let the snake oil salesmen distract you from the real issues with smoke and mirrors. They would sell their own mothers if they thought it would elevate their status for a term.
November 30 2009 04:27 pm | Thoughts of Thor
