Monthly Archives: January 2010

Green Companies vs Global Warming

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Posted by JJ on January 19, 2010 – 9:56 pm
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Green technologies posed the investment opportunity of our lifetime, according to Kevin Parker, Deutsche Bank’s global head of asset management, in a study published on Thursday 14 January 2010.

“The shift to a low-carbon economy to mitigate global warming will require the creation of new technologies, industries and jobs on a massive scale.  The absolute imperative to prevent climate change is therefore also, I believe, the economic and investment opportunity of our lifetime.  Climate change is not merely an investment sector that may hold future promise; it is a sector that has already delivered and is continuing to deliver,” said Parker.  “That is why we believe institutional investors should be shifting their asset allocation towards climate change.”

Dear oh dear, we are emerging from a credit crisis and we see this example of the kind of advice given to investors by  a leading bank.  Deutsche Asset Management had USD 695 billion in assets under management as of September 2009.  I guess that makes Deutsche a leading bank.  Seems they have learned nothing!

The reason for the strong performance of “Green” business is the same as the reason for the previous strong but short-lived performance of dot coms, and before them, ostrich farming.  For those ventures, the bubbles burst, leaving investors all wet and cold.

It’s flavour-of-the-month.  Fashion.  Whatever is strongly promoted to the public.  Whatever they believe in at the time.  The stronger the hype, the more publicity they are given, the more valuable their shares are perceived to be.  Until they go out of fashion, or the abysmal or non-existent dividends lead to panic selling, and the share values collapse.

And these ventures are due to collapse in a spectacular fashion.  We are in for up to thirty years of global cooling – even the IPCC (belatedly) admits that!  Long before then, voter dissatisfaction with the expensive climate control policies of their governments will lead to a reversal of support and removal of subsidies from “green” companies.

Good investment?  Unless a really good energy storage system is developed, these companies will be good investments only in the very short term.

Not that I am happy about it. We really do need to develop good systems to generate energy from renewable resources – after all, oil and coal are finite.  But the kind of nonsense arising from the global warming hype is leading to premature investment in technologies of limited value.  Instead of pouring funds into cap-and-trade nonsense, and subsidising inefficient power generation without continuity of supply, we should be funding efforts to develop realistic renewable power sources. Without risking the life savings of small investors hoodwinked by hype and carefully cultivated fear.

Seems I have revealed myself somewhat.  Yes folks, the Grumpy Old Man is an environmentalist and a conservationist.  But he also has a built-in baloney detector, and AGW is five-star, ocean-going baloney.  Sadly for investors, so is Deutsche bank’s advice.

A Funny Thing did not happen in the Cambrian and Late Ordovician Periods

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Posted by JJ on January 17, 2010 – 8:47 pm
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Climate Change scientists warn us to act right now to limit our CO2, or our climate will tip over irreversibly, and there will be a disaster for marine life.

The climate tip-over is foretold in a study reported by “Scientific American” on 12 January 2010.  It finds that “even if the world’s governments manage to cut global emissions in half by 2050 and then do everything possible to limit emissions from 2050 on, society has only even odds of limiting global temperature increases to 2º, a goal noted in the recent Copenhagen Accord“.

The article says that “The science is not clear what level poses a threat, but some research suggests concentrations must remain at or below 450 parts-per-million to prevent drastic climate change.”  And it says that “emissions today are on the path to 550 ppm and beyond”.  The last quote in the article is from Gary Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan University (an economist – what’s he doing here in “Scientific American”?)  He says that “Tip an ecosystem or planetary process – such as the atmosphere – too far in one direction, and it may suddenly and irreversibly “flip” into an altered state that precludes any notion of going back to the unaltered version”.

The marine disaster is foretold in a report published by the EU-funded European Project on Ocean Acidification.   The report says that levels of aragonite, the type of calcium carbonate which is essential for marine organisms to make their skeletons and shells, will fall by 60% to 80% by 2095 across the northern hemisphere.  Dr John Baxter, a senior scientist with Scottish Natural Heritage, and the report’s co-author, says “The bottom line is the only way to slow this down or reverse it is aggressive and immediate cuts in CO2.  This is a very dangerous global experiment we’re undertaking here.”

Now, let’s put what they are saying into perspective:

Consider the geological history of Earth from the Cambrian period that began 600 million years ago.  In the latter part of the Cambrian period, about 530 million years ago, the proportion of atmospheric CO2 was nearly 7000 parts per million.  In the Late Ordovician period, about 430 million years ago, CO2 was at 4400 parts per million.

Today we are in the beginning of the Quaternary Period.  In all of the past 600 million years, CO2 levels have been less than 400 parts per million in only the Carboniferous period and the present.  For about 70 percent of the whole 600 million years, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has been above 1000 parts per million.  1000 ppm – that’s well above the 550 million ppm they are rabbiting on about, up to peak of nearly 7000 ppm!  For 420 million years out of the last 600 million.

And guess what.  A funny thing didn’t happen in all of those 420 million years.  The sky did not fall.  That is, the ecosystem did not flip over to an irreversible state.  The Greenhouse Effect did not run away.  And, in the waters beneath an atmosphere containing 7000 ppm of CO2, the marine acidity did not kill the marine animals and plants that teemed in the Cambrian oceans.

P.S:

It’s a wonder the two “studies” didn’t say outright “Be afraid…  Be very afraid”.  They don’t use the words “Runaway Greenhouse Effect”, and they avoid any specifically testable conclusions,  but they want us to be afraid, all right.  Penn & Teller would love them.

In accord with good literary manners, I have enclosed the name of the scientific publication in quotes – viz: “Scientific American”.  I have no hesitation in also enclosing my final comment on the reported studies in quotes: “Yeah Right!”

References:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/10/ocean-acidification-epoca

The “Guardian” article “Ocean Acidification Rates pose Disaster”, reported on the Copenhagen Summit.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html.  They quote:

Temperature after C.R. Scotese http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
CO2 after R.A. Berner, 2001 (GEOCARB III)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-policy-analysis-goals-long-mid-term.

The study they quote was published by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and the Energy Research Center in the Netherlands, under the auspices of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Champagne Experiment – CO2 & Global Warming

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Posted by JJ on January 16, 2010 – 9:27 am
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Try this at home.  Put one bottle of champagne and one PET bottle of carbonated water in your refrigerator at 4 degrees C.  Put another of each on your kitchen bench and set your home temperature thermostat to 21 degrees C.  Leave the bottles for twenty-four hours.

Now take out the bottle of champagne from the fridge, and open it.  Also open the champagne bottle on the bench.  What happens?  The cold bottle opens with a hiss or a pop, and the bottle sits with bubbles rising in it,  The warm bottle spurts champagne, overflowing the neck so violently that you lose half of the contents.  Now do the same with the bottles of carbonated water.  What happens?  Much the same thing – the cold one bubbles away gently, the warm one overflows.  Now put the cold bottle of water back in the fridge without replacing the cap, in preparation for the second part of the experiment (keep the cap aside – I’ll tell you why at the end).

Congratulations!  Pour yourself a drink of champagne – you deserve it.  You have just demonstrated the possibility that cold champagne (and water) hold more CO2 in solution than warm champagne (and water)!

The volume of water in the oceans is approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometres, or 310 million cubic miles.  (Source : “The World Ocean.” The Columbia Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. 2007, 6th Ed. New York: Columbia University Press.)  Those oceans hold an awful lot of CO2.  So you have also demonstrated the possibility of something else.  Warmer oceans will hold less CO2 than cold oceans.  So we could expect that in the presence of global warming, the oceans (all 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of them) release CO2 directly into the atmosphere.  Rather a lot of CO2.

Hmmmm….  Is anyone wondering why the glacial records associate high levels of CO2 with high temperatures?  And why the CO2 rise always follows the temperature rise?  Don’t you think it possible that at least some of the CO2 is there because rather a lot of it would slowly bubble out of the oceans when they became warmer?   That would seem to expose Al Gore’s use of glacial records to support AGW theory for what it really is.  Poppycock.  Penn and Teller fodder.

Heh heh…  You have just wasted a bottle of champagne.  Cheer up – it is hard to be grumpy when you are drinking champagne.  So have another glass of champagne.  Go and relax for twenty-four hours, ready for the second part of the experiment.

After the twenty-four hours, go back to the fridge.  Open it and look at the bottle of carbonated water that you returned uncapped yesterday.  It’s no longer bubbling.  So if there is any CO2 remaining in it, it is held in solution.  Now remove the bottle from the fridge, screw the cap back on securely, and leave it on the bench at 21 degrees C for another twenty-four hours.

After the second twenty-four hours, open the warm bottle.  What happens?  It starts bubbling away.  And that’s the point of the second part of the experiment.  Congratulations, now you really have demonstrated that cold water holds more CO2 in solution than warm water!  If you have any more cold champagne, pour yourself one.  Otherwise, have a beer.

(The earlier part of the champagne experiment did not truly demonstrate that cold water holds more CO2 in solution than warm water.  It demonstrated only that when the pressure is released from water containing CO2 dissolved under pressure, it bubbles out more quickly if the water is warm.)

References:

Dr Jarl Ahlbeck “Increase of the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration due to Ocean Warming” – see http://www.john-daly.com/oceanco2/oceanco2.htm