States should rebel against them. This isn’t about the planet, it’s about power. Raw political power.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“We’ll observe Earth Day when the EPA obeys the law.”
Don’t hold your breath on that one.
6 thoughts on “The EPA Carbon Rules”
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Rand, may I direct your esteemed readers to
http://www.false-alarm.net/author/gosta/
Gosta Petterrson is a biochemist and former editor of a scientific journal in his field, so yes, he is not a Climate Scientists, and yes, the two manuscripts on his Web site are not published in a peer-reviewed journal.
He offers a contrary view to the Bern Model championed by the IPCC on the origin of the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere along with the estimate of how long that CO2 would persist were emissions ended or greatly reduced.
There are two components to this. One is that yes, the oceans have been warming over the course of the 20th century, and the effect of this warming has been to drive CO2 out of the oceans and into the atmosphere, much like a warming Coke loses its carbonation. The second is that no, extra CO2 injected into the atmosphere above the equilibrium concentration does not stay in the atmosphere. Rather, it diminishes with a 14 year exponential time-constant (also called e-folding time). This is the about same as a 10-year half life. Furthermore, the ocean reservoir into which it is absorbed in orders-of-magnitude larger than the atmospheric reservoir.
The Bern Model favored by the IPCC is based on the assumption that the only source of emission of CO2 into the atmosphere of any significant size is the anthropogenic burning of carbon fuels, making Portland cement, and cutting down forests. Geo emissions (such as volcanos) are much smaller in scale. Only half of the cumulative emitted CO2, however, appears in the atmosphere. That, along with Keeling’s curve of CO2 in the air measured in Hawaii at Mauna Loa leads to the Bern Model where half the emitted CO2 goes into the atmosphere, the other half goes into an equal-sized reservoir represented by the shallow surface layer of the ocean mixed by waves, and there is very slow transfer of surface CO2 into the deep ocean. This is the basis for saying that much of the CO2 you emit today will be around for 200 years.
Atmospheric testing of H-bombs emitted large amount of radioactive C14 resulting from the neutron transmutation of nitrogen in the air. Much of this CO2 emission ended in 1964 with the U.S. and the Soviet Union signing an atmospheric nuclear test ban. The decay curve of this pulse of C14 in the air strongly suggests a residence time for all extra CO2, radioactive or normal, of a 10 year half-life, 14 years to go down by 1/e where e is the base of the natural logarithm.
It also appears that the reservoir into which the C14 goes is large in relation to the atmosphere, so correcting for various factors such as nuclear power plants and the increasing CO2 level in the atmosphere, not only does C14 have a short “half-life” in the air, it decays along that curve down to nearly nothing. The radioactive half-life of C14 is about 5000 years, so I am talking about the “diffusion half-life” between the atmospheric and oceanic reservoirs.
The IPCC and its defenders are resorting to a kind of hand-waving on this that would have a person flunk Freshman Chemistry, or at least the unit on gas partial pressures.
If you assume that the oceans have been warming by a small amount, and if you assume this warming has been driving substantial amounts of CO2 out of the ocean by the warm Coke can hypothesis, and if you take the bomb test C14 curves on face value what you end up with is that only about half of the increase from 280 ppm to 400 ppm atmospheric CO2 or about 60 ppm is attibutable to humans. The other half is from ocean outgassing owing to the warming trend dating back to the Little Ice Age of the 18th century.
Hence only 1/4 of emitted CO2 is ending up in the atmosphere, with the remaining 3/4 safely dissolved into the oceans with no immediate risk of the reservoir saturating. The oceans are indeed warming, but this trend leads rather than follows the ramp-up of human emissions in the latter part of the 20th century.
If current trends continue unabated, the next half century will see 240 ppm CO2 emitted, which will only contribute an additional 60 ppm in the atmospheric concentration in relation to the 400 ppm there now.
As fossil fuel usage follows an exponentially growing trend line, either we will run out or we will run into environmental trouble — in the late 22nd century, but certainly not within anyone’s lifetime apart from life-extension elixer.
Happy Earth Day everyone, and sleep well everybody!
I have long been awaiting the final realization to dawn on people. I’ve been expecting it to take as long as needed to first realize that the sensitivity of surface temperature to atmospheric CO2 concentration is, in the aggregate, essentially nil. Then, the doors will be flung open, and people can freely question the very foundational premise of the panic, in which it is claimed that humans are in control of atmospheric CO2.
It is very apparent, simply from the plot of temperature anomaly and the rate of change of atmospheric CO2, that some temperature dependent process is the main driver of atmospheric CO2. When you scale to match all the bumps and burbles in that plot, you find that the trend is very nearly matched, too. Integrating the temperature relationship gives a pretty good fit to the measured atmospheric content.
Human emissions are not temperature dependent. Moreover, they also have a trend, so the only way to fit them into the mix is to somehow squeeze them in so that you continue to match the variation and the trend. There isn’t a lot of room to do that.
Additionally, if you look at the rate of emissions and the rate of change of atmospheric concentration, you find that there is only a superficial resemblance, and that the resemblance has been diverging in the past one or two decades during which temperatures have remained steady. The divergence is causing some climate scientists to claim that the sinks have somehow recently become more agressive. That is an epicyclic argument. There is no reason to assume that sinks have done anything out of the ordinary if you simply consider that the main driver was never human inputs in the first place.
It’s really a fairly ordinary feedback dynamic. A feedback loop maintains the system at an externally set reference, and sloughs off disturbances. I think the overwhelming likelihood is that human inputs are essentially eliminated almost entirely, and atmospheric CO2 is marching to the beat of the oceanic drummer.
Tonight, I intend to celebrate civilization by turning on every light in my house. I may even go for a leisurely drive or cook some meat on the grill. Let the ecofrauds snivel in the darkness. Life is good!
Piker. Obama and Bill Nye will fly around in a 747. You’ll need bigger lights running a long time while you cook thousands of meals on the grill to equal their carbon footprint.
On the plus side, Obama’s EPA will make coal cheap for keeping the grill going.
Since I pay my own bills instead of sponging off of the taxpayers, there’s no way I could match Obama’s carbon footprint. Still, can he actually be so oblivious to the mismatch between his words and his actions when it comes to energy consumption?
Germany tried this with their Energiewende. It was so ill conceived, so fatally wrong, so ignorant that they were forced to burn brown, dirtier, coal to make up the energy shortfall.