The largest fragments of what this document hopes to become are made available at irregular intervals at www.agkaiser.org click on “The Latest” which at this writing is: May 23, 2009 .
If you heat water on your stove, it warms more quickly with a lid on the pot. When it's reached the desired temperature, it's not sufficient to merely remove the lid, so that the energy escapes faster. You've got to turn off the heat.
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The largest fragments of what this document hopes to become are made available at irregular intervals at www.agkaiser.org click on “The Latest” which at this writing is: May 23, 2009 .
If you heat water on your stove, it warms more quickly with a lid on the pot. When it's reached the desired temperature, it's not sufficient to merely remove the lid, so that the energy escapes faster. You've got to turn off the heat. You must stop putting more energy into it. We can't turn off the Sun. We can't turn off volcanoes or prevent all wildfires. There are other natural phenomena that we can't turn off. Our responses to Global Warming are limited to the things we do that contribute to it.
Global Warming is acknowledged as a growing threat to life as we know it. We of the Planet Earth, to the extent that we have caused this danger, must face it together. The heat that's produced from stored [mostly] carbon energy sources is probably the primary cause of Global Warming and certainly the only one over which we have any control. The increased thermal efficiency of the air blanket, caused by the movement of carbon from within the solid Earth to the atmosphere, retards the outflow of heat from the Planet and slows our rotation on our axis,* to be sure. Worse, every molecule containing carbon releases energy in the form of heat as it's emitted. There's also energy input to our system each day from the Sun. Beyond the heat and light we come by naturally, it's the stored energy extracted from carbon sources, plus more from geothermal and nukes, that can be reduced. Those latter three, the stored energy sources, are the cause of the extraordinary warming that we can moderate.
* Dubious? Conservation of angular momentum is what accelerates or decelerates the rotational velocity of a spinning skater, as the arms are extended or retracted. The effect of our skyscrapers and carbon emissions on the length of the day may be very small and not the only factors, but the slowing is measurable. Anything that displaces mass outward from the center of the Earth will retard our Planet. - http://www.slate.com/id/2133359/
This seems so obvious that it requires some reflection to understand why so many scientists and engineers seem not to have noticed that it's the energy, the extra heat we add to the system from millions or billions of years old stored sunlight that is the starting point of the oncoming Global Warming Catastrophe. To concentrate on the carbon we add to the atmosphere and ignore the heat, is self destructive and self delusional. Have the thinkers simply been stampeded with the herd that seeks more energy at great profit for producers and any cost to ourselves? Are the technical leaders as greedy and foolish as the rest or are their salaries, grants and bourgeois lifestyles hitched to the pleasure and whims of bankers and investors?
Subjugation by neo-aristocracy makes the bourgeoisie more like the rest of US commoners than they want to believe. Our lives are ruled by the elite investor class. Whether or not we're lucky enough to be among the shrinking middle classes, we're most of US in this together. We must face the fact that the Planet is getting warmer and that it's the energy we add to the environment, which doesn't come in each day's ration of sunlight over which we have no control, that is the villain. We must see that the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy is universal. It even rules the economy that rules US. The conservative physical universe is the ultimate zero sum game.
The floating ice that melts won't raise the sea level. Archimedes taught the world about buoyancy a few years ago. However the glaciers in the Andes and elsewhere, and the Greenland ice cap will raise the oceans, whether the solid water melts or merely slides into the sea.[ibid] But there are more immediate disasters looming. The glaciers in South America, whose summer melt feeds the rivers on which millions depend for life, are shrinking. Glaciers in Peru are melting so quickly that by 2015 almost all of them may have disappeared.1 Six million live in the city of Lima, Peru alone. More rural high country agricultural peoples, who've lived there thousand of years and haven't benefited at all from the energy we use, will no longer be able to support their lives, even if they move to the cities first. - John Vidal Cities in peril as Andean glaciers melt - Ten percent of the world's population live in low lying coastal areas. If the sea rises one meter 600 million people may be displaced or severely impacted.2 Not everyone is a cynical conservative or brain dead libertarian who would simply let this happen.
Why don't the honest non co-opted scientists and engineers say that it's not just the carbon? The carbon emissions aren't the critical part of the disaster. It's the energy emissions, which carbon emissions accompany in the case of fossil fuels, that are heating the global environment. Carbon is a red herring, when we concentrate on it and ignore the energy we put into the environment. Carbon cap and trade is an associated distraction and a non solution that forgives the rich for the evil they do. It allows them to use the wealth they've taken from the community that produced it, to buy the permission to pollute even more.3
Carbon energy sources are sunlight that was stored in the Earth millions or billions of years ago. Though more recently stored, even the wood or other biomass that's burned provides heat from past sunlight. The nukes were made in stars. Geothermal was packed in by gravity long ago. Only sunlight that's incident on Earth today gives energy and heat that will be here anyway. Winds are a manifestation of today's ration of solar power – or at least they used to be. The energy in the tides is an immediate effect of gravity. No matter what transduction such energies undergo, or don't, their contribution to global warming remains the same. They are inevitable. We have no control over the Sun, Stars and Moon. The immediate energy they give US is the baseline. We can and must control our usage of stored energy – especially that which comes from hydrocarbons, which have the additional ill effect of increasing the thermal efficiency of the atmosphere.
“Real alternative fuels are non carbon based. Only energy produced by burning non carbon based fuels minimizes the contribution to the average temperature of the atmosphere.” - from /home/agk/literature/musings/2006/notes_08-06.wpd – this is the earliest reference that I've found, which was written by me, to the differentiation of carbon [stored] energy and incident sunlight - August 3, 2006
So we see that the carbon added to the atmosphere by burning [especially] fossil fuels is directly proportional to the heat/energy that causes the increase of the average temperature of the global environment. We also see that the carbon released with the heat, mostly in the form of CO2 but with heavier and more detrimental molecules as well, helps to retard the outflow of energy through our thin blanket of air. Make no mistake. It's the heat we add to the environment, not the retardation of thermal flow to space by carbon, that is the prime threat.
I've heard it said that there's not enough energy in sunlight to supply our needs. That assertion is probably very specious. What's true is that we don't know how to extract it. So, using the technology of the day in which the statement was made, not enough energy from the Sun could be generated to provide for our often extravagant usage. How much energy is spent by tornadoes and hurricanes? The wind is powered by the Sun. All the plant and animal growth is powered by the Sun. But the sheople keep saying that we can't continue functioning as we do with solar energy. Does that mean that if we're a self destructive species we must continue on that suicidal path set forth by our progenitors and the wealthy patrons who despoil the community for personal gain?
I'll recap. The established energy producers, scientists, engineers and most politicians and the public are convinced that we need to use even more energy to continue our way of life. Most also concede that global warming is real and needs attention. The “common wisdom” [an oxymoron] is that the warming can be stemmed by the reduction of carbon emissions. Such speciousness ignores the actual cause of higher temperatures, which is the heat emissions that are the reason for carbon emissions and are part and parcel to any use of energy stored in past years. This is the part for which we are responsible and over which we have control.
Not all energy that's input to our global ecosystem can be controlled. There's little chance we can stem the instantaneous flow of solar energy. That is the baseline of global energy accrual by the Planet. It is the use of stored sunlight that is causing the extraordinary global warming. It was put up hundreds of millions of years ago, when it comes from fossil fuels like coal, oil or natural gas; billions for nukes, made in stars, and the gravitational accumulation that accounts for geothermal. And it is that usage that we can and must control. If not, we may find ourselves with no sustainable lifestyle. So what can we do about it?
Coming soon to the ". . . Independent Energy . . ." website: prototype solar electric installation that diminishes dependence on centrally planned power systems and reduces carbon pollution and energy emissions from stored sources.
1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/13/climatechange.colombia
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2008/2008-04-28-01.asp
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0725512820070607
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/peru-may-lose-glaciers-by-2015.html
2 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7935159.stm
3 Cap and Trade that allots Carbon credits to polluting industries and allows trade among themselves exacerbates the “market solution” fraud that is at the root of all of our problems and the greatest existential threat to the survival of the Human Race and Life in general on the Planet Earth. But if the license to pollute was given to we consumers, whose desires [demand] usually get the blame for any shortcomings of capitalism, we could sell them to the producers who profit by ecological destruction in the first place. Additionally, this would stimulate production and the real economy would benefit.
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