march 2009 issue
READERS’ FORUM
The Climate Change Debate Continues
We welcome Readers’ Forum letters of interest to the professions.
Send them to George Lee, glee@apegga.org. Keep them to 300 words or less — longer letters published at the editor’s discretion. Letters represent the opinions and not necessarily the expertise of writers. The PEGG reserves the right to edit or reject any letter.
I am constantly amazed by the number of opinions posted here that contain statements about the writer knowing very little about the subject. It is then assumed that no one else has any greater knowledge, and the writer states strong opinions with no validating data.
Regarding the alleged rapid depletion of the world’s fossil fuel resources, I think a little research is appropriate.
Coal is the number one source of carbon dioxide. We consume 5.5 billion tonnes of it per year, mostly for electric power generation. Oil in various forms comes in at number two and is consumed at 3.3 billion tonnes per year.
From our current known commercially recoverable reserves, we have 130 years of coal and 54 years of oil. We are discovering more new oil per year than we are using and improved technology is enabling us to extract more of the oil in place, which
increases the reserves.
A good example of this is the technology that allows us to recover buried oilsands bitumen. We gain access to three trillion barrels of bitumen, which is not represented in the earlier mentioned reserves.
I am not criticizing research into alternative energy sources or more efficient use of resources. Clearly these efforts should be pursued vigorously and they simply constitute good stewardship. But there is no need to panic and squander large sums of money on ill-conceived projects that at this time are not even close to being competitive.
Also, linking valuable research and efficiency programs to the environmental cause-célèbre detracts from these programs.
Cost comparisons can be distorted if the assumed utilization factors of, for example, wind or solar power are not realistic. Reasonable pilot projects are the standard method for proving and evaluating new technologies, and these evaluations should be made public before we invest in large projects.
It is also a good idea to learn from others’ mistakes. Britain has invested heavily in wind turbines and learned that the amount of CO2 reduction had been grossly overestimated. The program is already in deep trouble.
Solar power has limitations, too. The Earth has an average cloud cover of 65 per cent, and in northern latitudes such as ours the useful hours of sunlight are limited, diminishing the potential for solar energy.
Expansion of our nuclear power capability is our best candidate for the next phase. Canada’s CANDU reactor was the very best and most cost effective reactor in the world. (I was in the nuclear industry through the 1960s and ’70s.)
But our flower power PM Trudeau and his green friends put a stop to that. Now the green group is trying to destroy our country’s economy by wrecking the oil industry without a viable alternative.
Everyone agrees that the life of fossil fuels is limited. But we must have a cost-effective replacement before they are phased out. There is no panic for a quick fix and CO2 is having no detrimental effect on our environment — in fact it is highly beneficial.
If anyone has some factual data that proves that CO2 is harmful in any way, please publish it. I have been studying this subject for 10 years. I have read hundreds of related papers, including the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and I have not found any solid scientific evidence to support the IPCC hypothesis. All the panel has is some dubious correlation data and a lot of empirical assumptions that can not be proven.
I have been attempting to access the documentation supporting the government’s decision to adopt the Kyoto Accord. It would appear that there was no public inquiry, nor any serious and unbiased review of the science, before it committed Canadian taxpayers to tens of billions of dollars worth of negative economic impact.
Years have past since this course was adopted and a great deal more research has been done. But our governments steadfastly refuse to re-examine the question with a public inquiry.
With so much at stake and with difficult economic times ahead, I find it extremely perplexing that a subject with so much potential impact is not being thoroughly and publicly investigated.
For those who still cling to the “consensus” justification for adopting Kyoto blindly, it was only a few months ago that the “consensus” of our economic geniuses around the world was assuring us that we were in fine economic shape. Well, that “consensus” was wrong and so is the scientific “consensus” that backs the IPCC.
In fact, it is also a figment of the IPCC spin doctors’ imaginations.
Barry A. Moore, P.Eng.
Calgary
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The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released a minority staff report concerning climate change on Dec. 11, 2008. It mentions that 650 international scientists do not agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s position on human-caused global warming.
This 231-page report can be found at www.epw.senate.gov/public. Being a firm non-believer in the anthropogenic warming fears as espoused by Al Gore, the former vice president of the U.S., I want this report to receive a diligent review by appropriate government staff members at the Alberta and federal levels.
Otherwise, I fear that huge numbers of dollars will be wasted chasing a fairy tail.
Bill Carver, P.Eng.
APEGGA Life Member
Calgary
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Recently a little sanity has drifted into the letters in The PEGG on Earth warming. I have been appalled by some of the earlier letters by professionals who seem to have forgotten some of the most basic concepts of our science.
In 1949 at the University of Alberta I took a basic course in geology from a wise man, the late Dr. Robert Folinsbee, P.Geol. At his first lecture to the civil engineering class, he said: “We humans have been on this Earth for such a short period of time that we know little or nothing about it, except that there are no averages, no standards, no norms. We have been here but the blink of an eye.”
Unless things have changed in the past 50 years, I believe this statement is probably still true.
I agree that we should take all measures to protect this great planet, even though we may differ in our ideas of how this should be done. As professionals we should do it with honesty, and playing Chicken Little will not do!
We must remember a theory is just an idea. It may be based on fact but it is not necessarily a truth. We must also remember that the computer is just a tool to assist us in our work. It does not think, it only tells us what the programmer has told it to do.
I would hope that none of our members would use fear to convert the public to their personal beliefs or to raise funds for questionable organizations.
From another late U of A great, Dr. George Ford, P.Eng., I end with this: “I am sure that after a number of years at university, you finally realize that you really know nothing.”
Jim Newby, P.Eng.
APEGGA Life Member
Edmonton
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“Anyone half the size of a complete idiot knows that global warming is occurring.”
This quote was a response given by the guest speaker at a luncheon hosted by APEGGA in Edmonton some eight years ago now. The speaker happened to be a prominent scientist giving a talk on his findings about climate change.
The assertion from one of the APEGGA attendees was that global cooling, not warming, was occurring. It was this assertion that the scientist challenged. No evidence was presented by anyone at the luncheon to support the attendee’s assertion.
But let’s presume we’ve learned something over the past decade. Let’s presume we’re at the stage in our intellectual development where we’ve accepted that climate change is occurring and are now wondering whether or not mankind contributes significantly to this phenomenon.
Here is what I’ve learned just recently, something that’s been in the high school curriculum in this province for over a decade now. A retired Grade 12 high school chemistry teacher reminded me of Le Chatelier’s Principle: “If a closed system at equilibrium is subjected to a change, processes occur that tend to counteract that change.”
The teacher explained to me that if a change is imposed on a system at equilibrium, the system will readjust if possible to counteract that change. Also, processes tend to proceed spontaneously to a state of minimum energy and maximum randomness. Generally these two tendencies are in opposition to each other, and equilibrium is a compromise between them.
He said more but one last point he made was that it takes very little to impose a change on a system. “I did it in the high school lab for over 30 years.”
As everyone in oil and gas knows, one drop can change the equilibrium concentrations of reactants and products in a big way. In the case of our environment and at the risk of grossly understating its size, this drop is made up of the pollutants mankind emits every hour of the day.
Richard Eliuk, P.Eng.
Hairy Hill
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Any debate about global warming should take place in the scientific arena — not the political one, with sides arguing their points based on nothing more than misguided and speculative information presented as fact.
Global warming is caused by the sun and possible geothermal heat transfer. Greenhouse gases do not warm but are merely passive insulators that reduce the rate of cooling. Clouds provide about 77 per cent of this insulating effect, CO2 provides less than 10 per cent. Water vapour and other atmospheric components provide the remainder.
We should refer to the role of greenhouse gases as reduced global cooling, not global warming.
If we want to debate the role of CO2 in climate change, we must stay within the confines of engineering and geoscience practice. The parameters are quite simple.
The Earth radiates thermal energy approximating a black body with a temperature of 288 K. The CO2 molecule is linear and symmetrical, and therefore does not have a permanent dipole moment. This limits it to just a single vibration mode of thermal energy capture that resonates with 14.77 microns.
At the current concentration of 386 p.p.m. by volume for CO2 in the atmosphere, the question for debate is how much of the thermal radiation within the band centred on 14.77 microns that is radiated by the Earth is already captured and how much is left to be captured.
Observational evidence from the notch in the thermal spectrum measured by the Nimbus4 satellite in 1970 demonstrates that over 95 per cent of the possible energy in this band had been captured when the concentration was 325 p.p.m. by volume. Theoretical projections based on the relationship between atmospheric CO2 content and increase in average global atmospheric temperature, using the MODTRANS facility maintained by the University of Chicago, show that at the current concentration of 386 p.p.m. by volume, 99 per cent of the available energy from the Earth has been captured.
Essentially the first 20 p.p.m. by volume provides over 50 per cent of the effect and each subsequent 20-p.p.m.-by-volume increase has a 20 per cent effect on the remaining energy. At 380 p.p.m. by volume, only 0.9 per cent of the energy remains to be captured.
The total greenhouse effect is about 34 C and CO2 is responsible for just 10 per cent of this or 3.4 C.
If we want to have a scientific debate about the effect of CO2 on global temperatures, the debate would be whether the effect of doubling CO2 would be closer to five per cent of 3.4 C or one per cent of 3.4 C.
The engineering debate would therefore be limited to 0.15 C and 0.034 C, and not about model projections of 2 C and 5 C as Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proclaim.
The other part of the global warming debate centres on melting ice from global warming caused by human emissions of CO2.
The sun heats the Earth and the Earth’s surface heats the atmosphere. It is contrary to the laws of thermodynamics for an atmosphere warmed by the surface of the Earth to send this energy back to the surface at a higher level than it was originally sent at.
It is easily demonstrated that changes to the amount of energy from the sun reaching the Earth’s surface can cause changes in the melting of ice during the polar summers. It is not physically possible, however, for changes in the insulating effect of greenhouse gases to add the energy necessary to melt any ice.
If by some chance this were possible (using the same type of premise that allows Superman to fly), it would still be impossible to explain the process that allows the stated changes in the amount of ice that melts from year to year. By its own admission, the IPCC states in the 2001 science report that global warming was 0.006 C per year. By volume the heat capacity of air is about 800 times less than that of ice so it would take 10.66 million cubic metres of air heated by 0.006 C to melt each cubic metre of ice.
There is not enough air in the whole atmosphere to do that, and certainly not in the thin layer of air adjacent to the ice that can transfer this heat. If somehow this actually took place, then all this heat would have been removed from the atmosphere and the global temperature measured would not show the 0.006 C temperature increase.
The most amazing thing about the whole global warming issue is that I can categorically state that it is physically impossible for a doubling of CO2 to have any more than a miniscule effect (far less than 0.1 C). And I can do so without contradicting a single scientific statement made by the IPCC, because it has never stated explicitly that CO2 causes global warming in any of its scientific literature.
All the panel has stated is that its models project 2 C to 5 C of global warming from a doubling of CO2. It never stated this as fact.
The IPCC also stated that if the Greenland ice sheet melted from global warming, there would be a dangerous sea level rise. It never stated that CO2 increases could cause ice to melt because that is physically impossible.
The causal relationship between CO2 and ice melting is nothing more than a political fabrication. It misrepresents the physical facts and enhances its case with well-orchestrated propaganda starring polar bears and hurricane Katrina — neither of which have anything to do with fossil fuel emissions or greenhouse gases.
To any of those who still think that there is a connection between CO2 emissions and global temperature, please visit http://icecap.us and read my Hansen Mars Challenge. Type Hansen in the search engine. You’ll find my contribution midway down the resulting list.
Norm Kalmanovitch, P.Geoph.
Calgary
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RE: One Possible Weakness Does not Negate our Climate Change Duties, by Harvey A. Buckmaster, P.Eng., P.Geoph., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, February 2009.
Mr. Buckmaster wonders why there should be any controversy about simple facts. I don’t think that any serious student of climate physics would dispute the simple facts that CO2 concentrations have increased since the start of the Industrial Revolution or that the observed temperature has increased over the past 100 years.
Whether this is an example of correlation or causation is another question.
It is also a well-known fact that CO2 absorbs energy in the infrared spectrum in only a very narrow band. Most of the infrared radiation from the Earth is unaffected by CO2 in the atmosphere. The predicted temperature increase associated with a given change in CO2 concentrations is also a logarithmic function, which means that each additional p.p.m. of CO2 in the atmosphere produces less and less warming.
At the point where 100 per cent of the energy in that narrow infrared spectrum is absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere, additional CO2 in the atmosphere ceases to have any effect on atmospheric temperatures.
If the discussion about climate change revolved around these simple facts, nobody would be making a fuss about anthropogenic global warming. A doubling of the CO2 concentration from the current 384 p.p.m. to 768 p.p.m. would produce less warming than the historic warming of the past century.
Where things get complicated is when feedback loops are added to the climate models that amplify the warming associated with CO2 increases by various mechanisms (e.g., higher temperatures lead to increased water vapour in the atmosphere). It is the existence of these (unknown) feedback mechanisms that produce the prediction from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of 6 C warming over the next century.
Despite what you might be led to believe by the various newspaper and television media, there is vigorous debate in the scientific community about the existence of these feedback loops and even whether the feedback mechanisms have a positive or negative influence on atmospheric temperature.
On Feb. 25, Dr. Will Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University, appeared before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and stated: “Since most of the greenhouse effect for the Earth is due to water vapour and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water’s contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about. The buzzword here is that there is ‘positive feedback.’
“With each passing year, experimental observations further undermine the claim of a large positive feedback from water. In fact, observations suggest that the feedback is close to zero and may even be negative.”
Many of the possible influences on changes in the atmospheric temperature — including solar activity, multidecadal variations in ocean circulations, cloud cover and cloud formation, oscillations in the Earth’s orbit — are only beginning to be understood.
As an engineer who has spent many years modeling the vibration characteristics of rotating machinery, I can understand the difficulties involved in modeling chaotic, non-linear systems without knowledge of input variables. The current climate models are much more sophisticated than the first models used 20 years ago, but that doesn’t mean their results are any more accurate at predicting future temperatures.
If we only had to worry about simple facts, I doubt that we would have had 10 consecutive months of Readers’ Forum letters on the topic. If we only had to worry about simple facts, I doubt that APEGGA would have solicited members’ input regarding climate change and public policy.
It is because climate change is such a complex and largely misunderstood topic that there is such vigorous debate about the issue.
Alasdair Robinson, P.Eng.
Calgary
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