![]() | Riders on the Storm: Stopping and Restarting Offshore Oil and Gas | The Oil Drum | Nate Hagens on "The Reality Report" with Jason Bradford at 12:10-1:00pm EDT on Energy, Weather, and Sasquatch Hunting | ![]() |
252 comments on DrumBeat: September 8, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
252 comments on DrumBeat: September 8, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction - Part IV: Energy from Breeder Reactors and from Fusion?
- The US stimulus and "green jobs"
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
—Albert Einstein
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
Just ordered the only copy of JSR-78-07 The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate on Amazon. Can't what to see what a super-secret science report looks like. JSR-78-07 does show up in several citation indexes and is described somewhere as a report prepared for the Department of Energy.
Check out the wiki link and see, once again, the politicization of science at work. I'm not referring to the actual JASON working group, but DARPA's sudden desire to handpick members.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASON_Defense_Advisory_Group
This was in 2002 - more of GWB's meddling.
The Republican War on Science
Interesting about those JASON folks.
Any one of them could have talked about the conclusions.
Any of their later "club" members, upon learning of the report...likewise.
And they still could do this.
Academic question:
Since the Earth has biological processes that continuiously trap CO2 and lock it in fossil fuels... AND chemical processes that continuiously trap CO2 and lock it in calcium carbonate... And these processes have been going on for ages...
How big of a carboneaous comet/asteroid would be equivalent to the CO2 emissions that we put into the atmosphere during the entire 20th century?.. during all of 2005?
I can answer that for you. Including the CO2 contributed from estimates of biomass/landuse, the amount of carbon equivalent from 1901 through 2007 would be a carbon ball with a mass of 466,800 million metric tons. That would be a sphere containing about 7 cubic miles of carbon or if you think like a borg, a borg cube of pure carbon that is 1.91 miles on each side.
In just the 20th century, 406,100 million metric tons were added.
In 2005, approximately 10,350 miilion metric tons of carbon was added to the atmosphere.
Hmmm, I wonder if comets are responsible for the end of the last Ice Age? Nobody mentions them as possible factors in climatic change (volcanoes are always to blame). And if they exploded in the upper atmosphere - or impacted on a thick ice sheet - no direct evidence would be left.
Interesting speculation. I'm sure scientists have already considered that if it were at all likely. There are not, to my knowledge, any comets or meteorites made primarily of CO2. These have been well studied and their compositions are well known. Also, there are other more likely sources of CO2 such as volcanoes which are well documented. Finally, the coming and going of ice has been studied quite a lot, as you might imagine. It's not my area but my impression is that each coming and going of ice has its own story involving volcanic eruptions, wobbles in earth's orbit, changes in the distribution of continents, biological effects and probably other things I'm not aware of.
It would be great if some scientist would put out a book for the rest of us giving an overview of the state of understanding of this topic. If anyone knows of one please post it.
If you're interested in meteorites the best book I've found is this one. It is a bit dated (about nine years since being published) but good enough for a broad understanding of the topic. Pretty amazing the amount of information we've gotten from these rocks that have fallen from the sky.
Meteorites and Their Parent Planets
Harry Y. McSween
Second Edition
If you get a chance, read "Under a Green Sky" by Peter Ward. It's an easy read and provides a pretty compelling case as to why only one of major mass extinctions is directly attributable to a comet/asteroid collision.
It discusses the signature(s), that one would expect to find from an object large enough to cause mass extinction (and would collide with the Earth's atmosphere at something on the order of 40-50 miles per second).
Since this is a US government work not subject to copyright, would you mind scanning it and posting it online?
The rest of us would probably appreciate it.
Thanks