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Re: Carbon Dioxide 

By: joe-taylor in ALEA | Recommend this post (1)
Fri, 07 Dec 12 12:22 PM | 106 view(s)
Boardmark this board | The Trust Matrix 		Msg. 12135 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 12128 by DigSpace)
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Digspace,

You have some wonderfully interesting theories here. However, you seem to be forgetting the delicate balance that this planet has been in that has supported human life for all of these years. As the planet warms as more and more of this CO2 is released, that balance is going to be further upset. The human race here on earth has existed and prospered under some pretty predictable weather and climate conditions and those are quite evidently being upset. Droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes are becoming more and more evident as time passes by. And, those things are very unpredictable and counter productive. There are six or seven billion of us on this earth and if the food production cycles are disrupted to any great degree, most of us will simply starve to death.

Here in the midwest where a great deal of the worlds food is produced we just got out of one drought and have entered another mild winter cycle that may lead to another drought in the next growing season. If that drought expands, the consequences could be catastrophic. You also talk of ethanal production being a huge success. What you do not mention is the fact that when you place corn into ethanal production, you take a great deal of its nutritional value away. WE need that nutritional value to feed the millions who depend on it for food.

So, to make a long story short, if the weather patterns continue to be disrupted, there will be no time to institute your carbon theory as the social and economic systems will start to break down. Human life on this planet exists in a very narrow band and as the planet warms, we begin to exit that bandwidth and move into a situation where only limited amounts of life can compete for the much scarcer food resources available. Civilization may break down and we may return to a tribal form of life where only the very strong and the better organized and more efficient of us can survive. And, it may not be very many drought and hurricane cycles away! Hurricane Sandy was a super hurricane and stretched over a thousand miles in length and many more may follow her in the coming years.

In summary, the human race has survived on predictability and may not survive on the future lack of it on our very complicated and interdependant economic cycles. At least not in the numbers that we have on this planet today. And, the reduction of those numbers may be a very, very messy thing to watch! The biblical four horsemen of the apocalypse may come riding through: pestilance, war, famine, and death! And, it may happen in numbers that we have not seen in the previously recorded history of this planet! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse

And, as you like to say, we could carry on but you get our drift! And, speaking od drift, then you have this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification_and_its_effects_on_marine_systems


IOVHO,


Regards,


Joe


To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.


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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Carbon Dioxide
By: DigSpace in ALEA
Thu, 06 Dec 12 11:03 PM 		Msg. 12128 of 54959

I assume the following:
That we have taken some 300m years of solar fixed carbon and released it in its most oxidized form, as atmospheric CO2. Apparently the properties of atmospheric CO2 dramatically alter the heat balance of Earth. Less heat leaves, more heat stays. So we are warmer. The result is climate change. I argue that we accept climate change. It has advantages and disadvantages. We leverage the advantages and mitigate the disadvantages. We move some of our houses away from the shoreline. We observe that many plants grow more vigorously. We grow those plants.
Historically we have been rather reliant on the considerable energy afforded by long chain hydrocarbons and their considerable utility for not just energy, but for materials.
Cellulose is a long chain polymer, but not a naked hydrocarbon, it is a carbohydrate.
Consider for example polypropylene. Not an oxygen to be found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileRazzolypropylene_tacticity.svg
The thermal mechanical properties of polypropylene are very attractive. And the can be replace by carbohydrates.
Consider for example polylactic acid products that are generated by the fermentation of sugars, the products of harvesting plants (this would be human use of CO2 as you asked for) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polylactic_acid
Consider for example the various polyesters represented by the polyhydroxyalkanoate group, again, produced by the fermentation of simple sugars, readily available by the harvesting of plants (this would be human use of CO2 as you asked for):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyhydroxyalkanoates
we are not talking about a rare product, look at these images, as much as 95% of the cell weight of these bugs will be converted to very high value long chain polyesters … it is simply staggering … and what do we feed them?, switchgrass, weeds, or sawdust.
http://www.unil.ch/webdav/site/dbmv/shared/Poiriers/Fig1.jpg
Indeed, we can simply have the plant “be” a polyester, please scroll to figure 4 of this (I know, it is very technical, so just go to figure 4)
http://www.esf.edu/chemistry/nomura/lab/publications/pdf/02%20Appl%20Microbiol%20Biotechnol.pdf
All of the things we do, all of the things we use, we can do and use by just growing plants. Fuel production, currently dominated by ethanol from yeast is rapidly moving towards longer chain molecules (greater value) using all sort sof bugs including Clostridium, and friends. While butanol is the firs step, longer chain alkanes are well within demonstrated technology. I may be constrained on that on some of that, so I am afraid I can’t be of much more help, or at least certainly not in a public forum.
So,we come back to carbon balance …. That becomes the issue … have we released too much carbon?
I believe that we will require this higher carbon flux, there are just too many of us and we have been now long reliant on free long chain hydrocarbons. In the absence of those I believe we will need to grow lots and lots of stuff to replace our fixed carbon needs (again fixed in a chemistry sense) .
It is not yesterday. We are not a few monkeys wandering fro trees. We are us. We require carbon, lots of it, and while we leveraged the 300m yrs of fossile fuels, I do not argue that we just walk away. We can fix carbon. We can modify it. We can make polyesters and we can make fuels. We require this flux, this carbon flux, we just must adjust (I felt like Jesse Jackson for a second).
We need this carbon, we need to cycle it, and we may well need to amend out perception of shorelines and temperatures. But we need to leave the box of the old CO2 levels and enter the world of the new CO2 levels, we do not need to push the current levels to the old levels, we need to se the new levels as the food for our sophisticated efforts going forward. We need to train our young people to leverage this truth as opposed to run from it.
Much is made of renewable ethanol production … but overlooked is that has actually hit a peak …. One can only put about 10% ethanol into gas, and pretty much all gas in the US has 10% ethanol. IT is a staggering success. If one was to back out the numbers on this and turn it into supertankers and so on, the US has achieved significant self-reliance as a consequence of the ethanol subsidy efforts. The technology has come miles, it is solid, entrenched, and has no ongoing dependence on subsidy. This ability is extant, and in practice. God bless heavy federal investment. It is nothing but a huge success story.
But ethanol sucks. I, in a bit of a mood, once asserted in a reasonably public venue that ethanol was the least valuable molecule out there that folks pursued. That is the truth. It is C2. The value of a molecule is based on its carbon chain length. C2 is one step away from CO2. Fucking worthless. We need, we know we need, the long chain carbons, and for technical reasons preferably hydrocarbons (when we are talking fuel).
And yes, we can do that, we have these tools.
In an area that enjoys almost no economic support, we have long chain fuels:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012/03/beller-20120315.html?utm_campaign=Feed:+greencarcongress/TrBK+(Green+Car+Congress)&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner

Alea, I could carry on, but you get my drift.

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