Pseudo green

[meow2222]

Chinese society is not the same as ours, and our knowledge of it is quite limited. We dont know whether the planners are operating under the same assumptions as us. Given much lower average income I suspect not. Likely houses will be smaller, densely populated, and maybe foamed concrete, daubed bamboo, or who knows what. And heating bills might be cut by interior cardboard cavity insulation and mylar film on batens on the exterior of the south facing wall... we really dont know. When affording heating is difficult, it makes all the more sense to get what benefit can be had at minimal cost, without the need for a zillion power stations, and they might choose to do so.

NT

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

I don't think the Suffragettes thought that way.

[Mary Fisher]

So does that mean we should do nothing at all?

Mary

[The Natural Philosopher]

Give the man a medal.

The answer to being energy obese is not in any fashionable diet. It is simply in eating less.

The simple answer is a rising tax - not on cars, lightbulbs or anything like that, but on FUEL. ALL fuel. If we paid the same sort of taxes on heating fuel as we do on car fuel, boy would we be investigating energy efficient house.s If we paid the same sorts of taxes on fossil fuel power stations as we pay on car fuel, there would only be nuclear power left. And a few windmills

The fact is that the governments new tax regimes are not aimed at slowing down fossil fuel usage, but in increasing the the tax take. Especially off 'toffs' who drive big cars (once a week) whilst commuters who drive little cars every day, get away scot free, as to huge empty busses.

The biggest thing the government could do is switch off all public lighting at midnight.

And tax all fossil fuel into power stations and into the domestic home at the same rate they tax car fuels.

THEN because their coffers will be full, remove all income taxes.

To restore competitiveness of our labour force,...ESPECIALLY in non energy intesnive things.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. It means you should just use less energy, Mary.

The simple way is to make it increasingly expensive.

If porsches were 3/6d, we'd all be driving one..as it were.

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

No; it means that we should do something that is proportionate; spending billions of £ reducing a number that is only at the third-significant-figure level - when modelling cannot even predict what changes at the most-significant-figure will bring - will be of no benefit whatsoever to the environment.

It is not even agreed that atmospheric CO2 is the most potent effect.

Greenland went from a - well - green land to an ice sheet in very short order: no global effects from mankind there! Perhaps all we are seeing is a return to a pre-Greenland condition.

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:16:18 +0100 someone who may be Andy Hall wrote this:-

Where they are completing flood defences that were started in the aftermath of floods decades ago and are now wondering how well these defences will stand up to global warming. As a result of this wondering they have started adopting the sort of managed flooding that has also been taken up in the UK.

In the UK some harbours have been filled in or partly filled in. However, this only buys a few years and so isn't a solution.

[Mary Fisher]

Greenland wasn't green in Man's history!

Mary

[Joe]

Now I *know* you're having a laugh.

Can you seriously imagine any modern government even having enough of our money, let alone too much?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. And it will be the one I vote for.

[Frank Lee Speke-King]

"The story that can be read in the ice cores is astonishingly detailed. The weather during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings settled Greenland, was much warmer than today. This was followed by the so-called Little Ice Age (from about 1300 to 1850 a.d.), during which the middle latitudes were colder than today. The ice cores also reveal very rapid changes in global climate. They tell of rain and snow, wind and fire, changing solar activity, huge volcanic eruptions, abundances and shortages of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and periodic and quasiperiodic events?some likely induced by secular changes in the Earth's orbital parameters, some by still unknown processes."

" Alley's book focuses not on the long-term changes that may have caused the ice ages, but on more recent, newly discovered "flickering" climate changes that the drilling through Greenland's ice cap revealed. He emphasizes that many of the important climate changes he and his colleagues have been able to read from the ice cores are sudden, abrupt and enormous. The Earth's climate has at times changed drastically in just a few years from livable to glacially inhospitable or unbearably hot and saunalike. If such changes were to occur today, we would face a climate catastrophe of proportions unprecedented in the history of humankind."

[Ian Stirling]

Yeah - it'd be a very blunt instrument, you'd either need a secondary throttle too, or something else.

A wacky benefit might be that it'd actually subcool the intercooler.

Taking as an example my somewhat weedy 1l 4 cylinder 4 stroke engine, with 6000RPM redline.

At 1500RPM and with a vacuum of 7PSI, (0.5atm) you're pulling some

3000l/min - 50l/s past the throttle. I make that P*V - 50KPa * .05m^3 * = 2.5Kw, of shaft power, or about 10Kw, or 1.3l/hour or so.

All true of course. It's a not insubstantial little gearbox and clutches.

[Ed Sirett]

Absolutely not. It's worth doing, even if just so the survivors will have some experience to lean on from the 'olden' days. It will make the problems less in some way that might help.

Only tonight I heard that the _increase_ in CO2 output from China in two years is equivalent to the entire UK current output. I may have misheard or misunderstood. I'm not simply saying "we're all doomed....we're all doomed..." I suppose crudely I'm saying "Our descendants will be in serious trouble anyway but also some of them will be up to sorting things out enough one way or another.

Speculative but, I believe, poignant question: How big will the world's population be at the end of this century?

[Ed Sirett]

AIUI Greenland was less inhospitable than it has been for the last 500 years. Although the "Green" bit was mostly Danish govt. spin.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well I won't be there for a start.

I would say about 50-70% of what it is now.

[The Natural Philosopher]

IIRC Eric the Red or something discovered Iceland, and Greenland, but they reversed the names to avoid everyone wanting to go to Iceland.

The colony survived for a few hundred years before politics at home and climate variations made it inviable, and those left died, or were absorbed into the Inuit population.

[Dave Fawthrop]

|>>

|>> Greenland went from a - well - green land to an ice sheet in very |>> short order: no global effects from mankind there! Perhaps all we are |>> seeing is a return to a pre-Greenland condition. |> |> Greenland wasn't green in Man's history! |> |AIUI Greenland was less inhospitable than it has been for the last 500 |years. Although the "Green" bit was mostly Danish govt. spin.

Actually Eric the Red's spin about 1000 AD. The found this cold inhospitable land (warmer than it is now) and called it Greenland to entice others to settle there.

[Huge]

And that's the real "elephant in the room", but one which no (Western) politician will dare mention. There are too many of us.

[Brian Sharrock]

And; ... according to the History Channel, a 'thriving' colony was established there but abandoned as the climate grew colder ... despite them chucking out all the pollution from their hearths. :) IIRC, burials were found at a location figured out from Saga's and runic scripts, confirming the existence of the Green-land Viking settlements.

[meow2222]

Today the world can support a population of several times present level. We have both the technology and the resources to do it. We dont do it because it isnt needed by us / those that make these decisions dont care about those that do need it. If in future rich countries need it, it will be done. Without any great difficulty.

NT