Wood burning stoves - Radio 4 programme (CO2 and going green etc)

[ARWadsworth]

For anyone interested this should be available for the next week

[geoff]

In message , ARWadsworth writes

Complete with greenwank starter ...

"Its environmentally friendly because the carbon has already been tied up ..."

or something

Yeah - but burning it releases the CO2 back into the atmosphere, shitforbrains

[The Natural Philosopher]

and a whole load of fairly poisonous dioxins.

[OG]

Which makes it relatively 'carbon neutral' - hence 'greener' than burning oil, gas or coal.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well it sure is DIRTIER..

Now I can remember places where wood is used a lot..and when coal was the de facto power source..filthy washing in filthy streets, carbon particulates everywhere..

Believe me, if more than 1% of the populatin burnt wood regularly we would be into a whole new pollution game,. and the cost of firewood would go through the roof, along with tee wood smoke and grime..

WE run three wood fires here..two open and one stove. They are great, but not for major heating. Great backups, but never primary sources. You need about 5 acres of private woodland to do that sustainably as well..And I am having to buy wood, having cleared the last 40 years of scrub and burnt it. I only have an acre and a half...

>

[ARWadsworth]

I want to know who made Barnsley a city.

Adam

[geoff]

In message , ARWadsworth writes

I'd really rather not

[David Hansen]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:24:17 +0100 someone who may be geoff wrote this:-

Indeed. However, while the tree is growing it is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere.

That does not mean we can plant trees and not bother doing anything else.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

Umm.. I'm not sure about that acreage figure. I have just felled a strip of dead Elm, wide roadside hedge really, which should do a heating season here. About 2m wide and 75 long. I suppose these trees took about

20 years to grow to 180mm at the butts.

With the amount of *puff* on the subject, there should be some real figures somewhere.

Hybrid varieties should do much better.

I don't know about the dioxin bit either but the smoke from our log burner does not smell of wood at all.

regards

[David Hansen]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:49:14 +0100 someone who may be Tim Lamb wrote this:-

One of the problems with burning fossil fuels is that this involves releasing CO2 which was removed from the atmosphere a long time ago.

[Bob Mannix]

That's no different to releasing any other CO2 - you either release or not and you either plant trees to compensate or not. The problem with burning fossil fuels is that this creates CO2 (full stop) and they are limited - their age doesn't come into it. The atmosphere doesn't react differently to fossil fuel CO2.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Releasing the carbon from timber grown in last 1000 years is not a problem. It will be released anyway as the timber rots, so you might as well burn it and get the heat from it. It's already part of the carbon cycle.

The problem (or at least, perceived problem) is releasing the carbon from trees which grew 100's millions of years ago, and has been locked up since the end of the Carboniferous period. That is extra carbon which then re-enters the carbon cycle.

It's always seemed to me like the reverse of burning fossel fuels is to grow trees, cut them down, and bury them forever. i.e. what you do if you send used paper to landfill, which we aren't allowed to do, of course.

[Huge]

Really?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I understand that you're a f****it who seems to have escaped from my killfile.

[Dave Baker]

The only ways to use trees to actually reduce atmospheric CO2 is either plant more of them and don't cut them down which is never going to happen because forestation diminishes year by year or build more things out of wood, houses etc, and plant more trees to replace those. Burning wood for fuel, provided you replant each tree, makes no net difference to atmospheric carbon at all unlike burning fossil fuels.

Imagine you just leave all the existing trees alone. Once they're fully grown, or at least well past the rapid growth phase of their life, their effect on carbon take up stagnates. Eventually they die of old age, the carbon is released by termites, fungi etc as they rot and new trees grow up to take their place and take the carbon up again. Burning them and planting new ones instead of just leaving them alone simply recycles the carbon faster but over the long term has no different net effect.

Our problems have been created by hundreds of years of burning fossil fuels. The key is to stop doing that. It makes no difference which of the carbon neutral power sources we use to replace that whether it's nuclear, solar or burning wood. We can never replace that fossil fuel carbon already released, or at least not easily. The only slim chance is ocean borne organisms which take up carbon, die and sink to the sea bed without being eaten by anything else first. The land area is under too much population pressure for much of it to realistically ever get used for more carbon uptake.

That raises the primary problem which is population density. In 1960 the global population was about 3 billion. Now it's 7 billion with most of the increase being created in developing countries, the ones which can least afford high technology fuel sources. The simplest way to reduce carbon emissions is to reduce the population and thereby the need for fuel. China is trying by limiting parents to just one child but that creates a population of steadily increasing age whereby fewer working adults have to support more and more retired ones. However if that can be handled for about two generations until the population stabilises at the new lower target level then the age spread normalises again.

If governments were serious about carbon emissions they'd make it financially less viable to have lots of children instead of actually giving child allowances to make it easier. However nothing we can do in the western world will make a gnat's worth of difference compared to the massive population increases in the developing world. In fact western populations are in many cases fairly constant or even starting to fall anyway. Not that it wouldn't still help to have them reduce even further because we use so much more energy per person compared to developing countries.

If we could get the whole world back to 1960's population levels not only would everyone's quality of life improve we'd solve most of the carbon problem at a stroke.

[Dave Liquorice]

If only it was that simple. B-(

Your buried paper will rot and produce methane, a far more potent green house gas than CO2. Now if you grow trees cut them down and bury them in something "sealed" that won't allow the carbon back into the atmosphere you are trapping the carbon and reducing the amount in the atmosphere.

[David Hansen]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:39:55 +0100 someone who may be "Bob Mannix" wrote this:-

I didn't claim otherwise.

[David Hansen]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:32:43 +0100 someone who may be "Dave Baker" wrote this:-

Nuclear is not carbon neutral. The best one can say is that it is low carbon and that involves leaving a number of things out of the calculation and assuming that the quality of the ore will not change.

Later on in your posting you appear to be advocating reducing the population in "developing countries". Could you just confirm that is the case please.

[Adrian]

David Hansen gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Seems to me he's actually advocating slowing the rapid population growth in developing countries. That's a very different thing from your implication of eugenics on racial grounds.

[Steve Firth]

Well you did, actually old boy. You stated that it was one of the problems with fossil fuels. Full stop. Which tends to imply that it's not one of the problems with other fuels.

Do try again later when you have a grasp of the English language.

And have learned not to snip responses so deeply that one is led to believe that your reply was complete and appropriate when it was neither.

[Steve Firth]

So, exactly the same as wind, solar, hydro then.

Except that unlike the above it creates useful quantities of electricity at lower cost and with less mucking about.