Saul Griffith, "Climate Change Recalculated"

According to Saul's calculations, in order to reach a goal of 450 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide in time to limit a global rise in temperature to 2 degrees C., we'll have to reduce the amount of burned fossil fuels to 3 terawatts (of power). That means we'll need to replace 11.5 terawatts with new clean sources.

From Stewart Brand's Long Now Blog:

That would mean the following. (Here I'm drawing on notes and extrapolations I've written up previously from discussion with Griffith):

"Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That's about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it's 30 percent efficient all told, we'll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That's a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That's a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25."

All of it! Please listen to Saul's Long Now Lecture to hear how, despite the odds, he remains an optimist.

Calculate and compare your own power consumption at WattzOn.com.

Check out the very cool 100 mpg, charge-overnight-from-a-wall-socket, ready-for-the-carpool-lane, 3-wheeled (California only) Aptera.
(As mentioned in Saul's talk.)

See also: Google PowerMeter is currently being tested by employees and is not yet available to the public.

.

Dean Kamen's Electric/Stirling Hybrid

Dean Kamen's DEKA Rebel

Dean Kamen, inventor and entrepreneur, has pieced together a hybrid that uses electric battery power for the drive train, and a Stirling engine for heat and defogging. In a pinch, the Stirling engine can also be used to recharge the battery. Read the whole story at UnionLeader.com (See Also: Dean Kamen's Deka Revolt Electric Car Runs on Any Fuel.

And check out this TedTalk from 2002. Kamen discusses the Stirling engine and it's applications for water purifying and power production in poverty zones.
Dean Kamen: Rolling along, helping students and the third world.mp3

And here's a Kamen TedTalk video where he discusses development of a prosthetic arm/hand that can pick up a raisin.

See Also: Esquire's How Dean Kamen's Magical Water Machine Could Save the World.
See Also: Telegraph's Dean Kamen: part man, part machine.

.

Robert Zubrin calls for challenging OPEC looting!

Mind Blowing interview with Robert Zubrin on CoastToCoastAm with George Noorey….really worth buying a copy of the audio! Zubrin points out that the move of Oil prices from $10 to $120 per barrel of oil is 1200% ! , Dudes! This is a Bush/Cheney/Republican TAX HIKE! Duh! This is the third person in the media to mention that they thought that people were now trying to break up the USA. Like was done to Yugoslavia and the USSR.

from CoastToCoastAm site

Next, author Robert Zubrin warned that the OPEC cartel wants to crash the American economy and then "buy out the wreckage." He argued for a flex fuel mandate (so that cars will run on both gasoline and alcohol) and said that increased ethanol production is not related to food shortages. 500 million acres of US farmland are not being utilized, and we have tremendous capacity to expand production, he commented.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2008/04/29.html#recap

Peak water developments….Our water footprints; see old Water Shed idea

How much Virtual Water is in your shirt?

Virtual Water  is a measure of all the water it takes to make the products you use.  Waterfootprint.orgcalculates that a new cotton shirt uses 2,700 liters. That's a tally of the water evaporated in irrigating and growing the cotton, and the water needed to wash away the fertilizers and dilute the chemicals used in the manufacturing process. With worldwide water shortages  set to become a major humanitarian crisis  this century, water waste is a serious new sin.  Read More"¦

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/

Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable by Peter Salonius

from Culture Change.org


Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable Print
Written by Peter Salonius
Editor's note: The following essay by soil scientist Peter Salonius is Part One of his two-part series for Culture Change that bursts the delusion of agriculture's providing for a large human population long-term. If after reading it you have doubt, read the scientific basis for it: the second part in the series, "Unsustainable soil mining, past, present and future." (A version of the second part was published in the May/June,2007 issue of The Forestry Chronicle.) The author lives in New Brunswick, and he published in Culture Change in 2003 "Energy tax made easy: Modifying human excess with international non-renewable energy taxation" (see link at bottom). – JL

I am convinced that we begin unsustainable resource depletion (overshoot) as soon as we use (and become dependent upon) the first unit of any non-renewable resource or renewable resource used unsustainably whose further use becomes essential to the functioning of society, such as:

THE FIRST TONNE OF COAL
THE FIRST LITRE OF OIL
THE FIRST KILOGRAM OF FISSIONABLE URANIUM
THE FIRST BARREL OF FOSSIL WATER FOR IRRIGATION — and
THE FIRST HECTARE OF FORMERLY NUTRIENT CONSERVATIVE NATIVE FOREST or GRASSLAND/PRAIRIE PLOWED

This last category of unsustainable renewable resource depletion (excessive leaching/export of plant nutrients from arable soils associated with most agricultural practice, and more recently also with harvesting of nutrient-rich forest biomass) has been looming over us, unseen, for 10,000 years. We can expect that it will catch up with us shortly because most of us are dependent on foodstuffs produced by unsustainable farming, and fiber produced by unsustainable forestry.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=154&Itemid=1

Unsustainable soil mining: past, present and future Print
Written by Peter Salonius
[This is Part Two of Peter Salonius's two-part series. The first part, "Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable", can be viewed by using the link at bottom.] ABSTRACTHuman settlement has increased food production by progressively converting complex, self-managing natural ecosystems with tight nutrient cycles into simplified, intensively managed agricultural ecosystems that are subject to nutrient leaching. (Most agriculture is unsustainable in the long term.)

Conventional stem wood forest harvesting is now poised to be replaced by intensive harvesting of biomass to substitute for increasingly scarce non-renewable fossil fuels. Removal of nutrient-rich forest biomass (harvesting of slash) can not be sustained in the long term.

[Key Words: soil nutrient depletion, biomass harvesting, site productivity]

Introduction

A general discussion of the concept of sustainability was presented by Gatto (1995), who suggested that notions of sustainability "reflect different priorities and optimization criteria, which are notoriously subjective"; however, the goal of maintaining soil-productive capacity is not a subjective notion. In this paper I will show that long term sustainable terrestrial carrying capacity depends on the maintenance of self-managing, nutrient-conservative plant communities.

The dynamic cyclical stability of complex ecosystems has been shown, for most animal populations, to depend on the ability of predators to dampen overshoot and runaway consumption dynamics of prey species (Rooney et al, 2006).

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1

Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 4347, Arcata , California 95518 USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax).

Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.

 

Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century

this ties in with the earlier post on Peak Phosphorus

from Juergen Schmidhuber's site

Since age 15 or so Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber's main scientific ambition has been to build an optimal scientist, then retire. In 2028 they will force him to retire anyway. By then he shall be able to buy hardware providing more raw computing power than his brain

Their Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century (e.g., V. Smil, Nature, July 29 1999, p 415) as it "detonated the population explosion," driving the world's population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.

Haber-Bosch process:

Under high temperatures and very high pressures, hydrogen and nitrogen (from thin air) are combined to produce ammonia.

Nearly one century after its invention, the process is still applied all over the world to produce 500 million tons of artificial fertilizer per year. 1% of the world's energy supply is used for it (Science 297(1654), Sep 2002); it still sustains roughly 40% of the population (M. D. Fryzuk, Nature 427, p 498, 5 Feb 2004).

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/worldpopgrowth1.jpg

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/

tags needed

time lapse film compresses 35 years of skyscraper construction in Shinjuku district of Tokyo

 http://blog.longnow.org/2007/09/10/35-year-time-lapse-of-tokyo-skyline/

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/laPU0bS8JOc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Jonathan Ott on Free/Cheap/Peak fossil fuels/minerals update/comments

from

Erowid Conference Report: Mind States Costa Rica by Lux, Erowid Staff Writer

v1 – Jul 18, 2007

sample from Jon Ott-

"The End of the Treasure in the Basement", by Jonathan Ott

Jonathan described himself as "not a prophet", but someone who has been interested in the question of energy and the petroleum-based political and economic infrastructure of the industrialized world since the 1970s. He's surprised that the infrastructure has held itself together as long as it has.

Most known organisms derive their energy from the sun, which was properly regarded by many religious cultures as the origin of life.

….

Since 1979 the amount of energy per capita has decreased, and more people have no access to energy and water every year. We're starting over the hill and soon it will be a cliff. This is important because energy equals life, in a literal and direct equation. What Hubbard pointed out was the disparity between the natural ecology of energy and the economic system of the world.

So we start looking to alternatives to oil, coal, natural gas, and wood. Take nuclear energy � it is highly efficient in generating electrical power, but it requires a huge investment of energy to operate. Nuclear power plants must have their own power plant to run, and it may be the case that nuclear power does not even generate net energy.

Fusion reactors are too little, too late. A best-case scenario is production of fusion power in 2050, and that's way too late.

There are currently four countries that have not yet reached their peak. Jonathan predicts that within 30 years the wheels will come off the global economy. Perhaps as soon as 20, but definitely by 30.

Jonathan's response to this situation has been to create a self-sufficient solar and water power supply that powers his lights, a short-range electric car, and his basic needs. He's beginning to generate all of his own food in a sustainable little farm as well, and his hope is to live to see the day when everything comes unglued so he can see what happens.

http://erowid.org/general/conferences/conference_mindstates7.shtml

Ott is one of my favourite writers and   theoreticians.

 

Author of (Books)

  • Ometochtzin: Las Muertes de Dos Conejo (2001)
  • Just Say Blow. Coca and Cocaine: A Scientific Blowjob (2001)
  • Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Errhines (2001)
  • Pharmacophilia: The Natural Paradise (1997)
  • Ott book
    http://www.erowid.org/library/books/images/age_of_entheogens.jpg

    This is a mind-blowing book, especially the Angel's Dictionary!

  • Age of Entheogens & the Angels' Dictionary (1995)
  • Ayahuasca Analogues: Pangaean Entheogens (1995)
  • Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic drugs, their plant sources and history (1993)
  • Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (1986)
  • The Cacahuatl Eater: Ruminations of an Unabashed Chocolate Addict (1985)
  • Teonanacatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America (Co-edited by J. Bigwood, 1978)
  • Hallucinogenic Plants of North America (1976)
  • more on Ott here
  • http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/ott_jonathan/ott_jonathan.shtml
  • What resources are not Peaking? Now it's Phosphorus! Way important!

    From the Oil Drum site

    Peak Phosphorus

    Google Technorati del.icio.us StumbleUpon

    This is a guest post by Patrick Déry and Bart Anderson. Patrick Déry is a physicist, energy, agriculture and environment analyst and consultant in Quebec, Canada. Bart Anderson is a former reporter, teacher and technical writer; he currently is co-editor of Energy Bulletin. Peak oil has made us aware that many of the resources on which civilization depends are limited.
    But oil production is not the whole story. Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus were also required for the "Green Revolution".

    Nitrogen is present in large quantity in the atmosphere (78% of its composition). The Haber-Bosch process for obtaining nitrogen uses one percent of all energy consumed by humans [5]. Nitrogen can also be fixed in the soil using micro-organisms such as rhizobium and azotobacters. If there is sufficient energy, nitrogen will be available.

    Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture. [6]

    Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

    What does this correlation mean? Even if we find a real substitute for fossil fuels, it will be impossible to maintain population growth because phosphate deposits are probably in decline. It will be impossible to maintain an agriculture without recycling nutrients.
    http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2882

    new twist on Peak Oil effects "…Civilization is being boiled out of existence…" by Hugo Salinas Price

    October 7, 2006.

    The evaporation of civilization

    Hugo Salinas Price

    All human societies are being destabilized by the energy that is injected into them. As societies are constituted by human beings, we can clearly observe how the more "developed" a society, the greater the physical and mental activity of its population; the population has no option to being in incessant activity. Like it or not, the energy in the societies in which we live propels us: motion, both physical and mental, becomes imperative for each of us, just as motion is imperative for the water molecule in a pot of boiling water. Each American consumes – I'd rather say, "is being boiled by" – 27 barrels of oil per year. The figure for Mexico is 7 barrels per year per person. China is down around 2.

    The vaporization of money

    The institution of money has completely vaporized! We no longer use money anywhere in this world. What humanity uses as money is a simulation of money, simple vouchers which are used everywhere as a means of exchange.

    However, these vouchers are not actually money – money defined as a thing of value the delivery of which, in an exchange, constitutes payment. Money in today's world is not a thing; it is a non-thing, a simple number whether printed on a bill, stamped on a coin, or a number represented by bits on a computer disk. Since money is not a thing, but only a non-thing, tendering it in an exchange cannot, and does not, constitute payment.

    What happened to money?

    http://www.plata.com.mx/plata/plata/comHSP72a.htm

    One Cubic Mile of Oil

    Very interesting article over on Wired with a diagram that puts our energy consumption in perspective. Wow! Now I understand what Michael is talking about when he says the singularity has already happened and it was cheap oil. And I get a much better idea of the gloom and doom side of oil depletion Robin's talking about. Humans consume 1 cubic mile of oil a year and as an example from the Wired chart- the equivalent is 52 Diablo Canyon sized Nuclear Power Plants running for 50 years!!!

    Preparing Math Students for a World of Collapse

    I have been a math teacher since 1991 when I taught my first algebra class at Philadelphia Community College. I had just received my Bachelors degree in Physics. Bolstered by my girlfriend Val's seemingly cushy part-time employment as a math instructor, and the fact that the math department was in quick need of an algebra instructor, I interviewed with the math chairman, and convinced him that I would be perfect for the job.

    I was right. As it turned out, I was good at it. Not that I didn't have my problems, I had many. However, I seemed to have a rapport with a class of math students that allowed me to teach in a relaxed atmosphere and keep everyone engaged. I have always enjoyed teaching and felt lucky to have had the kind of job that continually allows me to learn as much as my students.

    But I work hard at teaching. More than most, I think, but it may be that every teacher thinks that. I know there are alot of people who look at teachers and say, "Boy, what a job, summers off." These folks think that it's an easy task to walk in a room, stand up in front of 45 young people, and keep them directly engaged in mathematics for 90 minutes three to five days a week. Plus, they don't think about all the lost nights and weekends a teacher spends preparing exercies and grading papers.

    Preparing and psyching up for the experience of teaching is not only exciting, but scary too. As a musician, I've played in countless bands, and I gained some experience on stage. I can liken the first day of a new class to the same kind of butterflies that one can get before Saturday nite's performance.

    To keep my anxiety at a minimum, I have always prepared intensely for all my classes, producing notes, websites, hand-outs, transparencies, examples, and finding news stories relevant to our topics. I have learned how to create websites, and use the Internet (significant as I am no adolescent.) and create online classes. I have learned how to create a syllabus of information, pace it through the semester, and determine whether or not it's being understood.

    But the biggest thing I've learned from teaching is patience. Early on, I would start to lose it when students would not understand what I was s-o-c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y-t-e-l-l-i-n-g-t-h-e-m. I didn't know why they asked the same thing over and over again.

    I had to learn that each student's mind will absorb the patterns of math differently, and that I have to frame each concept so that it may be understood as quickly as each mind can possibly get it. It's somewhat like using the right phrase that instantly communicates the message, and the student grasps the pattern all at once in a simple and clear understanding. Finding those key words, and saying them in the right tone is the Teacher's Holy Grail for which there is no resolution. Each semester, the new class of students enlarges the catalogue of Magick Words, and we all climb the Mountain of Math together.

    My subject is greeted with much noise and moaning. "Aaaawrrhhh, math…." eyes rolling, head twisting, soul writing in agony at the thought of math class. "Why do we have to learn this?" or "What good will this ever be?" they whine.

    I have answered that question with a plethora of responses:

    It's a workout for your left head muscle.

    You never know what you might be doing in the future.

    It's history.

    It's cool.

    Someday, somebody could pay you to tell them what's in these books.

    And while I still believe that math and science are an important part of every educated mind, I've had problems being motivated to teach the topics given in the basic curriculum.

    After learning about Peak Oil, and then, economic imbalances, topped off with ecological collapse, what good did learning to solve equations with rational expressions do? How does spending two weeks of precious classtime on factoring prepare student to think critically?

    I admit, I'd had reservations about college math curricula even before I'd learned about the impending slide of civilization. Any criticism or suggestion of restructure would be met by the math department with " Well they have to learn this."

    "But, why?", I'd ask.

    "Because they're learning critical thinking." was always the last response.

    Nowhere have I ever found evidence of that claim.

    So what then? What should my motivation to teach algebra, and the students' learning it, be?

    Personally, I find the subject fascinating. The manipulation of tiny symbolic squiggles representing the unknown quantities of the universe dancing about a page is akin to a beautiful work of art or music. And I have always tried to communicate my own fascination and love of this subject, but many young college students just don't see it that way.

    But more importantly, how will learning math help students navigate the challenges they are most certainly going to face as they live their lives in the coming years?

    The easiest answer is to use mathematics to help students understand what is happening in the first place. In a class of Pre-algebra or general Algebra, the math topics are rudimentary, but amenable to using energy and population data for percent problems and linear equations. This kind of data is perfect for descriptive statistics analysis as well.

    In a liberal arts math course, one can go even further. Looking at exponentials, compound interest, and annuity equations leads directly to the finite resource equation and finding the exponential reserve, which gives the amount of time left for a finite resource that is being used at an increasing percent annually. This allows analysis of gas, coal, oil, and even domestic wellwater timeframes.

    In this way, by using actual data and mathematical analysis, communicating to students a realistic picture of the world outside the classroom is neither political, or, makes the teacher sound like a nut case.

    Beyond that, re-learning all the skills lost by our cheap oil-cheap imports society will be a difficult task. If some Peak Oil theorists are right, we're going to have to learn to do many forgotten tasks ourselves. How much power can we get out of a nearby stream? How would we build a hydro-electric system?

    Indeed, mathematics in a post-crash world will be used in carpentry, agriculture, domestic item production, civic engineering, food storage, the list is endless. McLuhan wrote we are returning to a cultural oral bias, this time with our eyes wide open. Perhaps we will have to re-live the entire history of mathematics from it's first applications to commerce and agriculture millenia ago in order to succeed in preserving our evolving culture.

    In any case, mathematics curriculum must adapt to a post-oil reality, or the institutions that push it will be relegated to the dust bin. If only schools and universities just listened to their students asking "Why math?", and responded honestly, they would be much more successful in graduating productive students with higher quantitative and critical thinking skills. And we would all be better off as a society at large.

    Critical-Mass

    Wow,
    Just to say that B and I were a part of http://www.santamonicacriticalmass.org/ Friday night. I have to tell you it's really some of the most FUN I've had in a LONG time. I mean, I've always loved bicycles and that's a big part of it, but something about 300 of us cruising through the night under a full moon… exhilarating. If there isn't a group near you http://www.critical-mass.org/ maybe you can start one. If you're near Santa Monica or Venice, please join us the first Friday of each month.
    JH