I agree too, except for a reservation about his list of clean energy sources - solar, hydrogen, gas, wind, geothermal, hot rocks, tide.

Hydrogen - clean credentials depend on how it's produced, and as has often been noted it is only an energy carrier (and less than 100% efficient at that) rather than a primary source of energy.

Gas - natural gas can only be considered as less damaging than other fossil fuel, certainly not "clean". Biogas is better in this respect, but again debatable how clean it is in overall terms.

And I'd add wave to the list.

Given that the past trend (aside from seasonal variation) is nothing but up....

That's not quite true.  If you look at the Keeling curve, there was about a 2-year freeze right after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo; it appears that reduced temperatures helped sequester carbon through greater ocean uptake, reduced water stress on plants, or other factors.

Global dimming wouldn't help us for long; we need to get working on carbon-negative agricultural and energy systems.

There is a discssion of this preprint starting at realclimate.org
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/04/target-co2/#more-552

Chris

And please no comments like we have solar and wind. How are those going to power transporation? Huge ships, planes and trucks require liquid fuel. Get ready for a rocky ride - its gonna get wild out there!

Perhaps you've not heard of this new invention called "electricity". It's existed for about two hundred years, and been used for about seventy years to make trains go. Only Australia and other island-nations really need shipping. Other countries can and in fact do trade using rail. A Berlin to Beijing train line, for example, would actually be faster than travel by ship.

We just won't have as many huge ships, planes and trucks. There'll be a lower volume of trade travelling by those routes. But honestly, does it matter? Will the West collapse because we can no longer buy as many cheap Chinese t-shirts?

Huge ships, planes and trucks require liquid fuel.

ahem.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/videos-beluga-skysails-kite-powe...

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/175894,slower-boats-to-china-as-...

We are not going to run out of oil or gas or coal overnight but we ould wakeup one morning soon to find shortages, first in industry and then at the pumps themselves. Already certain plastics feedstocks are difficult to come by and agricultural fertiliser is in short supply just now. There isn't a Plan B because it is not democratic governments responsibility to think for us and to plan very far into the future, as much as the politicians tell us that is what they are doing.

Governments implement exactly what the the people demand and they deliver it in a short term electoral cycle. I don't know about other parts of the world but Australia is culturally programmed that way. We don't want governments that will tell us what to do. We tell them what to do and the message is overwhelmingly "look after me, right now or else my vote goes elswhere". John Howard was a master politician for atleast 9 of his 11 years in the job. He dleivered what the public wanted, low interest rates, jobs, budget surpluses and a swag of middle class welfare built around the idea of "families with children". Howard didn't force anyone to borrow more than they should have to buy big houses, big cars, plasma screens all underpinned by rising consumption of oil. He simply delivered what the public wanted but it was the publics choice. If he had come right out and siad "well we are going to run out of growth in oil supply and that will casue us to downsize our aspiration sfor accumulating physical stuff" it is a matter of conjecture as to who would have got to him first: the public or his own party.

Kevin Rudd is now in a precariosu position. He spent the election campaign giving too diabolically opposed messages although they were always carefully isolatedd so as to appear completley unrelated. The first was climate change where he dodged any real commitmtents other than a showy siginging of Kyoto, and a promise to wait until Garnaut had made his report. This gave the impression of environmental responsibility without committing to any substantial change. The second issue was economic where no opportunity was spared to bash the government in realtion to bottlenecks in the economy which was choking output and therefore putting pressure on inflation and interest rates. No bigger example of bottlenecks was obvious than the coal delivery infrastructure on the east coast where Asia bound ships were moored for weeks, waiting their turn to be loaded with the black stuff. Kevin Rudd made implied promises that our econmic futre was tied up with removing these bottlenecks but it is difficult to see how we can export even more coal, while putting our hand on our hearts and saying we will do something about CO2 emissions. In teh end I think Rudd will do what he's told be the Australian public, which is "you bloddy well bettter look after me first or you will be out son".

Don't expect a plan to actually do anything from Kevin Rudd other than attend lots of meetings, listen earnestly, sign meaningless protocols and be photographed "committing" to climate cahnge partnerships. When peak oil manifests itself,ths current generationof feel-good climate cahnger politicians will find themselves replaced by strong-man type dictators anyway even in a so called parliamentry democracy.

Hansen's letter doesn't call for a moratorium on coal-fired power plants; it calls for CO2 sequestration at any new ones.

You can either do cheap coal and try to make sequestration work, or you can try to limit coal extraction. It looks like Hansen is calling for the former right now.

What happens to the coal thats now being produced? It will just be exported and burned in India, China or some other developing nation where odds are there will be few emission controls and essentially zero chance of the CO2 being sequestered

Potentially. But at the moment, we can't ship as much Coal as they want as it is, due to rail and port bottlenecks. If Australia reduces its demand for Coal (not something that's going to happen overnight), then Coal get's cheaper if production stays the same, but we can't load it onto ships yet.
If we slap it with a Carbon Tax like that proposed (although I deeply suspect the Govt will exempt Coal Exports), then Coal becomes less economically attractive, and the lower grades of coal become completely uneconomic. China and India will likely simply absorb the increased cost however, so I think we'd need to cap production as well.

It's not like there's going to be a surplus of Bunker Oil we can use to ship the coal to China anyway, in a few years.

Cutting coal exports to Asia may not be possible for geo-political reasons. We currrently export most of our coal to Japan and South Korea. China is a realtively new customer as is India but they ahve huge appetites and won't take too kindly to being told the shop is shutting early.

Rudd will make a big show of doing something about cliamte cahnge but in the end will achieve very little. China ultimatley will get whatever it wants and Australia will have little choice but to deliver. We are in pretty deep debt, not as bad as US admittedly, but we still can't sahke off the trade deficit even in mining boom times.

The Australian east code grid doesn't suffer this problem. We have an amazing resource which can handle load spikes and troughs very quickly. It's called the Snowy hydro system. At the moment it pumps water up at night because electricity is cheap then, and generates during the day from pumped water (and from melt-water and the normal Snowy river flow). Obviously, in the switch to solar and other renewables, it's going to be the other way around, but that makes no difference here.

Snowy Mountains Engineering:

• is in charge of grid stability (e.g. in the event of an electricity grid failure, it's their job to restart it and everyone matches them)
• can generate (I think) 1 GW to Melbourne and Sydney (about 10% of the east coast total capacity) each
• can drop or add generating capacity as fast as you can turn a sluice gate

Load management on the Oz east coast doesn't require coal plants.

West coast Oz I don't know as much about, but I suspect that much of the load is smelt works and mine works so there are lots of loads which can be shed or unshed if appropriate compensation is in place.

But I think billp is talking about the USA, which is a different story. The phrase 'totally screwed up' is one that springs to mind to describe their grid.

Crudedude:
You are correct. China's coal-fired plants burning increasingly large amounts of Australian coal is not going to stop.

The issue of Australia building coal power plants is minor compared with the huge issue of Australian coal being shipped as fast as it is mined to China.

Of course, the US is shipping coal to Europe. And who is going to stop it?

The right-wing voices you mention have been trying to silence Hansen for years:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture [in 2005] calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

I assume that this has something to do with why he is writing as a private citizen, rather than as a public official.

Is the discussion in Australia (and in New Zealand) also dominated by cultivation of ignorance and denial regarding global climate change?

Yes.

And no...

Australians are acutely aware of AGCC and its potential impacts. Most Australians just have to look at their dead lawn and dying garden to see that the Climate isn't always friendly. "A Land of Droughts and Flooding Rains" isn't a metaphor.

Due to the current drought across much of the country, Australians have had to cut water useage drastically. In South-East Queensland, a sub-tropical area, we are down to 140L per person, per day. Undoutably we could do better, but that means 'bucket showers'.

But mention CO2, and suddenly, the Columists in the media rags (mostly owned by Murdoch) begin screeching about our 'way of life', using already-debunked 'facts', weasel-words, and sleight-of-hand to confuse the readers (who, lets be blunt, usually aren't difficult to confuse). It's as though 'metering' CO2 is somehow different to metering all the other pollutants we expell into the environment every day. Both major Parties approved a Pulp Mill in Tasmania which will expell more Dioxins every year into the Southern Ocean just by itself than the entire population of Mills in Scandanavia!

This isn't helped by the move over the last ten or so years to an attitude of "the gum'mint should do something". People would be quite willing to have electricity, for example, go up in price because of a Carbon Tax, but only if the Government compensates them with a tax cut.

While newspapers give carte blanc to editorials arguing against AGCC (in a "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" kind of way), we won't get the groundswell needed to force a cap on coal mining, exports, or what-have-you. Witness the Opinion Pieces wailing about light bulbs when the former Govt announced plans to ban them.

I don't see any problem.

It's just a matter of capturing and sequestering CO2 as a normal part of operations. It does require energy and technology. Australia can build all the CCS coal plants it wants to, but Hansen has said NO NEW conventional coal plants(IGCCW/CCS instead). Suppose the price of cheap electricity doubles, SO WHAT!

Australia has something like 80 billion tons of coal and uses 125 million tons a year, a 500 year supply.
Why wait to develop this technology?

PM Rudd should go one better; and pledge to phase out all conventional coal plants in thirty years.
Then just 470 years to go.

It's an interesting dilemma you raise: is it reasonable to allow Australia to continue to export coal in exchange for the materials to pioneer the original model for a renewable grid?

I'm of the mind that Mr. Hansen is right. Even though it doesn't make much sense on paper, what we need is a tipping point: a functioning example of a Western nation that made the leap. Once it happens, the other nations won't want to be left behind.
http://www.bravenewleaf.com

And here is the dilemma - wind farms and solar thermal plants need steel,...

....and diesel for all those plants to be transported to their often remote sites. But peak oil means diesel shortages.

We'll need to set aside oil and gas fields for the sole purpose of serving as an energy input into those projects.

We are slowly sliding into what I call the deadly embrace between peak oil and global warming. Global warming doesn't allow us to go for alternative fuels (tars sands, coal-to-liquids etc.) on one hand and on the other we may run out of cheap and freely flowing diesel to fix us up on those clean energy projects.

Here's an ornery example. In the city of Port Augusta the two power plants (IIR one is 280MW) burn a grade of coal that has been likened to dirt ie contains sand, clay, moisture, pyrite and god knows what else. A few kilometres away apparently (this is supposed to be secret) drums of yellowcake from the Olympic Dam mine are loaded on the railhead for shipment via the northern transcontinental railway to Darwin. Thence to customers in South Korea, Russia, Japan etc.

According to some the dirt burning power station goes on the to-do list. However they think uranium export is an affront that must be stopped immediately.

It will stay in the ground, and we'll save a sky-full of carbon emissions.

What kind of crap unit is "sky-full"? Can we please stick to bona fide scientific units?

Stopping coal power plants now will make a difference. It will make an impact on global carbon emissions.

How much of an impact? Please quantify how large the impact will be on global carbon emissions. What effect will it have on the graph?

And what will be the specific quantitative benefits of that in terms of sea levels, fresh water, species, severe weather events, drought etc.?

There are several grades of coal. The lower the grade of coal, the more impurities in it, and the more damage it does to the coal power plant. The power plant engineers call them "clinkers" -- big chunks of ore (sometimes sulphur, sometimes other exotic metals).

Coal has impurities, sure.  However, these are crushed (and many screened out) as part of the fuel preparation; these plants are called powdered coal combustion for a reason.  These get blown into the furnace along with the coal, and engulfed (and often melted, and sometimes smelted) in the flame.

It is the fused ash that's called "clinkers".  If ash gets deposited above the steam generator and damages tubes when it falls off, that could easily cause a drop in power.  However, this has nothing to do with the size of anything in the fuel stream.

...most do not accept global warming.

I don't think that's the case:

MIT survey: Climate change tops Americans' environmental concerns
Nancy Stauffer, Laboratory for Energy and the Environment
October 31, 2006

According to a recent MIT survey, Americans now rank climate change as the country's most pressing environmental problem--a dramatic shift from three years ago, when they ranked climate change sixth out of 10 environmental concerns.

Almost three-quarters of the respondents felt the government should do more to deal with global warming, and individuals were willing to spend their own money to help.

"While terrorism and the war in Iraq are the main issues of national concern, there's been a remarkable increase in the American public's recognition of global warming and their willingness to do something about it," said Stephen Ansolabehere, MIT's Elting R. Morison Professor of Political Science.

...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/survey.html

Most ready for 'green sacrifices'

Most people are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change, according to a BBC poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries.

Seventy per cent of people said they were prepared to change their lifestyle - even in the US and China, the world's two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

Opinion was split over tax rises on oil and coal - 44% against, 50% in favour.

Support would rise if the cash was used to boost efficiency and find new energy sources, the poll suggested.

BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath says the poll suggests that in many countries people are more willing than their governments to contemplate serious changes to their lifestyles to combat global warming.

Overall, 83% of respondents throughout the world agreed that individuals would definitely or probably have to make lifestyle changes to reduce the amount of climate-changing gases they produce. Some 70% said they were ready to make personal sacrifices.

...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7075759.stm

You are out of touch with what the vast majority of people are thinking. I had a meeting with my congressman the other day, and a few hours later he met with a physician group. Here's how the local paper covered it:

Mar. 27, 2008, by Rob Burgess
When California 1st District Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) stopped by the Mendocino-Lake County Medical Society in the 200 block of West Henry Street Wednesday for a midday meeting slated to focus on rural health care, the first thing they talked about, oddly enough, was global warming.

“I think the climate change we’re seeing now is cyclical,” said Jens Vinding, a radiologist and society president who has lived in the county since 1972. “I think we need to wait a few more years to see what happens.”

Before he could settle into his seat, but without missing a beat, Thompson said he respectfully disagreed.

“Well I won’t be coming to you for any medical procedures I might need,” he said, laughing. “I don’t think we have a few more years to wait on this issue. The good news is that very few people share your view.”

Thompson is right. People are much better informed and very nervous.

A better target is actually 320 ppm. I think Hansen gives 350 ppm as the absolute upper bound but a closer reading of his work suggests below 320 ppm should be the potential safe zone.

www.climatecodered.net reviews ways of achieving this. Basically, the natural sinks need to be enhanced through good management.

I have done a couple of recent radio shows about this and will be doing more over the next few weeks.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/sustainability_emergency_part_ii

There is a piece at Realclimate on air capture

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/air-capture/

Lackner and coworkers have some patent applications covering potential devices, e.g.

http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US2006186562&F=8

http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO2007016271&F=8

The BP statistical review gives the production of oil, gas and coal year by year so i guess it could be worked out from that. Sorry I don't have the time to look into this further right now.

It is surely a big project to get the stuff out of the atmosphere.... Think of it as a really gigantic WPA for all the unemployed mortgage brokers and financial derivatives salesmen.

I don't think those people are going to be much help.  The real work is going to be done by process chains starting with plants, so the front lines are going to be manned by farmers and forestry workers.  Button-pushers (and code-wonks like me) are going to be helping mostly by writing checks.

This would be honest, productive work.

True, and one of the most important things we can do is add to the primary food-producing mission of farming the secondary missions:  the capture and recycling of carbon and chemical nutrients.

Wind, solar, and wave power can only reduce the quantity of fuels needed by coal or nuclear plants as they do not provide dispachable or base load power. Using batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro, etc to backup wind and solar are magical thinking at the needed storage volumes.

Maybe in the USA I would agree with you.

Australian east coast, no, I respectfully disagree.

Pumped hydro can already do 10% of the entire generating capacity of the systems, and the limiting factor on that is actually the interlinks between Tumut and Sydney and Tumut and Melbourne. We could interlink across the Tasman to New Zealand for about the same price as a coal power plant giving us nice uncorrelated wind, hydro and geothermal. If we were really desperate, we could sacrifice the Franklin River in Tasmania. (Politically unlikely, but technically entirely possible and not terribly expensive.)

Besides which, our peak generating times are the hot, sunny days in the middle of summer. So solar happens to provide scalable power generation at just the time it's needed, which is why it's less of an issue here than (say) the middle of continental USA when peak generation occurs in the middle of winter when renewables are at their worst.

I don't see any "magical thinking" for us. What's the problem with it?

Here in the U.S. we generate about 75% of our electricity with fossil fuels

Not quite that much; EIA says it's closer to 70%.

Wind, solar, and wave power can only reduce the quantity of fuels needed by coal or nuclear plants...

Excuse me, but isn't that all we need?  Reduce the amount of fossil fuels required, and thus the amount burned?

as they do not provide dispachable or base load power.

You don't need dispatchable supply for everything, and technologies like CAES appear to be able to provide considerable dispatch capabilities from a source like wind (though off-peak nuclear would do also).

CAES fired with gas from carbonization of biomass could be part of a carbon-negative energy system.  Given the following assumptions:

• biomass costs $50/dry ton at the point of gasification
• biomass contains 17.4 GJ/ton of energy, of which 50% is liberated as heat and gas in carbonization (half remains in the charcoal)
• the CAES system consumes 1 kWh of off-peak wind power and 4000 BTU (4.22 MJ) of biomass energy to produce 1 dispatchable kWh out
• off-peak wind power is available for US5¢/kWh

the variable cost per kWh would be
USD0.05 + USD50*(2*4.22e6/17.4e9) = USD0.0742/kWh.  Add capital costs and O&M to get the total.

I think we could manage with this.  If the USA produced 30% directly from wind and solar and another 30% of our electricity from carbonization-fired CAES (~1200 billion kWh/year), it would require
2*4.22e6 J biomass energy/kWh /17.4e9 J/ton of biomass * 1.2e12 kWh
= 582 million dry tons of biomass per year (within our capabilities with relative ease).  It would also produce about 30% of the input biomass as charcoal, so call it 175 million tons of sequestration-ready carbon.

You have a better idea of the possibilities for Australia; how much bagasse do you get each year?

Now, I'm not that familiar with US geography... but before I called someone a hypocrite I'd check some things out.

Hansens wiki entry has this to say.

James E. Hansen (born March 29, 1941 in Denison, Iowa) heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies[1] in New York City, a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Earth Sciences Division.

Which, even without knowing his job description, suggests that he might have reason to be visiting both New York AND Maryland... and given that the man seems to spend a large amount of time at hearings in Washington a location somewhat central would be the least hypocritical (IE logical) place to live.

(You may need to zoom out to see that this is in fact where Kintersville, the address at the bottom of Hansens letter, is located)

If Australia, the U.S. and Russia signed a multilateral treaty to ban all exports of coal for the next 50 years and put a moratorium on building of any new domestic coal-fired power plants that do not incorporate CCS technology, then the C02 problem would be solved via the "starve the beast" approach. China and India energy growth would be curtailed and scaled back on the back 9 of peak oil, and the developed world will squabble over the resources needed to build and operate nuclear power plants and other alternative energy options.

Who precisely is going to make this happen? Putin? Which of the three U.S. presidential candidates is anti globalization enough to push for a multinational regime of non trade?

It's interesting how much the world has changed since 1990. Then the Chinese riding their bicycles around Beijing was symbolic of communist poverty. Today, the Dutch riding their bicycles around Amsterdam is a sign of hip environmentally aware upper middle class wealth.

group thinking IPCC funded guys be way off on their own models

Try to avoid the canned rhetoric "group thinking" meme, sceptic.

I would reverse the argument myself and ask why is it that deniers (not you) argue against modelling when its climate, but not when its finance/economics?

Of course all models are only as good as the data fed into them, the assumptions on which they are built and the simplifications made.

If your assumption is eternal economic growth, then I guess your financial model might bump up against reality between recessions.

The "group thinking IPCC guys" of course publish their models where they are scrutinised... and picked apart.

You are also under a misunderstanding about the sources of funds. The IPCC collates data, "The IPCC does not carry out research, nor does it monitor climate or related phenomena."

Open scrutiny of models may not happen for your "hotshots" until the firm goes belly up and the creditors ask "Wheres my money... where's my fucking money??" (telephone cord around neck optional)

If all the financial engineering hot shots can get it wrong on risk abatement models in their CDO's and leveraged debt obligations why can't all the group thinking IPCC funded guys be way off on their own models.

This says more about the maturity of financial "engineering" than it says about climate science. See Mandelbrot for analysis.

Thank you pointing this out, oh mighty genius.

Everybody - we've been wasting our time discussing this - jjauregui says so - and we all know he knows everything - as demonstrated by the impeccable logic and data that he has presented.

Oh - sorry - I seem to have mistaken you for someone who is worth paying attention to - do you have any useful information for us or are you just a troll ?