Month: September 2013

For anyone with the ambition to rationally motivate others to act on climate change desperation has to be setting in. As Di Caprio’s character says in ‘Catch me if you can’: People only know what you tell them. If you tell them its not a problem, they say "Ok" and go on living. If you say the situation is desperate, they say "Ok" and still go on living. If you say "If you don’t act now things will get much worse", they say "Ok" once again, hoping someone will do something and tell them some day what it is they should do to ‘act now’.

If the public is not the audience, but ‘leadership’ is, then the situation is again hopeless. There is no leader that is not managing budgets, following economic rules, and those rules imply the use of fossil fuels. They imply using money as a means of allocating energy to producers, to mines, factories, trucks, stores so ‘the economy’ works. First of all it’s all short termism, second of all, everyone is captured by debt, the need to roll over loans, captured by the carbon credit economy.

The scientific community is irrelevant.This small fraction of the world population really doesn’t matter, except when their solutions would be implemented. We all know how impossible that has been proven to be, you can’t make fertilizer with wind, you can’t run a car on ammonia, you can’t build cheap vanadium flow batteries, you can’t produce an Aptera, you can’t do so many things that would reduce the need for fossil fuels. Why? Just a fossil fuel sales reflex, the Koch Brothers doing their job.  

So what is the IPCC for? What is knowledge for if you don’t use it. It seems to be a parking space for climate ambitious people, like the COP meetings, where those coming out will say "We had a good debate, both sides had their say". Truely, right now, WHO GIVES A FUCK?

There’s even politicians that dare to say "See, IPCC shows it’s not that bad" or "Good news, 2 degrees is manageable!". Don’t need to mention we are no where near bending the curve, the only thing reducing emissions is lower fossil fuel output.Economics ensures that all fossil fuels in the market get sold and burned. And all biomass without heavy protection is next.

We have known about the threat of permafrost CO2 and Methane release for years now. The process of rotting of biomass accumulated on the frozen planes of Russia and Alaska is destined to double or triple the amount of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. The process of melting is a matter of time, but it can be stopped if we eliminate carbon emissions and start using renewables to capture CO2.

Unlike most economically schooled idiots that are now blindly running humanity into the ground, we see the self sustaining ability of renewables. Economists will deny the special role fossil fuel have in our economy, their controlling power through our credit system. No money, no fuel, no products, no logistics, no life. Yet it is a ‘free market’ yeah right! 

Reasoning from the economic perspective there is no solution to climate change : Using fossil fuels can’t fix it. Actions are limited to the amount of fossil fuels, which economists and most other people rather allocate so they can enjoy life better, not to fix problems for future generations.

But we don’t need fossil fuels to fix the climate problem. It is impossible, and we have solar with 5760 times the energy potential as the world currently uses. We could power 5760 more earths, households, trains, factories than we currently do and our climate would not change on iota! Could we roll back 100 years of carbon pollution with that energy? You bet!

But the tundra poses a problem that is hard to fix with solar. There is a lot of wind up North, but that probably won’t be feasible either, or take to long. We propose a simple and elegant solution to the permafrost rot that will buy us some time to get the cooling of our planet going : Radiation.

Solution 1. 

How about making sure there are no bacteria that rot in the tundra soil? Just do the same as food producers, zap the soil with radiation. Sterilizing it will make it a safe store of carbon while we figure out how to freeze it again. A process of sticking radioactive rods in the ground should be able to treat a large part of the tundra, and this process can be applied where it is needed the most first, in methane seaps.

Solution 2.

Albedo is the reflectiveness of the earths surface. Increasing it means there is less energy absorbed. Water absorbs infra red, hot light, very well, which is why the Arctic ocean heats up so fast now that the ice is gone. Albedo can be achieved by covering the ground with a sheet of white material. This is a huge task, and we think it would be more effective and easier to achieve in the ocean instead of on land. But it is one that if you find a solution you can build and deploy using renewables you have a solution that stops warming in its tracks.

Solution 3.

Wind cooling. Wind can be used to pump heat out of the ground. So the permafrost can be retianed by building a series of windturbines, many of them to freeze the ground bottom up. Again this is a monster operation, but we need these to turn the tide.

With all of these solutions you can easily see it’s much more effective to remove pro fossil fuel politicians from our governments and install 100% renewables ASAP people instead. Then the task is still huge..