So let’s look at the math of global warming together, shall we?
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn’t yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious ”“ our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless ”“ position with three simple numbers.
Those three numbers?
1) 2° Celsius — So far this century, climatologists have calculated that we’ve raised the global temperature 0.8° C. Think about that: this May it hit 109° F in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia…and rained! Another 1.2° is what the 2009 Copenhagen targets as the maximum temperature rise we’ll aim for.
2) 565 gigatons — This is the amount of carbon scientists estimate we can still put into our atmosphere before we exceed that first number, 2° C. We’re less than half way to that target now, and even if we stopped all carbon emissions now, we’d probably hit 1.6° when all was said and done.
3) 2,975 gigatons — This is the amount of carbon scientists estimate is still sequestered in all carbon-producing energy sources. In other words, this is the carbon humanity *plans* to burn. In other words, we will burn five times what we think we can afford to and still have a livable planet.
So here’s the other part of the math equation.
We’re screwed. No snark. No redemption either. We can’t ask all the oil and gas companies of the world to simply stop producing fossil fuels, and we can’t ask coal companies to stop producing coal, and we can’t move fast enough to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
We’re done.
run out of carbon is what I meant in the early 90′s when I was saying we would run out of air before we ran out of oil.
Essentially, air is 79% nitrogen, and 21% oxygen. Other gases are really trace elements, including carbon.
But…adding even a trillion tons of carbon to the atmosphere would lower the oxygen content to 20.88%. You exhale almost twenty times as much carbon dioxide (4.5%), yet you can give mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Here.
Thorium is as common as Lead, and much more common than Uranium. It’s a nuclear fuel that doesn’t create Plutonium as a byproduct. That’s why we don’t already use Thorium. We developed a Thorium reactor back in the 70′s, but Nixon nixed it, as he wanted to make more bombs. The nuclear waste from Thorium reactors have much shorter half-lives than from Uranium reactors. The Thorium molten salt reactor design (LFTR) is much safer than current reactors, as it won’t melt down or explode.
Like all nuclear reactors, it doesn’t put carbon into the air. Thorium can make much more energy than Uranium reactors. We do need to manage the waste products, but from what I understand, they are lower grade and less dangerous than Uranium reactors. It will be cheaper if we wait for India to develop the technology, and then buy it from them, but it might be too late.