Global Warming and Cooling Cave Records

[Cave Monkey]

So, it sounds like this paper was a review. I have never heard of a review claiming a be a 'definitive' guide. Secondly, if the review was inconclusive, why did the cited authors want to have their names dissociated from it?

The paper you submit is not always what people get to see, its called creative editing. Oh i like that bit, but this bit can be blended out as it might confuse people, then if we move this over to here, it looks like this rather then that ect.

An example, the guys and girls who are actually out there extracing the ice cores know that increased CO2 in the atmosphere comes after a rise in global temperate, therefore it cant be a cause according to their data, and yet there are people 1000's of miles away sitting in cosy labs and offices who take the data the ice workers have struggled to get and manipulate it to suggest that CO2 throughout history has been the cause of global warming. Thus enabling them to give the public the answers and reassurance they are so desperate for.

The public is then presented with said information from a person all smartly dressed who seems very well informed and they take it as gospel, meanwhile there is a project leader spitting feathers on the ice somewhere with his hands tied because if he speaks out he will loose funding.

I am not in either camp really, we might be causing it, we might not, but i am not going to jump on the wagon just because I'm told to and its the cool thing. Yes we should try and protect what we have and recycle as long as it is economical and viable to do so, but we should accept that without definitive answers and black and white facts we are living in hope and walking blind.

 

[Bob Smith]

Having direct experience of metalliferous mining I strongly disagree with current aluminium recycling policies, the amount of energy to transport all the cans to the few smelting plants in the UK negates ANY benefit from recycling.

Clearly a knowledge of metalliferous mining does not necessarily qualify you as an expert in what happens to the ore once it has been mined.

These guys ought to know what they are talking about:

http://www.world-aluminium.org/production/smelting/index.html

Nick.

sorry nick, not sure what your getting at, i agree that ally is energy intensive, but current UK recycling policies are also energy intensive when everything is taken into account. i agree that the actual recycling process is better than raw processing, but overall it's currently no better. all i was saying is think about how you recycle. i have also spoken to mates at smelters that are told to send ally straight back through the the process to keep up with recycling targets. a bit piss poor i think you'll agree!

 

[nickwilliams]

According to the article I linked to, smelting aluminium (i.e. reducing bauxite to metallic aluminium) has an energy consumption of about 16kWh/ kg, whereas re-forming recycled aluminium requires only 5% of this, i.e (in round numbers) 1kWh/kg.

Other sources (http://www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Aluminum.html) say that 1 kg of bauxite gives 0.5 kg of aluminium.  So, for the assertion that it's more energy efficient to import the bauxite from Australia and smelt it than it is to re-cycle metallic aluminium to be correct, the energy consumption of transporting bulk aluminium waste by road would need to be 32 times the energy consumption of transporting bauxite by sea.

A further search reveals (http://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/info/estimatesoffuelconsumption.htm) that net weight ton-miles per gallon for bulk shipping carriers is (generously) 1000 whereas for road transport it is a bit under 100. I will admit that these are old figures, are for grain rather than ore and the whole calculation is necessarily crude, but it appears that the ratio of energy consumption between road and sea transport for bulk loads is closer to 10 to 1 than 30 to 1.

I take the point about the costs of transport being only one factor in the costs of recycling vs fresh production, and I realise I am putting a fair amount of words in your mouth with my interpretation of what you actually said, but to a first approximation it's pretty easy to show that your argument does not hold water. Now I may well be wrong and you may well still be right, but it's up to you to produce some numbers to back up your assertion.

The basic point of my posting it that, notwithstanding your knowledge as someone who may or may not be peripherally involved in the production of aluminium, like pretty much all of the other arguments being presented in this thread it's all only so much waft until you apply at least a modicum of rigor and actually do the math. Furthermore, the math is not terribly difficult to do, and the information required to base it on is easily available. It's really not possible to take you seriously if your argument is based on "I know a mate who works in a smelter and he tells me things which reinforce my existing prejudices so they must be true".

The fact that scrap aluminium is worth re-cyling is for me primarily proven by the fact that it has had a high scrap value since long before environmental considerations became fashionable. You are going to have to prevent some better evidence than you have done already if you are going to convince me otherwise.

Nick.

 

[Dep]

Eventually they caused the atmosphere to change to what we see today and caused their own extinction making way for oxygen dependant and more advanced creatures.

cue wars, pollution, racism etc we're bordering on Douglas Adams stuff here!

..actually I meant metabolically advanced but yes, the mice will probably outlast us.

 

[Dep]

Blimey, this thread's jumped about a bit.
But very interesting. Pretty much the full spectrum of viewpoints there.

 

[langcliffe]

An example, the guys and girls who are actually out there extracing the ice cores know that increased CO2 in the atmosphere comes after a rise in global temperate, therefore it cant be a cause according to their data, and yet there are people 1000's of miles away sitting in cosy labs and offices who take the data the ice workers have struggled to get and manipulate it to suggest that CO2 throughout history has been the cause of global warming. Thus enabling them to give the public the answers and reassurance they are so desperate for.

If anyone wishes to see some of these issues, including the above,  more fully discussed, I commend them to a brief report the New Scientist published a couple of months ago. However, I wouldn't recommend it to those who would prefer not to temper their opinions with considered argument.

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html

 

[whitelackington]

At the risk of appearing to be an ignorant fool, might it be because it is cheaper to adapt an EXISTING process, than to develop a completely new on to recycle purely old metal?

Typing lessons for U  Peter 

 

[rich]

Regarding the paper i mentioned, it was compiled from every bit of information made available by all the people regarded as leaders in global warming to be the definative guide on global warming, and it was inconclusive. However, thats not what we (the public) were told, and therefore most of the contributers wished to have their names disassociated with it.

If this paper exists then you should have no problem letting us know the details: journal published in, date, etc.

The paper you submit is not always what people get to see, its called creative editing. Oh i like that bit, but this bit can be blended out as it might confuse people, then if we move this over to here, it looks like this rather then that ect.

Look, you really DON'T have any idea about the process works. If you submit a paper to a serious journal, they DO NOT make changes to it. If the referees have a problem with the paper, then they will inform the authors, who then get a chance to make changes to satisfy the criticism. No one will edit the paper in the sense that you are talking about. If the authors don't agree with the requests they have the option of withdrawing the paper.

An example, the guys and girls who are actually out there extracing the ice cores know that increased CO2 in the atmosphere comes after a rise in global temperate, therefore it cant be a cause according to their data, and yet there are people 1000's of miles away sitting in cosy labs and offices who take the data the ice workers have struggled to get and manipulate it to suggest that CO2 throughout history has been the cause of global warming.

You're very confused. First, the people who extract the ice cores are generally the same people who publish an analysis of it. Even if this wasn't the case, someone who is sitting in an office a thousand miles away with a lab and some advanced computer models is going to be in a much better position to analyse the data than some poor sod freezing their bollocks off on top of the Greenland ice sheet.

By the way, the whole CO2 -- temperature lag thing has been explained. See here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

 

[graham]

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html

It would be nice if there was a way of preventing anybody posting further in either of these threads until they had read all this lot.

 

[Cave Monkey]

By the way, the whole CO2 -- temperature lag thing has been explained. See here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

Have you read the link you posted....
Its inconclusive. The only thing that they can all decide on is that there are many things effecting the climate of the planet.

So it is not as if the temperature increase has already ended when CO2 starts to rise. Rather, they go very much hand in hand, with the temperature continuing to rise as the the CO2 goes up. In other words, CO2 acts as an amplifier

But do not make the mistake of assuming that these warmings and coolings must have a single cause. It is well known that multiple factors are involved, including the change in planetary albedo, change in nitrous oxide concentration, change in methane concentration, and change in CO2 concentration.

This is a critical point. We cannot explain the temperature observations without CO2. But CO2 does not explain all of the change, and the relationship between temperature and CO2 is therefore by no means linear.

Yada, Yada Yada.....


Now this link as posted above previously is much better and a most informative read. http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html

It is also much more convincing as rather then saying, its like this because we say it is, it attempts to give a balanced argument to each point in relatively plain English..

 

[Cave Monkey]

If this paper exists then you should have no problem letting us know the details: journal published in, date, etc.

Have a rummage for yourself http://www.ipcc.ch/.
You probably have access/clearance through your university that i no-longer have.

 

[rich]

Have you read the link you posted....
Its inconclusive. The only thing that they can all decide on is that there are many things effecting the climate of the planet.

Yes, I've read the link. You've misinterpreted it. Here's one thing everyone agrees on:

We know why CO2 is increasing now, and the direct radiative effects of CO2 on climate have been known for more than 100 years. In the absence of human intervention CO2 does rise and fall over time, due to exchanges of carbon among the biosphere, atmosphere, and ocean and, on the very longest timescales, the lithosphere (i.e. rocks, oil reservoirs, coal, carbonate rocks). The rates of those exchanges are now being completely overwhelmed by the rate at which we are extracting carbon from the latter set of reservoirs and converting it to atmospheric CO2.

Your argument seems to be that because it's a complex system we have no hope of understanding it. But just because we don't understand something fully doesn't mean we can't get a good idea of what is going on.

Have a rummage for yourself http://www.ipcc.ch/.
You probably have access/clearance through your university that i no-longer have.

So I'm supposed to read through every paper on climate change that has ever been published, looking for a paper I don't believe exists, with no idea of what I'm looking for, and no way of telling when I've found it?

 

[Bob Smith]

Cheers Nick, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Whilst at Uni I remember the Environmental Science guys doing research on recycling/primary production energy costs. If i can find the paper I'll look up their conclusion. But thanks, you appear to be swaying my view on things, and i reckon there's a thesis in this somewhere. I remember the transport costs being particularly tricky to estimate though, and i agree until i give firm proof it's just like pissing in the wind.

 

[ttxela]

The fact that scrap aluminium is worth re-cyling is for me primarily proven by the fact that it has had a high scrap value since long before environmental considerations became fashionable. You are going to have to prevent some better evidence than you have done already if you are going to convince me otherwise.

Nick.

I reckon so, just a couple of cardboard boxes of old aluminium freezer trays buys 12 of us a good lunch, if it wasn't attractive to someone to re-use it they wouldn't pay me for it.

Is it possibly re-used for castings? I remember at school we used to melt down drinks cans and make castings in a sand box.