JoNova

A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).

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Upgrade coal power and cut 15% of emissions. Where is the Green applause?

If the Greens cared about CO2 they’d be very interested in ways to reduce emissions. But their selective interest speaks volumes about their real priorities. Anton Lang shows how newer coal fired powers stations run hotter and at higher pressures, and use 15% less coal to produce the same amount of electricity. We could upgrade our power stations and cut a whopping 15% of their emissions — which is huge compared to the piddling small, often unmeasureable savings thanks to renewables. Even massive floods that stop industry don’t reduce our emissions as much as this would. Do the Greens hate the coal industry more than “carbon pollution”? — Jo

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Ultra Super Critical Coal Fired Power gives a 15% CO2 Emissions Reduction

Guest Post: Anton Lang (aka TonyfromOz)

It all comes down to steam.

Assume (for a moment) that we have to reduce the emissions of CO2 by something like 20% between now and 2020.

Previously I showed we could achieve a reduction of 13% in CO2 emissions from the electrical power generating sector just by converting from the current 70’s technology coal fired power to the newest technology USC (UltraSuperCritical) coal fired technology. That 13% I quoted [...]

March 27th, 2013 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (290)

Australian floods show how cutting electricity use doesn’t reduce CO2

Coal power provides most of our electricity and despite widespread floods these plants have to keep working day in and day out to provide our baseload power.  | This one above is the old decommissioned “New Farm” Coal Power Station (1942)  |  Queensland State Library

Anton Lang cuts the numbers, and finds that while the Australian floods cut power consumption by 9% on the Eastern seaboard they only reduced CO2 emissions by 0.9%.

Even if cutting CO2 emissions was useful, it’s much much harder than most people realize. Electricity use is so pervasive that even though whole towns were off-the-grid due to floods, and real consumption fell, it didn’t make any difference to emissions. That’s because the baseload consumption is still so high, and is mostly still a coal powered load. Reducing the peak use of electricity by a whopping 9% hardly makes any difference to the total daily curve of electricity demand. The electricity for the peak load comes from natural gas, a bit from hydro, and some from intermittent unpredictable renewables. Coal can’t be switched up and down quickly, and it isn’t efficient to do so, even if it were possible to ramp up or change the [...]

February 27th, 2013 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (88)

CO2 emitted by the poor nations and absorbed by the rich. Oh the irony. (And this truth must not be spoken)

Kudos to John O’Sullivan for finding this story; see the note at the end about the extraordinary response his post on this received.

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Who are the world’s worst “polluters”? According to a new high-spectral-resolution Japanese satellite — it’s developing countries.

Who knew detailed spectroscopic data on Earth’s atmosphere was available to figure out where the CO2 and other greenhouse gases are being produced and absorbed?

In January 2009, a Japanese group launched a satellite “IBUKI” to monitor CO2 and methane spectral bands around the world to establish exactly where the world’s biggest sources and sinks of greenhouse gases were. With climate change being the perilous threat to millions, this data would seem so essential you might wonder why didn’t someone do it before. As it happens, NASA tried — it launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in Feb 2009, which was designed to do exactly the same thing, but it crashed on launch. Oddly, NASA don’t seem to be prioritizing the deadly climate threat, as it will take NASA four years to figure out why the Taurus XL rocket failed and relaunch it.

The results from from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)  show that Industrialized nations appear to [...]

November 3rd, 2011 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (273)

Italy caught emitting 10 times as much of a potent greenhouse gas

HFC-23 is 15,000 times as potent as CO2 in the greenhouse gas stakes. It’s only made by six factories in the whole of Europe.

Given that, you would think that they’d have this one esoteric compound completely tracked, measured to the nth, audited and cross checked, right? After all, how devastating would it be if governments can’t report something as simple as HFC-23 accurately, how could they possibly expect to run a global trading scheme on a gas like CO2, which is not just made in hundreds of factories, but thousands of cities, millions of cars, and billions of animals. Well, if you thought someone somewhere had a handle on those numbers, get ready to be corrected. Not only did people think it was a good idea if countries self-assessed their emissions, but they trusted those countries to accurately report numbers that millions of dollars of payments rested on, and nobody was looking too hard over their shoulder.

Who has been emitting twice as much HFC-23 as they admitted? That would be the whole of Western Europe. Italy, apparently, has snuck out 10 times as  much.

So what does a “binding target” mean exactly? Not much. When we can’t measure [...]

August 22nd, 2011 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post |

Blockbuster: Planetary temperature controls CO2 levels — not humans

There goes another “fingerprint”…

It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

Judging by the speech Murry Salby gave at the Sydney Institute, there’s a blockbuster paper coming soon.

Listen to the speech: “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources”

Professor Murry Salby is Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University. He’s been a visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, and he’s spent time at the Bureau of Meterology in Australia.

Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.

CO2 variations do not correlate with man-made emissions. Peaks and falls correlate with hot years (e.g. 1998) and cold years (1991-92). No graphs are available from Salby's speech or paper yet. This graph comes from Tom Quirk's related work (see below).

The higher levels of CO2 in recent [...]

August 5th, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post | Comments (767)

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? Part 5: CO2 Emissions Versus Temperature

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans

6 October 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third discussed ocean temperatures, and the fourth discussed past temperatures.]

Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series

Notice How They Never Directly Compare Temperature With Human Emissions of CO2?

According to the man-made theory of global warming promoted by the western climate establishment, the recent global warming is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by carbon dioxide (CO2).

So let’s compare the alleged cause (human emissions of CO2) with the alleged effect (temperature).

Human emissions of CO2 have been estimated from historical data for the period 1751 (before the industrial revolution) to 2007 for the major sources—coal, gas, and petroleum use, cement production, and gas flaring—by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center within the US Department of Energy. (The cumulative figures below extrapolate to 2010 using average annual emissions for the previous 14 years.)

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October 12th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | Email This Post Email This Post |