Posted on 02/19/2012 11:30:42 PM PST by smokingfrog
One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oil sands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.”
In a commentary published Sunday in the prestigious journal Nature, Weaver and colleague Neil Stewart analyze how burning all global stocks of coal, oil and natural gas would affect temperatures. Their analysis breaks out unconventional gas, such as undersea methane hydrates and shale gas produced by fracking, as well as unconventional oil sources including the oil sands.
They found that if all the hydrocarbons in the oil sands were mined and consumed, the carbon dioxide released would raise global temperatures by about .36 degrees C. That’s about half the total amount of warming over the last century.
When only commercially viable oil sands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.
In contrast, the paper concludes that burning all the globe’s vast coal deposits would create a 15-degree increase in temperature. Burning all the abundant natural gas would warm the planet by more than three degrees.
Governments around the world have agreed to try to keep warming to two degrees.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
You just can’t make this stuff up...oh, wait.
(That was REALLY good!!!)
This is comical. A Canadian university “discovers”that the *canadian* tar sands really are no big problem.
Global warming research keeps demonstrating its intrinsic corruption.
Stupid me. I thought that it was Solar activity and Earth’s rotational axis angle thereto that was primarily responsible for climate change. I’m glad that these great scientists have corrected that silly notion.
Rick Santorum told Colorado Springs supporters Tuesday that Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich would be ineffective challengers to President Barack Obama in the general election because of their views on cap and trade.
"Let's go to cap and trade. Governor Romney proudly announced that they were the first state, Massachusetts, to put a cap on CO2 emissions in the state of Massachusetts," Santorum told more than 100 supporters here.
Santorum also dinged Gingrich for filming a climate change ad with Nancy Pelosi, something Gingrich - as recently as yesterday - has admitted was a mistake. Both Gingrich and Santorum appeared at a Colorado energy conference on Monday.
"Speaker Gingrich has supported cap and trade for more than a dozen years. Now, he wants business incentives to go along with cap and trade, but he supported cap and trade, and sat on the couch with Nancy Pelosi and said that global warming had to be addressed by Congress," Santorum said. "Who is he or who's Governor Romney to be able to go after President Obama? I've never supported even the hoax of global warming."
Romney and Gingrich, Santorum said, "bought into the science of man-made global warming, and they bought into the remedy, both of which are bogus."
What? Another IPCC ahole with his “models”? Damned. I thought PT Barnum was dead, but I guess when you can get government grants, you can lie through your teeth, fudge the data or create it, smear your colleagues who disagree with you/your methods, and still come out rich.
Nature has become a mouthpiece for poor science and leftist myths, just as Science did a long time ago. I’m glad I left science when I did. I knew that some of my professors and fellow students were crazy, but this proves it.
Even if CO2 DID affect our climate, which I don’t think it does - well at least not the “manmade” amounts, the out-of-control coal seam fires in China (due to their poor safety and environmental controls) put out more CO2 in a year than all the cars and trucks in America do!
Automatically disqualified any further reading for me.
The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
We have more coal than anyone and the rest of the world uses coal.
Soooo as a way to help destroy and de feet America, obammy tries to take down our coal industry.
Course the dumb asses in W. Virginia and Pennsylvania voted for this marxist ass clown so they get what they voted for.
And W. Va has NO other industry besides coal.
Governments around the world have agreed to try to keep warming to two degrees.
Thank god, oh thank you government for looking out for us
I think proven reserves show that the USA is also the "Saudi Arabia" of "unconventional" oil and natural gas.
Up until the presidency of the second worst president in US history, the USA was well on the way to converting from coal to natural gas. But James Earl got government to stifle the effort because we were "running out of natural gas". THAT situation has now reversed, given horizontal drilling.
Nat gas is simply a superior fuel (AND chemical feedstock). Coal is simply dirty, difficult to extract, and difficult to use compared to NG.
Follow the grant money
Now that the National Socialist Democrat Party has pretty much killed petroleum jobs they are coming after your jobs you coal miners. Aren’t you glad you voted democrat?
He seems to be saying that coal is the CO2 bad guy since there is a lot of it. If oil from Canadian deposits were the most abundant, then IT would be the bad guy.
Doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures by 0.5 degrees C.
Doubling the amount of CO2 AGAIN would increase global temperatures by another ... 0.5 degrees C.
The IPCC warming models (that predict a much higher response to CO2 changes) rely on the infamous 'hotspot' model of the troposphere. Their models absolutely rely upon the formation of this hotspot. However this predicted hotspot *cannot be detected* by radiosonde thermometers.
The IPCC's whole model (and articles which presume its validity like this one) has been experimentally disproven. They have no scientific basis.
All true, but the EPA is closing our coal plants without replacing their output
If you look at china and India they are building new coal plants
Natural gas is better but Not having cheap energy spells doom
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