Good post.  For me there are several very scary things on the horizon. One is the phosphate crunch. We rely on chemical fertilisers to get sufficient yield to feed 7 billion people.

We can get phosphate from other sources apart from mining of course, but it's a question of rate of production and cost of production. Some of teh technology may take decades to develop.

Like anything else, it's very cheap just to dig it out of the ground, and we can extract it at a relatively fast rate. However we are very rapidly running out of phosphate deposits.

Prior to the GFC, Phosphate increased in price from US$40/tonne to US$430/tonne in just 14 months. That's an increase of 1000 percent.  

Like Crude Oil, the phosphate price has fallen, but we'll be back to square one when we get sustainable economic recovery.

Climate check-up 'screams world is warming'

A report on the world's climate has confirmed that 2009 was one of Australia's hottest years on record and provides more evidence of global warming.

Three hundred scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association compiled the report, which the association's data centre chief Deke Arndt says paints a compelling picture.

The list of last year's extreme weather events includes a flood in Brazil that left 376,000 people homeless, heavy rainfall in England that damaged 1,500 properties and three intense heat waves in Australia, one of them coinciding with the Victorian bushfires that killed 173 people.

South Australia and New South Wales had their warmest year on record as La Nina conditions changed to El Nino.

Maximum temperatures were generally above normal throughout Australia, adding up to the second hottest year since temperature started being record in 1910.



"Each of the last three decades has been substantially warmer than the decade before it," he said.

"On a decade scale, that is very clear. The 1980s was the warmest decade on record as of December 31, 1989, but every single year in the 90s was warmer than that decade's average temperature."

"What this data is doing is screaming that the world is warming, and that cannot be driven by any single individual or even a small set of groups, because the evidence is there to see - there are lots of groups doing this stuff," Mr Thorne said.

The scientists say the warming is due to greenhouse gases and while there were signs of human fingerprints, the report was not designed to attribute blame.
Link -
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/29/2967433.htm
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That said, the trend does seem to be in and I will stick my neck out and say that a Global Population of 7 Billion people ARE IMPACTING ON CLIMATE CHANGE!

muso wrote on Jul 30^th, 2010 at 10:01am:


All true, but energy use is but a symptom of wanton materialism and consumption - and humans will need to bravely and promptly address same, lest we should prematurely earn collective Darwin Awards...

So, we need to stop irrationally worshipping and feeding the insatiable and destructive 'Growth Fairy" - and denounce the propaganda of his evil twin, the 'Good Greedy Witch of the West'...

Equitist wrote on Jul 30^th, 2010 at 10:10am:


How do you see the best way of addressing that problem? People like to watch documentaries about all this gluttony..... on their new Plasma HD Televisions which account for a sizeable proportion of increased domestic electricity load. And guess what? I have an HD tevelision too, although it does use LED  technology.

Maybe we should start a new thread on how to reduce energy demand.

'Way out of whack' weather produces record hailstone

(CNN) -- A South Dakota ranch worker who found a record-setting hailstone says the chunks of ice falling from the sky sounded like "big bricks" being thrown at his house.


Leslie "Les" Scott found the record-breaker, which is almost the size of a soccer ball, last week. It's been been officially declared the largest ever recorded in the United States, in terms of both diameter and weight. The hailstone measured 8.0 inches in diameter, had a circumference of 18.62 inches, and weighed one pound, 15 ounces, according to the NOAA National Climate Extremes Committee.
Link -
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/07/30/record.large.hailstone/?hpt=C2#fbid=EqTS9N8...
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Now, that's a hailstone!

It's not just simple cause and effect. The reasons for the vast majority of the increase in CO2 concentration is anthropogenic - burning fossil fuels, manufacturing cement and clearing tropical rainforest.

On Methane,  I don't know where you get the 25 and 33 for Methane, but I'll explain that in a moment.  Methane is at the ppb level, so the decomposition of methane doesn't contribute too much to the rising CO2 level. That is negligible in the scheme of things.

What you should really have said about methane is that for a given concentration, methane had a global warming potential between 7 and 62 times that of CO2. It depends a lot on the actual time frame because methane doesn't linger as long in the atmosphere as CO2 does.

Now because the CO2 atmospheric concentration is much higher than that of methane, the actual effect of methane is lower than that of CO2:

As the ocean gets warmer, its ability to dissolve CO2 reduces, so less of the released CO2 is absorbed into the ocean.  

Water vapour is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2, but it tends to drop out in the form of rain unlike CO2.

Let me know if I've improved your understanding or worsened it  

muso wrote on Jul 31^st, 2010 at 9:47pm:



You've worsened it...
What you basically said (again) is that Methane causes more heating, and faster than Co2 does...

Yeah I already said that...
Co2  may 'hold' heat for longer, but methane creates heat faster..

On a stove, simmer(Co2) holds the pot at a lower temp over time, while a setting of high(methane) causes the pot to come to the boil...

Which is a more immediate problem, or has a more imediate effect???

Boil, or simmer????

gizmo_2655 wrote on Jul 31^st, 2010 at 11:15pm:


Not quite. It might be more effective than CO2, but there is currently much less of it in the atmosphere and the overall effect is that it causes less heating than CO2.
Gas        Concentration *  GWP  =  Total Warming Effect
CO2:          395            *    1     =       395
CH4:               1.8        *  25     =        45