Future fuel sources

[Geoff_H]

20 hours ago, Ian said:

For example if you had a hydrogen refueling station, how do you get hydrogen to that station? Do you liquefy it, build a pipeline or manufacture it onsite from the electricity grid.

Use the existing pipelines that feed methane to your house!  

[Geoff_H]

19 hours ago, Ian said:

are choices however if I was looking to build a plane diesel engines would be high on the list simply because they're more efficient and can burn jet-fuel. 

Actually the Otto combustion engine is theoretically more efficient than the diesel engine.  It is just that the compression ratio of the diesel is far higher than the Otto combustion engine.  However the recent dual cycle engines best the diesel for power and efficiency. BMW are looking at dumping the diesel for the dual cycle.  Mercedes are getting over 400hp out of a 2 litre engine. Imagine a light 1 litre 2 cylinder engine giving 200hp....weight savings and efficiency.

[facthunter]

Easier to lift out and replace with a new one. You realise you've bought a lemon when your engine blows and there's hardly any available at the wreckers and those that are there are very expensive. Demand pushes the price up.  EVERYTHING has to  be dead right for them to continue running. . Nev

[Siso]

Found this the other day, interesting development. Could be Nuclear powered as well.

 

 

[Flightrite]

Mankind ( or more the lunatic greenies) have crated so much fear re hydrocarbon products the average follower will just go along with whatever future power source the grubby media tells them!

[facthunter]

Of Course you can synthesise hydrocarbons. You just need extremely high temps to do it. That's very possible with concentrated sunlight. Already available. Nev

[Old Koreelah]

1 hour ago, Flightrite said:

Mankind ( or more the lunatic greenies) have crated so much fear re hydrocarbon products the average follower will just go along with whatever future power source the grubby media tells them!

Okey Flighty, I’ll bite. Who are these Lunatic Greenies? The people who have now been proven right.

Have you noticed how the anti-green side constantly shifts their position as they retreat in the face of reality?

Perhaps you want to carry on living like we have for decades, as if you have no responsibility for the effects on others?

Change is here, it’s good for us, so get on board.

[skippydiesel]

20 hours ago, Ian said:

On the fuel note, does anyone know if an experimental diesel powered airplane has flown in Australia? I think that someone in Tasmania was looking to put a Subaru diesel in a plane and I'd be interested to know how far they've got or did it all become too hard.

I think that the biodiesel route is probably simpler and cheaper than the other fuel pathways in the longer term.

I have never been convinced that bio fuels are an economic reality in the long term. Growing crops for fuel requires huge amounts of energy & chemicals that mainly come from fossil fuels - the only green bit comes from the sun . Then there is the question about food crops being ditched for fuel crops. Non of it really seems to make sense.

[spacesailor]

When all is lost !.

We go back to STEAM POWER !.

After all it was only Bureaucracy that killed it. ( weight tax ).

They run on any fuel, liquid  or solid, even nuclear.

spacesailor

 

[Ian]

Quote

Growing crops for fuel requires huge amounts of energy & chemicals that mainly come from fossil fuels

It requires some fuel, the returns are far greater, it requires about 40-55L fuel per hectare to crop canola.  The yield is 400-900L per hectare. On a 2000 hectare property that's quite a bit of oil. I'm not saying that other processes can't produce liquid fuels with net zero emissions however the agriculture route is a well understood one. Nobody will force farmers to grow crops at a loss, they'll only do it if it makes them money.

There are also lot of people betting on ammonia as a fuel created from cheap solar and wind, that sounds an awful lot like the Haber process for fixing nitrogen so you have a lot of fertilizer being produced without fossil fuels.

The key point being that fossil fuels are used in the process at the moment because they're convenient, the process also works without them.

 

 

[Ian]

Quote

Mankind ( or more the lunatic greenies) have crated so much fear re hydrocarbon products the average follower will just go along with whatever future power source the grubby media tells them!

Where do you get your "independent research" from?  Facebook or independent researchers on the Internet?

The science is absolutely blindingly clear and as a theory has been ascendant since the 1980s. When you look for factual advice look to scientific journals, even ones like new scientist or scientific american there is no debate, no lack of consensus and only the scientifically illiterate believe otherwise.

The Murdock press has been consistently anti-scientific orthodoxy, giving every crank and their dog a forum from which to wax lyrical. The problem is not hydrocarbons it is simply the fossil ones, coal, oil and gas.

 

 

[skippydiesel]

38 minutes ago, Ian said:

It requires some fuel, the returns are far greater, it requires about 40-55L fuel per hectare to crop canola.  The yield is 400-900L per hectare. On a 2000 hectare property that's quite a bit of oil. I'm not saying that other processes can't produce liquid fuels with net zero emissions however the agriculture route is a well understood one. Nobody will force farmers to grow crops at a loss, they'll only do it if it makes them money.

There are also lot of people betting on ammonia as a fuel created from cheap solar and wind, that sounds an awful lot like the Haber process for fixing nitrogen so you have a lot of fertilizer being produced without fossil fuels.

The key point being that fossil fuels are used in the process at the moment because they're convenient, the process also works without them.

 

 

What of fuel crops being grown instead of food /

 

I have always suspected more energy goes into bio fuel crops than is harvested ie the equation is running at a loss. Have you accounted for irrigation, pesticides, transport, processing & refinement to a usable fuel and the impact on the food chain????

[Ian]

Quote

What of fuel crops being grown instead of food /

 

I have always suspected more energy goes into bio fuel crops than is harvested ie the equation is running at a loss. Have you accounted for irrigation, pesticides, transport, processing & refinement to a usable fuel and the impact on the food chain????

Your conflating unrelated issues, farmer grow crops for money. If there's more money in fuel they'll grow fuel. Agricultural goods have been driven to very low prices historically and may rise. This is a good thing for agricultural producers and exporters and may lead to people not feeding grain to cattle. Currently about 36% of grain production goes to animal feed with only 55% used as human food.

If you suspect it do some research using government sites, your suspicions are just plain wrong and yes they account for all the things you mention. The term that you're looking for is Net Energy Balance or NEB, here's a link

Canola crops aren't irrigated, have low use of pesticides and don't always need them. Yes palm oil plantations have been very environmentally unsound however that's just one third world data point.

Another data point is that famines don't occur in countries with a free press so if you're concerned about people not starving make sure that countries have independent media rather than worrying about hypothetical fuel food congestion.

 

[turboplanner]

8 hours ago, Ian said:

Your conflating unrelated issues, farmer grow crops for money. If there's more money in fuel they'll grow fuel. Agricultural goods have been driven to very low prices historically and may rise. This is a good thing for agricultural producers and exporters and may lead to people not feeding grain to cattle. Currently about 36% of grain production goes to animal feed with only 55% used as human food.

If you suspect it do some research using government sites, your suspicions are just plain wrong and yes they account for all the things you mention. The term that you're looking for is Net Energy Balance or NEB, here's a link

Canola crops aren't irrigated, have low use of pesticides and don't always need them. Yes palm oil plantations have been very environmentally unsound however that's just one third world data point.

Another data point is that famines don't occur in countries with a free press so if you're concerned about people not starving make sure that countries have independent media rather than worrying about hypothetical fuel food congestion.

 

  Office Agriculture has brought many people undone over the years. Agribusiness is a complex one because the markets, like the stock exchange are uncontrolled. City people might remember the stratospheric fruit and vegetable prices during the recent drought in parts of the country. The larger part still produced its annual crops, and incurred costs which were no different from any other year so rorted the customers because they could. So the first hurdle you have to overcome is unstable pricing. You want people to do reseach using government sites, but we'd go broke oing that, the data is always out of date, however here's a first hand report from actual invoice prices. In 2017/18 I was buying feed oats for $12.00 per bag; when the drought hit, the same suppliers in the same district, which was not affected by drought lifted their prices to $17.00 per bag - a 41% increase, and because people paid it, that's now the going rate. In the large scale agribusiness industries this wild west pricing produces serious cost fluctuation pressures; a friend of mine who grows millions of chickens in one year was faced with an $8 million increase in his grain bill. Australian gouging cost us our tin industry and our wool industry which was replaced by the nore stable oil industry.  The second agribusiness factor is the grass; it's always greener over the fence, so when a farmer finds a way to get an edge and drives to town in an upmarket car because he switched from canola to cotton or wool to prime lambs, it's not long before the whole district is producing cotton or fat lambs. If the successful farmer has switched from dairy cattle to beef, everyone climbs into beef, so to a large extent Australian agribusiness is nomadic, so if you wanted to buy canola oil from them, for example you might do well in supplying service stations for three years, then you have no supply because they've all gone to beef - in other words its a free market, and a dangerous one for the inexperienced.  When you're costing agribusiness products, your scenario was also a little too simplistic, it's easy to knock someone down because he referred to pesticides, but ther are also weeds to control, or floods, or droughts.

 

Bearing all this in mind, if you could find a way to geberate the huge production required, and find a stable farmgate price, you're over the first hurdle then into a myriad of oncosts from storage to transport to any refining necessary to testing for and resolving any going compliance issues, to testing the product in hundreds of engines so ensure compatible lifetimes and power outputs.

 

Cross those hurdles and sell the product for less than petrol or diesel and you'll wear diamonds. The transport inndustry which included cars trucks and buses is waiting and always open to trialling better ways of transporting, but what we've seen since the fuel crisis of 1979 is incessant chatter about but the breakthroughs haven't stacked up in service.

[Ian]

I would like people to put some effort into their opinions rather than telling me about how on day a rock fell from the sky, hit them in the head and that it means the world is ending. The statement quoted below was simply incorrect. If you make a poorly thought out comment that is easily refutable then so be it.

20 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

I have always suspected more energy goes into bio fuel crops than is harvested

 

Agriculture is a business just like selling derivatives, you'll go broke not doing that bookreading stuff regardless of whether you're in agriculture, futures or building. There's always someone who's willing to  work harder than you so to succeed you need to be a bit smart. There's also a lot of luck, but to an extent you make your own luck sometime through that bookreading stuff.

I've attached a graph of the oil price over the last 2 years, it seem to fluctuate quite a bit, also the wheat prices over a longer period, I've also included the price of oats because I thought it might be of interest to you. Things like that make business hard. If you read up a bit you might have noticed that America's oat districts were hit by a drought pushing the price up. Someone might also be able to pick up a pattern between La Nina and US drought impacting oat prices. 

I also run a business which has grown, possibly because I try not to do too many dumb things, like flying planes. However there are no guarantees as I always did have a natural talent in that area so take anything I say with a grain of salt 😉

 

 

 

[turboplanner]

12 minutes ago, Ian said:

Agriculture is a business just like selling derivatives.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange was set up to sell futures to enable US farners and livestock producers to complete a sell of their products for a set price at the end of their growing season. That at least gave them some certainty that after investing in machinery, seed, fuel and wages, there would be a return at the end. The fluctuations in buy and sell prices these days are based on fear and greed and primarily conducted by city dwellers, but you certainly can buy a contract for grain or cattle, and if you don't cancel the order, receive a delivery, but the fluctuations I was talking about were the natural farmer induced fluctuations. Nevertheless there is a Net end result with graphs on supply and price fluctuating within a minimum-maximum bracket in the short to medium term so an annual volue available and a price available for seeds.

 

Where I think use of something like Canola for fuel would be difficult is availability of land. Our petrol and diesel consumption per DAY is in telephone book numbers with availability in every town and many roadsides. The question is whether seed production could ever be brought to that volume.

 

Around the time of the 1979 fuel crisis I was asked to take part in a Vicroads think tank on what their roads task would be in 2050. Naturally one of the primary subjects was availability of car fuel since we had been told the world was running out. Vicroads had done an analysis on road ownership and found the road authorities were the biggest landowners in Australia, and each road had vegetated verges so they could become the biggest farmers in Australia and grow crops to produce ethanol. A couple of South American countries had already committed to pure ethanol cars. We worked on it collectively for a few hours and were able to solve most of the potential issues of producing the crops, but we never got  arund to look at the actual volume required because magically petrol became available again, albeit at a much higher price.

[Ian]

My baseline assumption is that that the price of fossil fuel will be the base cost plus the cost of extraction of that much CO2 from the air and convert it into a stable long term solid or liquid. Most transport will go the way of electric vehicles, those that can't will continue to use liquid fuels at a higher cost.

At that price premium some other fuels that don't have to pay the extraction tax will start to look attractive. Hopefully there will be a degree of innovation which facilitates lower costs in this area. I don't know however it will put a floor under oil crops.

You're right about production areas and hopefully there'll be enough very cheap electricity to produce it via another mechanism however the processes at the moment are pretty expensive. Basically there'll be a small pool of liquid fuel otherwise.

I think that if the whole greenhouse gas issue was going away it would have done so by now instead of slowly gathering momentum. You have some of the biggest industries and budgets on the planet trying to stop it and they've failed, however they did slow the process down an awful lot.

While you seem to demonize city dwellers, I just prefer intelligent rational individuals and would like to demonize stupidity and people who believe in magic over maths. Basically I'm happy to let you believe whatever you want as long as I don't have to pay for it.

For the anti-vaxers out there I'd like to see the people being hospitalized having to pay their own medical bills.

[turboplanner]

7 hours ago, Ian said:

My baseline assumption is that that the price of fossil fuel will be the base cost plus the cost of extraction of that much CO2 from the air and convert it into a stable long term solid or liquid. Most transport will go the way of electric vehicles, those that can't will continue to use liquid fuels at a higher cost.

At that price premium some other fuels that don't have to pay the extraction tax will start to look attractive. Hopefully there will be a degree of innovation which facilitates lower costs in this area. I don't know however it will put a floor under oil crops.

You're right about production areas and hopefully there'll be enough very cheap electricity to produce it via another mechanism however the processes at the moment are pretty expensive. Basically there'll be a small pool of liquid fuel otherwise.

I think that if the whole greenhouse gas issue was going away it would have done so by now instead of slowly gathering momentum. You have some of the biggest industries and budgets on the planet trying to stop it and they've failed, however they did slow the process down an awful lot.

While you seem to demonize city dwellers, I just prefer intelligent rational individuals and would like to demonize stupidity and people who believe in magic over maths. Basically I'm happy to let you believe whatever you want as long as I don't have to pay for it.

For the anti-vaxers out there I'd like to see the people being hospitalized having to pay their own medical bills.

The anti-vaxxers are already wedged; locked out of most retail outlets and businesses so they can't sue the owners for allowing them to be infected and in Voctoria dying at a rate which is about four times the road toll, so auto-managed. It won't be a long financial drain.

 

We've been talking theory about alternative fuels and there's nothing wrong with that, but someone has to take the theory and produce a viable product, and that's not so easy, especially in this case the product not only has to be made available where it was needed. AdBlue (Urea) did it; I researched availability of AdBlue on all highways of Australia within the fairly short range of a particular interstate prime mover and found the supply network was covering the whole country with the exception of a section between Mount Isa and Darwin, and recommened carrying two small cans the get through this, and we had a practical prime mover not restricted in any way from moving on.

 

Electric is not new; Melbourne has the biggest electric tram network in the world, and we once had electric buses, and fleets of electric delivery trucks, it's just that no one has invented a power grid capable of accelerating from Base Load to Peak Demand.

 

However, you can split that into two sections: Industries which can operate on a fixed sipply load, and the rest of the country which creates Peak Demand. So, for example the processing of seed to oil might be a fit for renewable power supply, independent from the veriable grids.

 

There are solutions, but in some cases inventions have to occur, and alternative incomes have to be found.

 

The growing question is the validity of global warming itself:

Would it really be an issue if we do reach the magic 1.5 degree increase in temperature?

Would we be worried if Melbourne gets the average temperature of Sydney, Sydney gets the averaage temperature of Brisbane and large areas of norther deserts become tropical and available for living and farming?

 

What are your thoughts on these two publications by the IPCC; the exponential upward curve forecasts from 1990 to 2007, and then the 1.5 degree armageddon being backdated to a start in 1760 by the IPCC in 2018?

 

 

 

WH01528.pdf

[Ian]

1 hour ago, turboplanner said:

The growing question is the validity of global warming itself:

Would it really be an issue if we do reach the magic 1.5 degree increase in temperature?

It's not a growing question, and yes there will be consequences. It's pretty much that simple, the more you read the worse the story gets.

I think that you're going down the same path that people went down in the late 1990s and understanding the difference between trends, and individual measurements. Anyone can cherry pick a few points on a graph and say see. However generally those same people don't change their mind when this is pointed out to them, people tend to believe what they want to believe. I don't want to believe in climate change however the weight of evidence forces me to do so. I keep looking for something to make it not so however the case has been getting stronger and stronger. However don't believe me do some research.

If you go to the present day with the most recent NASA graphs you see the following. On my trust scale I generally trust people in NASA when they publish things. I used to work in CSIRO a long time ago and I generally trust the people there. Scientists in general could no more engage in a conspiracy than they could keep their mouths shut when their political masters tell them to. As an aside that's why the military generally distrusts scientists, and far more scientists and mathematicians fail the "security" personality tests than the general population.

Now I don't know what the end result of increasing CO2 levels however the general consensus in the scientific community is that it will be bad, both locally and globally. Occasionally I wonder if there will be net winners such as greenland or Australia if there was a permanent La Nina cycle, however things will generally get worse. For example there is a chance that the additional heat in the system will force the climate into a permanent El Nino cycle, is that a bad thing? There's evidence of this occurring in the past.

People concern themselves saying that biofuel use land that could be growing food. If sea levels rise the loss of high productivity agricultural areas will be enormous. For example using the IPCC projection https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-4-sea-level-rise-and-implications-for-low-lying-islands-coasts-and-communities/ there's going to literally be a world of hurt.

A lot of people in the anti-climate change camp firstly moved into the denial based approach and then later moved into the "is some CO2 and warmer weather going to be that bad". There are no concrete answers however the general consensus is that it will be really bad.

Even if you don't buy into global warming, ocean acidification due to CO2 will disruption entire ecosystems as things like coral reefs are no longer viable. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/ocean-acidification

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3960890/

 

[turboplanner]

10 minutes ago, Ian said:

On my trust scale I generally trust people in NASA when they publish things. I used to work in CSIRO a long time ago and I generally trust the people there.

Just taking your trust in NASA, the graph you posted shows climate at zero/baseline as late as the mid 1970's rising 1 degree by 2020; an increase of 1 degree in 45 years.

In the 2018 Summary for Policymakers [countries, including Australia] the IPCC said "Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0 deg C of global warmimg above pre-industrial levels [1760].........global warming is likely to reach 1.5 deg C between 2020 and 2052 if is continues to increase at the current rate. [their 1 degree having been changed  from their earlier report which was similar to NASA to 1 degree in 258 years.

Given that countries are still basing their actions on IPCC pronouncements, that differential, I would say, is alarming.

 

[Ian]

The IPCC document is one of the most heavily politicized documents on the planet and has upset numerous scientific contributors in relation to the watering down of their research and comments.

Every single version has undergone significant watering down of the projections. Never once has it gone up. However slowly the message has been getting stronger.

https://www.politico.eu/article/leaked-documents-show-major-polluters-try-to-water-down-un-climate-report-cop26-climate-change-co2-greenhouse/

Fundamentally this is because the message significantly impacts the bottom line of large polluters who have large budgets. One of the key tools that police use when investigating crime is simply to follow the money, people lie however money finds the shortest path.

Who do you trust, the dirt farmer or the city salesman, because the city sales guy is the one getting the cash.

Edited December 1, 2021 by Ian

[onetrack]

I have a serious level of concern whereby an international panel, formed by a defacto Govt (the U.N.) that is essentially responsible to no-one (because it's a global organisation), bases its entire existence on one factor, and one factor alone - global warming.

This panel must continue to justify its existence to its masters (the U.N. bureaucracy) by constantly keeping to an agreed story - that the world is heating up to the point whereby in the very near future, mankind will cease to exist, such will be the drastic climatic changes.

 

There are several problems here. The IPCC is basically examining climate records for the last 30 or 40 years, with an occasional mention of date back to the 1700's, as regards climate variations.

Yet the known and calculated history of mankinds existence on this planet is in the range of several hundred thousand years, to 40,000 or 50,000 years - and the climate to sustain human life has existed at least that long.

There are tantalising signs left in ancient things such as rocks and petrified wood, that there have been a very wide range of climate variations in that period - from mega-droughts through to wide variations in rainfall and temperature - and sea levels.

Yet the IPCC is insisting that the actions of mankind over the last, say just 50 or 60 years is ensuring that our known climate variations will alter by a relatively small amount in the next 30 years, and therefore all of mankind will perish.

 

I often wonder what will happen if a sudden and extended downward trend in global temperatures would result in the disbandment of the IPCC - or if this would merely be called "an aberration", and the IPCC would continue to exist and not be dismantled as having no further use.

Because these globally-funded "panels" and "committees" and organisations, who really have no responsibility to anyone to justify their existence, must continue their storyline to ensure that everyone is kept in a well-paid job studying numbers and records. There is no agreement in place anywhere to determine when or under what conditions, the panel or committee or organisation must be dismantled, as it has no further relevant work to do.

 

Then there's the ugly little fact that the "rising sea level" mantra is spoken of in hushed tones, as if it is the ruling feature of the planet. The problem is, "sea level" is just one measurement.

In accordance with all proper measurements, land height, relative to baseline measurements, must also be included in "sea level" measurements, as landforms rise and fall, considerably more than sea levels have done, in the last 20,000-30,000 years.

The crust of the Earth is essentially a moving mat, being pushed around by enormous pressures and forces that scientists still try to grasp.

Sea-floor spreading was unknown and not proven until 1962, and much has yet to be properly understood about the planet we live on, and the pressures it comes under, on a daily basis.

It is only just in recent years that wave heights have been accurately measured, and an understanding developed as to how wave heights affect our climate.

The factors behind El Nino and La Nina climate drivers are still yet to be fully understood - yet the IPCC constantly claims they have all the knowledge and accurate figures at their fingertips to be able to make climatic forecasts 50 years ahead.

 

Meantimes, we in the real world, know that figures and measurements are rubbery things that can be adjusted to match the storyline - particularly when the inputs to those figures and measurements are so numerous, that even with quantum computing, one would still be struggling to produce accurate climatic variation answers.

But one thing I do know, is that we need to take steps to clean up our act when it comes to pouring contaminants and pollutants into our atmosphere that makes our air quality suffer.

This is one simple very obvious feature of our style of civilisations, that must be addressed rapidly, to ensure our continued existence and quality of life.

Even now, the scientists and medical researchers have discovered that air pollution, mostly caused by industry and transportation sources, has been an important factor in the major and excessive level of COVID-19 deaths in Northern Italy.

So any steps we can take right now, to improve air quality, will have immediate benefit to the planet - and this is not something we need to aim for in 50 years time, unlike some calculated temperature rise, by some group of EU-based bureaucrats.

 

Edited December 1, 2021 by onetrack

[turboplanner]

38 minutes ago, Ian said:

The IPCC document is one of the most heavily politicized documents on the planet and has upset numerous scientific contributors in relation to the watering down of their research and comments.

Every single version has undergone significant watering down of the projections. Never once has it gone up. However slowly the message has been getting stronger.

https://www.politico.eu/article/leaked-documents-show-major-polluters-try-to-water-down-un-climate-report-cop26-climate-change-co2-greenhouse/

Fundamentally this is because the message significantly impacts the bottom line of large polluters who have large budgets. One of the key tools that police use when investigating crime is simply to follow the money, people lie however money finds the shortest path.

Who do you trust, the dirt farmer or the city salesman, because the city sales guy is the one getting the cash.

I was only interested in a simple comparison of a NASA projection vs an IPCC projection, altered very substantially from an earlier IPCC projection.

 

Edited December 1, 2021 by turboplanner

[spacesailor]

When this world was a frozen " snow ball" .

Who  ( in their  fight mind ) would prefer That, to our tropical paradise .

Before  the date of " snowball earth .)  l suspect it would be a little warmer than it is NOW ,.

spacesailor

 

[Old Koreelah]

45 minutes ago, onetrack said:

I have a serious level of concern whereby an international panel, formed by a defacto Govt (the U.N.) that is essentially responsible to no-one…

Perhaps they are in fact responsible to everyone on the planet!

 

Quote

by constantly keeping to an agreed story - that the world is heating up to the point whereby in the very near future, mankind will cease to exist…

Who has predicted mankind will be wiped out by climate change? Even the most extreme scenarios leave room for the survival of remnants of our species. I suspect many isolated/primitive/self-sufficient peoples of North Korea, Africa, New Guinea, etc. will have the resilience to carry on when our highly interdependent civilization collapses.

Quote

There are tantalising signs left in ancient things such as rocks and petrified wood, that there have been a very wide range of climate variations in that period - from mega-droughts through to wide variations in rainfall and temperature - and sea levels…

I totally agree that there is much more we could learn about past climate changes and their effects on humankind; the difference is that this time we have science, not superstition to guide our reaction.

 

Quote

I often wonder what will happen if a sudden and extended downward trend in global temperatures would result in the disbandment of the IPCC - or if this would merely be called "an aberration", and the IPCC would continue to exist and not be dismantled as having no further use.

I understand your distrust of organisations whose existence is dependant on a single threat. America is still suffering the effects of the all-powerful agencies set up to combat the illicit booze trade during Prohibition. It was later switched to persecuting the hemp industry (to protect Du Pont’s growing synthetics market) and morphed into the DEA, which has done a great job of locking up millions of poor blacks.

 

 

Quote

 

The factors behind El Nino and La Nina climate drivers are still yet to be fully understood…

I totally agree, so the current scientific focus on climate will likely greatly enhance our understanding of this most complex layer of the planet. The question is, will we learn enough to save ourselves?

 

One very worrying effect of the rapid warming of the Arctic is the prospect of a new Ice Age affecting Western Europe. So much Greenland ice is melting that the complicated mechanism of the Gulf Stream is being weakened. There is evidence from the past of it totally closing down within a few short years. That could displace a billion people.