Improving Wetware

While reading Eaarth I came across an number that needed further thought. Supposedly a barrel of oil contains as much energy as a man working can put out in 11 years.

OK, so that needs some cross checking. A barrel of oil is 42 US gallons, or 158.984 liters strange that a Thailand website was near the top of the google search for that conversion. That barrel of oil has about 6.1 GJ or 1,700 kWh, or 38 MJ per liter. roughly 10.5 kWh.

Maximum sustained energy that a human can put out is around 100W over an 8 hour period, so 0.8kWh/day, but that would be classed as extremely hard labor, so a better number to use would be about half that, so a good estimate would be 0.5kWh/day. Allowing for 250 working days/year, that means a strong, fit human can put out about 125kWh/year.

Comparing this to the 1,700kWh per barrel of oil, a human capable of a sustained output of 50W would take about 13.6 years to generate that much energy, so the figure of 11 years energy per barrel is reasonable. Other numbers in Eaarth suggest that in North America, the annual consumption of oil per person is about 60 barrels, so in a year, a human uses the equivalent of 660 humans worth of work.

Since that is hard to imagine, a smaller scale to look at it is that 1 liter of oil, enough to drive a car for maybe 15 km or 10 miles (assuming an efficient car), uses as much energy as an average human could put out in a month of working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. (21 days work at 0.5kWh/day for the 10.5kWh in a liter of oil).

Small wonder then that the thoughts of Peak Oil and Global Warming from excess CO₂ have everyone concerned in one way or another…

Bruce Schneier on worst case thinking

Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it’s only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.

Bruce covers the idea in depth, but for me the problem with worst case thinking is that is can be used to justify doing nothing. By focusing purely on the extreme possible downside it forgets the value of the benefits, AND forgets that doing nothing also has a cost.

Just who is pulling the strings?

the real story is not the relationship between science and the media at all. It’s the story of how the media has been completely taken in by a third group, a third culture, consisting of ideologically-driven, pathological liars, who will say almost anything in order to score political points, and will smear anyone they regard as an opponent.

Krugman has written about Building a Green Economy

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

Interestingly Krugman didn’t write much about James Hansen’s proposal for a tax and dividend to cut down on CO2 emissions. James HAnsen is against the Cap and Trade for reasons he explains very well. Hansen also has a paper that shows pictures of what cold winters used to be like - when the Niagara falls could freeze.

What we need is an approach that addresses the fundamental fact that keeps us addicted to  fossil fuels: they are the cheapest form of energy, provided their prices do not have to include  the damage they do to human health, the environment, and the future of our children.    For the sake of the people, especially young people, there should be a rising price on carbon  emissions.  The price should rise at a known economically sensible rate, so that businesses have  time to plan their investments accordingly.  The money collected should be put in the hands of  the public, so they are able to make the purchases necessary to reduce their carbon footprint. 

Since the trends on global CO2 levels are not good, I decided that it would be useful to watch how they are changing, The historical trend has been that on average we are increasing CO2 levels by approx. 1.9ppm/year. Based on this trend we will probably reach 400ppm in April or May 2015.

But we will see fluctuations up and down over the course of the year

This is a feature of the way the climate relates to the overall earth systems, the CO2 level drops as vegetation grows in the northern hemisphere summer, and then rises during the northern hemisphere winter, peaking in the spring, and then starting to fall off again in June. On an annual basis this fluctuation is around 6 ppm, but year on year we are averaging nearly 2ppm higher - but this varies with the economy and the weather in any year, hot years tend to be associated with a higher rise.

Below is sample data extracted from CO2Now.org which is also the source of the badge.

Overall this is a large scale experiment

How much CO2 can humans add to the atmosphere without adversely affecting the climate systems that we depend on?