Superb comments – thanks. Your summary is concise. Another is “cheaper than coal” which is my shorthand to designate energy options that have a chance at scale. Nuclear is the only additional scalable option that we know about today.

Thorium reactors – yes, my bet for the future – though we can’t know for sure today as we’ve not yet built at commercial scale. IFR may be easier to get past the politicians due to long term Argonne research support, at least until the 1994 “assassination” of the project.

The planet has never before experienced mass-manufactured modular nuclear power. Imagine the quality and cost of your auto if hand-built in your front yard.

Also, in 10 years, solar cells on roof tops should be cost-effective, and homes will be so well insulated that they will use very little energy.

I hope you are correct on the roof-top solar, but even so that is a 1% contribution. I’ve been hopeful of Nanosolar’s tech, but that is still a long ways from competitive w/o the German subsidies.

“Zero carbon and prosper”.

I think you will agree with Roger Pielke Jr’s formulation of “no regrets” energy policy.

Cheers, Steve

When I just look at the data for the last 40 years, it looks as if the temperature will increase 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and we might possibly be better off than we are now. But am I sure that this trend will continue? No.

So with so much uncertainty, is there anything rational that we can do in the United States. Yes, there is – there’s alot we can do. First, every new energy plant we build should be nuclear, and we should invest in deveoping a good design using thorium. You’d be surprised at how much better a thorium nuclear power plant can be – and the current unranium ones are really good, so that says a lot.

Second, within 10 years or so, battery powered cars will be cost effective. If we move quickly with nuclear power, we can charge those batteries with electricity generated from thorium power plants. And these cars will have many fewer moving parts and costs for them will go down.

Also, in 10 years, solar cells on roof tops should be cost-effective, and homes will be so well insulated that they will use very little energy.

There are many other things we can do, but they all have this in common – if done right, they will save us money. If we can just imitate France which gets over 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, we can have inexpensive, safe, and non-pollluting energy.

The lesson of Haiti was that it wasn’t the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, it was poverty. If we implement the suggestions I’ve given above, we will do more to decrease pollution than any carbon tax or any treaty will do, AND we’ll prosper at the same time.

We could even build, run and deal with the nuclear materials for nuclear power plants in other countries, helping them to prosper. It is prosperity that allows us the ability to build earthquake resistant home, and have catalytic converters in our cars, and clean water, and sanitation, etc.

So let’s have the least polluting environment possible, and prosper at the same time. Then, whether or not the Earth warms significantly, we’ll benefit.

A number of reasons.

The atmosphere-ocean exchanges variability are not only due to biology, but also due to thermodynamics. Basically colder water can hold more CO2. So the seasonal cycle of ocean-atmos. exchange is controlled not only by growth of marine plants but by seasonality of temperature, mixed-layer depth and other dynamic variables.

The seasonality of o-a exchange is not as simple to characterise in terms of seasonality because the Southern Ocean plays such a big role and of course its seasonality is in the opposite sense to the Northern Hemi. Some of the most important areas of o-a exchange are modulated by by processes like upwelling which do not correspond clearly to either N or S Hemi. seasonality. Examples include monsoonal upwelling zones in the Arabian Sea.

Also biomass in the ocean is labile (short-lived). That is, it’s turned over much more than terrestrial biomass. Even though ocean productivity plays a big role in the global carbon cycle, marine biomass (or standing stock, or inventory) is orders of magnitude smaller than terrestrial biomass. There are no “trees” in the ocean and its ecosystems are dominated by planktonic micro-algae whose lifespans are measured in weeks or months (even the dramatic kelp “forests” off Tasmania and the US West Coast do not account for very much biomass). Proposals like iron fertilization that seek to stimulate ocean plant growth would not work by storing carbon as biomass, but by storing it as dissolved carbon dioxide (mainly bicarbonate ion) in the deep ocean. The carbon would be transferred to the deep ocean as biomass, but it would be quickly converted to dissolved CO2 by decomposition. So it’s a somewhat different system.

And thanks for the clarification of Dyson’s seasonal flux comments. I interpreted his description in the same way as you outlined. I think what Dyson was after was to get a handle on the rate at which carbon could theoretically be removed from the atmosphere by some future geo-engineering approach. He wrote:

This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.

In this back-of-the-envelope estimation of the first derivative Dyson ignored the seasonal atmosphere-ocean exchanges. Why?

http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/13.htm

for an illustration of the reservoirs and fluxes in the carbon cycle.

The annual cycle Dyson cites is mainly a “deciduous” signal: net ecosystem respiration (due in part to decaying leaves) versus net ecosystem photosynthesis. Only net growth of tree trunks and branches, or carbon buried in soils or peats “counts” as sequestration in this cycle.

So any biotech solution would have to be a “tree-trunk” solution.

see:

Canadell, J. G., Le Quere, C., Raupach, M. R., Field, C. B., Buitenhuis, E. T., Ciais, P., Conway, T. J., Gillett, N. P., Houghton, R. A., and Marland, G., 2007, Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, p. 0702737104, doi:10.1073/pnas.0702737104.

and

http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbontrends/index.htm