At last, an intelligent solution to the problem of global warming

Sequestration of carbon dioxide emissions from a thermal power plant

I’d like to draw readers’ attention to an excellent article in Quartz magazine (December 4, 2017) by Akshat Rathi, titled, Humanity’s fight against climate change is failing. One technology can change that. Dr. Rathi has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Oxford, and his article is based on lengthy conversations with more than 100 academics, entrepreneurs, policy experts, and government officials.

What changed my mind

Until recently, if someone had told me that global warming may have severe ecological consequences for the planet, I would have responded as follows: “Look, you might well be right. But the fact is, we don’t have a practical solution to the problem of global warming. Renewable energy simply won’t work. You want proof? Go and have a look at Vaclav Smil’s one-page online article, What I see when I see a wind turbine. Smil concludes that modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels for decades to come. Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Bill Gates reads him. Obviously, the man knows what he’s talking about.”

I would have also pointed to a 2017 article in PNAS (vol. 114, no. 26, 6722–6727, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1610381114) by Christopher T. M. Clack et al., titled, Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar, which utterly demolished the widely touted claims made by Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, that the planet could be powered by 100% renewable energy. The authors of the PNAS paper concluded that Jacobson’s analysis contained “errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions.” To make matters worse, Jacobson’s plan would cost the world a cool 125 trillion dollars (that’s 125 followed by a dozen zeroes), over the next 33 years. That’s about 3.75 trillion dollars a year, which is nearly 5 per cent of the world’s current GDP of 78 trillion dollars. Even if we take into account future growth in the world’s GDP, as well as the possibility of recouping all that money in the future, it’s still a hell of a lot to pay up-front. So I would have concluded that the human race would be better off trying to adapt to climate change, than wasting money trying to fight it without any realistic hope of success.

Well, it turns out that a solution to the problem of global warming is at hand, after all. It’s called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Unlike clean coal technology, which scrubs out sulfur and mercury emissions but leaves the carbon behind, CCS removes carbon dioxide at the point where it is being emitted, and it can be applied not only to oil but to any fossil fuel. Until a few years ago, it was prohibitively expensive, but now, it’s finally become affordable. It’ll cost just 0.5 per cent of the world’s GDP (or 360 billion dollars a year), once it gets up and running. And the technology already exists. After reading Dr. Rathi’s article, I’m now convinced that this is the best game in town. However, I’d be very interested in knowing what other people think.

Why we need Carbon Capture and Storage

In his essay, Dr. Rathi confronts what he calls “the elephant in the room” by posing the question: why do we need to keep burning fossil fuels? Why not just phase them out altogether? Despite the optimistic rhetoric we keep hearing about how renewable fuels are getting cheaper, and how a solution to the storage problem is within sight, there are some very powerful reasons why the world will continue to rely on fossil fuels, for the foreseeable future:

Despite decades of progress, about 80% of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels — the same as in the 1970s. Since then, we’ve kept adding renewable capacity, but it hasn’t outpaced the growth of the world’s population and its demand for energy…

Today, about 30% of total world energy (and 40% of the world’s electricity) is supplied by coal, which emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than nearly any other fuel source…

The hugely valuable oil and gas industries, accounting for 33% and 24% of total world energy use, respectively, are also entrenched…

Even the head of the International Renewable Energy Agency, whose job is to ensure that its more than 180 member countries reach 100% renewable energy, is not exactly gung-ho about the prospects. “In the electricity sector, 100% renewables by 2050 or 2060 may still be achievable,” Adnan Amin told me, “but it’s unlikely to happen for all energy use.” The global electricity sector is responsible for only about 25 per cent of all emissions...

…[T]here is no way to achieve zero emissions through subsidies and taxes that are within the bounds of what would reasonably ensure that the global economy doesn’t come to a complete halt. (For coal, for example, these would be in the range of … 80 dollars per metric ton of CO2 emitted). You need something else to reduce emissions. Carbon-capture technologies are essential.

If you’re still not convinced, consider this: there are a handful of industries essential to the modern way of life that generate large amounts of carbon dioxide as a side product of the chemistry of their manufacturing process. These carbon-intensive industries — including cement, steel, and ethanol — produce about 20 per cent of all global emissions. If we want to keep using these products and reach zero emissions, the only option is to have these industries deploy carbon capture.

And we need to reach zero emissions, not just in the energy sector, but completely, across every industry and every part of the world.

In a nutshell: Professor Smil is right and Professor Jacobson is dangerously wrong about fossil fuels. They aren’t going away in a hurry. So how can we achieve zero emissions, if we continue to burn these fuels?

The Solution

Petra Nova - W.A. Parish project

A commercially viable carbon capture and storage project already exists in the U.S., and it didn’t require any untested, speculative technology to get off the ground. It’s called the Petra Nova project, and it’s located just outside Houston, Texas. Dr. Rathi describes how it works:

Among a string of failures, Petra Nova stands tall as a carbon-capture project completed on time and within budget. Its success is partly attributable to its use of off-the-shelf technologies that had been tested and proven…

When it started operating earlier this year, it became — and remains — the world’s largest coal power plant with carbon-capture technology, with the capacity to capture more than 90 per cent of its emissions, about 1.6 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. It cost 1 billion dollars to build, 190 million dollars of which came from the US government…

Petra Nova does all five steps of carbon capture and storage (CCS): generating carbon dioxide, capturing the emissions (which is a two-part process), transporting it to where it will be stored, and injecting it deep underground and then monitoring it.

The generation step is easy. For centuries, we’ve been burning coal to generate heat…

Part one of the capture step involves taking the mixture of gases in the exhaust spewed out by burning coal, typically about 10% carbon dioxide, 10% oxygen, and 80% nitrogen, and separating out the CO2. Carbon dioxide is slightly acidic, which means it will react with a base. Neither oxygen nor nitrogen is acidic, so in this case, if you add a base into the process, it will selectively trap the carbon dioxide from the mixture.

Once the other gases — which don’t have any greenhouse effects — are vented to the atmosphere, part two of the capture step begins: applying heat breaks the bond between carbon dioxide and the base, creating a pure stream of carbon dioxide, which can be captured before it enters the atmosphere. The base can be reused to capture more carbon dioxide.

Separating out the carbon dioxide is necessary because of the next step: compression and transport. Studies have shown that to ideally store carbon dioxide, the gas should be compressed to 100 times the atmospheric pressure. Compressing a gas that much requires a lot of energy…

After the CO2 is compressed, Petra Nova transports it about 80 miles (130 km) via a pipeline built specially to carry high-pressure carbon dioxide without leaking…

Finally, after the carbon dioxide has been transported by pipeline, the gas is injected underground, beneath a depleted oil field.

Sounds fine. But what if the gas doesn’t stay in the ground? And what will we do when we run out of depleted oil fields? Dr. Rathi has anticipated these questions, and he has convincing answers to both of them:

Every time CO2 is pumped into the oil field, about 20 per cent of the gas remains underground. The rest comes back up to the surface with the oil. That CO2-oil mixture is separated by simply lowering the pressure and letting CO2 bubble out of the sticky black liquid. Then the carbon dioxide is recompressed and put back into the field. In the end, all of the greenhouse gas is sequestered...

Enhanced oil recovery currently provides the largest revenue stream for companies capturing carbon dioxide. At a price of about $50 per barrel, Petra Nova is projected to break even—thanks to the extra oil recovered by captured-CO2 injections…

Eventually — it could be a few years, or decades, depending on how fast the world adopts CCS — we’ll exhaust the storage capacity of depleted oil and gas fields. Luckily, carbon dioxide can be also stored in underground saline aquifers, which are water-permeable rocks saturated with salt water. There, the CO2 mixes in with water and remains trapped underground… And CO2 can also be stored in widely available basalt-type rock, where the gas can mineralize into stone (as in Iceland’s Hellisheidi project)…

Is carbon capture and storage financially feasible?

An S-shaped sigmoid curve

Even if carbon capture and storage is technically feasible, it may not prove to be financially feasible. Dr. Rathi has some good news to report on this score: CCS appears to have already reached the critical point required for an energy breakthrough:

Charles Sandstrom at the Chalmers University of Technology notes that many technologies develop along an S-shaped curve, where progress is slow at first, then reaches a breakthrough and from that point on advances rapidly, until the development reaches the upper limits of scientific possibility. Shingles’ team created the Carbon X-Prize because they believe carbon-dioxide conversion technologies are at that inflection point…

To be sure, the laws of thermodynamics state that converting carbon dioxide into a product will require more energy than was produced when a fossil fuel was burned to generate that same CO2. But that doesn’t make it a bad idea. Renewable energy will keep getting cheaper…

“Using abundant renewable cheap energy to do CO2 conversion is no longer crazy,” says Julio Friedmann, a former deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of Energy and an expert in carbon management. “It was crazy three years ago. It’s not crazy now.”…

As most readers will be aware, the storage problem is the chief technical obstacle to making renewable energy work on a large scale – especially in areas where energy needs to be stored from one season to the next. But there’s good news: as Dr. Rathi points out, batteries are incapable of solving this problem, but microbes that convert CO2 into methane can do the job (see Batteries can’t solve the world’s biggest energy-storage problem. One startup has a solution, Quartz, December 11, 2017).

Why governments need to get involved

A coal-fired power plant in Luchegorsk, Russia. A carbon tax would tax the CO2 emitted from the power station

Readers who favor limited government might be wondering why the world’s governments need to get involved in the fight against global warming, if a cost-effective strategy for combating it already exists. Dr. Rathi explains that historically, energy breakthroughs have seldom occurred without massive levels of government support at the beginning. Rathi contends that a tax on carbon would allow government to raise the money required to fund carbon capture and storage, without distorting the market:

Conventional economics suggest we should let technologies compete in a marketplace, and let the best ones win. But, as economist Nicholas Stern puts it, climate change is “the biggest market failure the world has seen.” Most of these nascent carbon-capture technological developments, like other energy technologies, were only born due to government funding. To get them to mature for deployment at scales that would make a difference in our fight against climate change, they’ll need additional government help…

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, one market-friendly government policy is to set a price on carbon production. Economists have already thought this through, developing the concept of a “social cost of carbon” (SCC). A 2014 study looking at different models of SCC concluded that, conservatively, every metric ton of CO2 emitted today will cost the world 125 dollars in future adverse effects...

Apparently the policy works. Norway is on target to achieve zero emissions by 2030, twenty years ahead of schedule. And it managed to achieve that goal with a tax of just 70 dollars per metric ton of carbon dioxide, which is far lower than the “social cost” of carbon, estimated at 125 dollars per metric ton.

What the world needs to do

In order for carbon capture and storage to get off the ground, its supporters need to actively lobby for CCS to get a fair share of the government funding pie. It also needs to counteract slick green propaganda, which maliciously equates it with so-called “clean coal” technologies, which are actually nothing of the sort:

…[T]he US and the rest of the world need to do a lot more, and quickly. Between 2010 and 2016, the world spent 2.3 trillion dollars on renewable energy, largely thanks to government subsidies for the renewable sector (like Germany’s push for solar cells). In the same period, CCS got only 10 billion dollars in investment, according to the International Energy Agency. No surprise then, that the Global CCS Institute, a not-for-profit group funded by governments and corporations, calls for climate-change policy parity: If we want to save the world, the organization argues, we should provide the same incentives to any technology that cuts carbon emissions…

The term “clean coal” is a huge problem. It masks the fact that coal is a dirty source of energy. Current so-called “clean-coal” technologies nearly eliminate sulfur and mercury emissions, but they don’t reduce carbon emissions. And the use of coal is seriously hurting our fight against climate change. At the same time, over the past 20 years, coal has brought electricity for the first time to some 1.6 billion people. And if we care about the development of all people, our energies would be better spent cutting emissions rather than being religious about one fuel or another.

The trouble is that environmentalists conflate “clean coal” with CCS. If the world is to hit zero emissions, we will need to apply CCS not just to coal power plants but also to natural-gas power plants and then to every carbon-emitting industry. In other words, CCS really isn’t about coal. We cannot afford that confusion any more because time is running out…

The bottom line: how much will it cost?

If we’re going to invest in a new technology such as carbon capture and storage, it’s only fair to ask how much it will cost. The answer, according to Dr. Rathi, is about 0.5 per cent of global GDP. When you compare that with Professor Jacobson’s planet-wide renewable energy scheme, which would cost 5 per cent of the world’s GDP, CCS starts to make a lot more sense:

…[T]he long-term economics of CCS seem not only feasible, but eminently reasonable. The International Energy Agency estimates that the world needs to be burying at least 6 billion metric tons of CO2 per year by 2050. Though Petra Nova won’t say it, experts estimate the project’s carbon-capture cost to be about 60 dollars per metric ton of CO2. That’s half the social cost of not capturing the same carbon. Knox, Petra Nova’s spokesperson, says that were the company to build a second unit, costs would be at least 20 per cent lower than the first project, thanks to the lessons learned.

Even using a conservative number, like 60 dollars per metric ton, all the world would need to pay to start to make the CO2 problem go away today is 360 billion dollars. For comparison, the world’s GDP is forecast to be 78 trillion dollars in 2017…

In other words, we could save the planet from disastrous climate change for less than 0.5 per cent of world GDP in today’s economy…

CCS might seem expensive now, but direct-air capture in the second half of the 21st century will cost many multiples more. The reason is simple physics: CCS happens at the source of emissions, which typically contain more than 5 per cent carbon dioxide in the exhaust gas mix. The concentration of CO2 in the air is just 0.04 per cent — 100 times more dilute. Far more energy would be required to pull carbon dioxide straight out of the air, and that means far more money. The most recent estimates suggest the cost of direct-air capture could be as high as 600 dollars per metric ton — nearly 10 times the cost of carbon-capture technologies today

Prevention is better than cure. And, for our dying planet, either is better than doing nothing.

What you can do

The most effective thing that environmentally minded readers can do to advance carbon capture and storage as a technology to combat global warming is to contact the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, on either Facebook or Twitter, and pitch it in a way that appeals to Republicans: it’s technically feasible, affordable, cost-efficient, and a lot cheaper than kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with. I see no reason why Republicans would oppose a solution like CCS. Who knows? It may prompt a turn-around in U.S. energy policy. Stranger things have happened. The fact is: CCS works. What do we have to lose by trying it?

87 thoughts on “At last, an intelligent solution to the problem of global warming

  1. Rumraket,

    Yeah and it very deliberately tried to enhance the contrast between “wild climactic variations” and “2 degres” to make some sort of point.

    If you read the actual papers you will see the scientists are struggling with separating the signal from the noise. The signal is man made climate change and the noise is the natural cycle. You are claiming that the objection here is based on feelings. What facts back up this claim?

  2. Vj,

    If you are willing to distort facts to no end, why should anyone take you seriously. You reference to Ta-Nehisi Coates was not “accurate enough” as you call, it was a complete utter untruth. It was the opposite of what Coates said.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates NEVER said Perry was intelligent, was he said was the American people don’t seem to care much about electing someone intelligent. That is a completely, 100%, undeniable antithesis of what you claimed Coates was saying. He was saying Perry is probably an imbecile, but even some imbeciles could get elected. Coates could have said, Rick Perry is probably smart enough not to use a peeled banana to try to clean ear wax from his ears (but not certainly), and you would claim, “See, even Ta-Nehisi Coates says Rick Perry is smart!”

    Its either a lie, or the worst understanding of language that I have ever witnessed. Or maybe its even both VJ.

    But no, people should contact Rick Perry, because hey, VJ Torley says they should.

  3. colewd: If you read the actual papers you will see the scientists are struggling with separating the signal from the noise. The signal is man made climate change and the noise is the natural cycle. You are claiming that the objection here is based on feelings. What facts back up this claim?

    Over 90% of climate scientists are not struggling separating the signal from the noise

  4. newton,

    Over 90% of climate scientists are not struggling separating the signal from the noise

    So have 90% of the climate scientists that you quote quantified what percentage of the change is signal and what percentage is noise?

    If they are not struggling this should be a chip shot 🙂

  5. The ice age strong evidence as per Neil Rickert:

    When glaciers retrieved in the arctic over the last few years, they didn’t leave any ridges like that ones in Grand Canyon… I guess they just wanted to cover the evidence to support creationism or something…

  6. phoodoo: But no, people should contact Rick Perry, because hey, VJ Torley says they should.

    That’s not all there is to it. We’re supposed to make contact on Facebook and/or Twitter, where lobbyists and the Department of Energy (DoE) can measure the response, and where other entities (e.g., bots) can use our messages to generate additional interest.

    I haven’t mentioned what is most nefarious about Vincent’s post. DoE has included carbon capture and storage under the rubric of “clean energy” for a number of years. Clean energy, including CCS, was a major component of the Obama administration’s energy plan. The Trump/Perry DoE seems to support nothing but clean energy, which the oil and gas and coal industries favor. Vincent is attempting to dupe people into registering support for current DoE policy. Specific support for carbon capture and storage will be taken by DoE as evidence that Americans support only clean energy.

  7. Tom English: The Trump/Perry DoE seems to support nothing but clean energy, which the oil and gas and coal industries favor.

    This is where it gets complicated while both industries are fossil fuels as far as energy production coal and gas are in competition. The DOE is busy trying to have rate payers subsidize the coal industry to the detriment of the cheaper , if one ignores the side effects of fracking, natural gas industry.

    Vincent is attempting to dupe people into registering support for current DoE policy. Specific support for carbon capture and storage will be taken by DoE as evidence that Americans support only clean energy.

    Like I have been telling Vincent, if you reject CO2 as a problem why spend money to fix it unless of course there is money in it for one of your supporters. There are plenty of rubes out there who support Trump’s agenda no matter what, why go to the effort to dupe a few more?

  8. J-Mac:
    The ice age strong evidence as per Neil Rickert:

    When glaciers retrieved in the arctic over the last few years, they didn’t leave any ridges like that ones in Grand Canyon… I guess they just wanted to cover the evidence to support creationism or something…

    The Arctic is over water perhaps you mean the Antarctic

  9. J-Mac: I agree that the evidence is pretty strong…the question is, for what?

    The Grand Canyon

    Not formed by glaciers , get some pictures of upstate New York if the want to see the effect of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Ice Ages

  10. colewd: If you read the actual papers you will see the scientists are struggling with separating the signal from the noise.

    What does this even mean? What is “struggling” even, and does “struggling” mean you plainly do not succeed?

    Could the truth be that climate scientists “struggled” separating signal from noise, nevertheless succeeded, and have now conclusively demonstrated the reality of anthropogenic climate change caused by man-made greenhouse gases?

  11. newton: Not formed by glaciers , get some pictures of upstate New York if the want to see the effect of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the Ice Ages

    What caused the ridges in Grand Canyon, Newton?
    Don’t answer that… you are already married to whatever but the correct answer… as it is in the best interests of your faith not provide the correct answer…

    Why would you do otherwise if your want to remain faithful to nonsense?
    Belief in nonsense, especially scientific, makes this this blog running….

    For those who care:

    https://creation.com/startling-evidence-for-noahs-flood

  12. I suspect Rick Perry got interested in animal science after trying to understand his chia pet.

  13. J-Mac: Don’t answer that… you are already married to whatever but the correct answer…

    as it is in the best interests of your faith not provide the correct answer…

    Why would you do otherwise if your want to remain faithful to nonsense?
    Belief in nonsense, especially scientific, makes this this blog running….

    For a second I thought you were serious about ice sheets creating the Grand Canyon. Of course it was Noah’s Flood.

  14. J-Mac: You are wrong again…

    Canada’s Arctic ice caps melting rapidly since 2005, according to documents

    http://www.canada.com/technology/Canada+Arctic+caps+melting+rapidly+since+2005+according+documents/9521470/story.html

    Apologies, misread you were claiming Neil was contending the evidence for Ice Ages was the Grand Canyon. Missed him citing that. We agree that moving unfrozen water created the GC.

    And thanks for the correction about what constitutes the Arctic So while the Arctic Ocean covers 5 million sq miles, land and other bodies of water cover .5 million.

  15. Rumraket,

    Could the truth be that climate scientists “struggled” separating signal from noise, nevertheless succeeded, and have now conclusively demonstrated the reality of anthropogenic climate change caused by man-made greenhouse gases?

    Of course its possible but I would assume if it had been done you would cite a paper showing experimental evidence supporting the hypothesis by quantifying the signal strength vs the noise strength.

  16. colewd:
    Rumraket,

    Of course its possible but I would assume if it had been done you would cite a paper showing experimental evidence supporting the hypothesis by quantifying the signal strength vs the noise strength.

    The link I provided was not sufficient?

  17. Tom English,

    I haven’t mentioned what is most nefarious about Vincent’s post. DoE has included carbon capture and storage under the rubric of “clean energy” for a number of years. Clean energy, including CCS, was a major component of the Obama administration’s energy plan. The Trump/Perry DoE seems to support nothing but clean energy, which the oil and gas and coal industries favor. Vincent is attempting to dupe people into registering support for current DoE policy. Specific support for carbon capture and storage will be taken by DoE as evidence that Americans support only clean energy.

    Your conspiracy theory keeps getting crazier and crazier.

    1. Until writing this response to you, I had absolutely no idea what current DoE policy is, in the U.S. (Remember: I’m Australian, and I live in Japan.) Consequently, any assertion that I am “attempting to dupe people into registering support for current DoE policy” lacks credibility.

    2. You assert that the Trump/Perry DoE “seems to support nothing but clean energy.” Seems? Where’s your evidence?

    3. It turns out that the U.S. Energy Department “invests in wind research and development projects,” supports solar energy “through a portfolio of R&D efforts,” “is working to reduce the costs and weight of electric vehicle batteries while increasing their energy storage and lifespan” and “focuses on applied research, development, and innovation to advance hydrogen and fuel cells for transportation and diverse applications.” And they’re just a few contributions.

    I think you’re being paranoid about the Trump administration.

  18. newton,

    The link I provided was not sufficient?

    The link you provided was not a technical paper. It was a climate change advocacy group.

  19. colewd:
    newton,

    The link you provided was not a technical paper.It was a climate change advocacy group.

    Did you examine the footnotes at the end of the article for more in-depth information?

    What is your level of statistical knowledge in order to judge a technical paper?

    You sure you have no opinion about this?

    Never answered are we talking about Milankovitch Cycles or is ther some other natural cycle you are interested in?

  20. vjtorley: 3. It turns out that the U.S. Energy Department “invests in wind research and development projects,” supports solar energy “through a portfolio of R&D efforts,” “is working to reduce the costs and weight of electric vehicle batteries while increasing their energy storage and lifespan” and “focuses on applied research, development, and innovation to advance hydrogen and fuel cells for transportation and diverse applications.” And they’re just a few contributions.

    The Obama Energy Dept invested in those things, why do you think those programs are going to persist? Do you think it is an encouraging signal for a Department that its appointed leader has advocated for its elimination? It is slated in the President’s budget for major cuts.

    “ Since they(some people) can’t bear to acknowledge that there may be insoluble problems relating to their own everyday lives, they cope by denying the reality of the problem, ostrich-style. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s how many people deal with it, psychologically”

    Thinking the present administration might rationally accept the notion that climate change is a problem that needs to be funded might be an example of that coping mechanism. Elect a more friendly adminstration then the pro and cons of solutions becomes useful.

  21. newton: Do you think the Grand Canyon is the result of Noah’s Flood?

    The shape as well as the height of the Grand Canyon doesn’t have to be the direct result of Noah’s Flood the same way the Mount Everest doesn’t have to be…
    The cross-beddings are no doubt the direct effect of water…It is easy to test it and my kids have already proven that over the last 2 winters…

  22. J-Mac: The shape as well as the heightof the Grand Canyon doesn’t have to be the direct result of Noah’s Flood the same way the Mount Everest doesn’t have to be…
    The cross-beddings are no doubt the direct effect of water…It is easy to test itand my kids have already proven that over the last 2 winters…

    Or wind.

  23. newton: Thinking the present administration might rationally accept the notion that climate change is a problem that needs to be funded might be an example of that coping mechanism. Elect a more friendly administration then the pro and cons of solutions becomes useful.

    Maybe, like turkeys might be best advised not to vote for Christmas, Christians should think whether voting Trump and Pence was a good idea.

  24. The cross-bedding doesn’t have anything to do with the origin of the Grand Canyon, merely of certain strata through which the Grand Canyon was cut.

    Of course J-Mac links to a fairly lengthy creationist article that doesn’t recognize the difference either, probably in part because everything there is credited to the Flood without any noticeable comprehension of what’s involved.

    It would be nice if creationists would bother learning enough to even refer correctly to the processes involved. I mean, who knew to what J-Mac was vaguely referring? Now, if there was to be a discussion one would have to bring up the basics of geology that he doesn’t comprehend and try to instruct him when he simply prefers “experts” that lack understanding of geology. So no, obviously not worth it.

    Glen Davidson

  25. GlenDavidson:
    The cross-bedding doesn’t have anything to do with the origin of the Grand Canyon, merely of certain strata through which the Grand Canyon was cut.

    Of course J-Mac links to a fairly lengthy creationist article that doesn’t recognize the difference either, probably in part because everything there is credited to the Flood without any noticeable comprehension of what’s involved.

    It would be nice if creationists would bother learning enough to even refer correctly to the processes involved.I mean, who knew to what J-Mac was vaguely referring?Now, if there was to be a discussion one would have to bring up the basics of geology that he doesn’t comprehend and try to instruct him when he simply prefers “experts” that lack understanding of geology.So no, obviously not worth it.

    Glen Davidson

    So Glen is confused (again) what caused cross-bedding…So he can’t look up wiki… So what?

    “Cross-bedding forms during deposition on the inclined surfaces of bedforms such as ripples and dunes; it indicates that the depositional environment contained a flowing medium (typically water or wind). Examples of these bedforms are ripples, dunes, anti-dunes, sand waves, hummocks, bars, and delta slopes.[1] Environments in which water movement is fast enough and deep enough to develop large-scale bed forms fall into three natural groupings: rivers, tide-dominated coastal and marine settings.[2]”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-bedding

  26. newton,

    What is your level of statistical knowledge in order to judge a technical paper?

    Lets first see if there is a technical paper making the claim that the signal has been isolated. Statistical knowledge may or may not be the issue. The question is can we accurately model climate and so far the answer is no based on testing the current models.

    You sure you have no opinion about this?

    My opinion is that we have not isolated man made change from the natural cycle. This does not mean that man made change is not real it simply means the hypothesis is not yet successfully tested.

    Never answered are we talking about Milankovitch Cycles or is there some other natural cycle you are interested in?

    We are talking about temperature changes caused by natural factors like ocean oscillations solar issues etc. Milankovitch cycles are a theory which I know very little about.

  27. colewd: Lets first see if there is a technical paper making the claim that the signal has been isolated. Statistical knowledge may or may not be the issue. The question is can we accurately model climate and so far the answer is no based on testing the current models.

    So the answer is no about the statistical knowledge?

    My opinion is that we have not isolated man made change from the natural cycle. This does not mean that man made change is not real it simply means the hypothesis is not yet successfully tested.

    And yet an overwhelming majority of those who work in the field disagree with you. Have you seen a technical paper paper which refutes the current widely held belief which convinced you of this ?

    We are talking about temperature changes caused by natural factors like ocean oscillations solar issues etc. Milankovitch cycles are a theory which I know very little about.

    Thanks that narrows it down. Here is one about the solar activity for last 9400 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3341045/ to start

  28. Alan Fox: Maybe, like turkeys might be best advised not to vote for Christmas, Christians should think whether voting Trump and Pence was a good idea.

    For some turkeys as long as the Other turkeys get roasted first they are happy

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