Global Warming Update 2/11/2011 #2

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Global Warming expert Martin I. Hoffert. The full interview can be read and seen here: http://www.science20.com/david_houle/urgency_and_global_warming_an_interview_with_martin_i_hoffert

1. Scientificblogging.com: In your presentation at the Foundation for the Future’s “Energy Challenges: The Next Thousand Years” you were quite emphatic about the urgency for humanity to change energy consumption, and the types of energy that is used. Please elaborate and perhaps suggest timelines for this to occur.

Hoffert: "Avoiding a planet-changing global warming catastrophe is why we urgently need to transform the global energy system to a carbon-neutral one. The clock is ticking. Absent the fossil fuel greenhouse this transformation could be deferred to the 22nd century or later.

There’s enough energy in coal (more than twice oil and gas combined) to run high-tech civilization a few hundred years more; enough for electric power generation by conventional pulverized coal plants; enough for coal-derived synthetic liquid fuel powered motor vehicles and aircraft. Unfortunately, there’s also enough carbon in this coal that burning it is likely to drive climate back a hundred million years, when atmospheric CO2 levels were 3-4 times higher, global temperatures 10 degrees Celsius hotter, sea level 100 meters higher and both poles deglaciated. Dinosaurs and crocodiles roamed the warm polar latitudes of this middle-Cretaceous Earth. We’re well on the path to planet-changing from what Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss called our “grand geophysical experiment:” the transfer of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in fossil fuels to atmospheric CO2. It’s already started.

The good news is that three technology classes of carbon-neutral primary power in some combination could mitigate the worst impacts: (1) coal gasifiers driving integrated combined cycle power plants for electricity and hydrogen production with CO2 capture and storage in deep saline aquifers; (2) nuclear plants running on sufficiently abundant fissile fuels (i.e., U-233 bred from thorium) and eventually fusion; and (3) renewables, mainly solar and wind, along with appropriate transmission and storage technologies and smart, eventually global grids, perhaps superconducting, capable of matching electricity supply and demand load curves; and space solar power beaming energy collected in orbit to grid-interconnects worldwide for base load electricity. Zero point energy and cold fusion don’t make my list as I’ve not seen reliable evidence they could power the world. Improving the efficiency of primary energy conversion, transmission, storage and end use will certainly help. So-called “geoengineering” might also be needed for emergencies like “saving the arctic.” A near-term priority is efficicnt carbon-neutral propulsion for cars, trucks and aircraft now running on refined crude oil (see below).

Fixing global warming will be hard. Just the ticket to revitalize this nation and the world. As JFK put it at the beginning of the Apollo Program, “We choose to go to the Moon (and do the other things) not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to mobilize the best of our energies and skills.” New energy systems won’t spring into existence by market forces alone. Coal is too cheap. We’ll need carbon taxes, perhaps revenue-neutral ones ramping up over time; “cap-and-trade” schemes like those in the EU; or Keynesian pump-priming with some combination of government and private sector management and contractors doing the work, as in Apollo and military weapons programs. In the civil sector we have the National Highway Act passed under a Republican president, Eisenhower, by which interstates are built and maintained with federal tax money. Right now, we most need a scientifically literate US president well-advised in energy and climate with the vision to initiate massive programs to research, develop, demonstrate, diffuse and deploy carbon-neutral energy worldwide. A brain trust of talented engineers and scientists should run these programs, not bean counters.

An upbeat history lesson is the US mobilization to fight World War II begun in the midst of an economic depression with no significant military. By 1944, 50,000 planes a year were rolling off assembly lines. So too could wind turbines and solar modules. Funding is the least of our problems. Who remembers what WW II “cost” when the US ended-up economic superpower of “the American Century?” Does the question even make sense? Most needed now, as then, is a sense of urgency. Not paralytic terror, but a determination to face reality and get the job done. Political leaders should be banging on the table about this. We simply can’t maintain our civilization of six billion plus without massive power sources. Two billion are kept from starvation by grace of the “green revolution” based on energy-hogging fertilizers. However dark the threat of global warming, I remain an optimistic techno-nerd, an eternal geek pushing forward with technology toward the light."