[Stoves] We're Actually Using More Fossil Fuels Than Ever (Philip Lloyd)

[Traveller]

Nikhil Desai again in the same thread but in response to Philip Lloyd's two
posts farther below. :

A. True, there is no GMST baseline for the future. That is the trickery of
"climate actionistas". We are only shown "temperature anomalies", with the
presumption that somehow a "pre-industrial" GMST is the "baseline".
Baseline for what apart from temperature, depends on how much data can be
stuffed and manipulated in models.

It is not just that the globe has been "warming for around 170 years" -
whether or not we can tell the signal from the noise - but also that in at
least the most recent 70 years since the end of WW II, the earth has
sustained many more people, who have come to acquire better shelter, better
health, more secure livelihoods, greater mobility, and more refrigeration
and air-conditioning or heating/hot water.  By plain correlation, that is
enough evidence that GMST increase is not a problem in and of itself. (So
the refugee crisis or Himalayan floods are governance failures, not impacts
of anthropogenic climate change, scientists' proclamation notwithstanding.)

B. "Extreme events" are not some geophysical phenomena measured only in
rainfall or wind speeds but also in terms of their impacts on people or
local ecology. Over the last 100 years, humans have changed their local
environments radically, with the natural consequence that the interactions
between that local environment - built structures, landscaped areas,
changes in natural resource endowment status - and the weather events have
also changed.

Climate actionistas tell us, "reduce CO2 and all else will  be back to
God's plan". Only God knows God's plan. Rest is computers and media.

C. You say, "- the IEA gives an estimate of fuelwood use (which neither the
World Bank nor the BP statistical survey gives), and I think is exceeds the
forest sink by a significant margin, i.e. deforestation is real, and those
whom we serve are partly responsible. Fuel efficient stoves aren't
completely idiotic!"

1) IEA estimates of fuelwood use are fictional, built on citations built on
citations built on flaky data and assumptions.  The plain fact is, there is
no reliable inventory of biomass energy consumption by small users
(households, commercial, institutional), or of qualities, costs, prices.
This is a singular deception writ large, now with extension into emissions,
exposures, health damage, the New Testament of the Global Burden of
Disease.

In any case, aggregate national data are worthless. There is no homogeneous
"national forest", nor an integrated biofuel market. Yes, "deforestation is
real" at local levels, but the question is not why forests are cut but
rather why trees are not re-grown. A forest is much like a garden, a living
entity. Where it is, how dense, with what flora and fauna, distinguish it
from another forest, and each forest plays a unique role in local and
regional environments and economies. Local economics and politics rule.

2) I very much doubt fuelwood use "exceeds the forest sink by a significant
margin" at the global level. I don't have IEA numbers handy - there are
some FAO estimates as well - but I think woodfuel use for cooking and
heating amounts to roughly 2 billion tons dry wood-eq. per year (World
Bioenergy a couple of years ago). Add what you will for charcoal and
quibble about the sources, but nobody knows. On the other hand, "forest
sink" you mean the terrestrial CO2 absorption via photosynthesis, general
agreement seems to be that the net terrestrial sink is expanding. See IPCC
Special Report at
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/land_use/index.php?idp=32. Subsequent
analysis at
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/ch9s9-3.html; note the
wide variations and error ranges.  (Annual carbon flux in btCO2 ranging
from +8 to -11. I haven't bothered with the AR5 yet.)

I don't know what to make of your claim "those whom we serve are partly
responsible." Responsible for what? It's THEIR wood, isn't it? Their land,
water, labor, skills, money. They are not responsible for saving the rich
people's climate, the rich experts' fancies. We are here to serve them, not
save the earth; of course, many of us think otherwise.

I love your "Fuel efficient stoves aren't completely idiotic!" Not
completely. Not yet. Depends on how cooks use the stoves, not how the
experts boil water (and bake their own juicy plum puddings in academic
journal articles).

Nikhil




Also,

---------
(India +91) 909 995 2080  .

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:32:44 +0200
From: "Philip Lloyd" <plloyd at mweb.co.za>
To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] We're Actually Using More Fossil Fuels Than Ever
Message-ID: <03be01d1e0ce$fbbe1bc0$f33a5340$@co.za>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"

Dear Mangolazi

Actually it's not scary. We are repeatedly told that a warmer world will be
a more vicious world, but if you go to the data you find two problems:
1.  You measure change from some baseline, but for most climate indicators
there are no baselines - we don't really know what the "average" climate
should be, not least because it's changing all the time, so the estimate of
"average" has a large error associated with it. How can you tell what is
abnormal if you have no decent measure of what is normal?
2.  The recorded history of extreme events is rarely long enough to give
you a decent estimate of their frequency (and by decent I mean a standard
deviation of less than 10% per century) and totally inadequate to give you
any idea if the rate is changing.

There is some relief from the first problem.  If you have lots of good
data, sort of 30-40 years of good weekly average data, then you can detect
a trend with some statistical reliability - I say some, not good! But I
have searched in vain for any relief from the second.

The good news is that it has been warming for around 170 years, and if we
still cannot reliably detect climate changes other than temperature, then
the scariness gets much less.

Yours in confidence - and I don't mean confidentially!

Philip
------------------------------

From: "Philip Lloyd" <plloyd at mweb.co.za>
To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] We're Actually Using More Fossil Fuels Than Ever
Message-ID: <043501d1e10c$51d00720$f5701560$@co.za>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Thank you, Paul

We have known we were facing a huge increase in CO2 for a long time.  India
represents the next big surge - if it takes off anything like China we will
race through 450ppm. If Africa takes off, 500ppm will soon be there. Thank
heavens the effect is logarithmic, and the impacts will slow.

For a few rays of hope, however, I commend the Bray/von Storch survey of
climate scientists.  Unlike the Cook et al survey, which did a (probably
biased) survey of scientist's publications, Bray and van Storch used what I
think is a very good, neutral set of questions to ask the scientists
directly.  One of their first questions was" is the climate changing?" -
75% said no doubt.  They then asked if human beings were responsible, and
in the latest survey 49% said no doubt - 51% had reservations to varying
degrees.
The easiest access to the report is
https://www.heartland.org/policy-documents/bray-and-von-storch-5th-internati
onal-survey-climate-scientists-20152016
<https://www.heartland.org/policy-documents/bray-and-von-storch-5th-international-survey-climate-scientists-20152016>
.

There is an interesting problem of relevance to this list - the IEA gives
an estimate of fuelwood use (which neither the World Bank nor the BP
statistical survey gives), and I think is exceeds the forest sink by a
significant margin, i.e. deforestation is real, and those whom we serve are
partly responsible. Fuel efficient stoves aren't completely idiotic!



Kind regards


 Phi;ip.
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