How will Canada keep warm now?!?

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris

How is that an issue? The rich pay, the poor catch up and then pay.

It also lets Germany and Russia off the hook due to highly polluting industries that were shut down in the 90s as the old East bloc was dismantled.

So the problem is that not even all of the 'rich' are being required to pay.

And the poor never pay under Kyoto. The accord expires.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Asmodean
I meant that I would like to see the U.S. playing an active role in proposing an alternative to Kyoto, whilst at the same time working with scientists across the board to study tre long-time effects of global warming.

Something to that effect. I am all against Kyoto, too. But I don't really see the Bush administration pushing for alternatives. That's what I meant by them not taking the problem seriously.

Asmodean

Pushing for alternatives did Canada no good. Our negotiators did a piss poor job in the early stages and the accord was settled where growth of forests was rewarded, but not leaving exisitng forests intact. When the GoC realised how badly we'd screwed up, they went back and asked for credit for the massive forests that Canada leaves standing. We were told to f*ck off, the deal was done.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by notyoueither


Pushing for alternatives did Canada no good. Our negotiators did a piss poor job in the early stages and the accord was settled where growth of forests was rewarded, but not leaving exisitng forests intact. When the GoC realised how badly we'd screwed up, they went back and asked for credit for the massive forests that Canada leaves standing. We were told to f*ck off, the deal was done.

paradoxically leaving forests intact will probably lead to no net CO2 reduction bennefit from those forests. To get an ongoing CO2 reduction from forests you have to clear biomass (wood for instance) out of the forest periodically and sequester it in some way in which it won't decay or be burned.

So it a round about way it makes sense that forest left standing would give less credit than one from which timber is actively harvested and which is continuously replanted.

[notyoueither]

Uhmmm. I don't buy that idea. The Earth functioned for millions of years without gnomes like us squirreling away the older wood.

Visit an old growth forest sometime. The trees don't stop growing. They get really, really big. Then from time to time one dies and tips over, to be replaced by a score of youngsters. Much of the mass of the dead tree gets buried in the following seasons.

Anyway, the benefit Canada asked for was recognition that our forests already existed in 1990. We couldn't plant many more. Other countries who had slashed and burned for centuries were to get benefits for planting due to the benchmark year. We are stuck in time. We had plenty of trees then, and would get no benefit from maintaining them.

At the same time, expansion of the oil sands really picked up in the late 80's and has accelerated ever since. Whereas Germany and Russia are already at or near their Kyoto targets due to the shutting down of old industry, we hadn't even begun to really develop the largest oil reserves in the world.

The benchmark year is a real pain in the ass, and the accord has been stacked in such a way that benefits accrue to certain coutries who will feel no pain at all, while others are expected to pick up the bill.

Bad agreement, and the US was very well served by the Senate refusing to have any part of it. I can only hope that Canada can navigate the deal so that it doesn't break the country. I can tell you what will happen if the Fed ever comes calling and tells the GoA that we have to shut down the tar sands. It won't be very pretty.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Uhmmm. I don't buy that idea. The Earth functioned for millions of years without gnomes like us squirreling away the older wood.

Visit an old growth forest sometime. The trees don't stop growing. They get really, really big. Then from time to time one dies and tips over, to be replaced by a score of youngsters. Much of the mass of the dead tree gets buried in the following seasons.

Certainly, humanity wasn't squirreling away older wood but if we weren't burning fossil fuels why would we? We've only been burning fossil fuels for about 200 years. Furthermore, the overall biomass of the forest increases by very tiny amounts once it reaches a certain density. You also aren't addressing the effects of periodic forest fires in releasing the sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere. Finally, even very very old forests typically have fairly shallow soil over the bedrock suggesting they don't sequester the biomass into the ground.

However...

Originally posted by notyoueither
Anyway, the benefit Canada asked for was recognition that our forests already existed in 1990. We couldn't plant many more. Other countries who had slashed and burned for centuries were to get benefits for planting due to the benchmark year. We are stuck in time. We had plenty of trees then, and would get no benefit from maintaining them.

At the same time, expansion of the oil sands really picked up in the late 80's and has accelerated ever since. Whereas Germany and Russia are already at or near their Kyoto targets due to the shutting down of old industry, we hadn't even begun to really develop the largest oil reserves in the world.

The benchmark year is a real pain in the ass, and the accord has been stacked in such a way that benefits accrue to certain coutries who will feel no pain at all, while others are expected to pick up the bill.

Bad agreement, and the US was very well served by the Senate refusing to have any part of it. I can only hope that Canada can navigate the deal so that it doesn't break the country. I can tell you what will happen if the Fed ever comes calling and tells the GoA that we have to shut down the tar sands. It won't be very pretty.

I completely agree with all of your points here so it probably doesn't matter much if we differ a bit on the relative value of different approaches to forest management in removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Geronimo


paradoxically leaving forests intact will probably lead to no net CO2 reduction bennefit from those forests. To get an ongoing CO2 reduction from forests you have to clear biomass (wood for instance) out of the forest periodically and sequester it in some way in which it won't decay or be burned.

But that would only aggitate the problem of soil depletion, making one problem worse through a half-assed attempt to bandage another problem.


I bet we'll start doing it.

[Geronimo]

trees have very modest soil requirements anyway. As a rule forest soil is usually poor regardless.

[Odin]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Uhmmm. I don't buy that idea. The Earth functioned for millions of years without gnomes like us squirreling away the older wood.

That is because the CO2 eventually finds itself made into a component of limestone. If we released the CO2 from all the limestone on earth our atmosphere would be like that of Venus. On timescales less than a million years the climate is regulated somewhat by the biomass, but on longer time scales, the earth is in control.

[Dinner]

It is an interesting point about limestone. The atmosphere loses a great deal of CO2 due to the creation of calcareous deposits. Of course most of that gets recycled through tectonics or later gets uplifted then eroded so on a long enough time scale it ends up back in the system.

[My Wife Hates CIV]

In the end... Canada and the others who signed this will continue to burn fuels for energy years from now just like they do today. Kyoto is not the solution. Something needs to be done... for sure we're messing this planet up. But humans have always been good at that. We're just REAL good at it now. and CO2 levels are at the lowest they have ever been if you look at the whole history of the earth - not just the last 80 years. i say go global warming - because when the ice comes back the planet can't support 7 billion people (it probably can't support that many now). and the ice will return.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by My Wife Hates CIV
In the end... Canada and the others who signed this will continue to burn fuels for energy years from now just like they do today. Kyoto is not the solution. Something needs to be done... for sure we're messing this planet up. But humans have always been good at that. We're just REAL good at it now. and CO2 levels are at the lowest they have ever been if you look at the whole history of the earth - not just the last 80 years. i say go global warming - because when the ice comes back the planet can't support 7 billion people (it probably can't support that many now). and the ice will return.

it is true that CO2 levels appear to have once been ten times as high as they are today as recently as about 100 million years ago. However current CO2 levels are not record lows by any stretch of imagination. In fact current atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest they have been in all of human existance.

[Urban Ranger]

CO2 level is the highest in 20 million years.

[optimus2861]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Whereas Germany and Russia are already at or near their Kyoto targets due to the shutting down of old industry, we hadn't even begun to really develop the largest oil reserves in the world.

Bingo on both counts. Russia wasn't going to sign the thing at all until Putin did the math and realized he could make out like a bandit selling carbon-emissions credits to stupid countries like us who signed the thing without having a flip-flying clue how to actually implement it. (Thanks again, Jean Chretien, you asshat)

I can't wait to see the federal government try to justify sending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to Russia for the sake of Kyoto, or what the environmental lobby in this country thinks about that precious treaty when that happens.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Geronimo


it is true that CO2 levels appear to have once been ten times as high as they are today as recently as about 100 million years ago. However current CO2 levels are not record lows by any stretch of imagination. In fact current atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest they have been in all of human existance.

Over billion of years the CO2-Carbonate cycle has regulated Earth's climate, even though the Sun has gotten 20% brighter over the past 4.5 billion years (I can't remember exactly why, I know it has something to do with the gas laws) and the earth has compensated because when the planet warms up the rate of rock weathering increases, taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and traping it in limestone. The great fluctuations in climate over millions of years occur because the systen requires mountains to weather, and when there is little mountain building activity the levels of CO2 increase and you have a "hot house" climate, like during the Mesozoic. When there is lots of active mountain building, weathering removes Co2 from the atmosphere and you have an "ice house" climate with ice at the poles, like today or the late Carboniferous.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Geronimo


it is true that CO2 levels appear to have once been ten times as high as they are today as recently as about 100 million years ago. However current CO2 levels are not record lows by any stretch of imagination. In fact current atmospheric CO2 levels are the highest they have been in all of human existance.

And the period of human existence are the right way to measure if current level are high or not ?

It seems that CO2 and temperature in the last 400.000 years follows a pattern and in current time we are reaching a peak in both :

http://arctic.unep.net/index.cfm?issue=arctic_climatechange&type=&data_id=9100