Close window | View original article
Talk about burying the lede - climate change warmists are systematically ignoring a well-known gas that accounts for 97% of all greenhouse gas warming in favor of taking about CO2 whose contribution is comparatively minimal!
You've probably heard about "carbon offsets." Warmists want the whole world to get to "net zero" CO2 emissions, which means that no nation produces more planet-destroying CO2 than it absorbs. This is important, they say, because CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" which traps heat which warms the planet.
Since all of us breathe out CO2 with every exhalation and the cows that produce our hamburgers also emit CO2 just by breathing, warmists assert that we must do something to get rid of enough CO2 to balance what we produce. That's "net zero."
Since relatively few of us are, or care to be, in a position to stop producing CO2, people who desire to feel virtuous without changing their lifestyles buy "carbon offsets." That means paying someone else to do something that absorbs CO2. One of the most popular offsetting activities is paying people to plant trees.
A tree absorbs CO2 and produces oxygen. The tree uses the carbon as part of its structure, so as long as the wood doesn't burn or rot, the tree "locks up" the carbon it took out of the air. The agreeable fantasy is that trees are effective carbon sinks which will help Save the Planet, and that paying people to plant trees is thus a legitimate way to make people feel good by thinking that they're emitting less CO2.
You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.
- Adlai Stevenson, three-time failed Democratic candidate for President
There is a disagreeable fact concerning the idea of trees saving the planet - they produce water vapor. Warmists focus on CO2 because it's easy to tax and control, but it's far from being a major contributor to warming. The National Aeronautics and Space Agency published "Water Vapor Confirmed as Major Player in Climate Change" which points out:
Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas ...
"This study confirms that what was predicted by the models is really happening in the atmosphere," said Eric Fetzer, an atmospheric scientist who works with AIRS data at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Water vapor is the big player in the atmosphere as far as climate is concerned." [emphasis added]
The MIT Program on Global Change points out that water vapor accounts for most greenhouse-driven planet warming:
"I want to comment that the way-dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is not mentioned, namely water vapor," writes Ken Saunders of Pacific Palisades. "Water vapor accounts for about 97 percent of the total (natural plus man-emitted) greenhouse warming of the planet. See, e.g., John Houghton's 'The Physics of Atmospheres, 3rd edition,' Cambridge University Press, 2002." [emphasis added]
Water vapor is produced when water evaporates from puddles to return
as rain. From the time the vapor enters to the atmosphere until
it
falls again as rain, it traps heat as "the big player" among
greenhouse gases, accounting for 97% of all greenhouse warming.
But as Mr. Saunders said, nobody wants to talk about it.
Why isn't water vapor part of the warmist narrative? Not even governments or Democrats could be so foolish as to imagine that they can "fix" it - how are we supposed to keep ocean or lake water from evaporating? What sort of spectacularly destructive and chaotic results would any misbegotten attempt to do so create? There's no profit in railing against water vapor, so warmists focus on CO2 - which could, in theory, be reduced at great expense in terms of money and economic comfort while benefiting the well-connected who get government subsidies for producing expensive, intermittent electricity.
Ignoring the obvious solution of paving over all the wetlands to reduce evaporation, we need to consider the fact that trees emit water vapor while trapping carbon. In a TED talk, Antonio Donato Nobre, a senior researcher at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, pointed out:
Through a process called transpiration, a large tree in the Amazon can release 1,000 liters of water into the atmosphere in a single day.
... hundreds of billions of trees in the jungle release as many as 20 billion metric tons of water into the atmosphere every day. That means that while the Amazon, which pours 17 billion tons of water into the Atlantic Ocean a day, may be the largest river on earth - it's still exceeded by the airborne river drifting above the canopy of the trees.
NASA wrote that water vapor is "the big player" in trapping heat.
Trees extract CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it up until the wood
burns or rots, but along the way, all the water vapor the tree
generates traps more heat
than the CO2 it absorbs would have - remember, water vapor accounts for
97% of all heat trapped by
greenhouse gases. CO2w and all other greenhouse gases trap only
3% of the heat.
In terms of trapping CO2 for a short time, planting trees may contribute toward "net zero" in an accounting sense, but there's no planetary benefit whatsoever - at least, not from the global-warming perspective. It's just another way to signal virtue by transferring money to people who would probably be planting anyway because they want to harvest the trees for paper, lumber, or palm oil.
Saving the Planet by planting trees is another of those agreeable fantasies so beloved of our progressives.
In addition to praising CO2 offsets while ignoring water vapor, the real culprit, they've embraced the agreeable fantasy that industrial-scale devices which convert solar and wind energy into electricity are "renewable" in that the sun won't go out and the wind won't stop and "net zero" in that no CO2 is generated while the machinery runs. This ignores the immense amount of fossil-fuel energy needed to produce the tons and tons of steel, cement, rare earths, and other elements needed for windmills and solar panels, both of which are extremely hard to recycle, but that's their narrative and they're sticking with it.
As Mr. Stevenson observed, Americans prefer to ignore disagreeable facts, particularly when facts interfere with a longstanding money-making scams like selling carbon credits or subsidizing "renewable" energy sources which stress the electricity distribution grid by providing intermittent power.
Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale wells produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour when the wind is blowing, whereas the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour 24/7.
It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S. utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.
https://economics21.org/inconvenient-realities-new-energy-economy has a lot more inconvenient truths about renewable energy.
The next time someone complains that you're Killing the Planet by generating CO2 by driving your car or heating your home, just tell them that MIT says that 97% of all planetary greenhouse warming is produced by water vapor. Until warmists start trying to do something about water vapor, we plan not to even think about the 3% of warming caused by all the other gases, and the much smaller fraction of that contributed by human activity.