Tim Worstall

Thank Goodness For China!

As Madsen Pirie points out, China is about to overtake the US as the world’s largest CO2 emitter. It’s all fired by coal of course.

Unfortunately much of China’s coal is high sulphur, and puts out masses of sulphur dioxide, soot, and other nasty stuff.

That’s actually rather a good thing though in terms of climate change.There are those who point out that we can lessen temperature changes precisely by throwing lots of sulphur up into the atmosphere.

As indeed we did (or at least I think it the most likely explanation) between the 40s and 70s, which explains why there was little rise in temperature globally then.

Solving climate change is therefore really rather simple: we just need to pollute more.

In

7 responses

  1. Kit Avatar
    Kit

    Stop teasing the environmental folk. They have had to suffer yet another year when global temperatures refused to rise and those pesky hurricanes failed to blast the US.

    Reply
  2. View from here... Avatar
    View from here…

    Whiff of sulphur: The good, the bad and the ugly

    Blogger Tim Worstall is probably trying to rattle the cages of me and people like me (playful little devil), but his thoughts on coal, sulphur and a warmer world strike a bit of a chord. Picking up on a Madsen

    Reply
  3. View from here... Avatar
    View from here…

    Whiff of sulphur: The good, the bad and the ugly

    Blogger Tim Worstall is probably trying to rattle the cages of me and people like me (playful little devil), but his thoughts on coal, sulphur and a warmer world strike a bit of a chord. Picking up on a Madsen

    Reply
  4. james higham Avatar
    james higham

    That’s exactly what’s coming up in part 5 of China.

    Reply
  5. maksimovich Avatar
    maksimovich

    It is no use trying to cure the patient of one disease when the cure will kill the patient!
    An interesting paper here
    Long-term suppression of wetland methane flux following a pulse of
    simulated acid rain
    Vincent Gauci, Nancy Dise, and Stephen Blake
    Department of Earth Sciences,
    The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
    Our findings highlight the long-term impact of acid rain on biospheric output of CH4
    which, for discrete polluting events such as volcanic eruptions, outlives the relatively short-term SO42 aerosol
    radiative cooling effect.

    Reply
  6. Dave Hill Avatar
    Dave Hill

    Have you mentioned this to the PM, George Bush or God yet? I really think you should.

    Reply
  7. maksimovich Avatar
    maksimovich

    But wait there is more,…
    Acid rainfall in the Appalachian Mountains has decreased in recent years and organisms in its streams are thriving. But the environmental comeback could be creating new problems of its own, scientists say.
    A drop in nitric and sulfuric acid levels in the streams is changing biological activity in the ecosystem and hiking dissolved carbon levels, scientists reported at the American Geophysical Union conference last week in San Francisco.
    Dissolved carbon dioxide occurs as a result of organism respiration and decay of organic matter. It is a key source of acidity in pristine water.
    “These are unexpected results,” said David DeWalle, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University. “Rising amounts of carbon dioxide in streams and soil could have implications for the forest ecosystem, and the carbon balance in general.”
    Of course that natural philosophers knew this as Le Chatelier tells us in his famous principle
    Le Chatelier is most famous for the law on chemical equilibrium which bears his name,
    If a chemical system at equilibrium experiences a change in concentration, temperature or total pressure the equilibrium will shift in order to minimize that change.
    This qualitative law makes it possible to envisage the displacement of equilibrium of a chemical reaction.
    For example:
    A change in concentration of a reaction in equilibrium for the following equation:
    N2(g) + 3H2(g) → 2NH3(g)
    If one increases the pressure of the reactants (Nitrogen, N2 and Hydrogen, H2) the reaction will tend to move towards the products to decrease the pressure of the reaction.
    Another example: In the Contact Process for the production of sulphuric acid, the second stage is a reversible reaction:
    2SO2(g) + O2(g) → 2SO3(g)
    The forward reaction is exothermic and the backwards reaction is endothermic. When the temperature is increased, this new condition will favour the backwards reaction, as this will absorb the increased energy in the system, hence keeping the equilibrium by decreasing the temperature.
    http://www.livescience.com/environment/0612
    21_acidrain_reduction.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Louis_Le_Chatelier

    Reply

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