Good News from All Over
posted by hedgehog in Ecofascism, Petrolatum |Thanks to Saurabh, master of all things bloggy, I am writing my first post in months. First a little update: I am semi-retired as I am going through a job transfer that is likely to leave me on a different continent. I have spent recent weeks rummaging through my burrow, realizing how closely related hedgehogs are to packrats. Meanwhile I have outsourced all of my blog needs to Jonathan at Tiny Revolution, who has been doing a yeoman’s job of smiling into the apocalypse.
Speaking of the apocalypse, here is the best news I’ve heard in ages:
The relative lifetimes of CO2 and aerosol in the atmosphere result in the expectation that reducing fossil fuel use will accelerate warming. A CO2 molecule has a lifetime of about 100 years in the atmosphere, while an aerosol particle has an average life expectancy of only about 10 days. Therefore, if we instantaneously ceased using combustion engines, the (cooling) fossil fuel-related aerosols would be cleaned out of the atmosphere within weeks, while the (warming) CO2 would remain much longer, leaving a net positive forcing from the reduction in emissions for a century or more.
Meanwhile, this quote from Colorado:
“I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,†she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.â€
Colorado? Yes, the source of such gigglers as this:
The Greeley Tribune has agreed to end a years-old practice of copying stories from competing newspapers and falsely labeling them as Associated Press stories, the newspaper’s publisher said today….the practice began several years ago when Chris Cobler was the newspaper’s editor. Cobler is currently overseeing the paper’s online operations and announced this week that he was leaving to take a job with the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Fla., organization that provides training programs for professional journalists….Cobler agreed the practice was unethical and said it was his fault if it happened on his watch, but added repeatedly that he had not been the editor for 18 months.
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But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.
Of course not. You find women’s genitalia. Well… breasts, anyway.
if we instantaneously ceased using combustion engines, the (cooling) fossil fuel-related aerosols would be cleaned out of the atmosphere within weeks, while the (warming) CO2 would remain much longer, leaving a net positive forcing from the reduction in emissions for a century or more.
a comment implied that since the aerosol forcing isn’t especially cumulative, losing it in an aggressive effort to reduce longer- and much longer-term positive force was a worthwhile one-time hit and the response indicated that that’s the feeling of the editors, also. i think.
I wish that I had read more about the scrotum when I was a kid. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent so many years looking for answers about them in my adulthood.
no forget that. maybe more like this: if we can’t simulate the aerosols we make, we need to concentrate on tuning our emissions, not eliminating them, until we can figure out how to usefully scrub out the excess CO2 upstairs. i mean from this one angle.
and even if we could simulate the aerosols, it’d take power to make that work. so either we could use that power, doing what another comment somewhere suggested of hooking cars to an expanded power grid so the CO2 is caught, or we could do something hilarious like build nuclear plants specifically for the purpose of manufacturing clouds. that’s a pretty decent use for nukes — steady work, with a clear finish line. then we could take a lot of eCO2-producing equipment offline.
like maybe sticking a pipe in the ocean, separating the water, vaporizing it. or whatever would be good for making clouds. they’d probably need to be located at particularly turbulent spots so the vapor was carried high up.
I just had this vision of opening a copy of Paradise Lost at the library and throwing a noisy fit when I couldn’t find any passages about men’s naughty bits in it. If Maplethorpe had lived, perhaps he could have remedied that situation with some appropriate photo essays.
Thank You for my first snicker of the day.