Environment & Energy

Dr Hansen has been sidelined a bit over the last decade; he estimates the warming from a doubling of CO2 levels to be considerably higher than the IPCC consensus, and claims that the countervailing human-caused cooling, from coal particulates and sulfur dioxide in ship stack exhausts, has masked this warming effect. I think his loss of airtime partly relates to his support for nuclear; more 'PC' pundits like Michael Mann, the 'hockey stick' originator, argue that renewables are doing the job, and temperatures will stabilise (though not go down) as soon as we get to nett zero. Naomi Oreskes (author of 'Merchants of Doubt' about the oil-funded climate contrarian campaign) even called Hansen a type of 'denier' for not worshipping at the altar of wind and solar. Unfortunately for them, and us, it's looking like Hansen was right again. 2024 was called an outlier, with world temperatures predicted to fall again afterwards, to a gentler slope on the graph. Instead 2025 stayed nearly as hot, and 2026 could be worse. The reduction in sulfur pollution over the northern Pacific and Atlantic, as high sulfur marine bunker oil was outlawed, is acknowledged to be a factor, though how big a factor is disputed.
I've just been reading 'The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything', by Peter Brannen (after hearing him interviewed on Dr Chris Keefer's 'Decouple' podcast.) That widens the stage by a few billion years. Advanced life was only possible from 600 million years ago, after so much carbon had been locked underground that a free-oxygen atmosphere was possible. Homo sapiens is trying to reverse that imbalance, at a faster rate than in any of the five great extinctions. However, I don't think pessimism is either useful or justified. Sure, us humans do some very dumb things, but we also have a lot of very smart people. The SO2 aerosols we were emitting may have been cutting our warming effect by 40%; Hansen in his earliest climate projection even included a volcanic cooling remarkably similar to the early 90's Pinatubo effect. We can do the same, but strategically, without the associated lung disease and acid rain from coal and bunker oil. The whales we slaughtered en masse were fertilising the oceans with iron from deep water, that caused carbon-sequestering blooms of diatoms. By putting about an eyelash's mass of iron per cubic metre in the downwash swirls of the Gulf Stream, the Kuro Shiyo current, the Agulhas Current, the Australian Current, and the Brazil Current, we can recreate this major carbon sink, while we wait for the whales to recover.
A tiny Danish company called Copenhagen Atomics claims that by the year 2000, more than half of mankind's energy will come from thorium - from none at all now, and 80% from fossil fuels. That sounds presumptuous, but one little Dutch company makes 100% of the incredibly high-tech machines that make all the world's topline computer chips. Energy delivered 24/7/365, as 100 megawatts of 600C heat, or 40 MW of 2c/kWh power, from 40 foot shipping containers, is an attractive proposition, if they can swing it. Low power fission trial, in a full sized reactor, scheduled next year, in Switzerland.