Global Warming - - A Complete One Minute Rebuttal to Deniers

The following paragraphs cite the extremely clear and simple data and arguments justifying claims of global warming, need for signing on to the Paris accords & pushing for non air polluting power sources.

Scott Jenning's column in 3/10/19 L A Times proposes Trump's attraction to the GOP is gratitude inspired by his unleavened deprecation of its arch enemies the Clintons and Obama. With a horrendous global catastrophe ("global warming") bearing down on us all WAY TO FOCUS GOP!

To see global warming isn't all "BS" as Trump says first realize NASA and NOAA have ample support data back to 1880. Then it's just an appeal to standard energy conservation principles to establish what has caused global warming since the industrial revolution...
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One writes a conservation equation:

yearly light energy entering ionosphere (think photons) + yearly net Earth gravitational energy input (think gravitons) - yearly light energy leaving ionosphere = yearly Earth internal energy change + yearly change in Earth's solar orbital kinetic energy

(Yearly internal energy change would include tidal energy changes in Earth's oceans and molten core, changes in the heat content ( proportional to temperature) of the land and atmosphere.)

Since the first two terms in the above equation are essentially constant year to year and the last term is zero, differentiating one obtains

[- rate of yearly light energy radiating from Earth] = [rate of Earth's yearly internal energy gain].

 One concludes that the right hand side of the last equation can only be reduced (so that the Earth stops warming up) if  the rate of light radiation from Earth into outer space increases. This light escaping from Earth towards outer space is mostly infrared, simply because  average Earth temperature is too cool for any other emission wavelength. And just as a wool blanket retards infrared light from escaping our bodies, a well documented strengthening post industrial revolution atmospheric pollution blanket is not increasing but rather decreasing infrared radiation leaving Earth.

The logic and empirical evidence supporting global warming are accepted by virtually every climate scholar. Trump and his coal industry scientists denying it are like tobacco industry executives saying the evidence doesn't support a link between smoking and lung cancer. Quitting the Paris Accords was inexcusable. We need to transition to non polluting geothermal, tidal, nuclear, wind and solar power generators and methane reducing farming. Burning wood or other biofuels is also an acceptable power source since it merely recycles the same carbon in and out of the atmosphere. Industrial plants continuing to burn unearthed carbonaceous fuels should permanently sequester carbon dioxide emissions, e.g. in basalt rock formations.

But time and time again Trump transparently lies in order to reward greedy short sighted special interest groups at the expense of the long term. No doubt if he and his corrupt crowd were here to comment on the above dead reckoning of our global warming emergency it would be no different.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Doing (or explaining) the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. One way or another, it couldn't be clearer, we need to get rid of this dangerously corrupt and inept administration.

Epilogue 9/24/2019 :

So if  we elect a president in 2020 who recognizes the existential imperative of  switching over to non polluting energy sources how hard will it be? Not that hard, despite what Donald Trump and his GOP legion of foot draggers  claim.  Probably at least temporarily we need to profit from available safety improvements in nuclear power plant design and increase nuclear fission power generation from 20%  where it sits today. The scientists developing fusion power are appreciated, but we have been hearing for 70 years that fusion power is just a decade away. Geothermal and biofuel energy are renewable, non polluting and readily expandable. As mentioned above biofuels just cycle the same carbon in and out of the atmosphere; yearly cyclical Earth - Sun - Moon gravitational interaction creates abundant geothermal and ocean tidal energy. As soon as we phase coal and oil out of the energy picture clean electricity generation can take up the resulting slack. Only about 1% of the solar energy falling on the Earth alone would suffice. These  aforementioned  "green energy" sources are already well understood technologies. But a serious anticipated  problem has been that wind, tidal and solar are intermittent electrical power sources and no really robust, versatile and energy efficient post production storage means has been on line. Lithium for storage batteries is a finite resource, and all current rechargeable batteries have  both inconveniently brief  lifetimes  and lengthy full recharge times. Fuel cell "batteries" can be made non polluting but it is comparatively inefficient to have to manufacture their fuel before "burning" it in the cell. 

It is not generally appreciated but  a good solution to the problematic storage of intermittently generated electrical power is actually waiting in the wings just in time! Adequately high "energy specific", i.e. high watt hour per kilogram  supercapacitor technology is now commercially available. Arvio in Australia started selling 70 watt hour per kg graphene  supercapacitors in 1918 (bundled together into arbitrarily large multiples of 7 kilowatt hour residential or building reserve power supplies). Their research actually developed 148 watt hour per kg  supercapacitors. These capacitors can be recycled a million times, lose only 5% power per month  on the shelf and have a 99% efficiency over charge and discharge. These are all  much better figures then most batteries exhibit. Googling Arvio information on the internet brings up tech specs on a building / home energy storage module  composed of supercapacitors which Arvio currently markets - -  Sirius Energy Storage Module part number 3550 - 48 - A - 1.35C - M - A - G. From these it is possible to deduce the supercapacitors comprising this module can store 94 kilowatt hour  in 27 modules weighing 4400 pounds and stacking in a volume 1.2 meter x 1. 5 meter x 1 meter. This is more than sufficient energy to power a Tesla electric vehicle in a volume that could certainly be contained in many a van, bus or truck or in a reasonably sized trailer pulled by a Tesla sedan. China already has electric buses powered  not by battery but capacitors. And this volume  presumably can be halved or reduced to a third because Arvio already has tested supercapacitors storing double and triple the energy/kg of those making up its current Sirius module. 

There really is no excuse considering the tools discussed above for the US or any other  first world nation to further delay mounting a full bore effort  solving  the global warming problem advanced economies are responsible for while it is still tractable and before it becomes truly catastrophic.

Epilogue 2/3/2020 :

Recently I revisited an internet column ("Solarquotes") by Ronald  Brakel reporting on Arvio supercapacitor module energy storage specifications  that I had passed along (see" Epilogue 9/24/2019" immediately above). Unfortunately, upon further  reflection, some of these specifications had seemed self contradictory to me. In a reader's response section at the end of his column I contributed my ideas about why Arvio's capacitor energy storage module couldn't possibly deliver as advertised. I noticed there were quite a few other readers who had doubts to that  effect also. Here is what I wrote:   

Regarding Ronald Brakel’s SolarQuotes piece on the $4900, 3.55 kilowatt hour, 75 kg Sirius Energy Storage Module advertised by Arvio of Australia – – very interesting reading! However Arvio’s spec weight of 75 kilogram and price tag for the SESM seem much too low – – could these be double checked?
A 3000farad, 2.7 maximum volt capacitor cell stores 3.037 watt hr of energy so if the SESM stores 3.55 kilowatt hr it must contain 1169 such cells, regardless of their interconnection ( ;for the module to be rated at 48 VDC eighteen would be connected in series and then 65 of such series would be connected in parallel). Shunbin of China offers such 2.7volt, 3000f cells for $25 apiece (and Maxwell for $59) and it is difficult to see how Arvio’s SESM containing 1169 such cells can be priced at about 5 times less than 1169 x $20 = $23380. Also Maxwell’s 2.7 volt, 3000f cell weighs 1.124 pound so 1169 of them weigh 1314 lbs.How on earth can Arvio’s 1169 2.7volt,3000farad cell SESM only weigh 75 kg = 165 pounds, eight times less?
It would be of real significance if Arvio’s SESM specs weight, volume, and energy storage are indeed as they advertise. A Tesla automobile requires about 90 kilowatt hour of energy in its battery pack or 25 Sirius 3.55 kilowatt hr modules. But if 25 Sirius modules actually weigh 25 x 1314 lb = 32850 lb instead of 25 x 75kg = 4125 lbs then a capacitor powered Tesla sedan (or more realistically a pickup) is seemingly a long way off instead of fairly close.

In light of the above one must retrench somewhat my earlier assessment that supercapacitors are a ready replacement to the lithium battery. We're not quite there yet. Although laboratory progress is encouraging, energy stored per kilogram results obtained in the laboratory for a test capacitor's "active medium" do not translate directly to available energy per kilogram in the marketplace. It has been said that seven times more weight may be added to the active storage medium when a chassis, electrodes, and other necessary bits of miscellany are added. And right now researchers are still scrambling for better ways than merely connecting capacitors in series to obtain higher maximum voltage  capacitors. 

Parenthetically, perhaps that particular goal will recede in importance if researchers  integrate extremely high dielectric constant  barium titanate  into supercapacitors, since  capacitance is generally proportional to the dielectric constant of dielectric material.  Perhaps by powdering barium titanate might be induced to form the usual supercapacitor double layer morphology; if not, any layer of it would store field energy owing to its prodigious polarizability above 118 degrees centigrade - - a requisite operating environment. The Feynman lectures volume ll  discusses barium titanate in masterly detail and incorporation into some form(s) of capacitor has been advertised under controversy for decades by EEStor corporation.