Hubris versus concrete

Giant wind turbines, nuclear power plants, large solar installations, dams, high speed trains, highways for electric cars, etc all require massive amounts of concrete. The cement that holds concrete together is made by burning limestone (calcium carbonate), at very high heat which generates massive amounts of CO2 emissions.

In the production of cement, first there is the very high heat emitted to the environment, generated usually by combustion of fossil fuels which also produces CO2 as a by-product, second is the generation of huge amounts of CO2 by the chemical reaction that yields cement.  Cement production is generally reported as about 4% of total human CO2 emissions, but that does not include the CO2 emissions from the high heat source.  To produce cement, CO2 must be removed from the oven.

Is a so-called “green” environment or civilization itself sustainable without cement and concrete? Can someone re-invent this fundamental building material which has been used for millennia? Is that necessary?

CO2 is one of the gases emitted by volcanoes, generated by the same chemistry required to produce cement. Molten lava or magma in contact with limestone releases CO2.  The high heat of the volcano is burning limestone which was deposited as sediment on the floor of oceans and lakes over millennia, for example the famous 500 foot cliffs of chalk in the Seven Sisters on the Sussex Coast of England. CO2 and its ultimate sink, limestone, are part of the earth’s natural carbon cycle.  Burning limestone puts CO2 back into the atmosphere where it can nourish plants, which feed all life and make the earth greener and healthier.  The hubris of global warming / climate change proponents proposes interfering with earth’s carbon cycle.

500ft chalk cliffs Seven Sisters East Sussex England

CO2 in the atmosphere is not and has never been the cause of any significant or even measureable amount of global warming.  It is a mistake, intentional or not.  Statistics professor Jamal Munshi’s papers show that the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are not detectable as an anomaly, a change in slope (2nd derivative), in the onging, slowly increasing net global average CO2 concentration.  This has bee routinely measured for decades at the Keeling lab on Mauna Loa in Hawaii.

The annual CO2 emissions by humans into the atmosphere are estimated to be in gigatons, which seems to be a large amount at our human scale,  but the normal, continuous, billions of reactions per second which make up the flux of CO2 into and out of the natural environmental sinks of CO2, such as the surface of the ocean and soil, are orders of magnitude, exponentially, larger and compensating – by physical mechanisms such as Henry’s Gas Law – for additions of CO2 by humans.

In other words, even if we assume that the planet is warming,  human CO2 is not a significant or even a measureable cause of that warming.  Since fossil fuel emissions are not detectable as a change in the routinely measured trend of net atmospheric CO2 concentration, then human CO2 cannot be significantly affecting any other component of climate, good or bad. Even if humans wanted to or needed to change earth’s warming trend, it is not possible to do that by controlling CO2 concentration.  Global warming proponents incorrectly identified CO2 as the problem.

Physical theory supports that empirical data. Global warming proponents have identified the wrong cause of global warming.

Attempts to control atmospheric CO2 are a dead end and would fundamentally de-construct civilization.  Civilization and society as we know them are constructed with  concrete.  What would life be without cement and concrete?  Future historians will laugh at the destructive hubris of 20th and 21st century humans.

There are references at the end of these blog posts:
(1) https://budbromley.blog/2019/05/01/responsiveness-of-atmospheric-co2-to-anthropogenic-emissions-by-jamal-munshi/

(2) https://budbromley.blog/2019/06/04/effects-of-human-produced-co2-are-too-small-to-measure/

About budbromley

Bud is a retired life sciences executive. Bud's entrepreneurial leadership exceeded three decades. He was the senior business development, marketing and sales executive at four public corporations, each company a supplier of analytical and life sciences instrumentation, software, consumables and service. Prior to those positions, his 19 year career in Hewlett-Packard Company's Analytical Products Group included worldwide sales and marketing responsibility for Bioscience Products, Global Accounts and the International Olympic Committee, as well as international management assignments based in Japan and Latin America. Bud has visited and worked in more than 65 countries and lived and worked in 3 countries.
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