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Well, has anyone run a simulation to see what effect that altering the albedo of that much land would have? Perhaps putting dark blue arrays on dark blue ocean water is a better idea? Plus you get the bonus of free cooling water that would have absorbed the heat anyway. "Non-vegetated regions like the Sahara Desert reflect about 30 to 40% of the Sun’s incoming light. " http://www.eoearth.org/view/ar...

Israelis who eat mangos as children also possibly develop immunity to urushiol. also posted this below before seeing your comment. http://www.eoearth.org/view/ar...

This begs the question whether mining for BitCoins is more damaging to the environment than mining for precious metals, for a given value of return. The EPA emissions factor for electricity is about 0.69 tons of CO2 per megawatt hour, so producing the electricity used by this datacenter is, on average, dumping into the atmosphere 331 tons of CO2 per day or about 120,000 tons of CO2 per year. While there are many other forms of environmental damage from gold mining, a quick search suggest that the greenhouse emissions from gold extraction run to about 11.5 tons of CO2 equivalent per kg of Gold. At this rate 120,000 tons of CO2 yields of 10.5 tons of gold, worth nearly $500 million at today's price. Will this datacentre yield more than half a billion dollars worth of bit coins each year?

Energy received and energy emitted by the Earth aren't equal. You might have heard of global warming.

True, they're not equal. To a reasonable approximation, they are equal: the heat picked up via global warming is tiny compared to the amount of heat added by the Sun each day (and subsequently lost to space by radiation).

The energy emitted by the Earth isn't all infrared radiation.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org] and http://www.eoearth.org/view/ar... [eoearth.org] )

True, though it's mostly infrared and albedo.

Temperature doesn't have color

No, but a distribution of radiation does. When, in physics, someone says that radiation is "X Kelvin", it's shorthand for "a distribution of radiation very close to the ideal black-body radiation at X Kelvin". The great bulk of the Sun's and Earth's radiation is black-body radiation.

You can only define entropy for a thermodynamic system (i.e. Earth, or Earth + atmosphere).

Radiation certainly does have entropy. See, for example, Planck's "the Theory of Heat Radiation" or some more modern text.

All oher things being equal, the entropy goes up with the temperature (0 at 0K, higher at 6000K than at 300K)

This is just a misunderstanding of the meaning of 6000K vs. 300K light. Though it's incorrect to just assume zero entropy at 0K.

Entropy more or less describes the disorder of a system.

It's enormously more complicated than that. That's a Brian-Greene-level description.

You're probably talking about exergy

... Are you an engineer?

Score 5: Interesting/Insightful. WTF?

*) Diurnal. Does it mean what you think it means?
*) Energy received and energy emitted by the Earth aren't equal. You might have heard of global warming.
*) The energy emitted by the Earth isn't all infrared radiation.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and http://www.eoearth.org/view/ar... )
*) Temperature doesn't have color, pressure doesn't have speed and energy doesn't have entropy. You can only define entropy for a thermodynamic system (i.e. Earth, or Earth + atmosphere).
*) Entropy more or less describes the disorder of a system. All oher things being equal, the entropy goes up with the temperature (0 at 0K, higher at 6000K than at 300K)
*) You're probably talking about exergy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Thermodynamics is hard. You have to define everything and understand the underlying mathematical concepts.

LEDs are more directional. Direction matters more.

Depends. For low pressure sodium, it has a very narrow light emission spectrum. There are notch filters available that will filter out the entire low pressure sodium spectrum leaving the rest alone. And then the sky is dark once more when looking through a telescope.

LEDs, on the other hand, completely screw this up by emitting broad spectrum. You can't filter them efficiently. Game over.

  http://palomarskies.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-astronomers-love-low-pressure.html

So sure, direction matter if all you care about is general brightness of the sky. But for people with filters trying to live with light pollution, LEDs is game over.

This is aside the health effects that light pollution has and the low-pressure sodium lights are more efficient than LEDs (and don't disturb the circadian rhythm).
      http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153402/

This is the sort of conversation to expect from deniers, and not from actual skeptics.

Regarding whether the accumulation is exponential, maybe step back and take a broader look?

http://www.eoearth.org/files/112301_112400/112388/620px-Co2_atmosphere.jpg

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Carbon_dioxide?topic=49557

"Whether or not 400ppm has any other detrimental affect other than temperature (which it obviously hasn't driven to Eocene levels)"

You're missing a word. "Yet".

Remember when I said "There is no claim that the system will respond instantly. A system as large as the earth will take some time to warm up." In this thread? No I figured you didn't. Forgetting counterarguments is a specialty you guys cultivate.

Well, I did my best. Go ahead and have the last word if you must.

This is the sort of conversation to expect from deniers, and not from actual skeptics.

Regarding whether the accumulation is exponential, maybe step back and take a broader look?

http://www.eoearth.org/files/112301_112400/112388/620px-Co2_atmosphere.jpg

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Carbon_dioxide?topic=49557

"Whether or not 400ppm has any other detrimental affect other than temperature (which it obviously hasn't driven to Eocene levels)"

You're missing a word. "Yet".

Remember when I said "There is no claim that the system will respond instantly. A system as large as the earth will take some time to warm up." In this thread? No I figured you didn't. Forgetting counterarguments is a specialty you guys cultivate.

Well, I did my best. Go ahead and have the last word if you must.

"So, this means the US almost hit the targets of the Kyoto Protocol. Interesting.

Not exactly.. Kyoto Annex B.. US target is 7% below 1990 levels or 4.65 Billion tonns..
Verses current 2012 estimate of 5.2 billion tonns of CO2 emissions..

Achieving this goal would require cutting coal consumption by another 50% or so.
Note: Coal is still responsible for 1.5 billion tonns of 2012 US CO2 emissions.

Except that the data shows there's a time lag between adding CO2 to the atmosphere and an increase in atmospheric temperature, ocean pH etc. By the time the effects of ocean acidification and temperature rise become a serious problem, we may well have locked ourselves into making thousands of species extinct, with untold consequences to the ecosystems that depend on them (see coral reefs for example). Ecosystems are fragile things - sure, they'll find a balance one way or another, but that 'other' way is likely to be a whole lot less beautiful, complex and interesting, and sure as shit won't take long-term human welbeing into account.

I think the reaction against some of the climate change 'deniers' posting on this thread (throwing insults at them and implying they're uneducated) is largely because of their refusal to even consider the risk that the scientific consensus might be right. Even if they have some doubt about the cause or scale of the problem, if after taking a rational look at the data and reading arguments from both sides of the debate, they still think there's no risk of serious climate problems, or nothing we can do about it, then their level of education should rightly be called into question.

Incidentally, what are the chances they'll just end up with an atoll? Would this land rush be damp squib?

Zero. An atoll is made up of coral, not volcanic rock.

I believe that answer is actually much greater than zero (possibly 1.00), depending upon the the allowed timescale. Coral atolls are formed on top of old volcanices.

From the last the last of the following links:

"In 1842 Darwin explained the creation of coral atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean based upon observations made during a five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Accepted as basically correct, his explanation involved considering that several tropical island types—from high volcanic island, through barrier reef island, to atoll—represented a sequence of gradual subsidence of what started as an oceanic volcano. He reasoned that a fringing coral reef surrounding a volcanic island in the tropical sea will grow upwards as the island subsides (sinks), becoming an "almost atoll", or barrier reef island, as typified by an island such as Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, Bora Bora and others in the Society Islands. The fringing reef becomes a barrier reef for the reason that the outer part of the reef maintains itself near sea level through biotic growth, while the inner part of the reef falls behind, becoming a lagoon because conditions are less favorable for the coral and calcareous algae responsible for most reef growth. In time, subsidence carries the old volcano below the ocean surface and the barrier reef remains. At this point, the island has become an atoll."

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Atoll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Hawaiian_volcanoes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoll

1) It seems a stable biosphere is bigger than "biosphere II" which was pretty freaking big for just a couple people.

Recently, I discussed Biosphere II with someone who worked on it. It rapidly became biologically stable -- the problem was that it didn't stabilise at a equilibrium point compatible with human life! There's no fundamental reason why a similar project couldn't work properly, but some tuning is clearly needed.

As far as "inbreeding" is concerned, see this article. It says:

Following Frankham et al., estimates of the population numbers required to overcome these effects (known as the effective population, Ne) are 50 to avoid inbreeding depression, 500-5000 to retain evolutionary potential, and 12 to 1000 to avoid the accumulation of deleterious mutations. Franklin proposed the 50/500 rule used by conservation practitioners, whereby an Ne of 50 is required to prevent an unacceptable rate of inbreeding, while a long-term Ne of 500 is required to ensure overall genetic variability. Given that the average Ne /N ratio is roughly 0.10 these rules of thumb translate to census sizes of 500 to 50,000 individuals.

Sorry, but that I can't believe. Which country do you live?

the US. for starters 90% of alaska is off the grid. Each of 300 villages have their own isolated power grid.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_profile_of_Alaska,_United_States

There are lots of small communities in the US with a local hydro dam that powers them.

You should really do your homework. First, for pretty much any power generation the cost of the plant is the main cost component both in terms of money and energy costs. So what the OP earlier said that the power is cheap once the plant is up and running is true for pretty much anything. Now, if we look at energy return i.e. the ratio of energy produced over the ratio of energy spend (for construction, maintenance, running and decommission) windpower beats all other means of producing energy by a large margin. The EROI of wind is ~18, for comparison hydro has about 12 and Nuclear is lower than PV-solar at about 5 or 6. That means if you build a windturbine after about 12-18 months(!) you are producing net energy. Now I admit energy cost is different than monetary cost, however they should be proportional to each other.

source:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy

The scary contamination in Tokyo is between 0.3% and 1.5% of the radioactive exposure you get from smoking one cigarette. Scary, isn't it?

You didn't say why cigarettes are radioactive. As I recall, in WWII the government took the tobacco industry's usual fertilizer (urea) to make explosives. The tobacco industry switched to Rock Phosphate, which they liked better anyways because it could be mined with a caterpillar instead of collected with farm hands.

Most of the phosphate rock in Florida as well as some other locales contains significant concentrations of radioactive Uranium. This becomes an issue when the processed phosphate rock is used for a wide variety of crops. Certain types of crops take up Uranium readily, and thus a health risk is posed to humans who consume such products. An example species that absorbs Uranium readily is tobacco, the use of which is already strongly implicated in human lung cancer from smokers.

-The Encyclopedia of Earth: Phosphate Rock

If you're going to smoke, it's always better to use organic tobacco than tobacco that was fertilized with Rock Phosphate:

... Organic fertilizers such as organic vegetable compost, animal manure, wood ash and seaweed have proven to be sustainable and non-harmful to microbes, worms, farmers and eaters or smokers. Chemical phosphates may seem like a bargain compared to natural phosphorous, until you factor in the health and environmental costs. ... Tobacco smokers can also use this information to avoid radioactive brands of tobacco. American Spirit is one of a few companies that offers an organic line of cigarettes, and organic cigars are also available from a few companies. You can also grow your own tobacco, which is surprisingly easy and fun.

Until the public has an accurate understanding of how phosphate fertilizers carry radiation, and why commercial tobacco causes lung cancer but cannabis does not, there will be many needless tobacco-related deaths, and increased resistance to the full legalization of marijuana.

-Radioactive tobacco: It's not tobacco's tar which kills, but the radiation!

My pet theory is that there was actually a combination of factors which led to the mid-20th century spike in lung cancer levels. The other factor, besides the irradiation of smokers' lungs, was the mass dietary switch from stable saturated fats (butter, lard) to unstable polyunsaturated fats (margarine). The lungs have a lot of fatty acids... Send me an email for a free report. :)

That enjoy indoor plumbing http://www.eoearth.org/article/Water_and_poverty_in_the_United_States ? If not, how can we determine the percentage of US outhouses that will be in the 4G zone?

Given that there's more gold than lead in the Earth's crust

So it's up to you to back that up and interestingly enough the link you used doesn't even give a value in the column 'Earth's crust %' for these elements so sorting by that is not going to make any sense in this case. So the blindingly obvious thing to do is work out what it issorted by in that case. Which is *VERY* easy, and if you'd actually bothered to look at it and you'll see it's sorted by 'Earth's Crust %', then by 'Atomic Weight'. Not sure how you come to the conclusion that you did when the data you sorted by isn't even available for the specified elements.

Given that there's more gold than lead in the Earth's crust

So it's up to you to back that up and interestingly enough the link you used doesn't even give a value in the column 'Earth's crust %' for these elements so sorting by that is not going to make any sense in this case. So the blindingly obvious thing to do is work out what it issorted by in that case. Which is *VERY* easy, and if you'd actually bothered to look at it and you'll see it's sorted by 'Earth's Crust %', then by 'Atomic Weight'. Not sure how you come to the conclusion that you did when the data you sorted by isn't even available for the specified elements.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Uranium_supply
70 years with current mines and up to 200 years with new mines.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

• The missing carbon
• Graph showing ice age with 12 times more CO2 than today.
• Polar bears
• Ethanol
• Ethanol again
• Climate cultist whack job from "Whale wars" believes quote We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.
• NASA's chief on global warming.
• The IPCC get their their asses handed to them in front of Congress in 1997. A personal favorite is this quote:

  The observed warming since the late 19th Century has only been 0.5 degrees Celsius, or less than one-third of the predicted value. Critics argued, as I did before this committee, that there would have to be a dramatic reduction in the forecast of future warming in order to reconcile the facts and the hypotheses.

  By 1995, in its second full assessment of climate change, the IPCC admitted the validity of the critics' position: `When increases in greenhouse gases only are taken into account, most climate models produce a greater mean warming than has been observed to date, unless a lower climate sensitivity to the greenhouse effect is used. There is growing evidences that increases in sulfate aerosols are partially counteracting the warming due to increases in greenhouse gases.'

  Let me translate this statement. It means either it is not going to warm up as much as we said it would or something is hiding the warming. I predict that every attempt will be made to demonstrate the latter before admitting that the former is true.

My links are getting old it seems. I have a folder full of them, but a lot seems to have been eradicated by the cult of climate change. Feel free to use this stuff in your next big flame war, but I think you'll find that arguing with these idiots is pointless. Your best bet is to put together a well reasoned, informative essay... then wait for a related story and top post. You may be marked troll, but it doesn't matter. People like myself who don't agree with /.s group think tend to read at troll +6 anyway. In fact, I would have never seen your response if you had not been marked troll above... anyhow, we'll mod you up if you're hit with -1 disagree mod.

Otherwise no significant oil contamination in ANY sensitive marshes or wetlands.

YET. Calling the matter closed when the vast majority of the oil spill has yet to reach shore is vastly too premature.

The fact is that oil is itself a product of natural biological processes, and nature does have mechanisms for dealing with it over time.

"Nature" has a mechanism for dealing with it, and the operative term is "over time". The Brown Pelican, which only just recently was taken off the endangered species list, does not.

The Gulf itself is naturally and continuously contaminated by seepage from oil deposits, to the tune of an estimated 2,000 barrels a day. Every day. Over a history of millions of years.

And over the entire gulf. And filtered through ground sediments, not pumped up at high pressure through a bore hole. Really, people keep bringing up natural seepage, but it really just shows the contrast between nature and off shore oil rigs.

The fact is that once this spill is contained the ecosystem will recover. It might seem to take forever if you are a fisherman working those waters, but to call it an ecological disaster is just silly.

The Prince William Sound ecosystem has yet to fully recover.

"Nature" will recover. The ecosystem, as in the particular ecosystem that exists there today, may not. Nature has recovered from the annihilation of over 50% of all species in a (geologically) brief period of time, but plenty of ecosystems were lost in the process.

The problem with your assumption is that this is destroying an ecosystem. Do you even know what crude oil is? It's a naturally occurring, additive free, organic substance. It doesn't rampantly kill life on contact like say, mustard gas.

It's not an assumption, because this is not the first oil spill ever.

And yes I know what crude oil is, do you know that "naturally occurring, additive free, organic substance" and "harmless" are not adjectives?

Nobody is claiming it's going to instantly kill anything on contact. But if you had any idea of the environmental damage caused by previous spills, you wouldn't be talking like this "naturally occurring" substance isn't going to cause any problems in the quantities and concentrations here. Go ask an actual biologist or environmental scientist or anyone who has actually studied the impact of oil spills if they're concerned about this "organic substance". If they say that yes they are, make sure to remind them that the oil is additive free!

Oil naturally leaks in plenty of places on the planet. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130944.htm

You realize that article is talking about oil seeping out over an extended period of time, filtered through and partially biodegraded passing through ocean floor sediments before it even reaches the ocean water? Not pumped out through a cleanly bored holed designed to maximize pressure and thus output. The Exxon Valdez spill wouldn't have been a big disaster if the oil had been leaked out slowly over twenty years, and 11-110 of them wouldn't be a big issue on the time scales it took it to reach that level of concentration in the soil.

It does kill some animals fairly quickly, but it also feeds algae and other microorganisms as well as plant life on the shore. I expect that the "fallout" from this spill will hurt the fish and shrimp industries this year, but in the coming years, they will have bumper crops. I'm not saying this isn't an environmental incident, I just fail to see the doomsday scenarios that everyone is talking about.

Yeah, now who's making assumptions? Fail is the operative word here. Here's a couple links: http://www.answers.com/topic/exxon-valdez-oil-spill and http://www.eoearth.org/article/exxon_valdez_oil_spill showing how the environmental impact and disruption of ecosystems was ongoing ten and even twenty years later. There's plenty more on teh googles. Fishing was disrupted for multiple years, and catches have never recovered. Mortality remains high among contaminated fish and other animals.

It's not about doomsday from one spill, it's about damage to ecosystems that are already stressed. It's about idiots saying that it's not such a big deal so lets not stop doing it, ensuring that there will be subsequent stresses.

I think it will be important in 5 years to say: We've got a climate model that's made correct predictions for the last five years, so you should trust that model as a good guide to the future.

They've made plenty of predictions. They're just always wrong. The IPCC was established in 1989 and published its first assessment report in 1990. In that report, they predicted an increase of 1.3 to 2.3 degrees C. That didn't materialize and in 1997, the IPCC had their asses handed to them in front of congress:

However, it was apparent that when the first so-called consensus was imposed upon the issue of global warming by the First Scientific Assessment of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, such an equilibrium had not been reached.

That report in 1990 stated, `When the latest atmospheric models are run with the present concentrations of greenhouse gases, their simulation of climate is generally realistic on large scales.'

The suite of climate models extant at that time predicted that the globe's mean temperature should have risen by then between 1.3 and 2.3 degrees Celsius. Slightly revised versions of these models provided the technical background for the Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992.

The observed warming since the late 19th Century has only been 0.5 degrees Celsius, or less than one-third of the predicted value. Critics argued, as I did before this committee, that there would have to be a dramatic reduction in the forecast of future warming in order to reconcile the facts and the hypotheses.

By 1995, in its second full assessment of climate change, the IPCC admitted the validity of the critics' position: `When increases in greenhouse gases only are taken into account, most climate models produce a greater mean warming than has been observed to date, unless a lower climate sensitivity to the greenhouse effect is used. There is growing evidences that increases in sulfate aerosols are partially counteracting the warming due to increases in greenhouse gases.'

Let me translate this statement. It means either it is not going to warm up as much as we said it would or something is hiding the warming. I predict that every attempt will be made to demonstrate the latter before admitting that the former is true.

So, the IPCC went back to the drawing board and returned with Mann's infamous Hockey stick graph. They declared DOOM. End of the world. Humanity was fucked. They extrapolated from 1998 temperatures (an unusually hot year) that climate change was 'for real' this time and was about to run out of control. When the skeptics got their hands on his computer model, they found that entering random data produced hockey stick graphs too. Oops.

So, uh, yeah, they've got egg on their face with that one. Nevermind that their prediction was wrong, again. Temperatures peaked in 1998 and haven't been that high since. In fact, it doesn't take a lot of searching to find examples of where their model predictions do not match reality.

In spite of all this, there are still people out there who believe in the IPCC. They cannot explain how this planet managed to have an ice age with atmospheric CO2 levels around 4200ppm during the Carboniferous period. They cannot account for three gigatons of CO2 that simply vanishes right out from under their noses each year. But hey, there's a consensus. The IPCC says so. So "the debate is over."

Nevermind Hansen's faked data. Nevermind the

Is mankind causing this warming? There is more uncertainty here, but signs are increasingly pointing towards the affirmative.

What signs? The IPCC's signs? Those aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Climategate has proven conclusively that those people are working in an echo chamber. All they have are computer models loaded with junk data.

The real question is, "Does the cost of adaptation outweigh the cost of going carbon free?"

As AC already pointed out, that presumes going 'carbon free' would change anything. It wouldn't make any difference at all. To suggest that it would based on 'the signs' is just evangelical preaching. According to the cult of climate change's own estimates, Man is adding 4-8 additional gigatons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year. Yet, they can't even account for what happens to 3 gigatons of CO2 annually.

Furthermore, if we burned every single ounce of known fossil fuels on the planet tomorrow, that would approximately double the atmospheric CO2 to about 720ppm. During the Carboniferous period, this planet witnessed an ice age with atmospheric CO2 levels on the order of 4200ppm. That is very strong evidence that CO2 is a bit player in the climate game.

Most climate scientists say that the Earth is headed for a 4 C rise in temperature, regardless of what humans do at this point.

And yet, they can provide no evidence that warming would be a bad thing. They are pretty empty handed when you ask for evidence of any sort. Here's a nice little factoid for the Cult of Climate Change: 70000 years ago, mankind nearly went extinct... DURING AN ICE AGE. Honestly, what do you think is going to be more hospitable to man? Icy barren tundra or lush tropical forests?

Seriously? CO2? They want to scare us into doing something good for the environment, and THAT is their boogeyman? They could've gone for the mercury in coal fired plant emissions that is poisoning our seafood in the pacific. They could have gone with the fact that coal emissions are radioactive as all fuck.

No, they go with the clear odorless gas that makes plants happy. What a bunch of complete fucking morons... and they couldn't even get that right. What happens to the planet when we RUN OUT of CO2? What happens when all the little phytoplankton have entombed our precious CO2 as limestone at the bottom of the ocean. We're DOOMED without it, and CO2 is at the lowest levels seen in hundreds of millions of years. We should be HAPPY it is rising.

So you want another study on top of the large number of studies already done. Fine - I question your motives though. It seems to be a smoke screen at best. I mean you could have looked it up yourself and presented your somewhat better founded ideas here instead of spreading FUD.

Regarding the EROI you could start here:

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy

and here:

"Food, Energy, and Society", David Pimentel, Marcia Pimentel, Edition 3, illustrated, CRC Press, 2008, ISBN 1420046675, 9781420046670

Interestingly the second source presents a much lower number for the EROI than the first.

After all, all power conversion systems currently in use have a higher than 1 EROI, does this come as a surprise to you? Personally I count on the people who build power conversion facilities to have an interest in a properly filled wallet and the major energy storage medium being sold in some currency.

White roofs have the double effect of significantly reducing the air conditioning load within the building. This reduction in power consumption will probably reduce global warming by avoiding CO2 emissions as much if not more than the direct reflection effect... The peak power demand days in California are during the summer because of all the air conditioning.

One study found that there was between a 15% and 60% reduction in cooling power use just by applying a white roofing compound.

One problem with this is that high albeido (white-ish) pavement doesn't stay that way for very long because concrete ages and gets dirty.
You can read more about this here.

Believe it or not, there is a lot of research going into creating lighter colored surfaces for roads. One of the advantages is that it takes less light (and thus energy) to light up the surface at night. This also decreases the amount of "light pollution" you would have around town. There are other advantages to improving water quality and decreasing noise.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Cool_paving

However, one of the current hangups is how to keep them light? Unless we can also change the rubber in the tires to be lighter color as well, the road surfaces just end up black again in high traffic areas like California.

The figure was from the latest GEO magazine. Note that "human use" does not mean only "cornfield". Most of renewed forest, for example, is being periodically logged, and also areas such as pasture, meadows and urban areas count towards human use. The map referenced by GEO is found here.

There is a natural concentration of ~300pp billion of Nitrous Oxide in the atmosphere according to this reference at Encyclopedia of Earth: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nitrous_oxide

The users of the road are already paying for it in the form of very high state and federal taxes on gasoline.

Fuel taxes, which are not high, have not kept pace with inflation. You want to talk about high fuel tax, try Canada. Though it's been years since I've been there the last tyme I bought gas in Canada it cost significantly more there than in the US. And you can't blamed that on the cost of oil. The US imports more oil from Canada than from any other country. Europe has significantly higher fuel taxes than the US too. Because of low fuel taxes the US has one of the lowest fuel prices.

Falcon

There is no way cloning a single animal can be a viable method to reintroduce a species. The inbreeding necessary to maintain the line will eventually destroy its genetic health. Wild populations generally require 50 different animals in order to maintain the species' genetic viability. I would submit that in controlled laboratory environment, 32 specimens or 16 pairs would be the minimul viable population. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Minimum_viable_population_size/

Actually, I did. The paper fails to take into account the natural temperature buffering capacity of Earth. When you add acid to a heavily buffered solution, you don't see much change in pH, at least until you overcome the buffering capacity, at which point there is a sudden change.

In addition, it doesn't take into account that there is more than one sunspot cycle. The 11 year one is the shortest, while there are other cycles.

In addition, it should be noted that many of the greatest civilizations began when the Earth was 1-2 degrees C warmer than it is today (ref).

That's we're going to run them on Thorium, not Uranium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Thorium

Now I'm (somewhat reluctantly) in favor of large controlled nuclear power plants, but I think one ought to recognize statements like:

The industry is one of the most tightly legislated, and well trained in the world, and it is extremely improbable that the industry will ever have another significant accident.

for what they are: meaningless guesswork, and irrelevant in the discussion to boot.

First off, "extremely improbable" is so vague as to be meaningless. Secondly, it's not the probability of failure that defines "value at risk", it's probability of failure times cost of failure.

This is precisely the reason that it's very easy to life-insure workers in a nuclear power plant: value at risk at most a few hundred thousand $, probability: very small and fairly well known. As a matter of fact insurance premiums are higher in most other occupations (including staying at home). It is also the reason that no insurance company in the world will insure all the possible damage of a nuclear power plant having a catastrophic accident: the probability is tiny, but *if* it happens the insurance company is immediately wiped out.

I respectfully submit that (a) hundreds of micro nuclear reactors operated all around our major cities are going to be less carefully, competently, and rigorously operated than fifty or so big ones *or* reactors in the care of the US Navy, and that (b) the cost of a micro nuclear reactor accident in the outskirts of a city isn't going to be particularly small; especially not if radioactive contamination makes it into our ground water.

Therefore (and for reasons of security) I see hundreds of micro nuclear reactors as a lot more threatening than a few big ones.

I furthermore feel that the whole issue is too important to take the nuclear industry's word for operational safety and security. Instead I think the whole concept, including safety and security, should be subject to a very public scrutiny. And one in which vigorous handwaving, of the type shown in the parent post, does has no place.

Windfarms are only profitable with government subsidy; wind mills cost more energy than they make in there serviceable lifetime (Hence the need for subsidy). Bad for bat populations, which are already in decline.

What? The ERoEI for wind power is pretty high, maybe as high as 20 If wind turbines used more energy to manufacture than they produced in their lifetime they would be useless. Wind power is profitable, less so than gas or coal currently are, but still profitable. Here they calculate the cost in dollars as $53.1 per mega watt hour for coal, $52.5 for gas, $55.8 for wind and $59.3 for nuclear.They do suffer from high capital costs though.

Solar panels are fantastically bad environmentally. They require the production of green house gasses far worse than CO2, lifetimes are limited and exponentially decay. They require toxic batteries to work, and are unreliable due to weather. 14% efficiency. Also, bad for ground-level wildlife.

I have tried to find out how toxic and inefficient the production of photovoltaic panels are but came up blank. This paper says the opposite, at least compared to coal, but really is that a surprise? In 3-5 years they have created more energy then was used to make them, with 300+ times less heavy metal pollution than coal.
Your post seems more biased against renewables with each sentence. Isn't exponential decay good compared to the alternative functions of decay? 20% loss in efficiency after 20 years does not sound too bad. However photovoltaic cells are fantastically expensive.

Nuclear (low risk, high output, radioactive half-lives are down to 200 years)

You forgot to mention expensive and 200 years half-life only if you are re-processing the fuel.
Wind power and nuclear are fairly favourable now, while photovoltaic have potential but are too expensive. Of course little will change until the inevitable finally happens and fossil fuels start to raise in price faster than other forms of energy generation. Until then coal and gas will meet most of our electricity needs unless the government looks ahead.

For those who don't know, perhaps this will shed some light upon the issue of "Nuclear Batteries." http://www.eoearth.org/article/Small_nuclear_power_reactors While this is a bit too verbose, if you read the section on Lead Cooled Fast Reactors, you will see that ANL has been working on this for years. The nuclear power industry has had two major accidents, TMI II and Chernobyl. In the case of Chernobyl, the scientists purposely disabled the safety systems on the reactor to run tests, which has been engineered out. With the new models, the passive safety systems prevent reactors from going above ALARA standards. For a quick lesson in reactor criticality, as others have stated when you attempt to power a reactor, you need at the very least, 1 neutron that is within the reactor's designed energy levels (thermal neutrons for thermal reactors, fast neutrons for fast reactors). This will allow you to maintain a power level, however if it is all you have, you cannot increase power. To increase power you need a surplus of neutrons being produced per fission that will reach the designated energy levels, which is mandated to be well below beta (the point where a reactor becomes prompt critical, i.e. likely meltdown). TLDR version: The industry is one of the most tightly legislated, and well trained in the world, and it is extremely improbable that the industry will ever have another significant accident.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nuclear_fuel_cycle

Interesting reading on the topic.

However the grandparent was making a legitimate attempt to back up his claim with multiple sources.

No, he was quoting National Geographic... the magazine that was warning us about eminent doom due to global cooling in the 1970's. They are not a scientific, peer reviewed journal that you greenie weenies always require of anyone who disputes your claims. So show us your evidence... Oh wait. You only only have one paper to back up what you are saying:

It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; that its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter K depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.

Here's another puzzler for you: Where does half of all the CO2 generated annually by fossil fuel combustion end up? No, I'm not joking. This is a serious question. Three gigatons disappear each year and climate scientists haven't got the slightest clue where it all goes.

To the climate scientists who have actually done the calculations with knowledge of all three cycles, there is virtually no support that plants and algae are going to have any significant effect. The consensus is that the method that CO2 will eventually be removed is by slow sedimentation.

Really? What does the "consensus" say about the three gigatons of CO2 that disappear annually into an unknown sink. Considering that three gigatons is about half of what is contributed by fossil fuels annually, I wouldn't call that an insignificant amount. Well, reading that climate scientist's page indicates all three hypothesis mentioned involve plant growth. It seems the "consensus" actually considers increased plant growth a real possibility as an explanation to that observation.

Since that amount of carbon has never been in the atmosphere at once we have no idea what it would be like.

There have been many times that amount of C in the atmosphere. About 500 million years ago, Earth went through an ice age with CO2 levels 8 to 20 time higher than they are presently.

The largest sink of carbon on the planet is not organic. It is limestone and dolomite. Those two absolutely dwarf the C locked in fossil fuels. All the fossil fuels on Earth sum up to about 9x10^15 grams. Total mass of C in limestone on the other hand is around 3x10^22grams. Soooo, about 3 million times as much C in limestone as in fossil fuels. Most of that was in the atmosphere. Most of that is now in the ground as a result of plankton and ocean sedimentation.

It may be enough to tip the atmosphere into a runaway state that would result in a Venus-like atmosphere. But that's beside the point.

It isn't beside the point... it is one of the stupidest thing you could possibly say. Who fed you that? Just saying something like that damages any credibility you might have. The atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% CO2. The atmosphere of Earth is roughly 380 parts per million (0.038%). In a hundred years of burning fossil fuels non stop, we've witnessed a rise in atmospheric CO2 of about 100ppm (0.01%). In the link above, you'll see that if you burned all the known fossil fuel reserves today, it would add roughly 77% more CO2 to the atmosphere for a total of what.... 0.07%? That's not even close to the Ordovician atmosphere, much less the Venusian.

> we haven't figured out what to do with the tons of nuclear
> waster we have NOW,much less if we did like McCain wants and
> added 45 new plants.

Of course ``we'' have:

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Fast_neutron_reactors_(FBR)

Prohibited by the Carter Administration in the USA, but used
throughout the World. Breeder reactors use the output of
conventional fission plants as fuel and the resultant waste,
once reprocessed, has a half-life of a few centuries instead
of hundreds of millenia.

Yeah right. You'd have better luck arguing about Iraq being to enrich Bush's contractor buddies. We could have done Iraq very much differently and gotten the oil cheaper, safer, and more reliably if it had truly been about the oil.

As you say, Iraq isn't all about oil. It's also about making defense contractors like Blackwater and all the mercenaries they employee rich too. At the same tyme they avoid any prosecution for human right violations and other crimes. The US has been doing this for years, in Columbia contractors are used to spray herbicides on coca fields, but a lot of it is sprayed on villagers food crops. It would of been cheaper to just let Saddam run Iraq like he did in the 1980s while the Reagan and Bush Sr admins supported him. Back then he was spraying Kurds and March Arabs with chemical weapons, he gassed Iran, and did a bunch of other nasty stuff but the US's support only ended when he invaded Kuwait, a Sheikdom not a democracy.

This is also a false attack in the part that oil is a trivial source of electricity in the USA - Coal is #1, followed by Natural Gas, Nuclear, and hydroelectric. Petrochemical production is 1.6% - Mostly from standby generators.

But what effects one energy sector effects others as well. I don't understand it but someone else shared a link explaining, now I can't find it.

Name an electricity provider that gets 'billions' in subsidies other than solar/wind.

1. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - FEDERAL
   "USA, FEDERAL, Annual. (Multiple fuels). Green Scissors: Cutting Wasteful & Environmentally Harmful Spending. 2004 report. 2003 report. 2002 report. Summaries of wasteful government programs, including many in the energy area." "Subsidies evaluated worth $37 - $64 billion per year to U. S. energy sector."
2. Energy Subsidies How do energy subsidies distort the energy market?
3. Energy Policy Act of 2005
4. Ten most distortionary energy subsidies
5. No Need for Energy Subsidies
6. "Reforming Energy Subsidies"[pdf]
   In the United States, for example, renewables and energy conservation together receive only 5per cent of total federal energy subsidies, according to studies carried out by the Government in 1999."
7. Running On Empty: How Environmentally Harmful Energy Subsidies Siphon Billions From Taxpayers
   January 31, 2002
8. Federal Energy Subsidies
9. "Energy Subsidies: Lessons Learned in Assessing Their Impact and Designing ..."
10. "Energy Subsidies: A Call for Better Data"

I hope that's enough for you.

However, the link you pointed seems to be rather suspect: "The motivation behind the Encyclopedia of Earth is simple. Go to Google and type in climate change, pesticides, nuclear power, sustainable development, or any other important environmental issue. Doing so returns millions of results, some fraction of which are authoritative. The remainder is of poor or unknown quality" .

In other words, "don't try to get all the facts, come to us for the truth".

You might think that making all the concrete, metal, plastics, etc, involved in the manufacture of all the generators will put a large burden on the environment, but actually compared to the energy investment in building, running, and decommissioning a nuclear power plant, the environmental burden is quite light: http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_in vestment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy

wind power is rather good in that respect:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_in vestment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy