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Engineers are good at making useful things out of worthless land

Except there are lots of places where desert land is EXPENSIVE. Phoenix isn't as bad as Los Angeles, but it's not a cheap place to live. Median home prices in Indian Wells are $700,000. In fact you can't afford a 2-br apartment in Palm Desert. Land in Detroit is probably MUCH cheaper than desert land anywhere in California, yet no engineers running out there.

Edison looked at a small village in the California desert and thought it would be a great place to produce his new moving pictures.

Edison made his films in New York or New Jersey, and NEVER had any desire or intention to move anywhere. Hollywood was founded by other film-makers, in large part to get away from Edison's patents, which were enforced in New York, but not so much on the other, distant, coast.

And just as importantly, Hollywood is NOT A DESERT. Never has been. Southern California's water problems are due to a huge and thirsty population, with insufficient surface water sources in the area.

Comparison with arable land and with living space lets you identify how much land 6,000+ acres is. How about I just tell you I can build a more efficient plant on a span of 1,000 plutons?

Building in a desert has its own problems.

For reasons I've never understood, CSP salt towers are usually about 17% efficient; Photovoltaics range from 15% for your standard fare to 19% for top-end panels. By contrast, parabolic reflectors using a dish pointed at a small sterling engine mounted where a radio dish would place its satellite receiver have efficiencies as high as 31%. They're more maintenance (thus more expensive power) than a salt tower, and only generate during the day; salt towers might generate 1/4 or 1/5 as much power, but continue generating that output for twice as long, giving some night-time power and roughly half the total generation.

Sigh, bleeding heart study stating the opposite http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

From what I can find (just the abstract and the letter linked by drinkypoo), the study referenced in the article assumes the heat island effect, then evaluates its effect on tortoises, it doesn't actually attempt to model heat absorption to determine whether the heat island effect would occur. The referenced papers on heat island effects are all about urban heat islands, caused by paving.

So, it appears to me that the author, biologist Barry Sinervo, just assumed that solar farms covered in PV panels would produce urban heat islands similar to urban regions covered in black pavement, and then calculated what would happen to tortoises if they were exposed to the same level of heating as if big chunks of the desert were paved. The study I cited (written by atmospheric and climate scientists) did model the differential heat absorption effects, and found that large solar farms will cause localized cooling, not heating.

So, ignoring epithets like "bleeding heart" and focusing just on the science, it appears to me that Sinervo's assumption of heat islands was unsupported and wrong, though I can see his rationale if one forgets about the energy converted to electricity.

No but a blackbody absorbs more than something green or brown.

This study found that covering deserts with solar farms would reduce the absorbed heat enough to create regional cooling.

Sigh, bleeding heart study stating the opposite http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

Surprised, surprise: We already knew you were a spectacular idiot because you were willing to link the Daily Fail as if it meant something. I tracked down more information on Sinervo's bullshit (note he does not provide nor cite his own study, claims to have this information and then does not provide an adequate citation!) but he fails to comprehend how heat islands work. They produce a minimal localized heating effect down wind of the source, which rapidly dissipates, because heat rises. This actually even happens with wind power; the turbulence causes heating, but the effect dissipates rapidly. The highest temperatures in solar power are found in thermal solar with collectors, but in that case, the collector is substantially elevated; meaning the heat escapes the area even more rapidly.

The truth is that the albedo of a solar panel is only 25% from that of sand, and we are only covering a minuscule percentage of the desert with panels, so you can only have a minuscule effect.

http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

Sigh, bleeding heart study stating the opposite http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

True, those plants were probably brown and dead from the heat island effect of solar power plants
http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...
Thus she was just observing an effect and attributing it to the correct source for incorrect reasons.

The idea of pulling plastic out of the oceans is senseless to anyone who gives the idea a minute of thought. Do these people have any idea how big the ocean is and how small the particles of plastic can be?

Human progress since the Industrial Revolution has been based on cheap energy.

Well, then doesn't that mean we ought to start looking past fossil fuels then? After all oil won't stay cheap forever. And as long as we're looking, why not put "clean" on the punch list?

"Cheap", by the way, is not an unambiguous term, because the market doesn't count externalities like pollution. In China air pollution from "cheap" energy contributes to as many as 1.2 million premature deaths a year (source).

We've been doing unintentional geoengineering for hundreds of years now, why would some intentional geoengineering be so bad?

Because it might allow us to continue with global trade, industrial capitalism and rising prosperity.

Show me any practical, proven technology whose wide-spread deployment would significantly reduce GHG emissions and I will show you a green activist group vehemently opposed to it.

Wind: http://www.energyenvironmental...

Solar: http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

Hydro: http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

And of course Nuclear: http://www.nationaljournal.com...

Some people will claim that green activists aren't opposed to all these (and other) technologies per se but rather to these specific projects... and yet there is in fact opposition to every single specific project of sufficient scale or scope to make a difference, so that is clearly false. It is simply not plausible that every single project regardless of technology just happens to be so bad for the Earth it is worthy of vigorous opposition, unless you're against industrial capitalism, global trade and rising prosperity regardless, in which case you should just be honest and say so, and stop with all the irrelevant distractions about the climate.

Green activists are like anti-contraception activists: they believe their target activity (industrial capitalism/sex) is bad in and of itself, and cannot ever be made good, but they disingenuously and dishonestly claim that they are opposed to it because of its potential negative consequences... and then do everything they can to prevent anyone from ameliorating those consequences.

GA: "Global warming is bad! We must shut down industrial capitalism!"

Technologist: "Hey, I can fix things so industrial capitalism wouldn't cause global warming."

GA: "We must not do that!:

Tech: "Why not?"

GA: "Because industrial capitalism is bad!"

Tech: "How come?"

GA: "Because it causes global warming!"

Tech: "But I just showed you how we can avoid that."

GA: "We can't! You're lying! It's a trap! Industrial capitalism can't be made good because it's bad!"

Tech: "Fuck you. I'm going to go ahead anyway."

GA: goes away muttering, waving copy of Malthus...

http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...

Dude, I pointed you at a specific example. Here's the dashboard for the generation in France
That is not base load, that is the "load following" curve, ofc that is changing drastically. A picture explaining base laod: http://www.abc.net.au/science/...
Here is again a picture explaining what base load is: http://www.eike-klima-energie....
The blue part is base load.
This picture explains what base load is: http://www.allmystery.de/i/taf... it is the yellow and brown part (note the horizontal never changing line)
Something from Swizerland: http://www.win-swiss.ch/htm/st... the second last picture shows what base load is: it is everything up to the red line.

And now in english:
http://www.renew-reuse-recycle... The base load line is not visible, judging from the peak of roughly 50GW, base load is somewhere around 20GW - 25GW (Germany has 40% base load versus peak load relation, France has roughly 50% base load versus peak load relation)

OH A PERFECT PAGE You should pay me for trying to hammer this into your brain: http://www.geothermal-electric...
The "red" line is the base load line. Rather strange to have such a high base load, interesting.
I cite: In this graph, the base load is 120 megawatts, in the early hours of the morning. Demand does not fall below this base load at any time during the 24 hours.
Do you grasp it? Base load: the amount of power I always feed into the greed regardless of demand In germany actually around that time "demand is falling below" base load. I mentioned that to you in one of my first posts. The excess is mainly used to fill up our own pumped storages. So we create an artificial demand, if you want to say so, with the effect that our base load is a bit higher than it "could be".

Something you should have googled yourself instead of making an idiot of yourself: http://www.power-technology.co...
Care to read the text at the lowest dashed line? Or can you already guess what is written there?

A base load solar plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Unfortunately no picture here: http://www.kcet.org/news/rewir...
But a laymen's explanation, I cite: As you can see, even when California is on "standby" setting, around 5:00 am or so, we still consume a considerable amount of power. That's the power consumption base load.

For the next wrong answers of yours, I demand my usually salary which is $100 per hour for correcting your mistakes. Or stay dumb ... that is free of course.

San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.

Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)

Of course desalination is going to require more energy, which is why the 'activists' oppose every energy project that comes along, even these: http://www.kcet.org/news/the_b...
If there's an opportunity to stick it to the human species, they will take it.

It's not even a hidden agenda. It's openly expressed in some of the other posts right in this thread.

I'm not sure why you're being modded flamebait, it's true. Look, for example, who was funding Prop 37. People out there know they can make money by creating and playing off fears, and that's exactly what the organic movement does. They want people to look at food and wonder if feeding it to their kids will make them sick, so that they'll pay extra for their 'better' and 'safe' foods. There's also organizations like Greenpeace who sell fear for donation money; why do you think Golden Rice, which could save thousands of lives, is such a high priority for them? Why do you think they, specifically, targeted and destroyed CSIRO's low GI wheat research field, which, if it works (and since Greenpeace destroyed the research we don't know that it does) could produce diabetic friendly bread with a direct benefit to consumers? Sure, some people might have to die, but Greenpeace & other professional activists and the organic industry have to keep that money rolling in...of course, Monsanto is the evil greedy one.

Pseudoscience alert! From KCET's Chris Clarke
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/east-ca/learn-how-to-hate-the-desert-with-ted.html

Savory's talk is full of red flags, and to document and rebut each one would take more time than is really wise to spend on the talk. But three stand out as especially egregious.

The notion that bare, unvegetated soil in the American desert is an evil to be avoided flies in the face of everything we know about desert soil science. Bare soil in the desert includes desert pavement, a self-regulating system that controls air pollution. It includes alkaline crusts and dry lake beds, both homes to unique assemblages of organisms. Seemingly bare soil may hold seed banks of diverse assemblages of annual plants, some of which are limited enough in extent that covering the soil with grassland -- even if you could do so -- would push them toward extinction. And sparsely vegetated soil is crucial for the survival of many animal species, including desert tortoises, fringe-toed and horned lizards, and other animals that actually belong in the desert far more than do cattle.

The idea that grasses must be eaten by livestock to perform a valuable ecological function is similarly absurd. Grasses provide food, shelter, and even construction material for hundreds of desert animals ranging from jackrabbits to tiny insects, each of which is eaten in turn by other animals. Send in a wave of cattle to crop those grasses and we've diverted that ecological productivity to our own ends, depriving the local wildlife of food and habitat. Bunchgrasses can live for centuries if untrampled, providing year after year of ecological benefit to hundreds of generations of wildlife. Savory, like many grazing advocates, seems to regard such ancient bunchgrasses as decadent: In Lynn Jacobs' 1991 book "Waste of The West," Jacobs says "Savory claims like most ranchers that old growth range plants are 'useless' and 'decadent.'" But, adds Jacobs, "like tree snags in forests, standing dead range plant material is itself an important, natural environmental component."

Lastly, Savory's contention that the "algal crust" he shows developing on arid land soil is "the cancer of desertification" is unscientific in the extreme. He makes the statement at 4:00 into the TED video, but it's one he's made for years. Lynn Jacobs wrote in 1991 that students of (what was then being called) HRM learned from Savory that "Cryptogams are a prime indicator of a deteriorating environment." (To underscore his postulation, commonly Savory scuffs apart the cryptogamic layer while walking on Rangeland.)

This is, of course, completely false. Cryptobiotic soil crusts are a crucial underpinning of old-growth desert habitats across North America, and indeed throughout much of the world.

Savory has been around for a very long time preaching the same fallacious grazing gospel, and his name raises curled lips among land management scientists the way Velikovsky's name raises the ire of astronomers. He's merely the latest practitioner of a tradition a couple centuries long of land management mythologies based on wishful thinking that don't turn out to work. A century ago land speculation boosters in the American West claimed that "rain follows the plow"; Savory has merely updated that to "grass follows the cow."

Or, you go back to old fashioned boiler plate tech using mirrors to concentrate the light to generate heat to create steam or melt salt

Fortunately this is still 'solar' power :) Though perhaps not quite as useful as photovoltaic cells on every surface.

But tech is always improving - solar panels without rare earths (or at least significantly fewer)

Uh, yeah. Let me guess. It should be on the market in five years, just like every other solar technical wonder.

Oh please. If only you knew what was really going on, you'd have trouble breathing. Prices for solar power have dropped so rapidly and so consistently people are calling it "Moore's Law for Solar". A quote from the article: Solar modules prices have dropped from $300 per watt in 1956 to $50 per watt in the 1970s to $10 in the 90s to $1.05 a watt today. Just what did you think this should look like?

Approximately half of all the generating capacity last year was from renewable energy sources. The miracle of having an actually usable smartphone was a pipe dream just 5 years ago. Now, even most poor folks have one.

Today, anybody can afford to board a high speed aircraft and travel at 350 MPH at 40,000 with safety that rivals our living rooms. Think about that. A chair, 40,000 feet in the air, travelling 350 MPH, affordable to nearly everybody, complete with magazines to read, and we mostly complain about the noise.

Sheesh.

Most commercial applications of genetically modified food have been developed to benefit the producer, not the consumer

So what? Have you gotten any direct benefits from silos or tractors (besides in terms of cost)? What is wrong with somethng only benefiting farmers and/or the environment (and if you don't think GE crops benefit the environment, thing again: they facilitate no-till agriculture, which prevents fertilizer runoff and reduces carbon emissions).

and the consumer has a right to know about it when it's occurred

But why is it only GE and not everything else? Selective breeding, various types of hybridization, somaclonal variation and mutagenesis, induced polyploidy, sport selection, wide crosses, and embryo rescue, ect all get a free pass? What about everything else you could say about a crop, like where it was grown, what fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, plant growth regulators, ect were applied? Hell, most things don't even label the variety name, let alone the genetic history or a crop.

People should be allowed to know what the modification made was, and then choose whether or not they wish to consume food possessing that modification. If we're talking about increased Beta Carotene levels in Golden Rice, I suspect most consumers won't have a problem with it. If we're talking about soybeans and corn that have been modified to survive repeated direct spraying with Glyphosate - more people will probably opt out of eating that.

What about Clearfield wheat or any of the other non-GE crops bred for herbicide resistance? Why should that get a free pass? And what if I want to know the conventionally bred genes found in my non-GE food? It is very inconsistent to single out one method of crop improvement and ignore the rest. And do you think non-GE corn should have a label informing that it had more pesticides than an insect resistant GE corn? Somehow I can't imagine the movement for a label like that being so popular.

This thing is anti-science for the same reason those 'Warning: Evolution is only a theory' labels were anti-science. No one is denying that evolution is only a theory, but you know damned well the point of that was not to inform, it was to cast doubt on the validity of evolution (because how many people are going to respond by saying 'Only a theory like gravity'?). This is the same thing. They are singling something out because of political controversy, not science. Well, and profit of course. While it is true that Monsanto and others are funding the anti-side, organic businesses (and Mercola the homeopath and anti-vaxxer, so you know where the directors of this movement stand on science) are funding the pro, and what a fortunate coincidence, they don't use GE crops.

And by the way, do you want to know how to tell if something s GE or not? I always know if I'm eating something that is GE. Corn, soy, canola, cotton, sugar beet, alfalfa, summer squash, papaya. That's it. If something has those in it, its probably GE. You want to avoid GE, avoid those, or buy organic or things labeled non-GMO (like things certified via the Non-GMO Project). Millions of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jainists, and vegans get by without special labels just by educating themselves. Anyone who wants to avoid GE crops does not deserve a special law because they will not take responsibility for their own lifestyles and educate themselves.

This guy is saying the sort of things that have been getting me downmodded here on slashdot for years.

Global Warming/Climate Change may or may not be happening. But if it is it ain't happening at anything like the rate that would justify dismantling civilization over, we still aren't sure whether it is us or a natural cycle we don't undertstand, etc. And he doesn't go there but I will: too many politicians with a preexisting anti-civilization (Western industrial captialism based ccivilization that is...) bias glommed onto AGW with the willing consent of a lot of brand name scientists, thereby (rightly) harming the public's trust of all science.

Curbing CO2 emissions is hardly "dismantling civilization". Good grief. By that logic, emission regulations should have sent us to the stone age, but they haven't. What regulations on emissions have done is reduced smog and improved human health. You found a few stupid scientists who took things too far and now you see a way to deny the whole thing, but it's not going to work. Just because the extreme scenarios (that nobody believed anyway) didn't happen in two business cycles, doesn't mean the whole thing is bunk. http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/laws-that-shaped-la/how-los-angeles-began-to-put-its-smoggy-days-behind.html

I believe it is region dependent, but some can see them from their own site with no problem. wikipedia has plenty of background info on them. Their depth of coverage surprised me.

http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

A free-to-air satellite system can legally pick them and others up for just the price of the hardware.
Galaxy 19 North America 12152 H / 20000 / 3/4

They're also on MHz WorldView which is on some cable systems and public tv stations (such as subchannel 28.4 of KCET Los Angeles) (a couple of newscasts a day) MHz WorldView also has news from Israel, Japan, France, Germany and other English language international news sources)
Note they they carry other interviews and in-depth features not included when getting only the newscasts.

http://proweb.myersinfosys.com/week.php?timezone=0&station=world&channel=MHz+Worldview&airdate=

http://www.mhznetworks.org/mhzworldview/programming/

KCET has been running extra newscasts on their main 28.1 channel and cable feeds, and at least temporarily streaming from their web site.

http://www.kcet.org/egyptcrisis/

As always it's good to get a broad perspective and be less affected by any bias by getting news from a variety of sources

If something you'd like to see isn't on a cable system you use, ASK THEM TO ADD IT.

Those who saw news that didn't provide info on Google advertising employee Wael Ghonim from Dubai, part of the "April 6" group, the one who posted the January 25 Revolution Facebook page and got training from some involved with actions in elsewhere, may have seen more limited coverage. Wael Ghonim was detained for 12 days. His at times tearful interview following release certainly boosted the protest crowds that had started to wane after so many days. Early-on, RT (Russia Today) showed matching fist graphics used by the April 6 group and another and claimed that showed U.S. ties. (I'd ju

It's not every day one sees whip-carrying police on camels and horses. (I almost chocked on a sandwich when I saw NHK Japan report the animals as ceremonial. Opps! They missed the scenes showing the riders with whips. The blankets on the animals were surprisingly colorful. NHK generally has very high quality programmming) The Israeli broadcasts reflect nervousness,,,

On a funnier note, checking out some Spanish language coverage online led me to find a bug in Google translate (also seen in a 3rd party Mac Widget that uses it).

Does Google know something we don't??

"en esta capital" in Spanish translates to "in Beijing" in English!

http://translate.google.com/

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/calculate_convert/texttranslation.html

(those utilities are useful if one checks out some of the twitter feeds mentioned in coverage which include some in Arabic language)

Schools such as RFK were built with funds from a bond measure passed by voters in the LA county area. The terms of this bond measure requires that funds be spent on construction, and forbade any other use. There was a very good piece on this issue that I've linked to: http://www.kcet.org/socal/socal_connected_online/video/blackboard-bungle.html

Weekdays at 5pm.