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Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
Uh, no, it's not right in the article. It's in the comments. And we all know what comments are worth.
C'mon, at least try to be effective in your deliberate deception.
Scientists who study the climate agree that the climate is changing. What is not yet agreed upon is if the specific 'why' this time is due solely, or even partly, to human-introduced CO2, or if it's business as usual like the last few millions of years of records indicate. Heck, the jury's still out on whether CO2 leads or lags temperature rises, whether the simulations of a chaotic system are accurate enough, etc.
We need research into different energy sources, it's true, but what boggles my mind is why people don't address the simple things in their own lives, if they're concerned about energy conservation. The funniest thing I can see in this particular arena is the moron who rails against the oil companies and middle eastern governments, terrorists, and whatever else, then gets in his Explorer to commute to work by himself, getting 3 mpg, while babbling on his phone about how bad the energy situation is. If you drive a truck (no, I don't use the euphemistic 'SUV'), then shut the F up- you're part of the problem.
There is so much BS going around about alternative energy sources, but we could make a big difference now. I haven't ever owned a car that got less than 25 MPG, and I work half of my time from home; when I don't, I often ride a train. I doubt there are many alternative energy advocates that are close to my carbon footprint, but they put their faith in technology that doesn't exist instead of getting their supersized butts out of their trucks. And people listen to them anyway.
Bull, the IPCCC report says that it's "very likely" that human made CO2 results in climate change. That's about as definitive as you're likely to get from a very large group of scientists. Yes the precise details are not clear yet, but most of the uncertainty is about how *bad* it could/would get. That human activity is vastly increasing the CO2 levels is clear. That this has a significant influence on the climate is pretty much as well.
Climate scientists are not in complete agreement. It is always possible to find a few scientists that disagree with consensus opinion. Sometimes these mavericks are even right. See and the continental drift hypothesis.
However, many of the commenters above appear to be using some disagreement to deny climate change (forgive me if I'm reading too much into the comments. Attacking the consensus is a common tactic of deniers).
I would suggest that people look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is a United Nations effort with a very large number of scientists involved. So many, from so many different countries, that I would suggest that the information represents consensus opinion and should be listened to very carefully.
Let me quote their latest major report from 2007 (taken from Wikipedia).
" * Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
* Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
* Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the likely amount of temperature and sea level rise varies greatly depending on the fossil intensity of human activity during the next century (pages 13 and 18).[34]
* The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.
* World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 ÂC (2.0 and 11.5 ÂF) during the 21st century (table 3) and that:
o Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3].
o There is a confidence level >90% that there will be more frequent warm spells, heat waves and heavy rainfall.
o There is a confidence level >66% that there will be an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme high tides.
* Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
* Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years
"
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it...." is regularly attributed to Joseph Goebbels. However, I have found no evidence that he said it. Everyone quotes everyone else, but no one ever gives a source. See: http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm.
"A lie told often enough becomes truth" Vladimir Lenin.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
They are NOT agreed.
Yes. They. Are.
According to this recent study, 97% of specialists and 82% of scientists in general agree with anthropomorphic climate change.
So, what's your evidence that scientists do not agree? Put up or shut up.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
The data we have on the Earth presents a pretty good picture of warming, and the scientific consensus is that it's human caused. The trend in scientific consensus is also increasingly towards it being human caused.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Here, try actually getting a clue before spouting the party line. You may want to believe that you are so important that you can start and stop climate change but no, You're not.
I know your next move will be to discredit and belittle the people that believe other than you do so I included all their names and credentials.
I know it's long, so try really hard to focus and concentrate and you might be able to make it through the whole letter.
The following is the Dec. 13th 07 letter to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations on the UN Climate conference in Bali:
Dear Mr. Secretary-General,
Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction
It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.
The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by Âgovernment Ârepresentatives. The great Âmajority of IPCC contributors and Âreviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.
Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:
 Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
 The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
 Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.
In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is "settled," significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming. But because IPCC working groups were generally instructed (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/wg1_time
Ice core data tells us what the CO2 concentrations used to be. We can reconstruct atmospheric conditions for hundreds of thousands of years into the past. Lets consult the ice core data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Gee... looks like the CO2 started to shoot up during the industrial revolution. I'm pretty sure industrial revolutions are man-made things, but double check me on that just to be sure. While Earth has had CO2/temperature/etc fluctuate throughout history, the recent rate of CO2 concentration has increased at a clearly unnatural rate. And this "it's caused by the sun" argument was been thoroughly dismantled. The solar-variance explanation predicts a warming of the stratosphere. Global warming predicts a cooling of the stratosphere. Guess what? The stratosphere has been cooling.
How much peer-reviewed scientific literature do you see published per year that contradicts the anthropogenic global-warming explanation?
when indium dries up your going to have to coat your roof in cadnium.
When indium price rise then it will be economically feasible to mine it from places it is not feasible now, much like happened with oil.
i've said for years that PV is no good
PVs aren't the only way to generate power from the sun. At large scales solar concentrators may be more efficient. And PV tech may improve.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
... these same climate experts were also spouting off that there would be an ice age not so long ago.
Citation needed.
Try this one: Study Debunks Global Cooling myth of the 90s (or here)
"The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s -- frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds -- is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era....
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends. The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".
Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
Just 5 years ago, everbody spoke about the coming shortage of Lithium. Now we are loaded with it.
With that said, You missed Wind and Geo-thermal. In particular, geo-thermal is the only base-load type of AE out there. What has amazed me is how many fools there are do not realize that there is SHALLOW wells, and then there are DEEP wells. The good news is that smart groups like Google, the state of CA and NM are investing heavily into geo-thermal and those that are making it cheap.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PUT THE WASTE?
Nuclear waste isn't magically dangerous. There are nuclear materials that are super "hot", emitting scary amounts of radiation; these have a half-life that is very short. Given a few years, they radiate themselves down to about nothing. There are nuclear material that have a half-life of 10,000 years or so; and they are hardly radioactive at all, much less of a threat than the radioactivity that goes up the chimny stacks of a coal power plant every day. There are NO nuclear materials that are scary hot for tens of thousands of years. Its one or the other.
Various posters here on /. have made the claim that if we use "breeder" reactors, that we can re-use much of what is called "waste" now. We can re-use it over and over, and what is left will be a small amount of waste that isn't hard to manage.
Remember also that the best thing about nuclear power: you don't need very much fuel for the amount of power you get. With coal, you need tons and tons of the stuff every day, and that means tons of ash flying out of the chimny stacks (much of that ash radioactive). If you could filter out the ash, instead of putting it in the air, you would then have tons of ash waste to dispose of every day. The nuclear waste is comparatively nastier and harder to dispose of, but there is oh so much less of it.
...Mars is also undergoing global warming...
Mars is not warming.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.
You overestimate how far back you have to go to realize the rate of increasing CO2 is a problem (not so much the level of CO2 as much as the speed at which we get there). The fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter that's formed and been sequestered underground over many millions of years. It happened very very slowly. Humans have taken millions of years worth of coal and oil, and reintroduced all that ancient carbon back into the biosphere. We'll have returned all that ancient carbon into the environment within a mere couple hundred years. That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before.
And yes while CO2 concentrations for millions of years ago are interesting (such data has been reconstructed for the Phanerozoic at least, that I know of) it describes a vastly different world. The more you shuffle the continents to where they used to be, the less like our world it is. A focus on the more recent half-million years is warranted over the last 500 million. For example, we want to know what melting glaciers will to THIS Earth's albedo, not the Triassic Earth.
Also, your CO2 graph is not the same as many others available in your average google search.
Cite them. I'm willing to bet they're simply in different units, use a different range or scale, or may even use a different proxy for CO2 concentrations than ice cores. Keep in mind, that graph was compiled from multiple sources of data (sources of data correspond to the color of the line). You don't need to use an ice core to tell you what the temperature was 20 years ago.
I don't disagree that humans are spewing shit in to the atmosphere, and common sense says this can't be good, but as others have pointed out, there is a whole lot more to this climate change than just CO2.
We also put out lots of methane and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 actually. CO2 just happens to be the primary cause of the warming because we put out so much more of it than other gasses.
But, now we need to determine HOW MUCH he has contributed. For those who have missed it, Mars is also undergoing global warming.
Let me tell you something about the Mars climate change. Its cause is due to albedo changes due to dust on Mars, and has nothing to do with climate change on Earth.
I happen to know the gal who write that Mars global warming paper. In fact, she's one of my best friends. So I certainly didn't miss it. I also didn't miss it when she told me that people who hold up her paper to deny anthropogenic climate change on Earth are "clueless" and probably didn't read past her title, either.
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
Sorry Charlie, it's not crap, either. Those couple (three actually... was four for a while until MGS died) of spacecraft are designed and used to measure surface temperature, albedo, and all kinds of other nifty properties. It's amazing what you can do with spectrometers, IR imagers, and bolometers. And the data we have on Mars isn't exactly tiny, either. But as I said above to the other guy, the reasons are albedo change due to dust patterns and have nothing (NOTHING!) to do with the Earth.
As it happens, we have one (1) known occurrence of similarly abrupt increase in CO2 level. At the end of the Permian, a volcano system known as the "Siberian traps" set huge coal beds afire (think pacific "ring of fire" meets middle east oil fields). A large percentage of the worlds coal was burned in a geological eye-blink.
The was immediately followed by the Permian mass extinction, the largest mass extinction event in the worlds history, when pretty much every living thing on Earth died and only a handful of species (think things like cockroaches) had enough surviving members to struggle through.
--MarkusQ