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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.
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
... 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
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