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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."
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Sorry, but that's a bullshit answer.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
Ok, IRTFA. Sheesh, talk about using bazookas to swat flies. Is this anything more than FUD to scare people back to coal? Let me spell it out:
Solar-thermal plants using mirrors, steam turbines, and if you want 24/7, underground heat reservoirs. Completely buildable using some of the more common materials on the planet: sand, steel, concrete, copper, salt, etcetera. Who cares if they're inefficient compared to the super-fancy super-rare stuff in TFA, just build lots of them.
Maintenance? Bugger all in comparison to a coal plant, the bloody things run on sunshine. There's no toxic+radioactive coal dust/ash/soot getting into everything, no gas-guzzling trucks and trains leaving said dust billowing in their wake over nearby towns and farms as they go between mine and plant... blah blah bloody blah.
There are only three real reasons that the countries with plenty of sunshine (e.g. my own) haven't gone this route long ago: vested greed, common ignorance, short-term thinking.
TFA is complete BS, at least in terms of platinum.
I work for a company which is in the process of adding several centuries' supply of PGEs (platinum group elements) to proven reserves. Platinum and fuel cells are going to get a lot cheaper, within 10 years.
We know where PGEs are, but it's often in politically unstable places, or those that are busy strangling their domestic exploration industry (e.g. Canada).
This global recession will likely help finally unjam a lot of political roadblocks. When people are hurting, they don't tolerate environmental protests as much, and aren't as willing to turn a blind eye to eco-terrorism, which has wracked the industry in the last decade. Even the first world is finding it harder to ignore potentially adding a hundred billion to one's GDP for decades.
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One small nickel-iron type asteroid will also yield plenty of platinum, iridium and similar metals. Heck, there's still some disagreement over what they're mining in Sudbury, Ontario, is there because of magma upwelling after the original impact (circa 2bya) or remnants of the original impactor.
Separating them out can be done in space with a number of processes using large reflectors and solar heating. (Zone refining, fractional distillation, carbonyl extraction, etc..)
If we'd had the guts to start moving towards that when some people first started suggesting it seriously, we'd be there or nearly so by now.
-- Alastair
Acidification may or may not be affected by carbon. It likely is, to some small extent. But, the major causes of acidification is pollution, in the form of human waste and sewerage, and agricultural runoff. Turning the oceans into a cesspool was never a good idea.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
I've decided that the Matrix (and Joe Rogan for that matter) were correct: humans are no different than a virus. Think about it; what we consider "intelligence" or "sentience" is nothing more than a certain threshold of organization crossed.
Now take that level on a macro level. What virii are most successful? The ones that A) don't inhibit their transfer B) the ones that keep their hosts alive long enough to be transferred (or at least enticing to another organism in death) and C) the ones that evolve when A or B fails.
YES there is a point to this! I just think that we as humans need to find our balance. How much of a fever(1)/the runs(2) can we give the Earth? I still say the chances are the earth is going to be shot(3) or some other form of brain death(4) first anyway [/eeyore]
1. Global Warming
2. Volcanism
3. Asteroids
4. Humans exterminated due to lack of evolution/war/general stupidity
"The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works." That is not accurate. Years of peer-reviewed published literature showed us that there was an "aether" or "ether" in space, which provided some sort of framework on which the universe was based, or constructed. That aether supposedly formed a medium by which visible light and other forms of radiation were transmitted. It was only in the last century that the concept was proven wrong. Real science consists of observing the physical universe, drawing conclusions, and testing those conclusions to prove or to disprove the conclusions. It simply doesn't MATTER how many people THINK that the original hypothesis was right, or how vocal they are about their belief. It doesn't even matter if there is some silly thing like a "consensus" among scientists. The rest of your post is hardly worth considering. As I said, at least twice in pre-history, those carbon levels shot extremely high. You dismiss that fact with the idea that it wasn't the same earth. It almost seems that you believe the laws of physics have changed dramatically at some point in the earth's history. I certainly hope you aren't trying to pass your SELF off as some kind of a climatologist? Please, we already have to many self-acclaimed climatologists making noise out there.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I know this wasn't your point, so don't take this the wrong way; your comment about aether reminded me of a talk I heard once about evolution, given at a church (!); to paraphrase one particularly fun segment: "science changes its mind all the time, so it's essentially always wrong; you should instead rely on the Bible, which never changes its mind." It's wrong on so many levels, I needn't go into it directly; I should however point out that the talk was given by someone who styled himself a scientist, collected dinosaur bones, and was asking for money from the church so he could go buy more dinosaur bones, so he could put them in a museum display intended to prove that evolution (and history in general) never actually happened.
Analyzing data is hard. Asking the right questions, with the right assumptions, arriving at the right conclusions, and communication all of this clearly and fully to anyone else ... is hard. And even then, we still get it wrong, at least for a while. Cherish your differences!
Don't assume that counter-data is a counter-argument: in mathematics, finding an exception to the rule is a sure sign that something's wrong; in applied sciences, it's only an exception to the rule if you meet all sorts of criteria about the circumstances of the event. Saying "CO2 has risen before" is not the same as saying any of:
a) it is not rising right now
b) this event has the same cause has previous events
c) this event will have the same effects
d) same effects at different points in time are equivalent
I'm beginning to wonder just what IS in those deadzones.....
Little to no oxygen. Which I think is a more immediate problem than acidification.
If we have documentation about alkaline runoff - there ought to be more documentation about acid runoff.
It's not so much there would be acid runoff, not because of CO2 at least. CO2 is an acidic oxide, which water will absorb. On land though plants will use it to grow.
Oh, something I just recalled. You know how some people say "let's plant more trees"? While CO2 boosts the growth of some trees, it slows the growth of other trees. And guess what plant loves CO2? Poison ivy. It grows faster with higher CO2 levels.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Ever heard of Bjørn Lomborg? He is a nutcase who published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he (who has only one peer-reviewed publication in an unrelated field) said that all environmental scientist were were wrong about pretty much everything.
So, what happened to his career? While he was denounced by Scientific American and Nature, he was defended by The Economist, not exactly a climatology publication. The Danish government gave Lomborg the chair of a newly created "Environmental Assessment Institute", he published further books, and ended up in TIME's list of the 100 most influential people of 2004.
So, that's what happens when one is not in agreement with the scientific consensus, but says things that governments want to hear: lots of money, media attention, skyrocketing career. Lomborg was just a mediocre associate professor with only one peer-reviewed paper from 1996, who was looking at a very boring and uneventful career. By cherry-picking and fabricating data, he's a world star of climate-change denial now (note that last time I checked, he did not deny climate change outright, or even that it is anthropogenic, only that it is "inefficient" to do something about it, in practice reaching the same conclusion as deniers).
If anything, it amazes me that so few scientists do the same.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Your comment about clouds was interesting. I looked it up and the best I could find was a response to a comment on RealClimate : Whether clouds are a positive or negative feedback depends on where they form (higher clouds have a net positive forcing), how 'thick' they are and how long they persist. You can make innumerable logical deductions about which way the cloud feedback 'should' go, but our current best observations and modelling have not been able to pin down even the sign of the net response. Some models therefore show small negative feedbacks, some show small positive feedbacks - though in neither case are the responses dominant over the more important feedbacks.
I must ask what made you focus on the Antarctic when the Artic lost 1 million square kilometers of ice two summers ago - or 1/4 of its summer minimum : Cryosphere Today
Also FYI the arctic is cooling meme has expired : Real climate
FYI the 9 years of cooling : Real climate
Agreed - none of the lake, and island anecdotes are useful.