Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter"
They are NOT agreed.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
For things like solar, sure. But I don't see wind or tidal power generation needing anything more advanced than fiberglass.
Use less energy.
No, it can't solve everything, but more conservation would be vastly more helpful than trying to exploit new energy sources.
The article points out Indium in some of the better solar cells in the lab (40% efficient), and Platinum as an important catylist in a hydrogen fuel cells. Both of these are already valuable metals for existing applications, and will easily see minable reserves dry up if you add on renewable energy applications.
However, this is why you don't focus on one and only one solution to this problem. Solar reflectors, wind, tidal, and nuclear all have roles to play.
Not a typewriter
I disagree categorically with the article title. Sustainable energy is the only sane way to exist and make tradition upon. If in the short term, we find we can't implement some energy catching machine because of a scarity of an earthbound resource, someone will find another way. Human innovation is invincible.
Take it even further. Neither nuclear nor geothermal suffer from this supposed problem. And not even all solar power systems face it--molten salt and biomass-mediated systems, for example, won't suffer either.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
Bah.
--MarkusQ
Here's the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager The problem back then was supposed to be population which would drive the cost of scarce materials up. But lo and behold, despite a decade with the largest population growth in history, the prices went down. I'd bet anyone the same with regard to indium or any other metal. Not only will we not run out in 10 years, but the price will be lower.
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
But although silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen, it makes relatively inefficient cells that struggle to compete with electricity generated from fossil fuels. And the most advanced solar-cell technologies rely on much rarer materials than silicon...
...The efficiency of solar cells is measured as a percentage of light energy they convert to electricity. Silicon solar cells finally reached 25% in late December. But multi-junction solar cells can achieve efficiencies greater than 40%.
Hmm, so Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust at 25% efficiency and the alternative at a measly 15% performance gain will dry out in around a decade. Disclaimer: I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
Do the math. Looks like we'll be melting down more sand and (hopefully) augmenting our nuclear power in the near future.
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
--MarkusQ
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.
An earlier poster mentioned it but how about geothermal energy? Use the latent heat stored in the Earth to boil water to drive a turbine. The water is forced down into the Earth's crust where heat trapped millenia ago boils the water. This technology is under serious consideration for the central part of Australia, and I can think of places in America where it is viable as well. As for the copper coils used in converting the power one of the main areas of research today in the field of power generation is a superconductor which would mean less copper and more power from all existing technologies
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
As even mentioned in the article, the prices of the resources used in the construction of these renewable energy systems have dramatically increased due to unexpected increases in demand.
As prices go up and up, manufacturers aren't gonna be entering bidding wars for the last few grams of silicon. They're going to try and find cheaper materials that do the same job, switch to systems that don't use materials of such increasingly scarce supply, or decrease the amount of rare materials that each unit needs. Solar panels, windmills, etc. aren't going to become impossible to produce in a few decades.
These materials are scarce on Earth, but asteroids and other worlds would have these resources as well.
.. is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
Nuclear is clean, safe and practically inexhaustible. The latest advances could provide small nuclear "batteries" the size of a hot tube that could provide power to an entire neighborhood decentralizing much of the power systems (and huge networks of wires) we've come to think of as unavoidable. Making our power systems virtually fool proof. For too long we've lived in the fear from the propaganda of the illiterate press. It's time to start using the miraculous energy source we uncovered and made practical nearly 3/4 of a century ago. It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
Go nukes! Go nukes! Go nukes!
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.
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.
I thought the problem was that they can't get the transmission lines built because the NIMBY guys have been keeping the power companies in court for years. Last I heard they were finally getting started with the lines though, so the situation might turn around in a few years.
I read the internet for the articles.
The situation with renewable energy is different. Yes when it takes energy to manufacture biomass into fuels. But if is done right, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere one year, and putting it back in the next, creating a steady state. Clearly there are some issues now, but that is political. In the US, instead of using weeds, the corn growers, which have been pushing the US for years to a deadly philosophy of monoculture, is using food crops. On the other point, I don't think that biofuels is causing food prices to increase any more than lack of oil is causing the current high prices at the pump. demand for luxury food is increasing, the economic expansion of the past several years means that people are buying more, and there is much less focus on the needs of those that have no food.
As far as rare metals, these are not consumed. All these products can be remanufactured. The issue is political. In my US town, trash is picked up once a week at every house, but recycling is picked up only every other week at some houses. Houses are allowed to throw away dangerous materials without any fine. The only way to send electronics for remanufacture to go to the drop off on a work day. Of course a lot of this has to do with the costs involved. it is cheaper to mine new material rather than reuse old. for these materials the economics might be reversed, and we might the trend reversed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The only thing the power company can do is sell that energy for a cheaper price. They are a power company, not a "salt melting company". Building a plant to perform these kinds of activities costs a lot of money and needs a very complicated business plan that depends heavily on logistics-related factors.
A salt-melting (or any other kind of process) plant would need to run 24/7 to be profitable, using valuable energy during most of the day. The only difference from a normal salt-melting company would be the cost of a single part of their operation, during specific times of the day.
Conclusion: They would be selling energy at a cheaper price. But to themselves, while needing to run a new (to them) and complicated business. It's better to simply sell the energy to anyone else.
And they already do that: they sell energy at a lower price during low usage times. And the part the can't be sold is simply wasted using giant "toasters". It's cheaper to simply burn the excess energy than powering off the thermoelectrical plant.
I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
III-V material tandem multijunctions. At the moment, these would be a germanium bottom cell, a gallium arsenide middle cell, and a gallium-indium phosphide top cell, but to get over 40% they're going to tweak the materials materials, probably going to some sort of indium-gallium arsenide on the bottom, and very likely adding some more junctions. Nitride materials (e.g., gallium-indium arsenide nitride) are possibilities, too. You can substitute in small amounts of other group-III and group-V elements to tweak the materials properties somewhat.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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
I have been hearing about indium and platinum shortages from chicken littles for a couple of years now. In fact, there is 3 times more indium than silver in the Earth's crust and I haven't heard anyone shouting about a silver shortage - especially since digital camera's became popular. When the price goes high enough, more money will go into mining, extracting, and refining both minerals. And only solar cells, out of the currently common "sustainable" technologies, require these rare minerals.
The Indium Corp couldn't be biased.
It's an open market, so it must be true.
Back in 2006 this blogger noticed we use indium. Scroll down a bit.
The price is going up, but hey, copper prices sure fell.
I'm not worried. This just someone wanting some attention and web page hits.
Anarchists never rule
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
Platinum and Indium shortages only affect a limited number of technologies in the renewable camp, namely fuel cells and solar panels, neither of which are worth considering for large scale power generation due to their gross expense and lackluster performance. In the case of the latter, you don't even need Indium, though it makes for appreciably better panels.
This doesn't stop us from building solar-thermal power plants and wave farms rated in the hundreds of megawatts. Show me a windmill, or a hydraulic ram, or a steam turbine that uses either of these metals in any appreciable volume. Nuclear reactors might use some, but when you have nuclear power plants rated at over a gigawatt, that doesn't seem like a bad investment at all.
Ummm, I think you missed the point there.
Making ice, melting salt, and running pumps are methods for storing energy (like a battery) so when you are making too much power you can save up the excess and extract it later when you are producing too little power.
The poster wasn't suggesting that power companies become molten salt salesmen.
We can use the sun, wind and waters to generate more power than
we could ever fit humans onto this planet to use.
Who are all these 'tards who keep flogging oil, coal, and nuclear?
Instead of slurring alternate energy sources start designing
and engineering them.
Duh!
Anyone who has believed otherwise has been caught drinking too much of the spiked Kool-Aid.
We live in an effectively finite ecosystem with finite resources. Had we not allowed human population to explode as it has, particularly in the last 200 years, virtually none of what we consider "crises" would even be problems worth noting yet. We would still have had to address them eventually perhaps, but we would have had centuries more to learn before then. Unfortunately the species is very adept at burning the candle at both ends. What we're experiencing now is not much different than the crash of withdrawal after binging on some hallucinogen. The morning after is always a bitch.
Again, human overpopulation is the 800-pound Samsonite gorilla in the room. Until we deal with that, none of the rest is anything but posturing.
Since I intend for my people to walk among the stars,
Gene Roddenberry is dead, man.
I'm no expert on the subject, but wouldn't these sort of magnets be necessary to construct any sort of conventional power plant as well?
(Similarly, every hard drive manufactured for the past ~20 yearas has contained two of these magnets each. That sort of quantity makes me think that the supply of these materials is not as scarce as the commenter in that article would have us believe)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The WWW is the solution.
Wind, waves and water can be harnessed for renewable enegy without exotic metals.
The premis of the title is wrong as it makes the assumption that the only way to get good energy is through current solar cell technologies.
No exotic metals here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
they put their faith in technology that doesn't exist instead of getting their supersized butts out of their trucks.
That is because their super-sized buttocks will only fit in a large American car or truck. Have you ever seen the big guy in the sub-compact car? They don't want to be that guy. Not everyone can drive the Civic or the Prius even if they work great for you.
I got hit up by Greenpeace yesterday, pushing for support on legislation to reduce carbon emissions. Here's what I told them.
How many kids do you have/plan to have? Honestly, it doesn't matter. Do you have/plan to have any?
As a global society, we can't even manage to get everyone to sign up to stopping the increase in emissions. Even those countries that do sign up rarely show any interest in anything close to 50% reductions within a single generation (around 20 years).
Assuming we can't manage to drop at least 50% over each and every generation, and the population certainly isn't going down... Humanity is going to put out more carbon over your genetic line's lifetime, no matter what you do, than someone without kids will ever put out in their lifetime that politely ends and then stops stressing the environment.
You want to save the environment... Stop focusing your energy on nice-idea-but-ultimately-inconsequential carbon cuts and push for the real problem, humans, to stop breeding.
Humanity is, sadly, a plague on the global environment in just the same way locusts are in smaller areas - they massively produce in numbers too large for their environment to support.
The sad conclusion I've come to is that, able to keep draining the environment in new and creative ways that no other animal can do, short of choosing to conciously adopt a responsible breeding program, no amount of trying minor tweaks is going to make that dramatic a difference until we screw things up so badly nature forces it upon us.
Or make giant toast.
Do you have ESP?
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?
But there's no easy and efficient means of stepping the power down. Add to that that AC High power lines can skip the return circuit and save money using an earth ground return. Oh and DC is cheap and easy to make from AC, but AC is expensive to create from from DC.
cat sig >
... 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
The first problem is what exactly is meant by "sustainable"? The weakest definition is something like "not using fossil fuels" or some such nonsense. Why is this nonsense? Because unless you want to define the lifespan of the humann race as your own, it is meaningless.
Today, we have "sustainability" problems because of multiple factors and fossil fuels is only a small part. There is the matter of recycling wastes into raw materials, something which happens through natural processes. The only problem is today there are far, far more wastes being produced than can possibly be processed before the raw materials are needed. The only way out of this trap is to either obtain resources off Earth or to reduce the resource consumption to the level where natural recycling can occur. The latter means a big population reduction, on the order of 95% or so.
Well, that isn't going to happen. That pretty much means that use of off-planet resources is an absolute necessity for the human race to survive for more than another couple of generations. Would that be "sustainable" enough?
No. We need to look at a longer term. Where are things going to be in 1,000 years? How about 10,000? We are poised at a cusp where we must make some hard decisions. If we choose to fix problems on Earth first, pie-in-the-sky kinds of things like eliminating poverty, we are going to run out of resources and will to obtain off-planet resources. This effectively dooms us to the first alternative mentioned above of population reduction. Somewhere around 1850 was the last time that Earth recycled wastes through natural processes at a rate equal to or better than the rate the resources were being consumed. What the population back then? Think about that for a while.
Sustainable means it is good until the Sun expires. Currently the only thing that comes close to this is nuclear power with a breeder reactor fuel cycle. This is permanent. Solar power satellites with an orbital and lunar industrial base would be pretty much permanent. Virtually every other proprosal either falls far short of current power requirements (which are just going to grow with the population) or doesn't last for even 100 years.
Personally, I think we can hope for a solution that nobody has dreamed of yet and plan for a big population reduction. We have maybe 10 years before the decision is made for us no matter what we want. After that we will likely be struggling to keep the lights on and not likely doing a real good job of it.
Nuclear power is cheap, clean, virtually unlimited, and SCALABLE.
None of the "renewable" sources are even close to being scalable.
The nuclear waste problem can be taken care of by using reactors that use up fuel as completely as possible. Even if such reactors are too expensive for now, the amount of radiation released is far less than that of coal and it contained very easily by comparison. Spent fuel can be buried and then dug back up when it is cost effective.
Wasting time and taxpayers money on non-scalable methods is stupid when we have an excellent workable solution already. Give people the permits to build the reactors and the market can take care of this efficiently!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html/
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
And nuclear and conventional power don't need generators?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
These supercapacitor we keep hearing about could conceivably be used as batteries, but I it is probably more realistic for nuclear plants to provide for the base load and have other technologies supplement during peak hours.
Geothermal can also be used as a baseload [pdf].
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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.
> Although scientists are agreed ...
That's a lie.
There is no scientific consensus on AGW - over 31,000 American scientists (including more than 9,000 PhDs) have signed this petition arguing that there is no convincing evidence supporting AGW theory.
Nuclear is not clean!
It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
So I guess CATO and Forbes are Democrats. Where are these commercially running plants?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
A cruve ball, eh.
"Trashed econmomy."
BS. Seriously. We buy new cars anyway, so why NOT more efficient ones? Besides, if everyone drove dramatically more efficient vehicles it ALSO mean reducing (or eliminating) our trade deficit in oil. How does THAT trash the economy?
Eliminate dependence on foreign oil, and it also means we don't have to spend billions sending our kids off to die every time the Middle East hicups. How does THAT trash the economy?
And there are as many economic OPPORTUNITIES in doing the right things as there are not doing them. Solar cell have to be manufactured and installed. Wind turbines constructed. And so on. That spells jobs.
Less polution. Reduced environmental impact. Economic growth. Reduced trade deficit. Eliminate dependence on foreign oil. And perhaps, taking out some insurance on our planet. There are many, many, many reasons for making the investment.
And practically none for NOT doing so...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
...Mars is also undergoing global warming...
Mars is not warming.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
But there's no easy and efficient means of stepping the power down.
Why not? You could just wire Germany, France and Italy in series.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It was not in the 70s and the predicted end wouldn't be in the 90s.
The future oil production was *very* accurately predicted by M. King Hubbert, in the 1950s. Compare this graph plotted in 2004 with this one, which was created in 1956.
Considering all the variations both in consumption and in production, such accuracy in a prediction of 50 years in the future is truly remarkable.
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?
Even if these people make a sustainable power source of some sort using solar or wind or waves, ultimately it's not sustainable due to population growth.
Ever more people will demand ever more power, until we curb the people count we're stuffed.
'sustainable' power does not mean iridium, palladium, zirconium, stupidium and whatnot. it consists of innumerable alternative energy sources.
one of which, is SUN, and a possible other, in future, is cosmic rays. you dont need to sustain these, they just are.
is it possible that the article may be trying to portray the new drive for alternative energy in a bad light ?
Read radical news here
Within this current ice age, we're currently in an interglacial (a small warm patch). Do you know what that means? Yay, things are melting! Whoopeedo! It would be a jolly funny interglacial if they weren't. And within this interglacial, all the curves are bouncing around wildly, as they have always done.
The concern is not over the current The manmade CO2 influx of the last century seems quite large at first glance, but it isn't significantly more than natural processes inject quite regularly.
The manmade CO2 flux is indeed quite large relative to the normal imbalance between natural sources and sinks, which is why CO2 levels haven't been as high as they are now in millions of years.
The CO2 curves over millions of years are some of the most erratic processes known to science.
They don't jump up 100 ppm in a hundred years.
Yet no GCM currently models our destruction of the carbon transport mechanism. I guess it's not sexy for the media and won't bring in research funds.
It certainly would bring in research funds, and it would probably also be sexy for the media ("we're even more screwed"). The problem is that nobody yet has a good handle on what humans are going to do to those ecosystems. There is some research, but nothing that's yet made its way into the GCMs (which are only now acquiring interactive carbon cycle modules in the first place).
We were in the 200 ppm's of CO2 interval before the industrial age, and now we're in the 300 ppm's ... but we were at 1000 ppm just 100 million years ago, and temperature has not correlated with CO2 at all since then over long time scales.
Temperature has correlated with CO2 over many long time scales; see Royer's climate sensitivity estimate, for example. It doesn't always correlate, but you don't expect it to, because CO2 isn't the only thing that influences climate. The fact is, you have to get down to details in each geological period to understand what's going on at that particular time.
Temperature correlates with CO2 over geologically short time spans of 100ky periodicity as shown in the Vostok cores, but which is cause and which is effect (if either) is far less certain.
It's pretty well certain that CO2 has an effect on temperature, or else you can't explain the magnitude of the ice age cycle.
The paleoclimate record shows that CO2 levels are not in the slightest a primary determinant of average planetary temperature.
Nonsense. The paleoclimate record strongly supports the influence of CO2 on climate over many periods in the Earth's history.
At the end of the Ordovician Period some 400 or so million years ago, the Earth had CO2 levels of 4000 to 5000 ppm, well over 10 times our present value, yet guess what the mean temperature was? We were in the deepest ice age that the planet has ever experienced.
That doesn't mean that CO2 doesn't have any influence on the climate. Absolute CO2 levels aren't that informative, because the baseline climate is modulated by lots of other things, such as the positions of the continents and their effect on the atmospheric-ocean circulation, or the intensity of the Sun (which was weaker in the distant past). More relevant is changes in CO2 levels (although they are also not wholly predictive, because you have to consider what other drivers may be counterbalancing them). Indeed, although the Late Ordovician glaciation is not yet understood, there have been a number of papers which attribute it partially to a drop in CO2 levels. Some relevant papers are by Herrmann, Poussart, and Saltzman; search under "Ordovician".
But the Earth is not a test tube. It doesn't behave as one at all because it has numerous extremely powerful feedbacks that mitigate the effect of CO2 change.
It also has numerous powerful
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
Show me a working model of our planets' atmospheric interactions that supports the theory. There isn't one. Climatologists depend upon largely upon government funding. Their "consensus" is not based upon science but instead upon politics and self preservation. In my view that means you can no longer call them "scientists".
from TFA:
"the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources"
No, that's wrong.
Some technologies (solar cells) are require scarce materials in their construction. These materials are not used up to generate power. These materials don't have to be renewable. It doesn't matter that these materials are scarce, except from an economic point of view. And, most likely, these materials are used in a renewable way. When these constructions need to be replaced, can be recycled and the scarce materials can be re-used.
assignment != equality != identity
Well, the people on the planet now (including us) did not create the problem.
We, and I include myself in that, maybe making things worse. As someone once said, "if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem."
At the moment, the idea is to determine what the best course of action is. To me, it seems like the best way to handle the situation is to get as much low hanging fruit as possible (change light bulbs, etc, etc) in the short term. Things like this reduce energy usage and also don't really add an economic cost.
As happened to me, many others are finding out making some changes actually saves them money.
In the long term, switching to nuclear power would probably be the best way to go.
I haven't been convinced nuclear power is needed never mind the best way to go. Some say it's needed as a baseload, however geothermal energy [pdf warning] might be used as a baseload as well. And without subsidies nuclear power wouldn't be profitable. The Free Market CATO Institute has this article from the business and investment magazine "Forbes" on "Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power", "Hooked on Subsidies".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If it was profitable to do this, someone would already doing it. Hell, if it's such a simple idea you could start up a business yourself and melt salt when the electricity price is negative. Unfortunately, having a salt melting plant sitting idle for 99% of the time doesn't make up for the 1% of the time you can store energy.
On the other hand, with increasing amounts of uncontrollable energy sources and falling energy storage costs, it will be profitable at some stage. We're just not there yet.
Actually, there are a number of pumped storage systems deployed. The power they produce is expensive, but they follow a strategy of buying when prices (and demand) are at their lowest and selling high. Classic economics. These molten salt plants will fit in the same category and, presumably, follow very similar commercial strategies, though I've not seen what the cost-profile of the technology is.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"