Slashdot Mirror
Solar Lull Could Cause Colder Winters In Europe
Taco Cowboy writes "Since September of last year scientists have been wondering what's happening to the Sun. It's supposed to have reached the peak of its 11-year cycle, but sunspot and flare activity remains much quieter than expected. Experts now think the recent cold snap that hit North America and the wet weather that hit part of Europe might be linked to the eerie quietness of the Sun. According to the BBC, solar activity hasn't been this low in 100 years, and if activity keeps dropping, it may reach levels seen during the 'Maunder Minimum,' an 'era of solar inactivity in the 17th Century [which] coincided with a period of bitterly cold winters in Europe.' It wouldn't have a big effect on global temperatures, just regional ones. Why? The sun's UV output drops during these lulls, and the decreased amount of UV light hitting the stratosphere would cause the jet stream to change course. Prof. Mike Lockwood says, 'These are large meanders in the jet stream, and they're called blocking events because they block off the normal moist, mild winds we get from the Atlantic, and instead we get cold air being dragged down from the Arctic and from Russia. These are what we call a cold snap... a series of three or four cold snaps in a row adds up to a cold winter. And that's quite likely what we'll see as solar activity declines.'"
The Sun does not effect climate. Only carbon.
Only carbon.
absolutely nothing to do with the political hot air and chilling political failures this planet is suffering from.
Aha! Weather in some places that's colder or warmer than others! With stuff happening on the Sun.
Obviously Global Warming is a fiction created by neo-Luddite Green party members.
And communists. Yeah. Communists.
Three Squirrels
Good chance to make some money on rising energy costs. ...cause nobody wants to build nuclear plants, but nobody likes being cold, either.
..don't panic
So would a second "Maunder Minimum" now be a good thing because it buys us a little more time to get our act together? Or a bad thing because it lets us keep our heads in the sand even longer so that we get hit all the harder and faster when the sun returns to its normal behavior?
Not that we have solar observations going back long enough to detect long-term cycles, but another 50+ year minimum starting up now when it could make it much easier to avoid the worst permanent climate changes would be almost enough to get me believing in intelligent intervention.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
till after the fact, they might just be right.....
Your argument presupposes that we can manipulate our behavior and environment cohesively and quickly enough to effect a useful change that would - well, what would it do? Allow increased population growth? Allow for better standards of living for humans? The rest of the biosphere?
Given the inertia of 7 billion humans and our imperfect knowledge of some very, very complex systems, I'm not at all sure that anything we can do will actually help.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I, for one, am willing to do my part.
Have gnu, will travel.
Winter *is* coming.
It would be bad, but not for the reason you mention. It would be bad because then the alarmists don't get to tax and control the economy. Lefty socialists the world over are severely panicking that this prime opportunity is evaporating before their eyes.
It's been bloody hot this week downunder. perhaps the sun just flew south.
I knew it all along that Wired and the BBC were right-wing propaganda outfits full of climate-deniers....
Just a link to add for the " Mauder Minimum " that was mentioned in TFA -
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
Hope this helps !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... that the Solarian civil war had finally ended and the sun was at peace once more.
So could a lengthy drop in solar output be enough to counteract human-caused climate change? Recent studies at NCAR and elsewhere have estimated that the total global cooling effect to be expected from reduced TSI during a grand minimum such as Maunder might be in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 Celsius (0.18 to 0.54 Fahrenheit). A 2013 study confirms the findings. This compares to an expected warming effect of 3.0C (5.4F) or more by 2100 due to greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, even a grand solar minimum might only be enough to offset one decade of global warming. Moreover, since greenhouse gases linger in the atmosphere, the impacts of those added gases would continue after the end of any grand minimum.
So perhaps a serious lull in solar activity could put some feeble brakes on global warming, slowing it down... temporarily, only to charge back when the sun gets over its issues.
I'm a meteorologist, not a climate guy, but I find the hypothesis that the current solar lull is responsible for the recent cold snaps in the northern hemisphere to be extremely dubious. Much more tenuous than the hypothesis that the meandering jet stream is happening due to the reduction in the north/south temperature gradient due from a reduction of Arctic ice cover, which itself is physically feasible but still not shown very conclusively.
The best way to get a grip on these issues would be to run many, many ensembles of weather models and coaxing out statistical links. And this is where weather/climate modeling is going, for good reasons... but as all the armchair slashdot climatologists will (perhaps rightly) point out, models have issues... but they are getting much better and ensembles help a lot to provide a handle on the probability that forcing A is causing response B.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
If we enter another little ice age, that's bad for most everybody. Europe's agriculture would be decimated, many towns in the Alps will be overrun by glaciers, etc. We have good records of what happened during the last one ~200 to 600 years ago. It wasn't pretty.
The oil exporting desert kingdoms might benefit since energy demands will skyrocket and they might get some respite from their usually brutal summer heat.
About the only good thing from a new little ice age would be putting Al Gore, Michael Mann, etc. in their place, which is to say utterly discredited and labeled as perpetrators of the biggest fraud in history.
The Maunder Minimum is the degree of deviation from the white line allowed before the trooper cites you for being drunk. Even without exceeding the Maunder Minimum, poor performance here combined with "blowing an .08", a (very low) standard for fellatio (the theory being that you'd have to be *really* drunk to perform that poorly*), can combine to annoy the trooper into issuing a ticket. Tomorrow, we're going to re-discover "Boyle's Laws of Gasses", which dictates performance of glassware with insufficient bong fluid. Now put away your books; time for a pop quiz: Coke, or Pepsi?
* Scale normalized 0.0~~1.0 as per International Standards Req. 4:20, para 69, lines for two.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ah, finally the real objection to believing in AGW comes to light... you're afraid of your political opponents gaining power. But just for a moment consider that we may need to actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions for legitimate reasons. Can you think of a way that we could do that without the commie pinkos taking over? Let's get creative.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Greenhouse gas heat capture is reasonably well understood, even if many of the secondary effects are still being discovered. While completely unrealistic, eliminating carbon emissions tomorrow would do quite a bit to stabilize the climate, if we were very, very lucky the global climate wouldn't change much by the end of the century and after that the crisis situation would largely be over and global climates would likely remain reasonably stable thereafter. We're probably past the point of getting the climate back to the state it was in a century ago without massive geoengineering, but we can still work towards mitigating the changes.
As for the benefits - a big one would be a biosphere not confronted by a second major extinction event to exacerbate the one were already in the midst of (human hunting, fishing, farming, and (more recently), toxic pollution has devastated the biosphere over the last few millenia). We're going to be hard-pressed to sustain the ~10 billion people the global population is expected to stabilize at by mid-century without any climate troubles. If our farmland is being rendered non-viable by climate shifts that problem will be much, much worse. For example it's looking likely that without serious changes in climate policy in the near term, within a century or two corn mostly won't be a viable US crop except in the northernmost states. Canada will have become much more suitable, but that will mean devastating ecologically important wilderness areas, and while farms are fairly easy to move, you can't just up and move all the processing plants and other infrastructure, and refitting a century worth of infrastructure to process whatever crops, if any, are suited to the new climate is liable to be very expensive if even possible. Now imagine that happening to every crop, everywhere on the planet, simultaneously. Extremely expensive. Not to mention that during the transition period you're going to have vast regions of agricultural land that has become non-viable for one crop but not yet viable for another. And we'll also have all those more extreme weather patterns to contend with as the forcing factors from polar temperature differences weaken and stop forcing the weather to follow predictable patterns from year to year. We're already seeing the polar wind belts becoming weaker and more meandering, which allows weather patterns that would once have swept across the country to get trapped in the eddy currents to cause severe protracted storms in some places and droughts in others.
Global famine is looking like a very real possibility, and that would likely destabilize world peace more thoroughly than anything we've seen in centuries. Peace is one of those luxuries you strive for once not starving to death has been taken care of.
So basically yes to all of your possibilities. But we're not talking about an increase from today, we're talking about avoiding, as much as possible, a massive decrease in all of them. It's looking like some decrease is inevitable - estimates are that we're already harvesting the global ecosystem (farming, fishing, logging, etc) at a rate ~40% higher than is sustainable (we're "spending the capital" and doing long-term damage to environmental productivity). Getting efficient we could possibly support 10 billion people in comfort sustainably, but that's a tall order, and probably not even remotely possible if climate change are powerfully undermine our productivity. And what exactly do you suppose will happen in the intervening time if the global population is forced to be reduced by 1/2 or 3/4 within a few generations?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Absolutely! Virtually every independent climatologist on the planet agrees that we're causing extremely serious long-term climate problems because they're part of a leftist conspiracy to control the economy. Good thing we have big oil and other entrenched corporate interests looking out for us, they have no reason to lie! And when they use their wealth and power to secure massive subsidies from the government that's not "control", that's just the free market at work!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The original post is about changes in solar emissions, which certainly could have (and has had) an effect on climate. So why is this conversation degenerating into the "controversy" over whether burning fossil fuels could be altering the earth's climate. Look, Carbon Dioxide IS a greenhouse gas. No scientist disputes that if we just keep shoving the stuff in the atmosphere forever, eventually things will warm up. The only question is whether or not we are putting enough up there right now to have this effect. So lets do some simple math: 1 gallon of gasoline requires about 100 tons of biomass. 1 barrel of oil makes 20 gallons of gasoline. The world uses 85,000,000 barrels of oil per day. Doing the simple math, we use the equivalent of 170,000,000,000 tons of biomass per day. The earth's current biomass is estimated at 560,000,000,000 tons. So we burn the equivalent of 1/3 of all the earth's current biomass every single day. I find this pretty compelling. Changes in solar emissions may cover this up or even counteract it for a while, but eventually, if we keep shooting carbon into the atmosphere year after year, we won't be able to count on a solar minimum to compensate for it...
Yes, but that's very unlikely to happen because of an extended solar minimum alone - The Maunder Minimum actually occurred towards the tail end of the medieval little ice age. In this case we're in a situation where human forcing factors are pushing towards extreme warming, a few decades of solar decrease would only slow the rate of increase, buying us some more time without resorting to geoengineering projects with potentially devastating unintended consequences.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The cold was an arctic outflow. It was cold here because of the jetstream structure, it was a greatly expanded polar cell.
Facts
a) in winter water is warmer than land
b) from (A) arctic outflows happen over land not water
c) forcing affect of (b) is stronger the warmer the water is
d) cold air does not even come from up north, cold air comes from high in the atmosphere where it radiates to space
e) hot air rises
f) cold air falls
g) even though (d) said cold air does not come from up north, that is where most of the cold air descends from on high, so cold air does come from up north
h) (g) is well known. Look up Polar Cell, MidLatitudeCell, Hadley Cell. or google global air circulation
i) I have not said anything about global warming yet
The article referred to is obvious counter global warming "the sun is cooling" crap.
j) I have now referred to global warming
k) 70% of the earths surface is water. if all the land cools by 5deg and all the water surface warms by 3deg the whole earth has warmed by 0.6deg. Math says you have look at the whole planet not just the land.
l) In addition to (k) land warms/cools only about 6 feet, water warms/cools the full depth of the water eventually as water circulates.
m) it takes a lot more energy to warm water compared to air
n) I have not referred to global warming since (j)
Thanks for reading
The next ice age is going to come eventually. We aren't that far away from the point when its supposed to happen again. In fact some people claim we would already be experiencing its effect it it wasn't for the elevated CO2 and higher than usual solar activity in the last decade. Now that the Sun is abnormally inactive, which is something which may be indicative of an ice age, since the causes phenomenon are not completely well defined, we shall see.
When Al Gore bought real estate in NY which was close to sea level, that was enough to tell you that even he doesn't believe the crap he spouts.
Greenhouse gas heat capture is reasonably well understood, even if many of the secondary effects are still being discovered
Apparently it's not very well understood by the companies selling natural gas (methane, a greenhouse gas) in the U.S., which were recently reported to be leaking dangerous amounts of the stuff all over NYC and Washington DC, and that's not including the town that blew up in California.
you're afraid of your political opponents gaining power
Well, sure. Who wants a bunch of statist central command types running their lives? Tax-ravenous Nanny Staters are bad news. Why should we want them to get any more power than they've already got? They've latched onto climate alarmism as their latest propaganda tool, and it's perfectly delightful when they are deprived of easy, distracting sound bite fodder. Half their fun already ended when they had to switch from "global warming" to "climate change," and this just makes it a little harder for them to spew their usual lines. That's just great.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, it is real, but it might not be enough to save humanity from the next coming ice age. Some of us have been warming things up to try to prevent that disaster, but environmentalist wackos are fighting us.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
See? God himself wills it so. Makes as much sense as some of the crackpot theories i've heard.
There's a natural carbon cycle that gets plants their food. No one is suggesting interfering with that cycle. I'm discussing burning fewer fossil fuels so we don't add more carbon into that cycle. Believe me, no plants will die if we stop burning shit. If you think so, how do you think they survived the many millions of years before humans existed?
How can we reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn without socialists running the planet? I don't think this is a hard question.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The solar powered car I drive to save the planet from global warming has sucked all the energy from the sun? Oh the irony!
Who says they don't understand it perfectly well? It's just not in their own best interests to fix the problem, and it *is* in their best interests to deny it exists. Do you really expect them to be any better than the Tobacco industry?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Then why don't Republicans propose a tax on fossil fuels, and a tax on imports from countries that import fossil fuels? Then there's no need for liberals to take control of the situation. If you have a better way to reduce our usage of fossil fuels without statist central command types running our lives, let's have it!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Coal is made up of dead plant matter. So the carbon was available and in the environment at one point. I don't like coal power plants either but not because of CO2. I am more concerned about fly ash, coal mining deaths, carbon monoxide poisoning and things like that. CO2 doesn't even compute. There are alternatives like nuclear. Yes even wind with pumped storage hydro is a partial alternative. However I could care less about the amount of 'fossil fuels' we burn. The end state of the universe if we continue is heat death as entropy increases. The Sun itself will burn out at one point. So talk about 'renewables' is a misnomer. Its a matter of timescales of availability. No resource is infinite since the universe is finite.
> How can we reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn without socialists running the planet? I don't think this is a hard question.
That's easy. Make non-fossil energy sources that are cheaper than fossil energy sources. This is already happening, but it will take time for the new sources to displace the old ones (you don't replace a grid's worth of power in a day or a decade).
When I say "it's already happening", I mean the newest utility-scale solar PV plants are coming in considerably cheaper than nuclear, and wind turbines have been competitive for several years. The only reason they are not dominating new installations is Natural Gas is just ridiculously cheap these days.
If you have a better way to reduce our usage of fossil fuels without statist central command types running our lives, let's have it!
It's called nuclear energy. We have all sorts of options along those lines, but idiot lefty green-types can't stand the idea because it has the word "nuclear" in it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Who says they don't understand it perfectly well? It's just not in their own best interests to fix the problem, and it *is* in their best interests to deny it exists. Do you really expect them to be any better than the Tobacco industry?
At least t-butyl mercaptan (the smell they add) isn't bieng added to make it more addictive...
Just FUD:
Let's face it, how can anyone reasonably claim to be sceptical about man made climate change? The evidence is there for all to see and the energy companies have done their best, with their unlimited resources, to pick it apart. Looks like a pretty strong hypothesis to me. If anything, they're probably being way too conservative about their predictions.
BTW, Prof. Mike Lockwood has explicitly stated that he things man made CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change. In one statement, he says that solar activity is linked with variability (and it's not even conclusive because apparently sometimes they seem to go in opposite directions), not overall climate change, which is a big difference.
Who cares what idiot left green-types think? Mainline liberals, notably the Obama administration, are in favor of nuclear. Perhaps more education about newer types of nuclear plants could help assuage fears of nuclear power. I don't think calling a group of people idiots is going to bring them around to your way of thinking.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yeah, it's already happening, but it seems to not be happening fast enough to actually reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps Republicans can propose eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to help alternative energy sources compete with fossil fuels on cost.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
That's what they want you to think, but when's the last time you actually avoided any exposure to gas for a few weeks to test it? All part of the long term plan my man, all part of the plan.
[chuckle]
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't think calling a group of people idiots is going to bring them around to your way of thinking.
True. But then, people so irrational that they haven't stopped chanting "No Nukes!" since a 1980's rally starring Jane Fonda aren't going to take a deep breath, read up on the current reality and come to their senses.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm an idiot lefty green-type, and I LOVE nuclear power.
Then there's hope for you. What's the hang-up on getting the rest of your buddies to see the light?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Shit is plant food and people as well as animals excrete it. Once you start on that path, the usual consequences are death, famine and misery.
There was also a lot of denialism about whether shitting in the drinking water and not washing your hands before operating or examining a pregnant woman could cause disease. Many a prominent scientist called the idea unscientific and they sure weren't going to spend time scrubbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Another denialist myth, misquoted.
Al Gore bought some waterfront property. In CA. On a hill. It's very unlikely the sea level will rise some 80' during his lifetime considering the expected rate is less than 1" per year.
this lull in Solar activity can be replaced with the Anti- Environmental Hot Air of GOP and everything will be back to Normal
If you want to see a genuine tragedy for humanity, it's global cooling, regardless of the cause. A full-blown ice age means death on a scale worse than all the nuclear weapons in existence. Look for widespread starvation as agriculture becomes impossible north of Atlanta.
Regardless, you keep on believing things like "permanent climate changes" that don't depend on the sun aging. You'll fit right in with the billions of other fools that make up our species.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Republicans don't propose a tax on fossil fuels because unlike Democrats, Republicans wish to minimize slavery in the form of taxation.
You are proposing what moderates have been proposing for decades, and that always fails: to give up principles in order to deprive the opposition of an issue. What happens is that the opposition then takes a more extreme stand, policy changes and fails because it denies reality, and the opposition claims change failed because it wasn't big enough and it was opposed by the opposition.
I'm 64. During my life I've seen the Democrats go from being a party mostly of lying thieves to almost entirely lying thieves. Suggesting that the Republicans try to get out in front of Democrats is a really poor idea.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"independent climatologist" is an oxymoron. There isn't a one that doesn't work for an organization with a political bias.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The sun saw we were having global warming issues so it decided to turn down the heat.
Thanks Sun!
This story has half the number of comments than the one about code after it, despite it being slightly older.
Just shows you don't know how to look at data.
Sun of a bitch.
Oh the irony of not being able to read the entire summary, to understand that Europe is not the world.
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I like how you call the people who don't agree with you 'deniers', like the people who 'deny' the Holocaust happened. What pap.
Climate science deniers have tried to hijack the meaning of the word denier to make it sound like we're comparing them to Holocaust deniers. But the word has a long venerable history. After all it was Mark Twain who quipped "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt." long before the Holocaust.
What would happen if there was a new period like the Maunder Minimum has been looked at by scientists. What they found is that it would reduce warming by 0.1 to 0.3 degrees Celsius. That would slow global warming by a decade or two but it wouldn't stop it and when the new minimum ended temperatures would rise back to where they would have been without it anyway.
I don't get this summary (or TFA, for that matter). They're saying the sun is too quiet and this could explain the recent cold spell. The sun may have fewer sunspots than expected for this time in the cycle, but it still has more spots than it did during the last minimum: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg Certainly we're nowhere near something that looks like the Maunder Minimum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum).
soylentnews.org
This story has half the number of comments than the one about code after it, despite it being slightly older.
Just shows you don't know how to look at data.
Sweet Jesus, it's true.
And he even brought up that 97% turkey.
AGW True Believers are the quintessential "Correlation != Causation" offenders.
So talk about 'renewables' is a misnomer. Its a matter of timescales of availability. No resource is infinite since the universe is finite.
The mental hoops you're prepared to jump through to convince yourself that there's nothing wrong are quire remarkable.
Anyway: renewable isn't a misnomer. With coal, once it's dug up it's all gone. The time until it's all gone depeneds only on how much you take. With solar, the same is available whatever you do. that's what is meant by renewable: not that it's infinite.
You really do seem to be the King of Straw. You seem to enjoy creating an army of straw men to slaughter.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
not the same poster, but its not that im scared of "insert group here" getting power. Im scared that whatever group in charge will spend billions of dollars to "fix" something that either A cant be fixed or B isnt going to cause a big enough dent to fix it cost efficiently. Lets just look at the obamacare website as one example (or IRAQ if you want to try and say im singling out the democrats) We threw 650 MILLION dollars at a website... that doesnt work and is not secure. So what do we do? instead of admitting it was a bad idea, we double down and give another company 90 million more. Now what are the odds that we need to throw even more at it in 2 months when they find out, oh yeah that didnt work. I know MORE MONEY!!!
The issue in my case is not whether or not man is causing warming or not, but if it is actually something that can be taken care of without sending us all back to wood and mud huts
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
you mean the same tax breaks that are given to every company? or do you believe we should all be paying 20 bucks a gallon of gas? I already have to spend 70 bucks a week on gas as it is just to get to and from work (and no, dont tell me to move closer or get a more fuel efficient car, if that were an option I would)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
because the cost of gas is already prohibitivly high for many of us here. Yes I know in the rest of the world prices are even higher, but that doesnt mean that we can afford it. If the cost of gas jumped 1$ overnight and never dropped, I know many people who would no longer be able to get to work, keep a roof over their heads and eat properly. And we got greenies wanting us to increase that by more than double the current cost!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
you seem to act as if when we have a "record high" that sharpton and others use that isolated incident to to feed those who use their gut instincts on how silly those conservative tea party geeks who and ignore what they have to say....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I would like to point out a theory where a solar lull also results in lower global temperatures -- in a way that may be complementary with the UV-centric approach taken in TA... Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. See this documentary Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery. Radiation-seeded cloud formation was first observed by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1896. In BBC: Connections, Death In The Morning (index to 38:15) James Burke describes the events that led to WIlson's great invention, the cloud chamber. I highly recommend the entire Connections series, especially the original first season which begins with "The Trigger Effect".
On clouds... another Good Watch is the BBC documentary on the phenomenon of Global Dimming, especially its opening minutes where David Travis of the University of Wisconsin measured a 1 degree C change in temperature ranges in the days following 9/11, when all aircraft in the US were grounded. This (shocking!) correlation, that could only be ascribed to a particular human activity -- a lack of contrail cloud seeding -- reminds us that our contribution to climate might far exceed pure-chemical CO2 causation.
On clouds... while researching contrails years ago I had a true what-the-fuck moment to see that NASA had also noticed significant human triggered cirrus cloud formation but managed to leverage the presence of cirrus (Minnis et. al) into a net warming effect. This has led to extraordinary ideas like enlarging ice crystal size in cirrus by seeding to 'reduce' this 'warming' effect. I am old school and any claim that increased clouds (of any kind) are net-warming and not net-cooling is an extraordinary claim and should be confirmed by an extraordinary level of proof, not just computer energy-budget models of incoming versus outgoing long-wave radiation. And I'm glad to see that the cirrus net effect is not yet decided by everyone.
On survival during the coming solar minimum... those jolly old River Thames Frost Fairs look like a a real tonne of funne, but faced with the likelihood of global cooling it behooves us to fast-track the development of Thorium based energy. Because MSR/Thorium is the answer for both Global Warming and Global Cooling. I am generally behooved these days.
Also... the timely development of molten salt reactors and supplying the globe with cheaper grid-energy would improve the human race. It would help to offset the effect of driving on women's pelvises by relief from washing clothes by hand.
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
just like climate scientists!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Because if there is when global warming just slows down a bit instead of reversing the contrarian side will have to give up on their "It's the Sun" arguments. All you guys who get so worried about the coming glaciation (ice age) need to calm down. The science shows pretty conclusively that it ain't happening at 400 ppm of CO2.
You forgot the part about the 4 day time cube.
This, too, is caused by Global Whatevering.
>That's easy. Make non-fossil energy sources that are cheaper than fossil energy sources.
A wonderful idea. May I suggest we start by phasing out all the subsidies flowing into the fossil fuel industry? No more direct exploration/development subsidies. No more tax breaks. No more free passes on pollution damages, they can buy insurance or risk liquidation. Make the fossil fuel industry play on a level field and I think you'd discover many alternative energy sources are already considerably cheaper.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hardly - the fossil fuel industry is singled out for considerable subsidies and tax breaks (not to mention wars of convenience), and possibly even more importantly gets virtually a free pass on pollution damages - hell, if someone were to screw up a fracking operation tomorrow and, say, render the entire aquifer system for the greater Denver area completely toxic, the company is granted explicit immunity from any liability. What do you suppose would happen to the price of gas if they had to buy insurance or risk company-wide liquidation in the case of an accident? What do you suppose electricity from coal-fired power plants would be if they weren't allowed to dump toxic ash into massive leach fields endangering everyone downstream?
Yes, gasoline will get expensive, that can't be avoided because we are using it up. Would you really rather put the price hike off onto your kids or grandkids who are already going to be faced with some really ugly environmental fallout of the shit we've been doing for the last 100 years?
Don't want to pay $150-300 a week for gas? I think you'll find that an extra $1000/month in expenses a convincing argument to re-evaluate your situation. Get a scooter or utilitarian motorcycle - they're cheap and typically get at least 2-3x the mileage of a car. Or change jobs and/or move so your commute is less, you'll get the added benefit of a more free time. Of course it's an option - the country is a big place with lots of different situations available, even if they don't always pay quite as well. Don't want to change? That's fine, but you need to acknowledge at least to yourself that it's a matter of preference and convenience holding you where you are, not some diabolical snare.
Well, unless the co-parent of your children steadfastly refuses to acknowledge reality, in which case I really hope you've got some good negotiating skills - reality doesn't back down.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The great irony is those that deny AGW and push nuclear frequently accuse Climate scientists of lying and being corrupt, but somehow think the nuclear scientist who say its safe are pure as driven snow, its cognitive dissonance at its finest. Hoisted by their own petard, lol!
>Half their fun already ended when they had to switch from "global warming" to "climate change,"
And yet the globe is still warming. You know why the preferred term changed right? Because some people refused to accept that just because the *planet* is warming up, doesn't mean any particular location will, or that changes will be uniform throughout the year. Most of the warming will happen at the poles, and that will destabilize global climate patterns because it's the temperature difference between the poles and equator that drive and shape the major jets streams and ocean currents. Some places will get warmer. Some places will get colder. Some will have both hotter summers and colder winters. And some will become milder year round. Perhaps most damaging though many will find themselves subjected to far less predictable weather from year to year and storms get caught in eddy-currents of slower and more meandering jet streams. We're already seeing some signs of that - storms that just "stop" and dump their whole load over one region instead of passing over, leaving the region downwind suffering droughts.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree that fission appears to be high on a short list of options, but I can also understand people's hesitation. I have no doubt we can build safe nuclear plants. I also have no doubt that if the regulatory infrastructure isn't in place greedy and short-sighted businessmen will allow those plants to fall well outside of spec, putting the public at risk after all. Why should protestors believe that new plants will be kept well maintained when we're still allowing so many old ones to be operated despite having developed dangerous flaws?
And why the %$#@! aren't we reprocessing spent fuel? Yes, it's more expensive than mining fresh ore, so what? Fuel only accounts for a few percent of the lifetime operating costs of a nuclear reactor. Place a tax on all fresh ore to cover the difference. Or just flat out require that all purchasers reprocess the waste in a timely fashion. Lots of ways to do it that don't require storing highly radioactive toxic waste for geologic timescales. Lets start addressing the really obvious problems surrounding the existing nuclear infrastructure that will apply equally to new reactors, and *then* we can go nuts building new ones.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The problem I have with man made global warming theorists is the methods they use to compensate for it. They do so with making government bigger so that is has greater control on our lives. The government will pay people to buy solar panels and place them on their roof. The subsidies go to those wealthy enough to buy the solar panels. These rich people get more wealthy with the government subsidies.
What about the poor people lacking the means to get any subsidy since they cannot purchase a any green energy. They buy what it cheap, fuel oil and natural gas. The rich get richer, the poor stay poor.
The price of electricity rises as more and more "green" energy sources get added to the utilities. At some point the price of the utility power gets so high that home owner does some math that they don't need the expensive utility power. They can make their electricity from natural gas generators on site. Next to most every grocery store, bank, government building, lumberyard, home owners' back yards, is a backup generator. These sit there in the case of a rare power outage.
What if that power outage arises? All those back up generators fire up. People will start to do the math. This outage from the utility is costing them less than if they bought the "green " energy. People that are off the grid are now paying less for power since they no longer have to pay for the windmills and water dams. Natural gas is just too cheap.
The natural gas power will get cheaper still as people find that the "waste" heat from the generators can be used to heat homes and businesses.
The electric utilities will find it real hard to sell their electricity to people. They just start to move off the grid. So long as the utilities are mandated to buy power from expensive solar and wind the natural gas will always be cheaper and more reliable.
The rich people with their solar panels will have the government subsidized panels on their roof, the best they can buy, competing with the large number of panels the governerment bought last year, older and less efficient.
What is the government going to do now? Tell businesses and homes that they cannot have back up generators? Tell people they must buy the more expensive "green" electricity from the utilities? Well, they'll move their manufacturing and technology to somewhere else. Take it to another country where thy don't have to buy the expensive "green" energy.
We've seen this happen already with light bulbs. We don't make like bulbs in the USA any more. All our lights are made in China. What else is moving to other countries? Aluminum refining? Do we even forge steel here any more?
Jobs, money, everything will move out f the USA. The only things left will be military contractors that cannot legally move their manufacturing out of the USA. For them to operate with the "green" energy they will have to be giving blank checks for how many bald eagles get killed in windmills. They will be getting blank checks for how much pollution they put in the water from the elements that leach out of the solar panels.
We will be left with the very polluted environment we tried to avoid because the laws mandated it. The rewards were for solar and wind, not for the reduction in the dangers to the environment.
We will see another year of increased carbon output, a lowering of global temperatures, and the "climate scientists" will be shocked. They will point to their models and scream up and down on how the WORLD is wrong. The models are right but they didn't collect alll the data, or some ocean current is sucking all the heat into the ocean, or some more nonsense.
The problem is that we do not understand enough about the argument to make these predictions. If they want to show that reducing carbon output will reduce global warming then we need a power source that is cheap, reliable, and produces little carbon. We have it, it is nuclear fission. Build more nuclear power plants and carbon emissions will go down. On
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Mars gets almost half the sunlight as earth. It's more close to 60% so that is a 40% drop from what Earth has. With their weak atmosphere it is COLD on mars and at the poles everything does freeze, even the air. But if Mars had earth's atmosphere it would be significantly warmer than it is now.
Now keep in mind that we lose solar power in the summer when the earth is further away - but it is a negligible amount. What I'd like to know is what % do we lose due to the kilometers variation of the orbit.. Probably sun variations are more but I don't think they are likely going to be significant either; at least for billion years or something.
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Coal is dead plant matter that sat on the soil for millions of years or whatever. Like I said it is a matter of timescales. Wait long enough and more coal will form. Dig it all up and its all gone is hence a misnomer. If you don't want to wait you can synthesize coal. Read about charcoal on Wikipedia. It is just not as energy efficient from a human perspective to use since you are actively using energy resources to produce the coal.
Renewable is a misnomer since all these energy supplies rely on nuclear fusion in the Sun. Be it solar, wind, biomass, or whatever. Nuclear fusion converts lighter elements into heavier elements. At one point, when most of the hydrogen has been converted, the Sun will increase its radius and the Earth will be scorched. That's how infinitely renewable your precious resource is.
That's what Eskimos used to do as well. Nomads. You can live that way. Still it is no good way to have the stable foundation to develop a prosperous society.