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Blueprints For Taming the Climate Crisis
mdsolar sends this story from the NY Times:
Here's what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change. Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. ... Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal's footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply. This course, created by a team of energy experts, was unveiled on Tuesday in a report for the United Nations (PDF) that explores the technological paths available for the world's 15 main economies to both maintain reasonable rates of growth and cut their carbon emissions enough by 2050 to prevent climatic havoc. It offers a sobering conclusion: We might be able to pull it off. But it will take an overhaul of the way we use energy, and a huge investment in the development and deployment of new energy technologies. Significantly, it calls for an entirely different approach to international diplomacy on the issue of how to combat climate change.
I look forward to the enlightened, reasonable debate to follow. Please chain down your chairs and pop some popcorn.
I live in Montana and I'm rather looking forward to global warming. This place is gonna be even more amazing when it gets warmer. I might even have to buy a summer home in the Yukon.
On a slightly more serious note, as Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
----- obSig
How about we just use nuclear power for most cases because it's more efficient, safer, etc.?
How about we just use electric cars for most cases because they're simpler, more efficient, etc.?
How about we just stop using coal because it's fucking terrible all around?
Why do we need a climate change bullshit bogey man to get politicians to stop blocking natural progress?
If we concentrate on fusion, not fission. Today there are a number of researchers who think that the theoretical problems of fusion have been solved enough that all we need to do is invest money in actual hardware. But the existing entrenched interests keep opposing such investments. Well, that's what THEY say, anyway. But they are certainly right that fusion, when perfected, will be less problematic than fission, especially with regard to wastes.
Did you bother to note the rather important fact that none of our modern crop foods were alive during that time period. Adaptation of plant and animal life to major geologic changes doesn't happen in a century.
The problem we face isn't one of extinction of life on earth, but the inviability of meta-stable ecosystems we and our economies rely on.
http://laurencekc.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/solar-frickin-roadways-and-the-hype/
Yup, but we're talking about dynamic changes, it'll change far faster than it ever has before, and the systems we depend on to survive may not like it.
But hey, whatever, what's really important is creating a society that funnels all wealth to a lucky few while the rest willingly do so and try to kill each other for the privilege.
Mostly random stuff.
Got it. The jurassic plants like CO2, but the ones we eat and use today dont. Sure. Right. Yeah, you nailed it Al Goreleone.
Sigh; and the permian was similar (in fact, was the source of much of the fossil fuels we use now.) And yet, a far milder jolt on their climate wiped up 95% of all life the likes of which the world took ages to recover from. The nature of any given climate is of academic interest; the problem is in how fast it changes... and it's happening a lot faster now (we've done in just 200 years what took a million then) than during the world's worst known extinction level event.
Here's what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change
The West Antarctic Ice Shelf has already begun its collapse, guaranteeing us 10-12ft of sea level rise over the next 50-200 years (only the timeframe, not the result, remains in question). We have officially lost our "shot at preventing devastating climate change".
We do, however, still have a shot at preventing the necessary abandonment of every major coastal city on the planet, by avoiding another 200ft of sea level rise that would result from the rest of Antarctica melting.
At this point, we need to stop asking how we can go green, and start planning for our new seaside vacation homes in Arizona.
I'd drive a cheap-to-run car with torque like a supercharged V8 and my electricity would come from sources that put out their radioactive waste in neat chunks instead of slowly spreading it out the top of a smokestack!? This awful socialist future is going to ruin us all!!!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I have a crazy proposition for you:
There are multiple human beings who identify themselves as environmentalists, and not all are as informed as others. And not all are as spirited as others. And contradictions can arise within a community, as ideas struggle for dominance.
So the dinosaurs cause the climate change then, and we are doing it now! Right, thanks for clearing that up.
I wonder if caveman farting caused the last iceage to stop. I should ask you, you know for a fact everything.
I've heard people complain about big businesses, manufacturers, etc. But I think the general population is responsible for most of the energy requirements. If it's true, then it means we're the ones who can impact the most change, but we all must do our part.
Use an efficient device like the Apple TV/Chromecast/etc to watch Netflix instead of a power-hungry Xbox 360/One, Playstation 3/4 or Wii/U.
If you have more than one computer, don't use your high-end gaming PC to surf the Web, write code and other low-power tasks.
Stop mining Bitcoins. It hasn't been worth the energy required for a long time.
Use a small toaster oven instead of a full-size oven if you live alone.
Use a rice cooker instead of a huge pot to make rice and pasta.
When possible, only use a fan to help you keep cooler instead of the AC. When using the AC, don't try to cool your house down to winter climates, around 25C is cold enough for the summer.
In the winter, keep your house at only 21C.
Because the real benefit of the fossil fuels is the high density of the stored energy.
Give me the technology to build a battery that can power an electric car for 500 miles, and ...
Electric cars can now work for 99% of the population - all running on power they store overnight/while at work.
Solar can now store enough to last not only through the night but also through a cloudy day.
Wind based energies can now store enough to get through some calm days
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Oh great...that means we're fucked.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
If you want local solar to play any part in this future, it might help to restructure the power grid (at least in the USA).
The way things are currently setup, residential solar can only get pushed around the local grid.
This can be changed, but it's expensive. So obviously it's not popular.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
whatever it took to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees above the preindustrial average
What contributes to the temperature increase:
-Massive heat sinks, or cities of concrete and steel. Do we all move to the country and grass shacks?
-Massive use of electricity. Do we turn off all of our smartphones? iWhatevers? That would cut back the usage.
What are we willing to give up to reach that goal?
A handful of meteorologists may be able to pull off something Hitler and a history of despots have been unable to do. Bring to reality a world government under tight fascist control. Seig Heil!
A portion was left out of the summary. It is by mid-century that we'd see a big change over it the type of generation, not in 15 years. For the US, a renewable heavy, carbon capture heavy and nuclear heavy scenario were looked at. The energy security heavy scenario developed in "Reinventing Fire" by Amory Lovins was not explored. http://www.rmi.org/electricity
The US isn't the problem. Our carbon emissions are already falling. We could follow all those plans, and it won't make a lick of difference unless China, India, and developing countries change. Heck, the US could disappear completely, and it still won't make enough difference to matter.
you're a fucking idiot
the planet will survive just fine and life will always go one. it's US, HUMAN BEINGS, that we are concerned about here.
Fusion will be great when and if it happens. California will probably be underwater by then, at least if you believe in the boogeyman version of global warming.
In order to survive long enough to eventually develop some amazing energy source, we need to take action now, using power plant designs we can ramp up today and have reliable energy. Natural gas releases half as much CO2 as coal, so that's one improvement. Nuclear fission is awesome except for the worries about safety. Well, we've had nuclear for many years, and we've had other options, such as coal and hydroelectric for many years. Our experience shows that coal and hydroelectric both kill hundreds of thousands as times as many people as nuclear. Nuclear power has killed about 5 people, while just one hydroelectric dam failure killed 170,000 at Banqiao. So the "problem" with fission is indeed the WORRIES about safety - the actual safety is far better than any alternative.
Let's just pretend for a moment the answer to that question isn't yes
That wasn't even the point being made. It's the temperatures that are the threat to modern forms of plant, not CO2 concentration. Any farmer will tell you about the importance of climate to growing a particular crop.
So, what's China gonna be doing? Still running super-high-octane dino bones? It only works if all of the largest offenders work on it, no?
Im looking forward to your totalitarian police state to control every breath (CO2 alarm) from cradle to grave to make sure you and your police state help me and the human race survive.
At this point, we need to stop asking how we can go green, and start planning for our new seaside vacation homes in Arizona.
They are pumping so much ground water in Aridzona that they will be below water before you know it. Groundwater subsidence must be taken into consideration in your calculations.
as ideas struggle for dominance.
Dissent and anything other than blind acceptance of dogma will not be tolerated.
So now you're a farming expert, a dinosaur expert, a weather expert and a climate expert.
Wow, how many PHDs you got, bro?
A 15 year plan exists in rough outline. . Yes, it is extreme but then if the climate crisis worsens to the degree predicted by some, and action is delayed as it appears it will be, there will be very little time to geoengineer remediation.
Seastead this.
Helping a big part of American car owners to switch to electric cars would create a huge market segment for the gas car rental companies. Why aren't they doing it?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Fifteen years for a dramatic ramp-up of nuclear power anywhere outside of China?! Not possible. I believe the United States long ago lost the ability to manufacture key components to even make a nuclear reactor and its containment vessel.
not to mention that it's colder pretty much everywhere..
Oh yes, do show me what data I cited was wrong.
Please. Please, absolutely do.
I get that every time facts come in it makes you look like a bumbling idiot, and you object to that, but come on.
You make up an excuse, it's relatively easily demonstrated to fantasy, and you demand credentials, as if credentials were what was missing from the climate science side.
Got it. The jurassic plants like CO2, but the ones we eat and use today dont. Sure. Right. Yeah, you nailed it Al Goreleone.
The misrepresentation, half truth and putting Al Gore in there are all signs of vapid Talk Radio propaganda.
I know because I used to be in that environment.
Let's examine the parent's statement.
1. State a fact: "jurassic plants like CO2" - which sucks in people.
2. "the ones we eat and use today dont" - complete lie in this case (not even a half truth which is usually the case). Now the typical unsophisticated talk radio listener will think, "Well 1 is true so 2 is true."
"Sure. Right." - sarcasm to suck in them in.
" Yeah, you nailed it Al Goreleone" - bring in the talk radio's environmental symbol. Which by the way, Al Gore is only an environmentalist in talk radio's eyes.
See folks. That's how they do it basically. It's the same formula that used in advertising. Here's Sean Hannity's:
1. Tell a truth.
2. Usually there's a half truth.
3. Outright lie.
4. Blame Liberals.
5. Tell audience that they listen to him because they are smarter than average people. No really, listen to his show sometime.
That is amusing. Building a couple hundred more nukes in the US is not feasible. The same people that create climate hysteria also perpetuate and amplify nuclear hysteria.
At best a few reactors will be added at a couple sites in one or two red states. 15 years from now we'll be burning slightly less coal and a great deal more natural gas, and we'll have slightly fewer than the present 108 40+ year old zombie nukes. Unless one melts down, in which case we'll shut them all and burn even more gas.
And coal's footprint will shrink drastically
LOL. No it won't. We'll just have the Chinese burn it for us. Keeping your stores stocked with low cost goodies ultimately requires vast quantities of cheap power, and the Chinese will burn as much coal as it takes while you feather your environmental nest.
Whatever the climate is going to do given continued CO2 emission it is going to do, and we will adapt. Just as we and all the other species have done before. Coal is the fastest growing energy source on Earth. For every ton of CO2 you manage to shift of Asia, Africa, S. America, etc. they'll another for good measure, no matter how much it offends Western sensibilities.
Oh look, libel suit gets ruled correctly. Liars allies invent new lies to justify old lies.
When I see something which says "In 15 years the world will be like this", I think "My, what drivel", and move on.
From what I've seen in my lifetime, futurists and prognosticators are usually dead wrong, clueless, and writing little more than fiction.
In other words, it will require the impossible, need huge sums of money, depend on a level of consensus and cooperation unlikely to happen, and a near complete re-tooling of societies.
Blah blah blah.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
But one sure fire way to keep their customers tied to the grid is to encourage electric cars. If every home is charging two or three cars overnight they might not be able to ditch the grid. Since night load for the utilities is just 66% to 70% of peak day time load they can serve this market without additional investment in power plants.
Peeling off a large customer base from gasoline companies to the grid would be in the long term interests of the electric utilities. Why aren't they doing it?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Nuclear power has killed about 5 people"
Although I agree with you on fission, you may have forgotten about this nasty incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Nukes are unfortunately the only realistic answer in the short (100ish or so years) to solve this problem. Believe me, I *hate* nuclear, but I'm willing to realize that it's the lesser of short term evils at this point. Considering the massive damage climate change is going to wreak...it's not a high bar to be 'better' than that...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
As much as I agree that we need to reduce carbon emissions, these recommendations are a recipe for disaster. The USA research team, for example, recommends something like a 50% reduction in per capita energy intensity by 2050. That is flat out incompatible with human nature in a healthy economy and society. I neither want my children to live in a world ravaged by carbon pollution, nor do I want them living a life of energy poverty. Any sensible solution would avoid both outcomes by greatly expanding the availability of clean energy generation. The fact that no one seems to be willing to chart a course of clean energy abundance makes me suspicious that other motives are at work here besides saving us from global warming.
The French team starts with the only healthy and clean energy infrastructure in the world and _completely_dismantles_it_. Apparently their current administration has recommended that the country phase out nuclear power by 2050, and the team takes this as gospel, replacing it with biofuels. The projected results are predictably disastrous.
The only team to make reasonable recommendations here was China, but they also had the easiest job since China has the most low-hanging fruit and the only serious build-out of clean energy generation.
what is that?
something you do after attacking thunderstorms?
let's fight gravity!
Don't feed the troll.
captcha: feeders :)
Fusion is the energy of tomorrow... and always will be
I just got back from Shanghai where the pollution haze limits visibility to a couple of miles. In Beijing it's down to a few hundred yards most days. Let me know how the relative climate impact of electric cars in the US vs the economic impact and compare with the climate impact of 1/3 of all cars sold worldwide being in China in 5 or 6 years from now and I bet almost all of them will be gasoline powered. The international economic competitive impact to all electric in the US would be huge compared to the relative environmental impact.
If a minority of people create most of the wealth then most of the wealth will be in the hands of a minority.
Every cab should be electric. They sit idle most of the time anyway.
We need to do several things in the US to help ourselves, as well as push other nations.
We would be better off stopping subsidies on solar, and allow wind to expire in 2 years. Instead, we should now focus those subsidies on nuclear power (our own), along with electricity storage.
Then require that all new construction below 5-6 stories will have on-site AE that will equal or exceed its HVAC usage.
In addition, we need to put a tax on all consumed goods (including those shipped from overseas), based on the MAX CO2 that went into make it. The tax should start low and raise every 6-12 months. This will give time to all nations and states to make long-term choices.
Basically, the tax is applied to all goods, unless you register where it and its parts come from. Then if you get the parts from nations/states where the CO2 is lowest, you get lower taxes.
To make sure of the CO2, rather than the wild estimates that we have, we use the OCO2 which will show emissions production, along with movement, around the world.
Finally, to normalize it, we use $ GDP / tonne of CO2. The higher the $GDP, the better.
The above is all that is needed to force us to change, and give us time. Not just America, but all nations since America is the world's largest importer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When OCO2 starts taking measurements, the world is in for a REAL jolt.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem about nuclear is not about how many people it has killed, but about how many it will kill.
Some people want to hide nuclear waste deep in the mountains, hoping it doesn't harm them. I think this is a very stupid thing to do, as one day perhaps we will figure out how to get rid of nuclear waste (like having cheap safe rockets to send it to sun), and then need it. We know far too few about geological stability to decide for this step.
Don't take me wrong -- I think nuclear fusion is a great technology which will perhaps one day give us almost free energy. But until then we shouldn't destroy our future with fission.
It seems to me that only a single path is being considered - to reduce CO2 emissions.
In reality there are numerous other potential paths, none of which are being evaluated. This kind of blinkered approach reminds me of certain southern politicians. How about bringing some real science and economics to bear on choosing the best response to global warming?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
And WHO is this anonymous coward that refutes everyone (the experts) here? Probably paid to be a pain in the ass of any change.org er .com
It's pretty simple we should have raised the petrol tax on ourselves,
like Europe did 20 yrs ago to pay for the mass transit...
Instead we waited for wall street oil investors to tax us into less freedom of the road.
THEY are the deniers. Yes give us a walking lifestyle. Less cars more health.
I am living it and it is great. Less consumption is rewarding in itself!
Be free from the nay sayers and show the world we can be better.
Trans-oceanic shipping is currently based on Bunker Oil. This nasty stuff is a major pollution source to the point it is included in the Greenhouse emission budget on a national level. It is also dirt cheap, being the bottom gunky by-product of regular cracking of heavy oil at a refinery. Environmentally sound techniques like bio-fuels are optimized for producing gas for cars and other high-margin industrial processes. These have quite a price hurtle to cross.
The transportation improvements section of the PDF is pretty hand-wavy on 'improvements' like electrification of vehicles. Techniques like Cold Ironing, taking port from port instead of internal engines, is mainly useful for preventing horrible pollution from this high-particular sulfurous fuel while near shore. It does nothing for a ship under steam. Unless countries start pushing out nuclear barges, a highly impractical solution, all these shiny electric vehicles and parts are going to be chuffing their way across the seven seas to the sound of a large sunken carbon footprint. Some of these ships build today will be in service years from now, deep into the 21st century.
The report is maybe good for a non-technical CIO, but some of us are nerds. We all want to know what kind of power plant our flying cars are going to be using. Sadly this glossy discussion of carbon markets seems well prepared but no more so than any "Stories from Future" TV special. In particular, the transport sections are requiring a "strong global R&D push on technologies." Sure, we'll get right back to you on that one.
We can do it and in fact, are doing so.
We have switched over our house to LEDs (which I bought most of the bulbs for less than 10 each) and now see our electric usage has dropped by about $5-10 / month (about 50-100 KWH savings each month).
In addition, we have Solar on our roof and sell back our excess to the grid.
We are now getting ready to buy a Tesla Model [XS].
There is no doubt that my family's usage is going down.
What is needed is for us to get all of the nation's usage down, and it is easier than you can believe, if we use economics.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You keep telling yourself that. These wealth creators obviously would never game the system, lie, cheat or steal, right?
And what happened to the amazing productivity we all supposedly have? You know, from our technology? How come if we all are so productive, only a few of us are rich?
Tell me, what is "wealth"? Is it material possessions? Food in the fridge?
Or paper constructs that allow you to game the system?
Mostly random stuff.
The fact is, that USA is NOT the big polluter. China is. And USA has been going in the right direction for the last 7 years, while nearly all of BRICK is getting worse. Only Brazil is not getting worse.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
i am positively amazed -if not agog- at the number of amateur (yet far superior!) climate scientists posting here, who ABSOLUTELY KNOW that global climate change is a crock because of ______, which approximately 90-99% of the -you know- corrupt, commie-pinko, money-grubbing climate scam artists somehow missed...
amazing...
further, i am in a state of wonderment, that these armchair climate scientists KNOW this because they have carried out experiments on another 10, 100, 1000? earth-like planets with varying levels of CO2, etc, and thus KNOW by experiential means what WILL happen...
amazing...
so, nothing to worry about, huh ? ? ?
so, when the sea levels *do* rise abnormally in the near future, would you blowhards promise to go fucking drown yourselves ? ? ?
(note: there is ONE THING I KNOW from my own experience: weather patterns HAVE CHANGED from their normal patterns in my little corner of the world; i can NOT tell you definitively what is going on and causing it, but the LAST know-it-all i will listen to is some armchair climate scientist on slushdat...)
In 15 years we couldn't even switch over to all LED lighting instead on incandescent. And as the "Rolling Coal" jerks have appropriately pointed out, any attempt at legislating environmental changes versus "lifestyle" changes will be met with extreme civil disobedience. You might as well be asking to take away their guns.
We are doomed. Earth will survive, but we will not. But hey, it doesn't matter as long as kids get to stare into their cellphones all day twittering. Oh, wait, there's no cell phones anymore because we don't have electricity anymore because of global devastation? It's all that Socialist Keynan Muslim's fault! Benghazi!
We won't switch to nuclear because everyone will be "NIMBY", "oh noes radiation!", meanwhile they hold a 2 watt transmitter next to their skulls for 8 hours a day straight, and eat microwaved everything with GMOs and steroids. Electric cars won't catch on unless there's a revolution in charging times and range and cheapness.
And then there's the entire Republican Party platform that global warming doesn't even exist. Have you read the Texas GOP platform? If even a fraction of that gets through, we'll be sent back to the stone age.
America is too stupid, ignorant, and proud of being ignorant to give a crap if we are killing ourselves. And they won't do anything unless all of Florida is washed away, and even then they probably won't do anything.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Most delivery fleets can go electric, they have predictable routes, a home base, time to charge and the range is not very critical to them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The central paradox of Grow Old Timber's reportages, the twist that makes Grow Old Timber's witticisms so irresistible to shambolic, doctrinaire crackpots, is that these people truly believe that I'm some sort of cully who can be duped into believing that honesty and responsibility have no value and are therefore worthless.
If Grow Old Timber had lived the short, sickly, miserable life of a chattel serf in the ages âoebefore technocracyâ he wouldn't be so keen to overthrow the government and implement this green serfdom he thinks we should all live in.
Maybe he'd even begin to realize that he doesn't use words for communication or for exchanging information. He uses them to disarm, to hypnotize, to mislead, and to deceive.
Sadly, in one sense, he is correct. If we let Grow Old Timber mortgage away our future, then I will unmistakably be forced to live like a serf under his police state.
Just the other day, some of his demonic, ribald sycophants started like bots to blast one of his screeds all over the internet!
The screed described Grow Old Timber's blueprint for a world in which the worst types of treacherous sybarites there are are free to enable ignominious lotharios to punch above their weight. We would be under his hammer, his sickle living as Amish do by force to be green.
As I was done with the screed and sent it to the mental wastebasket I reflected upon the way that Grow Old Timber's legates believe that Grow Old Timber can absorb mana by devouring his enemies.
It should not be surprising that they believe this, however. As we all know, minds that have been so maimed that they believe that Grow Old Timber holds a universal license that allows him to lead a malevolent jihad against those who oppose him can believe anything, especially if it's false.
Yes fusion is the energy of tomorrow. And the best fusion reactor we have is called the sun. And we can begin harnessing it whenever we want.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
you do realize that humans didnt evolve to breathe CO2 at those levels, right? that when humans evolved CO2 levels were lower than today, let alone during the dinosaurs time? not to mention the fact that most plants alive today ALSO did not evolve to exist in such high CO2 levels? That such CO2 levels will cause dramatically higher temperatures and vastly different climatology, which will more than offset (ie: Kill the plants) any gains from higher CO2 levels? You also realize that CO2 is not "plant food" ? Plants use far more than just CO2? And plants are in general carbon nuetral, using and storing carbon while alive (in the form of growth), which then gets released back into the biosphere when they die?
Basic CO2 concentration guidelines:
The effects of increased CO2 levels on adults at good health can be summarized:
normal outdoor level: 350 - 450 ppm
acceptable levels: below 600 ppm
complaints of stiffness and odors: 600 - 1000 ppm
ASHRAE and OSHA standards: 1000 ppm
general drowsiness: 1000 - 2500 ppm
adverse health effects expected: 2500 - 5000 ppm
maximum allowed concentration within a 8 hour working period: 5000 ppm
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Probably because we spend more than before?
Productivity is way up since the 1950s. If you were to live according to a 1950's lifestyle including miles driven, size of home, vacation travel, amount of times going out to eat, drop internet, CATV, cell phones etc, you could save an enormous amount of money. Invest it in some index funds or take a dividend growth approproach and you would be pretty rich.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
What you said... and ... there were no humans!
Be careful about what you hold as ideal. It might not have a place for you.
...most plants alive today ALSO did not evolve to exist in such high CO2 levels? That such CO2 levels will cause dramatically higher temperatures and vastly different climatology, which will more than offset (ie: Kill the plants) any gains from higher CO2 levels? You also realize that CO2 is not "plant food" ? Plants use far more than just CO2? And plants are in general carbon nuetral, using and storing carbon while alive (in the form of growth), which then gets released back into the biosphere when they die?
Basic CO2 concentration guidelines:
The effects of increased CO2 levels on adults at good health can be summarized: normal outdoor level: 350 - 450 ppm acceptable levels: below 600 ppm complaints of stiffness and odors: 600 - 1000 ppm ASHRAE and OSHA standards: 1000 ppm general drowsiness: 1000 - 2500 ppm adverse health effects expected: 2500 - 5000 ppm maximum allowed concentration within a 8 hour working period: 5000 ppm
I'm too lazy to search the google:
... but wasn't there originally very high CO2 levels in earth's atmosphere, which kicked up temps. raised atmospheric moisture conc., therefore plant life went wild, eventually becoming so abundant as to drive down CO2 levels so that animal kingdom could thrive, as CO2 dropped plant life dropped off dramatically, eventually forming the goo in the ground that we now call oil, and burn to put the CO2 back.
A giant CO2 do loop
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
There is a problem with the high nuclear scenario in the report. It has a seven fold increase in nuclear power using Gen III reactors but with sea level rise eliminating tidewater sites, there may not be enough cooling available for that large an increase. Nuclear needs extra cooling because it is only about 30% efficient. A number of reactors are shut down already to avoid over heating rivers. Artificial lakes like lake Anna or the South Texas project might work, but you still need a water source to feed them.
The report also explores renewable and carbon capture scenarios so the problem with nuclear may not be a show stopper.
"Nuclear power has killed about 5 people"
Although I agree with you on fission, you may have forgotten about this nasty incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
And hard figures how many ppl died from that ?
Now that "Experts" have predicted this future you can now reliably bet it won't happen. The history of future predicting is that "Experts" get it wrong. They all have their biases and conflicts of interest that cause them to predict what they want the future to be like but the future is never the way they predict it.
So... If you want a safe bet, bet against this report.
Yep, and CFCs create holes in the OZONE layer..
OMG!!! Just stay indoors!!
LOL
Yeah, see, we are eventually going to come take your stupid wasteful shit. And you won't do anything, because the only dog you have in this fight is that you don't want to acknowledge how wrong you are and how you're harming the future.
Your reaction to cognitive dissonance isn't my problem.
A Shit Ton of them, and see them through to establishment.
We've decimated one of the largest moderators of climate on this planet in the past couple of centuries and until we start reversing this trend in a serious way, I wouldn't expect much progress on the climate front.
"Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources"
Eh?
Germany recently got half of its electricity from solar for a few hours and will be able to get 1/3 permanently. Solar generated electricity is almost cheaper than coal generated electricity in Australia.
It those two countries can do that, the United States doesn't need nuclear power on the scale of 60% of our electrical needs.
Whoa whoa whoa... hold on. The article states that, within 15 years, 100% of automobiles sold in America will be electric. BS!
How, exactly, are these things going to be fueled? Are there plants being built right now to generate the electricity required to power these automobiles? And where/how exactly will they refuel?
EV Charging station tech are still in its infancy with membership being required to refuel at different stations. This is like ARCO, Texaco, Shell, USA Gas, etc. all requiring your for-fee membership just to be allowed to buy gas from their stations.
And charging at home is just fine... if you have a garage in which you're allowed to charge. Does this author really think people in low-income neighborhoods are going to be so lucky as to have EV chargers suddenly appear on their streets or that apartment communities will install them in carports just for the heck of it?
"Level 3 chargers are on their way!" -- No they're not! Not for normal folk. They cost to much to build, they cost too much per kWh to use, and if they were actually installed en masse, would require massive power spikes from the grid-- and our grid cannot currently handle that.
Before anyone begins to see EVs as the future, we need to change the way they are refueled and battery-swapping needs to be the next step in EV evolution.
Model:
1) Battery Swap Station charges battery rails at night when grid electricity is cheapest and uses solar/wind during the day.
2) Roll up to a swap station when your charge is low.
3) Swipe your credit card, pay for X number of rails.
4) Vending machine makes available X number of rails while opening the equivalent number of rail slots for return.
5) Remove a used rail, insert rail into machine. Rail is scanned for inventory and return status.
6) Remove a fresh rail, insert rail into car.
7) Repeat 5 & 6 until complete.
8) When complete, lock in rails, close cover, go back to driver's seat, start up, drive away.
Pros:
Everyone can refuel their EVs regardless of where they live.
It's as cumbersome as pumping gas.
Less power consumed due to slower charging.
Less cost due to electricity source distribution.
Prevents the need to EV chargers everywhere.
Cons:
Requires new type of refueling station.
My reaction will become your problem you dictatorial scum motherfucker. If you use the boot of government on my back, I'm coming for YOU.
I'm done with you using some trumped up crisis to establish a worldwide police state.
Mmm... if I were working for the fossil fuel industry and energy companies I'd want to maintain the status quo as it is for as long as possible. In fact, I'd be bound to by corporate law. What's a good way to do that?
How about blueprints of grand plans; wildly expensive and disruptive civil engineering projects that not only require political cooperation and central planning on a national scale, but also international cooperation and investment, and giving up a certain degree of national autonomy "for the greater good", in order for international and transnational planning to be feasible. Also include ideas that have already been exposed by the scientific community as practically unworkable such as carbon capture and storage. Ignore the fact that China is investing more in renewable energy than the USA in total expenditure and Germany and other EU countries are investing way more per capita. Ignore the fact that other countries are investing heavily in fast, efficient mass-transportation systems, raising energy efficiency requirements of new buildings, retrofitting govt. buildings and providing grants for homes and businesses to retrofit theirs. And ignore the fact that decentralised networks of energy production in homes and communities are already contributing substantial proportions of energy back to national grids (e.g. Germany generated 75% of its power for a day and electricity prices went into negative figures. 50% of that energy was generated by home and property owners). Then announce your plan to the world saying, "This is the best way to do it."
We've been seeing this kind of nonsense from pro-status quo organisations (often shell companies set up by big oil and coal to fund non-profits) for decades already. This is nothing new.
We don't want to send nuclear waste anywhere. The long-term radiation in it represents reusable, unburned fuel.
...by ensuring that no plants ever get built.
In theory, I suppose, double liability would motivate everyone involved in design, construction, and operation to make sure that there are no mistakes. In practice, every human -- and every human organization -- has the power to cause accidents that they can't possibly pay for. Doubling the liability for those accidents won't make a bit of difference.
I drive carefully. I've still had a couple of accidents, though. If one of those accidents had sent me into a van hauling $10M worth of Swarovski crystal sculptures, I'd have been sorry, really I would, but I wouldn't be paying off the damages. If the courts found me at fault and fined me $20M, I wouldn't be any sorrier, or in any better position to pay.
So Dinosaurs AND Humans cause DGW/AGW or they DONT.
Who caused it last time? Since the dinos didnt have cars, planes, trucks, coal fire.
Im perplexed that all the Cult of the Church of Climatologists (C) Al Goreleone think that back then it was natural but this time it is "fo sho" our problem.
I think you fuckers put this shit on MTV, brainwash the kids, and then you use this crisis to have a dictatorship.
I don't think that will sell. Nuclear power has a bad rap despite the fact that objective studies show deaths per watt or medical costs per watt to be equal to or better than most alternatives.
Nuclear just gives voters the jeebies; that's the way it is.
Table-ized A.I.
Germany gets 2.3% of it's power from solar electric.
Not even for a moment did they get half their power from solar. The headline was wrong/,misleading times two.
More like 6%, unfortunately. That's nice and all, that when the sun is shining really bright, for five minutes you can get a significant amount of power from solar.
Then, within three hours, it's no longer 10AM-2PM and solar energy drops dramatically. (Our eyes see brightness roughly on a logarithmic scale, so what we perceive to be not quite as bright as bright is actually 90% less energy). For example, the moon looks to be maybe 5% as bright as the sun. Actually, the sun is 400,000 times brighter.
So yeah, solar is a great way to REDUCE the demand on your base sources during lunch time. Kind of like regenerative braking REDUCES the demand on the engine. Neither is, or ever can be, a primary energy source.
So now you plan to have higher CO2 and not have more plant life right? So plants are not going to grow more.
Bull fucking shit.
Pollen in the air are increasing to match the PPM growth. Its measurable.
But you hate the plants it seems.
The biosphere will adjust to the natural changes in the atmosphere. Its the little fuckers like you who think they are GOD that will fuck this whole place up royally.
You are like the Nausicaa Toxic Forest Creators. Your "cure" is fucking brutal.
Darwin is wrong wrong wrong about global warming! Government scientists have hit a line-drive touchdown in their level of deceit.
Table-ized A.I.
Your post is based on a slight misunderstanding of radioactivity, a misunderstanding that guys like Patrick Moore of Greenpeace purposely created to trick you. Since founding Greenpeace, Moore has realized he was foolish to BS people and he's changed his tune. Moore now says:
Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
Moore skipped the fundamental lie / misunderstanding though. There ARE substances that emit radiation very slowly, over a long period of time (trees are an example of this type). There are also substances that emit radiation quickly, quickly enough to harm you. What Moore didn't tell you is that THESE ARE TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF WASTE. If you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. A candle burns for a long time. Gunpowder burns quickly, releasing its energy all it once. All that energy being released at once is dangerous. Gun powder dangerous BECAUSE it is fast. The energy from the candle isn't dangerous BECAUSE it's being released so slowly. The release of nuclear energy is just the same. There are some materials that take 4,000 years to release their energy. Since it's so slow, you'd need to sit next to it for 800 years to be affected. Then there is the waste that releases enough energy to affect you in only one year. In four years, it's released most of its energy and it is safe to have around the house.
Listen, there is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', and you made a big mistake by using the phrase "devastating climate change", that should just be "climate change", so you can plead ignorance when 'catastrophic man-made global warming' doesn't occur.
www.climatedepot.com
watch out we got an anonymous internet tough guy here.
Looser.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Looser? You mean I'm not "tight?"
You meant loser, right, loser?
31 people died in the initial blast. Alas, there are no hard figures for the full toll, but last time I checked, 31 > 5, which is what I was replying to raymorris about.
Why in the hell did my comment get modded down? I was just trying to point out a simple fact, not try to get involved in the fission vs fusion vs solar vs hydro vs wind etc etc. I guess that makes me the asshole now?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
71 people died from Chernobyl. That same year, more people died from coal.
PREDICTIONS of increased cancer rates around Chernobyl vary. The average prediction is somewhere around 4,000. Compare 170,000 killed when a hydroelectric dam went. Nothing is perfectly safe, but the worst nuclear accident in history isn't as bad as the worst wheat accident.
You are right... these days it happens much quicker.
And yet, a far milder jolt on their climate wiped up 95% of all life the likes of which the world took ages to recover from. The nature of any given climate is of academic interest; the problem is in how fast it changes...
So it doesn't matter if we end up with the climate of Venus or Mercury? We just need to take it real slow and we can adjust to arbitrarily huge climate changes? I don't buy it.
we've done in just 200 years what took a million then
There are two things to note. First, the CO2 content was at times around 2000 ppm which is five times current levels. So we haven't done in 200 years what took a million. We're still a millennium or two away from reaching those levels.
Second, the climate driver then was supposed to be volcanoes which are never known for their steady output. And we can't measure 250 million year old geological effects below a certain time scale resolution. So the above changes may have repeatedly happened over the course of days to a few years for hundreds of thousands or millions of years not a gradual change over a million years. But those spikes may be (and probably are) below the resolution of anything we can measure today.
the longer we wait, the more expensive it becomes.
If energy complains and religious fundies where pushing a false debate with lies, we would have been making small changes for 20 years.
Switching to cleaner technologies will not bankrupt America, don't be stupid.
China and India are also putting money into clean energies.
IF America would stop listening to denier and start a big project, it would BOOST our economy, and drive new technologies developed by american companies.
Remember, big project do not literally burn money. Changing the grid to something 21st century? Yeah, that would cost a lot/. which goes to American workers, who then buy things and everyone pays taxes. The circle continues.
Spending money to develop small Solar furnace project, say 5MW, on farms mean workers making money cheaper at cleaner energy.
spending the billions on have a 10K sqr miles solar farm moves money through the economy, provides cleaner energy.
The idea the moving to cleaner energy will bankrupt America is complete nonsense.
If 8 years ago people actually starting being rational about the science and started actining, the burst bubble would have had a much SMALLER impact.
It's funny., developing a pipeline the will provide a 100 jobs for a short time is good for the economy, but switching to a clean energy that will create many thousands of long term jobs is some how bad for the economy.
And this doesn't even get into the fact that it means less dependence on other countries.
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I think it's too late anyway. With scientists figuring out we need crash programs to change basically everything in just 15 years to avoid major climate disruption, it's pretty much game over. People don't have the motivation and the cause and effect link is too removed for most dullards to understand what's going on. I think it's obvious from the postings here that the API has done their disinformation job very well. There is no way to mobilize the support we need to make this all happen in 15 years.
What it will take is these deniers finally realizing that in spite of setting new heat records every year and many months for the last decade, it really is getting hotter. It's going to take more major floods, more tornado swarms, more hurricanes, more droughts, and more weather disasters of scales never seen before these folks finally figure out they have been duped and used to enrich the few living out their last hurrahs.
But really, it's been to late for a decade. There is also too much infrastructure, too many IC cars, too much totally dependent on fossil fuels to roll things back in just 15 years. A lot of newly-installed infrastructure is designed to last 30 years and is amortized out over those time periods. These people make fun of him, but the time we should have really been working hard to fix this was when Al Gore popularized the alarm.
The term "dead man walking" comes to mind here. We're now just along for the ride. I am glad I am the age I am and have had a chance to live my life and won't be seeing when the real climate issues hit. When people can't feed themselves is when things will get really nasty and it's sad that kids today will likely get to see it. The earth is quickly headed to a time when it can't support anywhere near the life on it now. That means die offs. Big ones. Humans won't take that laying down though. They start wars. They steal. They kill. They basically go insane.
It will take a while but it's coming. These unthinking drones can deny it all they want. Make Al Gore jokes. Hockey stick jokes. Whatever. It's all simple physics and chemistry. Anyone with an undergraduate degree and any knowledge of infrared spectroscopy can understand the concept of greenhouse gases, trapping heat, and temperature increases. Throw in a bit of decaying formerly-frozen peat bogs, methane clathrates melting on the ocean floors, and the atmosphere's ability to hold more water vapor as it heats up, and we are making a mighty fine thermal blanket for this planet.
We just can't get out of this kitchen. We're stuck here.
> just be careful with your numbers.
Absolutely, thanks for pointing that out. I want to post accurate facts, both for the credibility of the argument and I learn something.
Researching solar, I first found out that while solar electric MIGHT be a useful supplement at lunch time, there is zero chance of it ever being viable for primary power. However, in looking for accurate, objective data, I also learned that solar pre-heating by running my hot water pipe across the lawn can save me a lot of money here in sunny Texas.
couple of things.
1) those levels will wipe the human species out
2) When that happen, plants didn't rot. Literally, the stuff the makes plant rot didn't exist in the Carboniferous era.
So, the plant sand trees dies and stacked up on each other, and became a locked up sequestration of carbon called petroleum.
The bugs the evolved after the Carboniferous they cause plants and trees to rot mean the CO2 in the plants get released back into the air.
As long as trees rot, there will never be reserve of petroleum again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Natural adaptation to fast changing CO2 might be hard.
But certainly fast adaptation of food crops is not only possible but already in progress (accelerated breeding and genetic modification). We simply don't grow the same stuff today that we did 50-100 years ago.
And we won't be growing today's crops 20 years from now even IF the climate stays exactly the same as it is today (which is unlikely, it will be slightly colder or slightly warmer or slightly drier or slightly wetter depending on where you are.)
Stopped reading right there. But I wonder how much this report cost? It seems to have kept quite a few people employed for quite a while. And all their solution requires to work is a miracle.
You can save a few bucks by pre-heating your hour water in the sun.
You can also power your refrigerator in the middle of the day, when you're not home , by paying $1,500 / month for solar electric. One of these two makes sense.
Every bit of money or time spent taking about solar electric is spent NOT working on something that can actually solve the problem, so it helps guarantee that we remain stuck with coal. If I owned a coal-mining company, I'd promote solar-electric to keep people distracted from nuclear and anything else that might actually be practical.
You are foreigner, because a TRUE AMERICAN would support a FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM and not act like a VICTIM.
AGW is falsifiable. It's solid science. Here, let me explain:
1) Visible light strike the earth
2) Visible light generates IR when it strike something
3) CO2 is transparent to Visible light
4) CO2 absorbed energy from IR
5) The amount of CO2 is increasing
6) we release giga-tones of CO2 that has been sequestrated from before the bug that cause trees to rot existed.
Every on of those could be shown to be false with trivial tests. You notice deniers never go after the science? they make ad homs and cherry pick
AGW is political becasue people who make money from the controversy keep stirring up the false controversy.
Adding energy(heat) to a system changes it. So explain to me how adding energy into the earth wouldn't change the climate.
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Is Marxism and involuntary population control implemented on a global scale by an international governing force body which is not bound by such quaint notions as elections or sovereignty. We must also reeducate or dispose of people who also believe in such things as gods or private property. That is the only way humanity will be able end global warming.
"but about how many it will kill. compaed to other energy sources.'
Modern reacors can be built that use current waste. The byproducts from tjhos reacors return to background radiation level in 200-500 years. not half life, back ground levels.
I can tell you hav no idea how nuclear wast is stored.
If we teleport all the nuclear waste into the Marianas trench, you wouldn't even raise the radiation in the sea by by a measurable amount.
But that would be waste full when we have the tech here to use it.
How much nuclear waste do you think there is?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The radioactive cesium released by Fukushima has a half-life of about forty years. That's short enough to be a real problem and long enough to take centuries to mostly go away. (Heck, radium's about sixteen hundred years, and nobody wants to handle that directly.) The radioactive iodine has gone away, every single atom of it. While there's a certain amount of truth in what you say, there are radioactive substances that are quite dangerous for long periods of time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You should flesh that out as a business plan and shop around for money.
Yes I am serious, it's a good idea.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Post Carboniferous era, trees are carbon neutral.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Isn't this the whole point of the climate change movement for the last couple of decades? The longer we wait to change, the more expensive and disruptive it will be. Why couldn't people just see it as an investment to try to keep a gradual change in our environment from becoming a crisis? Are we really that short-sighted?
We can't do it simply by eliminating fossil fuel use. We also need to return large areas to swamp and forest conditions and shrink the surfaces ruined by roof tops and blacktops. We will need a reduction in population as well which will tend to lessen the amount of trash and trash hauling. And if you think it completely through what we do is take energy and send it to an end point such as an air conditioner which turns that energy into heat again. So the end use of electricity needs attention as well. This is why the car anti pollution laws have failed. Newer cars pollute a lot less but we produce more and more cars every year so that the total pollution amount rises. If our goal had been to have far less cars on the road with far smaller engines we would have had a more effective law but the auto makers would have had a fit. There is more money in over powered, over sized, cars. In the late 1960s we needed people to go to tiny cars with tiny motors instead of a monster Pontiac Judge with a huge V8 engine and so over weight that it couldn't get out of its own way with tires too skinny to stop and brakes that were a bad joke as well. Yet the auto industry raved about such cars. And who could live without a Corvette with holes in the hood for the carbs to stick through and a blower to make absolutely certain you would die at high speeds.
You can try to not build shit this time by making security a top priority: First tear them down, then build them up. But operating an overaged plant isn't a good idea.
It's called the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principal 20% of the people produce 80% of the wealth and it nothing new. If 80% is produced by 20%, then it follows that 64% is produced by 4% and 51% by 1%!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
For my country, Australia, it suggests a move from coal to gas which seems logical until you look at what has happened to the local gas price because we are selling so much of it to other countries. It is now cheaper to burn coal again, so much so that gas fired power-stations are being shut down and coal fired ones are coming out of mothballs. The best they can offer as an alternative is bioenergy but that then limits how much food we can produce to help feed Asia. We have a huge chunk of the worlds fissile resources but there is no mention of rolling out nuclear base-load power stations in Australia, and that has the stench of a political agenda about it.
you are smug, highfalutin persnickety little motherfucker and I didnt even read most of your stupid fucking smarmy assfuck answer. Kill yourself. I have kids to raise without fuckface pricks like you trying to control me and indoctrinate my kids. Kill yourself, for the planet.
WTF do you think they do to things we purchase? SAY oh well, fuck no jack up the price(s) to offset your loved tax, let's tax everything the government uses money so wisely. You want clean power ride a horse, oh shit it puts out C02, you better walk oh wait you put oh CO2. Bottom line there is no win/win batteries are toxic. I am not riding in an electromagnet or having people riding in the back on top of batteries. However, more than happy with you all doing the base trials, what will you do when it found long exposure cause cancer. It's amazing to me the people that push the environment crap make no common sense. Let's see they have a bunch of kids increase the carbon footprint (it's acceptable in society), can't live without Air Conditioning, blow dryers, playstation, internet, etc... You want me to change makes some fuckin cuts yourself. Might want to start by looking at the carbon footprint of surfing the web posting stupid shit.
It's tempting as hell, I know. All that energy right outside. Also, if I could collect 0.00001% of the money in the world I'd be enormously wealthy.
The problem is, I can't collect even that tiny percentage. For solar electric, the fact that bright sun is only available for a few hours per day is an absolute deal-killer. Let's pretend for a moment that we had magic solar panels that collect a thousand times as much energy as what falls on them , and they're free. All we have to do is store the energy for overnight use. I have an idea, let's use the solar power to pump water uphill, then at 3PM we'll let it start coming back down, through turbines that generate electricity. Let's see where we can put these reservoirs. If we calculate the required amount of water X height, we find that the reservoirs need to cover 80% of the United States. That's right, you can power the country by putting most of it underwater. And that's with magical solar panels that are free.
The amount of energy we're talking about is so far outside most people's experience that we have a hard time reasoning about it. Solar IS good at heating things. Solar energy is good for growing food. It's good for a lot of things. It absolutely sucks balls at making electricity, because we need electricity in the evening, at night, in the morning. Also because solar electric is ten times as expensive than the alternatives. People simply can't afford a $1,500 / month electric bill.
There is ONE way you can turn solar into electricity that's practical on a small scale only. You use the sun to grow plants, then burn the plants to generate electricity, even after 2PM. That does have the minor side effect of releasing a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere. And of course the plants need water, lots of water. Lots of land too.
Preheating water with solar heat: a good way to save energy and money.
Turning light into electricity: a good way to power a small calculator, only. Doesn't provide enough power to run a watch. (But a tiny watch battery does.)
I think it's a great idea to have electric cars and 60% of our electricity come from nuclear power. I don't believe this because I believe AGW is real, I believe this because I think basing an economy on foreign sourced energy is a very bad idea.
Whether AGW is real or not the world needs to stop giving gobs of money to Mideastern dictators. They just use that money to build themselves palaces so they don't have to look at the people they exploit, or they build armies to wage holy wars on their neighbors. If nuclear power becomes more common then we'd stop having these resource wars over diminishing oil resources. Uranium and thorium are common enough that no one should have to fight over it.
People will still fight wars of course. They will just have to be more creative in coming up with a reason besides oil.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
1) No they wont.
2) Yes they did. The pile of stuff plants grow out of is dirt. If dirt were to lie around for a long time it would become the same stuff. 57% of the biotic content of soil is carbon.
This whole thing about the bugs rotting the trees is trash. Plants always turn into what we call soil. The actions of bugs, fungus, mold, worms, microbes, etc, can release the carbon content in soil/carbon sink.
What you probably mean is the actions of bugs, worms and organisms release the carbon content in the soil more than if they didnt exist.
So your claim as long as trees rot there wont be petrol reserves is more or less crap. This is a Leonardo DiCaprio line verbatim, lol.
What you should say is that if the things in the soil today that do things to release the carbon in the soil/carbon sink stop doing them then dirt wont pile up and become oil later.
Then again your ramblings here show that you are sheeple that just listens to other people's bunkum and then you bleat it back thinking you are an expert with an valid opinion. You've shown yourself to be a indolent moron here.
F.U.D
Considering the low probability of a serious reactor accident, individual utility companies might bet on not having one in their powerplants and have no insurance unless it is mandatory, like compulsory vehicle insurance.
Set the minimum coverage to something that would cover Fukujima (estimated $100B) and there is your market-based solution ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
> Somewhere either the sun or the wind is out, when it isn't in another place, so the electricity just gets redistributed from where it is to where it is not?
Where "somewhere" means up to 15% of the world, never more than 15%. For several hours, only the middle of the Pacific ocean has midday sun. You can't run mile-wide power cables from the Pacific to the UK. Remember, your eyes can see in either candlelight or in full sun, which is a MILLION times brighter. Though morning and late afternoon look "light" to our eyes, there's darn little energy there. Solar-electric pretty much captures energy from 10AM-2PM. Most of the time, the bright sun is on the other side of the planet, and that's pretty far away.
They did NOT momentarily get 50% of their energy from solar. They momentarily got 6%-7% from solar, when the sun was bright and nobody was at home because they were at work. The headline was wrong, in two different ways. I'll explain how in a moment.
Imagine if Germany shut down all of their electric power plants, then connected a Duracell AA battery to the public grid. You could honestly say that a single AA provided 100% of the power on Germany's public electric grid at that time. Of course, there wouldn't be a usable amount of power available from the grid, so everyone would be running of their own gas-powered generators, but all of the grid power would be coming from that one AA battery.
What Germany actually did was a less extreme version of the above. They actually shut down some power plants, not all. Because of this, electricity is relatively scarce in Germany - it costs ten times as much as it does in the US. You're not going to be charging up a Telsa in Germany! Not for $320 per charge!
Because the public electric grid in Germany is so expensive, 87% of the power people use comes from somewhere other than the public grid. The grid provides about 12.8% of the power for the country. For a moment, half of that 12.8% was from solar. The other 87% + half of 12.8% = 93.8% was not from solar electric.
Even if the US emitted no carbon at all, it wouldn't make much difference, since China and India are dwarfing its contributions in climate models and predictions, and they are not going to sign up to such nonsense.
And anybody who thinks we can plan economic development like that is an utter fool; if the failure of the USSR central planning doesn't convince you, just look at the complete failure of Obama's own economic predictions or the effects of his policies.
Sounds like conclusions from big utilities, GE, and Westinghouse. Nuclear fission will not grow to be that big a part in that short of a time. Wind and solar will continue to grow exponentially, and will supply a large percentage of our electricity. We'll still be using natural gas, but coal usage will be chiefly metallurgical. There'll be a lot of electric cars on the road, but it won't be 100% battery powered. 99% might have batteries or capacitors with some capacity, but many will have another power source on board, and many of them will be some type of ICEs. Maybe many will have fuel cells with sources of hydrogen on board (via a chemical reaction that releases it from some type of room-temperature liquid or solid-liquid combination). More than anything else, to cut back on CO2, there'll be higher energy efficiencies in buildings and vehicles. There'll be very little soot from man-made sources, and man-made surfaces will be more reflective. Burning petroleum will be far less common. Liquid biofuels will play a significant part. Much to my chagrine, though, most all of this will be under the control of large entities, not individuals making their own power. The big guys won't go away, they'll just switch business models and products.
> End-user prices for electricity are maybe 3x times higher in Germany
Maybe, except no. The wholesale spot price is three times higher, but German households pay more in green energy surcharges than they do in actual per kwh production costs. You have to ignore MOST of the charges on the household electric bill to say it's only three times as much as US households pay.
> In fact, Germany exports a lot of electricity (e.g. to France).
You got your two countries mixed up. France is the world's number one net EXPORTER of electricity. As in, they sell more electricity than other other country in the world. Check IEA if you think I'm mistaken. The cost in France is half of what it is in Germany, IEA numbers. They aren't buying it up from Germany for twice as much as they sell it for. France uses nuclear plants to produce 75% of that electricity.
> solar was 30 TWh (4.7%)
So they pay ten times as much (or let's pretend it's three times as much) and for all that extra money, only 4.7% is solar.
If each family paid $5,000 / month for their electric bill, maybe 20% of it could be solar! The other 80% could be bought from the French nuclear plants.
> The idea that the grid provides only 12.8% percent of the electricity is Germany is so wrong that I am speechless.
You numbskulls keep making the same mistake. The "50%" headline here on Slashdot made the same mistake, and I explained it then, quite clearly.
Since you don't seem to have the attentions span to read the exhaustive explanation, here's a short hint for you. Meditate on this quote:
"You're not going to be charging up a Telsa in Germany!"
If you believe the AGW / Climate change drivel you can neither read graphs, nor read properly, nor spot errors and fakery when it is done in plain sight.
The more shouting and burn-him-at-the-stake rants, the more proof is being provided of the above, ie. lack of intelligence.
This directly from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor No wonder it makes a hockey stick when fed white noise. I can understand why someone would do this. Thermodynamic modeling is among the most difficult mathematical challenges mankind attempts. Instead of trying to create and solve a big hairy partial differential equation, just hard code a vector. It it weren't for the leak, nobody would have known the difference.
To be exact, the half-life of cesium-137 is 30.17 years. I was responding to someone worried about geological time frames. Certainly cesium waste / fuel should be stored safely for several years while it decays. In 90 years, 88% of the radioactivity is gone. That's something to pay attention to. It's not the "thousands of years" that the greenies used to claim, until most of them realized that "no nuclear" means "more coal".
Let's see where we can put these reservoirs. If we calculate the required amount of water X height, we find that the reservoirs need to cover 80% of the United States. That's right, you can power the country by putting most of it underwater. And that's with magical solar panels that are free.
I call bullshit. Show your work.
Actually, since you're obviously just going to make shit up, I'll do it for you.
So I go here and plug in 916.6666 total watts per hour, giving me the 22 kWh/day it says on my power bill this month. Then I fill in 24 hours per day for the time I expect my equipment to run. Then I fill in a 48 Volt system voltage. Then I say I want 5 full days of backup capacity, so no sun for five days straight, 120 hours of battery capacity. Then I fill in 820 amp hours for this battery and the calculator spits out a number: I need 12 batteries that capacity. Looking at the data sheet, we discover that each of those batteries is 4516.875 cubic inches, for a grand total of 54202.5 cubic inches, which is 31.3672 cubic feet. Which, as luck would have it, is almost exactly the capacity of this refrigerator.
So in order to power my house in summer months, complete with the lights, appliances, computers, and the air conditioner I have today, for five whole days, I need approximately one refrigerator worth of lead acid batteries. Which will handily fit in a corner of my basement.
80% of the US under water? Bullshit. Try an extra fridge in every house. A ~$12600+charge controller+shipping fridge.
It isn't impossible to be 100% solar. Just expensive.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I see that you're skilled enough to calculate that your refrigerator-sized stack of car batteries could provide the power to pump several thousand gallons of water, demonstrating that batteries are a better way to store energy than lifting water is.
From your reported power usage, it sounds like you're probably single. If the rest of your figures are correct, we'd have roughly a refrigerator-sized stack of batteries _per_person_. Inverters are 0% efficient at no load (they waste 20 watts idling) to 90% at full load, so figure around 75% average efficiency, so 16-18 batteries per person rather than 12. Batteries lose capacity as they age. You don't want to replace your batteries every two years, but rather continue using them as their capacity decreases over five years, so we better go with 21 of those batteries.
The specific energy of a lead-acid battery is about 35 watt-hours per kilogram, or 64 pounds per Kwh. Our bank of 22 batteries is 193 Kwh at the battery when fresh, so you've got 12,352 pounds of lead and sulfuric acid to mine, then dispose of and replace every 5 years. Four billion pounds for the US. You're going to need a lot of large mines to get all that lead. You could do it, but it wouldn't be very good for the environment.
You asked me to show my work. Flood models are a bit complex, of course, but we can at least get a general idea by calculating the minimum and maximum possible, assuming ideal topography and worst-case topography. My original number was based on a calculation in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "Powering the planet: Chemical challenges in solar energy utilization", but they might be wrong, so let's do a fresh calculation:
As per the Bureau of Land Reclamation (operators of Hoover Dam / Lake Mead) Hoover dam produces 4 billion kwh annually. Per EIA, the US uses 4,047 billion kwh. So we need 1,000 Hoover Dams. BLR says Hoover is 726 feet high and flooded 248 square miles. They also say the amount of water pushing on the dam would cover the entire state of Pennsylvania 1 foot deep.
The location of Hoover dam was of course chosen with some care - it's a good place for a dam, in a deep canyon. It's a place where you can build a dam 726 feet high, so the flows hundreds of feet down through the turbines, releasing a lot of energy. We won't find 1,000 to build dams over 700 feet high, but let's pretend we could in order to figure a MINIMUM possible amount of flooding. This is the minimum assuming ideal topography, where we have all the deep canyons we want. Hoover Dam times 1,000 is 248,000 square miles for the minimum. Dams go on rivers, of course, filling the river valley, so reservoirs tend to be long and thin, not square. If our reservoir is 10 miles across, it'll be 24,800 miles long. Oops, that's longer the distance around the earth. Let's make it 100 miles across, so it'll be 2,480 miles long, roughly the width of the United States. That's the minimum, pretending we have 1,000 deep canyons to fill hundreds of feet deep. A dam built in flat land will just create a shallow flood across the whole state. Worst case, assuming flat topography, would have the whole US under 70 feet of water. If you go into flood simulator software that's been loaded with the actual topography of the US and start placing dams on actual rivers and let it calculate the flooding based on real topography, you end up with about 80% flooded.
>How about we just use electric cars for most cases because they're simpler, more efficient, etc.?
Or maybe because they are quieter ( on the inside ) I noticed that while driving my Volt I can listen to the classical music station and actually hear the music.