In my real work life I was sys admin for VAX VMS systems (I loved VMS) and Solaris with Oracle DB and a large ERP system. I left work 3 years ago to a comfortable retirement in a home I own free and clear and no debt. No diapers for me yet. Eat your heart out sonny.
This story brings back fond memories for me. In my first term of "data processing" we did our work on an IBM 1401 (circa 1982). The teacher was an old IBM guy who brought it to the school. As the story says, 6 bit "bytes" with a parity bit and a checkmark bit. You had to write your code to bootstrap your program in. The "OS" consisted of loading your card deck in the reader and punching the start button. It would read the first card into memory from address 0 to 79 then start executing at address 0. After that you were on your own. Output was to a card punch (address 100-179) or the 1403 printer (address 200-331). The rest of the total of 4K of memory we had was available for use. The word length was defined by the checkmark bit. You could put in two thousand digit numbers and add or subtract them. It was humorous sometimes when someone would make a programing error during the printing part of their program and get in a fast loop of page feeds. The 1403 printer could shoot the paper to the ceiling when it was feeding the paper that fast and the best solution was to put your foot on the top of the box of paper to rip the paper and stop the feed.
The last program we wrote was a fairly complex inventory problem. The 1401 only did add and subtract and the input data had one item that needed multiplying by a large number in the 200,000 range. You could tell when we ran the program who had written multiply routines in their programs and who just wrote a loop to do that many additions. The multiply routines would finish in a second or two but the add loops took over a minute to complete. I had great fun running and programming that thing.
Yah, it's possible there could be land life but it wouldn't look anything like what we have now. It would have to be seriously hardened against the effects of UV radiation.
The ozone layer does warm the stratosphere some since it it capturing UV energy up there and that has repercussions all the way down to the surface. But the effect is minor compared to the effects of CO2 and even CFCs which are hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful.
As K. S. Kyosuke says CFCs are among the most potent greenhouse gases. Meanwhile the ozone layer is one of the most vital protective layers of the Earth. Without it land life would be practically impossible as UVA & UVB rained down on the surface. Life would be largely limited to the oceans.
Who's going to pay for the nuclear power plants? Of the 5 plants that were under construction during the Obama administration one was completed, two were cancelled because of cost and the two under construction's costs have ballooned from around $7 billion to around $26 billion and are expected to come online in 2021 or 2022. The one that was completed was a Tennessee Valley Authority project that was something like 80% or 90% done after being started in the 1980s (I think). All they had to do was finish it off.
So find a way to finance them at a cost that can be competitive with gas, solar and wind and they can be built. It's true that if we started building them regularly like starting a new one every couple years the costs would probably come down some as experience went up but I'm not convinced that will be enough to compete as costs continue to drop with solar and wind. The only part of the puzzle missing is cost effective grid storage of electricity and there is a lot of work being done on that with a lot of different possibilities.
Yes, we've been using some forms of solar and wind power for thousands of years. But as a practical replacement for grid electricity it's only in the last 10 years or so the cost has come down enough to work. And the cost of both of those is still dropping so there will be more demand in the future. The only problem yet to be fully solved is cost effective storage and that's getting better all the time too. I expect it to take a decade or two more to get there as the major source of grid electricity.
First off, new ICE cars will probably stop selling in about 2 more years.
No chance of that happening. The automakers wouldn't be able to ramp up the production of EVs that quick and the supply of batteries couldn't support that level of production yet. More like 5-10 years for that to happen.
The actual absolute amount of temperature increase of the water is negligible, so it won't really affect hurricane/cyclone strengths.
Ocean surface temperatures have been setting records the last few years. The average may be small but the heat isn't always distributed evenly. In some of the areas where Atlantic hurricanes are found there have been surface temperatures 2-3 C above average at times. That does affect hurricanes.
It's much worse than that. Buying electric won't help - that power still has to be generated somewhere, and building those vehicles in the first place is very far from carbon-neutral. The real answer is to walk, or ride a bike (or skateboard, or whatever). And don't buy a new bike, use a second-hand one from somewhere. And if you live so far from your workplace that you can't, then move.
In the USA we have an infrastructure largely built around the automobile. That isn't going to change anytime soon. Keep working for the change you believe in but don't expect it to change at the rate you think it should. It just ain't going to happen.
In the meantime electric vehicles do help. Even if they draw their charge from a coal plant. The coal plant is something like 30% more efficient than an ICE automobile. And the grid is gradually getting more carbon free. I expect the rate of adding non-carbon power sources to the grid to increase in the future as they get cheaper and the effects of AGW become more and more obvious.
Why crash on the GOP? Look at how the left/dems are blocking nuke energy from replacing fossil fuels. We can do that rapidly, but the far left is stopping it. And their fear is not founded on science or logic. Just fear. There really is NO difference between the far left and right. Both hate science and logic.
The left are not blocking nuclear power (not that some of the don't try to). The Obama administration approved the building of four nuclear plants two of which got cancelled because of cost overruns and two of which are still being built at nearly 4 times their original cost. The problem is the financial industry won't touch them without massive government loan guarantees. Fix the problem of building them on time and on budget (with maybe 25% wiggle room) and you might see some more action. But they still have to compete on the cost of the electricity they produce with natural gas, solar and wind which is difficult.
You're assuming that municipal broadband always operates at a loss but I've never seen anything that indicates that. I'd be surprised if that was the case in Chattanooga given the number of subscribers.
Why in the world would a government owned municipal broadband provider want to serve as few as possible? That would just increase their cost per subscriber making more likely a private ISP could compete with them.
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In my real work life I was sys admin for VAX VMS systems (I loved VMS) and Solaris with Oracle DB and a large ERP system. I left work 3 years ago to a comfortable retirement in a home I own free and clear and no debt. No diapers for me yet. Eat your heart out sonny.
This story brings back fond memories for me. In my first term of "data processing" we did our work on an IBM 1401 (circa 1982). The teacher was an old IBM guy who brought it to the school. As the story says, 6 bit "bytes" with a parity bit and a checkmark bit. You had to write your code to bootstrap your program in. The "OS" consisted of loading your card deck in the reader and punching the start button. It would read the first card into memory from address 0 to 79 then start executing at address 0. After that you were on your own. Output was to a card punch (address 100-179) or the 1403 printer (address 200-331). The rest of the total of 4K of memory we had was available for use. The word length was defined by the checkmark bit. You could put in two thousand digit numbers and add or subtract them. It was humorous sometimes when someone would make a programing error during the printing part of their program and get in a fast loop of page feeds. The 1403 printer could shoot the paper to the ceiling when it was feeding the paper that fast and the best solution was to put your foot on the top of the box of paper to rip the paper and stop the feed.
The last program we wrote was a fairly complex inventory problem. The 1401 only did add and subtract and the input data had one item that needed multiplying by a large number in the 200,000 range. You could tell when we ran the program who had written multiply routines in their programs and who just wrote a loop to do that many additions. The multiply routines would finish in a second or two but the add loops took over a minute to complete. I had great fun running and programming that thing.
A lot of good points there. Thanks for filling in the details.
That's true but so what? More UV at the surface would be extremely bad news for life on the surface.
Yah, it's possible there could be land life but it wouldn't look anything like what we have now. It would have to be seriously hardened against the effects of UV radiation.
The ozone layer does warm the stratosphere some since it it capturing UV energy up there and that has repercussions all the way down to the surface. But the effect is minor compared to the effects of CO2 and even CFCs which are hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful.
As K. S. Kyosuke says CFCs are among the most potent greenhouse gases. Meanwhile the ozone layer is one of the most vital protective layers of the Earth. Without it land life would be practically impossible as UVA & UVB rained down on the surface. Life would be largely limited to the oceans.
Who's going to pay for the nuclear power plants? Of the 5 plants that were under construction during the Obama administration one was completed, two were cancelled because of cost and the two under construction's costs have ballooned from around $7 billion to around $26 billion and are expected to come online in 2021 or 2022. The one that was completed was a Tennessee Valley Authority project that was something like 80% or 90% done after being started in the 1980s (I think). All they had to do was finish it off.
So find a way to finance them at a cost that can be competitive with gas, solar and wind and they can be built. It's true that if we started building them regularly like starting a new one every couple years the costs would probably come down some as experience went up but I'm not convinced that will be enough to compete as costs continue to drop with solar and wind. The only part of the puzzle missing is cost effective grid storage of electricity and there is a lot of work being done on that with a lot of different possibilities.
Yeah but 30 feet of mud and mire don't disappear overnight. At best you might be able to do something with it in a couple of decades.
Yes, we've been using some forms of solar and wind power for thousands of years. But as a practical replacement for grid electricity it's only in the last 10 years or so the cost has come down enough to work. And the cost of both of those is still dropping so there will be more demand in the future. The only problem yet to be fully solved is cost effective storage and that's getting better all the time too. I expect it to take a decade or two more to get there as the major source of grid electricity.
First off, new ICE cars will probably stop selling in about 2 more years.
No chance of that happening. The automakers wouldn't be able to ramp up the production of EVs that quick and the supply of batteries couldn't support that level of production yet. More like 5-10 years for that to happen.
It will take at least several hundred years for thawed out permafrost to become suitable for agriculture.
if wind power and solar power are so great then why do they produce so little of our energy?
Largely because it takes time to ramp up production of those things. The current power grid wasn't built in a day either.
Anthropogenic global warming is one of the causes of climate change. In fact it appears to be the main driver of climate change at the current time.
Prove that global warming is real.
Given all the scientific evidence available I think the onus is on you to prove it isn't.
Climate change model is to my knowledge completely unable to provide verifiable predictions...
Here is a comparison of observations to climate models that shows you are wrong.
Climate model projections compared to observations
The actual absolute amount of temperature increase of the water is negligible, so it won't really affect hurricane/cyclone strengths.
Ocean surface temperatures have been setting records the last few years. The average may be small but the heat isn't always distributed evenly. In some of the areas where Atlantic hurricanes are found there have been surface temperatures 2-3 C above average at times. That does affect hurricanes.
It's much worse than that. Buying electric won't help - that power still has to be generated somewhere, and building those vehicles in the first place is very far from carbon-neutral. The real answer is to walk, or ride a bike (or skateboard, or whatever). And don't buy a new bike, use a second-hand one from somewhere. And if you live so far from your workplace that you can't, then move.
In the USA we have an infrastructure largely built around the automobile. That isn't going to change anytime soon. Keep working for the change you believe in but don't expect it to change at the rate you think it should. It just ain't going to happen.
In the meantime electric vehicles do help. Even if they draw their charge from a coal plant. The coal plant is something like 30% more efficient than an ICE automobile. And the grid is gradually getting more carbon free. I expect the rate of adding non-carbon power sources to the grid to increase in the future as they get cheaper and the effects of AGW become more and more obvious.
Why crash on the GOP? Look at how the left/dems are blocking nuke energy from replacing fossil fuels. We can do that rapidly, but the far left is stopping it. And their fear is not founded on science or logic. Just fear. There really is NO difference between the far left and right. Both hate science and logic.
The left are not blocking nuclear power (not that some of the don't try to). The Obama administration approved the building of four nuclear plants two of which got cancelled because of cost overruns and two of which are still being built at nearly 4 times their original cost. The problem is the financial industry won't touch them without massive government loan guarantees. Fix the problem of building them on time and on budget (with maybe 25% wiggle room) and you might see some more action. But they still have to compete on the cost of the electricity they produce with natural gas, solar and wind which is difficult.
You kind of lost me there. I read up about QAnon on Wikipedia the other day and they're just another wacky fringe right wing conspiracy group.
You're assuming that municipal broadband always operates at a loss but I've never seen anything that indicates that. I'd be surprised if that was the case in Chattanooga given the number of subscribers.
I thought I was responding to Notabadguy up above but I may have messed up and posted under you. If so, sorry.
And whoever gets voted into office is subject to the provisions of the US Constitution as interpreted by the courts.
Orange Man racist. Orange Man bad.
NPC script stuck in a loop again. Someone reboot.
It's nice when you use the term NCP. It makes it so easy to identify the trolls.
Why in the world would a government owned municipal broadband provider want to serve as few as possible? That would just increase their cost per subscriber making more likely a private ISP could compete with them.