I think it's a deep flaw of the current climate change concerns that they can't demonstrate that the solutions would be better than ignoring the problem.
I'd like to see you try to demonstrate that ignoring the problems of global warming would be better than doing something about it.
I'm not aware that anyone has yet built a financially viable thorium reactor despite at least a couple of attempts. Once someone demonstrates that is possible it may find more acceptance.
Well, I don't like the ACA much but it's better overall than what we had before. My preference would be for something along the lines of the Canadian health care system.
When I was a kid computers were made with discrete components and core memory. Now we put billions of transistors on a stamp sized piece of silicon. There are thousands of people working on the problems you bring up. For large scale installations the cost of solar PV cells is less than $1.00 per Watt and projected to drop to $0.36 per Watt by 2017. Efforts like Elon Musk's battery plant threaten to do the same thing for batteries. (BTW, Musk is a good example of someone with a can-do attitude.)
When the Bush administration took over from Clinton they were warned to keep an eye on Al-Qaeda but they did nothing until a meeting in August just before 9/11. They were more worried about Iraq. Saying the Clinton administration failed to prevent the attack on 9/11 is assuming their greater attention on Al-Qaeda would have not made a difference. That may or may not be true but it's obvious that the Bush administration dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda when they first took over.
Damn...it is gonna get mighty cold in them houses up north, on cloudy winter days with snow piled up halfway to the roofline when the solar panels are damned near useless, no?
There are a lot of naysayers telling us how one thing or the other won't work but we didn't get to where we are as a civilization by listening to them. It's the people with the "can do" attitude that lead us to the future.
While I agree with you about the permafrost cows really do burp more methane than they fart. The reason for that is when cows are out grazing they are doing minimal chewing and just passing it to the first of their four stomachs, the rumen. In there the grass is microbialy fermented which is what produces the methane. When the cows upchuck the fermented grass to chew their cud they burp the methane.
If you're wondering why the cows need the fermentation it's a process that breaks down the cellulose in the grass they eat into more nutritional things like sugars that the cows can digest.
Because all the 1.2% savings that can be made add up to make a large difference. If we find eight ways to make 1.2% savings across different areas then that is nearly a 10% reduction in the human generation of greenhouse gases. The human race isn't limited to finding just one method to solve the climate change problem. If we make small savings across the board with cost-effective, manageable solutions then we don't have to solve the problem with a single grand gesture that ends up costing a lot of money.
In the long run reducing methane emissions by livestock doesn't make any difference. The methane they emit comes from carbon that was already in the active carbon cycle when the plants they eat absorbed it from CO2 in the air. Methane breaks down to CO2 in a relatively short time scale (20-100 years) in the atmosphere and so gets recycled back into the plants eventually with no net change to the amount of carbon in the active carbon cycle. The only real long term answer is to stop adding additional carbon by stopping the burning of fossil fuels. Anything else is just putting lipstick on a pig.
We may cover less than 4% of the Earth's surface but the US is still directly responsible for about 15% of the worldwide emissions of CO2 (as of 2013). Plus you really should include the indirect emissions of other countries that are driven by US demand for the products they produce.
The way we raise cows is an issue but fixing the problem of methane released by ruminants will not fix the problem of AGW. It will just make a slight reduction in the warming.
Don't climate "scientists" have a personal bias invested in a certain outcome?
Even if there weren't anthropogenic global warming there would still be a climate to study. It would still be a subject of considerable interest to us so climate scientists would have plenty of work to do understanding it.
As Geoffry Landis point out the effects of AGW are small on the time scales most humans are aware of. It's a slow motion disaster that's easy to ignore until the effect build up and you wake up one day and ask "Wha' happened?" By then it's too late to fix it except on the slow motion time scale that it happened in the first place.
What bothers me, however, is that the article is talking about burps, while the problem is cow emissions. Not all cow methane emissions are burps.
The majority of the methane a cow produces is burped up rather than coming out the other end. That is from the microbial fermentation that takes place in the cows rumen.
The uppermost area of the rumen, the headspace, is filled with gases (such as methane, carbon dioxide, and, to a much lower degree, hydrogen) released from fermentation and anaerobic respiration of food. These gases are regularly expelled from the reticulorumen through the mouth, in a process called eructation.
I'm not particularly concerned about the methane released by cows and other ruminants because that is carbon from plants they eat that originally drew it from the air in the first place. So it doesn't add to the total carbon in the active carbon cycle like burning fossil fuels does which is the real problem. If all we were getting was some increased methane from raising more livestock it would be a minor problem that would hardly be worth worrying about if CO2 levels were still around 280 ppm. Far more concerning to me is the methane being released from organic matter in the permafrost and methane ices under the sea that's been sequestered from the active carbon cycle for a long time.
What I'm saying, though, is that given enough time -- electric motors wear out.
I think it's pretty silly to worry about the electric motor in a vehicle wearing out. Most well made electric motors run a long time without breaking down. The compressor motor in my freezer's been going for over 30 years now.
One can only imagine the cost of waiting for a big rig to recharge. But one does not need to be an oil company to create a Fuel Cell station. Which means any fuel profit goes to the station owner(s). Even driverless rigs will have to stop and refuel.
I think once electric big rigs get going they will have standard battery packs that can be easily swapped in 15 minutes or so. Even now the fuel tanks on them are mostly hanging exposed on the outside of the frame so swapping should be relatively simple.
I also expect that will eventually become the standard for electric cars too, easily swappable battery packs, so range anxiety becomes a thing of the past.
I bought my house in 1995 and paid off the mortgage in 2012. Now it's worth nearly twice what is was when I bought it. I pay about $200/month for property taxes and another $200/month for utilities. I'd be paying over $1000/month to rent anything I'd care to live in. The difference is being saved for retirement. But there is the cost of ongoing maintenance, I'm going to have to put a new roof on it in a couple of years and get it painted. I'm well satisfied with owning a house.
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I think it's a deep flaw of the current climate change concerns that they can't demonstrate that the solutions would be better than ignoring the problem.
I'd like to see you try to demonstrate that ignoring the problems of global warming would be better than doing something about it.
Try this:
Clinton warned Bush about Al-Qaeda
Unfortunately, Obama has already silently been trying to shut the door on nuclear, ...
If that's true how come at least 4 nuclear power plants have been approved by the Obama administration?
Vogtle Units 3 & 4 got $8.3 billion in Federal loan guarantees.
Summer Units 2 & 3.
Nuclear renaissance in the United States.
But there is another power metal: thorium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not aware that anyone has yet built a financially viable thorium reactor despite at least a couple of attempts. Once someone demonstrates that is possible it may find more acceptance.
Well, I don't like the ACA much but it's better overall than what we had before. My preference would be for something along the lines of the Canadian health care system.
When I was a kid computers were made with discrete components and core memory. Now we put billions of transistors on a stamp sized piece of silicon. There are thousands of people working on the problems you bring up. For large scale installations the cost of solar PV cells is less than $1.00 per Watt and projected to drop to $0.36 per Watt by 2017. Efforts like Elon Musk's battery plant threaten to do the same thing for batteries. (BTW, Musk is a good example of someone with a can-do attitude.)
When the Bush administration took over from Clinton they were warned to keep an eye on Al-Qaeda but they did nothing until a meeting in August just before 9/11. They were more worried about Iraq. Saying the Clinton administration failed to prevent the attack on 9/11 is assuming their greater attention on Al-Qaeda would have not made a difference. That may or may not be true but it's obvious that the Bush administration dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda when they first took over.
It was the insurance company that changed your doctor or your plan, not the ACA.
Yes... because of ACA...
I've had to change my doctor 4 times in the past 25 years because of changes to my employer provided health care plan.
Damn...it is gonna get mighty cold in them houses up north, on cloudy winter days with snow piled up halfway to the roofline when the solar panels are damned near useless, no?
There are a lot of naysayers telling us how one thing or the other won't work but we didn't get to where we are as a civilization by listening to them. It's the people with the "can do" attitude that lead us to the future.
You didn't read my whole response, did you? I said I didn't think methane from livestock was a big problem.
While I agree with you about the permafrost cows really do burp more methane than they fart. The reason for that is when cows are out grazing they are doing minimal chewing and just passing it to the first of their four stomachs, the rumen. In there the grass is microbialy fermented which is what produces the methane. When the cows upchuck the fermented grass to chew their cud they burp the methane.
If you're wondering why the cows need the fermentation it's a process that breaks down the cellulose in the grass they eat into more nutritional things like sugars that the cows can digest.
Only you seem to think that adding 3-nitrooxypropanol to the feed is for any reason other than to reduce the greenhouse gases from cows.
But who wants 3-nitrooxypropanol tainted milk and beef? /sarc
Because all the 1.2% savings that can be made add up to make a large difference. If we find eight ways to make 1.2% savings across different areas then that is nearly a 10% reduction in the human generation of greenhouse gases. The human race isn't limited to finding just one method to solve the climate change problem. If we make small savings across the board with cost-effective, manageable solutions then we don't have to solve the problem with a single grand gesture that ends up costing a lot of money.
In the long run reducing methane emissions by livestock doesn't make any difference. The methane they emit comes from carbon that was already in the active carbon cycle when the plants they eat absorbed it from CO2 in the air. Methane breaks down to CO2 in a relatively short time scale (20-100 years) in the atmosphere and so gets recycled back into the plants eventually with no net change to the amount of carbon in the active carbon cycle. The only real long term answer is to stop adding additional carbon by stopping the burning of fossil fuels. Anything else is just putting lipstick on a pig.
We may cover less than 4% of the Earth's surface but the US is still directly responsible for about 15% of the worldwide emissions of CO2 (as of 2013). Plus you really should include the indirect emissions of other countries that are driven by US demand for the products they produce.
2013 estimates for CO2 emissions by country
The way we raise cows is an issue but fixing the problem of methane released by ruminants will not fix the problem of AGW. It will just make a slight reduction in the warming.
If you look at the raw temp data for the U.S. we have been in a cooling trend for the past 115 years
Of course the US covers less than 4% of the Earth's surface so that's a relatively meaningless statistic even if it were true.
Here's the link.
Don't climate "scientists" have a personal bias invested in a certain outcome?
Even if there weren't anthropogenic global warming there would still be a climate to study. It would still be a subject of considerable interest to us so climate scientists would have plenty of work to do understanding it.
As Geoffry Landis point out the effects of AGW are small on the time scales most humans are aware of. It's a slow motion disaster that's easy to ignore until the effect build up and you wake up one day and ask "Wha' happened?" By then it's too late to fix it except on the slow motion time scale that it happened in the first place.
What bothers me, however, is that the article is talking about burps, while the problem is cow emissions. Not all cow methane emissions are burps.
The majority of the methane a cow produces is burped up rather than coming out the other end. That is from the microbial fermentation that takes place in the cows rumen.
The uppermost area of the rumen, the headspace, is filled with gases (such as methane, carbon dioxide, and, to a much lower degree, hydrogen) released from fermentation and anaerobic respiration of food. These gases are regularly expelled from the reticulorumen through the mouth, in a process called eructation.
I'm not particularly concerned about the methane released by cows and other ruminants because that is carbon from plants they eat that originally drew it from the air in the first place. So it doesn't add to the total carbon in the active carbon cycle like burning fossil fuels does which is the real problem. If all we were getting was some increased methane from raising more livestock it would be a minor problem that would hardly be worth worrying about if CO2 levels were still around 280 ppm. Far more concerning to me is the methane being released from organic matter in the permafrost and methane ices under the sea that's been sequestered from the active carbon cycle for a long time.
I believe by saying "he had power" the OP meant that the APU was running so the pilot had power to to flight control mechanisms.
What I'm saying, though, is that given enough time -- electric motors wear out.
I think it's pretty silly to worry about the electric motor in a vehicle wearing out. Most well made electric motors run a long time without breaking down. The compressor motor in my freezer's been going for over 30 years now.
If I had a Volt I might use Sta-bil to extend the gas lifetime.
One can only imagine the cost of waiting for a big rig to recharge. But one does not need to be an oil company to create a Fuel Cell station. Which means any fuel profit goes to the station owner(s). Even driverless rigs will have to stop and refuel.
I think once electric big rigs get going they will have standard battery packs that can be easily swapped in 15 minutes or so. Even now the fuel tanks on them are mostly hanging exposed on the outside of the frame so swapping should be relatively simple.
I also expect that will eventually become the standard for electric cars too, easily swappable battery packs, so range anxiety becomes a thing of the past.
As the article points out there may come a time when it takes a lot of effort to get the gasoline to fuel them.
I bought my house in 1995 and paid off the mortgage in 2012. Now it's worth nearly twice what is was when I bought it. I pay about $200/month for property taxes and another $200/month for utilities. I'd be paying over $1000/month to rent anything I'd care to live in. The difference is being saved for retirement. But there is the cost of ongoing maintenance, I'm going to have to put a new roof on it in a couple of years and get it painted. I'm well satisfied with owning a house.