Why did you link to a chart that stopped right before the most active hurricane season on record (which was followed by several more extremely active hurricane seasons, and only one relatively inactive season)?
First off, it depends on what you call "proponents". The only ones whose opinion really matters is that of climate scientists, not uneducated members of the public. The scientific community has been largely divided on the results of AGW on hurricanes in the Atlantic basin (the basin which most Americans care about), although there seems to be more evidence for "worse" than "better" thusfar, if the number and frequency of citations of the papers is anything to go by. You have a balance between two factors which are near-universally agreed upon: increased sea surface temperatures and heat content, which is hurricane fuel; and wind shear, which slaughters hurricanes mercilessly. There are other factors which strongly affect hurricane development whose trends are not so well understood, including dry air (such as from the Saharan Air Layer), atmospheric instability, and so forth. And beyond formation, one also cares about steering patterns -- are you getting a lot of "fish storms", or majors that will slam into NOLA, Miami, and NYC? On top of this uncertainty, you have an already *extremely* variable basin. The number of storms that spins up in a season has ranged from 1 tropical storm to 28 named systems, and the ACE varies by orders of magnitude. And the rates of storms tends to "cluster" into active an inactive periods. These things make it very difficult, on top of the forecasting difficulties, to assess actualized trends.
What we can say for now with certainty about the Atlantic basin is that we are definitely on a major "up" time in hurricane activity. 2005 was the most active season on record. This year is nearly keeping pace with it in terms of formation rate (although with lower intensity and more favorable steering). There've been a couple mild seasons, like 2006, but overall, it has not been a pleasant time as far as Atlantic basin hurricanes goes. Each season has been starting out with a veritable teakettle of sea surface temperatures well above average, and shear and other factors generally just haven't been able to counteract that enough.
Beyond all of this, it's worth mentioning that each basin is different and will follow its own trends.
The proper response to an event that seems anomalous is to see whether there's any research on the subject -- both research saying whether it *should* be happening more often, and research saying whether it *is* happening more often. Weather is the noise. Climate is the signal. If you know what the signal is, you can tell how likely what you just experienced was and whether you can expect more of it in the future.
In the case of snowfall, increased snowfall is a forecast of global warming for most regions outside of the tropics and subtropics. It's a consequence of the increased precipitation forecast overall for most areas, which is more dominant for most places outside of the tropics/subtropics than the decreased time below freezing. I've not yet looked for studies on snowfall rate-changes in Colorado, if there are any -- either forecast or reakuzed. But I've read studies on how major precipitation events and flood events have been trending nationwide, and both are matching the forecasts quite well, along with the likewise well-matching tropospheric moisture content that drives it.
In the case of drought, increased droughts are *also* a forecast of global warming. This may seem odd, when combined with the increased overall precipitation and flood events, but there are several factors at play. One, certain regions are more easily depleted of their atmospheric moisture due to the aforementioned major precipitation events. Two, surface moisture evaporates more quickly. Three, the jet stream tends to rise poleward and kink more. And four, precipitation events become more seasonal in many regions, which is compounded by decreased snowpack (snowpack is an averaging-out factor for many river flows). In the case of the US, the drought forecasts have mainly been for the southwest, ranging from southern California through to Texas. The Northeast and the Pacific Northwest are forecast to have significantly more flooding events without much increase in major drought events. The Deep South is increased to have both an increase in drought and flood events.
According to the studies I've come across, average rates of drought actually hadn't changed that much in the US so far. The change forecast by this point in time wasn't very great (it's backloaded), mind you, but still, the reality was lagging behind the forecasts. Of course, this year's truly exceptional drought and heat in Texas will go a long way toward that catching up.
Reactive losses *are* losses. They heat the wires. Reactive reserves for phase stabilization can help get that back under control, but they don't undo the losses already in the wires. Reactive losses are a well known issue with submarine AC cables and limit their length.
DC not only is viable, as the person below you notes, it's already *in use*. The majority of new long-distance high power links being strung up in Europe (red=existing, green=under construction, blue=proposed), and a number in North America as well, are HVDC. Learn about it. Conversion is now efficient and no longer nearly as expensive using modern thyristor-based digital converters. Long-distance HVDC links are much more efficient than long-distance AC links.
Enough of this "I'm pontificating about a subject I've never read about" nonsense.
Power sharing goes both ways. It's like trade ties. The more integrated you are with another nation, the more difficult it becomes to go to war with them -- e.g., China bombs a power plant in Japan and Beijing goes dark, too.
AC under seawater is difficult. DC under seawater is simple. Both AC and DC suffer from resistive losses in the cable, but AC also suffers from reactive losses, which are far higher underwater. You can even do earth return, either a monopolar transmission or an uninsulated (and thus cheaper) return wire. And no, it's not dangerous; it's already used in quite a few places.
What is being proposed here is a nationwide HVDC grid, which is an especially important thing in Japan where they have basically two separate AC grids operating on different frequencies. This prevented the southwest from sharing power with the northeast after the tsunami, causing the northeast (including Tokyo) to suffer rolling blackouts for a long period of time. DC can allow power sharing between the two grids.
Basically, it's a proposal to allow power generated in any part of the country to be consumed in any other part, with minimal losses. And seeing as the country is the size of California, the weather in one part of the country can be very different than the weather in another part of the country, so it's a boon to not just stability and efficiency, but renewables capacity as well. Peaking plants and energy storage systems anywhere in the country can likewise support the entire nation.
I certainly hope Japan leads the way on this. Europe has been moving in this direction at a moderate pace, but the US only at a snail's pace. It needs a big push.
Germany is already phasing out coal power, so no. Because of how rapidly they're doing their nuclear phaseout, there will probably be more coal in the short term, but Germany has made it clear that it intends to replace them with solar and wind, and has announced a boost in investment in these sectors.
Your link is one of the most irresponsible, shoddy pieces of "reporting" I've seen in a long time. I followed back their web of references until I finally found their source. The numbers for coal cited by their source are 0.04-0.14 or 0.13-0.23 occupational deaths per TWh for coal, and 0.01-1.23, 0.65, or 0.62 public fatalities per TWh for nuclear and 0.02-0.09, 0.04, or 0.02 occupational fatalities per kWh.
In short, their numbers cited are total BS.
Let's look at the rest of the graph that the author *didn't* want to talk about. First, public health costs (all numbers hereon are in milli-euros per kWh):
From that, we can see that coal is likely worse than nuclear for public health, but different researchers can't even come *close* to agreeing on the risk. It's likely that the nuclear disparity is dependent on whether or not you include accidents or just "business as usual" operation.
Now, occupational health costs:
Coal: 0.08, 1-2 Nuclear: 0.08-0.09, 0.15, 0.14
Possibly the same, possibly safer to work in a nuclear power plant than a coal mine. And now, environmental costs (I have no idea how they quantify these):
But, of course, this is A Total Red Herring, because virtually nobody is proposing to replace nuclear power plants with coal power plants. The general counterproposal is to use some combination of wind, solar (with or without thermal storage), geothermal, dam uprating for peaking, pumped hydro storage, NG peaking, and long-distance transmission for load averaging.
The sources are in the article you yourself cited. In fact, in the very same sentence it says "maintenance", it also says "design", and throughout the rest of the article they talk about how it's useful for design.
NIF itself isn't commercializeable, but a variant called HiPER definitely is. The only thing you *have* to destroy in either is the hohlraum (your "fuel bottle"). Commercialization requires low capital/operating costs and a high power production rate, which means a high repetition rate. NIF fails on both counts. HiPER inherently is an order of magnitude better on the former, and they're working on a high repetition-rate laser system for it even before the facility has started construction.
What NIF offers over HiPER, by virtue of its 3x higher compression ratio, is more "basic physics" capability and the ability to create conditions that are useful in nuclear weapons design. HiPER is solely about power generation.
The whole purpose of the NIF facility is to explore the physics of what happens at extreme pressures and temperatures.
That has little to do with maintenance and everything to do with design. Calling it "maintenance" is pure PR. Sure, you could say, "we want to see what will happen to these bombs if we were to detonate them after their tritium has broken down to X degree", or whatnot, but that's about as close as you can get. In reality, it's about maintaining and expanding our knowledge for designing reliable nuclear weapons in an era where actually testing them is prohibited.
I hate this attitude, which says that, "Because we don't have the holy grail yet, we haven't accomplished anything." The Q-factors on fusion reactions are many orders of magnitude better than we were getting even just a few decades ago. The amount of "unknown", while not eliminated, has been dramatically reduced, and on some paths, there's a pretty clear route to commercial viability. Inertial confinement, like NIF, in particular. Well, not exactly like NIF. The leading path for commercial viability of an inertial confinement system is HiPER, which uses a much smaller (and thus much lower capital/operating cost) compression pulse, and compensates by adding a heating pulse as well. It's calculated to get a Q-factor of about 100, which is well more than is needed for viable commercial power production. There's so much confidence that this could lead to viable commercial fusion power production that they're already starting to deal with some of the "commercialization" aspects, not just the raw physics aspects -- for example, a high repetition-rate laser system.
It also depends on what you call "breakeven"; it can be measured in many different ways. On the input side, you can consider only the energy which actually does useful work in the target, the total energy delivered to the target, the total energy consumed to power the delivery system, or the total energy consumed by the plant. On the output side, you can consider the raw total energy yielded by the fusion reactions, the total energy output by the whole fusion process (output of reactions minus whatever energy is used within in the plasma for initiating further reactions), the total captured energy, the total electrical energy produced after generation losses, or the total energy delivered to customers after delivery losses as well.
We've met breakeven by some metrics, not by others. Obviously, you ultimately need at least several times over breakeven using the harshest input and output metrics, plus realistic capital and operating costs per unit output, for it to be realistic for electricity generation.
True, over 1/3rd of Iceland used to be forested before human settlement. Well, as much as you can call Icelandic forests "forests";) But as you note, the interior was always desert, plus the glaciers were still giant rivers of ice back then, they still got their winter snows, etc. A funny thing, now with the introduction of the lupine/lúpína, some places in Iceland that were never able to be colonized before due to too hostile of a climate, like some of the sands in the northeast, are now being colonized. So in that way, the country is actually getting greener.
Yeah, isn't Iceland such an incredible place? Too good for this Earth. A couple weeks ago I took the time to translate my resume into Icelandic, for obvious purposes.;) Veistu einhver sem (th)arft** forritara?;)
Not to mention that asteroids can cause sizeable ore deposits without bearing the ore themselves. A good example is the Creighton nickel/copper/platinum-group metal deposit under Sudbury, Ontario. The area was struck by a huge asteroid 1.85B years ago, which blasted out a large chunk of the crust. The huge transient crater (250km across -- contrast with 170km for Chicxulub) then became filled with a mantle melt plume, yielding large amounts of heavier metals close to the surface.
I've seen this so many times recently -- "Ha ha, Greenland is made of ice, and Iceland is made of green grass!" That's such an oversimplification. Iceland has the largest glacier in Europe; just ignoring all of Iceland's other glaciers, that one (Vatnajökull) alone takes up 8% of the country, and is very visible when you approach the country from the south and east (where most settlers would be coming from). And as for the "grass" part that sometimes gets thrown in when describing Iceland, it's not that grassy of a place place at all. Oh, sure, there are ample grassy areas, but there's even more moss, lichen, and plenty of higher plants like blueberries, crowberries, bilberries, etc (and nowadays, lupine). And most of the interior is a barren moonscape. Come winter, the whole island gets snow, although it doesn't stick that well in the southwest (last winter they only had 14 days with snow cover, although it's usually about 3x that).
Greenland is not completely covered in ice; there are some very sizeable areas in the southwest that are green. There are even Greenlandic "forests" (although they're not much to write home about;) ). Now, yes, there was an element of propaganda in the choice of name for Greenland. But it's not totally off base in terms of the places where people settled.
Nor was it supposed to. It's simply a thought experiment to make clear how little of a carbon-bearing material you have to burn to make a huge difference in CO2 levels, because many people have difficulty comprehending how human activity can influence something as "big" as our atmosphere.
The problem with what you propose (as discussed in the last diary of the series) is the throughput problem. The throughput on such a system would be abysmally low, and for some things, throughput is life-or-death for a colony. The reality is that a colony will need a combination of bulk industry and mass manufacturing along with rapid prototyping (whether involving nanomanufacturing or not) for the numerous, but only occasionally replaced, parts.
As mentioned, and discussed in more detail in the series, bioplastics are not a universal substitute for petroleum plastics, and (as mentioned right hear), not all plastics can be used for all jobs. Different plastics have significantly different material different properties. Show me a single bioplastic, for example, that's suitable for containing strong oxidizers. And even producing bioplastics is anything but an easy, consumable-free process. It's not like you go and pick a piece of PVC off the plant.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you link to a chart that stopped right before the most active hurricane season on record (which was followed by several more extremely active hurricane seasons, and only one relatively inactive season)?
First off, it depends on what you call "proponents". The only ones whose opinion really matters is that of climate scientists, not uneducated members of the public. The scientific community has been largely divided on the results of AGW on hurricanes in the Atlantic basin (the basin which most Americans care about), although there seems to be more evidence for "worse" than "better" thusfar, if the number and frequency of citations of the papers is anything to go by. You have a balance between two factors which are near-universally agreed upon: increased sea surface temperatures and heat content, which is hurricane fuel; and wind shear, which slaughters hurricanes mercilessly. There are other factors which strongly affect hurricane development whose trends are not so well understood, including dry air (such as from the Saharan Air Layer), atmospheric instability, and so forth. And beyond formation, one also cares about steering patterns -- are you getting a lot of "fish storms", or majors that will slam into NOLA, Miami, and NYC? On top of this uncertainty, you have an already *extremely* variable basin. The number of storms that spins up in a season has ranged from 1 tropical storm to 28 named systems, and the ACE varies by orders of magnitude. And the rates of storms tends to "cluster" into active an inactive periods. These things make it very difficult, on top of the forecasting difficulties, to assess actualized trends.
What we can say for now with certainty about the Atlantic basin is that we are definitely on a major "up" time in hurricane activity. 2005 was the most active season on record. This year is nearly keeping pace with it in terms of formation rate (although with lower intensity and more favorable steering). There've been a couple mild seasons, like 2006, but overall, it has not been a pleasant time as far as Atlantic basin hurricanes goes. Each season has been starting out with a veritable teakettle of sea surface temperatures well above average, and shear and other factors generally just haven't been able to counteract that enough.
Beyond all of this, it's worth mentioning that each basin is different and will follow its own trends.
The proper response to an event that seems anomalous is to see whether there's any research on the subject -- both research saying whether it *should* be happening more often, and research saying whether it *is* happening more often. Weather is the noise. Climate is the signal. If you know what the signal is, you can tell how likely what you just experienced was and whether you can expect more of it in the future.
In the case of snowfall, increased snowfall is a forecast of global warming for most regions outside of the tropics and subtropics. It's a consequence of the increased precipitation forecast overall for most areas, which is more dominant for most places outside of the tropics/subtropics than the decreased time below freezing. I've not yet looked for studies on snowfall rate-changes in Colorado, if there are any -- either forecast or reakuzed. But I've read studies on how major precipitation events and flood events have been trending nationwide, and both are matching the forecasts quite well, along with the likewise well-matching tropospheric moisture content that drives it.
In the case of drought, increased droughts are *also* a forecast of global warming. This may seem odd, when combined with the increased overall precipitation and flood events, but there are several factors at play. One, certain regions are more easily depleted of their atmospheric moisture due to the aforementioned major precipitation events. Two, surface moisture evaporates more quickly. Three, the jet stream tends to rise poleward and kink more. And four, precipitation events become more seasonal in many regions, which is compounded by decreased snowpack (snowpack is an averaging-out factor for many river flows). In the case of the US, the drought forecasts have mainly been for the southwest, ranging from southern California through to Texas. The Northeast and the Pacific Northwest are forecast to have significantly more flooding events without much increase in major drought events. The Deep South is increased to have both an increase in drought and flood events.
According to the studies I've come across, average rates of drought actually hadn't changed that much in the US so far. The change forecast by this point in time wasn't very great (it's backloaded), mind you, but still, the reality was lagging behind the forecasts. Of course, this year's truly exceptional drought and heat in Texas will go a long way toward that catching up.
And that's about all I have to say about that.
Good for you. Not for everyone else. 2. Unless the reporting was lying. Wherein "do more research" should be directed at the news media, not me.
Reactive losses *are* losses. They heat the wires. Reactive reserves for phase stabilization can help get that back under control, but they don't undo the losses already in the wires. Reactive losses are a well known issue with submarine AC cables and limit their length.
DC not only is viable, as the person below you notes, it's already *in use*. The majority of new long-distance high power links being strung up in Europe (red=existing, green=under construction, blue=proposed), and a number in North America as well, are HVDC. Learn about it. Conversion is now efficient and no longer nearly as expensive using modern thyristor-based digital converters. Long-distance HVDC links are much more efficient than long-distance AC links.
Enough of this "I'm pontificating about a subject I've never read about" nonsense.
Power sharing goes both ways. It's like trade ties. The more integrated you are with another nation, the more difficult it becomes to go to war with them -- e.g., China bombs a power plant in Japan and Beijing goes dark, too.
At risk of doubling down on the burning of karma, Carl only said "billions and billions" as a reference to people who erroneously claimed he did.
It'd be 0 cycles.
AC under seawater is difficult. DC under seawater is simple. Both AC and DC suffer from resistive losses in the cable, but AC also suffers from reactive losses, which are far higher underwater. You can even do earth return, either a monopolar transmission or an uninsulated (and thus cheaper) return wire. And no, it's not dangerous; it's already used in quite a few places.
What is being proposed here is a nationwide HVDC grid, which is an especially important thing in Japan where they have basically two separate AC grids operating on different frequencies. This prevented the southwest from sharing power with the northeast after the tsunami, causing the northeast (including Tokyo) to suffer rolling blackouts for a long period of time. DC can allow power sharing between the two grids.
Basically, it's a proposal to allow power generated in any part of the country to be consumed in any other part, with minimal losses. And seeing as the country is the size of California, the weather in one part of the country can be very different than the weather in another part of the country, so it's a boon to not just stability and efficiency, but renewables capacity as well. Peaking plants and energy storage systems anywhere in the country can likewise support the entire nation.
I certainly hope Japan leads the way on this. Europe has been moving in this direction at a moderate pace, but the US only at a snail's pace. It needs a big push.
Germany is already phasing out coal power, so no. Because of how rapidly they're doing their nuclear phaseout, there will probably be more coal in the short term, but Germany has made it clear that it intends to replace them with solar and wind, and has announced a boost in investment in these sectors.
Therefore, we should all be driving Ford Nucleons? ;)
Your link is one of the most irresponsible, shoddy pieces of "reporting" I've seen in a long time. I followed back their web of references until I finally found their source. The numbers for coal cited by their source are 0.04-0.14 or 0.13-0.23 occupational deaths per TWh for coal, and 0.01-1.23, 0.65, or 0.62 public fatalities per TWh for nuclear and 0.02-0.09, 0.04, or 0.02 occupational fatalities per kWh.
In short, their numbers cited are total BS.
Let's look at the rest of the graph that the author *didn't* want to talk about. First, public health costs (all numbers hereon are in milli-euros per kWh):
Coal: 0.05, 0.01-0.07, 0.01-0.64, 3-5, 4-13, 5-14, 10-50
Nuclear: 4.9, 0.003-0.009, 0.001-0.005, 0.012, 2.4, 2.4
From that, we can see that coal is likely worse than nuclear for public health, but different researchers can't even come *close* to agreeing on the risk. It's likely that the nuclear disparity is dependent on whether or not you include accidents or just "business as usual" operation.
Now, occupational health costs:
Coal: 0.08, 1-2
Nuclear: 0.08-0.09, 0.15, 0.14
Possibly the same, possibly safer to work in a nuclear power plant than a coal mine. And now, environmental costs (I have no idea how they quantify these):
Coal: 0.005, 0.013-0.015, 0-0.1, 0.1, 0.2-0.8, 0.02, 0.5-2
Nuclear: 0-0.002
And lastly, global warming (the one case that nuclear wins hands-down):
Coal: 0.04, 10-18, 15, 10-50
Nuclear: 0.0012, 0.0012
But, of course, this is A Total Red Herring, because virtually nobody is proposing to replace nuclear power plants with coal power plants. The general counterproposal is to use some combination of wind, solar (with or without thermal storage), geothermal, dam uprating for peaking, pumped hydro storage, NG peaking, and long-distance transmission for load averaging.
The sources are in the article you yourself cited. In fact, in the very same sentence it says "maintenance", it also says "design", and throughout the rest of the article they talk about how it's useful for design.
Fusion energy gain factor
NIF itself isn't commercializeable, but a variant called HiPER definitely is. The only thing you *have* to destroy in either is the hohlraum (your "fuel bottle"). Commercialization requires low capital/operating costs and a high power production rate, which means a high repetition rate. NIF fails on both counts. HiPER inherently is an order of magnitude better on the former, and they're working on a high repetition-rate laser system for it even before the facility has started construction.
What NIF offers over HiPER, by virtue of its 3x higher compression ratio, is more "basic physics" capability and the ability to create conditions that are useful in nuclear weapons design. HiPER is solely about power generation.
The whole purpose of the NIF facility is to explore the physics of what happens at extreme pressures and temperatures.
That has little to do with maintenance and everything to do with design. Calling it "maintenance" is pure PR. Sure, you could say, "we want to see what will happen to these bombs if we were to detonate them after their tritium has broken down to X degree", or whatnot, but that's about as close as you can get. In reality, it's about maintaining and expanding our knowledge for designing reliable nuclear weapons in an era where actually testing them is prohibited.
I hate this attitude, which says that, "Because we don't have the holy grail yet, we haven't accomplished anything." The Q-factors on fusion reactions are many orders of magnitude better than we were getting even just a few decades ago. The amount of "unknown", while not eliminated, has been dramatically reduced, and on some paths, there's a pretty clear route to commercial viability. Inertial confinement, like NIF, in particular. Well, not exactly like NIF. The leading path for commercial viability of an inertial confinement system is HiPER, which uses a much smaller (and thus much lower capital/operating cost) compression pulse, and compensates by adding a heating pulse as well. It's calculated to get a Q-factor of about 100, which is well more than is needed for viable commercial power production. There's so much confidence that this could lead to viable commercial fusion power production that they're already starting to deal with some of the "commercialization" aspects, not just the raw physics aspects -- for example, a high repetition-rate laser system.
It also depends on what you call "breakeven"; it can be measured in many different ways. On the input side, you can consider only the energy which actually does useful work in the target, the total energy delivered to the target, the total energy consumed to power the delivery system, or the total energy consumed by the plant. On the output side, you can consider the raw total energy yielded by the fusion reactions, the total energy output by the whole fusion process (output of reactions minus whatever energy is used within in the plasma for initiating further reactions), the total captured energy, the total electrical energy produced after generation losses, or the total energy delivered to customers after delivery losses as well.
We've met breakeven by some metrics, not by others. Obviously, you ultimately need at least several times over breakeven using the harshest input and output metrics, plus realistic capital and operating costs per unit output, for it to be realistic for electricity generation.
True, over 1/3rd of Iceland used to be forested before human settlement. Well, as much as you can call Icelandic forests "forests" ;) But as you note, the interior was always desert, plus the glaciers were still giant rivers of ice back then, they still got their winter snows, etc. A funny thing, now with the introduction of the lupine/lúpína, some places in Iceland that were never able to be colonized before due to too hostile of a climate, like some of the sands in the northeast, are now being colonized. So in that way, the country is actually getting greener.
Yeah, isn't Iceland such an incredible place? Too good for this Earth. A couple weeks ago I took the time to translate my resume into Icelandic, for obvious purposes. ;) Veistu einhver sem (th)arft** forritara? ;)
** -- Dang Slashdot doesn't let me type thorns :P
Not to mention that asteroids can cause sizeable ore deposits without bearing the ore themselves. A good example is the Creighton nickel/copper/platinum-group metal deposit under Sudbury, Ontario. The area was struck by a huge asteroid 1.85B years ago, which blasted out a large chunk of the crust. The huge transient crater (250km across -- contrast with 170km for Chicxulub) then became filled with a mantle melt plume, yielding large amounts of heavier metals close to the surface.
I've seen this so many times recently -- "Ha ha, Greenland is made of ice, and Iceland is made of green grass!" That's such an oversimplification. Iceland has the largest glacier in Europe; just ignoring all of Iceland's other glaciers, that one (Vatnajökull) alone takes up 8% of the country, and is very visible when you approach the country from the south and east (where most settlers would be coming from). And as for the "grass" part that sometimes gets thrown in when describing Iceland, it's not that grassy of a place place at all. Oh, sure, there are ample grassy areas, but there's even more moss, lichen, and plenty of higher plants like blueberries, crowberries, bilberries, etc (and nowadays, lupine). And most of the interior is a barren moonscape. Come winter, the whole island gets snow, although it doesn't stick that well in the southwest (last winter they only had 14 days with snow cover, although it's usually about 3x that).
Greenland is not completely covered in ice; there are some very sizeable areas in the southwest that are green. There are even Greenlandic "forests" (although they're not much to write home about ;) ). Now, yes, there was an element of propaganda in the choice of name for Greenland. But it's not totally off base in terms of the places where people settled.
Actually, it is aerodynamic drag which deorbits satellites over time.
The atmosphere is exceedingly thin in LEO, but it still exists.
Nor was it supposed to. It's simply a thought experiment to make clear how little of a carbon-bearing material you have to burn to make a huge difference in CO2 levels, because many people have difficulty comprehending how human activity can influence something as "big" as our atmosphere.
The problem with what you propose (as discussed in the last diary of the series) is the throughput problem. The throughput on such a system would be abysmally low, and for some things, throughput is life-or-death for a colony. The reality is that a colony will need a combination of bulk industry and mass manufacturing along with rapid prototyping (whether involving nanomanufacturing or not) for the numerous, but only occasionally replaced, parts.
As mentioned, and discussed in more detail in the series, bioplastics are not a universal substitute for petroleum plastics, and (as mentioned right hear), not all plastics can be used for all jobs. Different plastics have significantly different material different properties. Show me a single bioplastic, for example, that's suitable for containing strong oxidizers. And even producing bioplastics is anything but an easy, consumable-free process. It's not like you go and pick a piece of PVC off the plant.