50kW barely even qualifies to be called rapid charging.
For those wondering what rapid chargers look like -- a couple hundred kW rapid charger is usually a box about the size of 1-2 small soda machines with a cable about the size of a gas hose (but heavier) coming off it. The aforementioned 800kW charger is the size of four large soda machines pushed back to back.
Wait, you said dioxide, not monoxide (which is strange, since the article is talking about CO, not CO2). In that case, change my post from "Fischer-Tropsch" to "Sabatier".
Right now your catalytic converter converts CO (which is a partial combustion product) into C02 and heat. They're saying this enzyme could turn it into propane, which could then be burned again in the engine thereby using the energy that would normally be wasted.
Wow, you could take the <1% of your exhaust that's carbon monoxide, convert it to fuel (losses), then burn it (average vehicle energy usage efficiency, after all losses: 20%). Yeah, that's really going to up your mpg.:P
They're also suggesting that you could split CO2 from the atmosphere into CO (probably by electrolysis) and use it to produce gasoline for fuel. That would be an achievement because it solves a lot or energy storage problems.
And what's wrong with the Sabatier reaction? And talk about a lossy way to store energy.:P
We have one. It's called the Fischer-Tropsch process (plus electrolysis). The problem is that the fuel is super-expensive at today's energy prices.
Hydrocarbons are not "comparatively easy" to convert to mechanical or electrical energy. Compared to an electric motor powered by a battery, an internal combustion engine is a veritable Rube Goldberg Contraption.
As for batteries: they've had an 8% energy density improvement per year for the past two decades. That rate shows no sign of slowing down; rather, it seems to be speeding up. There are enough lab techs out there that even if only a very small fraction of them made it to the market, this rate could continue for at least the next decade or two, probably longer.
1 decade improvement for a 100-mile EV: 215 mi 2 decades improvement for a 100-mile EV: 466 mi 3 decades improvement for a 100-mile EV: 1006 mi
The primary reason we don't have car factory factories is that we don't need that many factories. If we needed enough factories, more and more of the factory construction would be automated.
"Bio-robots" is a perfect example of what I was talking about. You see how obscenely complex self replicators are? Until we can build them on the large scale, we're not going to be able to build them on the small scale, where the challenge is far greater. The smallest bacterial genome (by a large margin) is 160,000 base pairs -- and that particular bacterium is in the process of evolving into an organelle.
The cage is very small A tiny silver ball That makes you a hero The moment you step inside The world is watching you What you're about to do Will live on forever Even though you'll be dead And gone Buckle up We're about to turn the engines on.
Hint: building robots really small doesn't make the engineering challenge easier. It makes it *harder*. So until well after we reach the point where we could have regular size robots "dismantle Mars for construction", it's not going to happen.
Nanotechnology is quite real. Nanobots are sci-fi code for "magic" and are made of 100% pure Handwavium.
What's being discussed is not a "colony" in any normal sense of the word. It's a base. "Colony" implies a large degree of self sufficiency, which requires the most massive engineering engineering effort in the history of humankind to even get started. What Musk is doing is working on lower-cost spacecraft. Spacecraft that, IMHO, are still 1-2 orders of magnitude too expensive to make true colonization realistic. If all you do is go there and use some regolith for shielding and make some methane fuel using equipment shipped from Earth, perhaps growing some plants in greenhouses shipped from Earth, etc -- you're not colonizing. Namely, because not only could such a "colony" not independently expand itself, but if the shipments from Earth suddenly stopped, the next time something significant broke, the entire colony would die. You're not going to, say, jury-rig a new compressor out of duct tape and rocks. You couldn't even make duct tape itself without an entire petrochemical industry. A sustainable colony requires a mind-boggling amount of sustainable industry and the use of structures and devices engineered to be produceable by said industrial infrastructure.
But anyway, kudos to Musk for at least doing *something* useful rather than building palm tree islands or city-sized yachts.
The Volt and Corolla aren't exactly in the same class. The Volt is a much nicer car than the Corolla. But just pretending that they're the same: the Volt has a $350/mo lease and the Corolla $150-$250/mo. The average Volt driver will save about $60 a month versus the Corolla in energy costs. There's no way to quantify the difference in maintenance, but the Volt has a much simpler drivetrain, with the most complex part (the gas generator) rarely used. There are few moving parts in the frequently used portion (the electric drivetrain). No oil changes, no lead-acid batteries (the li-ion has an 8-year, 100k mile warranty), no transmission, most braking is done with regen leading to much less stress on the physical brakes, etc. So maintenance should be significantly lower. Overall, the price difference isn't all that much, but you get a much nicer car and rarely ever have to stop by gas stations.
Also, just because the prime demographic is college-graduate upper middle class 40 year olds, that hardly means that they're the only buyers.
I don't know what data Deloitte Consulting was looking at, but I follow market research on EVs as part of my job, and it's not "Young people wealthy people" who are generally determined to be the most likely buyers for electric vehicles. Like with hybrids, it's educated, middle aged, upper-middle class people (EV buyers average slightly younger, but not much). I could conjecture that they primarily looked at the market for Tesla Roadsters to reach their conclusion. But the Tesla Roadster is nothing like, say the Nissan Leaf.
There are researchers in the field who disagree with you. The important thing to note is that was a very different Earth than today -- non-CO2 atmospheric composition, surface layout, albedo, surface chemistry, etc. Changes do matter, and formerly stable systems can reach intense disequilibriums at times -- for example, all life on Earth risked being snuffed out by first, the Oxygen Catastrophe, and later, the Sturtian-Varangian glaciation. How many potential Earths out there were snuffed out by such disequilibriums that we on this planet lucked out of (Anthropic Principle)?
An asteroid of this size isn't a planet killer. The Earth impacts calculator suggests (if you adopt reasonable parameters) that you'd probably die if you were 50 miles away from the impact, but probably be fine if you were 100 miles away.
Now, the calculator doesn't show the effects of an "asteroid winter" from the dust kicked up, which wouldn't be pleasant, but again, would hardly be a planet killer. Asteroids of this size strike the planet every ~140,000 years.
1) The "business as usual" scenario is 3.5C rise by 2100, not 1C in a few hundred years. In fact, there's enough inertia out there just from what we've already emitted to rise more than 1C by 2100.
2) The primary "end of all life" concern is that we'll trigger what happened on Venus here on Earth -- a runaway system with self-feedback mechanisms, wherein we reach a tipping point from adding more carbon that leads to continually more to enter the atmosphere and/or less to leave the atmosphere. At this point, nobody really knows for sure whether that's possible, but there are a number of prominent scientists who are extremely concerned about this. While our current CO2 levels are unprecedented within the last ~15 million years, and our "business as usual" forecast levels much higher still, carbon dioxide levels were extremely high in the early Earth without such a runaway effect. However, the planet was a very different place back then; a *lot* of things are different.
No, the health consequences of carbohydrate intake are FAR higher than the health consequences of power.
How are the carb levels on that red herring that you're serving up?
What health consequence have you suffered because of power? Asthma? Headaches? Cancer? Now how many positive health consequences have you gotten because you don't have to walk to work? Or because you have A/C, or running water, or fresh food delivered to a market from across the world, or any number of energy intensive modern comforts?
False dichotomy. An extra 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour (the wind PTC) is hardly something that will make you walk to work, give up AC, running water, or fresh food. It's practically unnoticeable - $13 a month. And that will disappear over time and then reverse, as renewable generation costs keep dropping, and will drop all the faster the more widespread they're used (just like fossil fuel gen costs did).
1) Weather exists *atop* the climate signal.
Climate is an aggregation of weather. A climate signal exists *atop* individual weather events.
No matter how you arrange it, you experience the combination of weather and climate. So if your sea levels are 3-6 feet higher (current 2100 forecast), and you experience a 3-6 foot storm surge, you've just effectively doubled the height of the surge to 6-12 feet; in terms of storm surge, it's like adding 1-2 Saffir-Simpson categories to the strength of every hurricane. The same thing applies to flood, drought, etc.
Moving the goalposts here. CO2 is a different beastie than SOx and NOx.
Wrong. The study I cited right off the bat explicitly ignored CO2. Merely charging power plants for the health consequences of all of their *non-CO2* emissions would cost them between just over 2 cents and just over 12 cents per kilowatt hour.
That being said, I've been living in LA for almost 20 years, breathing the smog -> what health consequence have I had?
Oooh, anecdote time! And if I survived a fall off Niagara Falls, would that mean that Niagara Falls is perfectly safe to go over the edge of?
FYI, smog tends to make worse existing illnesses. It's especially bad for those with asthma, young children, the elderly, and those with heart and lung disease. PM primarily affects the lungs and can be persistant. NOx is a general irritantant that produces the brownish haze and is linked to SIDS. CO is a potent and irreversible cardiotoxin and neurotoxin. SOx causes acid rain, difficulty breathing, and is linked to premature death. Many VOCs are carcinogenic and toxic to many body systems.
And there's not only direct health costs, by the way; there's also, for example, the increase in missing work due to smog-induced sickness.
What, Denmark stopped using all petroleum products?
Who said anything about stopping using *all* petroleum products? Wind + Solar Thermal + Geo + Natural gas peaking is a stable, reliable, cheap, and very low carbon mix.
The times in history in which the ocean has become acidic have been associated with mass extinctions.
Citation, please.
The Siberian Traps? The PETM? How many do you want? Heck, I challenge you to find a *single* time when the oceans acidified when there *weren't* significant extinctions as a result. Anyone who's ever kept a reef tank can tell you how ridiculously sensitive corals are to pH (and temperature, too, BTW).
Sea level rise occurs everywhere
Sea level rises actually are not evenly distributed across the globe (similar to disparities in tidal levels for various places).
Neither of those statements are contradictory. And anyway, the disparity is not great.
And not all plants respond positively to increases in
"Dinosaurs used to roam the earth" is based on fossils. A measurement. There was no experiment -- no creation of a system with specific properties to test a hypothesis about how those properties produce the result. In fact, an experiment is impossible.
Actually, there are measurements used to gather data on fossils, and they are reproduceable, but that is neither here nor there. The composition of Earth's past atmosphere, its past temperature, its past ice extent, and so forth, are all likewise based on measurement. For example, measurements of gas bubbles trapped in ice cores.
The 4.5 billion age is also a measurement. Radioactive decay of certain elements in certain rocks. It is based upon a significant assumption that is an elephant in the room that nobody mentions. What if the rate of decay is NOT a constant?
Oh, great -- you're a YEC (or at least listening to their propaganda) as well. Short summary: NO. One, radioactive decay is a consequence of various physics properties whose change would have all sorts of other, easily discernable effects. Two, you'd have to shift all kinds of different radioactive decay mechanisms by carefully tuned, illogical amounts to have the clocks all give the *same* wrong answer. And three, the amount of heat released from faster radioactive decay would have turned our planet to slag and extinguished the sun by disrupting the CNO cycle.
The ability to measure temperature came about in the early to mid 1600's, depending on who you claim invented the thermometer.
Ah, so if walk up to a giant pool of lava, it's safe to assume that that rock wasn't the slightest bit warm a few minutes ago because I wasn't there to measure it? I'm sorry, but physics has consequences. And events have effects. Effects that can be preserved for very long periods of time. To say "Either a person was there watching it or it didn't happen" is the epitome of absurdity.
In a year or two when someone finds an error in the data and it turns out that the past ten years WEREN'T "the warmest on record" we'll inevitably treated by another round of self-serving propoganda from the same smug bastards who spent years promoting 1998 as THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD as if that was proof the world was ending, and then said, "well, it really isn't all that important" when the claim turned out to be false.
What are you talking about? 1998 (an incredibly intense El Nino year) was the hottest year on record until 2005, which passed it on two of the three major climate datasets. There was a minor GISS revision based on a discontinuity related to data from NOAA, but it was very small, and applied only to the US. It had essentially no change on the global record. However, 1998 ceased to be the hottest year on record *for the US* (but again, only by a very small amount, as it was very close to 1934 to begin with). But since when is the US the world? The US only makes up a couple percent of the planet's surface area.
However, your claim that most of the models used in climate research are true to first principles is false. I am a computational physicist, and every GCM I have looked at has non-physical aspects that violate well-established physical principles, most worriesomely conservation of energy. For a model that is nohting but a long-term integration of a physical system to violate conservation of energy is extremely problematic, and yet I have seen no discussion anywhere that looks at how this and other unphysical assumptions affect the model results.
With only a couple exceptions, nothing is done from a purely empirical basis (certain aspects of clouds being the big empirical example; clouds are very difficult to model, and make up most of the margin of error in the models). Some things have to be handled using sub-grid level approximations, like some turbulence effects, but those are readily calculated independently, as well as being empirically verifiable. Violations of conservation of energy? Please, by all means, show me a single peer-reviewed paper that supports that assertion. That's a major charge and these models have been out for a very long time. Certainly *someone* has passed peer-review if it's true, ne?
But I digress -> comparing possible long term health consequences to certain death of millions of children in poverty because energy is artificially priced high indicates to me that the externalities have been taken into account.
First off, we're talking about America here. America is passing energy regulation that affects America. Secondly, the consequences of using the atmosphere as a dumping ground are just as statistically guaranteed as the consequences of higher energy prices (which are only a temporary thing anyway; fossil fuel energy costs have been optimized by centuries of massive-scale usage). And third, at least in the context of America (again, what we're talking about), you're completely wrong. The health consequences of power are FAR higher than the health consequences of higher energy costs.
All subsidies and national focuses aside, wind is already nearly cost-competive with coal *without* coal's externalities having to be taken into account. Your notion that this represents some sort of dramatically higher costs is just not supported by the evidence. Wind costs keep falling. Solar costs are higher, but are falling even faster than wind.
Everything has "externalities", but to assert that you're going to be able to identify and link them any better than a random choice is hubris, I would submit.
Oh, give me a break. You really think that emitting PM, NOx, SOx, etc into the atmosphere is unquantifiable in terms of health consequences? Tell that to people breathing smog in LA.
Coal is "cheap" because the externalities are not nearly as important to us as the benefits of having a reliable and economical power system.
Reliable? I'm sorry, but was it the US or Denmark that has big problems with power system reliability?
The aspect of our power system that people like you like to overlook is that we *already* have a great deal of randomness in our power system -- on the *demand side*. We already have to be able to handle unpredictability. We have a variety of standby and peaking systems that we use for the purpose.
Well, I've never known a fisherman to fish for coral or phytoplankton.
((Facepalm))
I do know that the ocean has been more and less acidic over the ages, and fish still swim in the sea.
The times in history in which the ocean has become acidic have been associated with mass extinctions. Corals, in particular, are *extremely* sensitive to pH. We already know what it will do to Earth's oceans, as there are natural laboratories for ocean acidification that exist. It's not pretty.
If they had cheap power, they could build levees and dams to stave off that kind of *weather* (as opposed to climate).
1) Weather exists *atop* the climate signal.
2) The world will *never* be able to wall off all of its coastlines. Sea level rise occurs everywhere, and a large portion of the world's population live by the coast. The US, wealthiest country in the world, couldn't even dream of entirely walling off its own coastal cities. Heck, we can't even keep our below-sea-level, clear-and-present-risk cities like New Orleans safe. Galveston and several more are already disasters in the waiting (Ike was bad enough, but it could have been far worse).
3) The coasts are hardly the only thing affected. The decline in interior snowpack means rivers become more seasonal -- higher and more unpredictable spring flood flows, lower summer/fall flows (and corresponding consequences to irrigation and water supply). The increase in average water vapor content leads to a statistically significant higher rate of major flood events. The higher temperatures also dessicate soil faster between rain events.
Except rising CO2 levels increases plant growth and *shrinks* the Sahara.
Sahara plants are limited by water, not CO2 (just like most oceanic plankton life is limited by iron, not CO2). And not all pla
One of the neat things about solar thermal plants is that you get a "peaking plant" at little extra cost. California's SEGS does this. Basically, you run a natural gas line to the plant, and when you need more power than the sun can provide, you fire up the natural gas burner which heats the water as though it had been heated by the sun. Everything else continues normally through the turbines; they don't care where the heat in the water came from.
Proxies that dont have yearly resolution cannot be used to make judgments about yearly temperature variations. We are talking about proxies that have centennial resolution here.
Actually, it's more like decadal resolution since the last glaciation. And anyway, show me a period of centennial resolution of 3.5C rise in 100 years (the "business as usual" scenario for at present). The entire warming since the last glaciation was, what, ~8.5C?
Coal is only "cheap" because it doesn't have to pay for its externalities. It can dump mining waste into creeks and contaminate rivers downstream. It can emit all of the CO2 into the atmosphere that it pleases. And it can emit amounts of other pollutants that, while regulated, are still extremely costly to society. I read one paper recently that showed that if America's coal plants had to pay for the health the cost of their emissions -- *not* counting CO2 and climate change -- the cost would range from just over 2 cents per kilowatt hour for the cleanest plants to just over 12 cents per kilowatt hour for the dirtiest. So merely making them pay for the health consequences of their emissions alone would put them out of business. Even the lower end is more expensive than the production tax credit for wind.
That's ignoring the consequences of AGW, of course. What do you think it does to poor fishermen when the ocean acidifies, dramatically lowering coral growth rates and hurting population of various kinds of phytoplankton? What do you think it does to poor Bangladeshis when they lose another large chunk of their country every decade, and a corresponding higher elevation suddenly finds itself at risk of storm surges? What do you think the expansion of the Sahara does to poor Africans? It's not that a warmer climate is somehow automatically a bad thing; in fact, historically, warmer climates have led to greater biomass and biodiversity. The problem is that it's a different climate than our societies are adapted to. It doesn't help a poor Bangladeshi that there's a bunch of new farmland in Canada when their country is drowning. It doesn't help an African village whose well just dried up that the winters are milder in Anchorage. And mass migrations are not only not a solution, but they're the cause of some of the greatest periods of chaos in human history. The Dark Ages were a consequence of the mass migration of Germanic tribes as a result of Mongolian pressure in the Asian steppes, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
How about 800kW?
50kW barely even qualifies to be called rapid charging.
For those wondering what rapid chargers look like -- a couple hundred kW rapid charger is usually a box about the size of 1-2 small soda machines with a cable about the size of a gas hose (but heavier) coming off it. The aforementioned 800kW charger is the size of four large soda machines pushed back to back.
Wait, you said dioxide, not monoxide (which is strange, since the article is talking about CO, not CO2). In that case, change my post from "Fischer-Tropsch" to "Sabatier".
Wow, you could take the <1% of your exhaust that's carbon monoxide, convert it to fuel (losses), then burn it (average vehicle energy usage efficiency, after all losses: 20%). Yeah, that's really going to up your mpg. :P
And what's wrong with the Sabatier reaction? And talk about a lossy way to store energy. :P
We have one. It's called the Fischer-Tropsch process (plus electrolysis). The problem is that the fuel is super-expensive at today's energy prices.
Hydrocarbons are not "comparatively easy" to convert to mechanical or electrical energy. Compared to an electric motor powered by a battery, an internal combustion engine is a veritable Rube Goldberg Contraption.
As for batteries: they've had an 8% energy density improvement per year for the past two decades. That rate shows no sign of slowing down; rather, it seems to be speeding up. There are enough lab techs out there that even if only a very small fraction of them made it to the market, this rate could continue for at least the next decade or two, probably longer.
1 decade improvement for a 100-mile EV: 215 mi
2 decades improvement for a 100-mile EV: 466 mi
3 decades improvement for a 100-mile EV: 1006 mi
The primary reason we don't have car factory factories is that we don't need that many factories. If we needed enough factories, more and more of the factory construction would be automated.
"Bio-robots" is a perfect example of what I was talking about. You see how obscenely complex self replicators are? Until we can build them on the large scale, we're not going to be able to build them on the small scale, where the challenge is far greater. The smallest bacterial genome (by a large margin) is 160,000 base pairs -- and that particular bacterium is in the process of evolving into an organelle.
The cage is very small
A tiny silver ball
That makes you a hero
The moment you step inside
The world is watching you
What you're about to do
Will live on forever
Even though you'll be dead
And gone
Buckle up
We're about to turn the engines on.
Hint: building robots really small doesn't make the engineering challenge easier. It makes it *harder*. So until well after we reach the point where we could have regular size robots "dismantle Mars for construction", it's not going to happen.
Nanotechnology is quite real. Nanobots are sci-fi code for "magic" and are made of 100% pure Handwavium.
The difference between Musk and Rutan is that Rutan will get you to space, while Musk will get you to orbit.
The two sound similar, but they're nothing close to each other in terms of technical difficulty.
What's being discussed is not a "colony" in any normal sense of the word. It's a base. "Colony" implies a large degree of self sufficiency, which requires the most massive engineering engineering effort in the history of humankind to even get started. What Musk is doing is working on lower-cost spacecraft. Spacecraft that, IMHO, are still 1-2 orders of magnitude too expensive to make true colonization realistic. If all you do is go there and use some regolith for shielding and make some methane fuel using equipment shipped from Earth, perhaps growing some plants in greenhouses shipped from Earth, etc -- you're not colonizing. Namely, because not only could such a "colony" not independently expand itself, but if the shipments from Earth suddenly stopped, the next time something significant broke, the entire colony would die. You're not going to, say, jury-rig a new compressor out of duct tape and rocks. You couldn't even make duct tape itself without an entire petrochemical industry. A sustainable colony requires a mind-boggling amount of sustainable industry and the use of structures and devices engineered to be produceable by said industrial infrastructure.
But anyway, kudos to Musk for at least doing *something* useful rather than building palm tree islands or city-sized yachts.
Because without volume, the drivetrain will *always* be expensive.
The point of the subsidy is to make the tech more affordable by increasing volume.
They're starting at the higher end because the higher cost of the drivetrain is less noticeable there.
The Volt and Corolla aren't exactly in the same class. The Volt is a much nicer car than the Corolla. But just pretending that they're the same: the Volt has a $350/mo lease and the Corolla $150-$250/mo. The average Volt driver will save about $60 a month versus the Corolla in energy costs. There's no way to quantify the difference in maintenance, but the Volt has a much simpler drivetrain, with the most complex part (the gas generator) rarely used. There are few moving parts in the frequently used portion (the electric drivetrain). No oil changes, no lead-acid batteries (the li-ion has an 8-year, 100k mile warranty), no transmission, most braking is done with regen leading to much less stress on the physical brakes, etc. So maintenance should be significantly lower. Overall, the price difference isn't all that much, but you get a much nicer car and rarely ever have to stop by gas stations.
Also, just because the prime demographic is college-graduate upper middle class 40 year olds, that hardly means that they're the only buyers.
There are tax limitations on resale.
I don't know what data Deloitte Consulting was looking at, but I follow market research on EVs as part of my job, and it's not "Young people wealthy people" who are generally determined to be the most likely buyers for electric vehicles. Like with hybrids, it's educated, middle aged, upper-middle class people (EV buyers average slightly younger, but not much). I could conjecture that they primarily looked at the market for Tesla Roadsters to reach their conclusion. But the Tesla Roadster is nothing like, say the Nissan Leaf.
There are researchers in the field who disagree with you. The important thing to note is that was a very different Earth than today -- non-CO2 atmospheric composition, surface layout, albedo, surface chemistry, etc. Changes do matter, and formerly stable systems can reach intense disequilibriums at times -- for example, all life on Earth risked being snuffed out by first, the Oxygen Catastrophe, and later, the Sturtian-Varangian glaciation. How many potential Earths out there were snuffed out by such disequilibriums that we on this planet lucked out of (Anthropic Principle)?
An asteroid of this size isn't a planet killer. The Earth impacts calculator suggests (if you adopt reasonable parameters) that you'd probably die if you were 50 miles away from the impact, but probably be fine if you were 100 miles away.
Now, the calculator doesn't show the effects of an "asteroid winter" from the dust kicked up, which wouldn't be pleasant, but again, would hardly be a planet killer. Asteroids of this size strike the planet every ~140,000 years.
1) The "business as usual" scenario is 3.5C rise by 2100, not 1C in a few hundred years. In fact, there's enough inertia out there just from what we've already emitted to rise more than 1C by 2100.
2) The primary "end of all life" concern is that we'll trigger what happened on Venus here on Earth -- a runaway system with self-feedback mechanisms, wherein we reach a tipping point from adding more carbon that leads to continually more to enter the atmosphere and/or less to leave the atmosphere. At this point, nobody really knows for sure whether that's possible, but there are a number of prominent scientists who are extremely concerned about this. While our current CO2 levels are unprecedented within the last ~15 million years, and our "business as usual" forecast levels much higher still, carbon dioxide levels were extremely high in the early Earth without such a runaway effect. However, the planet was a very different place back then; a *lot* of things are different.
How are the carb levels on that red herring that you're serving up?
False dichotomy. An extra 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour (the wind PTC) is hardly something that will make you walk to work, give up AC, running water, or fresh food. It's practically unnoticeable - $13 a month. And that will disappear over time and then reverse, as renewable generation costs keep dropping, and will drop all the faster the more widespread they're used (just like fossil fuel gen costs did).
No matter how you arrange it, you experience the combination of weather and climate. So if your sea levels are 3-6 feet higher (current 2100 forecast), and you experience a 3-6 foot storm surge, you've just effectively doubled the height of the surge to 6-12 feet; in terms of storm surge, it's like adding 1-2 Saffir-Simpson categories to the strength of every hurricane. The same thing applies to flood, drought, etc.
Actually, there are measurements used to gather data on fossils, and they are reproduceable, but that is neither here nor there. The composition of Earth's past atmosphere, its past temperature, its past ice extent, and so forth, are all likewise based on measurement. For example, measurements of gas bubbles trapped in ice cores.
Oh, great -- you're a YEC (or at least listening to their propaganda) as well. Short summary: NO. One, radioactive decay is a consequence of various physics properties whose change would have all sorts of other, easily discernable effects. Two, you'd have to shift all kinds of different radioactive decay mechanisms by carefully tuned, illogical amounts to have the clocks all give the *same* wrong answer. And three, the amount of heat released from faster radioactive decay would have turned our planet to slag and extinguished the sun by disrupting the CNO cycle.
Ah, so if walk up to a giant pool of lava, it's safe to assume that that rock wasn't the slightest bit warm a few minutes ago because I wasn't there to measure it? I'm sorry, but physics has consequences. And events have effects. Effects that can be preserved for very long periods of time. To say "Either a person was there watching it or it didn't happen" is the epitome of absurdity.
What are you talking about? 1998 (an incredibly intense El Nino year) was the hottest year on record until 2005, which passed it on two of the three major climate datasets. There was a minor GISS revision based on a discontinuity related to data from NOAA, but it was very small, and applied only to the US. It had essentially no change on the global record. However, 1998 ceased to be the hottest year on record *for the US* (but again, only by a very small amount, as it was very close to 1934 to begin with). But since when is the US the world? The US only makes up a couple percent of the planet's surface area.
With only a couple exceptions, nothing is done from a purely empirical basis (certain aspects of clouds being the big empirical example; clouds are very difficult to model, and make up most of the margin of error in the models). Some things have to be handled using sub-grid level approximations, like some turbulence effects, but those are readily calculated independently, as well as being empirically verifiable. Violations of conservation of energy? Please, by all means, show me a single peer-reviewed paper that supports that assertion. That's a major charge and these models have been out for a very long time. Certainly *someone* has passed peer-review if it's true, ne?
But I digress -> comparing possible long term health consequences to certain death of millions of children in poverty because energy is artificially priced high indicates to me that the externalities have been taken into account.
First off, we're talking about America here. America is passing energy regulation that affects America. Secondly, the consequences of using the atmosphere as a dumping ground are just as statistically guaranteed as the consequences of higher energy prices (which are only a temporary thing anyway; fossil fuel energy costs have been optimized by centuries of massive-scale usage). And third, at least in the context of America (again, what we're talking about), you're completely wrong. The health consequences of power are FAR higher than the health consequences of higher energy costs.
All subsidies and national focuses aside, wind is already nearly cost-competive with coal *without* coal's externalities having to be taken into account. Your notion that this represents some sort of dramatically higher costs is just not supported by the evidence. Wind costs keep falling. Solar costs are higher, but are falling even faster than wind.
Everything has "externalities", but to assert that you're going to be able to identify and link them any better than a random choice is hubris, I would submit.
Oh, give me a break. You really think that emitting PM, NOx, SOx, etc into the atmosphere is unquantifiable in terms of health consequences? Tell that to people breathing smog in LA.
Coal is "cheap" because the externalities are not nearly as important to us as the benefits of having a reliable and economical power system.
Reliable? I'm sorry, but was it the US or Denmark that has big problems with power system reliability?
The aspect of our power system that people like you like to overlook is that we *already* have a great deal of randomness in our power system -- on the *demand side*. We already have to be able to handle unpredictability. We have a variety of standby and peaking systems that we use for the purpose.
Well, I've never known a fisherman to fish for coral or phytoplankton.
((Facepalm))
I do know that the ocean has been more and less acidic over the ages, and fish still swim in the sea.
The times in history in which the ocean has become acidic have been associated with mass extinctions. Corals, in particular, are *extremely* sensitive to pH. We already know what it will do to Earth's oceans, as there are natural laboratories for ocean acidification that exist. It's not pretty.
If they had cheap power, they could build levees and dams to stave off that kind of *weather* (as opposed to climate).
1) Weather exists *atop* the climate signal.
2) The world will *never* be able to wall off all of its coastlines. Sea level rise occurs everywhere, and a large portion of the world's population live by the coast. The US, wealthiest country in the world, couldn't even dream of entirely walling off its own coastal cities. Heck, we can't even keep our below-sea-level, clear-and-present-risk cities like New Orleans safe. Galveston and several more are already disasters in the waiting (Ike was bad enough, but it could have been far worse).
3) The coasts are hardly the only thing affected. The decline in interior snowpack means rivers become more seasonal -- higher and more unpredictable spring flood flows, lower summer/fall flows (and corresponding consequences to irrigation and water supply). The increase in average water vapor content leads to a statistically significant higher rate of major flood events. The higher temperatures also dessicate soil faster between rain events.
Except rising CO2 levels increases plant growth and *shrinks* the Sahara.
Sahara plants are limited by water, not CO2 (just like most oceanic plankton life is limited by iron, not CO2). And not all pla
One of the neat things about solar thermal plants is that you get a "peaking plant" at little extra cost. California's SEGS does this. Basically, you run a natural gas line to the plant, and when you need more power than the sun can provide, you fire up the natural gas burner which heats the water as though it had been heated by the sun. Everything else continues normally through the turbines; they don't care where the heat in the water came from.
Titanate cells do not have shelf life problems.
AltairNano's titanate cells are already used in grid buffering (short term -- they provide enough time to bring peaking plants online).
Proxies that dont have yearly resolution cannot be used to make judgments about yearly temperature variations. We are talking about proxies that have centennial resolution here.
Actually, it's more like decadal resolution since the last glaciation. And anyway, show me a period of centennial resolution of 3.5C rise in 100 years (the "business as usual" scenario for at present). The entire warming since the last glaciation was, what, ~8.5C?
Coal is only "cheap" because it doesn't have to pay for its externalities. It can dump mining waste into creeks and contaminate rivers downstream. It can emit all of the CO2 into the atmosphere that it pleases. And it can emit amounts of other pollutants that, while regulated, are still extremely costly to society. I read one paper recently that showed that if America's coal plants had to pay for the health the cost of their emissions -- *not* counting CO2 and climate change -- the cost would range from just over 2 cents per kilowatt hour for the cleanest plants to just over 12 cents per kilowatt hour for the dirtiest. So merely making them pay for the health consequences of their emissions alone would put them out of business. Even the lower end is more expensive than the production tax credit for wind.
That's ignoring the consequences of AGW, of course. What do you think it does to poor fishermen when the ocean acidifies, dramatically lowering coral growth rates and hurting population of various kinds of phytoplankton? What do you think it does to poor Bangladeshis when they lose another large chunk of their country every decade, and a corresponding higher elevation suddenly finds itself at risk of storm surges? What do you think the expansion of the Sahara does to poor Africans? It's not that a warmer climate is somehow automatically a bad thing; in fact, historically, warmer climates have led to greater biomass and biodiversity. The problem is that it's a different climate than our societies are adapted to. It doesn't help a poor Bangladeshi that there's a bunch of new farmland in Canada when their country is drowning. It doesn't help an African village whose well just dried up that the winters are milder in Anchorage. And mass migrations are not only not a solution, but they're the cause of some of the greatest periods of chaos in human history. The Dark Ages were a consequence of the mass migration of Germanic tribes as a result of Mongolian pressure in the Asian steppes, for example.