Unfortunately there has been a news story about a battery breakthrough every week or so for the last 10 years. (In MIT technology review, for example, there's a constant drumbeat of battery-breakthrough stories). Few of these breakthroughs make it to commercialization at all, and those that do are less revolutionary than promised. Batteries have made only gradual progress.
Compare a $10k used car to $10k electric car: The cost of a decent LiFePO4 battery pack is $6k
That seems like a problem in your argument. There is no electric car+battery combination which costs $16k. The figure you cite is less than half the actual retail cost of an electric car+battery. Even the prius plug-in, due next year, costs over $30k, and the battery pack only provides a 10 mile range.
The cost of electricity to recharge the pack is ~$0.10
Retail electricity for residential consumers in states which don't burn coal is about $0.14/KwH, not $0.10. If we burn coal to generate electricity, then we've negated any environmental benefit of electric cars, so we should use the $0.14/KwH price for electricity. Electricity from renewables would be at least 50% more expensive than even that.
Let's try a comparison with these figures. The Nissan Leaf costs $35,000, and an approximately equivalent Nissan Versa Hatchback costs $15,000. If we drive the versa for 150,000 miles with $4/gal fuel at 35 mpg, we pay $17,142 for fuel. If we drive the Leaf for 150,000 mi (which is the rated life of the battery pack), the fuel (electricity) would cost $8,400 (leaf has a 24 KwH battery pack which costs $3.36 to recharge at $0.14/KwH and takes us 60 mi on average, for a per-mile charge of $0.056, *100,000 = $8,400).
We must also include the cost of financing. Interest at 3% above inflation for 5 years would cost $2250 for the Versa and $5250 for the Leaf. Even if you pay using cash upfront, you are foregoing interest you could have earned by investing the same money, so it's an opportunity cost.
There will also be different insurance costs, for insuring a $15,000 car against theft vs. a $35,000 car. But let's ignore that now.
Of course the government will give you a $7,500 tax break right now if you buy an electric car, but will only do so for a small number of buyers until the incentive expires, so let's ignore that now because it's not generalizable.
The total cost of the Versa for 150k mi is $34,392, and the total cost of the Leaf for the same distance is $48,650. It costs about 41% more to drive a similar electric car at present, not counting insurance or limited-time government incentives. It is not cost-competitive.
It's possible that an electric car will become competitive if gasoline costs far more in the future and batteries cost less. If the Leaf costs $30k in the future and gasoline costs $7/gal (in 2011 dollars), then the Leaf would be approximately cost-competitive with a gasoline-powered car. This circumstance is definitely possible within the next 15 years.
It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It was very close to being worse than Chernobyl.
Do you have any support for this claim?
From what I can tell, efforts to control things at Fukushima essentially failed completely. They had full station blackout; they were not able to restore power; no important systems worked other than power-less emergency core cooling at 2 and 3, and then only for awhile; generators brought in were of the wrong kind; etc etc. All they did successfully, was vent and spray water on the outside. Nevertheless, total emisisons of radionuceides was about 20% of Chernobyl, according to various sources.
How do you figure that it was "very close" to being worse than Chernobyl?
I see shattered, wooden studs on those blasted-out Fukushima Daiichi buildings.
Fukushima had a GE Mark I containment, which is far weaker than the containment at most PWRs. Mark I containment was controversial, and considered possibly too weak, even when it was introduced in ~1965 when safety standards for nuclear plants were vastly lower. (Some engineers publicly resigned from GE around 1970 and protested that Mark I was too weak; it was a big news item for awhile).
Boiling water reactors generally have much weaker containment than PWRs. That's because BWRs make some kinds of accidents less likely, like 3 mile island. However BWRs are just as likely to melt down in cases like Fukushima, and are obviously less able to withstand meltdowns when they do occur.
It would have been much, much better if the earthquake and tsunami had (by chance) hit a PWR from 1975, rather than a BWR from 1969. There would still have been a meltdown, but the containment would have been massively stronger.
Probably you don't know, but France is scattered by regions where uranium was mined once
France gets most of its Uranium from central Africa. All mining of Uranium ceased in France around 2001.
The volume of Uranium required, for a given amount of power, is about 1 million times smaller than the volume of coal required for the same amount of power. Of course Uranium is at a lesser concentration (about 2%), so you must correct for that. Still, you can estimate the comparative damage to the environment from Uranium mining vs coal mining.
and a lot of constructions (roads, buildings, private houses) are contaminated due to the use of sterile rocks from U. mines.
Mine tailings are not radioactive enough to require evacuation.
There are roads in France which were purposefully made out of mine tailings and their radioactivity is only negligibly higher than other roads.
Not to mention the constant ocean pollution at la Hague
This is not useful information. The question is: how much pollution compared to other things.
The point appears to be seriously disputed. The first paragraph of the article you cited claims: "Japan's nuclear safety agency today rejected a claim in British newspaper The Independent that the earthquake itself, not the subsequent tsunami, destroyed cooling systems"
However, even if the claim is true, it's worth remembering that all meltdowns are not created equal. A meltdown which does not breach containment, is like three mile island.
If systems had continued functioning at Fukushima then the sequence of events would definitely have been very different. Cooling systems at units 2 and 3 were definitely still functioning. Vents for venting pressure would still have functioned. Filters would have functioned. Devices to prevent hydrogen buildup would have done something.
Not all meltdowns are the same. Bear in mind, that in a meltdown, time is of the essence. Heat is being generated by short-lived radionucleides which decay exponentially. If you can retain containment for even a few days longer, it makes a huge difference (10x or more) to how much radioactive material is released. Saying "well Fukushima would have melted down anyway" may be true (probably not, but I'll grant it here), but that doesn't mean that the outcome would have been similar.
Ignore the tens of thousands killed, the hundreds of thousands made homeless/jobless by the tsunami, but hype the shit out of Fukushima because it's "rah-dee-oh-act-iff"
This isn't really the media's fault though. The meltdown at Fukushima was seat-of-your-pants action. Everyone would have their eyes glued to TV screens all around the world (of course, I did too).
Granted, it's disproportionate. Fukushima may kill 2000 people from eventual cancer deaths, whereas we have the equivalent of 20 Fukushimas every year in the USA from deaths caused by coal-burning. But, deaths caused by coal burning are ongoing, constant, and boring.
Recently I read about a proposed EPA rule for coal smokestacks that would reduce the number of deaths in the USA by 10,000 per year (perhaps 5 Fukushimas per year, as a guess). The rule was not approved. It received back-page news and there was no protest.
What does that say about the wisdom of building terrestrial nuclear power plants?
It says little or nothing about the wisdom of building plants. You still do not have enough information (from that alone) to determine if plants are safer or more dangerous than alternatives. You must look at the rate of occurrence for large earthquakes (like 9.0) and above, and for other massive natural disasters. Then you must look at the distribution of plants and estimate the number of meltdowns. Then you must compare the harm of those meltdowns to the alternatives available at a cost which the public will accept (burning coal or natural gas).
You need two numbers here for comparison, in order to generate even the roughest estimate of the wisdom of building plants. You cannot arrive at an estimate by just saying "natural disasters happen and we can't predict where...", any more than you could determine the relative safety of (say) walking vs driving by noting that lightning strikes occur and kill pedestrians more than drivers.
What would it take? Better science education. You can't be a denier if you understand a little physics.
Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be the case. Many of the people I know who deny global warming took undergraduate courses in physics etc.
Unfortunately, AGW is more complicated than just basic physics and can't be decided by just taking a physics course at University. It's not just a matter of co2 absorbing and re-emitting IR radiation in a simple thermal model, which would be basic physics. It also involves feedback effects and albedo, etc, and those require a sophisticated model. In fact, most of the warming from AGW is caused by complicated feedback effects. So there is no simple experiment or calculation which you can perform by yourself during physics class which could confirm or deny AGW. Even the experts didn't confirm AGW until the mid-1980s.
Notice that denialism isn't an issue in Europe - there's it's the lunatic fringe (where it belongs.)
Europe as a whole doesn't have better science education than the USA.
There is a comparative test (the PISA test) issued every year for a random sample of students in various countries. Only Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland get significantly higher scores in science than the USA. Many European nations (like Romania and others) score far worse than the USA.
I think the issue is that continental Europeans are far more likely to defer to experts.
There is a big difference between people who believe in AGW and the environmentalist granola-eating windmill-loving crowd. Granted, some people on the left see AGW as another opportunity to impose the commune-living low-tech lifestyle that they were trying to impose before. They treat AGW as just a tool or as an excuse to get what they already wanted. But not everyone who believes in AGW is doing so for opportunistic reasons. For example, I believe in AGW, and I think we should deal with it by building 500 new nuclear reactors in the US and by reducing nuclear safety standards somewhat. This obviously is not what the lefty crowd would want. Nor was it my "agenda" to go nuclear even before I came across AGW. I had no agenda. Without AGW I would favor generating electricity using natural gas turbines.
No, because each person radiates only about 100 watts of heat, which is only about 700 billion watts for the whole planet. This is trivial compared to solar insolation of the Earth, which is about 700 quadrillion watts, or 7 million times as much. Even if the greenhouse effect only adds about 2 watts per square meter, it still causes a difference of 1 quadrillion watts which is more than 1400x as much as all heat radiated from humans.
Of course there are other factors which I'm ignoring here. If people are eating food that wasn't grown with fertilizer, then the land would otherwise have produced plants which would be decomposed by fungii which would produce the same amount of heat anyway, so humans in that case aren't even adding to the heat output. In that case we're just displacing heat which would've been emitted by fungii. However, if we didn't use fertilizer, then only about 2 billion of us could be alive, so the net amount of heat added by human body heat in this case is 500 billion watts, not 700 billion. Of course there are still other factors, but all of them are minor.
The amount of heat you add to the atmosphere directly via body heat is trivial even when you compare it to the amount of waste heat radiated directly by industrial machinery or cars. Your car could heat two medium-sized houses in winter using its radiator. Even waste heat from industrial machinery, however, is trivial compared to the effects of GHG.
Ok i have a stupid question.*
It wasn't a stupid question.
I but was wondering if stuff like that was factored into models...
I think that people who make these models did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and decided to ignore direct heat radiation from humans since it's so trivial.
AGW proponents just don't look past the surface, just like most people. This is why they are so easy to manipulate, and make so many evil bastards super rich.
AGW makes evil bastards super rich? Which evil bastards have gotten super rich off AGW? Warren Buffet? Bill Gates? Larry Ellison? The Koch brothers?! How many super rich people got that way as a consequence of AGW?
If greedy bastards were getting super-rich off AGW, then wouldn't we expect green companies to make extraordinary incomes? Otherwise, how would rich people obtain money from AGW?
I've recently looked through the market capitalizations of various companies as part of my investment strategy. It appears to me that there's far more money to be made (and far more evil bastards who would benefit) from the denial of global warming than from its confirmation. For example, the market cap of Exxon-Mobil alone is probably vastly higher than all "green energy" companies combined (although this is difficult to determine since many green energy companies are so small that they're not public).
Also, what about all the climatologists who seem to believe in AGW? Are you saying that they are all essentially duped and are easily manipulated by evil greedy people?
More peaks in the absorption spectra (IR+Raman) is proportional to heat capacity, because one causes the other.
Are you sure about this? It seems like you have a very severe misconception about this. From what I recall, the two are basically unrelated.
Whereas the opacity of a substance is caused by radiation frequencies matching quantum mechanical properties of molecules, heat capacity is totally unrelated and is caused by degrees of freedom of movement of atoms in a molecule. The two are just not closely related and one doesn't cause the other.
I grabbed a textbook and looked up the heat capacities of materials, and the graphs of absorption spectra. There appears to be little correlation and sometimes there's an inverse correlation.
That material absorbs IR radiation and re-emits it. This slows heat loss of the system. This is the definition of heat capacity.
That's not the definition of heat capacity. Not at all. You're badly mistaken about this.
Heat capacity is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a body by a given amount. For example, a quantity of glass might have a certain heat capacity. But that has nothing to do with whether it's transparent or opaque. For example, soda-lime glass has a similar heat capacity to some kinds of concrete, but obviously one is transparent to visible light while the other is totally opaque, despite their identical heat capacities.
Whether something "slows heat loss of the system" is not the same thing as its heat capacity--not at all. Heat capacity is referring to a property of the substance in question, not to any secondary effect upon the system. For example, a glass window pane may "slow heat loss of [a] system" by preventing convection but that says nothing about its heat capacity.
Where, exactly, do you think that "opacity" comes from?
Not from heat capacity. Opacity doesn't "come from" heat capacity.
It seems you're making two mistakes here: 1) you're confusing something which slows heat loss of a system, with something that has a high heat capacity; and 2) This leads you to believe that opaque things will "cause" heat capacity because they prevent heat loss of a system in this case.
Maybe that's because Harvard is nowhere near the most expensive school. There are many schools which charge that much including room and board, and they require you to buy their room and board.
I declare you as someone who didn't bother to find information before responding.
Here in England for example we pay far, far less for education than in USA and I don't see it being of worse quality, quite the opposite.
Here in the USA we have many public Universities which will provide a quality education to anyone who has met the academic requirements. As an example, there is a state University near me which costs $6,000 per year. And you could easily go to college for less than that; you could go to city college and then transfer, in which case you would pay $14,000 for your entire University education. These prices are the maximum amount you could pay, if you didn't qualify for any scholarships and if your parents are wealthy and you don't qualify for any financial aid.
However those schools aren't good enough for anyone anymore. Instead everyone goes to these little "luxury Universities" which have sprung up everywhere recently and which charge $60,000 per YEAR. These luxury Universities have become extremely common over the last 20 years; in fact, they're practically the norm now. They offer things like manicured lawns, and beautiful buildings, and one instructor for every five students. Unfortunately, some of them have only mediocre academic reputations.
The people who have $150,000 in debt for their undergraduate education (!!) went to those expensive luxury schools.
These facts are not mentioned by the protesters, or by the debtors seeking forgiveness. Instead, those people act as if they had to pay $200,000 for their undergraduate education; as if they had no other options.
By omitting these facts, the protesters have given an extremely misleading impression. I'm not at all surprised you were under the mistaken impression that education is terribly expensive in the USA. In fact, it is not. Each student pays whatever he wants, depending upon the degree of luxury and attention which he requires.
When I first saw schools charging $60,000 per year, while there are perfectly adequate schools charging 1/10th that amount, I was shocked by it. But now I'm even more shocked, because now I see the attendants of those schools demanding, as a matter of "justice", that others should pay for their luxury excursion.
I don't mean to seem uncaring. I actually sympathize, a lot, for the young kids that went to those luxury schools. They had no idea what they were getting into, and they probably didn't even realize how much money that is, and how hard it would be to pay it back (with interest). They got stuck in a trap.
I do not, however, wish to pay for the luxury schools when I don't attend them and to continue paying for such schools. If there is to be a bailout, and I must pay, then I have a right to demand restrictions and to set limits. I demand a law which prevents 18-year-olds from taking out more than $35,000 in debt for their entire undergraduate education. If that means that they must forgo a luxury school and go to cheaper school instead, then so be it.
Instead of mad EJB skills today you'd use Spring and whatnot.... Not to say core Java skills were useless, but a 10 year old skillset would have lost quite a bit in productivity and marketability.
I'm not disagreeing with this point. I said that frameworks etc have changed significantly, but core languages have not.
but a 10 year old skillset would have lost quite a bit in productivity and marketability.
A 10-year half life might be reasonable, but the author was claiming a 2-year half-life.
If you take the time to read the article, you'll see he's actually talking about how long your skills in customizing a particular release of software are viable, not about how long languages or operating systems remain relevant.
I read the entire article before commenting. It says nothing of the sort. I don't even know where you got what you're saying. Did you read the article?
From the article: "The longer answer is that, in my opinion, a techie’s skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life. That is to say, that the exact set of skills you have today will only be half as marketable two years from now."
I still program in Java which I've been doing since 1998. I also sometimes program in Python which I've been doing since 1997. Obviously some things about those languages have changed, but many things haven't.
OO languages are fairly similar to what they were 10 years ago. As is OO design, etc. There have been large changes to frameworks etc, but there is a significant "core skill set" which transfers over.
In my case, my skills have not become become less marketable at all over the last two years. Recently I spent two years out of work (voluntarily), and when I returned to the job market I had no problem whatsoever finding a job.
I think the half-life of skills is more like 15 years.
No, because the article was referring to the amount of cesium-137 released. There were also other radionucleides released from Chernobyl (like Strontium-90), which weren't released in significant amounts from Fukushima.
Ignore other posters here; uranium is not very radioactive.
Based on the new data, I wonder how large of an area around the facility needs to be abandoned, and for how long...
About 80% of the radioactive particles landed in the ocean, according to the article.
The contaminated area will have to be abandoned for 300 years because that's 10 half-lives of cesum-137, after which 99.9% will have decayed. However they may not even abandon it but rather just pave over some of it and build on top of it. Cesium-137 is an ingestion hazard and is no threat to you by just being in its vicinity.
I'm not saying that TEPCO and most private companies will generally be honest when it's not in their interest to do so. However it's also a possibility here that TEPCO was unaware at the time of the exact amount of radioactivity released.
Not Bill Gates. But VISA, Mastercard, the banks and PayPal are doing a pretty good job of starving Wikileaks while simultaneously depriving you of your economic and free speech rights.
But that happened after the State Department sent a letter to Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Amazon, Western Union, and others, warning that WikiLeaks was engaging in illegal behavior and they should cut it off. Granted, they're not obligated to follow such a letter, however by doing so they can curry favor and get what amounts to free lobbying.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem. However it's totally unlike the problem which the parent identified. In fact, it's essentially the opposite problem insofar as it represents the state department leaning on private industry.
How long would you survive if they decided you needed to be economically isolated?
I could survive forever, since I could still use checks. Check clearning doesn't rely on any single entity or small number of entities.
The problem here is that wikileaks is soliciting donations online only, and online donations have always been done overwhelmingly by visa, mastercard, or paypal, and most people are too lazy to send a check somewhere.
The wikileaks episode may be a strong argument for BitCoin but not for what the parent or article was claiming.
Half the population doesn't believe in global warming, and the other half is subdivided into the following groups: 1) people who don't care enough to do anything about it; 2) environmentalists who will protest outside of nuclear power plants, make the problem worse, and who basically caused this predicament in the first place more than anyone else by aborting the nuclear revolution.
I would say the chances of concerted, rational, worldwide effort to massively reduce carbon emissions are about 0.00001%.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately there has been a news story about a battery breakthrough every week or so for the last 10 years. (In MIT technology review, for example, there's a constant drumbeat of battery-breakthrough stories). Few of these breakthroughs make it to commercialization at all, and those that do are less revolutionary than promised. Batteries have made only gradual progress.
That seems like a problem in your argument. There is no electric car+battery combination which costs $16k. The figure you cite is less than half the actual retail cost of an electric car+battery. Even the prius plug-in, due next year, costs over $30k, and the battery pack only provides a 10 mile range.
Retail electricity for residential consumers in states which don't burn coal is about $0.14/KwH, not $0.10. If we burn coal to generate electricity, then we've negated any environmental benefit of electric cars, so we should use the $0.14/KwH price for electricity. Electricity from renewables would be at least 50% more expensive than even that.
Let's try a comparison with these figures. The Nissan Leaf costs $35,000, and an approximately equivalent Nissan Versa Hatchback costs $15,000. If we drive the versa for 150,000 miles with $4/gal fuel at 35 mpg, we pay $17,142 for fuel. If we drive the Leaf for 150,000 mi (which is the rated life of the battery pack), the fuel (electricity) would cost $8,400 (leaf has a 24 KwH battery pack which costs $3.36 to recharge at $0.14/KwH and takes us 60 mi on average, for a per-mile charge of $0.056, *100,000 = $8,400).
We must also include the cost of financing. Interest at 3% above inflation for 5 years would cost $2250 for the Versa and $5250 for the Leaf. Even if you pay using cash upfront, you are foregoing interest you could have earned by investing the same money, so it's an opportunity cost.
There will also be different insurance costs, for insuring a $15,000 car against theft vs. a $35,000 car. But let's ignore that now.
Of course the government will give you a $7,500 tax break right now if you buy an electric car, but will only do so for a small number of buyers until the incentive expires, so let's ignore that now because it's not generalizable.
The total cost of the Versa for 150k mi is $34,392, and the total cost of the Leaf for the same distance is $48,650. It costs about 41% more to drive a similar electric car at present, not counting insurance or limited-time government incentives. It is not cost-competitive.
It's possible that an electric car will become competitive if gasoline costs far more in the future and batteries cost less. If the Leaf costs $30k in the future and gasoline costs $7/gal (in 2011 dollars), then the Leaf would be approximately cost-competitive with a gasoline-powered car. This circumstance is definitely possible within the next 15 years.
Do you have any support for this claim?
From what I can tell, efforts to control things at Fukushima essentially failed completely. They had full station blackout; they were not able to restore power; no important systems worked other than power-less emergency core cooling at 2 and 3, and then only for awhile; generators brought in were of the wrong kind; etc etc. All they did successfully, was vent and spray water on the outside. Nevertheless, total emisisons of radionuceides was about 20% of Chernobyl, according to various sources.
How do you figure that it was "very close" to being worse than Chernobyl?
Fukushima had a GE Mark I containment, which is far weaker than the containment at most PWRs. Mark I containment was controversial, and considered possibly too weak, even when it was introduced in ~1965 when safety standards for nuclear plants were vastly lower. (Some engineers publicly resigned from GE around 1970 and protested that Mark I was too weak; it was a big news item for awhile).
Boiling water reactors generally have much weaker containment than PWRs. That's because BWRs make some kinds of accidents less likely, like 3 mile island. However BWRs are just as likely to melt down in cases like Fukushima, and are obviously less able to withstand meltdowns when they do occur.
It would have been much, much better if the earthquake and tsunami had (by chance) hit a PWR from 1975, rather than a BWR from 1969. There would still have been a meltdown, but the containment would have been massively stronger.
France gets most of its Uranium from central Africa. All mining of Uranium ceased in France around 2001.
The volume of Uranium required, for a given amount of power, is about 1 million times smaller than the volume of coal required for the same amount of power. Of course Uranium is at a lesser concentration (about 2%), so you must correct for that. Still, you can estimate the comparative damage to the environment from Uranium mining vs coal mining.
Mine tailings are not radioactive enough to require evacuation.
There are roads in France which were purposefully made out of mine tailings and their radioactivity is only negligibly higher than other roads.
This is not useful information. The question is: how much pollution compared to other things.
The point appears to be seriously disputed. The first paragraph of the article you cited claims: "Japan's nuclear safety agency today rejected a claim in British newspaper The Independent that the earthquake itself, not the subsequent tsunami, destroyed cooling systems"
However, even if the claim is true, it's worth remembering that all meltdowns are not created equal. A meltdown which does not breach containment, is like three mile island.
If systems had continued functioning at Fukushima then the sequence of events would definitely have been very different. Cooling systems at units 2 and 3 were definitely still functioning. Vents for venting pressure would still have functioned. Filters would have functioned. Devices to prevent hydrogen buildup would have done something.
Not all meltdowns are the same. Bear in mind, that in a meltdown, time is of the essence. Heat is being generated by short-lived radionucleides which decay exponentially. If you can retain containment for even a few days longer, it makes a huge difference (10x or more) to how much radioactive material is released. Saying "well Fukushima would have melted down anyway" may be true (probably not, but I'll grant it here), but that doesn't mean that the outcome would have been similar.
This isn't really the media's fault though. The meltdown at Fukushima was seat-of-your-pants action. Everyone would have their eyes glued to TV screens all around the world (of course, I did too).
Granted, it's disproportionate. Fukushima may kill 2000 people from eventual cancer deaths, whereas we have the equivalent of 20 Fukushimas every year in the USA from deaths caused by coal-burning. But, deaths caused by coal burning are ongoing, constant, and boring.
Recently I read about a proposed EPA rule for coal smokestacks that would reduce the number of deaths in the USA by 10,000 per year (perhaps 5 Fukushimas per year, as a guess). The rule was not approved. It received back-page news and there was no protest.
It says little or nothing about the wisdom of building plants. You still do not have enough information (from that alone) to determine if plants are safer or more dangerous than alternatives. You must look at the rate of occurrence for large earthquakes (like 9.0) and above, and for other massive natural disasters. Then you must look at the distribution of plants and estimate the number of meltdowns. Then you must compare the harm of those meltdowns to the alternatives available at a cost which the public will accept (burning coal or natural gas).
You need two numbers here for comparison, in order to generate even the roughest estimate of the wisdom of building plants. You cannot arrive at an estimate by just saying "natural disasters happen and we can't predict where...", any more than you could determine the relative safety of (say) walking vs driving by noting that lightning strikes occur and kill pedestrians more than drivers.
Unfortunately this doesn't appear to be the case. Many of the people I know who deny global warming took undergraduate courses in physics etc.
Unfortunately, AGW is more complicated than just basic physics and can't be decided by just taking a physics course at University. It's not just a matter of co2 absorbing and re-emitting IR radiation in a simple thermal model, which would be basic physics. It also involves feedback effects and albedo, etc, and those require a sophisticated model. In fact, most of the warming from AGW is caused by complicated feedback effects. So there is no simple experiment or calculation which you can perform by yourself during physics class which could confirm or deny AGW. Even the experts didn't confirm AGW until the mid-1980s.
Europe as a whole doesn't have better science education than the USA.
There is a comparative test (the PISA test) issued every year for a random sample of students in various countries. Only Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland get significantly higher scores in science than the USA. Many European nations (like Romania and others) score far worse than the USA.
I think the issue is that continental Europeans are far more likely to defer to experts.
There is a big difference between people who believe in AGW and the environmentalist granola-eating windmill-loving crowd. Granted, some people on the left see AGW as another opportunity to impose the commune-living low-tech lifestyle that they were trying to impose before. They treat AGW as just a tool or as an excuse to get what they already wanted. But not everyone who believes in AGW is doing so for opportunistic reasons. For example, I believe in AGW, and I think we should deal with it by building 500 new nuclear reactors in the US and by reducing nuclear safety standards somewhat. This obviously is not what the lefty crowd would want. Nor was it my "agenda" to go nuclear even before I came across AGW. I had no agenda. Without AGW I would favor generating electricity using natural gas turbines.
No, because each person radiates only about 100 watts of heat, which is only about 700 billion watts for the whole planet. This is trivial compared to solar insolation of the Earth, which is about 700 quadrillion watts, or 7 million times as much. Even if the greenhouse effect only adds about 2 watts per square meter, it still causes a difference of 1 quadrillion watts which is more than 1400x as much as all heat radiated from humans.
Of course there are other factors which I'm ignoring here. If people are eating food that wasn't grown with fertilizer, then the land would otherwise have produced plants which would be decomposed by fungii which would produce the same amount of heat anyway, so humans in that case aren't even adding to the heat output. In that case we're just displacing heat which would've been emitted by fungii. However, if we didn't use fertilizer, then only about 2 billion of us could be alive, so the net amount of heat added by human body heat in this case is 500 billion watts, not 700 billion. Of course there are still other factors, but all of them are minor.
The amount of heat you add to the atmosphere directly via body heat is trivial even when you compare it to the amount of waste heat radiated directly by industrial machinery or cars. Your car could heat two medium-sized houses in winter using its radiator. Even waste heat from industrial machinery, however, is trivial compared to the effects of GHG.
It wasn't a stupid question.
I think that people who make these models did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and decided to ignore direct heat radiation from humans since it's so trivial.
AGW makes evil bastards super rich? Which evil bastards have gotten super rich off AGW? Warren Buffet? Bill Gates? Larry Ellison? The Koch brothers?! How many super rich people got that way as a consequence of AGW?
If greedy bastards were getting super-rich off AGW, then wouldn't we expect green companies to make extraordinary incomes? Otherwise, how would rich people obtain money from AGW?
I've recently looked through the market capitalizations of various companies as part of my investment strategy. It appears to me that there's far more money to be made (and far more evil bastards who would benefit) from the denial of global warming than from its confirmation. For example, the market cap of Exxon-Mobil alone is probably vastly higher than all "green energy" companies combined (although this is difficult to determine since many green energy companies are so small that they're not public).
Also, what about all the climatologists who seem to believe in AGW? Are you saying that they are all essentially duped and are easily manipulated by evil greedy people?
What you're saying seems implausible to me.
Are you sure about this? It seems like you have a very severe misconception about this. From what I recall, the two are basically unrelated.
Whereas the opacity of a substance is caused by radiation frequencies matching quantum mechanical properties of molecules, heat capacity is totally unrelated and is caused by degrees of freedom of movement of atoms in a molecule. The two are just not closely related and one doesn't cause the other.
I grabbed a textbook and looked up the heat capacities of materials, and the graphs of absorption spectra. There appears to be little correlation and sometimes there's an inverse correlation.
That's not the definition of heat capacity. Not at all. You're badly mistaken about this.
Heat capacity is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a body by a given amount. For example, a quantity of glass might have a certain heat capacity. But that has nothing to do with whether it's transparent or opaque. For example, soda-lime glass has a similar heat capacity to some kinds of concrete, but obviously one is transparent to visible light while the other is totally opaque, despite their identical heat capacities.
Whether something "slows heat loss of the system" is not the same thing as its heat capacity--not at all. Heat capacity is referring to a property of the substance in question, not to any secondary effect upon the system. For example, a glass window pane may "slow heat loss of [a] system" by preventing convection but that says nothing about its heat capacity.
Not from heat capacity. Opacity doesn't "come from" heat capacity.
It seems you're making two mistakes here: 1) you're confusing something which slows heat loss of a system, with something that has a high heat capacity; and 2) This leads you to believe that opaque things will "cause" heat capacity because they prevent heat loss of a system in this case.
Both of your steps are mistaken.
I'm aware of the Stafford limit.
What I meant was we should disallow (or the government should refuse to enfoce) private loans beyond a certain amount.
Maybe that's because Harvard is nowhere near the most expensive school. There are many schools which charge that much including room and board, and they require you to buy their room and board.
I declare you as someone who didn't bother to find information before responding.
Here in the USA we have many public Universities which will provide a quality education to anyone who has met the academic requirements. As an example, there is a state University near me which costs $6,000 per year. And you could easily go to college for less than that; you could go to city college and then transfer, in which case you would pay $14,000 for your entire University education. These prices are the maximum amount you could pay, if you didn't qualify for any scholarships and if your parents are wealthy and you don't qualify for any financial aid.
However those schools aren't good enough for anyone anymore. Instead everyone goes to these little "luxury Universities" which have sprung up everywhere recently and which charge $60,000 per YEAR. These luxury Universities have become extremely common over the last 20 years; in fact, they're practically the norm now. They offer things like manicured lawns, and beautiful buildings, and one instructor for every five students. Unfortunately, some of them have only mediocre academic reputations.
The people who have $150,000 in debt for their undergraduate education (!!) went to those expensive luxury schools.
These facts are not mentioned by the protesters, or by the debtors seeking forgiveness. Instead, those people act as if they had to pay $200,000 for their undergraduate education; as if they had no other options.
By omitting these facts, the protesters have given an extremely misleading impression. I'm not at all surprised you were under the mistaken impression that education is terribly expensive in the USA. In fact, it is not. Each student pays whatever he wants, depending upon the degree of luxury and attention which he requires.
When I first saw schools charging $60,000 per year, while there are perfectly adequate schools charging 1/10th that amount, I was shocked by it. But now I'm even more shocked, because now I see the attendants of those schools demanding, as a matter of "justice", that others should pay for their luxury excursion.
I don't mean to seem uncaring. I actually sympathize, a lot, for the young kids that went to those luxury schools. They had no idea what they were getting into, and they probably didn't even realize how much money that is, and how hard it would be to pay it back (with interest). They got stuck in a trap.
I do not, however, wish to pay for the luxury schools when I don't attend them and to continue paying for such schools. If there is to be a bailout, and I must pay, then I have a right to demand restrictions and to set limits. I demand a law which prevents 18-year-olds from taking out more than $35,000 in debt for their entire undergraduate education. If that means that they must forgo a luxury school and go to cheaper school instead, then so be it.
I'm not disagreeing with this point. I said that frameworks etc have changed significantly, but core languages have not.
A 10-year half life might be reasonable, but the author was claiming a 2-year half-life.
I read the entire article before commenting. It says nothing of the sort. I don't even know where you got what you're saying. Did you read the article?
From the article: "The longer answer is that, in my opinion, a techie’s skill set from a marketability perspective has a two year half-life. That is to say, that the exact set of skills you have today will only be half as marketable two years from now."
I still program in Java which I've been doing since 1998. I also sometimes program in Python which I've been doing since 1997. Obviously some things about those languages have changed, but many things haven't.
OO languages are fairly similar to what they were 10 years ago. As is OO design, etc. There have been large changes to frameworks etc, but there is a significant "core skill set" which transfers over.
In my case, my skills have not become become less marketable at all over the last two years. Recently I spent two years out of work (voluntarily), and when I returned to the job market I had no problem whatsoever finding a job.
I think the half-life of skills is more like 15 years.
No, because the article was referring to the amount of cesium-137 released. There were also other radionucleides released from Chernobyl (like Strontium-90), which weren't released in significant amounts from Fukushima.
Ignore other posters here; uranium is not very radioactive.
About 80% of the radioactive particles landed in the ocean, according to the article.
The contaminated area will have to be abandoned for 300 years because that's 10 half-lives of cesum-137, after which 99.9% will have decayed. However they may not even abandon it but rather just pave over some of it and build on top of it. Cesium-137 is an ingestion hazard and is no threat to you by just being in its vicinity.
I'm not saying that TEPCO and most private companies will generally be honest when it's not in their interest to do so. However it's also a possibility here that TEPCO was unaware at the time of the exact amount of radioactivity released.
But that happened after the State Department sent a letter to Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Amazon, Western Union, and others, warning that WikiLeaks was engaging in illegal behavior and they should cut it off. Granted, they're not obligated to follow such a letter, however by doing so they can curry favor and get what amounts to free lobbying.
I'm not saying this isn't a problem. However it's totally unlike the problem which the parent identified. In fact, it's essentially the opposite problem insofar as it represents the state department leaning on private industry.
I could survive forever, since I could still use checks. Check clearning doesn't rely on any single entity or small number of entities.
The problem here is that wikileaks is soliciting donations online only, and online donations have always been done overwhelmingly by visa, mastercard, or paypal, and most people are too lazy to send a check somewhere.
The wikileaks episode may be a strong argument for BitCoin but not for what the parent or article was claiming.
Half the population doesn't believe in global warming, and the other half is subdivided into the following groups: 1) people who don't care enough to do anything about it; 2) environmentalists who will protest outside of nuclear power plants, make the problem worse, and who basically caused this predicament in the first place more than anyone else by aborting the nuclear revolution.
I would say the chances of concerted, rational, worldwide effort to massively reduce carbon emissions are about 0.00001%.
Nope; it's the other way around. The federal reserve deposits money into banks using checks which draw upon nothing.