And there was no power surge (not outside the DCs anyway).
A large number of ex-BA IT staff have commented in fora about the historic robustness of the system, however over the last 5 years BA has systematically gutted its IT staff and outsourced just about everything to India.
The CIO of BA (and IAG) is a manager whose last claim to fame was being the person responsible for ramming through the highly contentious (as in strike-causing) cabin crew contracts which stripped out many rights in 2011.
He has ZERO IT background and was charged with reducing the IT bill by $90 million per year.
Wind and solar combined can _just_ match the current conventional fleet, but electrical generation only accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions
Factor in reduction of carbon from heating/cooling and transportation and you start needing 6-8 times the amount of electrical capacity that exists now.
No, you can't carpet deserts. Apart from the issue that places like the Sahara belong to someone else (and they'll want that energy for themselves), there's a practical limit of about 1500 miles for transporting electricity before grid losses make it too expensive to be worthwhile.
One of the larger problems with Wind/solar plants is the need for fast peaking/backing plants to guarantee their output (which the wind/solar operators don't have to pay upkeep on). Molten salt nuclear systems can load follow without penalties - which means that they can replace peaking plants - and the fact that they're cheaper overall than wind/solar should mean that in a short period of time those "renewables farms" will become rusting monuments to useless technology.
"The main reason nuclear has been so costly isn't because the technology itself isn't feasible."
A lot of _that_ has to do with the conventional uranium cycle being pretty rotten at producing electricity and pretty good at producing nasty byproduct stuff which happens to be handy to build nuclear weapons with - which means paranoid levels of security are required - and that's before you get into the issue of mixing radioactives and water under high pressure. (steam explosions and leaks happen. It's a fact of life. The best fix is not to mix them)
Thorium cycle is a lot harder to weaponise and a lot easier to generate electricity with. Molten Salt systems were already proven in the cold war but discarded in the rush to make more bombs. Thankfully the chinese and others are now reopening investigations into the technology which should have been at the core of the civil nuclear program from the 1970s onwards.
Fusion might happen but it;s unlikely to be in my grandchildrens' lifetime. We need to get on with decarbonising _now_. Nuclear waste is a vastly overblown issue and with MSRs the volume is reduced by a factorof 100+ anyway.
Methane breaks down to CO2 and H20, both of which are greenhouse gases in the troposphere.
The issue isn't that "CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries", the issue is that we're emitting more into the atmosphere each year than the planet can absorb. Until that stops, the levels will keep increasing.
As part of that, ocean acidity levels have increased by 30% in the last couple of hundred years. The knock-on effects of _that_ are only just starting to become apparent (such as the great barrier reef bleaching now being declared as "irreversible" - when this was decried as alarmist as little as 5 years ago)
42% of americans may think this now, but Southern Florida is already pretty much lost. It's simply a matter of time before most areas will have to be abandoned because of saltwater incursion into the aquifers even if the persistent flooding and increased number of storm surges doesn't drive people out first.
In addition, Louisiana has lost around 30% of its land area over the last 60 years. This is as much down to mismanagement of the delta system as actual sea level rise but coastal villages are already being abandoned and it's only a matter of time until larger towns have to make similar decisions.
"Last year, the world emitted 36B tons of CO2, and about 0.25B tons of CH4, equivalent to about 8B tons of CO2 in 100-year warming potential. So methane is a serious problem, but far less than CO2."
Until you factor in stuff like the Leptav Sea emissions of methane clathrates - the plumes are reported to be over 1km wide in places
If these ongoing emissions and the continuing incursion into the arctic of warm water from the Atlantic destabilise the siberian continental shelf clathrates then there's the potential for 1-6GT(*) of CH4 to bubble out rapidly in a new Storegga Slide with accompanying tsunamis - which will be against sparsely populate shorelines but still catastrophic.
The global methane survey couldn't account for the origin a large chunk of the atmospheric methane it picked up and subsequently blamed cow burps as a possibility - having spoken to the people who ran the survey, it turns out that not only were they not looking at the possibility of ocean releases, they weren't aware of the Leptav Sea emissions (despite them having been increasing for a decade) and the instruments used are _only_ tuned to detect methane over land (apparently it's nearly impossible to detect it over water).
Now they're aware of the existent and possible scale of the emissions (it's hard to verify stuff happening in russian waters, the russians aren't cooperative), they're trying to rerun what they've got to see if they can verify the emissions are as bad as suspected or whether a new mission will be required.
(*) Noone's quite sure how much is down there. It's at least 1GT but could be as high as 8-10GT and whilst we have some idea of release volumes from the Storegga Slides, any release volume is a matter of speculation. It should be noted that the timeframe of the Storegga Slides and associated methane release more or less coincides with the sharp rise in temperature at the end of the last glaciation. It's a chicken and egg question if those are related, but that kind of warming in current conditions coupled with the spike in CO2 as the methane breaks down may well push us a long way along the curve towards an anoxic oceanic event and associated terrestrial animal dieback.
Sea level changes aren't that much of a problem in the longer term, even if they cause population movements.
The bigger issue to think about is that in geological history, large spikes in CO2 levels go hand in hand with anoxic oceanic events and consequent dieoffs on land and sea. Half our atmospheric oxygen comes from the oceans so it's something to bear in mind, especially as some of the existing dead zones seem to be spreading.
"Florida is largely porous limestone rock. It gets its water from aquifers in that rock, and sea water can and does intrude into that rock."
As a teen, I had an interest in Florida's water system due to the unique plantlife in the everglades (mainly saracenias).
It was stated by multiple sources back in the 1980s/90s that if anything happened to mess up the water supply into northern Florida from the Okefenokee swamp (which is fed from Georgia/Alabama/South Carolina), the entire state could end up effectively uninhabitable within 2 decades without massive investment in desalination projects - and that one of the biggest risks to continued habitability was anything interfering with the massive swamp that runs along the length of central florida, as this was the main thing keeping saltwater at bay.
Apparently this has been of increasing concern since the early 1970s when the population started heavily encroaching on swampland.
"I'm honestly surprised they don't dock themselves right now, at least in a secured yard at a large facility"
There are several types of freighting, but they can be broadly broken into haulage (point to point between depots) and drayage (distribution from depots to local destinations).
The difficult places mentioned are all typical of drayage operation, not haulage - and drayage tends to be a "clock in at the depot, run deliveries, return to depot, clock out", vs haulage drivers spending days away from home at a time.
It's haulage which will see driver replacement first, but AI augmentation will make difficult drayage operations a lot easier, particularly with regard to being able to visualise obstacles and traffic in tight situations.
Once you have the high speed system, if it's idle it costs money - and the primary cost driver - friction(*) - is mostly removed in hyperloop so the marginal cost of freight should be quite low.
Lest you think this is just a hyperloop thing, european high speed lines are being opened up for high speed freight (160km/h minimum speed) for the same reasons.
(*) For high speed trains, the vast majority of friction isn't the nose or undercarriage vs air, or even wheel vs track, it's air-skin friction on the sides, even with the highly streamlined shapes in use, but what really limits speeds turns out to be the pantograph connection (contact pressures used in the TGV speed attempts damaged the overhead lines) Pointy noses are primarily for looks and secondarily to keep the front on the ground at extreme speeds.
"I could also see Amazon partnering with one of Musk's companies to build hyperloop for freight."
So can I. The only way to make hyperloop economic is to carry freight on it.
"It seems like building a 1-meter or even 30-cm freight pipe would be a heck of a lot easier than transporting people. "
If you have automated podule control then they should be interspersible, but the big costs in freighting revolve around repacking. Rail only became economic "again" after containerisation allowed containerwise shipping instead of mixed wagonloads.
Any transportation system which requires repacking from one type of container into another is likely doomed to economic failure from the outset. Whilst it's possible that hyperloop _could_ be based around something like LD3/4 aircraft containers it would make more sense if its loading gauge was large enough from the outset to carry outsize intermodal containers (ie, 15 foot high, 60 foot long shipping containers, not just "standard" 12 foot by 20 foot ones.)
1: Fewer crashes, better fuel economy (both due to human factors such as tiredness and time between stops no longer being as critical (driver hours and fatigue both come into it)
2: It's an industry which has had a hard time recruiting enough drivers for years. It may be that a human stays with the rig for a few years as loadmaster and for final positioning, etc (or joins the rig at a waystation when it enters its destination zone), but that depends on whether a rig is doing haulage or drayage.
The "costs"
Fewer drivers - obviously - but also fewer things supporting them -roadhouses, fuel stops positioned for driver hour requirements, motels, etc. Think of all those "ghosts" along the old route 66, etc - this is as big a change as the coming of the interstates.
it's been estimated that there are about 400 million people who will be affected worldwide but it's also been estimated that white collar jobs will go before driving ones do (it's easier to automate desk jobs). Time will tell.
"What you can't do is copy the Highway Code and sell your own version or whatever as it is protected by the Crown Copyright."
And that's effectively what Elsevier is doing.
This "compilation copyright" claim on publicly funded research is rather intriguing and rather toxic. Their business model is on par with Edison stealing the Lumiere Brothers' movies and then bankrupting them by asserting copyright on movies THEY had made.
Uranium is stupidly expensive and a pain in the rear to refine and burn as a nuclear fuel. It's good for proving the cycle, but thorium is a better long-term fuel - and we have 50-500,000 years' supply of it.
The best part is that thorium is pretty much going begging as rare earth mines can't give it away. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff already mined and ready to be used.
India hasn't paid much attention to either, but China has - for a very simple reason - land elevation.
If sea levels rise 7 metres, China's going to have to relocate around 400 million people. They're not looking forward to that and would prefer not to do so if t can be avoided - and unlike other governments the PRC has a large engineering base in its leadership who feel they can at least try to avert a disaster.
India, Pakistan and Bangaladesh are already feelinging at the consequences of people being forced to move but at the moment, "they're poor, so they don't count"
"I guess the danger is that it could slow their move to renewables."
It could, but the chinese in particular are investing in nuclear energy at levels unmatched by anyone at any period in history - and they're working hardest on _safe_ nuclear technology that the USA had working in the 1960s - then canned because it was almost impossible to weaponise.
Renewables and gas are bridging technologies. They can't provide enough energy to meet overall demand and they still emit CO2 respectvely. Once you have commercially viable LFTR technology (which can load follow), you don't need expensive "renewables" systems and all those solarPV+wind farms are going to become crumbling monuments to a few decades of panic in the early 21st century.
"CH4 is indeed a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2 - figures of 20-30x the heat trapping potential are often mentioned "
That's 20 the heat trapping potential when averaged over a century.
Now factor in that it decays relatively rapidly upon release and realise that in the first decade the effect can be _100_ times as high as CO2.
That's why things like the Laptev Sea methane plumes (which are located in about the worst possible location for such a thing to occur) should be terrifying people.
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"Ticketing and scheduling systems are not life-safety critical"
Loading, aircraft balancing (centre of gravity) and fuel load calculations ARE.
All of these were affected. Plus BA's entire VOIP system.
And there was no power surge (not outside the DCs anyway).
A large number of ex-BA IT staff have commented in fora about the historic robustness of the system, however over the last 5 years BA has systematically gutted its IT staff and outsourced just about everything to India.
The CIO of BA (and IAG) is a manager whose last claim to fame was being the person responsible for ramming through the highly contentious (as in strike-causing) cabin crew contracts which stripped out many rights in 2011.
He has ZERO IT background and was charged with reducing the IT bill by $90 million per year.
Make of that what you will.
The powercos in the area have come out and categorically stated there was no form of power hit, dip or other problem on the public side of the meters.
Wind and solar combined can _just_ match the current conventional fleet, but electrical generation only accounts for 30-40% of carbon emissions
Factor in reduction of carbon from heating/cooling and transportation and you start needing 6-8 times the amount of electrical capacity that exists now.
No, you can't carpet deserts. Apart from the issue that places like the Sahara belong to someone else (and they'll want that energy for themselves), there's a practical limit of about 1500 miles for transporting electricity before grid losses make it too expensive to be worthwhile.
One of the larger problems with Wind/solar plants is the need for fast peaking/backing plants to guarantee their output (which the wind/solar operators don't have to pay upkeep on). Molten salt nuclear systems can load follow without penalties - which means that they can replace peaking plants - and the fact that they're cheaper overall than wind/solar should mean that in a short period of time those "renewables farms" will become rusting monuments to useless technology.
"The main reason nuclear has been so costly isn't because the technology itself isn't feasible."
A lot of _that_ has to do with the conventional uranium cycle being pretty rotten at producing electricity and pretty good at producing nasty byproduct stuff which happens to be handy to build nuclear weapons with - which means paranoid levels of security are required - and that's before you get into the issue of mixing radioactives and water under high pressure. (steam explosions and leaks happen. It's a fact of life. The best fix is not to mix them)
Thorium cycle is a lot harder to weaponise and a lot easier to generate electricity with. Molten Salt systems were already proven in the cold war but discarded in the rush to make more bombs. Thankfully the chinese and others are now reopening investigations into the technology which should have been at the core of the civil nuclear program from the 1970s onwards.
Fusion might happen but it;s unlikely to be in my grandchildrens' lifetime. We need to get on with decarbonising _now_. Nuclear waste is a vastly overblown issue and with MSRs the volume is reduced by a factorof 100+ anyway.
There's nothing showing a spike like we're generating at the moment but there are plenty of CO2 spikes over longer periods (usually 10k years or so).
What should give pause for thought is that time and again in geologic history, those CO2 spikes go hand in hand with anoxic oceanic events.
Methane breaks down to CO2 and H20, both of which are greenhouse gases in the troposphere.
The issue isn't that "CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries", the issue is that we're emitting more into the atmosphere each year than the planet can absorb. Until that stops, the levels will keep increasing.
As part of that, ocean acidity levels have increased by 30% in the last couple of hundred years. The knock-on effects of _that_ are only just starting to become apparent (such as the great barrier reef bleaching now being declared as "irreversible" - when this was decried as alarmist as little as 5 years ago)
42% of americans may think this now, but Southern Florida is already pretty much lost. It's simply a matter of time before most areas will have to be abandoned because of saltwater incursion into the aquifers even if the persistent flooding and increased number of storm surges doesn't drive people out first.
In addition, Louisiana has lost around 30% of its land area over the last 60 years. This is as much down to mismanagement of the delta system as actual sea level rise but coastal villages are already being abandoned and it's only a matter of time until larger towns have to make similar decisions.
"Last year, the world emitted 36B tons of CO2, and about 0.25B tons of CH4, equivalent to about 8B tons of CO2 in 100-year warming potential. So methane is a serious problem, but far less than CO2."
Until you factor in stuff like the Leptav Sea emissions of methane clathrates - the plumes are reported to be over 1km wide in places
If these ongoing emissions and the continuing incursion into the arctic of warm water from the Atlantic destabilise the siberian continental shelf clathrates then there's the potential for 1-6GT(*) of CH4 to bubble out rapidly in a new Storegga Slide with accompanying tsunamis - which will be against sparsely populate shorelines but still catastrophic.
The global methane survey couldn't account for the origin a large chunk of the atmospheric methane it picked up and subsequently blamed cow burps as a possibility - having spoken to the people who ran the survey, it turns out that not only were they not looking at the possibility of ocean releases, they weren't aware of the Leptav Sea emissions (despite them having been increasing for a decade) and the instruments used are _only_ tuned to detect methane over land (apparently it's nearly impossible to detect it over water).
Now they're aware of the existent and possible scale of the emissions (it's hard to verify stuff happening in russian waters, the russians aren't cooperative), they're trying to rerun what they've got to see if they can verify the emissions are as bad as suspected or whether a new mission will be required.
(*) Noone's quite sure how much is down there. It's at least 1GT but could be as high as 8-10GT and whilst we have some idea of release volumes from the Storegga Slides, any release volume is a matter of speculation.
It should be noted that the timeframe of the Storegga Slides and associated methane release more or less coincides with the sharp rise in temperature at the end of the last glaciation. It's a chicken and egg question if those are related, but that kind of warming in current conditions coupled with the spike in CO2 as the methane breaks down may well push us a long way along the curve towards an anoxic oceanic event and associated terrestrial animal dieback.
I live in europe. A gallon of gas IS over US$9.00
Sea level changes aren't that much of a problem in the longer term, even if they cause population movements.
The bigger issue to think about is that in geological history, large spikes in CO2 levels go hand in hand with anoxic oceanic events and consequent dieoffs on land and sea. Half our atmospheric oxygen comes from the oceans so it's something to bear in mind, especially as some of the existing dead zones seem to be spreading.
"Florida is largely porous limestone rock. It gets its water from aquifers in that rock, and sea water can and does intrude into that rock."
As a teen, I had an interest in Florida's water system due to the unique plantlife in the everglades (mainly saracenias).
It was stated by multiple sources back in the 1980s/90s that if anything happened to mess up the water supply into northern Florida from the Okefenokee swamp (which is fed from Georgia/Alabama/South Carolina), the entire state could end up effectively uninhabitable within 2 decades without massive investment in desalination projects - and that one of the biggest risks to continued habitability was anything interfering with the massive swamp that runs along the length of central florida, as this was the main thing keeping saltwater at bay.
Apparently this has been of increasing concern since the early 1970s when the population started heavily encroaching on swampland.
My old portable didn't have zero either.
The ordinary walmart product isn't being directly mixed with the content of your bloodstream.
There are a number of barriers between the digestive tract and your internal liquid systems.
"I'm honestly surprised they don't dock themselves right now, at least in a secured yard at a large facility"
There are several types of freighting, but they can be broadly broken into haulage (point to point between depots) and drayage (distribution from depots to local destinations).
The difficult places mentioned are all typical of drayage operation, not haulage - and drayage tends to be a "clock in at the depot, run deliveries, return to depot, clock out", vs haulage drivers spending days away from home at a time.
It's haulage which will see driver replacement first, but AI augmentation will make difficult drayage operations a lot easier, particularly with regard to being able to visualise obstacles and traffic in tight situations.
Once you have the high speed system, if it's idle it costs money - and the primary cost driver - friction(*) - is mostly removed in hyperloop so the marginal cost of freight should be quite low.
Lest you think this is just a hyperloop thing, european high speed lines are being opened up for high speed freight (160km/h minimum speed) for the same reasons.
(*) For high speed trains, the vast majority of friction isn't the nose or undercarriage vs air, or even wheel vs track, it's air-skin friction on the sides, even with the highly streamlined shapes in use, but what really limits speeds turns out to be the pantograph connection (contact pressures used in the TGV speed attempts damaged the overhead lines) Pointy noses are primarily for looks and secondarily to keep the front on the ground at extreme speeds.
"I could also see Amazon partnering with one of Musk's companies to build hyperloop for freight."
So can I. The only way to make hyperloop economic is to carry freight on it.
"It seems like building a 1-meter or even 30-cm freight pipe would be a heck of a lot easier than transporting people. "
If you have automated podule control then they should be interspersible, but the big costs in freighting revolve around repacking. Rail only became economic "again" after containerisation allowed containerwise shipping instead of mixed wagonloads.
Any transportation system which requires repacking from one type of container into another is likely doomed to economic failure from the outset. Whilst it's possible that hyperloop _could_ be based around something like LD3/4 aircraft containers it would make more sense if its loading gauge was large enough from the outset to carry outsize intermodal containers (ie, 15 foot high, 60 foot long shipping containers, not just "standard" 12 foot by 20 foot ones.)
The benefits:
1: Fewer crashes, better fuel economy (both due to human factors such as tiredness and time between stops no longer being as critical (driver hours and fatigue both come into it)
2: It's an industry which has had a hard time recruiting enough drivers for years. It may be that a human stays with the rig for a few years as loadmaster and for final positioning, etc (or joins the rig at a waystation when it enters its destination zone), but that depends on whether a rig is doing haulage or drayage.
The "costs"
Fewer drivers - obviously - but also fewer things supporting them -roadhouses, fuel stops positioned for driver hour requirements, motels, etc. Think of all those "ghosts" along the old route 66, etc - this is as big a change as the coming of the interstates.
it's been estimated that there are about 400 million people who will be affected worldwide but it's also been estimated that white collar jobs will go before driving ones do (it's easier to automate desk jobs). Time will tell.
"They contribute editorial expertise and a network of reviewers"
the reviewers are almost entirely unpaid, as is a good chunk of the editorial work.
Some people are making out like bandits but the vast majority of effort along the chain is unpaid.
"Elsevier does own the copyright. The people who did the research gave it to them."
Not always. I work with academics who are extremely unhappy about Elsevier asserting copyright on papers they authored.
"What you can't do is copy the Highway Code and sell your own version or whatever as it is protected by the Crown Copyright."
And that's effectively what Elsevier is doing.
This "compilation copyright" claim on publicly funded research is rather intriguing and rather toxic. Their business model is on par with Edison stealing the Lumiere Brothers' movies and then bankrupting them by asserting copyright on movies THEY had made.
Uranium is stupidly expensive and a pain in the rear to refine and burn as a nuclear fuel. It's good for proving the cycle, but thorium is a better long-term fuel - and we have 50-500,000 years' supply of it.
The best part is that thorium is pretty much going begging as rare earth mines can't give it away. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff already mined and ready to be used.
India hasn't paid much attention to either, but China has - for a very simple reason - land elevation.
If sea levels rise 7 metres, China's going to have to relocate around 400 million people. They're not looking forward to that and would prefer not to do so if t can be avoided - and unlike other governments the PRC has a large engineering base in its leadership who feel they can at least try to avert a disaster.
India, Pakistan and Bangaladesh are already feelinging at the consequences of people being forced to move but at the moment, "they're poor, so they don't count"
"I guess the danger is that it could slow their move to renewables."
It could, but the chinese in particular are investing in nuclear energy at levels unmatched by anyone at any period in history - and they're working hardest on _safe_ nuclear technology that the USA had working in the 1960s - then canned because it was almost impossible to weaponise.
Renewables and gas are bridging technologies. They can't provide enough energy to meet overall demand and they still emit CO2 respectvely. Once you have commercially viable LFTR technology (which can load follow), you don't need expensive "renewables" systems and all those solarPV+wind farms are going to become crumbling monuments to a few decades of panic in the early 21st century.
"CH4 is indeed a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2 - figures of 20-30x the heat trapping potential are often mentioned "
That's 20 the heat trapping potential when averaged over a century.
Now factor in that it decays relatively rapidly upon release and realise that in the first decade the effect can be _100_ times as high as CO2.
That's why things like the Laptev Sea methane plumes (which are located in about the worst possible location for such a thing to occur) should be terrifying people.