Insulting me [in] the first line seems to me that you're taking this personally. I have nothing against you. I'm just testing your arguements out. Jeez.
I was impressed enough with your comment to read some of what you wrote in the website you reference: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/
A lot of what you wrote is well thought out. However I have to agree with others that some of your conclusions are not logically correct. I would classify one of your errors in logic as "It does not follow" (il non sequitur).
For example.
While it is true that some "super weeds" have aquired immunity to herbicides it does not follow that people have not been breding in robustness to other environmental challenges. Hense some GM plants can literally grow faster and more aggressively. If we step out of the kingdom of the Plantea over into the kingdom of Animalia we find killer bees as an example of an experiment gone wrong. Genetic transferance of genes was the objective. GM modification is just a more efficient technology (which you pointed out).
The fallacies in your logic continue with the attempt to "paint" the picture. For instance instead of suggesting that the artical makes a "supposition" which is probably true - but not fatal - you suggest that they make a "hysterical supposition". Clarification of what you mean by the adjective "hysterical" would be useful... to me it is a red flag that you are trying to trash the artical.
Your point #3 is well taken. Indeed - where is the evidence that supports gene transfer from older technology takes place? Well - there is a lot of evidence and the killer bees example I used above is one. However you are talking about the world of plants. The specific fallacy here is "proving non-existence". Embedded in this is a "bandwagon fallacy" in that this is a subtle appeal to the majority... the assumption being that many people have not observed anything as a "major problem" hense it must be concluded that there isn't one.
Your last paragraph again contains a fallacy. The term "as fast as they claim" illustrates this. It isn't necessary for genes to jump fast in order for there to be a serious problem. The simple fact of the matter is that if they jump at all then we can have a problem because we are introducing genes that never existed in nature and we are doing this at a rate that exceeds the evolutionatry processes by orders of magnitude.
The later fallacy is found in paragraph #4 as well. In part this might be an "excluded middle" fallacy where the tacit assumption is made that if we have genes quickly spreading through the enviroment then there clearly may be a problem and if they spread not at all then there is no problem... "and there is no gray area". The world contains a lot of gray areas.
In short I liked your post. It is well written. It also illustrates that a well written post modded up to the max may still be full of fallacies.
Today I am a moderator but I didn't mod your post down because I think this serves as a good example that people need to look more critically at things.
Oh come on now! Read my posts below. In order to get global cooling you need to reflect off huge amounts of solar radiation. The oceans contain vast amounts of energy and moderate the planet's temperature over scales of 1000 years.
Yes - there is evidence of a massive cooling as depicted in "Day After Tomorrow". It happened more than 540 million years ago during the PreCambrian.
Since then, there has been blamy days. I would say that over 540 million years of history might point the finger in the direction of a few more good years to come!!! Furthermore CO2 levels were 13x-17x greater than now during the Ordovician for instance and yes - the planet cooled - but not because of the CO2 - it is said to cause warming in fact! The planet cooled in SPITE of the high CO2 levels.
And when it cooled it cooled to about like it is now - maybe a little warmer overall - but not near as depicted in the movie.
You should try to get your paleoclimatology information from sources other than Hollywood.
Your logic is correct but it has nothing to do with the presumed warming which BTW is not at all proved. Paleoclimatologists are now starting to debunk the myth of Global Warming.
Lots of land at high elevation is connected with global cooling and we have had a great deal of mountain building since the end of the Creataceous (65 million years ago). if you check Scotese's section on the Miocene he elaborates on this: http://www.scotese.com/moreinfo15.htm
This may have been enough to tip us into the present snow ball earth. However it is more likely that it was a number of factors working together and the mountain building is just one of them.
Nevertheless once we cooled and the poles froze over - at that point the Milankovitch cycles clearly are enough to cause repeated glaciation and interglacials and we are presently in an interglacial.
Over the last say 30 million years there has been a great deal of erosion of the high elevation land mass... yet there is still a large amount of land mass at high elevation. So where this leaves us with regard to whether the earth is stable in a hot house phase or snowball phase is an open question. I rather think we are stable in either phase and nobody knows where the boundries are.
In addition we have the cosmic radiation flux and this varies depending on where the solar system is in our trip around the galaxy. Presently it is argued that the flux is high and this results in a greater amount of cloud cover. This in turn increases the reflection of incident solar radiation.
The press however ignores this for the most part and still focuses on CO2. The truth of the matter is that it is quite easy to see that CO2 has a minimal effect at levels under say 10,000's PPM and presently these levels are at about 370 PPM. In the past CO2 did have an effect, and is probably responsible for the cycles in the precambrian where the planet is likely to have frozen all the way down to the equator. The distribution of Precambrian tilites supports this.
With the earth completely frozen over then CO2 which was still being released by volcanic activity could not be absorbed by the oceans and indeed the amount of photosynthesis was reduced due to the frozen climate... and in this environment CO2 would have built up to several 10,000's PPM - like maybe 30,000 PPM or more - this would eventually be enough to start a warming.
In this environment as the oceans at the equator melted, the CO2 would be absorbed and meanwhile as the temperatures climbed above freezing, the water vapour in the atmosphere would have climbed back into the 10,000's of PPM - so H2O back then would have replaced the CO2 as a greenhouse gas - as it has been doing since the end of the Precambrian.
We know that CO2 levels during the Taconic Orogeny of the Ordovician were 13x to 17x greater than now. This was not enough to prevent a global cooling. Back then the planet dropped from a hot house into a snowball phase and then warmed back up again. Albeit the sun was producing less energy back then. This leaves us with the proof that high levels of CO2 back then could not keep the planet warm and the positive feedback of a hothouse earth with high water vapour levels augmented with high CO2 couldn't keep the planet warm.
So the whole round earth did cool during the Ordovician and eventually slipped into an ice house phase (like today). Later the earth did warm up in spite of the fact that the positive feedback and low water vapour levels due to condensation of water vapour (IE the inability of the atmosphere to hold significant volumnes of water at temperatures below the dew point) could not keep the planet cold.
Large amounts of land at high elevation may have caused the Ordovician cooling and the subsequent erosion of this land may have allowed the planet to warm up. But this explanation would be an oversimplification, and at best it is likely only a factor in the picture.
Ice conditions in the arctic continue to deteriorate as global cooling continues to increase the size of arctic ice flows. Whereas 20 years ago Polar Bears had to swim as much as 60 miles between flows, the cooling trend over the last 2 decades has reduced the distance to as little as 1-2 miles in some cases.
Polar bear populations have been exploding in recent years. Polar bears are preditors of baby seals (see picture of cure little seal with big brown eyes attached). Polar bears have been known to eat as much as 100 pounds of seal flesh in a single feeding. Bears can kill several seals in a single day.
Bears search around until they find the breathing holes seals need to make through the ice in order to breath. Faced with certain death from drowing the hapless seal has no alternative other than to take her chances.
2 decades ago the arctic was warmer than today and with the cooling, vast areas of the arctic ocean which were formerly open water are now freezing over. This further adds to the misery faced by the seals. In the past seals could simply surface in the open ocean whereas today they must not only cope with the encroaching ice, they also face certain dead either from drowning or from predatory bear attacks.
Global cooling has been attributed to the inability of mankind to stabilize the climate.
Fossil fuel consumption has been in decline worldwide since the peak of World Oil Production in 2007. CO2 levels are still rising but are not strong enough to offset the well recoginzed cooling trend identifed by the progression of our planet into another ice age. As the planet cools, ice continues to build up and ever greater amounts of water vapour are lost from the atmosphere. This sets on a vicious positive feedback mechanizm which will eventually culminate with a full blown glacial cycle with Glaciers to a depth of over 10,000 feet in the North Eastern part of the USA.
The peak of the last ice age occured about 18,000 years ago and is widely recognised as the 22'nd cycle of the recent Pleistocene ice ages. The present ice ages have been gripping the earth since the cooling trend of the last 30 million years which is now recognized as being a partial consequence of the mountain building which peaked in the Miocene and which continues today in areas like the Himalyan Ranges.
The present cooling trend is thought to be the beginning of another ice age which is anticipated sometime during the next 20,000 years. In the past glacial cycles occured with a frequency of about 110,000 years and are caused by the variations in the Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles).
Technical issues asside. All that power can be used to run a red light cam. If they place the ramp properly they should be able to catch cars in the stale yellow zone where they know damn well the average driver cannot react fast enough to stop the car.
This should generate a cash flow that is quite profitable. Furthermore since they won't need to be hooked to the grid - they can be locted anywhere.
Hey - lets do some biz. I'll pad the invoices for $20K and then offer to settle for $2K. This way you can feel oh so good as I shake you down for $2000 bux.
The jerks just love people like you. Over time they figure out where the highbar is and cheat and steal just below this level. Most people will pay rather than fight. I suppose traffic tickets fall into this area as well. But then that is instutionalized right?
Well - I read the site frequently... People might note that you can't post comments as you can here at slashdot. If people could post comments then the absolute crap that he picks up on would get throughly trounced rather quickly.
Your idea to start drilling now isn't going to work unless you can figure out where to drill. The industry dosn't know where... they are drilling what they do know about.
Savinar is out to lunch simply fanning flames. In the short term he is correct - and there is likely to be a major disruption. We need about 20 years of a crash building program to replace conventional oil decline - that is 20 years before peak. I suspect peak world oil production will occur in 2007 and it is possible it will occur BEFORE 2007. It is also possible it will occur as late as 2010 and given some massivly good luck maybe even after 2010.
At this point the investments in the Alberta Tar sands are beyond the "crash" building level. This will cause production to ramp up to about 3.3 MBOPD by about 2010. While this may sound like a lot - it isn't. This will replace perhaps 2 years declines of just the top 4 conventional feilds.
Yet - there are solutions.
One of the easiest solutions is to move work closer to people. Maybe people can adjust their working conditions rather easily and simply set up an office at home and spend 2/3 of their time in this office rather than downtown.
Of course - many people don't think this idea will work. As oil goes over $100 per barrel they will have to reconsider.
More than likely the option will be payed out differently than mearly a rational - lets work part time from home approach. Initally rather than say 1/4 of the work being done from home... what will happen is that about 1/4 of the work force will be laid off.
Overall the commuting will drop. The same number of reduced hours will be subtracted from hours spent in offices downtown... however rather than this being spread evenly through the population and everyone enjoying the extra freedom and productivity... instead 1/4 will be deemed to be unemployed. They will spend 100% of their time in their new at home office - probably filling in CV's. Meanwhile the other 75% will continue in the old ways.
I described this process in the long convoluted fashion above to illustrate that the way we describe things has a bearing on how we perceive them. In a rational world if we have to cut back say 25% on the commutes we wouldn't do it via unemployment. Note also that these comments address the office and white collar activities - many blue collar activites cannot be location shifted - but office work for the most part certainly can be.
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So there are short term effective rational solutions. It is not necessay for people to sit 6 abreast in SUV's in grid lock traffic 2x per day. Peak oil will affect transporation more than any other part of our economy. If the USA gets 1/2 of its cars off the road for instance - then this is equivalent to saving about 1/2 of 2/3 of 20 million barrels per day - and that is about 3 million barrels of oil per day - about the same as Alberta's Tar Sands will produce by 2015.
Personally - I think getting 1/2 the cars off the raod is quite feasible. Furthermore this will save money... and if we do this via moving work closer to where people live - then everyone wins... especially single moms who will have a big part of their child supervision issues alieviated.
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Note that moving work closer to people is only one step. Moving distribution of goods off of our highways and onto railroads is another very effective way to save fuel. This has the added benefit that MOST of the wear and tear on our hiways will be reduced and traveling will be far more pleasant for the light vehicals. Then as fuel costs continue to climb - there will be fewer vehicals overall.
Insulating our homes is very economical and has the additional benefit that they will be more comfortable to live in.
The solutions are there. We just need to put them into production.
I run my own company. Some stuff is passed on to younger programmers, some I do myself. I am in my 50's now and nwo I use C++. I've used over 13 languages and programmed on over 13 platforms so I guess that means I had to learn more than 13 editors.
Thank gawd for small mercies. I now use Xemacs.
While I have so many things to do that I cannot get the time to focus as I did when I was younger, I find that I have a much better idea of what needs to be done. It is fine to leap tall buildings with a single bound but often young whipper snappers leap over the worng buildings.
Well - if he was smart enough to run a winders box then he can claim the script kiddies got it and used his bandwidth to serve pr0n and movies and such.
When he discovered this he had his machine cleaned and like most bozzos just hooked the same old shit back online unpatched. Right?
Some of this is embedded in the peering arrangments - but a lot of this was showing its ugly head about 1998 when the Telcos started "CONVERGING" with content providers. The merger of AOL/Time Warner is a good example. While in this case AOL is not a Telco - they were a large ISP with at the time a large user base and a distribution system in place. Now with Broadband the Telco's are moving into the role of trying to be ISP's and they have a very unfair advantage.
The idea is that if you have a stranglehold on the content and the delivery system then you can force your own crap down people's throats.
AOL/Time Warner is just one example. And when I write here that you _can_ force feed your own crap - I am not suggesting that AOL/Time Warner were delivering crappy content. All I am saying is that with control of the pipes that deliver the content you can chose to a large extent what content is to be delivered. So of course - aquire through merger or aquisition or however you can a pool of content and choose to deliver it preferentially over everything else.
What this new strategy is about is not a hell of a lot different than the convergance that took place a few years ago. It is just that to a considerable extent this did not provide the leverage they were looking for so they are out to try it again!
Now lets look at this from a business standpoint. Clearly the content side of the business (of a combined content provider/content distributor) must have some revenues. The distribution side of the business needs to attract the surfing public and they can't do this without content. So this means that in one form or another we end up with money being transfered from the distribution side to the content creation side.
And that is where the peering arrangments come in. Effectively all small and middle players are left out in the cold. This is because a peering arrangement has to be negotiated before any money is remitted for the content needed by the Telco side of the business. This is obvious because an ISP with no content is not a viable business. This is why regional Telcos/ISP's pay HUGE peering fees to connect to POP's.
So whatever content providers have been lucky enough to "converge"end up with an inside track and are paid for what they do. Meanwhile independant content providers such as those who run webservers end up paying for their content to be distributed and its called amoung other things: bandwidth charges.
It is against this stacked playing feild that the average webmasters, blog creators etc. are working.
Now - the Telco's propose to increase charges as well. In the past to get static IP"s typically meant paying upward of 3x or more for "static IP charges" and "bandwidth charges" and "managed connections" and "managed hosting" and so forth. However if you were able to do exactly the same thing from the inside of the converged organisation you would be paid for all of this. However to get to the inside you have to be bloody ass big - and be able to thus negotiate - or you would have to sell your business for a song.
This is one reason the dot.com's imploded. They had no workable revenue model.
The thing is that fair trade practices legislation and anti-combines legislation prohibits this sort of colusion. I do not know why the laws that are on the books have not been applied - other than perhaps the content creation industries and content distribution industies (which by the way include the RIAA and MPAA) have enough political clout to attempt to create a whole new legal vocabluary that somehow suggests that a spade is not a type of shovel.
A nice laminar flow hood with better than 3 micron filtration should do the job nicely. Wash an clean then dry the drive. Make sure everything is fresh and there is no linty things around - then work in the clean air stream.
Laminar flow hoods are not that expensive. You can buy one for about $500 or less and make one for a little over $100. Any good biology/mycology lab should be able to provide leads. Or just take a class in biology and mod the drive in the lab. It'll give new meaning to the idea of keeping your code bug free.
I mis read your post. I don't know. I would think what you are suggesing might have a lot of merit. It might kill a lot of ppl too. I do think your suggestion is definatly worthy of serious investigation.
I did say we have a shortage of hydrogen. This is why we need to build plants at a billion a pop. Suncor for instance use to use natural gas from some stranded feilds. Like fools they used this for energy as well when what they should have been doing was burning the coke and using the methane as a chemical feedstock.
Natural gas production in N. America peaked in 2001. We cannot build LNG facilities fast enough to make up the losses. Hense new sources of hydrogen must be found and a for instance is that Suncor last January announced plants that while they didn't say it in the announcment are in fact based on Fischer-tropsch. What they should be looking at is nuclear but the pres doesn't like to hear that word used in his company.
Your idea to use Benzene for instance would be great except the supply isn't available in the quantities needed.
Sure benzene will be fine. Methane is even better since it is CH4.
In fact some of the low molecular weight alcohols such as methanol and ethanol would be good... especially methanol since this is just a slightly oxidised methane molecule.
The thing is you are going to need millions of barrels per day of whatever molecuals you might want to use.
Now - there is another possibility as well. The Peace River Arch basment complex has not been drilled. If teh Abiogenic origion of petroleum is correct then this basement may be filled with so much hydrogen that there won't be a problem. In fact it may be filled with so much oil that the tar sands become irrelevant. But - no one has drilled it. Other than C. Warren Hunt and Larry Rickman - but that well stopped short of target amougnst rumours of all sorts of funny financial dealings. If some ppl scratch up a million or so we can re-enter the well. Drop me an email.
The short answer is that if combined with insulation and good design - YES. The cost at the moment will eb abvout $150,000 per house using data from the "solar decathalon" competition. http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar_decathlon/
You can find some information from Simmon's book "Twilight in the Desert". You can also see one estimate here: http://www.energybulletin.net/358.html That artical is from May, 2004. Since then Canadian Natural Resources and others have announced expansions.
When Ghawar goes into decline - then all major oil fields in the world will be in decline with the exception of the few new ones that have been discovered. There is a rather nice development taking place in the Caspian - and it is frequently touted as a counter example to the peak oil idea. However - those fields are not going to make the difference. Neither will the Tar sands. Also we have the Orinocco heavy oils and those resouces are in the vicinity of 1.6-1.8 trillion barrels - same as the Alberta Tar Sands. This leaves vast resources in oil shales like the Green River formation in the USA and the Stuart oil shales in Queensland.
The tar sands will last a good long while. However the rate limiting factor is how quickly they can be developed. We are facing TERRIBLE obstacles.
One of the obstacles is illustrated by a major Calgary company that decided not to increase its heavy oil production in the Lloydminster area about 2000. Their project would have doubled the population of Lloyd. They didn't have the manpower available so the project was shelved.
Companies like Canadian Natural Resources have announced they are TRIPPLING their investments in the tar sands operations (about $30 billion). Suncor, Nexen, Shell and others are moving ahead as fast as they can with huge projects. Then we have laughable outfits like Habanero which looks to me like a pump and dump scheme.
One of the biggest issues to face is the shortage of hydrogen. Liquid fuels in general have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon. In heavy oils and bitumin it is close to 1:1 and by the time we get into coal it is as low as 0.6:1 Thus for every atom of carbon dug out of the tar sands we have to find an atom of hydrogen. One of the best sources is to crack water.
If we were to do this with say steam hydrolysis then we would need to build about 75 nuclear plants in the range of 1GWe. Nobody has put forward plans with the possible exception of Total SA. The other option is to use the Fisher-tropsch reaction and this creates massive amounts of CO2 (and CO). In fact if we have a stream of say 5 million barrels of oil flowing from Tar Sands and all hydrogen is derived from water using Fischer-tropsch, then we would have a flow of something like 2-3 million barrels of liquid CO2 flowing as well. Since we can use the CO2 to make beer we could have quite a nice flow of beer too. However we can get CO2 for beer from other sources - so we are still left with the issue of what to do with the CO2.
By far the best solution is to hook that carbon to yet more hydrogens instead of hooking it up with Oxygen and stuff the result into the pipelines. Another viable but unfortunately non-politically correct solution is to release it into the atmosphere where plants can get at it and re-combine it with hydrogen through a process known as photosynthesis using solar energy. Perhaps the reason this is not politically correct is that the Canadian government has not yet figured out how to tax photosynthesis. As for greenhouse gas issues and global warming - well - that is more or less bunk - but I'm not going to talk about that here.
Production of the CO2 is a political issue of course because Ottawa is working on how to slip in a carbon tax. The problem is there simply is no alternative unless we undertake a massive nuclear expansion.
In the end - even when all these alternatives are considered and even if the BEST and MOST INTELLIGENT choices were made - we are still going to face a crisis.
I have to laugh at the well meaning fellow who commented that when the price goes up people will simply use less. Let me ask if he has shut off his furnace. It is 20 below outside and mine
The notion that ethanol production is an energy loss stems from the eroneous conclusions of David Pimenthal, a Corenell university insect scientist. He should have stuck with his bugs.
Making fuel from corn however is not nearly as good an idea as making it from plants such as hemp.
Montreal is known for its smoked meats. Pate is made from livers. Livers are an innard. Steak and Kidney pie is made from innards. So is blood sausage.
Sausages are made from guts. Well - sausage casings are! When you eat polish sausage and breakfast sausage then you are eating innards.
Gutz Gutz - GLORIOUS GTUZ!!! Please pass another sausage?
When I was in UNI I read an artical in Scientific American about a study (out of Texas I think) which stated that a car that got 25 MPG was more efficent fuel wise than the average transit system.
Pay very close attention to those monsters off peak hours. They weigh in the TONNES and they are typically empty. A taxi fleet driving hybreds might both be cheaper and more fuel effcient - especially if driven by a ROBOT like the Johny Cabs in Arnie's movie "Total Recall".
I think we are pretty close to being able to build a transit system like this.
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Insulting me [in] the first line seems to me that you're taking this personally. I have nothing against you. I'm just testing your arguements out. Jeez.
That fallacy is called "ad hominem".
I was impressed enough with your comment to read some of what you wrote in the website you reference: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/
... "and there is no gray area". The world contains a lot of gray areas.
A lot of what you wrote is well thought out. However I have to agree with others that some of your conclusions are not logically correct. I would classify one of your errors in logic as "It does not follow" (il non sequitur).
For example.
While it is true that some "super weeds" have aquired immunity to herbicides it does not follow that people have not been breding in robustness to other environmental challenges. Hense some GM plants can literally grow faster and more aggressively. If we step out of the kingdom of the Plantea over into the kingdom of Animalia we find killer bees as an example of an experiment gone wrong. Genetic transferance of genes was the objective. GM modification is just a more efficient technology (which you pointed out).
The fallacies in your logic continue with the attempt to "paint" the picture. For instance instead of suggesting that the artical makes a "supposition" which is probably true - but not fatal - you suggest that they make a "hysterical supposition". Clarification of what you mean by the adjective "hysterical" would be useful... to me it is a red flag that you are trying to trash the artical.
Your point #3 is well taken. Indeed - where is the evidence that supports gene transfer from older technology takes place? Well - there is a lot of evidence and the killer bees example I used above is one. However you are talking about the world of plants. The specific fallacy here is "proving non-existence". Embedded in this is a "bandwagon fallacy" in that this is a subtle appeal to the majority... the assumption being that many people have not observed anything as a "major problem" hense it must be concluded that there isn't one.
Your last paragraph again contains a fallacy. The term "as fast as they claim" illustrates this. It isn't necessary for genes to jump fast in order for there to be a serious problem. The simple fact of the matter is that if they jump at all then we can have a problem because we are introducing genes that never existed in nature and we are doing this at a rate that exceeds the evolutionatry processes by orders of magnitude.
The later fallacy is found in paragraph #4 as well. In part this might be an "excluded middle" fallacy where the tacit assumption is made that if we have genes quickly spreading through the enviroment then there clearly may be a problem and if they spread not at all then there is no problem
In short I liked your post. It is well written. It also illustrates that a well written post modded up to the max may still be full of fallacies.
Today I am a moderator but I didn't mod your post down because I think this serves as a good example that people need to look more critically at things.
There will be ppl who like it. Even though a 101 key I/F to a comptuer is pretty standard - most ppl use a mouse and it has how many buttons?
May I suggest you take at least some undergraduate level geology.
Oh come on now! Read my posts below. In order to get global cooling you need to reflect off huge amounts of solar radiation. The oceans contain vast amounts of energy and moderate the planet's temperature over scales of 1000 years.
Yes - there is evidence of a massive cooling as depicted in "Day After Tomorrow". It happened more than 540 million years ago during the PreCambrian.
Since then, there has been blamy days. I would say that over 540 million years of history might point the finger in the direction of a few more good years to come!!! Furthermore CO2 levels were 13x-17x greater than now during the Ordovician for instance and yes - the planet cooled - but not because of the CO2 - it is said to cause warming in fact! The planet cooled in SPITE of the high CO2 levels.
And when it cooled it cooled to about like it is now - maybe a little warmer overall - but not near as depicted in the movie.
You should try to get your paleoclimatology information from sources other than Hollywood.
Your logic is correct but it has nothing to do with the presumed warming which BTW is not at all proved. Paleoclimatologists are now starting to debunk the myth of Global Warming.
Lots of land at high elevation is connected with global cooling and we have had a great deal of mountain building since the end of the Creataceous (65 million years ago). if you check Scotese's section on the Miocene he elaborates on this: http://www.scotese.com/moreinfo15.htm
This may have been enough to tip us into the present snow ball earth. However it is more likely that it was a number of factors working together and the mountain building is just one of them.
Nevertheless once we cooled and the poles froze over - at that point the Milankovitch cycles clearly are enough to cause repeated glaciation and interglacials and we are presently in an interglacial.
Over the last say 30 million years there has been a great deal of erosion of the high elevation land mass... yet there is still a large amount of land mass at high elevation. So where this leaves us with regard to whether the earth is stable in a hot house phase or snowball phase is an open question. I rather think we are stable in either phase and nobody knows where the boundries are.
In addition we have the cosmic radiation flux and this varies depending on where the solar system is in our trip around the galaxy. Presently it is argued that the flux is high and this results in a greater amount of cloud cover. This in turn increases the reflection of incident solar radiation.
The press however ignores this for the most part and still focuses on CO2. The truth of the matter is that it is quite easy to see that CO2 has a minimal effect at levels under say 10,000's PPM and presently these levels are at about 370 PPM. In the past CO2 did have an effect, and is probably responsible for the cycles in the precambrian where the planet is likely to have frozen all the way down to the equator. The distribution of Precambrian tilites supports this.
With the earth completely frozen over then CO2 which was still being released by volcanic activity could not be absorbed by the oceans and indeed the amount of photosynthesis was reduced due to the frozen climate... and in this environment CO2 would have built up to several 10,000's PPM - like maybe 30,000 PPM or more - this would eventually be enough to start a warming.
In this environment as the oceans at the equator melted, the CO2 would be absorbed and meanwhile as the temperatures climbed above freezing, the water vapour in the atmosphere would have climbed back into the 10,000's of PPM - so H2O back then would have replaced the CO2 as a greenhouse gas - as it has been doing since the end of the Precambrian.
We know that CO2 levels during the Taconic Orogeny of the Ordovician were 13x to 17x greater than now. This was not enough to prevent a global cooling. Back then the planet dropped from a hot house into a snowball phase and then warmed back up again. Albeit the sun was producing less energy back then. This leaves us with the proof that high levels of CO2 back then could not keep the planet warm and the positive feedback of a hothouse earth with high water vapour levels augmented with high CO2 couldn't keep the planet warm.
So the whole round earth did cool during the Ordovician and eventually slipped into an ice house phase (like today). Later the earth did warm up in spite of the fact that the positive feedback and low water vapour levels due to condensation of water vapour (IE the inability of the atmosphere to hold significant volumnes of water at temperatures below the dew point) could not keep the planet cold.
Large amounts of land at high elevation may have caused the Ordovician cooling and the subsequent erosion of this land may have allowed the planet to warm up. But this explanation would be an oversimplification, and at best it is likely only a factor in the picture.
CO2 during the Or
Global cooling harming seal populations.
Ice conditions in the arctic continue to deteriorate as global cooling continues to increase the size of arctic ice flows. Whereas 20 years ago Polar Bears had to swim as much as 60 miles between flows, the cooling trend over the last 2 decades has reduced the distance to as little as 1-2 miles in some cases.
Polar bear populations have been exploding in recent years. Polar bears are preditors of baby seals (see picture of cure little seal with big brown eyes attached). Polar bears have been known to eat as much as 100 pounds of seal flesh in a single feeding. Bears can kill several seals in a single day.
Bears search around until they find the breathing holes seals need to make through the ice in order to breath. Faced with certain death from drowing the hapless seal has no alternative other than to take her chances.
2 decades ago the arctic was warmer than today and with the cooling, vast areas of the arctic ocean which were formerly open water are now freezing over. This further adds to the misery faced by the seals. In the past seals could simply surface in the open ocean whereas today they must not only cope with the encroaching ice, they also face certain dead either from drowning or from predatory bear attacks.
Global cooling has been attributed to the inability of mankind to stabilize the climate.
Fossil fuel consumption has been in decline worldwide since the peak of World Oil Production in 2007. CO2 levels are still rising but are not strong enough to offset the well recoginzed cooling trend identifed by the progression of our planet into another ice age. As the planet cools, ice continues to build up and ever greater amounts of water vapour are lost from the atmosphere. This sets on a vicious positive feedback mechanizm which will eventually culminate with a full blown glacial cycle with Glaciers to a depth of over 10,000 feet in the North Eastern part of the USA.
The peak of the last ice age occured about 18,000 years ago and is widely recognised as the 22'nd cycle of the recent Pleistocene ice ages. The present ice ages have been gripping the earth since the cooling trend of the last 30 million years which is now recognized as being a partial consequence of the mountain building which peaked in the Miocene and which continues today in areas like the Himalyan Ranges.
The present cooling trend is thought to be the beginning of another ice age which is anticipated sometime during the next 20,000 years. In the past glacial cycles occured with a frequency of about 110,000 years and are caused by the variations in the Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles).
For more information please check Christopher Scotese's paleoclimate website: http://www.scotese.com/lastice.htm
I run firefox on Linux Debian. What a mess. Of course I have javascript shut off and of course I run privoxy as well.
But that webpage would suc under the best of circumnstances. Ha! do these people even bother to check their work?
What a botch. We need to set up the website joke of the day club and capture some screenshots!
The thing is that there are competant webmasters. Unfortunately many are underemployed. I think ppl can add 2+2
Technical issues asside. All that power can be used to run a red light cam. If they place the ramp properly they should be able to catch cars in the stale yellow zone where they know damn well the average driver cannot react fast enough to stop the car.
This should generate a cash flow that is quite profitable. Furthermore since they won't need to be hooked to the grid - they can be locted anywhere.
Here in Alberta the small claims limit is either $20,000 or $25,000. They just increased it.
Hey - lets do some biz. I'll pad the invoices for $20K and then offer to settle for $2K. This way you can feel oh so good as I shake you down for $2000 bux.
The jerks just love people like you. Over time they figure out where the highbar is and cheat and steal just below this level. Most people will pay rather than fight. I suppose traffic tickets fall into this area as well. But then that is instutionalized right?
Well - I read the site frequently... People might note that you can't post comments as you can here at slashdot. If people could post comments then the absolute crap that he picks up on would get throughly trounced rather quickly.
Your idea to start drilling now isn't going to work unless you can figure out where to drill. The industry dosn't know where... they are drilling what they do know about.
Savinar is out to lunch simply fanning flames. In the short term he is correct - and there is likely to be a major disruption. We need about 20 years of a crash building program to replace conventional oil decline - that is 20 years before peak. I suspect peak world oil production will occur in 2007 and it is possible it will occur BEFORE 2007. It is also possible it will occur as late as 2010 and given some massivly good luck maybe even after 2010.
At this point the investments in the Alberta Tar sands are beyond the "crash" building level. This will cause production to ramp up to about 3.3 MBOPD by about 2010. While this may sound like a lot - it isn't. This will replace perhaps 2 years declines of just the top 4 conventional feilds.
Yet - there are solutions.
One of the easiest solutions is to move work closer to people. Maybe people can adjust their working conditions rather easily and simply set up an office at home and spend 2/3 of their time in this office rather than downtown.
Of course - many people don't think this idea will work. As oil goes over $100 per barrel they will have to reconsider.
More than likely the option will be payed out differently than mearly a rational - lets work part time from home approach. Initally rather than say 1/4 of the work being done from home... what will happen is that about 1/4 of the work force will be laid off.
Overall the commuting will drop. The same number of reduced hours will be subtracted from hours spent in offices downtown... however rather than this being spread evenly through the population and everyone enjoying the extra freedom and productivity... instead 1/4 will be deemed to be unemployed. They will spend 100% of their time in their new at home office - probably filling in CV's. Meanwhile the other 75% will continue in the old ways.
I described this process in the long convoluted fashion above to illustrate that the way we describe things has a bearing on how we perceive them. In a rational world if we have to cut back say 25% on the commutes we wouldn't do it via unemployment. Note also that these comments address the office and white collar activities - many blue collar activites cannot be location shifted - but office work for the most part certainly can be.
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So there are short term effective rational solutions. It is not necessay for people to sit 6 abreast in SUV's in grid lock traffic 2x per day. Peak oil will affect transporation more than any other part of our economy. If the USA gets 1/2 of its cars off the road for instance - then this is equivalent to saving about 1/2 of 2/3 of 20 million barrels per day - and that is about 3 million barrels of oil per day - about the same as Alberta's Tar Sands will produce by 2015.
Personally - I think getting 1/2 the cars off the raod is quite feasible. Furthermore this will save money... and if we do this via moving work closer to where people live - then everyone wins... especially single moms who will have a big part of their child supervision issues alieviated.
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Note that moving work closer to people is only one step. Moving distribution of goods off of our highways and onto railroads is another very effective way to save fuel. This has the added benefit that MOST of the wear and tear on our hiways will be reduced and traveling will be far more pleasant for the light vehicals. Then as fuel costs continue to climb - there will be fewer vehicals overall.
Insulating our homes is very economical and has the additional benefit that they will be more comfortable to live in.
The solutions are there. We just need to put them into production.
I run my own company. Some stuff is passed on to younger programmers, some I do myself. I am in my 50's now and nwo I use C++. I've used over 13 languages and programmed on over 13 platforms so I guess that means I had to learn more than 13 editors.
Thank gawd for small mercies. I now use Xemacs.
While I have so many things to do that I cannot get the time to focus as I did when I was younger, I find that I have a much better idea of what needs to be done. It is fine to leap tall buildings with a single bound but often young whipper snappers leap over the worng buildings.
I'll probably still be a developer when I am 80.
Well - if he was smart enough to run a winders box then he can claim the script kiddies got it and used his bandwidth to serve pr0n and movies and such.
When he discovered this he had his machine cleaned and like most bozzos just hooked the same old shit back online unpatched. Right?
You are so correct!
Some of this is embedded in the peering arrangments - but a lot of this was showing its ugly head about 1998 when the Telcos started "CONVERGING" with content providers. The merger of AOL/Time Warner is a good example. While in this case AOL is not a Telco - they were a large ISP with at the time a large user base and a distribution system in place. Now with Broadband the Telco's are moving into the role of trying to be ISP's and they have a very unfair advantage.
The idea is that if you have a stranglehold on the content and the delivery system then you can force your own crap down people's throats.
AOL/Time Warner is just one example. And when I write here that you _can_ force feed your own crap - I am not suggesting that AOL/Time Warner were delivering crappy content. All I am saying is that with control of the pipes that deliver the content you can chose to a large extent what content is to be delivered. So of course - aquire through merger or aquisition or however you can a pool of content and choose to deliver it preferentially over everything else.
What this new strategy is about is not a hell of a lot different than the convergance that took place a few years ago. It is just that to a considerable extent this did not provide the leverage they were looking for so they are out to try it again!
Now lets look at this from a business standpoint. Clearly the content side of the business (of a combined content provider/content distributor) must have some revenues. The distribution side of the business needs to attract the surfing public and they can't do this without content. So this means that in one form or another we end up with money being transfered from the distribution side to the content creation side.
And that is where the peering arrangments come in. Effectively all small and middle players are left out in the cold. This is because a peering arrangement has to be negotiated before any money is remitted for the content needed by the Telco side of the business. This is obvious because an ISP with no content is not a viable business. This is why regional Telcos/ISP's pay HUGE peering fees to connect to POP's.
So whatever content providers have been lucky enough to "converge"end up with an inside track and are paid for what they do. Meanwhile independant content providers such as those who run webservers end up paying for their content to be distributed and its called amoung other things: bandwidth charges.
You can visualize the cash flows this way:
converged telco/content provider:
$$$(customer) -> local-isp -> webserver/telco (converged/peered)
independant content provider:
$$$(webmaster) -> local-isp -> webserver/telco (converged/peered)
It is against this stacked playing feild that the average webmasters, blog creators etc. are working.
Now - the Telco's propose to increase charges as well. In the past to get static IP"s typically meant paying upward of 3x or more for "static IP charges" and "bandwidth charges" and "managed connections" and "managed hosting" and so forth. However if you were able to do exactly the same thing from the inside of the converged organisation you would be paid for all of this. However to get to the inside you have to be bloody ass big - and be able to thus negotiate - or you would have to sell your business for a song.
This is one reason the dot.com's imploded. They had no workable revenue model.
The thing is that fair trade practices legislation and anti-combines legislation prohibits this sort of colusion. I do not know why the laws that are on the books have not been applied - other than perhaps the content creation industries and content distribution industies (which by the way include the RIAA and MPAA) have enough political clout to attempt to create a whole new legal vocabluary that somehow suggests that a spade is not a type of shovel.
So - the above post is dead on the mark.
Maybe with IPV-6 - but with IPV-4 there are only 65K ports that can be used for NAT and some of these are already in use.
Practically you might be able to get away with maybe 50,000 ppl. But that would be pushing it.
A nice laminar flow hood with better than 3 micron filtration should do the job nicely. Wash an clean then dry the drive. Make sure everything is fresh and there is no linty things around - then work in the clean air stream.
Laminar flow hoods are not that expensive. You can buy one for about $500 or less and make one for a little over $100. Any good biology/mycology lab should be able to provide leads. Or just take a class in biology and mod the drive in the lab. It'll give new meaning to the idea of keeping your code bug free.
I mis read your post. I don't know. I would think what you are suggesing might have a lot of merit. It might kill a lot of ppl too. I do think your suggestion is definatly worthy of serious investigation.
I did say we have a shortage of hydrogen. This is why we need to build plants at a billion a pop. Suncor for instance use to use natural gas from some stranded feilds. Like fools they used this for energy as well when what they should have been doing was burning the coke and using the methane as a chemical feedstock.
Natural gas production in N. America peaked in 2001. We cannot build LNG facilities fast enough to make up the losses. Hense new sources of hydrogen must be found and a for instance is that Suncor last January announced plants that while they didn't say it in the announcment are in fact based on Fischer-tropsch. What they should be looking at is nuclear but the pres doesn't like to hear that word used in his company.
Your idea to use Benzene for instance would be great except the supply isn't available in the quantities needed.
Sure benzene will be fine. Methane is even better since it is CH4.
In fact some of the low molecular weight alcohols such as methanol and ethanol would be good... especially methanol since this is just a slightly oxidised methane molecule.
The thing is you are going to need millions of barrels per day of whatever molecuals you might want to use.
Now - there is another possibility as well. The Peace River Arch basment complex has not been drilled. If teh Abiogenic origion of petroleum is correct then this basement may be filled with so much hydrogen that there won't be a problem. In fact it may be filled with so much oil that the tar sands become irrelevant. But - no one has drilled it. Other than C. Warren Hunt and Larry Rickman - but that well stopped short of target amougnst rumours of all sorts of funny financial dealings. If some ppl scratch up a million or so we can re-enter the well. Drop me an email.
The short answer is that if combined with insulation and good design - YES. The cost at the moment will eb abvout $150,000 per house using data from the "solar decathalon" competition. http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar_decathlon/
You can find some information from Simmon's book "Twilight in the Desert". You can also see one estimate here: http://www.energybulletin.net/358.html That artical is from May, 2004. Since then Canadian Natural Resources and others have announced expansions.
When Ghawar goes into decline - then all major oil fields in the world will be in decline with the exception of the few new ones that have been discovered. There is a rather nice development taking place in the Caspian - and it is frequently touted as a counter example to the peak oil idea. However - those fields are not going to make the difference. Neither will the Tar sands. Also we have the Orinocco heavy oils and those resouces are in the vicinity of 1.6-1.8 trillion barrels - same as the Alberta Tar Sands. This leaves vast resources in oil shales like the Green River formation in the USA and the Stuart oil shales in Queensland.
The tar sands will last a good long while. However the rate limiting factor is how quickly they can be developed. We are facing TERRIBLE obstacles.
One of the obstacles is illustrated by a major Calgary company that decided not to increase its heavy oil production in the Lloydminster area about 2000. Their project would have doubled the population of Lloyd. They didn't have the manpower available so the project was shelved.
Companies like Canadian Natural Resources have announced they are TRIPPLING their investments in the tar sands operations (about $30 billion). Suncor, Nexen, Shell and others are moving ahead as fast as they can with huge projects. Then we have laughable outfits like Habanero which looks to me like a pump and dump scheme.
One of the biggest issues to face is the shortage of hydrogen. Liquid fuels in general have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon. In heavy oils and bitumin it is close to 1:1 and by the time we get into coal it is as low as 0.6:1 Thus for every atom of carbon dug out of the tar sands we have to find an atom of hydrogen. One of the best sources is to crack water.
If we were to do this with say steam hydrolysis then we would need to build about 75 nuclear plants in the range of 1GWe. Nobody has put forward plans with the possible exception of Total SA. The other option is to use the Fisher-tropsch reaction and this creates massive amounts of CO2 (and CO). In fact if we have a stream of say 5 million barrels of oil flowing from Tar Sands and all hydrogen is derived from water using Fischer-tropsch, then we would have a flow of something like 2-3 million barrels of liquid CO2 flowing as well. Since we can use the CO2 to make beer we could have quite a nice flow of beer too. However we can get CO2 for beer from other sources - so we are still left with the issue of what to do with the CO2.
By far the best solution is to hook that carbon to yet more hydrogens instead of hooking it up with Oxygen and stuff the result into the pipelines. Another viable but unfortunately non-politically correct solution is to release it into the atmosphere where plants can get at it and re-combine it with hydrogen through a process known as photosynthesis using solar energy. Perhaps the reason this is not politically correct is that the Canadian government has not yet figured out how to tax photosynthesis. As for greenhouse gas issues and global warming - well - that is more or less bunk - but I'm not going to talk about that here.
Production of the CO2 is a political issue of course because Ottawa is working on how to slip in a carbon tax. The problem is there simply is no alternative unless we undertake a massive nuclear expansion.
In the end - even when all these alternatives are considered and even if the BEST and MOST INTELLIGENT choices were made - we are still going to face a crisis.
I have to laugh at the well meaning fellow who commented that when the price goes up people will simply use less. Let me ask if he has shut off his furnace. It is 20 below outside and mine
The notion that ethanol production is an energy loss stems from the eroneous conclusions of David Pimenthal, a Corenell university insect scientist. He should have stuck with his bugs.
Making fuel from corn however is not nearly as good an idea as making it from plants such as hemp.
Montreal is known for its smoked meats. Pate is made from livers. Livers are an innard. Steak and Kidney pie is made from innards. So is blood sausage.
Sausages are made from guts. Well - sausage casings are! When you eat polish sausage and breakfast sausage then you are eating innards.
Gutz Gutz - GLORIOUS GTUZ!!! Please pass another sausage?
When I was in UNI I read an artical in Scientific American about a study (out of Texas I think) which stated that a car that got 25 MPG was more efficent fuel wise than the average transit system.
Pay very close attention to those monsters off peak hours. They weigh in the TONNES and they are typically empty. A taxi fleet driving hybreds might both be cheaper and more fuel effcient - especially if driven by a ROBOT like the Johny Cabs in Arnie's movie "Total Recall".
I think we are pretty close to being able to build a transit system like this.