It's more complicated than that. Grasslands typically store more carbon than temperate forests, but they store it in the soil. As the grass is replaced by forest, the carbon is released from the soil, more than offsetting any gains in wood mass. The above-ground carbon stored by trees and plants is fairly small. It's about an order of magnitude smaller than soil carbon (excluding peat and methane clathrates, which are found in soil, but are localized to specialized biomes).
Most reforestation has happened in the temperate zone and is entirely made up of primary forest (very poor at storing CO2). Deforestation is happening mainly in tropical and boreal forests (tropical forests by logging and reduced rainfall, boreal forests by increased winter and nightime temperatures).
But either way you slice it, a square kilometer of land isn't going to store much CO2 compared to a 1 GW coal plant, some of which can chew through ten million short tons of coal in a year, enough to cover that hypothetical square kilometer forest about 5-10 metres (about 16-32 feet) deep in coal, and that's just for one year.
You can tell that this person hasn't taken any economics courses. His statement alone about the length of a loan having a large effect on the cost and the interest rate a small effect is the perfect customer for a credit card or auto loan company, because he'll be taking the longest term, highest interest rate loan and paying the minimum every month.
The only things that matter are:
- Total cost of ownership of a new Accord (using a discount rate for future expenses).
- Total cost of ownership of a new Prius (using a discount rate for future expenses).
- Assume that you pay either car cash and compare new car vs new car.
To be pedantic, planting trees (unless it's done on soil that was used for industrial agriculture, which has pretty much giving up its carbon already), will generally cause a release of CO2 from the ground. Even once the forest becomes mature, the net release of CO2 is positive in many cases (especially if the land used to be grassland).
But assuming that is ignored, a million trees:
- Is nothing. Assuming they're Christmas trees, it's about a square kilometre. It's also about 1/100th of the annual harvest in the USA.
- Is meaningless. Tell me in megatonnes of CO2 or gigawatts how much this will save, and if it doesn't equal a megatonne/yr or gigawatt, then it is just a drop in the bucket. Probably less of an effect than eradicating all spyware (thus causing less PCs to be replaced by lazy or ignorant or rich PC owners).
I feel that the Chinese efforts are mostly show and little substance. The US likes to tout its "carbon sequesteration" and "clean coal" technology. The Chinese like to tout their zero-emission cities. Both have little real effect on the climate or on their GDP as they are very small in comparison to their respective economies. Housing a few hundred thousand people in a few zero-emission cities is not going to offset hundreds of new coal plants, thousands of new coal mines, and tens of millions of new cars (all forecast for China in the decades to come).
Likewise, there are only a few carbon sequesteration projects in the US, and it is unlikely that there will be many more. The advantage of coal is its price, and sequesteration makes just about any other power source look cheaper (and you still have to worry about the CO2 being released one day).
Considering the essential lack of any long-term response to the gasoline price surge in both China and the US (drill more oil and build gasification plants are short-term and not such eco-friendy ideas), I doubt much progress will be made with oil headed back down towards more typical levels.
In the medium term (5-20 years), I do think the Chinese will surpass both the US in absolute and per-capita CO2 generation terms (if they haven't surpassed us in absolute numbers yet). The Chinese economy is growing 10 percent a year while ours grows by around 3 percent, and their economy is at the stage where each percent of growth generates more than 1 percent energy usage growth, as much of the growth is driven by lower middle-class goods such as cars, household appliances, air conditioning, refrigerators, tvs, etc., as well as by a boom in heavy industry to fuel the expansion and light industry for the export market.
If the US economy crumbles (which I feel it will, given our enormous debt burden and our awfully run government), China will be substantially hurt, but they'll live through it while the US will have negative emissions growth because of demand destruction. If it doesn't, we'll just keep on importing more and more and help keep their 10pct/year growth on track for a few more years.
And I doubt that either China nor the US will leave a single ounce of economically extractable coal in the ground on account of enviormental concerns unless there is a major change in government.
Re:We can all breathe a bit easier
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Chinese Eco-Cities
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Per-GDP is a pretty lousy measure of polluters so long as there is world trade. Some sectors are inherently polluting or much harder to clean up, and some are inherently quite clean. It also ignores trade surpluses and deficits.
For example, steelmaking and plastics are very polluting and energy intensive industries. Banking and insurance is not very polluting per unit of GDP. The US exports banking and insurance while importing steel and plastics (both in raw form and as manufactured goods). US retail, as hard as it tries to be wasteful, is inherently fairly efficient because it sells a disproportionate amount of luxury goods, which don't take much space or shipping, while Chinese stores sell a disproportionate amount of low-value goods like food, which are transport and space intensive.
Once all of this is accounted for, the US is genuinely probably about 50% more efficient than China per unit GDP. This comes from things such as more efficient power generation (~40% for our coal plants vs. ~30% for their coal plants) and far more efficient buildings (our 4,000 square foot McMansions are more efficient per $ of value and per square foot, at a given temperature setting, than their 400 square foot coal-heated houses).
The reason why the US is reviled (and quite justifiably so in my own view) is that its citizens consume far more than is needed for a good lifestyle. Consumption is probably so high that it actually reduces our happiness. The US might only be 3rd in per-capita emissions, but the two above it have major (and highly polluting) oil extraction and exporting industries, while the US imports most of its oil (and therefore transfers some of the pollution that its consumption causes). The US is also the main force pushing other countries to consume more. The rest of the world might not complain so loudly if we didn't butt into their afairs via the WTO, World Bank, trade agreements, corporations, etc.
Explain why it's an oxymoron. Death is an event, in which something goes from living to non-living. Preventable means that humans could have acted differently and the death not happened (it would be replaced by some other death at some later time for some other reason, but this particular death would not occur).
To be an oxymoron, it must appear to be contradictory after a quick look. This one requires a definition of death different from the normally accepted medical definition of death to produce any contradiction, since a death is not owned by the creature who will die, but is an event unto itself.
This isn't the first time I hear about some physics-defying whiz-bang solution to all our problems. They all have a few things in common.
- They're never peer reviewed, or if they are (like Cold Fusion), the peer review process finds out that an experimental error (or flat out lying) caused the purported violation of the laws of physics.
- They're promoted by businessmen/entrepreneur types, who are out for a lot of publicity and money.
- Aside from the ones that are peer reviewed, they inner workings are kept secret. To properly assess a discovery, it is necessary to replicate the machine or experiment.
Which all point to the conclusion that this person is either a money/publicity whore, or delusional. I think it's the former.
And speaking as a scientist, his idea has about a snowball chance's in hell of being true. Electrons existing in discrete energy levels is required to avoid having all atoms self-annihilate and explains why the orbiting electrons don't spontaneously emit radiation in their ground state. Entropy being shown false is more plausible than electrons being able to go under the ground state, and plenty of people have tried (and failed) to disprove that entropy never decreases.
I don't know about medical insurance, but life insurance is much more expensive for smokers than non-smokers. Whenever you see ads touting life insurance rates, the fine print always says that it is for non-smokers only.
And I do think it's fair, considering that smoking is the second largest source of preventable death (after heart disease - but that's a much harder problem to tackle than smoking).
I couldn't agree more. A well-designed shelf using 2x6s should support several TONS of weight per plank. Even standard shelving using much thinner wood and using glue (and maybe screws) instead of quarter inch bolts as fasteners will probably suffice for such a light load as yours.
And yes, as the above poster said, most houses are built of wood. Pretty much wherever corrosion and weight/bulk are not terribly large issues, wood is the material of choice because it's cheap, easy to work with, and more enviormentally friendly than the alternatives (metal, plastic, stone, concrete).
You're right. Any who claims that photosynthesis is 50% efficient is nuts. If I remember right, total efficiency maxes out around 1% (given ample nutrients, rain, soil, and a fast growing plant like marajuana).
The losses in the C3 (or C4) cycle are enormous, and a plant is a living creature with a metabolism and much of the sugar generated goes for other uses than laying down fiber (which is what we eventually harvest for timber or firewood or hay).
- solar panels. Pricey even in land based use. Marine use would be even more expensive. Still the least ludicrous of your ideas. Might only cost $10B per GW of capacity, not counting platform cost, which is about 10x the cost of a coal plant and 30x the cost of a gas plant considering a generous 33% use factor. At least this option is low maintainance, and since you're using battery storage, you don't even need to spring for a pricey inverter and the control equipment is simpler than directly driving an electrolysis machine or the grid.
- solar thermal. A 1 acre platform can produce about 100-500 kW of power, but you will need a steam engine or steam turbine (at this power range and using steam around 300 degrees centigrade, both steam engines and steam turbines are worthy of investigation and have similar efficiencies once you take into account the ability of steam engines to accept saturated steam efficiently and work at less than full throttle efficiently). Small steam machines require tending and maintainance just like their larger cousins in coal plants (or land based solar thermal plants), but they don't get any economy of scale. Setup cost could be reasonable, so long as you avoid expensive or unfit technology (avoid using an organic rankine cycle turbine, and don't use any glass [no mirrors or vacuum tubes around the collectors], as I guarantee that the sea will break them). Cost is probably around $3-5B per GW, but maintainance will be quite steep, probably on the order of 50 cents per kilowatt-hour.
- energy from ocean heat content. Maintainance, as determined from trial land-based installations, is prohibitive. You will also need a massive steam turbine, as the pressure differential is just a few dozen millibars. Efficiencies are on the order of 1-2%, and massive amounts of water must be moved. Maintainance is at least 1 order of magnitude larger than solar thermal for the same power output, and space constraints will limit the effective power to a few MW (for hundreds of millions sunk into the plant - particularly the turbine, no less the platform). Storms also have a tendancy to destroy the pipes used to get the cold water from below. For costs, take the numbers for solar thermal, and multiply them by 10x for both capital and maintainance. That's $30-50B per GW of capacity and about $5 per kilowatt-hour in maintainance and operational expenses.
- aquaculture platform. Now we're getting silly. It's much easier to raise your shrimp and salmon in land-based ponds or in next-to-shore enclosures. That way you can get the food to your animals by truck instead of by supply ship, and operations are much easier than on a cramped platform deck (which wouldn't support a very large pool anyway). As far as farming algea goes, first develop a method to use the algea, and then I'm sure it'll be a whole load cheaper to use fresh water ponds than try growing them in tanks on a platform.
Based on my extensive research, land based solar thermal and conventional wind are the most promising of the renewables (nuclear isn't renewable, though it sure beats organic fossil fuels). Wind is nearly as cheap as conventional power (less than 2x pricier in the USA, and we have no carbon tax). Solar thermal is pricier than wind currently, but I believe that it has more promise because there is far more suitable land for solar than wind, and improved material science (particularly if the stirling engine could ever be perfected, but just better heat transfer liquids, structural materials, and turbines would be a big help). Also, there is more room for cost reduction through more efficient engineering in solar thermal than in wind power, and solar thermal could theoretically scale to the 200MW per turbine range (where the efficiency of scale seems to peter out).
The electricity->hydrogen->electricity cycle is only about 50% efficient using utility-scale 100MW plants (slightly lower for 1MW or so sized plants, and much lower for lab-sized plants). Right now there is so little wind power installed that the grid can easily handle large amounts of extra wind power. When 20% of electricity is coming from wind, then they'll start to be substantial benefits to power storage (though I see hydroelectric storage as a more practical form of storage than hydrogen, and that's good until renewables cover 100% of electricity demand and we're at the stage of needing liquid fuel for airplanes and vehicles).
Second, I believe that using a floating platform with very tall (~400 feet or so) structures is asking for trouble. Something floating is far more vulnerable to storms than a securely grounded pile. There must be a good reason it's not being done now.
Thirdly, why have the things so far from shore. Transmission losses (if undersea cables are employed) are large over such distances, and it does take quite a bit of aluminum to make such long wires. If a ship must come to load the hydrogen every once in a while, then you just added a large operating expense (and one of the nice things about wind and solar is very low operating expenses).
So why not stick to tried and true near-shore and land based wind turbines?
I still haven't found an I-Tunes or Napster type download site that allows either payment with cash or anonymous purchasing. These are things that I take for granted in most normal stores (those that require or give discounts for being non-anonymous are boycotted by me, and they're mostly in the food segment - I don't care if the competition is 50% pricier).
I also don't have a credit card account (I cannot find an issuer who meets my low moral standards). I don't have a Pay Pal account either (same issue with meeting my minimal moral standards, plus the fears of them pulling something lowballed as they aren't regulated like banks). For most things, I'm willing to pay with cash, money order, or check. For potentially sensitive stuff (media, condoms, hobbyist equipment, fertilizer, detergent, blank CDs/DVDs/VHS tapes, etc), it's cash only.
Media is one thing I don't want a record being made of. Will my purchase of "Battleship Potempkin" (A famous movie from the early USSR era, circa 1920) or my purchase of "Triumph of the Will" (A Nazi propaganda movie, circa 1940) trigger flags in some database. (This is ignoring the fact that both works should be in the public domain - they're not because converting a film copy to digital apparently passes as a creative adaption according to the Patent and Copyright Office).
And what about Disney stuff. At any given moment, most of their old material is not available for sale. That aside, an adult (who doesn't have kids) would probably trigger about as many flags for needing psycho help as the two above films would trigger 'communist' or 'nazi' flags.
And what about independant filmakers and hobbyists who just want to distribute their stuff and would rather have the largest audience possible and don't care about cash (this is true of any 'true' political/propaganda piece). A large P2P user base makes it a lot easier to do so (they now only need to focus on getting the word out, which isn't that hard if they have good quality warez as word of mouth spreads). Heavy P2P addicts get a smaller dose of advertisements than usual, also increasing the odds that the non-traditional stuff will get picked (just look at anime's penetration into the US market, and there was virtually zero marketing until pretty recently).
Controlled drugs are the perfect example of how escalating penalties against a commonly done and moral (in the eyes of the law violators) act results in a very small decrease in the number of cases of the act, but does result in immense economic and societal losses.
About 30% of people in the US use marajuana, which is about the same usage rate as 20-30 years ago, before the major increases in marajuana-related jailings. Despite black people having something like 5-10x the risk of getting caught, the usage rate is around 30% for both white and black people, so the extra (and racist) enforcement against blacks apparently doesn't cause a dent in demand. Monetary situation and social status also don't seem to play much of a role.
My gut feeling (and limited research) is that file sharing has most of the properties of marajuana. Among the participants peers, they're generally considered harmless. They're both at least somewhat addictive (I know quite a few people who download just for the sake of a large collection). Both are generally done by younger people, who has much less fear of authority and act very much on impulse. The high or the download comes now, and the 20 years of jail come later.
File sharing might be even harder to eliminate than drugs because people don't even need to find dealers and can do it entirely in the privacy of their homes. It's also much easier to keep nosy parents from finding out.
The government could ratchet up enforcement to having.3% of the US population in jail (including 1.5% of blacks) on file sharing charges and it probably still wouldn't stop a large number of younger people from doing it, especially if the jail time gives them street credentials.
The sane thing to do would be to at the very least decrimilize file sharing (right now it's up to a 10 year jail term, though it's very rarely enforced). Personally, I would like to see copyright law abolished for very different (socialist) grounds, but that's another story.
The problem of rogue clients can be caught by doing random spot checks. Have a few jobs done twice. If they disagree, then one (or both) of the two clients messed up. Rerun the job on a university computer and ban the offender. Do checks often on new clients and trust most results coming from established clients.
And yes, I would be one to mess with the code, but I wouldn't use the modified code on the internet, it would be for internal tinkering (since I love to play with simulations and would love to get my hands on a climate simulator). To do that would require source for both client and server, and I'm not about to go asking for permission just to get a toy to play around with (and according the web page, personal entertainment would probably not be a valid reason to get access to the source).
From my experience with open source projects, proper procedure is to submit the optimised code (as a diff file) to the developers so that they may incorporate the code into the codebase as well as do any extra tests they may want to do. Optimizing the code and just running it on your client isn't going to be of much benefit to society.
Lastly, I can see the reason for malicious intent, mostly coming from anti-Kyoto and pro business-as-usual types, who have plenty of resources to hire black hats or maybe even get the CIA on the job.
What's so hard about releasing these things under an open source license.
I have nothing against donating CPU cycles, but I have yet to find a group that doesn't require me to sign a restrictive software license. And for this particular project, it's a university running it no less. Aren't universities supposed to encourage the spread of information?
(Then again, I'd have to bury my head in the sand and forget about all the patents that universities have amassed, often using tax dollars to fund the research that led to them).
I've seen campers and boats towed by subcompacts (1.2 - 1.6l, not exactly sure since US cars are typically measured by horsepower). While you cannot fit 2,000 lbs of stuff in the car itself, you could probably throw 2,000 lbs onto a trailer or into a camper (even if you cannot or it's too much trouble to have a trailer, you can do two trips with 1,000 lbs each time, for those rare cases - personally the most I've had to transport is about 1,000 lbs at any one time).
You can fit about 5 properly sized (not overweight) people into a subcompact, though not all that comfortably. If one is a kid, then you can increase that number to 6 (though it is illegal, not that we've ever been ticketed). That said, if your household has more than one vehicle (as most US households do), then you can use both vehicles for those rare cases the whole family goes out together.
For most people's needs, a small car has enough towing capacity to pull a modest boat or camping trailer. I remember my grandfather towing his boat with his subcompact, and it seemed fine enough to me. True, you couldn't safely go at highway speed, but to tow the thing a few miles to the ramp, you don't need an overpriced SUV.
Even if you do have an SUV, to be safe, you should drive pretty slowly anyway on the highway, because you are very prone to jack-knifing. Your braking is limited by the tires on the trailer, not by the brakes on your car.
In my area (New York City), highways are typically 50-55 mph limit, with people doing about 75 when the roads are open (a rarity, bumper to bumper is more typical). Doesn't stop people from buying overweight SUVs. The speed limit on all other roads is 30 mph within city limits.
Even if these new bulbs were free they wouldn't replace low pressure sodium bulbs.
A 60W incandescent bulb is the bottom of the barrel in efficiency. If this thing is twice as efficient, then it would fall in between halogen bulbs and standard fluorescent bulbs in efficiency. Compact fluorescent bulbs are 4-5x as efficient as 60W incandescent bulbs. Low pressure sodium vapor lamps are something like twice the efficiency of fluorescent bulbs, and for something where the light is used only a fraction of the time it's on and draws very large amounts of juice, I would rather they be energy misers, so my taxes can be kept low and I can spend the money on better indoor lighting, which I am around much more than street lighting.
BTW, for indoor lighting, compact fluorescents already put out a very nice light. I don't see any need to switch to a bulb that is half as efficient, even if it does last several times longer. They're also dirt cheap. My last batch cost me only three bucks a bulb.
A peculiarity of the US patent system is that anyone can file for a patent for up to 1 year after the idea is officially published. It's perfectly legal to find an unpatented discovery in a magazine, patent it, and the sue the original devoloper.
Unfortunately, that draft specification wouldn't qualify as prior art under our dumb laws.
There is no way that a 10x40 ft container is going to produce 150kW of continuous power (for the uses they envision, it would have to be continuous).
150kW using photovoltics requires about 1000 sq metres of space in the middle of the desert at high noon. You'll need about 4000-5000 sq metres of space and a massive battery system to deliver 150kW day and night with photovoltics (you can get away with as little as half the space if you spring for more efficient panels, but the price skyrockets and such panels are generally reserved for spacecraft and solar racecars and the likes).
a 150kW wind turbine is huge, and 2 people aren't going to be able to build the foundation (necessary to keep a several hundred foot propeller from getting ripped away) on a moment's notice and without heavy machinery (a cement truck and a crane at the least). Once again, if you want 24/7 power, you'll have to install around a 450kW turbine in the best of conditions (say, on a mountain ridge), or as much as a 1.5MW turbine (about the largest built... larger than the statue of liberty) under more ordinary conditions, like in Iraq.
And let's not even get into the cost assuming this was true. Even without the standard military surcharge, photovoltics is about the most expensive renewable source of energy around and I couldn't even think of stuffing a statue of liberty sized wind generator into a standard packing crate and having it assembled by two people.
I also couldn't envision a battery system capable of storing 2-4MWh (megawatt-hours) of juice and not bringing the helicopter or truck over its weight limit. That's like 2,000 heavy duty car batteries (No way you're going to use anything pricier than lead-acid for such a large battery). So that's around 60,000 to 100,000 pounds of weight. Too heavy for a truck, although a heavy bomber or cargo plane could carry the load. The parachute would be a sight to be seen to slow that lead weight on its way down.
And lastly, what about the cooling tower and the inverters and the transformers. Such a large plant will need some heavy duty electrical equipment to deliver consistant frequency and voltage (assuming it gives out standard 110/220 volts, 50/60 Hz alternating current).
As far as the patents go, assuming they really do have 180 relevent patents (at $30,000 a pop, I would be a little suprised), they're just an indicator of how much you paid your attorneys. Just because you have a patent doesn't mean it works or is even physically possible.
It turned out that the satellite had a systematic error in how it deduced temperature. Once the error was fixed, it turns out that the satellite now is in agreement with land measurements. I cannot where I read this since this happened quite some time ago.
While I do agree that a 5 degree shift would be quite dramatic, I think we're on the road for far worse if we continue business as usual (1-2% per year CO2 growth until over half of the earth's fossil carbon is burnt, with no real effort in sequesteration or renewables).
Also, if the climate shifts to where it was during the late Mesozoic/early Tertiary era, then the only temperate area will be Antarctica. The landmass of Antarctica and the polar winds will prevent excessive heat from reaching continental Antarctica, but the Artic Ocean will be bring up warm waters from the equator and keep the climate tropical (just barely, but still warmer than Florida).
If we do manage to dump all the carbon contained in coal, oil, natural gas, coalbed methane, oil shale, tar/oil sands, peat, whatever other flammable fossil fuels we come up with, we will easily exceed the CO2 concentrations of the late Mesozoic. Don't forget that there's lots of methane and carbon locked up as hydrates and in permafrost that will get released in the process, and raising ocean temperatures will release CO2 (since hot water holds less gas than cold water).
So we're not talking about a 5 degree shift, but about a 75 degree shift. Tundra and taiga will no longer be found, and there will only be temperate land (with no topsoil, I may add) in Antarctica. In addition, coastal flooding will be so massive that the globe will look quite different.
It will take time, since the oceans and ice caps have enourmous thermal inertia, but climate change is accelerating exponentially (something like e^t) as our emissions grow exponentially. The melting is more like t^2 * e^t right now, and t * e^t once most of the ice in the world is melting. The exponential comes from the exponential solar forcing (CO concentrations are increasing exponentially), the t^2 comes because a doubling in climate change roughly doubles the melt area and doubles the melt rate. It might even be t^3 * e^t because the melt season will also increase, since until winter temps are above freezing, the melting will only occur during the summer.
One last point is that the sun is brighter now than during the Mesozoic, so given the same atmosphere and geography, it will get even warmer.
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It's more complicated than that. Grasslands typically store more carbon than temperate forests, but they store it in the soil. As the grass is replaced by forest, the carbon is released from the soil, more than offsetting any gains in wood mass. The above-ground carbon stored by trees and plants is fairly small. It's about an order of magnitude smaller than soil carbon (excluding peat and methane clathrates, which are found in soil, but are localized to specialized biomes).
Most reforestation has happened in the temperate zone and is entirely made up of primary forest (very poor at storing CO2). Deforestation is happening mainly in tropical and boreal forests (tropical forests by logging and reduced rainfall, boreal forests by increased winter and nightime temperatures).
But either way you slice it, a square kilometer of land isn't going to store much CO2 compared to a 1 GW coal plant, some of which can chew through ten million short tons of coal in a year, enough to cover that hypothetical square kilometer forest about 5-10 metres (about 16-32 feet) deep in coal, and that's just for one year.
You can tell that this person hasn't taken any economics courses. His statement alone about the length of a loan having a large effect on the cost and the interest rate a small effect is the perfect customer for a credit card or auto loan company, because he'll be taking the longest term, highest interest rate loan and paying the minimum every month.
The only things that matter are:
- Total cost of ownership of a new Accord (using a discount rate for future expenses).
- Total cost of ownership of a new Prius (using a discount rate for future expenses).
- Assume that you pay either car cash and compare new car vs new car.
Right on.
To be pedantic, planting trees (unless it's done on soil that was used for industrial agriculture, which has pretty much giving up its carbon already), will generally cause a release of CO2 from the ground. Even once the forest becomes mature, the net release of CO2 is positive in many cases (especially if the land used to be grassland).
But assuming that is ignored, a million trees:
- Is nothing. Assuming they're Christmas trees, it's about a square kilometre. It's also about 1/100th of the annual harvest in the USA.
- Is meaningless. Tell me in megatonnes of CO2 or gigawatts how much this will save, and if it doesn't equal a megatonne/yr or gigawatt, then it is just a drop in the bucket. Probably less of an effect than eradicating all spyware (thus causing less PCs to be replaced by lazy or ignorant or rich PC owners).
I feel that the Chinese efforts are mostly show and little substance. The US likes to tout its "carbon sequesteration" and "clean coal" technology. The Chinese like to tout their zero-emission cities. Both have little real effect on the climate or on their GDP as they are very small in comparison to their respective economies. Housing a few hundred thousand people in a few zero-emission cities is not going to offset hundreds of new coal plants, thousands of new coal mines, and tens of millions of new cars (all forecast for China in the decades to come).
Likewise, there are only a few carbon sequesteration projects in the US, and it is unlikely that there will be many more. The advantage of coal is its price, and sequesteration makes just about any other power source look cheaper (and you still have to worry about the CO2 being released one day).
Considering the essential lack of any long-term response to the gasoline price surge in both China and the US (drill more oil and build gasification plants are short-term and not such eco-friendy ideas), I doubt much progress will be made with oil headed back down towards more typical levels.
In the medium term (5-20 years), I do think the Chinese will surpass both the US in absolute and per-capita CO2 generation terms (if they haven't surpassed us in absolute numbers yet). The Chinese economy is growing 10 percent a year while ours grows by around 3 percent, and their economy is at the stage where each percent of growth generates more than 1 percent energy usage growth, as much of the growth is driven by lower middle-class goods such as cars, household appliances, air conditioning, refrigerators, tvs, etc., as well as by a boom in heavy industry to fuel the expansion and light industry for the export market.
If the US economy crumbles (which I feel it will, given our enormous debt burden and our awfully run government), China will be substantially hurt, but they'll live through it while the US will have negative emissions growth because of demand destruction. If it doesn't, we'll just keep on importing more and more and help keep their 10pct/year growth on track for a few more years.
And I doubt that either China nor the US will leave a single ounce of economically extractable coal in the ground on account of enviormental concerns unless there is a major change in government.
Per-GDP is a pretty lousy measure of polluters so long as there is world trade. Some sectors are inherently polluting or much harder to clean up, and some are inherently quite clean. It also ignores trade surpluses and deficits.
For example, steelmaking and plastics are very polluting and energy intensive industries. Banking and insurance is not very polluting per unit of GDP. The US exports banking and insurance while importing steel and plastics (both in raw form and as manufactured goods). US retail, as hard as it tries to be wasteful, is inherently fairly efficient because it sells a disproportionate amount of luxury goods, which don't take much space or shipping, while Chinese stores sell a disproportionate amount of low-value goods like food, which are transport and space intensive.
Once all of this is accounted for, the US is genuinely probably about 50% more efficient than China per unit GDP. This comes from things such as more efficient power generation (~40% for our coal plants vs. ~30% for their coal plants) and far more efficient buildings (our 4,000 square foot McMansions are more efficient per $ of value and per square foot, at a given temperature setting, than their 400 square foot coal-heated houses).
The reason why the US is reviled (and quite justifiably so in my own view) is that its citizens consume far more than is needed for a good lifestyle. Consumption is probably so high that it actually reduces our happiness. The US might only be 3rd in per-capita emissions, but the two above it have major (and highly polluting) oil extraction and exporting industries, while the US imports most of its oil (and therefore transfers some of the pollution that its consumption causes). The US is also the main force pushing other countries to consume more. The rest of the world might not complain so loudly if we didn't butt into their afairs via the WTO, World Bank, trade agreements, corporations, etc.
Explain why it's an oxymoron. Death is an event, in which something goes from living to non-living. Preventable means that humans could have acted differently and the death not happened (it would be replaced by some other death at some later time for some other reason, but this particular death would not occur).
To be an oxymoron, it must appear to be contradictory after a quick look. This one requires a definition of death different from the normally accepted medical definition of death to produce any contradiction, since a death is not owned by the creature who will die, but is an event unto itself.
This isn't the first time I hear about some physics-defying whiz-bang solution to all our problems. They all have a few things in common.
- They're never peer reviewed, or if they are (like Cold Fusion), the peer review process finds out that an experimental error (or flat out lying) caused the purported violation of the laws of physics.
- They're promoted by businessmen/entrepreneur types, who are out for a lot of publicity and money.
- Aside from the ones that are peer reviewed, they inner workings are kept secret. To properly assess a discovery, it is necessary to replicate the machine or experiment.
Which all point to the conclusion that this person is either a money/publicity whore, or delusional. I think it's the former.
And speaking as a scientist, his idea has about a snowball chance's in hell of being true. Electrons existing in discrete energy levels is required to avoid having all atoms self-annihilate and explains why the orbiting electrons don't spontaneously emit radiation in their ground state. Entropy being shown false is more plausible than electrons being able to go under the ground state, and plenty of people have tried (and failed) to disprove that entropy never decreases.
I don't know about medical insurance, but life insurance is much more expensive for smokers than non-smokers. Whenever you see ads touting life insurance rates, the fine print always says that it is for non-smokers only.
And I do think it's fair, considering that smoking is the second largest source of preventable death (after heart disease - but that's a much harder problem to tackle than smoking).
I couldn't agree more. A well-designed shelf using 2x6s should support several TONS of weight per plank. Even standard shelving using much thinner wood and using glue (and maybe screws) instead of quarter inch bolts as fasteners will probably suffice for such a light load as yours.
And yes, as the above poster said, most houses are built of wood. Pretty much wherever corrosion and weight/bulk are not terribly large issues, wood is the material of choice because it's cheap, easy to work with, and more enviormentally friendly than the alternatives (metal, plastic, stone, concrete).
You're right. Any who claims that photosynthesis is 50% efficient is nuts. If I remember right, total efficiency maxes out around 1% (given ample nutrients, rain, soil, and a fast growing plant like marajuana).
The losses in the C3 (or C4) cycle are enormous, and a plant is a living creature with a metabolism and much of the sugar generated goes for other uses than laying down fiber (which is what we eventually harvest for timber or firewood or hay).
- solar panels. Pricey even in land based use. Marine use would be even more expensive. Still the least ludicrous of your ideas. Might only cost $10B per GW of capacity, not counting platform cost, which is about 10x the cost of a coal plant and 30x the cost of a gas plant considering a generous 33% use factor. At least this option is low maintainance, and since you're using battery storage, you don't even need to spring for a pricey inverter and the control equipment is simpler than directly driving an electrolysis machine or the grid.
- solar thermal. A 1 acre platform can produce about 100-500 kW of power, but you will need a steam engine or steam turbine (at this power range and using steam around 300 degrees centigrade, both steam engines and steam turbines are worthy of investigation and have similar efficiencies once you take into account the ability of steam engines to accept saturated steam efficiently and work at less than full throttle efficiently). Small steam machines require tending and maintainance just like their larger cousins in coal plants (or land based solar thermal plants), but they don't get any economy of scale. Setup cost could be reasonable, so long as you avoid expensive or unfit technology (avoid using an organic rankine cycle turbine, and don't use any glass [no mirrors or vacuum tubes around the collectors], as I guarantee that the sea will break them). Cost is probably around $3-5B per GW, but maintainance will be quite steep, probably on the order of 50 cents per kilowatt-hour.
- energy from ocean heat content. Maintainance, as determined from trial land-based installations, is prohibitive. You will also need a massive steam turbine, as the pressure differential is just a few dozen millibars. Efficiencies are on the order of 1-2%, and massive amounts of water must be moved. Maintainance is at least 1 order of magnitude larger than solar thermal for the same power output, and space constraints will limit the effective power to a few MW (for hundreds of millions sunk into the plant - particularly the turbine, no less the platform). Storms also have a tendancy to destroy the pipes used to get the cold water from below. For costs, take the numbers for solar thermal, and multiply them by 10x for both capital and maintainance. That's $30-50B per GW of capacity and about $5 per kilowatt-hour in maintainance and operational expenses.
- aquaculture platform. Now we're getting silly. It's much easier to raise your shrimp and salmon in land-based ponds or in next-to-shore enclosures. That way you can get the food to your animals by truck instead of by supply ship, and operations are much easier than on a cramped platform deck (which wouldn't support a very large pool anyway). As far as farming algea goes, first develop a method to use the algea, and then I'm sure it'll be a whole load cheaper to use fresh water ponds than try growing them in tanks on a platform.
Based on my extensive research, land based solar thermal and conventional wind are the most promising of the renewables (nuclear isn't renewable, though it sure beats organic fossil fuels). Wind is nearly as cheap as conventional power (less than 2x pricier in the USA, and we have no carbon tax). Solar thermal is pricier than wind currently, but I believe that it has more promise because there is far more suitable land for solar than wind, and improved material science (particularly if the stirling engine could ever be perfected, but just better heat transfer liquids, structural materials, and turbines would be a big help). Also, there is more room for cost reduction through more efficient engineering in solar thermal than in wind power, and solar thermal could theoretically scale to the 200MW per turbine range (where the efficiency of scale seems to peter out).
The electricity->hydrogen->electricity cycle is only about 50% efficient using utility-scale 100MW plants (slightly lower for 1MW or so sized plants, and much lower for lab-sized plants). Right now there is so little wind power installed that the grid can easily handle large amounts of extra wind power. When 20% of electricity is coming from wind, then they'll start to be substantial benefits to power storage (though I see hydroelectric storage as a more practical form of storage than hydrogen, and that's good until renewables cover 100% of electricity demand and we're at the stage of needing liquid fuel for airplanes and vehicles).
Second, I believe that using a floating platform with very tall (~400 feet or so) structures is asking for trouble. Something floating is far more vulnerable to storms than a securely grounded pile. There must be a good reason it's not being done now.
Thirdly, why have the things so far from shore. Transmission losses (if undersea cables are employed) are large over such distances, and it does take quite a bit of aluminum to make such long wires. If a ship must come to load the hydrogen every once in a while, then you just added a large operating expense (and one of the nice things about wind and solar is very low operating expenses).
So why not stick to tried and true near-shore and land based wind turbines?
I still haven't found an I-Tunes or Napster type download site that allows either payment with cash or anonymous purchasing. These are things that I take for granted in most normal stores (those that require or give discounts for being non-anonymous are boycotted by me, and they're mostly in the food segment - I don't care if the competition is 50% pricier).
I also don't have a credit card account (I cannot find an issuer who meets my low moral standards). I don't have a Pay Pal account either (same issue with meeting my minimal moral standards, plus the fears of them pulling something lowballed as they aren't regulated like banks). For most things, I'm willing to pay with cash, money order, or check. For potentially sensitive stuff (media, condoms, hobbyist equipment, fertilizer, detergent, blank CDs/DVDs/VHS tapes, etc), it's cash only.
Media is one thing I don't want a record being made of. Will my purchase of "Battleship Potempkin" (A famous movie from the early USSR era, circa 1920) or my purchase of "Triumph of the Will" (A Nazi propaganda movie, circa 1940) trigger flags in some database. (This is ignoring the fact that both works should be in the public domain - they're not because converting a film copy to digital apparently passes as a creative adaption according to the Patent and Copyright Office).
And what about Disney stuff. At any given moment, most of their old material is not available for sale. That aside, an adult (who doesn't have kids) would probably trigger about as many flags for needing psycho help as the two above films would trigger 'communist' or 'nazi' flags.
And what about independant filmakers and hobbyists who just want to distribute their stuff and would rather have the largest audience possible and don't care about cash (this is true of any 'true' political/propaganda piece). A large P2P user base makes it a lot easier to do so (they now only need to focus on getting the word out, which isn't that hard if they have good quality warez as word of mouth spreads). Heavy P2P addicts get a smaller dose of advertisements than usual, also increasing the odds that the non-traditional stuff will get picked (just look at anime's penetration into the US market, and there was virtually zero marketing until pretty recently).
Controlled drugs are the perfect example of how escalating penalties against a commonly done and moral (in the eyes of the law violators) act results in a very small decrease in the number of cases of the act, but does result in immense economic and societal losses.
.3% of the US population in jail (including 1.5% of blacks) on file sharing charges and it probably still wouldn't stop a large number of younger people from doing it, especially if the jail time gives them street credentials.
About 30% of people in the US use marajuana, which is about the same usage rate as 20-30 years ago, before the major increases in marajuana-related jailings. Despite black people having something like 5-10x the risk of getting caught, the usage rate is around 30% for both white and black people, so the extra (and racist) enforcement against blacks apparently doesn't cause a dent in demand. Monetary situation and social status also don't seem to play much of a role.
My gut feeling (and limited research) is that file sharing has most of the properties of marajuana. Among the participants peers, they're generally considered harmless. They're both at least somewhat addictive (I know quite a few people who download just for the sake of a large collection). Both are generally done by younger people, who has much less fear of authority and act very much on impulse. The high or the download comes now, and the 20 years of jail come later.
File sharing might be even harder to eliminate than drugs because people don't even need to find dealers and can do it entirely in the privacy of their homes. It's also much easier to keep nosy parents from finding out.
The government could ratchet up enforcement to having
The sane thing to do would be to at the very least decrimilize file sharing (right now it's up to a 10 year jail term, though it's very rarely enforced). Personally, I would like to see copyright law abolished for very different (socialist) grounds, but that's another story.
The problem of rogue clients can be caught by doing random spot checks. Have a few jobs done twice. If they disagree, then one (or both) of the two clients messed up. Rerun the job on a university computer and ban the offender. Do checks often on new clients and trust most results coming from established clients.
And yes, I would be one to mess with the code, but I wouldn't use the modified code on the internet, it would be for internal tinkering (since I love to play with simulations and would love to get my hands on a climate simulator). To do that would require source for both client and server, and I'm not about to go asking for permission just to get a toy to play around with (and according the web page, personal entertainment would probably not be a valid reason to get access to the source).
From my experience with open source projects, proper procedure is to submit the optimised code (as a diff file) to the developers so that they may incorporate the code into the codebase as well as do any extra tests they may want to do. Optimizing the code and just running it on your client isn't going to be of much benefit to society.
Lastly, I can see the reason for malicious intent, mostly coming from anti-Kyoto and pro business-as-usual types, who have plenty of resources to hire black hats or maybe even get the CIA on the job.
What's so hard about releasing these things under an open source license.
I have nothing against donating CPU cycles, but I have yet to find a group that doesn't require me to sign a restrictive software license. And for this particular project, it's a university running it no less. Aren't universities supposed to encourage the spread of information?
(Then again, I'd have to bury my head in the sand and forget about all the patents that universities have amassed, often using tax dollars to fund the research that led to them).
Yes, yes, and no.
I've seen campers and boats towed by subcompacts (1.2 - 1.6l, not exactly sure since US cars are typically measured by horsepower). While you cannot fit 2,000 lbs of stuff in the car itself, you could probably throw 2,000 lbs onto a trailer or into a camper (even if you cannot or it's too much trouble to have a trailer, you can do two trips with 1,000 lbs each time, for those rare cases - personally the most I've had to transport is about 1,000 lbs at any one time).
You can fit about 5 properly sized (not overweight) people into a subcompact, though not all that comfortably. If one is a kid, then you can increase that number to 6 (though it is illegal, not that we've ever been ticketed). That said, if your household has more than one vehicle (as most US households do), then you can use both vehicles for those rare cases the whole family goes out together.
For most people's needs, a small car has enough towing capacity to pull a modest boat or camping trailer. I remember my grandfather towing his boat with his subcompact, and it seemed fine enough to me. True, you couldn't safely go at highway speed, but to tow the thing a few miles to the ramp, you don't need an overpriced SUV.
Even if you do have an SUV, to be safe, you should drive pretty slowly anyway on the highway, because you are very prone to jack-knifing. Your braking is limited by the tires on the trailer, not by the brakes on your car.
In my area (New York City), highways are typically 50-55 mph limit, with people doing about 75 when the roads are open (a rarity, bumper to bumper is more typical). Doesn't stop people from buying overweight SUVs. The speed limit on all other roads is 30 mph within city limits.
Even if these new bulbs were free they wouldn't replace low pressure sodium bulbs.
A 60W incandescent bulb is the bottom of the barrel in efficiency. If this thing is twice as efficient, then it would fall in between halogen bulbs and standard fluorescent bulbs in efficiency. Compact fluorescent bulbs are 4-5x as efficient as 60W incandescent bulbs. Low pressure sodium vapor lamps are something like twice the efficiency of fluorescent bulbs, and for something where the light is used only a fraction of the time it's on and draws very large amounts of juice, I would rather they be energy misers, so my taxes can be kept low and I can spend the money on better indoor lighting, which I am around much more than street lighting.
BTW, for indoor lighting, compact fluorescents already put out a very nice light. I don't see any need to switch to a bulb that is half as efficient, even if it does last several times longer. They're also dirt cheap. My last batch cost me only three bucks a bulb.
A peculiarity of the US patent system is that anyone can file for a patent for up to 1 year after the idea is officially published. It's perfectly legal to find an unpatented discovery in a magazine, patent it, and the sue the original devoloper.
Unfortunately, that draft specification wouldn't qualify as prior art under our dumb laws.
Tell that to the RIAA/MPAA/media companies. File sharers aren't the ones asking for all the crazy new laws.
There is no way that a 10x40 ft container is going to produce 150kW of continuous power (for the uses they envision, it would have to be continuous).
... larger than the statue of liberty) under more ordinary conditions, like in Iraq.
150kW using photovoltics requires about 1000 sq metres of space in the middle of the desert at high noon. You'll need about 4000-5000 sq metres of space and a massive battery system to deliver 150kW day and night with photovoltics (you can get away with as little as half the space if you spring for more efficient panels, but the price skyrockets and such panels are generally reserved for spacecraft and solar racecars and the likes).
a 150kW wind turbine is huge, and 2 people aren't going to be able to build the foundation (necessary to keep a several hundred foot propeller from getting ripped away) on a moment's notice and without heavy machinery (a cement truck and a crane at the least). Once again, if you want 24/7 power, you'll have to install around a 450kW turbine in the best of conditions (say, on a mountain ridge), or as much as a 1.5MW turbine (about the largest built
And let's not even get into the cost assuming this was true. Even without the standard military surcharge, photovoltics is about the most expensive renewable source of energy around and I couldn't even think of stuffing a statue of liberty sized wind generator into a standard packing crate and having it assembled by two people.
I also couldn't envision a battery system capable of storing 2-4MWh (megawatt-hours) of juice and not bringing the helicopter or truck over its weight limit. That's like 2,000 heavy duty car batteries (No way you're going to use anything pricier than lead-acid for such a large battery). So that's around 60,000 to 100,000 pounds of weight. Too heavy for a truck, although a heavy bomber or cargo plane could carry the load. The parachute would be a sight to be seen to slow that lead weight on its way down.
And lastly, what about the cooling tower and the inverters and the transformers. Such a large plant will need some heavy duty electrical equipment to deliver consistant frequency and voltage (assuming it gives out standard 110/220 volts, 50/60 Hz alternating current).
As far as the patents go, assuming they really do have 180 relevent patents (at $30,000 a pop, I would be a little suprised), they're just an indicator of how much you paid your attorneys. Just because you have a patent doesn't mean it works or is even physically possible.
It turned out that the satellite had a systematic error in how it deduced temperature. Once the error was fixed, it turns out that the satellite now is in agreement with land measurements. I cannot where I read this since this happened quite some time ago.
While I do agree that a 5 degree shift would be quite dramatic, I think we're on the road for far worse if we continue business as usual (1-2% per year CO2 growth until over half of the earth's fossil carbon is burnt, with no real effort in sequesteration or renewables).
Also, if the climate shifts to where it was during the late Mesozoic/early Tertiary era, then the only temperate area will be Antarctica. The landmass of Antarctica and the polar winds will prevent excessive heat from reaching continental Antarctica, but the Artic Ocean will be bring up warm waters from the equator and keep the climate tropical (just barely, but still warmer than Florida).
If we do manage to dump all the carbon contained in coal, oil, natural gas, coalbed methane, oil shale, tar/oil sands, peat, whatever other flammable fossil fuels we come up with, we will easily exceed the CO2 concentrations of the late Mesozoic. Don't forget that there's lots of methane and carbon locked up as hydrates and in permafrost that will get released in the process, and raising ocean temperatures will release CO2 (since hot water holds less gas than cold water).
So we're not talking about a 5 degree shift, but about a 75 degree shift. Tundra and taiga will no longer be found, and there will only be temperate land (with no topsoil, I may add) in Antarctica. In addition, coastal flooding will be so massive that the globe will look quite different.
It will take time, since the oceans and ice caps have enourmous thermal inertia, but climate change is accelerating exponentially (something like e^t) as our emissions grow exponentially. The melting is more like t^2 * e^t right now, and t * e^t once most of the ice in the world is melting. The exponential comes from the exponential solar forcing (CO concentrations are increasing exponentially), the t^2 comes because a doubling in climate change roughly doubles the melt area and doubles the melt rate. It might even be t^3 * e^t because the melt season will also increase, since until winter temps are above freezing, the melting will only occur during the summer.
One last point is that the sun is brighter now than during the Mesozoic, so given the same atmosphere and geography, it will get even warmer.