Warming in Russia could be very bad because there are megatons of methane in the permafrost in Siberia that, if it should be released due to melting, is going to rapidly accelerate warming.
An interglacial period doesn't mean the glaciers are going to reappear tomorrow, and it certainly doesn't give us license to vomit CO2 into the atmosphere in ever-increasing quantities under the false impression that we're helping.
Because the "good side" isn't permanent, and once the more severe effects, like rain belts shifting, you're going to see the "bad side".
Beyond that, in many areas, mild winters are really fucking bad. Where I live, that means much lower snow pack, which means major water restrictions and wildfire season coming earlier and earlier every year.
For now, it's screwing other people over. Within a few decades it will be screwing that country boy and his kids over. And really, it's already screwing the country boy over, but just in more subtle ways, like rising food costs and the increasing price of his property insurance.
We must continue to subsdiz... er, I mean encourage fossil fuel use, because, you know, it's what Jesus and George Washington would want! Remember folks, billionaires need lots of money so they can be protected from the effects of the products they produce.
Because there is no capital punishment in Norway. To execute him would either make that an extrajudicial killing (bad) or retroactively changing laws to allow him to be executed (also bad).
A total ban is probably ludicrous, but by the same token, we don't let people shit in public, because of health concerns and basic social decency, so why is it that we let people smoke in public?
They're just a shrinking minority raging against the dying of the light. By this point, they seem to take great pride in being obnoxious assholes, as the irascible malcontents they truly are.
And please, spare us "what about the poor people!" If you gave a shit about the poor people of the world, you'd be advocating for solutions that wasn't about to make their lives much much worse.
I wonder, in the long run, if Iceland, due to its wealth of geothermal energy, is going to become a sort of new Saudi Arabia.
Heck, I look at my own backyard, British Columbia, and just wonder at the short-sightedness of government planners. Right now we're going to be building the Site C dam in the north eastern part of the province, which means massive upgrades to transmission capacity to bring all that power to the southwestern corner of the province.
Meanwhile, much of the north coast of British Columbia is very geologically active; hot springs everywhere, plenty of sub-surface geological activity. The geothermal potential in the northwest part of the province is huge, and wouldn't mean having to flood large valleys to do it. While I'm in general in favor of hydroelectric, it has its environmental cost as well, but at the very least if we're working on an energy strategy for our province for the next century, we should be looking at diversifying, and it isn't going to cost that much more to build the transmission capacity to the north coast than to the most inland sections of the province.
In the long run, I think jurisdictions blessed with plenty of geothermal capacity are going to be hotbeds of energy production.
That is until some bastard comes along and invents economical cold fusion....
There are posters here who believe it's their god-given right to dry their clothes at peak usage times and not have to pay for it. For many of these people, pseudo-skepticism is the obvious answer, because it marries their inherent selfishness with a claim that amounts to "of course you can have your cake and eat it too".
You can create an energy storage system with a pumped-storage hydroelectric systems pumped-storage hydroelectric systems . In essence, you use wind or solar to pump the water up, and then you use a hydroelectric generation system to produce power even during periods when there is no sun or wind. There are other systems, like pumped heat electrical systems as well.
I don't know where you went to school, but when I was in school they taught about this fancy amazing thing called "potential energy". There are other ways to store energy other than big-ass batteries.
And, of course, some forms of renewables are fairly constant. In some areas, geothermal is the answer.
Exactly. I'm unsure of why people think this complaint is valid. it's almost like someone saying "Until cars can go 100mph, there's no use for cars, so we should stick with horse and buggy!"
Renewables are coming into grids in a staged fashion, and in the long run, you won't have the monochrome energy system many areas have (the coal-burning power station), you will have a variety of sources; solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and along with better energy storage systems (like the "pumped" systems you mention), so that the flaws in one form of renewable are made up by the other.
The only reason people demand the "all or nothing" approach, so far as I can see, is to create a goalpost they think renewables won't be able to meet. It's create a false dilemma.
If prices go up, they go up. That is going to happen no matter what. But since it's likely, in the medium term, integration of renewables will be staged, I doubt in many places you're going to be forced to dry your clothes at 2am. However, you may end up with a pricing model that encourages that. So what? That's why timers were invented.
First of all, what you have is anecdotes, you have nothing to back them up, other than your claim. It doesn't take into account types of clouds, other possible conditions that could lead to cooler temperatures. I'd say we're at the point where your hypothesis isn't even wrong. It's a cartoon caricature of science.
Second of all, for clouds to be asserted as a means of reducing the overall effect of CO2, you have to demonstrate that cloud cover is increasing. At the moment, scientists, even if the entire effect of clouds isn't known, treat them as a relatively stable constant. If you have some evidence to demonstrate that there is significant increases in clouds, go to it, provide that. Otherwise, this is just another version of the rather brain-dead "but clouds!" meme that pseudo-skeptics throw out there; another example of an objection whose veracity, or even logic, doesn't matter. All that matters is you said the words.
The problem with these claims that CO2 makes a difference is that all the advocates of this bizarre view do is look at the raw number "ah, what can a 1% ppm increase do, it's peanuts", when in fact, when you look at the size of the atmosphere and think about how much additional energy is being trapped, that small increase means a fucking shitload of additional solar radiation getting trapped in the lower atmosphere.
So the question always becomes, whence the energy? If it isn't heating the surface and the oceans, then what it's doing? Is there a magic energy sink that just makes excess energy go away?
In reality, of course, the cloud claim has always been bunk. Researchers have treated clouds as relatively constant over time (in other words, there wasn't that much different in overall cloud cover in 1800 as there was in 1900 or 2000). So while the precise effects of clouds may not be known, they can be treated as a relatively stable quantity. If clouds are raising albedo, then surely those making the claim can provide data demonstrating significant increases in cloud cover.
At the end of the day, it's just another pseudo-skeptic meme that gets repeated. For the pseudo-skeptic crowd, it does not matter that an objection is true, or even makes sense. All that matters is that an objection was made. Somehow, providing you can form a challenge out of a series of words strung together into a proper sentence, an entire scientific discipline can be brought down. These people are no different than the people who were claiming cigarettes didn't cause cancer or the people that claim the Earth is only 6,000 years old and Noah saved all the animals with a big ol' wooden boat.
It is clear that it's a bad thing. It will increase ocean temperatures and alter ocean pH levels, causing massive changes to a food source that feeds hundreds of millions of people. It will shift rainbelts, rendering currently arable land far less useful to agriculture (or far more expensive to keep under cultivation), while taking marginal agricultural land completely out of the food supply. It will see a slow but steady inundation of coastal areas, again, effecting hundreds of millions of people. It is already seeing formerly "tropical" diseases creeping to higher latitudes.
As to accusations of crony capitalism, how is not pricing fossil fuels for the actual costs they incur anything but handing fossil fuel companies probably the largest set of financial subsidies in human history? Do you think continue to allow people like the Kochs to profit massively off of an energy source that is heating the planet (and no, there's no debate that it's happening, not in the scientific circles, the WSJ is not a science journal and Frank Spencer stopped being a climatologist a couple of decades ago) anything but crony capitalism?
For chrissakes, even the Saudis know the days of oil as a major energy source are numbered, which is why they're working to create one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in history: http://www.reuters.com/article... .
If the market was able to produce a solution on its own, it would have been now. The market is going to need a kick in the nuts, and that kick in the nuts is making fossil fuels more expensive.
It will, however, even in relatively small overall increases in concentration in the atmosphere, heat up the surface, so while it isn't a pollutant by some very narrow definition of "pollutant", it can have large scale detrimental effects. But then again, when you're trying to win debates with moronic asides and dull-witted rhetorical tricks, I guess it scarcely matters.
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It is for agrarian and urbanized civilization.
But many humans can't. Look what happens when a bunch of humans from the Middle East decide they want to pick up and move to Europe.
Warming in Russia could be very bad because there are megatons of methane in the permafrost in Siberia that, if it should be released due to melting, is going to rapidly accelerate warming.
An interglacial period doesn't mean the glaciers are going to reappear tomorrow, and it certainly doesn't give us license to vomit CO2 into the atmosphere in ever-increasing quantities under the false impression that we're helping.
Because the "good side" isn't permanent, and once the more severe effects, like rain belts shifting, you're going to see the "bad side".
Beyond that, in many areas, mild winters are really fucking bad. Where I live, that means much lower snow pack, which means major water restrictions and wildfire season coming earlier and earlier every year.
For now, it's screwing other people over. Within a few decades it will be screwing that country boy and his kids over. And really, it's already screwing the country boy over, but just in more subtle ways, like rising food costs and the increasing price of his property insurance.
We must continue to subsdiz... er, I mean encourage fossil fuel use, because, you know, it's what Jesus and George Washington would want! Remember folks, billionaires need lots of money so they can be protected from the effects of the products they produce.
Because there is no capital punishment in Norway. To execute him would either make that an extrajudicial killing (bad) or retroactively changing laws to allow him to be executed (also bad).
Translation: I have the mind of pathetic child. Don't make me cry! WAHHHHHHH!!!!!
A total ban is probably ludicrous, but by the same token, we don't let people shit in public, because of health concerns and basic social decency, so why is it that we let people smoke in public?
None of these have been associated with causing lung problems and cancer with those standing nearby like smoking has. It isn't the same thing.
They're just a shrinking minority raging against the dying of the light. By this point, they seem to take great pride in being obnoxious assholes, as the irascible malcontents they truly are.
Great. Do it when you are truly alone. But alone doesn't really mean hanging out outside next to the doors as people walk by.
What I can't understand is why anyone takes that useless twat Muller seriously.
Or, to put it another way, you're willing to keep subsidizing, and likely at ever growing rates, the profits of the owners of fossil fuel stocks.
Not for long it won't be.
And please, spare us "what about the poor people!" If you gave a shit about the poor people of the world, you'd be advocating for solutions that wasn't about to make their lives much much worse.
I wonder, in the long run, if Iceland, due to its wealth of geothermal energy, is going to become a sort of new Saudi Arabia.
Heck, I look at my own backyard, British Columbia, and just wonder at the short-sightedness of government planners. Right now we're going to be building the Site C dam in the north eastern part of the province, which means massive upgrades to transmission capacity to bring all that power to the southwestern corner of the province.
Meanwhile, much of the north coast of British Columbia is very geologically active; hot springs everywhere, plenty of sub-surface geological activity. The geothermal potential in the northwest part of the province is huge, and wouldn't mean having to flood large valleys to do it. While I'm in general in favor of hydroelectric, it has its environmental cost as well, but at the very least if we're working on an energy strategy for our province for the next century, we should be looking at diversifying, and it isn't going to cost that much more to build the transmission capacity to the north coast than to the most inland sections of the province.
In the long run, I think jurisdictions blessed with plenty of geothermal capacity are going to be hotbeds of energy production.
That is until some bastard comes along and invents economical cold fusion....
There are posters here who believe it's their god-given right to dry their clothes at peak usage times and not have to pay for it. For many of these people, pseudo-skepticism is the obvious answer, because it marries their inherent selfishness with a claim that amounts to "of course you can have your cake and eat it too".
You can create an energy storage system with a pumped-storage hydroelectric systems pumped-storage hydroelectric systems . In essence, you use wind or solar to pump the water up, and then you use a hydroelectric generation system to produce power even during periods when there is no sun or wind. There are other systems, like pumped heat electrical systems as well.
I don't know where you went to school, but when I was in school they taught about this fancy amazing thing called "potential energy". There are other ways to store energy other than big-ass batteries.
And, of course, some forms of renewables are fairly constant. In some areas, geothermal is the answer.
Exactly. I'm unsure of why people think this complaint is valid. it's almost like someone saying "Until cars can go 100mph, there's no use for cars, so we should stick with horse and buggy!"
Renewables are coming into grids in a staged fashion, and in the long run, you won't have the monochrome energy system many areas have (the coal-burning power station), you will have a variety of sources; solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and along with better energy storage systems (like the "pumped" systems you mention), so that the flaws in one form of renewable are made up by the other.
The only reason people demand the "all or nothing" approach, so far as I can see, is to create a goalpost they think renewables won't be able to meet. It's create a false dilemma.
If prices go up, they go up. That is going to happen no matter what. But since it's likely, in the medium term, integration of renewables will be staged, I doubt in many places you're going to be forced to dry your clothes at 2am. However, you may end up with a pricing model that encourages that. So what? That's why timers were invented.
First of all, what you have is anecdotes, you have nothing to back them up, other than your claim. It doesn't take into account types of clouds, other possible conditions that could lead to cooler temperatures. I'd say we're at the point where your hypothesis isn't even wrong. It's a cartoon caricature of science.
Second of all, for clouds to be asserted as a means of reducing the overall effect of CO2, you have to demonstrate that cloud cover is increasing. At the moment, scientists, even if the entire effect of clouds isn't known, treat them as a relatively stable constant. If you have some evidence to demonstrate that there is significant increases in clouds, go to it, provide that. Otherwise, this is just another version of the rather brain-dead "but clouds!" meme that pseudo-skeptics throw out there; another example of an objection whose veracity, or even logic, doesn't matter. All that matters is you said the words.
The problem with these claims that CO2 makes a difference is that all the advocates of this bizarre view do is look at the raw number "ah, what can a 1% ppm increase do, it's peanuts", when in fact, when you look at the size of the atmosphere and think about how much additional energy is being trapped, that small increase means a fucking shitload of additional solar radiation getting trapped in the lower atmosphere.
So the question always becomes, whence the energy? If it isn't heating the surface and the oceans, then what it's doing? Is there a magic energy sink that just makes excess energy go away?
In reality, of course, the cloud claim has always been bunk. Researchers have treated clouds as relatively constant over time (in other words, there wasn't that much different in overall cloud cover in 1800 as there was in 1900 or 2000). So while the precise effects of clouds may not be known, they can be treated as a relatively stable quantity. If clouds are raising albedo, then surely those making the claim can provide data demonstrating significant increases in cloud cover.
At the end of the day, it's just another pseudo-skeptic meme that gets repeated. For the pseudo-skeptic crowd, it does not matter that an objection is true, or even makes sense. All that matters is that an objection was made. Somehow, providing you can form a challenge out of a series of words strung together into a proper sentence, an entire scientific discipline can be brought down. These people are no different than the people who were claiming cigarettes didn't cause cancer or the people that claim the Earth is only 6,000 years old and Noah saved all the animals with a big ol' wooden boat.
It is clear that it's a bad thing. It will increase ocean temperatures and alter ocean pH levels, causing massive changes to a food source that feeds hundreds of millions of people. It will shift rainbelts, rendering currently arable land far less useful to agriculture (or far more expensive to keep under cultivation), while taking marginal agricultural land completely out of the food supply. It will see a slow but steady inundation of coastal areas, again, effecting hundreds of millions of people. It is already seeing formerly "tropical" diseases creeping to higher latitudes.
As to accusations of crony capitalism, how is not pricing fossil fuels for the actual costs they incur anything but handing fossil fuel companies probably the largest set of financial subsidies in human history? Do you think continue to allow people like the Kochs to profit massively off of an energy source that is heating the planet (and no, there's no debate that it's happening, not in the scientific circles, the WSJ is not a science journal and Frank Spencer stopped being a climatologist a couple of decades ago) anything but crony capitalism?
For chrissakes, even the Saudis know the days of oil as a major energy source are numbered, which is why they're working to create one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in history: http://www.reuters.com/article... .
If the market was able to produce a solution on its own, it would have been now. The market is going to need a kick in the nuts, and that kick in the nuts is making fossil fuels more expensive.
It will, however, even in relatively small overall increases in concentration in the atmosphere, heat up the surface, so while it isn't a pollutant by some very narrow definition of "pollutant", it can have large scale detrimental effects. But then again, when you're trying to win debates with moronic asides and dull-witted rhetorical tricks, I guess it scarcely matters.