The article (which you can download with Sci-Hub) is not about the length of Earth's day, although it does produce a new and more accurate estimate of it at early epochs on Earth. The paper is really about the Milankovitch Cycle that controls climate on a ~22,000 year time scale which be evident if TFS bothered to include the paper's title Proterozoic Milankovitch cycles and the history of the solar system.
The main purpose of the study was to use geological data to construct the Milankovitch cycle going back more than a billion years.
Here in Ontario emissions from power generation have been going up despite the government going mad with wind and solar. Yes, the remaining coal plants have been shut down -- and the nukes (60% of power) and hydroelectric have been dialed back to provide space on the grid to accommodate the mandated 'first to the grid' rule for this stuff. But to fill in the fluctuations and sags in wind they have also been aggressively adding gas turbines -- so overall emissions are rising.
Never trust an AC without links. From this site it appears that Ontario's carbon emissions fell from 2005 to 2016. And all of Canada is down from 2006 despite economic and population growth.
we're still burning more coal. In fact we burn more now than all of the 18th century. ANd we literally ran out of whale oil.
so what is your point?
But U.S. peak coal use was in 2007. Every year for the last five years coal consumption has fallen from the previous year in the midst of a strong economy (thanks Obama!). U.S. annual coal use is down to mid-1980s levels. By 2021 we should have turned the clock back a full 40 years.
Don't leave us hanging. List what these expensive materials are, and how much they add to the cost of each panel?
Are you referring to the dopants that added to the silicon in order create the solar cell? There are the extremely rare and expensive elements of boron and phosphorous. One you dump into your clothes washer (borax) and the other you dump on to your lawn and garden.
and there's no shortage of unused land in the world.
Not all "unused" land is equally useless though. If it gets plenty of sunlight, but also plenty of rain, it's being used as farm land and the value of that land is what could have instead been earned if it were being used for farming..
But that farm land is a fine place for wind turbines, and it happens a lot of U.S. farm land in the nation's central "wind belt". And farmers don't complain about wind turbines spoiling their view, and they are delighted to collect a monthly check for simply allowing the turbine to be there.
I am planning, next time I do a general job board resume posting (if I do), not to have my phone number at all, and to provide a special email address.
I have found that posting a resume on Dice, for example, immediately generates several entirely useless calls daily for short term contracts for unrelated (or barely related) skill sets, at noncompetitive wages in places where I do not live.
The email address will get loads of recruiter spam of course, but I can quickly scan that any time I want and easily delete the cr@p.
Recruiters with decent job opportunities are best accessed through LinkedIn, Hired, and other non-bulletin board like platforms.
I was set on keeping it for a long time as a high reliability back-up in emergency situations, when cell networks could get saturated (the phone company powers the land line independently of the local power grid) but when the only calls I was getting were spam, and that on a daily basis, justifying the cost for something that was only being a perpetual nuisance made no sense.
It was really the daily nuisance factor that made me drop it.
Deceptive counting.
Once you add in transportation, power plants, prospecting, refining, and the other dependent industries, the number goes up.
For example, there are 75,000 coal miners,
There are 30,000 employed in the transport of said coal.
Coal power plants employ another 60,000.
Prospectors employ another 10,000 or so.
Still not absurdly huge, but much larger than you are claiming.
This roughly correct, there are about 174,000 coal related jobs in the U.S., making it (if it were a single company) about the 48th largest employer in the country, behind Costco, and Walmart is still 13 times larger, and only one in 800 working Americans is employed by this industry at all. Of course replacing coal with other forms of power still keeps power plant workers employed, so any shift away from coal will keep many of these still working.
Is there any way that coal plants can be adapted to burn gas rather than coal?
Yes, and coal plant conversions are a major business. They don't have the efficiency of an advanced combined cycle plant, and thus can't compete long term, but they have their place.
A case can be made for providing subsidies for nuclear power to push carbon releasing power out of the picture faster. But subsidizing nuclear and coal is corrupt insanity. If the case were made for how we could get rid of coal faster I'd be all for giving it a hearing.
Natural Gas Advanced Combined Cycle plants are cheaper than coal plants right now, which is why they are pushing coal fired power plants out of business right now. Check out up-to-date levelized costs for all the types of power plants, NG advanced combined cycle beats them all - which is why hard nosed capitalist businessmen have been replacing coal with natural gas power at (currently) a rate of 20 GW a year.
So what you are saying is that your lead sentence is false, the reef is more than the dead skeletons of corals, given that part of it is alive. Further, although you do not acknowledge it or perhaps even know it, it is also an entire eco-system consisting of more than just corals - in fact they are the most diverse ecosystems in the entire ocean.
The notion that "dead corals will bounce back within a year or two" is similar to asserting - "Hey, trees sprout from seeds every spring! So if an old-growth forest is destroyed, it can bounce back the very next year!"
Big, big different between the earliest stages of recolonization and a mature ecosystem.
Industry doesn't give a fuck about DeBeers' marketing/PR about diamond only being "real" when the got dug out of the ground by some child slave labor, despite having the same carbon atoms in the exact same position as when white lab coats do it.
Industry is happily using "non-real" diamond grown in labs : much cheaper, but the exact same properties (well obviously, it's the exact same structure after all).
For high tech industrial purposes (i.e. not as an abrasive) synthetic diamonds are far superior to natural diamonds due to their uniform properties and lack of flaws and impurities. And if you want impurities they can be precisely doped, something impossible with natural diamonds.
DeBeers has literally trillions of carats of diamonds in their vaults
Given peak historic production of ~175 million carats/year, order of magnitude citation badly needed.
The DiamondShades website is quite informative.
I especially liked this remark on its first page (it has a four page payout): "Moreover, supply of diamonds generally precedes demand."
In other words (and this is easily corroborated by looking at the history of diamond mining and marketing): diamonds are abundant enough that the industry keeps finding rich supplies that outstrip existing demand. So the industry responds in two ways - aggressive marketing (giving diamond engagement rings was not a "tradition" until DeBeers marketing created it in the 1920s), and restricting production or sales (during the Depression DeBeers built up a stockpile equal to several years of sales).
Someone already addressed this -sort of - but here is a simpler analysis without resort to bringing in the odd unit of measurement known as "filing cabinets".
The living room of a large house might be 600 square feet, with a 12 foot ceiling (since large houses with large living rooms often have vault ceilings), or 7200 cubic feet. This is about 200 cubic meters, and at the density of diamond (the flat synthetic plates stack well) this would amount to 700 tonnes, or 700 million grams, of 3.5 billion carats. So you would need about 300 large living rooms to get to a trillion carats.
I had been wondering when someone would take this step - direct marketing cheap synthetic diamonds.
Until now the producers of synthetics had been participating in the cartel (once run directly by DeBeers, but still in existence as a profitable collaboration among diamond producers), pricing their wares at the same price point as the (cartel fixed) prices of natural diamonds.
The cartel had enforcement muscle by having the power to keep the diamonds of non-complaint companies out of the regular jewelry supply chain. The obvious solution is direct marketing of diamonds outside this supply chain.
I did not expect it would be deBeers itself that would take this step. But it makes sense, since they have dropped control of the cartel, and this allows them to capitalize on this market ahead of any competition, who will now be playing catch up.
And natural diamonds are not rare. Since everyone in the world who wants one can buy one they could not possibly be genuinely rare. In fact the 'problem' that the industry faced after the discovery of the diamond pipes in Africa, and then Siberia and Australia is increasing the market to absorb the glut in potential production with their extremely effective century-long marketing campaigns.
So, no protection at all should be applied until a species becomes actually endangered? We should watch the range and number of wild species collapse until its survival is actually endangered before doing something about it?
Hmm, seems like it would make much more sense to observe species moving in the direction of becoming endangered, and take modest measures to prevent that from happening in the first place. Waiting for a crisis before taking any action is stupid.
It is actually in the interest to owners of private property to prevent the species from becoming endangered, because if that happens legal restrictions go into effect on what they can do with land with endangered populations on it. But if steps are taken to prevent this from happening, those legal restrictions do not ever go into effect.
Preventing a species from becoming endangered is in the best interest of capitalist developers and land owners wishing to exploit their property commercially (or for any other reason).
"There is an excess of feral cats in the US, and even domesticated cats SIMPLY ENJOY KILLING THINGS. They're *cats*. That's what they do.
As a cat owner for many years I emphasize the accuracy of this remark. The Felidae are the most successful predator family on Earth, they are the top predators on every continent on which they are found (and haven't been hunted to extinction as the American Lion was). Those adorable behaviors of house cats are adaptations to hunting - "playing" with small things, their ability to site motionless but alert for hours, pouncing etc.
We had rodent invasion problems constantly in our present house until we got three house cats (adopted young feral cats), but once we got the cats, rodent problems promptly vanished and have never recurred.
Our cats never go outside. And they like it that way now. And indoor cats live longer.
And yes, I support controlling feral cat populations to protect wildlife. It is a necessity. They are just too efficient as killers.
There was a sharp disconnect in the economy start in around 1972 when worker's wages suddenly (and permanently) became completely disconnected from productivity, which it had tracked for decades. At that time the oldest boomers were still in the 20s. The rigging of the economy for the benefit of corporation and the plutocracy was well established by the early 1980s, this was done by men who were all from that so-called "Greatest Generation". Things were rigged against the boomers from the time they entered the job market.
Due service glitches multiple times a week - during which we power cycle the whole chain of devices from cable modem, to router, to switch, to wi-fi just to make sure everything connects correctly again - we are following the FBI's recommendation. Cheers for Spectrum!
This is called Vavilovian mimicry and is very, very well known. There are many weed species that have been selected to match the growth period, habit, and appearance of crop plants, and are thus propagated inadvertently by farming. They only need to mimic during the part of the their life cycle where they are subject to weeding, but some are near replicas are of the crop plant despite belonging to different genera.
I think robotic farming may make this a lot harder for the weed. If you have robot planter that exactly space the seeds, and robotic sprayers that can both recognize crops based on their appearance, but can also use their planting pattern for recognition, it could become a lot harder. Also the optical sensors could out perform the human eye. Narrow band filters might be very useful for recognizing the crop plant. In fact this might offer another genetic engineering tool. Add an unusual pigment or pigments that reflect specific wavelengths which the robot can detect with filters, but won't be found in any of the weed species. Essentially adding optical tagging.
Slashdot Mirror
The article (which you can download with Sci-Hub) is not about the length of Earth's day, although it does produce a new and more accurate estimate of it at early epochs on Earth. The paper is really about the Milankovitch Cycle that controls climate on a ~22,000 year time scale which be evident if TFS bothered to include the paper's title Proterozoic Milankovitch cycles and the history of the solar system.
The main purpose of the study was to use geological data to construct the Milankovitch cycle going back more than a billion years.
Here in Ontario emissions from power generation have been going up despite the government going mad with wind and solar. Yes, the remaining coal plants have been shut down -- and the nukes (60% of power) and hydroelectric have been dialed back to provide space on the grid to accommodate the mandated 'first to the grid' rule for this stuff. But to fill in the fluctuations and sags in wind they have also been aggressively adding gas turbines -- so overall emissions are rising.
Never trust an AC without links. From this site it appears that Ontario's carbon emissions fell from 2005 to 2016. And all of Canada is down from 2006 despite economic and population growth.
... In BC, for example, the higher carbon tax is being used to finance carbon emission quadrupling giant hydro dams and LNG projects...
Quadrupling relative to what? And while LNG releases carbon, what trick do those British Columbians have to get hydroelectric dams to emit carbon?
we're still burning more coal. In fact we burn more now than all of the 18th century. ANd we literally ran out of whale oil.
so what is your point?
But U.S. peak coal use was in 2007. Every year for the last five years coal consumption has fallen from the previous year in the midst of a strong economy (thanks Obama!). U.S. annual coal use is down to mid-1980s levels. By 2021 we should have turned the clock back a full 40 years.
Don't leave us hanging. List what these expensive materials are, and how much they add to the cost of each panel?
Are you referring to the dopants that added to the silicon in order create the solar cell? There are the extremely rare and expensive elements of boron and phosphorous. One you dump into your clothes washer (borax) and the other you dump on to your lawn and garden.
and there's no shortage of unused land in the world.
Not all "unused" land is equally useless though. If it gets plenty of sunlight, but also plenty of rain, it's being used as farm land and the value of that land is what could have instead been earned if it were being used for farming..
But that farm land is a fine place for wind turbines, and it happens a lot of U.S. farm land in the nation's central "wind belt". And farmers don't complain about wind turbines spoiling their view, and they are delighted to collect a monthly check for simply allowing the turbine to be there.
I am planning, next time I do a general job board resume posting (if I do), not to have my phone number at all, and to provide a special email address.
I have found that posting a resume on Dice, for example, immediately generates several entirely useless calls daily for short term contracts for unrelated (or barely related) skill sets, at noncompetitive wages in places where I do not live.
The email address will get loads of recruiter spam of course, but I can quickly scan that any time I want and easily delete the cr@p.
Recruiters with decent job opportunities are best accessed through LinkedIn, Hired, and other non-bulletin board like platforms.
The old joke is: "Emacs is a good operating system, but what it lacks is a decent text editor."
And this is why I dropped my land line.
I was set on keeping it for a long time as a high reliability back-up in emergency situations, when cell networks could get saturated (the phone company powers the land line independently of the local power grid) but when the only calls I was getting were spam, and that on a daily basis, justifying the cost for something that was only being a perpetual nuisance made no sense.
It was really the daily nuisance factor that made me drop it.
Deceptive counting. Once you add in transportation, power plants, prospecting, refining, and the other dependent industries, the number goes up.
For example, there are 75,000 coal miners, There are 30,000 employed in the transport of said coal. Coal power plants employ another 60,000. Prospectors employ another 10,000 or so.
Still not absurdly huge, but much larger than you are claiming.
This roughly correct, there are about 174,000 coal related jobs in the U.S., making it (if it were a single company) about the 48th largest employer in the country, behind Costco, and Walmart is still 13 times larger, and only one in 800 working Americans is employed by this industry at all. Of course replacing coal with other forms of power still keeps power plant workers employed, so any shift away from coal will keep many of these still working.
Is there any way that coal plants can be adapted to burn gas rather than coal?
Yes, and coal plant conversions are a major business. They don't have the efficiency of an advanced combined cycle plant, and thus can't compete long term, but they have their place.
Don't presume to speak for me.
A case can be made for providing subsidies for nuclear power to push carbon releasing power out of the picture faster. But subsidizing nuclear and coal is corrupt insanity. If the case were made for how we could get rid of coal faster I'd be all for giving it a hearing.
Low quality AC BS.
Natural Gas Advanced Combined Cycle plants are cheaper than coal plants right now, which is why they are pushing coal fired power plants out of business right now. Check out up-to-date levelized costs for all the types of power plants, NG advanced combined cycle beats them all - which is why hard nosed capitalist businessmen have been replacing coal with natural gas power at (currently) a rate of 20 GW a year.
So what you are saying is that your lead sentence is false, the reef is more than the dead skeletons of corals, given that part of it is alive. Further, although you do not acknowledge it or perhaps even know it, it is also an entire eco-system consisting of more than just corals - in fact they are the most diverse ecosystems in the entire ocean.
The notion that "dead corals will bounce back within a year or two" is similar to asserting - "Hey, trees sprout from seeds every spring! So if an old-growth forest is destroyed, it can bounce back the very next year!"
Big, big different between the earliest stages of recolonization and a mature ecosystem.
But *those* are industrial uses.
Industry doesn't give a fuck about DeBeers' marketing/PR about diamond only being "real" when the got dug out of the ground by some child slave labor, despite having the same carbon atoms in the exact same position as when white lab coats do it.
Industry is happily using "non-real" diamond grown in labs : much cheaper, but the exact same properties (well obviously, it's the exact same structure after all).
For high tech industrial purposes (i.e. not as an abrasive) synthetic diamonds are far superior to natural diamonds due to their uniform properties and lack of flaws and impurities. And if you want impurities they can be precisely doped, something impossible with natural diamonds.
DeBeers has literally trillions of carats of diamonds in their vaults
Given peak historic production of ~175 million carats/year, order of magnitude citation badly needed.
The DiamondShades website is quite informative.
I especially liked this remark on its first page (it has a four page payout): "Moreover, supply of diamonds generally precedes demand."
In other words (and this is easily corroborated by looking at the history of diamond mining and marketing): diamonds are abundant enough that the industry keeps finding rich supplies that outstrip existing demand. So the industry responds in two ways - aggressive marketing (giving diamond engagement rings was not a "tradition" until DeBeers marketing created it in the 1920s), and restricting production or sales (during the Depression DeBeers built up a stockpile equal to several years of sales).
Someone already addressed this -sort of - but here is a simpler analysis without resort to bringing in the odd unit of measurement known as "filing cabinets".
The living room of a large house might be 600 square feet, with a 12 foot ceiling (since large houses with large living rooms often have vault ceilings), or 7200 cubic feet. This is about 200 cubic meters, and at the density of diamond (the flat synthetic plates stack well) this would amount to 700 tonnes, or 700 million grams, of 3.5 billion carats. So you would need about 300 large living rooms to get to a trillion carats.
I had been wondering when someone would take this step - direct marketing cheap synthetic diamonds.
Until now the producers of synthetics had been participating in the cartel (once run directly by DeBeers, but still in existence as a profitable collaboration among diamond producers), pricing their wares at the same price point as the (cartel fixed) prices of natural diamonds.
The cartel had enforcement muscle by having the power to keep the diamonds of non-complaint companies out of the regular jewelry supply chain. The obvious solution is direct marketing of diamonds outside this supply chain.
I did not expect it would be deBeers itself that would take this step. But it makes sense, since they have dropped control of the cartel, and this allows them to capitalize on this market ahead of any competition, who will now be playing catch up.
And natural diamonds are not rare. Since everyone in the world who wants one can buy one they could not possibly be genuinely rare. In fact the 'problem' that the industry faced after the discovery of the diamond pipes in Africa, and then Siberia and Australia is increasing the market to absorb the glut in potential production with their extremely effective century-long marketing campaigns.
Are you mad? One fire and it's all gone. Carve it into a stone tablet if its important.
Hard to do with actual currency. Those $100 bills don't take the heat either.
However it you return the ashes to the treasury they will endeavor to validate that they are $100 bills and will replace them if they can.
And yet, people in hot countries don't really have air-con according to this. What does that tell you?
They are relatively poor.
So, no protection at all should be applied until a species becomes actually endangered? We should watch the range and number of wild species collapse until its survival is actually endangered before doing something about it?
Hmm, seems like it would make much more sense to observe species moving in the direction of becoming endangered, and take modest measures to prevent that from happening in the first place. Waiting for a crisis before taking any action is stupid.
The fact is the burrowing owl is disappearing in California.
It is actually in the interest to owners of private property to prevent the species from becoming endangered, because if that happens legal restrictions go into effect on what they can do with land with endangered populations on it. But if steps are taken to prevent this from happening, those legal restrictions do not ever go into effect.
Preventing a species from becoming endangered is in the best interest of capitalist developers and land owners wishing to exploit their property commercially (or for any other reason).
"There is an excess of feral cats in the US, and even domesticated cats SIMPLY ENJOY KILLING THINGS. They're *cats*. That's what they do.
As a cat owner for many years I emphasize the accuracy of this remark. The Felidae are the most successful predator family on Earth, they are the top predators on every continent on which they are found (and haven't been hunted to extinction as the American Lion was). Those adorable behaviors of house cats are adaptations to hunting - "playing" with small things, their ability to site motionless but alert for hours, pouncing etc.
We had rodent invasion problems constantly in our present house until we got three house cats (adopted young feral cats), but once we got the cats, rodent problems promptly vanished and have never recurred.
Our cats never go outside. And they like it that way now. And indoor cats live longer.
And yes, I support controlling feral cat populations to protect wildlife. It is a necessity. They are just too efficient as killers.
Right you are.
There was a sharp disconnect in the economy start in around 1972 when worker's wages suddenly (and permanently) became completely disconnected from productivity, which it had tracked for decades. At that time the oldest boomers were still in the 20s. The rigging of the economy for the benefit of corporation and the plutocracy was well established by the early 1980s, this was done by men who were all from that so-called "Greatest Generation". Things were rigged against the boomers from the time they entered the job market.
Due service glitches multiple times a week - during which we power cycle the whole chain of devices from cable modem, to router, to switch, to wi-fi just to make sure everything connects correctly again - we are following the FBI's recommendation. Cheers for Spectrum!
This is called Vavilovian mimicry and is very, very well known. There are many weed species that have been selected to match the growth period, habit, and appearance of crop plants, and are thus propagated inadvertently by farming. They only need to mimic during the part of the their life cycle where they are subject to weeding, but some are near replicas are of the crop plant despite belonging to different genera.
I think robotic farming may make this a lot harder for the weed. If you have robot planter that exactly space the seeds, and robotic sprayers that can both recognize crops based on their appearance, but can also use their planting pattern for recognition, it could become a lot harder. Also the optical sensors could out perform the human eye. Narrow band filters might be very useful for recognizing the crop plant. In fact this might offer another genetic engineering tool. Add an unusual pigment or pigments that reflect specific wavelengths which the robot can detect with filters, but won't be found in any of the weed species. Essentially adding optical tagging.