IGX

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Gene wrote:

nafod wrote:Within the Navy, and in the urban planning community I get to listen to, the discussion is about dealing with it. They've moved past the "is it occurring" stage. So sea walls, setbacks, rezoning, new shipping routes, and human migration are all topics.

The President commands, the Navy obeys. Ain't rocket surgery, Nafod.

The process he describes of being in a "post if" environment and addressing "when" has gone far beyond administrations and agencies. Within the larger strategic, disaster, and resource planning communities climate change is an element of nearly every decision. Whether you're Shell oil or the local municipal water engineer, you are looking forward under an expectation of changed circumstances. Whichever side of the debate you find yourself, this is a best practice.

Here's the route of the Crystal Serenity cruise ship this past August. Unthinkable just a few decades ago. If cruise lines are adjusting to the new reality...

Gene wrote: Would a gradual transition to non carbon sources work, sources that do not require Wind Power and other dullard sources of power? More Nukes, Thermo, Hydro, and possibly plasma based nuclear fusion once it's economically possible? We need to get away from combustion anyhow, to save those items for chemical feed stocks.

I am down with that

nafod wrote:

Gene wrote: Would a gradual transition to non carbon sources work, sources that do not require Wind Power and other dullard sources of power? More Nukes, Thermo, Hydro, and possibly plasma based nuclear fusion once it's economically possible? We need to get away from combustion anyhow, to save those items for chemical feed stocks.

I am down with that

Wind and solar work great for peak demand. Especially with solar PV being at or near parity with new coal installations. No need to ignore an enormous amount of renewable energy just because it doesn't suit your political bent.

Invest in a national smart grid that's up to 21st century standards as opposed to the 19th century patchwork we have handing on poles around the country. Provide for the base load with thorium reactors, let solar and wind provide for peak, and smooth the whole thing out with Tesla Powerwall type batteries and EVs that are tied to the grid when not in use. Job done. Tens of thousands of actual "shovel ready jobs" created to build and maintain an actual first world infrastructure.

Get completely off the foreign juice. Tell Muhammed the Jihadist that they're quarantined in their shithole until they can join the civilized world, and not a dollar more aid until you meet basic human rights standards. Export your terror over here again and we'll shit hammer you back to the neolithic age with zero worries of economic/energy consequences. Then do it.

wind does is not necessarily a good peak source, i.e. max production doesn't necessarily match peak demand. that's why the wind industry has looked at a variety of approaches to energy storage--batteries, compressed air, and such.

solar is a peaking source, and even relatively modest amounts can significantly shave peak power prices. as individual customers, we see "postage-stamp" rates, the cost of a kilowatthour is the same, no matter when we use it. the electricity market, however, sees signficant variability in rates. reducing peak prices for utilities could ultimately result in lower average rates--in theory, at least.

I read a white paper looking at what it would take to run the country completely on wind. I'll try and dig it up. I think it was in popular mechanics.

Compressed air seemed to come out on top as a way to store wind due to the fact that we know how to store compressed gasses underground from using the technology with methane. And you can use the wind turbines as the generators from the compressed air when the wind isn't blowing. Drawback is huge thermal losses due to the temperature increases/decreases when compressing and decompressing the air.

I've always liked pumped storage hydro. There's a good example at Raccoon Mountain in Tennessee that powers Chattanooga. But I think battery technology is going to outpace any mechanical storage, if it hasn't already.

What do you think of the molten salt thorium reactors I keep hearing are our savior?

my wife buys kosher salt. that's the extent of my knowledge.

Here's a simplistic rundown:

Antarctic sea ice had barely changed from where it was 100 years ago, scientists have discovered, after poring over the logbooks of great polar explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

Experts were concerned that ice at the South Pole had declined significantly since the 1950s, which they feared was driven by man-made climate change.

But new analysis suggests that conditions are now virtually identical to when the Terra Nova and Endurance sailed to the continent in the early 1900s, indicating that declines are part of a natural cycle and not the result of global warming.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016 ... shrinking/

sea ice v glaciers

dead man walking wrote:my wife buys kosher salt. that's the extent of my knowledge.

"Kosher" and "salt", "climate" and "science". Continuity and consistency.

A significant glacier that bounds the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is cracking from the inside out.

The Pine Island Glacier is a significant body of ice that has begun to show signs of wear due to rising global temperatures. In 2015, a 225-square-mile iceberg broke off the glacier and drifted away, a concerning prospect by itself. But researchers accidentally discovered when testing new imaging software that the major break started about 20 miles inland instead of at the edge of the ice shelf, where the ice would be expected to be at its weakest.

The evidence of a deep subsurface rift indicates that a warming ocean likely contributed to the breakup and will likely lead to more significant breaks in the near future.

"It's generally accepted that it's no longer a question of whether the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, it's a question of when," Dr. Howat said in the release. "This kind of rifting behavior provides another mechanism for rapid retreat of these glaciers, adding to the probability that we may see significant collapse of West Antarctica in our lifetimes."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/20 ... inside-out

sangoma's advice is to take two aspirin.

further evidence of how fucked up things are becoming.

In their Nature paper, an international team of scientists said that the majority of the Earth's terrestrial store of carbon was in the soil. They warned that as the world warmed, organisms living in the planet's soils would become more active, resulting in more carbon being released into the atmosphere - exacerbating warming.

"There have been concerns about this positive feedback for a long, long time," said lead author Thomas Crowther, who conducted the research while based at Yale University. . . "We show that . . . the losses are going to be really considerable."

"Carbon comes out of the soil, which leads to more warming, which leads to more carbon out of the soil, it is a reinforcing cycle. The concerning thing is that our projection is that we are going to lose 55 petgrams, that's 55 trillion kilograms by 2050. This process is only going to accelerate and accelerate."

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38146248

So, global warming/global cooling/climate change is going to release giant monster worms and maggots and shit from the ground too?

Is this like Cthulu?

Alfred_E._Neuman wrote:

nafod wrote:

Gene wrote: Would a gradual transition to non carbon sources work, sources that do not require Wind Power and other dullard sources of power? More Nukes, Thermo, Hydro, and possibly plasma based nuclear fusion once it's economically possible? We need to get away from combustion anyhow, to save those items for chemical feed stocks.

I am down with that

Wind and solar work great for peak demand. Especially with solar PV being at or near parity with new coal installations.

That's only true if peak demand aligns with the elements. I wouldn't make that bet. We don't all live in the southern US where the ACs go on during the hot day.

Only a third of US electricity is used for commercial uses. .

Alfred_E._Neuman wrote: No need to ignore an enormous amount of renewable energy just because it doesn't suit your political bent.

Amount of haz waste from refining rare earths and silicon for solar cells is huge.

This is a site for "tailings" for refining "rare earths" used in magnets which are used in Wind Mills. Batou China.



Out of sight, out of mind? I think not. I've read that much of that muck contains Thorium. We can breed it into U233 in reactors. Someone used the term "thermal spectrum" neutron reactors too, which I've heard about.

Energy sources should serve human needs not put us at the mercy of Nature. Fission and fusion energy will take the economic handcuffs imposed on us all by scarce fossil fuels. I don't believe in the "science" of global warming. I believe in the energy scarcity and poverty it creates in the developing world.

Fission is practical but generates waste that requires disposal. Get enough of it and there is an incentive to reprocess it.

A fusion reactor won't have a lot of haz waste. Work keeps getting done on them and is a lot closer to reality than fantasy batteries for wind and solar.

Fusion energy was demonstrated in the Ivy Mike tests. The "farnsworth fusor" is used to make neutrons from deuterium gas. (see http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/klopfer2/ )

Commercial neutron generator using this tech - http://www.nsd-fusion.com/

We know that fusion works. We don't yet know how to do it with plasmas and make money with it.


Once energy is really cheap we can recycle materials, "mine" landfills for metals and plastics, and many other things that are not practical today. I consider this a far better future than living in some luddite hell because of weak imaginations.

Alfred_E._Neuman wrote:Here's a simplistic rundown:

Thorium breeders are a nice idea. You turn the Thorium into U233. The US did one in the 1960s. They started it on a reactor for airborne power.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgK6h0LrHA0[/youtube]


China is working on it. http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china ... r-reactor/

So this data is alarming to me.


I'm hoping the ice recovers and returns to its mean trend next year, but I am expecting it won't. This impacts weather all over the northern hemisphere.

The good news is it is a really big slap in the face, hard for the climate change skeptics to ignore or explain away as a statistical aberration.

What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

Even if it is true, the movement got co opted just like the NRA, pro life and ADL and SPLC. It's purpose is to generate funds and not solve the issue.

buckethead wrote:What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

1. energy innovation
2. pollution reduction
3. resilience to extreme weather

Might make sense to put them all together. Cheap energy with minimal pollution from nukes, newer nukes. Later fusion power.

Cheap energy means air conditioning and heat are cheap.

Wind and Solar are expensive energy. wind and sunlight are free but gathering them is expensive.

Gene wrote:

buckethead wrote:What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

1. energy innovation
2. pollution reduction
3. resilience to extreme weather

Might make sense to put them all together. Cheap energy with minimal pollution from nukes, newer nukes. Later fusion power.

Cheap energy means air conditioning and heat are cheap.

Wind and Solar are expensive energy. wind and sunlight are free but gathering them is expensive.

Thanks. Now what's 2+2

nobody knows for sure

buckethead wrote:What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

The voice of reason that will be lost.

Gene wrote:

buckethead wrote:What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

1. energy innovation
2. pollution reduction
3. resilience to extreme weather

Might make sense to put them all together. Cheap energy with minimal pollution from nukes, newer nukes. Later fusion power.

Cheap energy means air conditioning and heat are cheap.

Wind and Solar are expensive energy. wind and sunlight are free but gathering them is expensive.

These are issues with verifiable outcomes. It makes sense to put more resources into developing more efficient solar cells and wind generators. Or safety of nuclear power reactors. Practical solutions of practical problems.

Sangoma wrote:

buckethead wrote:What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

The voice of reason that will be lost.

you don't know what you are talking about.

much of the work that has advanced so-called low-carbon solutions have resulted from policies and work primarily designed to reduce harmful air pollutants--NOx. particulates, and mercury, for instance--and to develop safer, lower-cost means of powering our lives. in addition to renewable power, as an example, energy efficiency has been a major target.

dead man walking wrote:

Sangoma wrote:

buckethead wrote:What I've been saying on here for years: discussion of climate change is unnecessary for (and has been detrimental to) facing the problems of pollution

The best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.

That's the conclusion of new report by authors from Oxford, London School of Economics, Third Way, the American Enterprise Institute, the Breakthrough Institute and others. Climate Pragmatism argues that we can move past the climate wars by focusing on what we already agree on: energy innovation, pollution reduction, and resilience to extreme weather.

http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/stat ... _pragmatis

The voice of reason that will be lost.

you don't know what you are talking about.

much of the work that has advanced so-called low-carbon solutions have resulted from policies and work primarily designed to reduce harmful air pollutants--NOx. particulates, and mercury, for instance--and to develop safer, lower-cost means of powering our lives. in addition to renewable power, as an example, energy efficiency has been a major target.

By energy efficiency you mean exporting polluting industries to other countries with fewer environmental restrictions. Balance pertains.