Invest In Turning Deserts Green As Alternative Response To Climate Cha

[4588686]

[quote name='Groo the Wanderer' timestamp='1328609711' post='2382942']

[/quote]

That is the future you're helping to usher in for your children. But it's kewl. In doing so you got to make fun of a political movement that's been defunct and impotent for almost half a century now. Which is what really matters.




[img]http://www.youdopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/crank_yankers_yay.jpg[/img]

[arfink]

Why would making more power with fewer resources be irresponsible? As I see it, most "green energy" advocates aren't attempting to convince people to consume less power, but instead seeking to produce less power with more resources.

So let's recap here: It's not in dispute that the Earth has been getting warmer. That much can simply me measured with a thermometer. It's not yet been proven that this is being caused by humans, as opposed to some other, more likely cause, like the recent increases in solar activity. The link between our CO2 production and the warming trend is merely a correlation, but you could also say that inflation of the dollar and global warming are correlated too, but we don't say that inflation is driving global warming. The correlation by itself proves nothing, but I haven't seen any more evidence given than that.

BUT, let's just assume that we ARE somehow producing enough CO2 to cause global warming. For the sake of argument.

What is our number one CO2 producing industry? I'm gonna say electricity production, specifically electricity produced by coal. Most of our electricity is produced by coal, and all of our baseline power production is provided by coal. Coal fired plants are cheap to build, remarkably reliable, and can be run continuously as long as we continuously feed them coal. Not even conventional nuclear designs can run continuously and provide constant power, as they need to be shut down and disassembled to insert more fuel.

Coal fired power plants are also the #1 offenders for production of CO2 as well as a huge host of other toxic and carcinogenic chemicals. Whether released directly into the air or "scrubbed" out and then dumped on the ground or into our water supply, these waste products are piling up in huge quantities. And the waste from a coal fired plant is arguably more dangerous than the stuff coming out of nuclear plants, as it is more toxic, more carcinogenic, soluble in both air and water, produced in vast quantities, and is not carefully sequestered as nuclear waste is, but is instead simply sent into the air or dumped on the ground.

Besides this, a 1 gigawatt coal fired plant will consume roughly 4 million tons of coal each year. That is a LOT of fuel to burn for 1 gigawatt of power. The evil, dangerous, radioactive light-water reactors (Chernobyl and Fukushima were of this type) only need to be fed 250 tons of uranium each year to produce 1 gigawatt of power. A thorium liquid-salt reactor only needs 1 ton of fuel a year.

Any "alternative energy" solution needs to live up to our demands. And ironically, it needs to be an alternative to something we already rely on- coal. Not a supplemental source of energy. A real alternative. In order to be a real alternative it has to be these things:

-cheaper than coal (otherwise the market will ultimately reject the idea)
-cleaner than coal (otherwise we're not solving the problem)
-more efficient than coal (otherwise we're still going to deplete earth's fuel reserves too quickly)
-capable of continuous operation (otherwise we have no baseline power, and thus no reliable power)

So far no "alternative" has been proposed that can actually replace coal with the exception of thorium power.

[arfink]

[quote name='Ice_nine' timestamp='1328599020' post='2382921']
In conjunction with all these ideas we could try consuming less too

maybe


maybe?




I guess that's the biggest hippie dream of all unfortunately.


Why the hell is global warming a religious issue?


questions I have
[/quote]

Yes, we could consume less electricity. The amount of regulation required to force that to happen would be insane, but if we instead made power-saving alternative affordable even to the poorest of the poor then we'd be on to something. I am thinking of, for example, LED or CFL lighting. Producing light is commonly thought to be the #1 use of electricity in the world, but when a poor person is faced with spending a few dollars on tungsten lightbulbs or spending hundreds of dollars to have a house full of CFLs or LED lamps, the decision he will make is obvious. The next runner up is electric heating, and the inefficiency problems there have less to do with heater design (which are already about as efficient as electric heating can get) but with house design. I don't see it being very easy to refit every house and building in the world to make more efficient use of their electric heaters. No, there has to be an easier and cheaper way to deal with the problem than to intrude on the lives of every person in the world, as nice as it would be to do that. People should want to consume less of their own accord, but we should not have to force them.

Right now though, our energy consumption via gasoline in cars is actually far higher than the energy we consume with electricity. It is thought that new, more efficient battery designs would make electric vehicles many times more efficient than gasoline burning ones, assuming that we can also come to a good solution for producing that volume of electrical power from our grids. Right now the US power grid is incapable of replacing gasoline joule for joule if everyone had an electric car tomorrow.

Ultimately, if we only reduce our consumption and do not replace the problem power sources that lie at the root, we still won't win the battle. The goal should not necessarily be only to reduce consumption, but smarter production of energy.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='arfink' timestamp='1328632880' post='2383035']It's not yet been proven that this is being caused by humans, as opposed to some other, more likely cause, like the recent increases in solar activity.
The link between our CO2 production and the warming trend is merely a correlation, but you could also say that inflation of the dollar and global warming are correlated too, but we don't say that inflation is driving global warming. The correlation by itself proves nothing, but I haven't seen any more evidence given than that.[/quote]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MLry6Cn_D4[/media]

I recommend the following. [spoiler]
ipcc wg1 ar4 chapter nein!
[url="https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/publications/wg1-ar4/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf"]Understanding and attributing climate change[/url]

Something more current.
[url="http://thingsbreak.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/anthropogenic-and-natural-warming-inferred-from-changes-in-earths-energy-balance.pdf"]Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance[/url]

Moar stuff
[url="http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm"]The human fingerprint in global warming[/url]
[url="http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm"]Solar activity and climate[/url]
[/spoiler]

[Laudate_Dominum]

"This nation will invent the Zed-P-M by the end of this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

[fides' Jack]

[quote name='arfink' timestamp='1328632880' post='2383035']
So let's recap here: It's not in dispute that the Earth has been getting warmer. That much can simply me measured with a thermometer.
[/quote]

It is now - in dispute, that is. I really don't buy it. Those numbers constitute a [i]fraction of a degree[/i] over the last hundred years. Do you know how accurate those thermometers were a hundred years ago? I don't, but I know they couldn't have been as accurate as they are now. On top of that, they didn't have as many - they weren't monitoring the same portions of earth. So this whole idea of "global warming" really doesn't sound very accurate to me at all. And people who try to be in the middle and call it "climate change" also agree that the earth is warming - but I haven't seen any real evidence of that yet, depite the thousands of websites dedicated to it.

Call me crazy, but that's where I stand. We have no more proof of global warming than we do for global cooling.

Edited February 7, 2012 by fides' Jack

[arfink]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' timestamp='1328638330' post='2383065']
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MLry6Cn_D4[/media]

I recommend the following. [spoiler]
ipcc wg1 ar4 chapter nein!
[url="https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/publications/wg1-ar4/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf"]Understanding and attributing climate change[/url]

Something more current.
[url="http://thingsbreak.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/anthropogenic-and-natural-warming-inferred-from-changes-in-earths-energy-balance.pdf"]Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance[/url]

Moar stuff
[url="http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm"]The human fingerprint in global warming[/url]
[url="http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm"]Solar activity and climate[/url]
[/spoiler]
[/quote]

I don't have a good reason to trust those sources because I also have reason to distrust their model of what temp ranges should be "normative." They believe that the correlation of greenhouse gas production to warming is re-enforced by the idea that our actual temps are rising relative to our statistical temp models. But this doesn't prove that we're causing the problem- it only further proves that, yes, we are experiencing increased temperatures. No duh.

Also, their models are conspicuously lacking when it comes to modeling fluctuation in both solar output and cosmic ray absorption. Both of those factors are being ignored by many models, or their importance is minimized, when the truth of the matter is that we don't have a way to accurately predict those two factors. Thus, to me, it's not surprising to see global temp fluctuation when one of these much more powerful forces also fluctuates. Sure, it doesn't prove anything by mere correlation, but it seems far more likely at least.

[Laudate_Dominum]

So the science is no good. You don't trust it. So where do you get your remarkable insight into this topic? Btw, I call BS. It is painfully obvious to me that you don't know what you're talking about. Your solar activity claim basically robbed you of any credibility and now you're writing off research such as Huber and Knutti's paper with a bit of handwaving. Get real, dude. Hitler disapproves.

[Selah]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' timestamp='1328638330' post='2383065']
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MLry6Cn_D4[/media]

[/quote]

Ooh, Nazi dubstep

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[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' timestamp='1328646986' post='2383167']
So the science is no good. You don't trust it. So where do you get your remarkable insight into this topic? Btw, I call BS. It is painfully obvious to me that you don't know what you're talking about. Your solar activity claim basically robbed you of any credibility and now you're writing off research such as Huber and Knutti's paper with a bit of handwaving. Get real, dude. Hitler disapproves.
[/quote]

Obviously you are woefully ignorant about just what goes on with all that Solar Activity.

[spoiler] [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IlHgbOWj4o"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IlHgbOWj4o[/url] [/spoiler]

Edited February 7, 2012 by Hasan

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Hasan' timestamp='1328647641' post='2383171']
Obviously you are woefully ignorant about just what goes on with all that Solar Activity.

[/quote]
Truth from the gut, baby.

[arfink]

So you dislike Svensmark's solar activity research? I went around looking for peer-reviewed papers which sought to disprove his theory, and most of them simply conclude as you seem to agree they should: the sun's energy fluctuations are not enough to influence earth's temperature directly.

But the theory isn't that the sun getting hotter and is thus warming earth. The theory is that the sun's electromagnetic field fluctuation will change the level of cosmic ray bombardment we receive, and that this ionization is driving the formation of aerosols that produce clouds. Svensmark's theory suggests that a large amount of data is being neglected in climate research. Clouds play an extremely pivotal role in the regulation of earth's temperature, but the link between cloud formation and cosmic rays (and thusly solar activity) is not being given enough thought.

EDIT: This paper seeks to disprove the Svensmark theory:

[url="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009GeoRL..3609820P"]http://adsabs.harvar...GeoRL..3609820P[/url]

Svensmark has objected that their modeling is inaccurate, and has been conducting empirical testing with a cloud chamber at CERN. His results have not yet been fully published.

[url="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/14/update-on-the-cern-cloud-experiment/"]http://wattsupwithth...oud-experiment/[/url]

EDIT2: still haven't been able to find the results of Svensmark's experiments at CERN, though anecdotal references online seem to suggest it has been supressed.

Edited February 7, 2012 by arfink

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='Hasan' timestamp='1328647641' post='2383171']
Obviously you are woefully ignorant about just what goes on with all that Solar Activity.

[spoiler] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IlHgbOWj4o[/media] [/spoiler]
[/quote]

Oh I think we all can guess what sorts of activities those solars are getting up to.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q7FFjUpVLg[/media]

[arfink]

If Svensmark retracts his claims or has them disproved by something other than a computer simulation (which he and others have claimed is flawed) then my last objection to the "greenhouse forcing" theory will be quashed, and I'd be content.

[arfink]

The CERN CLOUD project:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR15.11E.html