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Devoyniche posted:What would be the outcome of switching full scale to solar energy, hypothetically? As I understand it, at a kindergarten level, the sun's energy is being trapped in by greenhouse gasses, right? I have no idea how solar panels work other than "sunlight becomes energy" and sunlight is basically just energy itself; could you not just use the energy being beamed down and the suns energy that is getting trapped, and would doing so have a cooling effect? What would be the effect on flora, who use that energy from the sun to photosynthesize? I imagine that this is something people have already looked at, but I was just wondering. Besides the fact that everything suddenly becomes incredibly expensive? Really solar panels are kinda like water wheels for sunlight. There isn't any extra energy introduced into the system from taking solar light (a broad band of electromagnetic energy) that we can't directly use and turn it into useful electrical energy (moving electrons), but it takes the energy, converts some of it into a useful method, and then the rest of the energy is dispersed into stuff that we can't really use. If the solar panels are being used on the ground, it's pretty likely nothing much besides a little grass is going to grow underneath it.
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 03:42 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 06:46 |
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Well the energy from the sun that is converted into electricity is not lost. It is converted from one form to another. Plus you have to remember that nothing is 100% efficient, including solar panels (which is part of the reason why they're not used more widely).
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 03:57 |
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.htmlquote:What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years. Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012) monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979. Is this true?
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 04:56 |
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Devoyniche posted:What would be the outcome of switching full scale to solar energy, hypothetically? As I understand it, at a kindergarten level, the sun's energy is being trapped in by greenhouse gasses, right? I have no idea how solar panels work other than "sunlight becomes energy" and sunlight is basically just energy itself; could you not just use the energy being beamed down and the suns energy that is getting trapped, and would doing so have a cooling effect? What would be the effect on flora, who use that energy from the sun to photosynthesize? I imagine that this is something people have already looked at, but I was just wondering. The sun's energy is being trapped as heat, not as light that can be photosynthesized. It's the same as a car in a hot parking lot with the windows rolled up. No more light than with windows down, but damned if your thighs won't cook if you're wearing shorts and have leather seats. Photovoltaic cells utilize light energy, not heat, so the extra solar energy trapped by greenhouse gasses wouldn't do a drat thing to help them along. Plants use light for photosynthesis and not heat in a similar but not exactly the same way. A small amount of increased CO2 around 400ppm can help plants grow a very, very, very tiny amount better in a greenhouse setting, but not enough by one hell of a legendary longshot to offset the ecological damage to plantlife from climate shifts. Speaking in broad terms, climate change might benefit plants in the isolated areas where the climate might not change, but those are very few and incredibly far between. Solar energy would see absolutely no benefit unless there was less cloud cover in a given area. This would also generally mean less rainfall, adversely affecting the native ecology and standard climate in said area. This entire description is not entirely accurate, but it's the best way I know to describe it at the most fundamental level without introducing hyperbole or hilariously bad analogies. TheFuglyStik fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Mar 28, 2012 |
# ? Mar 28, 2012 07:08 |
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Pipe Dreamer posted:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html "CO2 is not a pollutant. Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels, and because warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated. Nations with affordable energy from fossil fuels are more prosperous and healthy than those without." The author Happer himself is apparently not afraid to Godwin climatologists and the Dr. whose website he quotes is a proponent of intelligent design. ~a little googling is all it takes~
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 07:29 |
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Pipe Dreamer posted:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by William Happer, chairman of the Marshall Institute that denies the negative effects of second-hand smoke, the carcinogenic nature of tobacco smoking, the existence of acid rain, and the evidence linking CFCs and ozone depletion. He's crazy, and even if he wasn't crazy he has his facts wrong, or they at least aren't as solid as he would have you believe. The monthly global temperature anomaly for February 2012 is 0.3654, according to the NOAA.
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 08:03 |
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totalnewbie posted:What is D&D's opinion on the website Wattsupwiththat.com? The climatology equivalent of the Discovery Institute.
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 15:27 |
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Fat Jesus posted:Like I asked before, instead of a carbon tax, what other method would you suggest that governments use to reduce carbon emissions?
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 15:30 |
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Devoyniche posted:What would be the outcome of switching full scale to solar energy, hypothetically? As I understand it, at a kindergarten level, the sun's energy is being trapped in by greenhouse gasses, right? I have no idea how solar panels work other than "sunlight becomes energy" and sunlight is basically just energy itself; could you not just use the energy being beamed down and the suns energy that is getting trapped, and would doing so have a cooling effect? What would be the effect on flora, who use that energy from the sun to photosynthesize? I imagine that this is something people have already looked at, but I was just wondering. Solar panels would convert some of the visible radiation into electricity rather than having the ground absorb it and re-radiate it as infrared light, some of which escapes back into space and some of which remains here on earth and contributes to higher temperatures. Also by not using fossil fuels, we lower the amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Particle emission from burning fossil fuels actually has a bit of a cooling effect since it deflects some of the sunlight before it has a chance to be absorbed by the ground and re-radiated as infrared light, so ceasing particle emissions would actually have a warming effect. I don't know what the net effect would be though. This article, which simply examines the situation of ceasing greenhouse gas emission and doesn't take into account exclusively using solar energy, claims global warming would continue for a while due to the thermal inertia of the oceans. Emitting no further greenhouse gases would, however, eventually result in global cooling. Here's a somewhat longer explanation. Link. upsciLLion fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Mar 28, 2012 |
# ? Mar 28, 2012 19:11 |
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:The monthly global temperature anomaly for February 2012 is 0.3654, according to the NOAA. My understanding is that the increase in the planet's surface temperature isn't a very good measure of global warming anyway, since a lot of the excess heat has been trapped in the ocean.
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 19:24 |
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Corrupt Politician posted:My understanding is that the increase in the planet's surface temperature isn't a very good measure of global warming anyway, since a lot of the excess heat has been trapped in the ocean. This is definitely true, I was mainly trying to point out that his data was suspect. Not just heat either, the ocean is absorbing massive amounts of CO2 as well, which is driving the acidification. Two prong attack on ocean life through warming and increasing acidity happening much faster than it has historically.
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# ? Mar 28, 2012 22:54 |
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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02434.x/abstractquote:An extensive assessment of historical trends in winegrape maturity dates from vineyards located in geographically diverse winegrape growing regions in Australia has been undertaken. Records from 44 vineyard blocks, representing a range of varieties of Vitis vinifera L., were accessed. These comprise 33 short-term datasets (average 17 years in length) and 11 long-term datasets, ranging from 25 to 115 years in length (average 50 years). Time series of the day of the year grapes attain maturity were assessed. A trend to earlier maturity of winegrapes was observed in 43 of the 44 vineyard blocks. This trend was significant for six out of the 11 long-term blocks for the complete time period for which records were available. For the period 1993–2009, 35 of the 44 vineyard blocks assessed displayed a statistically significant trend to earlier maturity. The average advance in the phenology was dependent on the time period of observation, with a more rapid advance over more recent decades. Over the more recent 1993–2009 period, the average advance was 1.7 days year, whereas for the period 1985–2009 the rate of advance was 0.8 days yr−1 on average in the 10 long-term vineyard blocks assessed for cross-regional comparison. The trend to earlier maturity was associated with warming temperature trends for all of the blocks assessed in the study. I find this sort of thing interesting because a lot of our earlier measurements of climate factors were incomplete/inaccurate due to the technology available at the time. This study is essentially based on the enzyme activity of plants, which have different levels of activity depending on the temperature. The vineyards examined will not have been replanted at all in the time periods examined in the study so it is the same individual plants they are measuring. Most importantly, the technology has not changed appreciably in the intervening years and where it has it has generally been a change towards mechanisation rather than to change the actual vineyard operations.
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# ? Mar 29, 2012 02:41 |
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gently caress You And Diebold posted:The monthly global temperature anomaly for February 2012 is 0.3654, according to the NOAA. It's not apples to apples. They use different periods. NOAA uses 1971-2000, while UAH uses a base period of 1981 to 2010.
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# ? Mar 29, 2012 18:12 |
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It's true that temperatures have been more or less flat for the last ten years. It's also true that you can find several similar situations over the last century. It's not exactly a startling revelation. For people who so-often say "climate is too complicated we can't possible understand it," they sure seem to fixate on single-variable correlations. Aerosols increased and solar output decreased in this period. It's not shocking that temperature trends would slow as a result.
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# ? Mar 29, 2012 22:00 |
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When I graduated in 2010 from the atmospheric science program at UC Berkeley, I asked my professors -- people who worked in climate change research -- what the status of modeling positive feedbacks was. The answer they gave me was to shrug and say "Well, nobody really knows, because they're so hard to model." Are there any atmospheric scientists in this thread who are more current on the state of the research today? Have we made any progress on modeling positive feedbacks and the sorts of rapid state transitions associated with abrupt climate change? The fact that everyone constantly talks about tipping points and positive feedbacks but nobody seems to propose mechanisms about how they work is very worrying to me. I think "It could be within a decade, or even next year, that the climate imperceptibly, and without our being able to model or predict it, begins to transition abruptly into a new equilibrium." And this is frightening.
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# ? Mar 29, 2012 22:18 |
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DrSunshine posted:When I graduated in 2010 from the atmospheric science program at UC Berkeley, I asked my professors -- people who worked in climate change research -- what the status of modeling positive feedbacks was. The answer they gave me was to shrug and say "Well, nobody really knows, because they're so hard to model." The mechanisms are well understood. Heck I can tell you one right now;- CO2 heats atmosphere-> Atmosphere heats ocean-> Ocean releases CO2->Go to step 1. Theres a number of other ones too. The nut of it that CO2, Methane and other greenhouse gasses kind of catalyse (not sure the right word here, Im not a chemist) a number of reactions , many of which release CO2. CO2 then traps in heat, and it cycles like that. We appear to have confirmation that at least some sort of effect like this is currently occuring in the permafrost as well. We have no idea how bad it could get, but the worst plausible models suggest "very". The thing with positive feedback loops, is your right they are not easy or necesarily even well modeled. But the physics lead us to think, along with what we know about how venus was formed, that CO2 feedback loops both exist, and at the absolute worst can be planet destroyingly horrifying (although I dont think any serious climate scientists are proposing a "earth turns into venus" outcome) so even though they are currently too complex to model reliably, the precautionary principle tells us we must at least account for the posibility, including the posibility that the outcome could be *dismal*. duck monster fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Mar 30, 2012 |
# ? Mar 30, 2012 04:30 |
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duck monster posted:The mechanisms are well understood. I suspect that Dr Sunshine was referring to scientists developing comprehensive mathematical models making testable predictions, not elementary single sentence summaries. Mr Chips fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Mar 30, 2012 |
# ? Mar 30, 2012 04:38 |
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Yeah, I meant "mechanisms" as in the "machinery" of partial differential equations and dynamical systems. Sorry for being unclear! EDIT: One of the reasons why these things are not well-understood is because they operate on wildly differing timescales. While large-scale climatic changes take decades to resolve, mechanisms such as the melting of sea ice and feedbacks due to changes in plant respiration, take places on the order of weeks. When modeling the climate, climatologists use asymptotic analysis to "put on the blinders" so to speak, to drop out the terms which become negligible at those time and length scales. However, due to the nonlinear, chaotic, and possibly exponential effects of many of these positive feedback mechanisms, that kind of simplification will not work so well. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Mar 30, 2012 |
# ? Mar 30, 2012 04:43 |
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Arkane posted:It's not apples to apples. They use different periods. NOAA uses 1971-2000, while UAH uses a base period of 1981 to 2010. NCDC/NOAA made the switch to 1981-2010 as of July, 2011, so it's a fair comparison. Unless they're still putting out old stuff which wouldn't surprise me!
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# ? Mar 30, 2012 17:57 |
http://hint.fm/wind/ This is an animated map of all the wind movements in the US, in realtime. It's really fun to look at, much in the way that considering the subject of this thread is not. So I didn't. I just stared at the map instead and thought about what fun my children are going to have kayaking to work down Broadway from Harlem to lower Manhattan.
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 11:53 |
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Is there any truth to my own personal delusion that fossil fuels will become scarce enough to make them economically unviable to the point where carbon-neutral energy sources (note; I don't necessarily mean renewable) will become the economically preferred option in time to start fixing things?
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 14:57 |
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With coal liquefaction and fracking, probably not. The first world can stretch out the fossil fuel gravy train for quite a while.
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 15:19 |
Smegmatron posted:Is there any truth to my own personal delusion that fossil fuels will become scarce enough to make them economically unviable to the point where carbon-neutral energy sources (note; I don't necessarily mean renewable) will become the economically preferred option in time to start fixing things? In theory solar photovoltaics have reached grid parity in certain parts of the world, such as Australia. Not that us Aussies will adopt it on a large scale despite being a pretty sunny nation - Gina Reinhart would have a fit. In theory, there's no real reason (beyond redesigning the electrical grid to cope with intermittent power sources) as to why we can't phase out coal and rely exclusively on a mixture of wind, solar and possibly nuclear/wave power. One thing that is interesting about solar power, is that in Germany the presence of so much solar (about 25GW) is significantly lowering the peak price of electricity. What this means is that traditional generators (i.e. coal and gas) can't make as much money from selling during peak demand due to the increased supply. So of course the coal and gas industries are against more renewable energy entering the market to compete with them. Tl;dr, the technology exists but not many nations want to spend the time and money to roll it out en masse for stupid reasons. froglet fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Apr 4, 2012 |
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 15:54 |
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Smegmatron posted:Is there any truth to my own personal delusion that fossil fuels will become scarce enough to make them economically unviable to the point where carbon-neutral energy sources (note; I don't necessarily mean renewable) will become the economically preferred option in time to start fixing things? Even worse, multiple commentators have noted that no single alternative or any combination of alternatives will allow us to continue our 'business as usual', perpetual growth model for an economy. All the current options (when these are even being looked at) are supply-side; with what can we replace oil to let us keep things as they are? And the ultimate answer is none; the solution must be based on / include demand-side changes, i.e. we need to change how much we consume and drive. We need to transition to an economy based on sustainability instead of assuming endless growth. Here's one article I found with a quick Google, there are many many more making the same points out there. http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-22/won%92t-innovation-substitution-and-efficiency-keep-us-growing
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 18:53 |
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TACD posted:Here's one article I found with a quick Google, there are many many more making the same points out there. http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-22/won%92t-innovation-substitution-and-efficiency-keep-us-growing quote:With an overall societal EROEI of 3:1, for example, roughly a third of all of that society’s effort would have to be devoted just to obtaining the energy with which to accomplish all the other things that a society must do (such as manufacture products, carry on trade, transport people and goods, provide education, engage in scientific research, and maintain basic infrastructure). quote:As we saw in Chapter 3, in our discussion of the global supply of minerals, when the quality of an ore drops the amount of energy required to extract the resource rises. All over the world mining companies are reporting declining ore quality. So in many if not most cases it is no longer possible to substitute a rare, depleting resource with a more abundant, cheaper resource; instead, the available substitutes are themselves already rare and depleting. quote:We will be doing a lot of substituting as the resources we currently rely on deplete. In fact, materials substitution is becoming a primary focus of research and development in many industries. But in the most important cases (including oil), the substitutes will probably be inferior in terms of economic performance, and therefore will not support economic growth.
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 19:16 |
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Smegmatron posted:Is there any truth to my own personal delusion that fossil fuels will become scarce enough to make them economically unviable to the point where carbon-neutral energy sources (note; I don't necessarily mean renewable) will become the economically preferred option in time to start fixing things? Not really. A lot of people will still drive at $10/gallon gas, either because they can afford to or because they have no other options to get to work or access basic services. If there is a long term price increase, that may increase the value of high density areas which allow for public transportation, but the shift would take decades. We should have stopped building low density communities where public transportation is inefficient or impossible twenty years ago, but the market demanded them. Of course it doesn't matter now anyway, since for all practical purposes we are no longer "in time to start fixing things."
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 19:51 |
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Konstantin posted:Not really. A lot of people will still drive at $10/gallon gas, either because they can afford to or because they have no other options to get to work or access basic services. If there is a long term price increase, that may increase the value of high density areas which allow for public transportation, but the shift would take decades. We should have stopped building low density communities where public transportation is inefficient or impossible twenty years ago, but the market demanded them. Of course it doesn't matter now anyway, since for all practical purposes we are no longer "in time to start fixing things." Perhaps this is why, then, we should institute a heavy fuel tax to subsidize public transit and to discourage car-driven development. Just because it's "too late" doesn't mean we just put up our hands and let the current system fail miserably.
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 20:37 |
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The problem I see is that if we wait until we've already burned all the fossil fuels it won't matter if we transition to carbon neutral energy because we'll all be dead. Doing some super rough calculations if we burned all the currently recoverable coal in the world, some 930 billion tons, assuming half the emitted carbon is absorbed by the oceans and biosphere, we might see atmospheric carbon reach concentrations as high as 570 ppmv which would probably be game over for civilization as we know it. This is just coal recoverable with today's technology, and there isn't any scenario I can imagine in which it wouldn't be profitable to mine and burn it without government intervention.
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# ? Apr 4, 2012 23:35 |
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Shipon posted:Perhaps this is why, then, we should institute a heavy fuel tax to subsidize public transit and to discourage car-driven development. Just because it's "too late" doesn't mean we just put up our hands and let the current system fail miserably. I think that a better idea would be to channel development to high-density areas through a combination of subsides and taxes. A fuel tax won't make public transportation viable in low-density areas, and even a very high one won't make people move. Instead, we should do whatever is needed to encourage development of high-density real estate suitable for public transportation for all price levels and family sizes, while using zoning laws to ban or heavily tax the construction of new low-density real estate. With the right city plan, public transportation can fund itself, but it is a huge and endless money sink if you try and use it when there isn't enough density to support it.
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# ? Apr 5, 2012 03:48 |
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Smegmatron posted:Is there any truth to my own personal delusion that fossil fuels will become scarce enough to make them economically unviable to the point where carbon-neutral energy sources (note; I don't necessarily mean renewable) will become the economically preferred option in time to start fixing things? No. Australia alone has enough coal to supply the world for hundreds of years, plus there are coal deposits that are too deep/impure/small to extract that can be exploited for CSG. China has heaps of coal too but it is very impure and results in very bad pollution.
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# ? Apr 5, 2012 05:25 |
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4liters posted:No. Australia alone has enough coal to supply the world for hundreds of years, plus there are coal deposits that are too deep/impure/small to extract that can be exploited for CSG. China has heaps of coal too but it is very impure and results in very bad pollution. That would make for a pretty cool dystopian future, so I'm all for that.
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# ? Apr 5, 2012 06:29 |
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4liters posted:Australia alone has enough coal to supply the world for hundreds of years What's your source for that? The wiki for peak coal tells me that estimates for coal reserves vary wildy, and one source says that the world could see peak coal happen in as few as 15 years. M. King Hubbert predicted world coal peak at around 2150. The University of Newcastle in Australia said that global peak coal could happen sometime between the present and 2048, and that Australia itself could peak a little after 2050. "Global coal reserve data is generally of poor quality and is often biased towards the high side. Collective projections generally predict that global peak coal extraction may occur sometime around 2025 at 30 percent above current extraction." Once oil production begins winding down, I think it's reasonable to assume a similar big spike in coal extraction might happen, so coal might not last that long. Ivan Shitskin fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Apr 5, 2012 |
# ? Apr 5, 2012 06:32 |
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Aufzug Taube! posted:What's your source for that? The wiki for peak coal tells me that estimates for coal reserves vary wildy, and one source says that the world could see peak coal happen in as few as 15 years. M. King Hubbert predicted world coal peak at around 2150. The University of Newcastle in Australia said that global peak coal could happen sometime between the present and 2048, and that Australia itself could peak a little after 2050. I'm pretty sure almost none of the peak coal predictions take brown coal into account. For example, just the area of Latrobe Valley in Victora has an estimated 30 Billion tons of brown coal! Awesome, huh? Once we run out of current energy sources, we can move on to our massive reserves of brown coal, the most polluting energy source on the planet.
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# ? Apr 5, 2012 12:18 |
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yeah I'm suss on the peak coal thing. I wish there was peak coal. But seriously, theres a tonne of that poo poo underground. And its all ripe to stuff into the atmosphere and ruin our collective poo poo.
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# ? Apr 5, 2012 16:19 |
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Shipon posted:Perhaps this is why, then, we should institute a heavy fuel tax to subsidize public transit and to discourage car-driven development. Just because it's "too late" doesn't mean we just put up our hands and let the current system fail miserably. He's right, though. The time when "discouraging car-driven development" and building public transit infrastructure was relevant was the time when cities and towns were being initially planned and built. New development is almost irrelevant at this point--we are already stuck with a bunch of low-density developments not amenable to public transit. For similar reasons, trying to "channel development into high density areas" is also basically irrelevant. These are things that are very effective when nations are being built, they are much less effective when they have already been built. To make any kind of meaningful dent in the problem, you would need a massive redistribution of the nations population, industry, and infrastructure, and this is simply not possible given the resources and time available. It is much more straightforward to try and reduce the carbon cost of car based transportation with e.g. batteries, fuel cells, biodiesel, etc., coupled with non-fossil fuel based electricity generation. At this point, even this approach is not really going to be able to make much of a dent in the climate change problem given the available resources and time, but its not quite as lovely an option as trying to redevelop an entire nation. Redevelopment doesn't just require time and money, it requires political will and the collective support of a large portion of the population. Technology, on the other hand, once sufficiently developed, and provided it is economically viable, propagates regardless of what anyone thinks of it.
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# ? Apr 6, 2012 02:18 |
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Shipon posted:Perhaps this is why, then, we should institute a heavy fuel tax to subsidize public transit and to discourage car-driven development. Or, you could vote with your feet and move to Vancouver. Guess what Metro-Vancouver just did.
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# ? Apr 6, 2012 02:28 |
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/healthy-polar-bear-count-confounds-doomsayers/article2392523/ Good news! quote:The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.
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# ? Apr 6, 2012 02:40 |
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Pipe Dreamer posted:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/healthy-polar-bear-count-confounds-doomsayers/article2392523/ The bears surviving global warming is a nice plus, but I can imagine a ton of denialists jumping on this claiming "SEE SEE THERE IS NO WARMING!"
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# ? Apr 6, 2012 05:50 |
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Is responding to IWC bannable here too, or just in the Australia thread?
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# ? Apr 6, 2012 07:42 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 06:46 |
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Just the Australia thread, probably still a good idea not to though.
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# ? Apr 6, 2012 16:21 |