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Salt Fish posted:To be fair, saying "the daily volume of liquids so handled would be about equal" does not give us any useful information. It would seem to me that sequestering C02 at a rate of 1 liter liquid co2 : 1 liter oil consumed would be a monumental step forward. How receptive do you think most energy conglomerates would be to this idea? Or even the idea of large scale CCS implementation / enforcement?
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Aug 11, 2012 02:56
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The Ender posted:How receptive do you think most energy conglomerates would be to this idea? Or even the idea of large scale CCS implementation / enforcement? I don't know, 0%? I'm not offering a magic bullet I'm just responding to a somewhat unfair treatment of sequestration technology by the excerpt posted.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:02
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Seeing the news earlier mention the lowest yield of corn in years (or something to that effect) and seeing all the dickheads at Chick-Fil-A recently, it's made me wonder if Americans will actually begin to kick up a fuss now that their food is actually going to be priced up. Maybe it won't be severe enough this year, but surely it has to be soon.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:07
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They'll kick up a fuss but it'll be at Obama, not Exxon.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:19
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Handsome Dead posted:Seeing the news earlier mention the lowest yield of corn in years (or something to that effect) and seeing all the dickheads at Chick-Fil-A recently, it's made me wonder if Americans will actually begin to kick up a fuss now that their food is actually going to be priced up. Maybe it won't be severe enough this year, but surely it has to be soon. I'm not sure about the U.S., but Canada has dealt with rising food prices by simply 'downsizing' food products. Everything is the same price at the grocery store, you just get less. The same with fast food chains & restaurants, for the most part. I would imagine that most U.S. grocers & restaurants would do the same thing, assuming they haven't already.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:19
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The Ender posted:I would imagine that most U.S. grocers & restaurants would do the same thing, assuming they haven't already. They've been doing it for a while now: quote:http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/04/04/u-s-companies-shrink-packages-as-food-prices-rise/
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Aug 11, 2012 03:38
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quote:Indeed, this new CCS industry would be similar in scale to that of existing energy industries. If just 60 percent of the CO2 produced by today’s coal-fired power plants in the United States were captured and compressed into a liquid, transported, and injected into the storage site, the daily volume of liquids so handled would be about equal to the 19 million barrels of oil that the United States consumes every day. It is sobering to realize that 150 years and trillions of dollars were required to build that existing system for oil. That makes me feel a little better, actually. Concievably, when our global economic system destroys us all and the government has to come up with a desperate, arbitrary way to make jobs, they could try something like this. China in particular would have a totalitarian state with a lot of people who'll probably just riot if they don't have any way of making money. Sure, it's still last-minute, but maybe combine this with peak oil and an unwilling drop in our energy production and at least the planet will be livable, even if it won't be very pleasant compared to right now. Of all the desperate options, I hope this is the cheapest by the time serious action gets undertaken. Also- does Inconvenient Truth use a lot of the dark humor demonstrated by the clip? I always heard it being described as ultra grim and alarmist. If the whole film uses that tone, they might have gotten more mileage out by branding it "a comedy about our inevitable, easily avoidable doom" rather than "everyone just sit around and be depressed because oh god our lives are over". The former, at least, would have been harder for skeptics to caustically dismiss.
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Aug 11, 2012 04:36
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Some Guy TT posted:Are we really better at adapting than indigenous peoples? This entire thread is a testament to our incredible inability to adapt to a situation right in front of our faces. Indigenous peoples have survived, what, a million years, maybe more in their foraging lifestyle? Our agrarian lifestyles are the experiment which hinge on current environmental climate. They're the ones who've actually survived radical temperature changes before. We are destroying their lifestyles. The oceans are experiencing a major extinction event that is only accelerating. The chemicals we've grown to love so much are found concentrated in animal life almost everywhere on the planet, including in the inuit. Adapting was really the wrong word. Our externalities are going to push them to extinction.
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Aug 11, 2012 04:36
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quote:Also- does Inconvenient Truth use a lot of the dark humor demonstrated by the clip? I always heard it being described as ultra grim and alarmist. If the whole film uses that tone, they might have gotten more mileage out by branding it "a comedy about our inevitable, easily avoidable doom" rather than "everyone just sit around and be depressed because oh god our lives are over". The former, at least, would have been harder for skeptics to caustically dismiss. Inconvenient Truth was, in my opinion, ridiculously optimistic. Gore censored a lot of the worst aspects of climate change from the film, not wanting to exceed a viewer's 'hope budget'. The alarmist components of IT were: a) Insinuating that Hurricane Katrina & a few deadly heatwaves were caused by global warming. Some of this extreme weather may have been caused by climate change, but we don't conclusively know what extreme weather has or hasn't been caused by it, so it's dishonest to cite any given disaster as an example of the ravages of global warming. b) Suggesting a catastrophic sea level rise as a result of Greenland or Antarctica completely melting. Yes, either event may cause an extreme sea level rise (though not likely to the extent that Gore shows in the film), but we will be in so much extraordinary trouble from the heat increase necessary to melt those bodies that if it ever happened, flooding is the last thing anybody would care about. Most of the film presents a plucky 'We Can Do It Together!' bullshit message, and slings some mud at Gore's former political opponents. The Ender fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 05:03
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theblackw0lf posted:Man I can't wait for the history books 100 years from now that will try to comprehend how there could have been so much political inaction in the face of absolute disaster. My little contribution is writing down the names of the people responsible so if this timetable accelerates and the catastrophe is in fact only 20 years away, my kids will know who to drag out of their homes to face justice.
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Aug 11, 2012 08:32
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Handsome Dead posted:Seeing the news earlier mention the lowest yield of corn in years (or something to that effect) and seeing all the dickheads at Chick-Fil-A recently, it's made me wonder if Americans will actually begin to kick up a fuss now that their food is actually going to be priced up. Maybe it won't be severe enough this year, but surely it has to be soon. American bad-food is already so heavily subsidized that it doesn't really matter anyway. Far more corn than is needed, is already produced. And gently caress, if the corn goes belly up, it just means you'll start getting real sugar. I'm not sure I'd complain about that, it just means y'all would have to start being nicer to Cuba and Queensland farmers* *Who have recently been getting their poo poo wrecked by flooding. 
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Aug 11, 2012 08:35
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That's my main lingering thread of optimism about food and water supplies. I don't think the crash for those will be bad as some of us are anticipating, because right now globally we produce and distribute these supplies in a really moronic, inefficient way solely because it makes certain rich assholes richer. If global warming forces the world to become smaller, that might be a change for a better, since the modern international food economy isn't really benefitting anyone. As far as water goes, in the United States there will probably be enough drinking and bathing water if people take five minute showers and don't do stupid poo poo like flood irrigation for lawns. And maybe the loss of those idiotic luxuries might finally shake people up to the fact that yeah, we're in deep poo poo, and it will get worse before it gets better.
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Aug 11, 2012 09:27
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quote:American bad-food is already so heavily subsidized that it doesn't really matter anyway. Far more corn than is needed, is already produced. We actually have a pretty good idea of what will happen to the grain belt in the United States with increased temperatures, due to the sun-induced warming event that occurred from about 900 AD to about 1300 AD (the 'Medieval Warming Period'). This period saw global temperatures that are roughly equivalent to what we should be expecting in another 30~ years. Here's a map of 'America's Breadbasket', where most corn and grain crop growing & harvesting is done:  And here's the progression of the mega drought caused by the Medieval Warming Period:  And, scarily enough, current rainfall patterns are trending in precisely this same direction (arid conditions creeping up from the south into the west, then sweeping eastward).
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Aug 11, 2012 11:09
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What does PDSI stand for? That chart makes it look like blue is a good color, but I kind of doubt the Sonora Desert is going to be much good for arable land in an era of rising temnperatures.
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Aug 11, 2012 13:00
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Some Guy TT posted:What does PDSI stand for? That chart makes it look like blue is a good color, but I kind of doubt the Sonora Desert is going to be much good for arable land in an era of rising temnperatures.
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Aug 11, 2012 13:10
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I wonder how much global temperatures would dip if we could shave off exactly half of the 3km thick ice shelf on Antartica, so that the bottom half still remains, and place the top half somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean. In essence, you would be creating almost a second Antartica continent; except this one would be floating above the ocean for a while before it melted. In the meantime, I wonder how much solar radiation it would reflect back into space.
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Aug 11, 2012 14:48
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So you want to shave off a 1.5km thick piece of ice the size of Antarctica and put it in the middle of the pacific ocean? This has got to be one of the worst ideas I've seen in a while. A great deal of the ice in Antarctica is on land, you're talking about a pretty significant amount of sea level rise not to mention the minor fact that it's impossible. This is close to 20 million cubic kilometers of ice.
a lovely poster fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Aug 11, 2012 |
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Aug 11, 2012 14:56
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^ I'm pretty sure this was an episode of Futurama. Does this mean the SW will stop being a desert wasteland?
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Aug 11, 2012 16:52
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Some Guy TT posted:That's my main lingering thread of optimism about food and water supplies. I don't think the crash for those will be bad as some of us are anticipating, because right now globally we produce and distribute these supplies in a really moronic, inefficient way solely because it makes certain rich assholes richer. If global warming forces the world to become smaller, that might be a change for a better, since the modern international food economy isn't really benefitting anyone. As far as water goes, in the United States there will probably be enough drinking and bathing water if people take five minute showers and don't do stupid poo poo like flood irrigation for lawns. And maybe the loss of those idiotic luxuries might finally shake people up to the fact that yeah, we're in deep poo poo, and it will get worse before it gets better. Its peak-fish that worries me
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Aug 12, 2012 03:21
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PhazonLink posted:^ Wet sand isn't much better than dry sand as a growing medium if you're interested in supporting large urban populations, so no, probably not.
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Aug 12, 2012 08:29
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duck monster posted:Its peak-fish that worries me I prefer to think about peak-resource in general. Phosphorous be bad though, being an essential ingredient for life and all: Isaac Asimov posted:...I am suggesting, though, that while we try to cope with the inevitable disappearance of coal, oil, wood, space between people, and other things that are vanishing as population and per capita power requirements mount recklessly each year, we had better add the problem of disappearing phosphorous to the list, and do what we can to encourage sewage disposal units which process it as fertilizer rather than dump it as waste - or to mine the ocean floor. Extra reading Myotis fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 15:49
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^^^^ Ya should add the book "The Alchemy of Air" for readingPhazonLink posted:^ That would be nice. It really dose not take much rain to turn the southwest into a grass land. El nino of the 90's did it for a year. Paper Mac posted:Wet sand isn't much better than dry sand as a growing medium if you're interested in supporting large urban populations, so no, probably not. "dust bowl" It's whats in the dirt that matters and the bread belt leeched up anything good in that dirt along time ago. That's why we keep adding(over adding) fertilizers. If we didn't no decent crop would grow there anymore for a good while. If the southwest had regular rain our farming out put would greatly increase as well. Nevada would have tons of decent farming land if it only had sufficient rain fall. We just need a solid water supply. I wonder how much desalination tech will reduce the effect of that drought(if applied). If we can pump in as much water as we need from the ocean. Just run the facilities at night when power needs are low and store the slurry in an abandon salt mines like the ones we use to store oil. Or disperse it back into the ocean if salinity becomes an issue. Zelthar fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 22:51
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Zelthar posted:Just run the facilities at night when power needs are low and store the slurry in an abandon salt mines like the ones we use to store oil. Or disperse it back into the ocean if salinity becomes an issue. Salt, even raw sea salt and not just pure sodium chloride, has plenty of industrial uses. It will probably be a rapidly monetized industrial waste resource. I have a small hope that it gets used in molten salt batteries to store excess generation from renewable sources for non-peak generation times, but who knows how it would be used in the end.
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Aug 14, 2012 03:29
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Meanwhile, somewhere in the Arctic... http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
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Aug 14, 2012 15:36
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https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/ is a pretty cool place to get some information on the Arctic, although there might be a bit too much information You can definitely see how far we've deviated from the "norm"
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Aug 14, 2012 15:44
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The fact that what is most probably the most important topic to humanity right now got bumped off the front page of this forum depresses me. Also, largest river in the U.S: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/15/13295072-drought-sends-mississippi-into-uncharted-territory?lite
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Aug 15, 2012 17:41
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dphrag posted:The fact that what is most probably the most important topic to humanity right now got bumped off the front page of this forum depresses me. that article posted:It carries 60 percent of the nation’s grain, 22 percent of the oil and gas and 20 percent of the coal, according to American Waterways Operators. It would take 60 trailer trucks to carry the cargo in just one barge, 144 18-wheeler tankers to carry the oil and gas in one petroleum barge. Food is going to get even more expensive if the river shuts down. That combined with the poor midwest harvest will be bad news (though beef may become fleetingly cheap as farmers are forced to slaughter their herds, then become appropriately expensive if we have another poor summer).
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Aug 16, 2012 07:12
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Industrial capitalism is like a car race, except there's no real finish line, and the main rule is that you have to go as fast as you can, and you melt down your admiring fans for fuel, and somewhere farther along is a cliff that you are required to drive off of.
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Aug 16, 2012 16:59
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Just heard one of my friends blame West Nile on immigrants. 
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Aug 16, 2012 20:45
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deptstoremook posted:Industrial capitalism is like a car race, except there's no real finish line, and the main rule is that you have to go as fast as you can, and you melt down your admiring fans for fuel, and somewhere farther along is a cliff that you are required to drive off of. Industrial socialism is so much better, because you can decorate your car with mountains of 'bourgeois' skulls.
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Aug 16, 2012 21:02
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Yeah, but you run out of screaming fans quite quickly. You made me imagine a halftrack hot-rod with skulls clattering behind it.
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Aug 16, 2012 21:32
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Coming soon: the Kia Rouge. It gets 100mpg (according to official propaganda), all of the children downstream from the factory where it is made suffer from from serious birth defects, and it is the vehicle of choice for 9 out of 10 post-structuralist philosophers.
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Aug 17, 2012 00:28
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AuMaestro posted:all of the children downstream from the factory where it is made suffer from from serious birth defects It's still better than the idea of the Kia Soul. Just think, the bank might be able to repossess your Soul, literally.  Also, why not try refuting deptstoremook's hyperbole with something other than hyperbole yourself?
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Aug 17, 2012 06:09
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I am by no means an expert on this topic, but I recently got into a debate with my uncle about global warming (he refers to himself as "a real conservative fella") and as evidence that warming was real and something and he should really be concerned about, I linked him to the IPCC chart referenced upthread. In response he sent me to this site: http://notrickszone.com/2011/01/22/signs-of-strengthening-global-cooling/, where I discovered a whole conservative/libertarian network of people propagating "global cooling." Some of it's pretty obviously vapid bullshit, but some of it had a pretty convincing veneer of science, that I am not knowledgeable enough to parse. So I was just curious what people's thoughts were on this. Is it all just noise backed by oil companies and their friends to confuse things, or is it people with ideological bents picking the few friendly bits of data from a complex system? Or is it possible that catastrophic warming isn't as well established as I thought it was?
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Aug 17, 2012 06:16
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TheFuglyStik posted:Also, why not try refuting deptstoremook's hyperbole with something other than hyperbole yourself? If "industrial capitalism" is to blame and is so irredeemably bad that we have no choice but to find an alternative, then either we could reject capitalism in favor of deptstoremook's favorite environmental catastrophe disguised as an ideology, or we could reject industrial development in favor of some kind of stupid primitivist garbage. There's really nothing to say about it except for hyperbole and "dude, look at recorded history".
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Aug 17, 2012 06:16
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Sorry, I should probably post the money quotes: "The entire planet has stopped warming since 1998 and, more significantly, has started to cool since 2003. Instead of warning people of cooler weather for the next 30 years, there’s still the distinct false sense of expectation of unprecedented warming. People and governments are being urged to go entirely in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons – and at a potentially horrendous price." "Another key factor which will soon [ in 1-4 years] start to contribute to the global cooling of US and Canadian east coasts, the western coast of Europe and the Arctic will be the cooling of the North Atlantic as measured by the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation or AMO. This cooling started after 2005. But the AMO is affected by ENSO cycles, especially El Ninos, so we saw a brief warming of AMO during 2010. Climate history shows that global cooling was strongest when both the PDO andAMO were both simultaneously in the negative or cool mode - like in 1964-1976 and again 1916 to 1923. The AMO has been in the positive or warm mode since 1994. Its cycle is not as predictable as the 60 year PDO cycle, but more recently it followed the pattern of the PDO wait a lag [about a 20-year lag]. Its cycles have been quite variable. During its last cycle it was in the negative or cool mode for 30 years (1964-1994] and its cycle seems to be related to the Meridional Overturning Circulation [MOC] and the changes in the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation [THC]. There are a number of estimates when it will again go negative. My best estimate is about 2015 based on the most frequent past intervals of around 20 years and the cooler waters that feed the MOC from the Southern Oceans. Once it does go negative, the global temperature anomalies may drop further until about 2030, the Arctic temperature may cool further and the Arctic ice extent should increase again." And so on.
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Aug 17, 2012 06:20
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Its bullshit. What else can anyone say? Why would you accept for even one second someone giving you a WordPress blog made by a random guy with a BS in mechanical engineering as a refutation of an IPCC report?
Salt Fish fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 06:32
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Salt Fish posted:Its bullshit. What else can anyone say? Why would you accept for even one second someone giving you a WordPress blog made by some ex-patriated American living in Germany without credentials as a refutation of an IPCC report? Well it's not so much that I accept it, just that it's not as obviously inane as I expected. I mean he's not an expert, but he does link to articles by experts that at least seem authoritative. So that sort of threw me off. I mean I guess my question is something like a) is it really true that the global mean temperature has dropped since 2003? and b) is that at all meaningful or is it just some fluctuation within a larger trend?
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Aug 17, 2012 06:41
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AuMaestro posted:If "industrial capitalism" is to blame and is so irredeemably bad that we have no choice but to find an alternative, then either we could reject capitalism in favor of deptstoremook's favorite environmental catastrophe disguised as an ideology, or we could reject industrial development in favor of some kind of stupid primitivist garbage. There's really nothing to say about it except for hyperbole and "dude, look at recorded history". I'll refer back to my original question, in plainer terms: What is your solution? Saying "primitivism=bad" isn't the epitome of an argument. Present a viable solution if you want to convince people. edit for content: Basically, saying the radical alternative to industrial capitalism will kill people isn't much of an argument. If we shouldn't stop overusing our resources beyond what can be supported, then how does this stop society's eventual decline from lack of resources? Given that you agree with the idea that resources are being stretched beyond sustainable means, what do you suggest as an acceptable solution that balances human comfort and the environment that sustains industrial capitalism itself? TheFuglyStik fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Aug 17, 2012 |
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Aug 17, 2012 06:48
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No invention, short of the air raft, will save humanity.
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