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Sogol posted:and we live in closed thermodynamic system. No, we don't.
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Apr 13, 2014 03:10
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Sogol posted:... a joke told by Shakespeare in the mouth of one of his most rambling, foolish and pedantic characters. You're so close to getting it. So very very close 
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Apr 13, 2014 03:14
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forbidden lesbian posted:You're so close to getting it. So very very close Perhaps some one has more than a one liner on the content?
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Apr 13, 2014 04:00
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No, because it's hidden behind a wall of faux-intellectual buzzwords. I think I mostly agree with you, in that 'hey, our current civilisation is pretty fragile if you pull the farms out from under us'. But I'm honestly not sure, and I made a real effort to give your post the same level of attention you put into it.
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Apr 13, 2014 04:07
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nm.
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Apr 13, 2014 04:20
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Sogol I've been following your posts and I do understand what you've been saying, and they are comforting in a way, though I think I went through my own personal moments of duress before I came across them. Regardless, again, it is comforting to see it articulated in that way, because at the time it was a bit more chaotic (mentally).
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Apr 13, 2014 04:54
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Sogol posted:The self referential nature of my comment is not lost me. Not until you've developed some ability to present content in a comprehensible fashion. SA isn't a scientific journal and you'd still fail to pass peer review if it was.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:20
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Hello Sailor posted:Not until you've developed some ability to present content in a comprehensible fashion. SA isn't a scientific journal and you'd still fail to pass peer review if it was. You know, just because I used some sources on an Internet forum pointing to some ways people are thinking about the effects of climate change does not mean I pretending to write a scientific article or considering a peer review process. You can consider the earth as an open system because of asteroids, the moon and our currently limited ability to throw things out of the gravity well. With respect to the forces considered in climate change no such matter exchange is occurring and it is considered a closed system. It would change things radically if it actually were an open system at that scale. Sogol fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 06:39
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Because of asteroids? 
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Apr 13, 2014 06:56
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Sogol posted:With respect to the forces considered in climate change no such matter exchange is occurring and it is considered a closed system. It would change things radically if it actually were an open system at that scale. Atmospheric tides were fairly important things to factor into climate models, last I knew.
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Apr 13, 2014 07:03
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Hello Sailor posted:Atmospheric tides were fairly important things to factor into climate models, last I knew. Also sunlight, which bombards the planet constantly.
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Apr 13, 2014 07:09
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SedanChair posted:Because of asteroids? Yes, because the distinction between open and closed systems has to do with the exchange of both matter and energy. In an open system both are exchanged. In a closed system only energy. Asteroids constitute an exchange of matter making the planet technically an open system. At that time scale and the scale of a solar system it is technically an open system because asteroids enter the system as meteors and meteorites, the moon was carved off, we can throw matter out of the gravity well, etc. constituting an exchange of matter. At the scale of the systems considered for something like climate change (the systems being effected by collective human activity) the planet is considered a closed system. There is energy exchange (you know, the sun shines), but no real matter exchange. Sogol fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 07:09
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Hello Sailor posted:Atmospheric tides were fairly important things to factor into climate models, last I knew. Rhjamiz posted:Also sunlight, which bombards the planet constantly. Both of these are energetic, rather than exchange of matter.
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Apr 13, 2014 07:12
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Sogol posted:Both of these are energetic, rather than exchange of matter. So the consensus of physicists is that gravity is a type of energy and has no relationship whatsoever to matter?
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Apr 13, 2014 08:44
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Hello Sailor posted:So the consensus of physicists is that gravity is a type of energy and has no relationship whatsoever to matter? Gravity is a force. It is not matter. Atmospheric tides are not gravitational anyway, are they? It might make a difference whether or not we consider it open or closed. What it means to consider it a closed system is that all the matter stays in the system. New matter isn't created or introduced in any meaningful way for modeling (outside of something like a massive asteroid hit which would be very meaningful). For instance the planetary notion of carrying capacity can be thought of in relationship to this. Wendell Berry makes an interesting distinction between natural economy, that recognizes carrying capacity, cycles and such that could be thought of in the context of a closed, finite system and financial economy which is abstracted from that. Herman Daley, the steady state economist, does something similar. In the financial economy we basically have the notion of infinite growth as if it were some sort of open system. It's abstracted from the natural economy, which assumes a closed, finite thermodynamic system (and the living and cyclic systems nested within that). We also have the conception of a waste stream, rather than the cyclic nature of a closed system. When we transform matter into something we no longer consider useful there is no where for it to go. It stays in the system. You know, the basic old saw about when you throw something "away" where is that in a closed system? This means use orientation, interest and utility become really important. Matter can be transformed, but essentially no new matter is introduced. There is a kind of cyclic renewability based on the energy, but most industrial models are not based on that at all. They are based on an entirely different use orientation and interest. In that way the material aspects of the system are not renewable. This is even true for the material components of wind and solar in the way we currently harness those. The scale of use and impact is much different than fossil material though. From this point of view the system is finite. Herman Daley basically left the world bank because he kept creating economic models that included carrying capacity (which is locally a bit different than this planetary notion) and they kept getting deleted from the publications. I don't know what a truly open system planet would look like. It would seriously change basic things like stocks and flows which is one of the basic things about atmospheric warming. How we think about it effects what we design and how we behave in profound ways, it seems to me. One of the ways to simply understand our inability to effectively address complex global phenomena such as climate change is that beneficiaries of the current non-renewable use of material are fighting about who will profit and who will pay the costs of transitions. That use orientation is one in which we treat a finite, closed system as if it were infinite and open. It is delusional. It can only be imagined to work, even locally, if you delete all sorts of costs associated with the closed system as a whole, which is what we have done. Sogol fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 09:37
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Rhjamiz posted:Also sunlight, which bombards the planet constantly. Sogol posted:Gravity is a force. It is not matter. Maybe there is something to what you're saying, but for now, you just completely miss physics. vvv whelp I didn't even know about that distinction vvv Cingulate fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 11:22
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Hello Sailor posted:So the consensus of physicists is that gravity is a type of energy and has no relationship whatsoever to matter? Cingulate posted:Maybe there is something to what you're saying, but for now, you just completely miss physics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system#In_thermodynamics posted:In thermodynamics, a closed system can exchange energy (as heat or work) but not matter, with its surroundings. An isolated system cannot exchange any heat, work, or matter with the surroundings, while an open system can exchange all heat, work and matter. For a simple system, with only one type of particle (atom or molecule), a closed system amounts to a constant number of particles. However, for systems which are undergoing a chemical reaction, there may be all sorts of molecules being generated and destroyed by the reaction process. In this case, the fact that the system is closed is expressed by stating that the total number of each elemental atom is conserved, no matter what kind of molecule it may be a part of. Mathematically:
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Apr 13, 2014 11:42
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Sogol posted:Both of these are energetic, rather than exchange of matter. The sun dumps loads of actual matter (in the form of charged particles in a plasma) onto the earth constantly. The magnetosphere funnels that junk toward the poles before it falls through the atmosphere, creating showers of secondary charged particles that appear to us as the aurora borealis.
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Apr 13, 2014 12:33
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mdemone posted:The sun dumps loads of actual matter (in the form of charged particles in a plasma) onto the earth constantly. The magnetosphere funnels that junk toward the poles before it falls through the atmosphere, creating showers of secondary charged particles that appear to us as the aurora borealis.
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Apr 13, 2014 12:38
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Yeah given that it only took bacteria a few decades to evolve the capability to eat loving nylon, and that we have specialised bacteria living in both radioactive and highly acidic toxic waste dumps that have been around for less than 200 years, I seriously doubt it would take millions of years to evolve the capability to decompose trees. Wikipedia posted:The large coal deposits of the Carboniferous primarily owe their existence to two factors. The first of these is the appearance of bark-bearing trees (and in particular the evolution of the bark fiber lignin). The second is the lower sea levels that occurred during the Carboniferous as compared to the Devonian period. This allowed for the development of extensive lowland swamps and forests in North America and Europe. Based on a genetic analysis of mushroom fungi, David Hibbett and colleagues proposed that large quantities of wood were buried during this period because animals and decomposing bacteria had not yet evolved that could effectively digest the tough lignin. It is assumed that fungi that could break it down did not arise before the end of the period, making future coal formation much more rare.[14][15] The Carboniferous trees made extensive use of lignin. They had bark to wood ratios of 8 to 1, and even as high as 20 to 1. This compares to modern values less than 1 to 4. This bark, which must have been used as support as well as protection, probably had 38% to 58% lignin. Lignin is insoluble, too large to pass through cell walls, too heterogeneous for specific enzymes, and toxic, so that few organisms other than Basidiomycetes fungi can degrade it. It can not be oxidized in an atmosphere of less than 5% oxygen. It can linger in soil for thousands of years and inhibits decay of other substances.[16] Probably the reason for its high percentages is protection from insect herbivory in a world containing very effective insect herbivores, but nothing remotely as effective as modern insectivores and probably many fewer poisons than currently. In any case coal measures could easily have made thick deposits on well drained soils as well as swamps. The extensive burial of biologically produced carbon led to a buildup of surplus oxygen in the atmosphere; estimates place the peak oxygen content as high as 35%, compared to 21% today.
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Apr 13, 2014 12:40
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Cingulate posted:Are these on a scale to be relevant for climate change? Of course not. I was responding to the pedant with a pedantic correction.
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Apr 13, 2014 13:32
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It's also worth noting that the energy we exchange with the sun is not just heat or work, there is a tremendous amount of electromagnetic energy entering our atmosphere at all times. This is how solar panels work, after all. Earth is not a closed system.
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Apr 13, 2014 14:54
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And in a closed system energy can come and go. Sheesh. I thing Sogol is a bit wordy (but generally good) but this is a bunch of people literally whining at a writing style and quibbling over a distinction that they don't understand. Yes, (incredibly) small particulates bombard the earth constantly, but it is an effect that is ignorable for considering climate change. Let off.
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Apr 13, 2014 15:02
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mdemone posted:Of course not. I was responding to the pedant with a pedantic correction. The Internet, ladies and gentlemen.
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Apr 13, 2014 16:07
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forgot my pants posted:We have enough uranium in the ocean to supply our energy needs for 5 billion years, making nuclear just as renewable as solar or wind energy. We also have the technology to harvest that uranium already and I'm sure we could get better at it given a million years or so of developing that technology. Well it's like hydrogen which is almost infinitely renewable. We could run ourselves forever off that poo poo. The question is how much energy do we have to put into it to get it out. In the case of hydrogen, it's pretty expensive! Sea water uranium is plentiful abundant, but it's extremely expensive to get at it, and if it's not what we are doing, that's likely because it's cheaper not to use it. Not sure how the maths work for thorium though. That's a technology nobody ought be sniffing at the environmental balance sheet for, I think.
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Apr 13, 2014 16:30
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duck monster posted:Well it's like hydrogen which is almost infinitely renewable. We could run ourselves forever off that poo poo. The question is how much energy do we have to put into it to get it out. In the case of hydrogen, it's pretty expensive! Sea water uranium is plentiful abundant, but it's extremely expensive to get at it, and if it's not what we are doing, that's likely because it's cheaper not to use it. What are you talking about? Where is this supply of hydrogen fuel coming from?? Even the most inefficient method of obtaining uranium returns more energy when it is fissioned, but no method of obtaining H2 will return more energy than is needed to extract it.
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Apr 13, 2014 16:49
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Placid Marmot posted:What are you talking about? Where is this supply of hydrogen fuel coming from?? Even the most inefficient method of obtaining uranium returns more energy when it is fissioned, but no method of obtaining H2 will return more energy than is needed to extract it. Yeah the expense from uranium sea extraction is in literal dollars, not energy expenditure.
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Apr 13, 2014 16:53
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Claverjoe posted:And in a closed system energy can come and go. Sheesh. I thing Sogol is a bit wordy (but generally good) but this is a bunch of people literally whining at a writing style and quibbling over a distinction that they don't understand.
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Apr 13, 2014 18:13
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Strudel Man posted:On the other hand, I don't quite see how the relative material isolation of the earth is particularly relevant to what he was talking about. I mean "This is inherently unsustainable without an infinite supply of energy and we live in closed thermodynamic system" certainly sounds like a sentence which is talking about limitations on energy, not matter. Basically I think it is something like we need to handle the closed aspects of the system before we take advantage of the open aspects available from larger scales. The energy-material relationship is critical to this, it seems to me. Basically we still use fire (and to a lesser extent collision) to break apart material bonds in a way that releases the energy and then use that released energy to transform other material (mostly into disposable consumer goods and ways of living needed for that). All of that is happening locally in terms of the planet as a closed system. The scale of that activity is now effecting the cyclic planetary systems, which are mostly solar energy input, at the same level as those systems, local to the planet. This means that the planetary systems are interrupted or transformed by the activity. They are complex, interrelated systems and this means it is very hard to predict what will happen or employ control mechanisms to manage consequences. The industrial era is a locally contained explosion. It is taking place in a model that is intended to maximize and consolidate profit while ignoring the costs associated with the successes of that model. Because of the closed nature of the system we always have the material question in great part defined by the gravity well. If we handle the energy question then the relationship to the gravity well changes and we might start to be in a more robustly open system, but we have to handle our relationship to the finite, closed nature of the local planetary system first without creating irreparable damage. If we handle that question, which essentially means the 7b+ of us learning to live within our means, the local carrying capacity of the planet, then many other options may open up. We aren't really currently on track to do that or even really consider it. Sogol fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 20:15
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Placid Marmot posted:What are you talking about? Where is this supply of hydrogen fuel coming from?? Even the most inefficient method of obtaining uranium returns more energy when it is fissioned, but no method of obtaining H2 will return more energy than is needed to extract it. The loving ocean! H2O. You can zap the gently caress out of water and make hydrogen poo poo out of it, but the catch is, more energy goes into zapping that hydrogen out then you'll get from doing fuel poo poo with the hydrogen. (In actual fact hydrogen is usually manufactured from fossil fuels using this process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming ) Its an analogy! But yes, its very expensive (money/energy/whatever your metric you want to use) to extract sufficient uranium of the right isotope out of sea water. Otherwise it'd be exactly what we are doing.
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Apr 14, 2014 05:05
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computer parts posted:And only half of the Roman Empire fell. Oh, Byzantium fell too. It just took about three times longer.  But yeah, the point is that collapse rarely occurs over short time periods, especially in large, well-established empires/civilisations (like modern Western Civilisation). Sogol posted:That is one basis for considering Mad Max scenarios. If you imagined that as a possibility (not a certainty) then you might focus on building local capacity for resilience (which is subject to poverty traps). In order to do so though you have to work at multiple scales, rather than just attempt to isolate some local scale, since such isolation (bunkering up) won't produce resilience. I'm very much in favour of building local resilience, but I fundamentally disagree that contemplating (or asking people to contemplate) Mad Max scenarios is a helpful step towards that. If you tell people there is no future, 99% of the time they will respond with either nihilism or denial. If you tell them there is a future, but it will be a lot shittier than the present and they will just have to deal with it, they might actually start working towards doing that. E: For reference, in Mad Max 99% of everyone had died, and the survivors lived in a Hobbesian dystopia scrabbling for the remaining resources. There are infinitely many more likely but still extremely lovely futures to contemplate. The prospect of living through the local equivalent of New Orleans during Katrina, or the dust bowl in the Great Depression, or the South during the American Civil War, or Detroit over the last few decades, should be enough to galvanise people into action. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 05:18
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Oh, Byzantium fell too. It just took about three times longer. Yes, in actual practice of creating community groups dealing with local ecosystems, town halls and such I might name something about scenarios, but not dwell on Mad Max stuff since there is really not much value there. The positive motivations of communal activity and agency are as powerful as any of the negative motivations anyway, in my experience. They tend to keep a working group together over time, where as the negative cast is not as effective at that.
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Apr 14, 2014 07:49
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Sogol posted:Both of these are energetic, rather than exchange of matter. Well the "solar wind" is composed of various ionised gasses. You can get a compression waves (which are technically sounds) in space too. Also re the whole argument on closed vs open system: Check the chart here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_system Closed system appears correct to me. On a technicality mass is exchanged due to neutrino decay etc .... but frankly such distinctions are slightly over the top. Lead out in cuffs posted:I'm very much in favour of building local resilience, but I fundamentally disagree that contemplating (or asking people to contemplate) Mad Max scenarios is a helpful step towards that. If you tell people there is no future, 99% of the time they will respond with either nihilism or denial. If you tell them there is a future, but it will be a lot shittier than the present and they will just have to deal with it, they might actually start working towards doing that. People are used to being bailed out when they are completely and utterly screwed. People also hate doing things that give them a future when it costs them in the present. Anti cigarette and AIDS advertisements had show 100% grim and graphic depictions of doom to be even partially effective. The trick is to run the "you will be screwed" campaign alongside the "and here's your ticket out" campaign.
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Apr 14, 2014 09:46
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duck monster posted:The loving ocean! H2O. You can zap the gently caress out of water and make hydrogen poo poo out of it, but the catch is, more energy goes into zapping that hydrogen out then you'll get from doing fuel poo poo with the hydrogen. You cannot compare hydrogen and uranium as "fuels"; hydrogen can be used as energy storage, but it is not a source of energy. It would be like calling lithium or lead fuels because you can make batteries from them, and "almost infinitely renewable" because they can be recycled hypothetically infinitely. Currently, using hydrogen for energy storage actually promotes carbon emissions, since hydrogen requires both refined oil and another energy source to produce. If the world is some day able to run entirely on nuclear and renewables, then perhaps hydrogen would become an appropriate energy storage medium for vehicles.
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Apr 14, 2014 13:54
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Placid Marmot posted:Currently, using hydrogen for energy storage actually promotes carbon emissions, since hydrogen requires both refined oil and another energy source to produce. If the world is some day able to run entirely on nuclear and renewables, then perhaps hydrogen would become an appropriate energy storage medium for vehicles. There's some interesting stuff going on with algal bioreactors, but since the process is based on photosynthesis, it's effectively just another form of solar power. It also still needs to be more efficient; running a car on hydrogen produced this way is around 4-6 times as expensive as gasoline, last I knew.
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Apr 14, 2014 14:56
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Even if we had workable fusion reactors for baseload, hydrogen power storage is a wash. It's hard as hell to bottle and doesn't provide much power density. Saving a step and just using batteries would probably be significantly more functional.
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Apr 14, 2014 15:44
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Placid Marmot posted:You cannot compare hydrogen and uranium as "fuels"; hydrogen can be used as energy storage, but it is not a source of energy. . Wrong! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_fuel And your missing the point of my analogy anyway.
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Apr 14, 2014 16:10
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If you really wanted to be pedantic, isn't everything just a stored version of energy with various levels of accessibility?
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Apr 14, 2014 16:16
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duck monster posted:The loving ocean! H2O. You can zap the gently caress out of water and make hydrogen poo poo out of it, but the catch is, more energy goes into zapping that hydrogen out then you'll get from doing fuel poo poo with the hydrogen. Uranium extraction is hardly "very expensive" in the senses that matter- this is because fuel is a small proportion of the overall cost of nuclear energy production. Even if it doubles or triples the cost of fuel, it still wouldn't be uneconomical compared to the internalized costs of fossil fuel production (or compared to solar, etc). Why don't we do it? Pretty simple- it's still a lot cheaper to get it from other sources, or use thorium or whatever. When people bring up seawater extraction it is to note that fissile material is not running out anytime soon. The problem has always been that burning fuels have always been externalized, otherwise we would have had nuclear power yesterday. However, if people are correct about GW then even significantly more expensive nuclear power would be "worth it". As for the other silly argument- quote:It is worth noting that 'closed system' is often used in thermodynamics discussions when 'isolated system' would be correct - i.e. there is an assumption that energy does not enter or leave the system. The pendant is the one who would refer to earth as a closed system, because it would never be called that in academia. Strudel Man posted:On the other hand, I don't quite see how the relative material isolation of the earth is particularly relevant to what he was talking about. I mean "This is inherently unsustainable without an infinite supply of energy and we live in closed thermodynamic system" certainly sounds like a sentence which is talking about limitations on energy, not matter. Exactly, in the context of GW calling the earth a closed system is incredibly silly, since nobody would be thinking of the super technical definition most professors wouldn't even care about.
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Apr 14, 2014 16:20
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duck monster posted:Wrong! Actually that's exactly what the link says, did you not even read or understand it? quote:Once manufactured, hydrogen is an energy carrier (i.e. a store for energy first generated by other means). which is exactly what that poster was getting at.
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Apr 14, 2014 16:22
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