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I would start with the IPCC reports and go from there.
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Feb 11, 2016 01:16
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Nuclear plants, even operating with a once-through fuel cycle and no reprocessing, simply don't consume enough fuel over their lifetime for this to be a big issue. Logistically, it is not a big deal to just store it all on site. The rational behind repositories like Yucca mountain is that it is better to have one or a few centralized sites for long term storate of fuel/high-level waste, rather than just storing them on site after decommissioning for Reasons.
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Mar 21, 2016 23:13
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Trabisnikof posted:The problem for nuclear is that due to all the issues listed (site unique designs, limited number of vendors, strict regulation, etc) in the world we live in it just doesn't make sense for most large grids to increase their nuclear fleet size. It doesn't take ~*~global socialism~*~ or radical changes to nuclear regulations to make many nuclear power plants in a short amount of time, France being a (perhaps the only..) historical example. Really all it takes is: 1. One or two well established designs that have passed non site-specific regulatory approval 2. A means of reasonably quickly selecting sites such that site-specific approval is straightforward 3. A nuclear industry with a demonstrated ability to deliver plants on time and within budget, for well established designs 4. Enough government intervention to either outright build the plants with taxpayer dollars, or to guarantee/subsidize to a degree large enough to make biulding the number of plants required commercially attractive. 1 and 2. are basically already in place or very nearly in place, and do not require any heroic efforts to achieve. Number 3 requires the nuclear industry to get its poo poo together, because its present track record, at least in the US and Europe, is god awful. Industry consolidation and a far more vertically integrated structure would help a lot here, and this is basically guaranteed to happen if Number 4 is met. Number 4 is the big one, and boils down to allocating enough $$$, one way or another, to encourage massive nuclear development. I think that without substantial government subsidizing/intervention, a substantial increase in nuclear power wont happen. I also dont see it happening any time soon. But it would not take a global political revolution for e.g. US policy and public opinion to become relatively pro nuclear, given the increasingly obvious reality of global warming.
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Mar 21, 2016 23:25
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Trabisnikof posted:Even in France Areva is failing. I think we are mostly on the same page. Areva's contemporary failings are a good example of why I said the nuclear industry needs to get its poo poo together. And I don't think Bechtel would do any better--see my post. But just because the industry in the US/EU is making GBS threads its pants in many ways now, doesn't mean it is inherently dysfunctional or that the shitshow with e.g. the EPR is inherent to nuclear reactors. Look at France in the 70's, for a counterexample. The problems that Areva or other western nuclear firms are having has little to do with strict regulations....for example in Areva's case they aren't meaningfully more strict now than they were in the 20th century, when France crakned out perfectly good reactors like sausages. From 2nd hand experience I get the impression that a lot of it is organizational, with a mish mash of several different firms interfacing in laughably inefficient ways, and a serious lack of top-down direction or planning, combined with an emphasis in consultancy firms/subcontractors on billable hours instead of long term deliverables. Again. France in the mid/late 20th century is a good example of a functional nuclear industry, its not something that has never existed or can never exist again. But, you're right, the resources that would need to be marshaled to encourage a meaningful (in terms of global warming) ramp up in nuclear development are pretty massive, and there is no guarantee that it wouldn't end up being an anemic fuckup anyway. My point is just that it wasn't always this way, doesn't always have to be this way, and "fixing" things, although probably an insurmountable hurdle in my opinion (at least in the next 20 years), does not require world-changing political revolutions. As far as conservation, efficiency, renewables, etc. The bottom line is that the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that are needed, at this point, to plausibly stabilize the climate are truly staggering. Efficiency, demand response, (energy) storage--simply aren't going to get us there, without a massive increase in some sort of carbon free energy generation. This isn't to say such things aren't important, but they are supplemental components to a strategy that must incorporate huge scaling up in renewables or nuclear or both. As far as renewables vs nuclear goes, I'm not sure that investing in nuclear is a better option than investing in e.g. solar, but im certainly not sure of the reverse either. The bottom line or me is I can point to a time and place in history when at least one economically developed large country developed a nearly carbon free electricity generation infrastructure using nuclear energy. Furthermore, they did so in the space of ~2 decades or less, they did so economically, and they did so without needing to radically change their political or economic structure. I can't point at the same thing for renewables, not even remotely close. Given the urgency and complexity of the problems surrounding climate change mitigation, I am tempted to take the "easy" way out and just say: "hey you see that thing that would solve our problems and those other people did before and it worked, just do it again". Morbus fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 00:15
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This is probably the most depressing thread on SA, but between lolcubesats and "I saw a thing about Blacks on PBS once lets close humanity depts" it sure is a good laugh seeing armchair STEMlords overextend themselves.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:51
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So a question I have been trying to find a good answer for is: for the purpose of electricity generation alone (i.e. ignoring transportation etc.), about how much of an increase in the price of fossil fuels would be required to make them very noncompetitive compared to, for example, nuclear and/or solar? Could a sufficiently severe and prolonged shock to fossil fuel prices be reasonably expected to replace a large fraction of fossil fuel based electricity generation with non-CO2 emitting alternatives over something like a 10 year period?
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Nov 25, 2016 08:01
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Trabisnikof posted:Wind already is cheaper compared to building a new plant. The problem is, if I built a coal plant 40 years ago and I've already paid off my capital costs then it's hard to make building something new cheaper. You'd probably need add +$20ish $/per MWh to fossil fuels to make building new renewables cheaper than just operating your existing coal plant and +40ish to make building nuclear cheaper than operating your existing coal plants. That's spitballing off the doe lcoe numbers https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf Based on this, Paradoxish's post, most else I've read, and common sense, I think its fair to say that the fossil fuel price increase required to dramatically change the equation is less like 10x and more like 4x or even 2x, for example. For oil and gas at least, this is within the historical range of volatility that can be caused by deliberate supply shocks. Thinking particularly of the 1973 oil crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, or the more contemporary (and localized) examples of Iraqi Kurdistan, Libya, and Nigeria. I am in no way advocating this, but its no less crazy of an end-times climate change scenario than >30 billion USD/yr being spent on SRM or aerosols and that crazy poo poo gets serious discussion all the time.
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Nov 25, 2016 10:49
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The arctic amplification we've been seeing is pretty clearly more severe than a lot of the more conservative estimates that had been made. Does this have anything to do with increased arctic methane releases? Either as an effect or cause? It looks like atmospheric methane had leveled out and then surged up a bit from 2010-2015. Is there a (relatively) benign explanation for this like changes in agricultural activity, or are we beginning to see hints of the oh-poo poo methane bomb?
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Dec 12, 2016 22:10
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Part of the reason sulfate aerosols are considered relatively benign is that they aren't a novel feature of the climate and there are empirical bounds on their effects. Obviously any kind of atmospheric geo-engineering can have unintended consequences, but I think the likelihood of sulfate injection taking us into uncharted and dangerous territory (to anywhere near the extent that GHGs already have) is low.
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Dec 14, 2016 20:36
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Nocturtle posted:How would you go about proving this? Well you conduct a controlled experiment where you dump a bunch of sulfates into the air and see what happens. Short of that you obviously aren't going to "prove" anything. But there are a lot of reasons why you can be reasonably certain about the broad scope and effects of sulfate geoengineering: -Sulfates are always in the atmosphere, and there is a natural sulfate cycle. Volcanoes occasionally dump large amounts of sulfate into the upper atmosphere, and the cooling effect and depletion of these sulfates is documented empirically and somewhat well understood theoretically. -The lifetime of stratospheric sulfate aerosols is around a year or so, and tropospheric sulfates much less than that. One the one hand, this means sulfate geoengineering needs to be constantly sustained to be effective. On the other, it means if necessary it can be quickly halted whereupon the earth system should return to its previous state relatively soon. -The amount of sulfur that needs to be added to the atmosphere is generally estimated to be between 2-5 megatons/yr.. almost certainly more than 1, almost certainly less than 10. This is similar to or less than the sulfate loading caused by large volcanic eruptions that happen several times per century. The biggest unresolved issue is that, while the sulfate loading from occasional large volcanic eruptions apparently does not have any catastrophic effects to ecosystems, it's not clear what would happen if you had a continual forcing like most geoengineering proposals call for. While this is a big "if", to the extent that people are thinking about it, there don't seem to be obvious reasons why more prolonged reductions in UV and scattering of sunlight should cause major problems. There are also concerns about acid rain and ozone depletion. For the former, this seems very unlikely to be a big issue since the amount of tropospheric sulfur is only increasing by a tiny amount. For ozone depletion, the effects would be most pronounced in the arctic where it matters less, and in any case the UV reflected off sulfate aerosols and the extra UV from less ozone look like they would be approximately of the same amount, so big changes seem unlikely. There is a decent review article here, although its from 2008. Probably you can find a more recent one. http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/4007
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Dec 15, 2016 01:20
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:You've never actually run an actual scientific experiment in your life, have you? Yes...I have run actual scientific experiments. More importantly, so have plenty of actual climate scientists who think geoengineering is worthy of discussion, and they've written papers you can go read. I guess if you don't like them you can ask those people if they've ever run an actual scientific experiment in their life? This isn't (primarily..) some pipe dream of idiot SV billionaires trying to technomagic their way out of a societal problem, its a topic that has been seriously broached by climate scientists primarily out of concern that we may not be able to escape unacceptable changes to the climate even if we halt GHG emissions quickly and completely. You can disagree, and its obviously a topic that merits argument and discussion, but you can't just flippantly dismiss anyone who talks about it without looking like a jackass. Honestly I probably agree with you about most of this so I'll just ask this: You say we can already avert a crisis by reducing emissions (by reducing consumption, switching to renewables, phasing out high emission technology, whatever). This is by no means a certainty and is increasingly unclear among climate scientists. The only scenarios in either AR4 or AR5 with even remotely good confidence of staying below 2C warming by 2100 are those that require CO2 concentrations to start declining sometime around 2040, with no overshoot of ~500 or so ppm. There is a growing psuedo-consensus that 350 ppm might be what is ultimately needed. To reach 350ppm by 2100, the CO2 concentration needs to stabilize (i.e. net zero emissions) soon, and then start dropping, faster than what natural sinks are generally thought to be capable of (and that's assuming deforestation, ocean acidification, etc. don't completely gently caress those sinks worse than they already are). Thus, such scenarios explicitly require some kind of negative emissions at some point, in addition to radical emission reductions by more than half within a couple decades. And even then, 350ppm might be too much. After all, the pre-industrial atmosphere only had 280ppm, so that's the only number we really know to be safe (and it seems every 5 years the scientific consensus on a safe upper limit drops by 50ppm or so). On top of all this, there is an ever-increasing likelihood that certain positive feedbacks may be occurring more severely than we would have liked. What if arctic sea ice continues to plummet at its current rate? What if methane from thawing tundra become significant? What if, god-forbid, clathrates from seabed permafrost start venting? What if ocean acidification dramatically reduces the ocean's ability to sink carbon--something that is relatively poorly understood? If some of these runaway processes really get going even Bond-villian scale geoengineering may be useless, and as of now we may not be able to identify with certainty the emergence of such processes before it's too late. So, how certain are you that we can reduce emissions as radically as we need to in 20 years? How certain are you that, on top of that, we can sink the poo poo we've already put into the atmosphere as fast as we need to, either through extremely aggressive reforestation or technological means? How certain are you that we won't reach a catastrophic tipping point somewhere on our 30 (fat chance) to 100 year journey to 350ppm? Arctic feedbacks are already scaring the poo poo out of people today. Even if things don't get worse at all over the next 20 years before they start improving, how certain are you that another 20 years of what we've already got doesn't lead to a really bad equilibrium? If your answer to all of these is "reasonably certain", congratulations you must sleep better than I do. But if not, you need to balance these uncertainties and their consequences with the uncertainties of various geoengineering proposals. And then you must acknowledge the very real possibility that some time in the near future, some sort of geoengineering might be required simply to buy us time and stabilize dangerous feedback processes while we work towards the radical emission reductions that are needed. There is even a (weaker) argument to be made that geoengineering is needed now, in conjunction with radical emissions reduction, in order to e.g. begin refreezing arctic sea ice. Nobody in their right mind thinks geoengineering is a "good" idea, only that it might be or become a necessary idea. And given that, it's important to seriously consider it now, to the extent possible, so that we have at least some clue what we are doing if it turns out that we cant fix this mess just by reducing emissions.
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Dec 15, 2016 09:03
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:Reducing consumption and moving wholesale to renewables is a complete fix, but it's a method of mitigation that we have much more control over and one that forestalls the issue of continued level of emissions. As you said, we have no idea what some natural sinks are capable of, or what will happen with the forcing of certain feedback mechanisms as global CO2 (ppm) rises, to say nothing of runaway methane emissions as tundra and other deposit-heavy biomes heat up. If we reduce consumption, that gives up more breathing room and flexibility than if we just rely on geoengineering without solving the problem of how society functions. There's a hard cap to what geoengineering can do, and if we're constantly trying to geoengineer our way of of climatic forcing then we'll never get around to dealing with the real issue: humans cannot and should not continue to function as a civilization reliant on hydrocarbons and severely imbalanced, not to mention unsustainable, levels of product production and consumption. Reducing consumption and moving wholesale to renewables may NOT be a complete fix, that's the whole point. This isn't even controversial. Depending on what your definition of a complete fix is, zero emissions by 2020 may not even be close to getting us there. I think we may be talking past each other on this point, so let me try to establish some common ground. RCP2.6/RCP3-PD is the most wildly optimistic scenario considered in the IPCC AR5, yes? Some features of RCP2.6 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-011-0152-3) -Energy related CO2 emissions (not including transport or industry) freeze by 2020 (having not increased appreciably since 2010), are ZERO by ~2040-50, and are NEGATIVE by 2060 -Total net emissions (including those from agriculture, cement, aircraft, everything) are less than 20% their current value by ~2070 -Explicitly requires extensive use of CCS in combination with renewables to reach negative emissions in the energy sector. The scale of CCS required is sufficient to consider this a form of geo-engineering -Explicitly requires declining methane for the rest of the century and has no margin whatsoever to account for increased natural methane emissions due to climate feedbacks. Now, RCP2.6 ends us up with ~400ppm by 2100, with good confidence of <2 degree warming but probably not much less than 1.5. Is that a complete solution?? Here is a pathway that drops emissions super rapidly, sucks net carbon out of the air on top of that, makes very optimistic assumptions regarding methane, land use, reforestation, and still ends up with a climate that amounts to "doing exactly what our climate is doing now, except a bit worse, and from a warmer starting point". This isn't a complete fix; its just sub-catastrophic... probably. But whatever, gently caress RCP2.6. You can look at some of the "pathways" the 350 folks advocate, like this one: http://sei-us.org/Publications_PDF/SEI-350ppmPathway-09.pdf The first thing you will notice about this and similar pathways is they are some Fisher-Price poo poo compared to that kind of analysis and modeling that go into the RCP scenarios, which is why AR5 notes that there is a lack of studies looking at sub 430ppm (although admittedly there are political reasons for the exclusion of radical pathways from the IPCC reports and even RCP2.6 barely squeaked in). If you can find a really good one, let me know, but I haven't seen any. Forget that, though, this scenario calls for (apart from a time machine) TOTAL emissions to be less than half what they are now in 4 years (seems legit), almost nothing by 2040, and ZERO by 2050. How do we do this? Exponential decline of total global emissions by 10%/yr starting 6 years ago. How, specifically, do we do this? gently caress if I know. Note that this is not a scenario in the sense that any of the other RCPs are. It does not make any realistic attempt to model the response of all sources of emissions to spectrum of actions; its just a thought experiment about what kind of emission profile might end up at 350ppm. Ignoring all the problems with this (generous assumptions regarding natural sinks being one of them), is this a complete solution? Even 350ppm may not keep us below 2C (see for example http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.727.9524&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=279), and it is still way above the known-to-be-safe climate optimum of 280ppm. We are at ~390 now, with ~+0.8C warming, and there is a real possibility that we may cross dangerous tipping points at any moment. If we somehow attain 350ppm by 2100, we will by then have pushed things further in a bad direction, and will not have a climate dynamics significantly more favorable than they are now. Again, even 350 is not a "complete fix", it is just a much more conservative "avoid catastrophe" limit, one made with far less regard to what we can realistically attain and far more emphasis on what a realistic upper bound for the safe limit is, practical considerations aside. Even 280ppm may not be a complete fix. It almost certainly would be, but all of these estimates and models and scenarios essentially discount the possibility of our imminently crossing a tipping point--something that CANNOT be ruled out with any good degree of certainty. This becomes more true every year, as we learn more about the arctic and our oceans. Of course, a 280ppm world should, eventually, return to a climate equilibrium similar to what existed before we came and messed with it, but if getting there requires us to wait 300 years for eleventy fuckjillion gigatons of sea ice or methane to refreeze or be removed, it doesn't really matter. This is the motivation behind serious consideration of geo-engineering. You keep coming back to this idea of people trying to engineer our way out of an unsustainable society, in lieu of aggressive emission reductions. While I'm sure you can find some fucker moron on a message board someplace who will tell you that the Immortal King CyberThiel and his Space Shades(TM) brought to you by SpaceX will save the planet no matter what we do with our emissions, that fucker moron isn't someone to take seriously, and it's disingenuous to prop that lovely fedora wearing straw man up in front of actual climate scientists who are legitimately concerned that emission reductions will not save us. Rap Record Hoarder posted:I'm not, but we haven't even tried on any serious level. There sky is the limit for what we can do to shift and reduce consumption patterns in the developed world alone. A LOT can be done in 20 or 30 years. That we're seeing such drastic, terrifying feedback responses now should only be more motivation to doing what we can do now, The sky is not the limit for what we can do to emissions in 20 or 30 years. Zero is. Possibly somewhat less than that if you consider CCS not a form of geoengineering. Zero in 20-30 years, assuming no climate black swans, tipping points, or other "oops we were too optimistic/everyone was wrong" scenarios (cause that never happens), will probably get us to around 350-450 by 2100. It might not. It might end up below 350, but at that point you are basically crossing your fingers and hoping things will be better than we think. 350 might be safe, it very well might not be. This goes doubly so for the far more realistic (but still incredibly optimistic) figure of 400ppm. That we are seeing such drastic, terrifying feedback responses now SHOULD be motiviation to do everything we can do now, but it is ALSO reason to fear that we may soon cross, or have already crossed, the point where emission reduction is no longer sufficient by itself. I mean clearly, you can agree that such a point exists. Ultimately what matters is cumulative emissions, so if for example it's 2050 and we're at 550ppm obviously there is no way we can meet <2C by 2100 just by reducing emissions. People always want to imagine that this point it lies in the future, but it may not. At what point will insisting that emission reductions alone are sufficient just be another form of kicking the can down the road? Rap Record Hoarder posted:I will agree that "some" geoengineering might be necessary, but again we should exhaust every other option (of which there are many) before we get there. Just saying that "oh we can geoengineer our way out of it" is not a reason to diminish the importance of vastly re-configuring the way that our society functions as a part and parcel of any climate change mitigation or adaptation strategy. It is, of course, absolutely imperative that we reduce emissions as aggressively as possible as quickly as possible, starting decades ago, by all means possible. No informed person is arguing we geoengineer our way out of it. I am certainly not arguing that. What we are arguing is that emission reduction might not be enough. More importantly, there is a possibility that a climate emergency may quickly emerge that requires immediate action beyond what is achievable by radical emission reductoin. Or, we may find that by the time radical emission reduction becomes policy, it's too late. We need to be prepared for this. The bottom line is that any statement that emission reduction alone--however radical--can completely unfuck our situation is pure hubris. It may be enough, and we must reduce emissions as radically as possible. But we can't ignore the possibility that geoengineering will be required on top of this, which requires planning for it now. One thing I think we will agree on is that if geo-engineering does become necessary, then obviously the preferred method is simply carbon removal. But there are real cost, speed, and efficacy concerns about that. Sulfur aerosols are among the least-bad next options, and we need to study such schemes seriously.
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Dec 16, 2016 09:38
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Potato Salad posted:... No. The only RCP scenarios with <2C by 2100 require extremely aggressive actions right now assuming there are NOT tipping points that we have crossed or will cross in the next 50 years. For example RCP2.6 requires CO2 from all fossil fuels and industry in western developed nations to be reduced to less than 1/3rd their present value in 20 years. In other words, in this scenario, US fossil fuel emissions in 2020 are >3 times higher than they need to be in 20 years. You can go play around in the RCP database if you want to get a broad overview of what kind of emission reductions are required in various regions over time for different scenarios: https://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/RcpDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=compare. Be aware that, as a general rule, the emission requirements for energy production alone are far more aggressive than what is shown in the "fossil fuel and industry" category. For details you need to refer to the actual publications for each RCP scenario. I linked the main publication for RCP2.6 in my last post. The IPCC AR5 report gives RCP2.6 a likely range of +0.4 to +1.7C warming by 2100 in terms of the 5% and 95% confidence interval. Some analyses give RCP2.6 or similar scenarios as high as a 33% chance of exceeding 2C by 2100. If you average together all the estimates you inevitably end up with mean of around 1 to 1.5 degrees C and a likely range that does not exceed 2 degrees C. But something that should be pretty well understood by anyone who was watching the recent US election polling catastrofuck, is that while it is somewhat straightforward to estimate the mean of a process using probabilistic models, accurately nailing down the uncertainties is much more difficult. But in any case, all of this is assuming we do NOT have to deal with dangerous positive feedback tipping points like arctic permafrost melt. Indeed, while IPCC AR4 and AR5 both confidently predict reductions in arctic sea ice and near surface permafrost, the models in the IPCC reports expressly do not consider the effects of permafrost carbon feedbacks on the climate. The IPCC reports, in general, do not address "tipping points". Part of this is political. A lot of it is because the science on such tipping points is less clear--not necessarily because the underlying dynamics are theoretically disputed, but because the positive feedbacks involved are harder to model and difficult to predict with the kind of certainty that is needed in a global consensus building exercise like the IPCC. It's worth noting that even the do-nothing RCP scenarios do not predict the total loss of arctic sea ice until ~2050, which is hard to reconcile with the current reality. As a result, IF there ARE such tipping points we are crossing or have crossed, some inescapable truths emerge: 1. Aggressive emission reductions undertaken immediately, such as those in RCP2.6 will probably not keep us below 2C by 2100. 2. More importantly, even reductions significantly more radical than RCP2.6 (assuming such a thing even practically exists) will not get us below the point that, by demonstration, is already sufficient to set off unacceptable runaway warming. 3. Any non-negative amount of emission will only make things worse. Therefore, something other than emission reduction is needed. So really, every scenario in the IPCC assessment reports basically take for granted a best case scenario where we can fix the problem before tipping points kick in (and so we can therefore ignore them). And even then, extremely aggressive action is needed now to keep us confidently below 2C by 2100. I should point out that this whole "below 2C thing" can be misleading. If we end up with a climate that warms 2C then stays there, things will really suck, but can be adapted to. "Adapting" may involve a lot of pain and suffering and deterioration of the general human condition, but 2C warming is a lovely new normal that can at least in principle be adjusted around. But ultimately the stability of the climate is just as important as some arbitrary warming threshold by some arbitrary date. Even if we are at 1.5C by 2100, if there are unmitigated positive feedbacks that will continue to warm the planet, "adapting" to the situation makes about as much sense as "adapting" to a blazing inferno in your house by unbuttoning your sweater and putting on sunglasses. The whole "adaptation" component to climate change depends upon our arresting whatever processes are causing warming, not just reaching some goal by 2100 or whenever. It may well be that the carbon we've already emitted has set into motion a trend that will not terminate at any kind of acceptable point. If that is the case, emission reduction becomes only a (critically necessary) component of any strategy that wants to conserve some semblance of our traditional climate.
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Dec 17, 2016 05:47
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nessin posted:Nuclear, even modern, is really expensive from a total cost of ownership perspective but replacing inefficient aging reactors with Wind Farms and Solar Plants means you're probably still depending on coal and oil plants for your renewable downtime. I think you will have a hard time showing that nuclear plants are expensive from a total cost perspective. Most attempts to measure the levelized cost of electricity generation show nuclear as being comparable to coal. It's just that the initial costs and delays are huge, meaning you need to be able to invest huge amounts of money at considerable risk over years and years before even making back your first cent. In which case, why go through all the trouble unless you are going to have long-term economics significantly *better* than e.g. coal? It's like if you told me I could walk down the street and buy food from the grocery store, or put $200,000 in escrow for 10 years and get a lifetime supply of groceries at the end of it. Even if the numbers work out about the same long term, why the gently caress would I do that? As a result, in most places getting nuclear plants built requires some sort of government assurance or involvement with the project.
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Dec 17, 2016 06:24
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From that graph, the maximum sea ice extent in 2016 is clearly lower than the minimum extent used to be (which is terrifying). But most plots on arctic sea ice extent don't show the same thing. Is this something to do with e.g. measuring the area if sea ice vs. volume?
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Dec 18, 2016 10:45
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Something to bear in mind, whether you are one of the sadbrain nerds who go off the deep end every few pages like clockwork in this thread, or a normal person, is warming in the arctic over the last few decades is probably caused, to a large degree, by black carbon and methane, not just CO2. Of course, the warming we are seeing in the arctic is a consequence of global warming, and if CO2 emissions are not radically reduced to bring down the global temperature, the arctic is eventually as hosed as anywhere else. But black carbon (basically soot, that lands on snow/ice and make it less white hence less reflective) may account for around half of arctic warming. Methane, also, is disproportionately important in the arctic due to the scarcity of natural sinks (soil). This is good news (sort of) because: -Black carbon and methane have short atmospheric lifetimes, and therefore any action taken to reduce these emissions has a much faster response vs. CO2, which hangs around for a long time and must be slowly removed by natural sinks. -Black carbon in particular is not well mixed in the atmosphere like CO2 or methane; sources from Europe and North America are most significant to arctic warming. A recent study conducted in Abisko (northern Sweden) found that ~45% of the BC found there can be attributed to combustion within the EU, which is obviously a much easier source to regulate than e.g. global CO2 emissions. (http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12776). Other studies also find similar figures (the review article at the bottom attributes ~40% of arctic BC to the EU). Generally speaking, the most significant sources are invariably domestic burning of e.g. wood fired stoves, diesel engine transportation (including marine), and industrial burning of liquid fossil fuels. These are all relatively straightforward to regulate, especially in the high latitude western countries whose emissions are most important for the arctic (for example, restrict wood and oil stoves, implement strict emission standards on diesels, transition industrial generators to natural gas). A lot of this is happening already, for e.g. clean air or economic reasons, and there is no reason such activity could not be dramatically accelerated. As a result, strategies which substantially reduce black carbon emissions near the arctic may be able to help the situation very substantially even if CO2 concentrations do not go down for decades.importance of black carbon to arctic warming is only somewhat recently gaining wide appreciation, but it is on the radar. Since BC, especially from sources that are important in the arctic, can be radically reduced, quickly, and with minimal economic consequences (compared to CO2), it could very well be that this, combined with non-crazy amounts of CO2 reduction globally, can arrest the extreme warming we are seeing in the arctic. It is may be that such action combined with modest concentrations of sulfate aerosols injected only at polar latitudes could stabilize the arctic even if we gently caress the goose and there aren't radical CO2 emission reductions, at least in the near-mid term. This, of course, would do nothing to solve ocean acidification, global warming in general, or the fact that we are all turbofucked long term if emissions are not reduced sharply. But since virtually all of the oh-poo poo near term tipping points are located in polar regions, this knowledge should at least help you guys be somewhat less suicidal.
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Dec 19, 2016 04:32
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Conspiratiorist posted:The Arctic is gonna melt during the next 5-10 years, though. What do you mean by "melt"? Arctic summer ice vanishing (in the sense that you can cross the north pole by ship) in ~5-10 years or less is possible on the very pessimistic end of estimates (which imo is the good side to bet on). That's extremely bad, but it's not in and of itself not some game over point where the trend can't be reversed if you remove the climate forcings causing it. Next year (not just the summer) would have to be absurdly hotter than 2016 to get us an ice free summer. Could happen, but its a long bet. At any rate most climate scientists don't predict an ice free summer until considerably further out than 10 years. It's fine to argue against that (I'd probably join in) but you've gotta do better than "arctic (the whole thing??) gonna melt next year".. In any case, compared to "we need to cut CO2 emissions in half by 2020", reducing the absolute poo poo out of black carbon, form northern states, in the next 5 years, is a comparatively trivial goal. And reducing such emissions could have an immediate effect, unlike CO2.
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Dec 19, 2016 05:12
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Conspiratiorist posted:I'm saying that we'll already be having ice-free summers (with whatever effect that'd have on the thermohaline circulation) by the time cutting out black carbon emissions is considered in America. Yes, doing so would be good, and yes, anyone with the chance I fully endorse to go work on it, but it's not going to be some clinch last minute miracle that saves the arctic - because it's not going to happen next year, hell it's not going to happen during the Trump administration, plus currently methane is spiking and the global temperature keeps increasing. At best we are going to get a slowdown of ice loss for the winter->summer transitions, but you'd need a major refreeze to start seeing a year long arctic icecap once it goes down the first time. Why do you think the United States and its policy is an important factor in black carbon radiative forcing in the arctic?
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Dec 19, 2016 06:20
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Paradoxish posted:It's been a while since I've spent any time looking into it so I'm probably wrong, but I thought it'd been pretty much established that soot was unlikely to be a major cause of arctic warming since only emissions at very high latitudes remain low enough in the atmosphere to actually end up on the ice? The radiative forcing due to BC in the arctic is estimated to be very high, generally. There is very little uncertainty that black carbon, deposited on snow and ice, has a massive radiative forcing associated with it. There are uncertainties about e.g. the effect of co-pollutants that may have negative forcings, but in general there is little disagreement that BC emissions are broadly similar in importance to CO2 and methane, as far as arctic radiative forcing goes (there is growing consensus that BC is probably the 2nd or 3rd most important emission in terms of radiative forcing even globally). It's true that emissions from very high latitudes are most important per unit of emission, since they will disproportionately be deposited onto the snow and ice. More distant emissions have to be lofted high into the atmosphere in order to be transported to arctic latitudes, and atmospheric BC doesn't reduce albedo the way it does on snow/ice. Some will still make it to the surface though. Globally, Asia is the dominant source of BC emissions (by a huge amount), so you have a situation of low RF per unit emission, but massive emissions. Parts of Europe have very small emissions, but extremely high RF per unit emission and so the little soot they emit is important. Russia emits a decent amount of soot, from sources at high latitudes, and so is very important. The US emits about as much soot as Russia, but it does not contribute much to radiative forcing since sources are at mid latitudes. See for example: https://www.amap.no/documents/download/977 Morbus fucked around with this message at 08:41 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 07:16
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BattleMoose posted:Because its stupidly expensive and as long as we are emitting co2, it will always be more cost effective to emit less than try to take it out of the atmosphere. Taking c02 out of the atmosphere is so unviable its not even discussed as an option. For all intents and purposes, once emitted it will persist for thousands of years. Direct air capture of CO2 is discussed as an option, and it's at least in theory not totally crazy expensive, just....way more expensive than not doing it. And also more expensive than switching to renewables. As far as magic technological solutions go its maybe one of the least bad. As always, it should be noted that trying to technomagically fix emissions without actually reducing our emissions is insanely stupid, basically impossible, and economically backwards. But if "well we could always spend trillions of dollars on a massive CO2 removal geo-engineering scheme" helps you sleep at night, then yes, it is a theoretical possibility and within the envelope of conceivable practical reality, provided it is coupled with radical emission reductions. And the CO2 we've emitted won't persist for thousands of years. For atmospheric CO2 it's on the order of decades, and even the shittiest end-state for natural sinks conceivable won't put it past a century. For oceans its more complicated, but still not thousands of years. Of course this point is completely academic since 50 years of 500ppm will gently caress us just as rightly as 5000. There is also the fact that if severe tipping points are passed, even reducing the CO2 concentration immediately to 280ppm won't necessarily cool the planet back to normal for a long time.
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Dec 20, 2016 11:21
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Uncle Jam posted:Sulfates is completely untenable because an over all global cooling of 1C with sulfates does not equal a distributed regional cooling of 1C. Some areas will be unaffected and others will have total crop failures and snow in July. There are a lot of uncertainties here, but there isn't any strong basis to say, for example, that some areas "will" be unaffected and others will have total crop failures and snow in July. The only really accurate statement that can be made about the regional side effects of sulfate injection are that: 1.) we really don't know, 2.) to the extent that people have tried to model it, the side effects are of course proportional to the amount of sulfate injection. Depending on the specifics of the model, you can end up with situations that are relatively benign and where changes in regional precipitation mostly act to counteract changes that have occurred due to global warming...or you can end up with situations where you introduce new droughts or exacerbate existing in e.g. Africa and Asia that would have serious consequences. One thing that is generally true is that the models which introduce modest amount of aerosols, to counteract modest amounts of radiative forcing (in line with an RCP2.6-4 kind of situation), tend to produce more benign outcomes. Models that introduce larger amounts of aerosols to counteract business-as-usual scenarios vary a lot more in their outcomes. Uncle Jam posted:Even if you seed the air evenly, the upper atmosphere will redistribute it very quickly. Some mechanisms are understood but predicting them is virtually impossible now. I don't think its accurate to say predicting distributions is "virtually impossible", just that there are a lot of uncertainties and the distributions you end up with vary greatly depending on the injection strategy modeled. Existing climate models to agree on certain broad features and trends, though. In any case, it's not really my intent to "defend" or advocate sulfate aerosol injection. I am just firmly in the camp that this is something we can better understand, and *must* better understand, so that we can make informed decisions in the future. I really, really don't think anyone can take this option off the table. One, because it may be necessary. Two, more importantly, because some government somewhere may decide it is. It's an eventuality that needs to be planned for, just like the myriad other undesirable consequences of climate change.
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Dec 20, 2016 20:26
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Uncle Jam posted:I'm not even talking climatology though, for the distribution in the stratosphere, because that's all about forecasting. We can be somewhat sure of what is going to happen with atmospheric conditions 1 or 2 weeks ahead, but for sulfate transport you'd need at least a year and a half of accurate modeling. That is an absurd dream. There have been plenty of attempts to do such long term modeling. The results have been anything but consistent or certain, but there is some agreement on broad features. I'm not qualified to say whether or not such attempts are absurd or not, although it's worth pointing out that climate models, in general, need to account for aerosol transport over multi-year time frames, and there has been on-going effort over decades to refine such models and compare them to observation. If you have particular objections over the ability of climate modeling to assess something like stratospheric sulfate injection or aerosol transport in general, I would be honestly interested in hearing more about them.
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Dec 21, 2016 05:54
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BattleMoose posted:This strategy is only an option if we are burning fossil fuels, it requires a *VERY* concentrated mass of air, that only exists in the presence of burning fossil fuels. It cannot be used to remove CO2 from the general atmosphere. Firstly, thank you very much for posting that paper. After reading it I have a few questions: 1. If only ~50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere can be expected to be removed "quickly" (i.e. on 10-100 year timeframes), is it correct to say that the absolute floor on the CO2 concentration we could achieve for the next >200 years, if we attained 0 CO2 emissions immediately, is around 340ppm? 2. Is it also correct to say that if we ever hit ~550ppm, we will be "locked in" at ~420ppm for at least a couple centuries? 3. If this is the case, is 350ppm a total pipe dream, cause it looks like it is. As far as direct air capture of CO2 goes, you *can* do it from ambient air, and it wouldn't be *impossibly* expensive or require impossible amounts of area. It is totally a pipe dream regardless, since the most optimistic figures are around ~20 tons CO2 removed per meter squared of surface area at a cost of ~$1000/ton/yr. So offsetting even a single coal plant (~10 million tons C/yr) would require a plant with a footprint on the order of a few square kilometers and cost 10 billion dollars per year. BUT, when you're talking about 100's or 1000's of years, I don't think the technological removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is far fetched, provided human society doesn't collapse completely in the next 100 years. It's not even super far fetched on a 100 year time frame, in terms of what might become technologically feasible.
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Dec 22, 2016 07:28
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Flip Yr Wig posted:I was under the impression that the main problem with plant-based sequestration is that most of the carbon just goes back into the atmosphere when a plant decays. This doesn't *necessarily* have to be a problem in and of itself. But it does change the way you have to look at bio based sequstration and then you run into problems... If your algae or whatever are replicating at around the same rate they are dying (i.e. you have a stable living population), then the net carbon emission can be zero. Of course once you realize this, you come to the immediate conclusion that as with any form of sequestration, you ultimately fix only the amount of atmospheric carbon that you permanently store in some condensed form.. You are only removing CO2 so long as the population is growing, and the ultimate amount you remove is proportional to how much algae you grow, and then either keep alive, or capture and sequester somehow before it decays. So if you want to remove X tons of carbon, you need ~X tons of algae biomass added to the earth. The "excess" carbon that humans have released, taking us from ~300ppm to ~400ppm, is around 400 gigatons. The total biomass of the earth is ~600 gigatons.
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Mar 31, 2017 21:10
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Wanderer posted:I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting that algae farming would be the only CO2 capture method used. Ideally, you'd be combining it with biochar, biofuels (Daniel Nocera and Pamela Silver's artificial leaf, or CO2/hydrogen blends), artificial stone (mixing olivine into carbon-polluted seawater to make artificial limestone), reforestation, and using the CO2 industrially. I understand, but the bottom line is you have a ~400 GtC problem and you need 400 GtCs of solutions. Thinking in terms of the amount of carbon that needs to be removed puts things in context. Even if algae farming contributes only ~10% to the solution, it still requires a totally unrealistic amount of biomass. Combining algae CO2 capture along with some form of permanent sequestration avoids this problem in principle, but at that point what is the advantage vs direct capture and storage or other schemes? Thinking in terms of GtC budgets is also important because it illustrates just how much carbon has been dug up and pumped into the atmosphere, and how futile it is to conceptualize things in terms purely in terms of emission rates. If you poo poo 300 million years of carbon into the air instantaneously, obviously you cant just stop emitting and then expect things to return to normal on any reasonable timeframe. A significant fraction of the carbon we have emitted we are essentially stuck with for thousands of years. This is why it is so urgent to curb emissions rapidly and aggressively; reaching zero emissions in and of itself won't matter if we live in a 600ppm world by the time it happens. Also, the longer we continue emitting, the more necessary and impractical sequestration becomes if we want to have any hope of a reasonable climate.
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Mar 31, 2017 23:43
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StabbinHobo posted:I wasn't gonna go sci-fi dweebery but since people already mentioned diamond-buildings... can anyone with a materials science background tell us what the current state of artificial diamond technology is? The short answer is CVD diamond can get you at most around 10 grams per day, less for single crystals. The theoretical maximum for CVD diamond growth is probably < 1-10 kg/day per reactor. That limit assumes your growth is limited only by reaction rate and your reaction rate is as high as it can be given sensible limitations on temperature and plasma ionization. It also assumes you can use very large substrates and still grow at this very high deposition rate. Neither of these are likely to be remotely true, but even if they were, 10 kg/day/reactor is still not high enough to ever be useful for structural applications. Even if you did have structurally useful quantities of diamond, it would probably be a lovely structural material for many applications, for the same reasons other ceramics are (poor fracture toughness in particular). For electronic, optical, and other thin-film or nanotechnology applications, existing CVD diamond technology is already good enough for many applications. One thing that gets a lot of hype is the potential of diamond based semiconductor devices, but the main limitation there (other than cost in the near term) is that there is no good n-type dopant for diamond and there are fundamental limitations to there ever being one. In any case, the appropriate carbon based material for any trump tower megaproject is pig poo poo.
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Apr 4, 2017 06:11
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Anyone know of any serious studies of the near and long term economic consequences of coral reef collapse? There are a lot of articles and papers here and there that broadly cover impacts or point out specific consequences. And it isn't hard to find tidbits here and there that assign dollar amounts to every sq. km of reef loss or something like that. But I'm having a hard time finding anything where someone just straight up assumes "zero coral reefs" and then tries to assess the impact of that. What will the impacts be to food security? What sort of ecosystems will replace reefs? What will be the knock off effects from that? If anyone has a link to like a review article or something similar on this topic I'd appreciate it.
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Apr 10, 2017 21:59
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Salt Fish posted:My consumption is ethical, you see, because there are so many other people also consuming the same way. The only individual actions that matter are those that affect more than just yourself. If you can convince 100 other people to restrict their consumption, who then convince 100 more, that's a good thing. But in general, turning into a reclusive subsistence farmer is an inefficient way to "do something" about climate change vs. for example, political action. It's especially stupid when people elect not to participate in conferences or mobilize politically because ~*~*~my carbon fartprint~*~*~. The reality is that there are already like a billion people with a lower carbon footprints than you will ever have; the climate is headed into the toilet just fine despite them, their collective impact on climate policy is exactly gently caress all, and having a few million westerners join them isn't going to tip the scales. If even 10% more of the population really sincerely thought climate change was a huge issue, you wouldn't have a congress and cabinet full of climate change deniers. I mean, a single fracked well has a carbon footprint on the order of at 10,000-100,000 metric tons of CO2 over its lifetime. So you can either convince 1000 people to literally go live in a loving cave, or somehow displace the output of a single tiny fracked well that only operates for a few months in it's entire existence. People are right when they say it's hard to make meaningful political contributions towards better climate change policy. But people who conclude that it's somehow easier or better to crusade against every day consumption are loving stuuuuuuuuuupid. Unless you think you found the One Weird Trick to turn a sizable plurality of consumers in developed countries into Old People, you are certainly better off focusing on even the most impotent looking political action than you are by skipping a flight or something. Just to beat the point home, delaying the emissions from burning 10 minutes worth of DAP fuel shifts the global emission curve by about the same amount as one US household having zero carbon footprint for ~35 years. The people protesting that pipeline, however meager their effort might ultimately end up being, and whatever their actual reasons were, did more to offset the current amount of carbon in the atmosphere than thousands of people ceasing all consumption of everything forever. Morbus fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 05:26
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Burt Buckle posted:If everybody switched to electric cars and solar powered homes, what would be the next big obstacles in terms of CO2? Meat consumption? World wide, electricity production and heating account for about 35-40% of greenhouse gas forcing. Manufacturing and industrial activity (like cement production, for example) account for ~20%. Transport accounts for ~15%. Agriculture (including cow farts) account for ~15%. For just the US, electricity+heating are still ~40%. Industrial emissions are still around 20%. Transport accounts for ~25-30% of US emissions, and agriculture ~10%. As far as transportation emissions go, in the US, cars and trucks account for ~85% of all transportation sector emissions. I'm not sure what the global breakdown is, but I expect it is broadly similar, with light duty vehicles and trucks accounting for much more than aircraft, boats, ships, and trains combined. So, best case, if you switch ALL heating and electricity production to zero emission sources, and change ALL cars and trucks to electric, you would reduce total CO2 equivalent GHG emissions by around 50-65%, i.e. you'd cut them in half or by 2/3rds, ballpark. Roughly 1/3 of emissions come from industrial and agricultural emissions that would not, directly, be improved simply by a renewable electricity grid and electric transportation infrastructure. That said, abundant renewable electricity could in principle offset industrial emissions that come from e.g. on site burning of coal or fossil fuels for heat, process steam, mechanical work, etc. Overall, you could potentially cut emissions by as much as 75-80% just through zero emission electricity production and electric transportation, but that's pushing it.
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Apr 27, 2017 04:47
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Burt Buckle posted:Is there any even remotely conceivable way to get planes in the air without fossil fuels? Seems like many other problems at least have a solution (in theory) but I've never heard of nuclear planes. Zero emission hydrocarbon fuels are the best bet in the near to medium term. Biofuels are one way of doing this. Prior to the explosion of fracking and subsequent plummeting of natural gas prices, the US DOE was funding "electrofuel" research where electrical power is used to convert CO2 and water into hydrocarbons, either through direct electrochemical reduction of CO2 (poor efficiency), or through microbial electrosynthesis where biological pathways similar to those used in biofuels are exploited, but in a way that can be powered by direct current rather than photosynthesis. Longer term, battery powered aircraft aren't entirely out of the question if high specific energy chemistries like lithium-air can ever be made practical. For example, liquid fossil fuels have an energy density of around 40 MJ/kg, and the maximum theoretical energy density of lithium-air (by themselves, not counting the components of a battery) is also around 40 MJ/kg. Even if the ultimate energy density is considerably lower, the overall efficiency of an electric motor powered fan could be nearly twice as high as a turbofan. You'd still have the problem of having to carry the weight of your fuel with you the whole flight though. And this kind of technology is so far off that if and when it ever becomes available, the efficiency of aircraft turbine engines will have improved (whereas electric motors can't be made much more efficient). Hydrocarbon or hydrogen fueled gas turbines will probably always be more efficient and have better power to weight ratios than even the most exotic theoretical best-case battery powered turbofans ever can. In any case there is absolutely no way you will see battery powered aircraft on any time frame relevant for reducing GHG emissions. Edit: like the other guy says: sort out cars first. Air travel isn't negligible but it's a very small piece of the pie overall. With absolutely heroic engineering efforts on zero emission aircraft, you may end up reducing global emissions by 2-3%. Phasing out the most egregious CFCs is a lot easier and would get you twice that. Compared to widespread adoption of electric cars, it's not even remotely close Morbus fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 05:19
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Dead Reckoning posted:Hope the majority of energy supplied by your local utility isn't from coal. Even if it is, it's much easier for renewables to displace fossil fuels used for electricity production than it is for them to replace gasoline or LPG/CNG used for transportation directly. And if demand for electricity goes up to the point where new capacity needs to be installed, renewables (wind especially) are already cost competitive. The bottom line is if demand for energy shifts away from gasoline and towards electricity, you will end up with emission reductions.
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Apr 27, 2017 06:27
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Ol Standard Retard posted:... No, no we don't.. I'm not saying that movement in that direction would be a bad thing, but it's misleading to pretend like current food practices are inextricably linked to fossil fuels. Most of what you mention--decentralize land use, abandon JIT food availablity, shipping, locavore blah blah all revolves around one thing: transportation. Pretend for a moment that Li-ion batteries are at ~$50/kWh and photovoltaics are ~500% cheaper than they are today. It goes without saying that in such an environment, fossil fuel use for electricity production and land vehicle propulsion would be eventually totally displaced. Which means you could knock yourself out trucking strawberries across the continent all winter long if you wanted to, without fossil fuels. Nitrogen fixing is the less tractable part of our current agriculture system that depends on fossil fuels. But by any measure this accounts for < 5% of total emissions, probably <= 2%. Methane emissions and land use changes are, by far, the most significant agricultural contributor to GHG emissions and these don't have (directly) a whole lot to do with fossil fuel consumption. In other words, even if you totally displaced the use of fossil fuels for both transportation and nitrogen fixing, you could carry on doing more or less what we are doing now, but would still produce the majority of the agricultural emissions we are producing now. So yes, we do need to really reconsider the way we grow our food if we wan't to curb GHG emissions, but that is mostly due to attributes of modern agriculture that do not in fact fundamentally depend on fossil fuels.
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May 1, 2017 07:21
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We just need catalytic converter buttplugs for cows.
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May 2, 2017 04:14
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That in and of itself isn't really a rebuttal, since the "point" of the graph is to say "Look! CO2 emissions started going up exponentially during the 19th century to now, and yet the overall trend that the temperature is following is the same trajectory it had been on for hundreds of years--it was already warming!". The reason it's deceptive is, as someone else noted, the temperature record (including the one in his stupid plot) shows a clear departure from its previous history starting around the industrial revolution, and he has just made it look smother by compressing the vertical scale and diluting the steepness of the recent warming by fitting over a much longer time range before there was significant warming. Not only that, but the graph tries to pass of what is in fact a recent long term warming trend as something that has been occurring for 350 years. It's really stupid because if you scrutinize the temperature record in that very same plot even a little, it's clear that something is going on. For hundreds of years the temperature in Whocarestonshire, England bounced between cold years <= 8C and hot years >= 10C, with not much long term trend. Then right around the late 19th / early 20th century when CO2 emissions start to pick up, no more "cold" years around the 8C mark. None, for the last century. The "cold" years keep getting warmer, until they become the same as normal years used to be. And in the last 30 years, you see an unprecedented 30 year warm period.where the average annual temperature is always > 10C.
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May 2, 2017 08:03
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Star Man posted:Misanthropes think there are too many people on the planet and any number is too many. News at 11 You would be a misanthrope too if you had to spend as much time around them as they do.
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May 6, 2017 05:04
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Burt Buckle posted:See? Those clever UAE scamps are actually gonna benefit from climate change maybe perhaps. It's gonna be okay guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svKq044qrYU You know, things like this and Masdar city make more sense if you consider that its all part of a secret Brewster's Millionsesque spending challenge...
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May 8, 2017 06:37
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Paradoxish posted:This thread goes around and around on this issue, but no, there isn't going to be a technological "solution" because it isn't really possible for there to be one. We have to both reduce emissions and eventually pull carbon back out of the atmosphere. The latter will be done with technology, but it's going to be incredibly expensive. The former will be done through technology and social change, both of which are also going to be costly. If we aren't willing to pay those costs and make those sacrifices, then we'll pay them later when we're forced to deal with the consequences of our inaction. I think reduction of emissions is going to happen faster than most people think. If Li-ion battery prices continue to decrease for even a little while longer, that alone will virtually guarantee most cars/trucks moving off fossil fuels. That combined with continued incremental improvements in conventrional photovoltaics and wind energy virtually guarantee that electricity generation will become dominated by renewable sources. The ultimate enabler for all of this is simply that the cost of renewables and storage have a lot of room to decrease, while declining EROIE fundamentally limits the prices at which fossil fuel energy can be profitable. Even current oil prices, for example, render most wells (and near 100% of new ones) unprofitable. So the price that fossil fuels need to support themselves is at best fixed and in reality must go up, whereas the price of storage and renewable generation will continue to plummet even if there are no major technological breakthroughs. If there *is* even a modest technological breakthrough in certain areas (say a cheap, rechargable metal air battery, or an order of magnitude improvement in price or performance of PVs), I don't think people appreciate just how suddenly things can change and just how quickly the fossil fuel industry (and fossil fuel dependent states) can come crashing down. The current prices of fossil fuels are putting enormous strain on the industry and petrostates, and are probably not sustainable. Anything that maintains price pressure at these levels or forces them even lower is a deathblow.
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May 11, 2017 00:06
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:More good news: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511?lo=ap_a1 I dunno, it's probably better that plants are synthesizing more carbohydrate in response to elevated CO2 than it would be if they weren't.
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Sep 14, 2017 23:07
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achillesforever6 posted:The worst hot take I've been seeing from shitheads on Climate Change is that its actually good because it's been leading to innovations in energy production Ever since I burned my fingers off I've gotten really good at doing things without fingers!
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Sep 22, 2017 08:58
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I am legit convinced that half of what Elon Musk throws out there is just him loving with people to see what they will believe.
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Sep 30, 2017 00:29
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