Comments not related to Oil and Natural Gas production in this thread.
180 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, Sept 12, 2019”
Better hurry up, time to buy some Tesla cars while Tesla is still selling them and while they are affordable.
Will Tesla Stop Selling Cars? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf7uVYovqOk
And you will be all set up for using Boring Tunnels.
Sheesh, with Tesla cars taking over for 5 to 10 ICE cars each car sales could plummet. They only have to produce a few million a year to completely change the industry and kill a lot of petroleum burn.
“Using the word fanatic is a wonderful way to avoid having to look beneath the surface at any of the human motivations that might be involved. Labelling somebody a fanatic is just an A to B knee jerk response in terms of the depth that factors need to be examined. Real people that might be extremely motivated, or feel extreme pressure and societal and cultural coercion to do something, might have some really interesting motivations and points of view. What sort of a range of options do they think they have?” ~ Dan Carlin Hardcore History
I’m personally willing to believe that fully autonomous cars will be a reality within ten years.
If the cards actually fall this way, I could see one new Tesla put into fleet rental service easily displacing five to ten conventional cars.
I have a so called “utility tractor” which is a toy compared to the ones most farmers have these days but it can out work ten horses, and if I wanted to, I could run it ten hours, park it, eat supper, grease it and fuel it up , and put another operator on it for another ten hours….. day after day, for a couple of weeks, when I would need to change the oil.
Change on such a scale could happen again.
It’s probably too little too late as far as the big picture is concerned, but I still believe some people in some places may pull thru ok.
Electric cars were no big deal since there were already cars everywhere. Sure if one had the funds and a more global consciousness, EV’s are the way to go. But most people are not that willing to change yet.
Horses to cars, trucks and tractors was a big leap.
However, a global system change such as what Tesla is proposing and seems about ready to engage is a game changer. Musk has made announcements before and he is never more than about one year off. Things might just happen fast. We will know in just a few years.
I would not be surprised if there was a lot of political (corporate driven) resistance to this new model. That means that other countries will run with it and the US might once again show it’s intransigence.
Replacing eight cars with one would be big deal, especially considering that the one will run primarily on wind and solar power, at some future time….. assuming of course that Old Man BAU hobbles on long enough.
I’m totally with you about corporate pushback. It will be huge, and will probably delay the adoption of fully autonomous cars by ten years in some countries.
Okay…but most cars have to be used at the same time, or close to the same time. Work starting time is not descretionary, nor is school, events, etc. Plus there is that pesky charge time.
Respectfully, 1 ev will not replace 10 cars.
Now, $10 gasoline and better transit options for city folks will, as well as a decent carpooling app will. Think ‘electronic hitchhiking’.
“Anyone going to San Antone, or….”
Oh yeah, I just wanted to say that until insurance and litigation solves that pesky autonomous car crash incident, it’s all on borrowed time. Who pays when the car kills someone?
“Who pays when the car kills someone?”
Its a really good question.
Same applies to other ‘robots’/drones.
If it is a military drone, apparently no one pays.
Is it less painful to be killed by an autonomous car, or a drunk/distracted/sleepy driver?
When it comes to vehicles, a big question is- Is it more or less likely for an autonomous vehicle to crash than a one driven by humans?
Also, autonomous vehicles have a learning curve, while individuals don’t.
Every individual accident in an autonomous vehicle can be analyzed and used to prevent all similar accidents in the future – that’s really not true for humans.
“Okay…but most cars have to be used at the same time, or close to the same time. Work starting time is not discretionary, nor is school, events, etc. Plus there is that pesky charge time.”
A taxi type car can have up to 6 passengers. Charge times are dropping down to minutes not hours. Buses and vans can be electrified too. Start times for work can be staggered and roads will be less crowded meaning faster transit times.
Watch the Boring Tunnel video up at the start of this thread to get an idea how a 1 hour commute can be done in 8 minutes.
Not much room for more railroads in dense areas but with a lot less cars on the roads, moving faster, the problems fade away.
Once travel goes all autonomous the speed and guaranteed flow will increase dramatically.
Disclaimer ( I doubt if we have time to accomplish all that before we get into deep shit in too many ways, but it’s nice to think about how a world could change as a mental exercise).
BTW, with machines, robots and AI taking over more each day one must consider that getting to “work” might not be a thing in the future.
“most cars have to be used at the same time, or close to the same time. Work starting time is not descretionary, nor is school, events, etc”
Why? 2nd if all cars go to the same place why is there a need for so many empty seats? It is this fixation about fixed times that is an issue here, plus that of single users. Let me give you 3 examples.
My working day started at 9am. If I aimed to be there by 9 it would take me 20-25 minutes, if I aimed to arrive just after 9 it would take me 5-10 minutes. 1 1/4 hrs a week wasted along with excess burnt fuel when there was absolutely no need for me to walk through the door by 9.
Try some of the roads around here at around 2pm. We have the siesta from 2-4pm so everyone is trying to drive at the same time and turn the roads into traffic treacle.
A lady who lived a few doors from the school who drove her kids all the way around the block to deliver them to school each day so she could be seen bringing them by car.
NAOM
I believe the same time needed won’t work argument fails because car sharing will save so many people so MUCH money that employers will find it very much to their advantage to stagger the times employees check in and out to a far greater extent than they do today.
My local situation is typical of a good many tens of millions of people. They live ten to thirty minutes driving time from work, and absolutely HAVE to have a car to get there and back. In the case of somebody who runs a cash register, the cost of owning and running their car can easily consume a third of their income.
BUT no car, no job. Moving closer to work is generally a pipe dream, because affordable housing close to work generally does not EXIST.
There will be an ENORMOUS incentive for them to take a job with an employer that schedules them so they can avoid rush hour, and so get a cheap OFF PEAK ride in autonomous car to and from work.
It won’t take long for employers in most businesses to adapt to such scheduling. They will have the same incentive, getting good help at the lowest possible pay rate.
The actual cost of running an autonomous car will be peanuts, on a per mile basis, because they can be super standardized, making them extremely easy and fast to repair, when repairs are needed, and it’s no problem whatsoever to build a car TODAY, using a CONVENTIONAL engine, that will last five hundred thousand or even a million miles.
The reason nobody builds cars that well, for now, is that nobody wants to keep a car that long. Hardly anybody that buys a new one expects to keep it long enough to even think about wearing it out these days. It’s about status, about new features, about creature comfort and that nice new car smell, rather than TRANSPORTATION.
There will be PLENTY of things to spend money on to demonstrate status, later on, but maybe there will be lots of autonomous LIMO’s.
Such limo’s may come with a DOORMAN, a ride along servant, in a spiffy uniform, to open and close the doors that would ordinarily open and close themselves, lol. He’ll still be quite useful, he can hold the passenger’s umbrella and carry the passenger’s suitcases, lol.
He can run into Starbucks and grab coffee, or the drug store, so the passenger won’t have to stand in line at the counter.
In the intermediate term, say next 15 years, I think a reasonable assumption is that 1 EV replaces 1 ICE. I doubt all that many will be shifting to owning no car in the next decade.
Here are few questions many people will be asking themselves within 5 years-
Do I get a new, or lightly used, ICE at negative interest loan rate, hoping that petrol will be reasonably priced for another 5-10 years?
Do I get one of those new EV/PHEV’s now available, or wait for that new solid state battery version that is supposed to be out in 2-3 years?
How will the auto makers be able to judge when to scale back ICE production? It will hard to get that right. Demand may shift suddenly.
Remember the ‘Osbourne Effect’- [delayed purchase while waiting for an upcoming innovation]
I wouldn’t suggest taking the graph literally, at specific dates or magnitude. Its the concept that is well displayed.
“In the intermediate term, say next 15 years, I think a reasonable assumption is that 1 EV replaces 1 ICE. I doubt all that many will be shifting to owning no car in the next decade.”
Think I will print that out and put it in the same frame as the ” Man will never fly” and “The war to end all wars.” quotes.
(smile)
I think the only way you will be correct on this is through the corptocracy stopping the EV/autonomous movement to protect their investments and profits.
Also, if SHTF, car ownership will fall like a rock anyway.
So I give your idea a 30 percent chance in the US, 15% globally over the next 10 to 15 years. The economics are heavily in favor of autonomous taxis and vans, as well as less pollution.
And then there is peak oil… whenever.
I hope you are correct,
but I wouldn’t put my dime on it.
“Also, if SHTF, car ownership will fall like a rock anyway.”
I suppose it depends how bad a crises is encounterd.
In a severe economic crises, people will stop buying new vehicles, and stick to their old ones for as long as possible. They will still own them,
and use them for critical functions, unless it is cheaper to get a robot taxi car to come (or feasible to walk).
BTW A historic global agreement aimed at halting deforestation and curbing dangerous carbon dioxide emissions has failed.
WORLD ‘LOSING BATTLE AGAINST DEFORESTATION’
Deforestation ‘accelerating’ … The amount of annual carbon emissions resulting from deforestation around the globe are equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by the European Union with an area of tree cover the size of the United Kingdom lost every year between 2014 and 2018.
Meanwhile, we have “exponential growth” of wildfires! 😉
INDONESIA FOREST FIRES SURGE
“It is just the latest such outbreak globally — huge blazes have torn through the Amazon in South America while bushfires are sweeping across eastern Australia in an unusually ferocious and early start to the wildfire season.”
Calif has been drying out and has a huge stock of dead trees in the sierras – estimated at 149 million
You can drive up the mountains in certain areas and see 20-30 miles of burned off areas, where it once had big and thick with trees before the last couple decades. Seems like a version of desertification.
I understand much of the Mediterranean zone, from Greece to Portugal has a similar trend. https://www.vox.com/2019/2/13/18221822/california-149-million-dead-trees-wildfire
Uh, oooh, the propaganda has gotten deeper. Now a war on natural gas is being declared. I guess suppressing coal, wind and solar has not been totally effective, so the campaign thickens as the public turns it’s back. A bit late though.
Natural gas as an input for fertilizer was raised in the last non-petroleum post, but this comment got lost:
Natural gas (aka methane aka CH4) is used because it provides hydrogen, which is combined with atmospheric nitrogen in the Haber-Bosch process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
There are other sources of hydrogen – the most straightforward is electrolysis of water, using seawater and renewable electricity.
NG IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO PRODUCE FERTILIZER.
Absolutely true Nick.
However, no energy source, no industrial process has come anywhere close to reproducing the affordable product, for over 100 yrs. Its thermodynamically hard to match.
When one of the other sources can compete, at scale, advertise your business.
You will have customers, lined up.
Until then, its very hopeful.
There had been previous discussion of wind, or solar, to ammonia. Ammonia is also used widely as a nitrogen source on farms. There are many small-scale research projects on this going on, but no one seems to be claiming commercial viability that I am aware of.
NG IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO PRODUCE FERTILIZER- when you go around shouting things like this, do you think it makes it somehow believable, or practical?
Perhaps there will come a tipping point where N fert from renewable energy is cheaper than from Nat Gas. In the USA, I’ll bet that point comes in the late 2060’s.
The fact that H2 from electrolysis isn’t price competitive is very, very different from it not being viable. Beta VCRs couldn’t quite compete with VHS, but if VHS had never existed, Beta would have worked just fine. There are an infinite number of other examples of things that were viable, but couldn’t quite compete.
If the H2 input is 30% of the retail price of fertilizer, and fertilizer is 10% of the price of food, then a doubling of cost for H2 would only increase food prices by about 3%.
And, how much would farmers shift their crops towards less intensive fertilizer crops, and more careful fertilizer utilization?
The point is: a substitute for NG for fertilizer does indeed exist. If we transition away from NG (or it depletes) it won’t be the end of the world. No one would starve.
—-
That’s a worst case scenario, which assumes current pricing of electricity (and current electrolysis engineering). Large scale installation of wind and solar are likely to be over-built, to reduce the impact of intermittency. That will produce massive amounts of surplus power, which will be dirt cheap for this kind of off-peak, secondary consumption.
I’ve made the same basic argument that Nick is making about NG and fertilizer, in talking about the need for immigrant labor to keep our farms running.
We could get by without natural gas sourced nitrates here in the USA, and without immigrant labor, because we can AFFORD to, but a short term transition in either case would be next to impossible.
In the developing world, people would starve by the tens of millions, by the hundreds of millions, without cheap nitrate fertilizers, which are the KEY input of the so called Green Revolution.
So we’re in deep doo doo, on a global basis.
There’s no known way of obtaining elemental hydrogen in large quantities at a reasonable cost, other than stripping it out of natural gas.
Hickory is dead right about that.
Renewable electricity might eventually be cheap enough to use it to get H2 from H2O. But I’m willing to bet my farm on there never being enough H2 available to feed seven billion people except by sourcing it from natural gas.
It will be FAR more practical to divert gas from electric generation, heating, and other uses than it will to produce food without lots of nitrates.
This is NOT going to end well…… but just maybe the population will start falling off, globally, before we run short enough of gas that we can’t make enough fertilizer with it.
If we HAVE to, we can go back to eating bread, beans, onions and cabbage, with maybe a chicken on the family table on Sunday, in rich countries. That alone would cut the need for fertilizer by half, and quite possibly by three quarters.
Poor countries aren’t positioned to drop down the food ladder….. they’re mostly on the bottom rung already.
Depending on how fast the climate goes to hell, I may live to hear about people starving by the tens of millions well before we run critically short of any industrial inputs of any kind.
There’s some hope that we can develop new crops, new species, for all intents and purposes, that will produce well enough to cut WAY back on fertilizers.
But so far, we don’t even have much in the way of lab demo work supporting this argument. I don’t expect to live to see perennial wheat growing on most grain farms.
“I’m willing to bet my farm on there never being enough H2 available to feed seven billion people except by sourcing it from natural gas.”
But have you considered the lessons learnt from experiences in 1980’s VCR technology before coming to that conclusion?
The technology and science that make cheap electronics possible are consistent with the basic laws of physics.
There’s an approximately zero hope that anybody will ever prove the thermodynamic laws of physics wrong. It takes exactly as much energy to break a chemical bond as was released when it was formed, plus however much is lost due to inefficiencies in the process in the real world. All industrial processes run at less than perfect efficiency. Most involving industrial chemistry run at large losses.
Except for the odd molecule here and there, there’s no free hydrogen on Earth. Separating it from methane is the cheapest method, and will always be the cheapest method of getting it, in terms of the amount of energy required, because there’s nothing else available in large quantities that has hydrogen that’s as easily separated as methane.
There can be no disputing this observation. It’s sort of like saying it takes longer to walk two miles than it does to walk one mile. It’s totally cut and dried.
Having said this much,
I will be the first to admit and even argue the position that renewable electricity or fusion power MIGHT eventually be cheap enough that we can manufacture free hydrogen on the grand scale by way of separating it from water molecules, or organic materials other than methane.
But I’m not one to believe that we will build enough wind and solar farms to have electricity available to manufacture nitrates by the tens of millions of tons any time soon.
For now and for the easily foreseeable future, it will by far and away be more practical and economic to use whatever renewable electricity we can produce to operate cars and machinery and use any available methane to make nitrogen fertilizer.
But at some point, we may have a substantial excess of renewable electricity, because we will be forced to overbuild wind and solar farms by a factor of two or three in order to have enough when the wind and sun fail to cooperate.FF depletion GUARANTEES we will either build out renewables, or go back to muscle power, lol.
When that time comes, assuming the overall economy doesn’t crash and burn sooner, it will be possible to use this surplus electricity to manufacture free hydrogen on the grand scale.
I don’t think any of the regulars here will live to see that time, but our grandchildren might… if they survive, and Old Man BAU survives.
“There’s no known way of obtaining elemental hydrogen in large quantities at a reasonable cost, other than stripping it out of natural gas. ”
You guys need some education in chemistry. Ever heard of catalysts? They change the pathway of a reaction and lower the activation energy required to break bonds.
A newly discovered catalyst promises cheaper hydrogen production
“Experiments confirmed the performance of Mo6S4: the voltage required to drive the HER reaction was about 0.1 volts, 50 per cent lower than flawed lattice MoS2, and approaching platinum (~0.05 volts).
“It’s not quite as good as platinum, but considering that it’s very cheap and very stable, I think it has great potential,” Wang said. ”
Jiggly Jell-O to make powerful new hydrogen fuel catalyst
“A cheap and effective new catalyst can generate hydrogen fuel from water just as efficiently as platinum, currently the best — but also most expensive — water-splitting catalyst out there. The catalyst, which is composed of nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide, is manufactured using a self-assembly process that relies on a surprising ingredient: gelatin, the material that gives Jell-O its jiggle. ”
For those interested, it takes about 50 kWh of electric power to get 40 kWh of hydrogen energy (1 kg) using platinum catalyst.
So the loss is not at big as you think and the catalysts are getting cheaper and more available.
My beard is getting longer, waiting for all this magic stuff.
Catalysts are not magic. Platinum catalysis has existed for a long time. We are just now making cheaper alternatives so the systems can be upscaled for global energy.
Activity of fuel cell catalysts doubled
An interdisciplinary research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has built platinum nanoparticles for catalysis in fuel cells: The new size-optimized catalysts are twice as potent as the best process commercially available today.
So GF, any idea how close these new catalysts are to being ready to replace the magnetite catalysts that are used at industrial scale for the past 100 yrs?
Is it just wishful thinking, or close to implementation?
I’m no judge of this aspect.
Really don’t care about the Haber process, a process that has put us in a deadly corner of extreme population.
Talking about water to hydrogen for energy storage and use.
They use steam reforming on natural gas with a nickel catalyst to produce hydrogen for the Haber Process.
Magnetite is not used to produce hydrogen.
The cost of electrolysis is nearing the cost of SMR. Electrolysis avoids all the downsides of using natural gas so when the collective gets their heads out of their collective asses SMR will be eliminated.
The efficiency of both processes is about the same.
Well you entered the conversation late, so that probably explains being off topic.
we were indeed talking about N2 fertilizer production.
Well, I guess you missed the part where a source of hydrogen is needed for that process.
Haber essentially doubled the population of Earth with H2 process.
No person is of more importance in the last 200 years: Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the “detonator of the population explosion”, enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[23] About 1–2% of the world energy consumption and 5% of the natural gas consumption is currently used for the Haber process.
I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m way behind and falling farther behind every day, technically, although I do try to keep up with major changes in the technologies involving energy.
Maybe H2 via electrolysis will be feasible on the grand scale within the foreseeable future.
Combined with fuel cell power generation , it could be THE technology that solves the intermittency problem holding back the transition to renewable electricity.
Storing H2 in large enough quantities isn’t at all easy, for mobile use , but stationary storage isn’t all that difficult, so long as you can live with some relatively minor losses due to leakage.
And there may be progress enough made in storing it that it will be practical to use it to run cars and trucks. But so far H2 tanks suitable for highway use cost an arm and a leg, and don’t hold much, in relation to the size of them.
My personal opinion is that if H2 is ever competitive as transportation fuel, compared to batteries, it will be twenty years or so, maybe even farther down the road. The tech will have to be perfected from lab level to large scale production, the infrastructure will have to be built, fuel cells cheap enough and durable enough will have to be developed and scaled up, and the public convinced that H2 is the way to go.
In the meantime, batteries will keep on getting cheaper and better……but it would take a battery as big as a baseball stadium to store as much energy as could be stored in H2 in one old salt mine or large natural cavern. It might be possible to pump it down old oil or gas wells as it’s produced, and allow it to come back out on it’s own, as it’s needed, on a daily cycle.
And if it’s cheap enough, it could be burned in gas turbines, which aren’t very efficient, compared to fuel cells… but gas turbines are a mature technology, and relatively cheap.
Practical electrical storage via H2 on a daily cycle would be awesomely helpful, in terms of CO2 pollution,and potentially extremely profitable as well, later on, when gas eventually goes sky high again due to depletion.
Like I said many times before,
wake me up Nick when it is anywhere close to real world applicable.
Until then, my beard will get longer and longer.
“Beta VCRs couldn’t quite compete with VHS, but if VHS had never existed, Beta would have worked just fine. There are an infinite number of other examples of things that were viable, but couldn’t quite compete.”
The take home lesson for Nick from that little piece of history appears to be that anything is possible. Anything! It reminds me of when Fred, I think it was Fred, said that, and I’m paraphrasing, transcontinental flight was once unachieved and thought impossible, but then it happened, so don’t worry Elon Musk will save the planet.
It seems to me that Nick’s methodology for future trends analysis can be summed up by the following: “the things I like will happen, and the things I don’t like won’t happen”. From which I can pretty much conclude he doesn’t like hard work in the outdoors.
Honestly, Nick, 1980’s VCRs has got to be the stupidest example, analogy if you will, that I’ve ever heard in my life for why renewable fertilizer is a realistic scenario in the short term. Jesus Christ Nick, you’re like a new born calf!
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I was trying to explain the difference between “competitive” and “viable”.
There are many, many different situations where different products are in competition (VCRs were just one example). Often one product wins and the other product is eliminated from the market entirely, even though the difference between the two was relatively small (whether the difference was price or features – with simple commodities, there usually won’t be a difference in “features”, and the difference in price can be very, very small).
But, even though the loser was eliminated and may eventually be forgotten (like Beta VCRs), if it had been the only product in the market it would have worked just fine. IOW, it was viable, even though it wasn’t competitive.
Thanks. As an adjunct where I teach, I can take classes for free and am currently taking Human Evolution. We have spent two weeks on climate of the Cenozoic, and the PETM came up just yesterday. Was able to forward this link to my prof.
If you liked that one, this one may be helpful also.
I guess we will need to engineer lower methane cows.
Or maybe stop stuffing meat in our maws.
It’s being done by breeding and changes in the diet also help.
NAOM
Yesterday Germany announced its plan of climate mitigation in transport, which is to save 1/3 of CO2. As of now, transport in Germany has not yet saved any CO2. So the plan is: 7 milions of EVs until 2030 and increasing rail capacity by improved rail traffic managment. What is conspiciously lacking is building of new railway lines; on the main lines, like Rotterdam-Genua for example, there is a train every 10-15 minutes now.
You can see how we are prisoners of the past paradigm, here the car paradigm. EVs are for the sake of car industry. But batteries are expensive and limited in offer, cars need bitumen for roads, whereas railways are relatively free of both batteries and bitumen. Yet it is car industry that is the biggest industry of Germany, not the railway industry, which is just a Siemens division. What we really should be doing, is moving any load possible to rail, especially the entire long range transport. Yet 20 years ago in Europe post railway cars were common (cars were moving stuff just from a railway station to a post office). Now the post railway cars have disappeared completely. And yet they could be a solution to the growing packet traffic, which was a singled out as a “problem” by German goverment too .
But we won’t go to the past, no way! “Progress” is the another paradigm, so EVs must be.
However, the German goverment said fuels will soon become “more expensive” to push people towards change. So this is a picture of future: fuels expensive for climate sake.
The electrification is a choice for high population density areas. In Russia cities have light rail and trolleybuses (for example, they go between cities around Crimea peninsula), but the long range trains still are moved by power of diesel. Hard to imagine an electrified Transsiberian Railway.
“fuels expensive for climate sake”
That is excellent news!
fuels will be getting very expensive soon anyway in the coming decade, if not for the competition from EV/PHEV.
Yes. They are trying to prime and to nudge people.
In West Europe there is a problem of heating oil, it is much too popular here. In the East Europe, NG has been always the fuel of choice, with house gas installations being standard a long time already.
In heating, East Europe moved from coal to gas, whereas West Europe shifted from coal to heating oil.
What’s PHEV?
“Electrification of the last segment of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Khabarovsk (Хабаровск) to Vladivostok (Владивосток) was completed in 2002.[26] By 2008, the tonne-kilometres hauled by electric trains in Russia had increased to about 85% of rail freight.[19]”
Another picture: listened to an interview with a German captain of NG-powered ship, nothing big, some kind of local Helgoland craft. He said that in comparision to diesel motors, NG ships are slower. Slow manouvering is a bit of problem, especially against non-NG-ships.
Not many electric aircraft in the forecast!
“Between 2013 and 2018, aviation sector emissions grew from 710 to 905 million tonnes of CO2, according to the latest estimates by the International Air Transport Association. Flying now generates just under 3% of global emissions, roughly the same as Germany. Icao’s own forecast anticipates emissions to increase by up to 300% by 2050 under business as usual.”
RAINFOREST FIRES TRIGGER SMOG ALERTS IN INDONESIA AND MALAYSIA
“Indonesia and Malaysia have issued severe smog alerts as fires rage in large sections of their rainforests. Both countries have closed schools and issued face masks. Satellite images show almost 1,000 fires are burning in the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra, while 10 are burning in Malaysia. Many of the fires are started by illegal land clearing to make way for palm oil plantations or for subsistence farming.”
The PETM seminar I posted above explains how fires become commonplace in a warming world, even with more intense rains.
I have an old bridge to sell you if you believe that one!
Market based offset program? Key words for ” we are hiding our emissions on paper and are conning you”
Don’t worry, Elon will get interested in aviation if he thinks it will grow a lot. He will then make all short flights electric and long flights hybrid flying body designs that are super efficient using his new synthetic liquid fuel derived from sunlight and atmospheric CO2. Jets as we know them will cease to exist at the commercial level. You will arrive at the airport in a Tesla taxi or bus and part of the trip will be by Boring Tunnel. Then an AirX plane or SpaceX rocket will take you to the destination landing site where another Tesla taxi will take you to your destination via another Boring Tunnel.
Me, I am waiting for the VTOL electric taxis. Want to take at least one flight before I kick the bouquet. Should be within five years. 🙂 (smile face not coming through so smile)
Hi GF,
I get it, I really do. We’re collectively fucked.
But nevertheless, as one of his teammates said about Yogi waving his bat at the outfield fence, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.
And so far, Musk has done it.
Some of us may pull thru the bottleneck ok.
Ask any professionally educated farmer, and he will tell you that disaster is commonplace, but that so far, it’s never struck over the entire world simultaneously in modern times. The last time as best I remember the whole planet went to hell in a hand basket was some tens of millions of years ago.
Maybe half of us will die off soon enough that it takes enough pressure off the environment that the other half can continue to live. Or maybe ninety percent of us die off, leaving the last ten percent with enough resources to continue living life as we know it today, after a fashion.
Or maybe not.
Well, the PETM is somewhat of a good model for us to follow. Lots of land animal diversification. Populations fell but recovered after the PETM. Plants and animals moved north (in the northern hemisphere). Dwarfism was rampant but again, things got bigger later.
So it was tough times with lots of changes but not a major extinction. Some extinction with populations reduced in most cases. Recovery later with much more diversity.
We are doing it faster now, plus people are generally destructive, so that makes it different. But over the next 1K years the changes should slow down to a more “sane” pace. Especially if mankind reduces or changes his ways.
Of course there is a chance for species survival (or radiation of species) but even without global warming we were not headed to a good place. Maybe global warming will put us (the general us, not just people) in a better place in the long run. It’s the long run that really counts here. Anything can happen in the shorter runs, and apparently has in the past.
I have to admit I selfishly wouldn’t mind hitching a ride on a SpaceX Starship flight before I exit this asylum. Got no plans for dehydroepiandrosterone and metformin therapy, so 25 year window tops. Go Elon Go.
Unexpected Surge in Global Methane Levels Last year global methane reached a new historic high, marking the second highest year-over-year jump recorded over the last 20 years. More importantly, the jump in 2018 extended an unanticipated multi-year resurgence of growth in global methane levels that has generated enormous concern in the science community. Scientists report that the new and unexpected methane math threatens to eliminate the anticipated gains of the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement built upon models that assumed stable methane.[3]
In a warming world we can expect swamps, bogs, fresh water bodies, permafrost to release methane as well as all the shallower methane hydrate to be released such as in the Arctic Ocean. Eventually some of the deeper methane hydrates will release too, further in the future.
CO2 will probably not fall, may even rise slowly in the future (next ten thousand years) and methane may stabilize on average at a higher level than currently present (though bursts could become common). Given the loss of sea ice and the loss of most land snow cover, along with the loss of the Greenland Ice sheet as a high altitude cooling region, the temperature will keep rising. Also add the increased insolation in the northern hemisphere over the next 10k years (12 w/m2 at 65 N) due to orbital changes and it’s going to be a very long time before things cool off again. over the next 30k years we get an additional 25 w/m2 at 65N. Essentially forever as far as humans are concerned.
Plus the continuous global dimming we have now will cease, adding another continuous heat independent of CO2.
Anyone for dwarf horses and buffalo?
Maybe large blooms of lily pads in the Arctic Ocean will reduce the carbon in the atmosphere and cool things off eventually? But by then, no one will care.
BTW, at this level of GHG and this temperature range, global temperature and radiative forcing are linear.
One of my favourite history lessons is how, in World War II, more oil spilled into the seas than has been spilled since. Miraculously, it all naturally decomposed. Beaches were fine allowing for pleasurable recreation and fish still thrived because there was ethical conservation. Life is a whole lot tougher than anyone will ever be able to comprehend.
Alt right shit posting is notorious for its laziness. Fucking Millennials.
Happy, happy miracles!
Hi Gonefishing, thanks for sharing the article. But I would like to get some of the numbers clarified.
You said the Radiative forcing from orbital change will be 25W/m2 over the next 30000 years. I think a forcing of 4w/m2 is equivalent to a doubling of CO2 concentration or a warming of 3C. So a forcing of 25W/m2 would be equivalent to a six-doubling of CO2 concentration (an increase by 64 times). Are your sure the numbers are correct?
“You said the Radiative forcing from orbital change will be 25W/m2 over the next 30000 years.”
No, I said “the increased insolation in the northern hemisphere over the next 10k years (12 w/m2 at 65 N) due to orbital changes and it’s going to be a very long time before things cool off again. over the next 30k years we get an additional 25 w/m2 at 65N. ”
I did not say radiative forcing nor did I say anything about CO2.
The orbital cycles vary the amount of incoming radiation in total and in hemisphere and lately control the glaciations. It is likely, since there are no deep troughs in the northern insolation during the next 40,000 years that the Earth will resume it’s more normal warmer state and CO2 will follow to over 1000 ppm.
8000 years of humans changing the planet surface as well as the latest few hundred years of deforestation and fossil fuel burn is apparently enough to kick us out of the Ice Age.
The last warm period, the Eemian, was kicked off by a 75 w/m2 rise in insolation and ended by a more than 100 w/m2 fall.
Warm periods normally last about 2000 to 3000 years. We have been in one for over 11,000 years so there is a major system change. Otherwise northern Canada and northern Europe/Siberia would be covered in permanent ice by now instead of melting. The Arctic Ocean would be continuous ice instead of the partial slushy it is now.
Once the oceans warm up there is no going back without another major system change.
As far as CO2 and methane go, the melting permafrost and shallow seas will provide plenty of that over the coming millennia as the Earth system warms. They are typically followers and the stores of carbon are huge.
How certain are the numbers? Far more certain than the numbers from climate models and GHG calculations. Also, the link between the insolation changes due to orbital changes and climate change was verified in the 1970’s using deep sea ocean sediment cores. (Hays et al. 1976). Specifically, the authors were able to extract the record of temperature change going back 450,000 years and found that major variations in climate were closely associated with changes in the geometry (eccentricity, obliquity, and precession) of Earth’s orbit. Indeed, ice ages had occurred when the Earth was going through different stages of orbital variation.
Since this study, the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has embraced the Milankovitch Cycle model.
Gonefishing, you did not use the term “radiative forcing”. But “insulation” derived from incoming solar radiation and numbers such as 12w/m2 or 25w/m2 are measures of radiative forcing.
I know you did not mention CO2. I said 25w/m2 is EQIVALENT to a six-doubling of CO2 concentration (or roughly a global warming effect of 18C).
In the past transition from glacial to interglacial period, the direct effect from orbital change was pretty small and the warming or cooling eventually happened because of cumulative change of CO2 and albedo effects. That 25w/m2 sounds more like the sum of all direct and indirect effects rather than direct effect from orbital change alone.
The least you could do is look up the definition of radiative forcing.
No, 6X CO2 is not comparable to 25w/m2 of additional insolation at 65N.
I see you are struggling with the basics of climate science, astronomy and paleontology, then coming to erroneous conclusions/interpretations.
Political economist
The number for 25 W/m2 at 65N is the increase at summer solstice from todays level. This was a bigger deal when there were large ice sheets in Northern hemisphere as was the case during glacial maximums.
Today the biggest ice sheet is in Antarctica so the dynamics may be very different.
“This was a bigger deal when there were large ice sheets in Northern hemisphere as was the case during glacial maximums”
Dennsi, you might want to reconsider that statement. With ice cover about 80 percent of the SWR is reflected back to space. Now the northern regions are dark and will absorb much of that SWR during the spring/summer months of up to and over 20 hours per day of sunlight.
Also the now fully exposed melting permafrost is a large source carbon when warmed and the shallow Arctic seas are also vulnerable.
Perhaps but it is a seasonal thing and winter will continue at 65N.
Perhaps? Are questioning the albedo change or the fact that there is now uncovered permafrost?
Yes, we have winter down here too and no permafrost, so what does winter have to do with it?
Move uphill. Aim for 30 ft above sea level or the local flood plain, minimum.
SF6, total is about equivalent to one month of CO2 atmospheric rise so not much effect. The article appears to me to be more twisted BS against renewables (even shows a wind turbine as it’s first picture) and more diversion. The annual EU release of SF6 they speak of is about equivalent to .02 percent of annual CO2 release globally. The “dirty secret” is the burning of fossil fuels and the methane leakage related to the generation of electric power. So even if SF6 use were doubled and no one took care to prevent leakage or capture it, it would make almost no difference at all to GW.
Yes SF6 is needed for 35kV and up. Not sure how that applies to all those lower voltage distributed networks. It’s all high voltage electrical, not just renewable.
Did a quick calculation and SF6 (produced since 1950’s) is about equivalent to 0.25 ppm of CO2 at present. Something to keep an eye on and dispose of properly. I know the US has been implementing regs to control and reduce leakage for a while now.
How do they come up with the 100 year GWP numbers?
Wikipedia has a decent article on GWP, however don’t confuse those numbers with what is actually happening in the atmosphere and on the planet. They merely look at equal masses of CO2 and the subject gas and calculate how they might effect global warming relative to CO2 over different time periods. In the case of SF6 the GWP rises with time due to it’s inherent stability.
They’ve completed two wells:
the injection well to 2,214 meters (7263 feet)
the production well to 5,057 meters (16,591 feet)
going to be doing some testing now.
I’m about as far from computer expert as anybody who posts here, but I’ve got a pretty good layman’s grasp of ordinary machinery.
Just about any third world country bigger than a postage stamp could build such drones as were used to hit the Saudi’s.
Airplanes are simple as shit, much simpler than cars.
I’ve built a vehicle myself that does everything a basic old model pickup truck does, but without any of the amenities such as a roof and windshield, out of scrap metal and salvaged parts such as wheels, engine, transmission, etc. Built it mostly JUST for the fun of it.Somebody someplace is probably riding it on their farm today, hauling a few bales of hay or some firewood or whatever.
I once made my mind up to build an airplane myself, but eventually lost interest. Computers ? For sale in every city on Earth, and so I’m told, a cheap laptop could easily be programmed to fly a drone to a given location. Programmers are a dime a dozen these days. Homing in, no problem, they did that back as far as WWII using a couple of radio stations as references, well before radar. Today, gps costs only a hundred bucks, retail.
So somebody tell me, why couldn’t just about anybody, or any country, capable of getting together a couple of million in cash, and hiring a dozen skilled mechanics and a couple of programmers, build such drones?
I could build one myself, buying the engine and electronics of course, hiring the programming done, given a couple of years and a couple of helpers and a small machine shop such as can be found in any small city with a couple of factories. Might have to build a couple of experimental models to get the exterior dimensions good enough to fly properly.
Plans would be a snap. There are PLENTY of pictures available on line, and the internals hardly matter at all for one one way trip, so long as it’s not too heavy to fly.
It appears as sure as sunrise tomorrow that we will see more of this sort of thing at an ever increasing rate. It would be easier to build one of these things than it would be to get hold of a couple of good ground to air missiles by a factor of ten, maybe a factor of a hundred. No connections needed in the international arms black market.
Good bye political stability, such as it WAS. It’s going to be a lot worse from here on out.
Autonomous cars which are still extremely tough to impossible to build will be a reality within a few more years, and once they’re for sale, anybody who can put his hands on hundred kilos of explosives will be as dangerous as a hundred well armed men in uniform.
But at least this attack on the Saudi’s should serve as one more wake up brick upside our collective head. If oil prices shoot up twenty or thirty bucks a lot more people will be thinking about buying their first electric car.
Every electric car on the road , so long as it gives good service, will get five or ten potential buyers to thinking about buying an electric car when the new car bug bites.
Maybe the US should actually become energy independent. Though that would involve lots of EV’s and renewable energy being added quickly.
I wonder whatever happened to degrowth? Is that now a forbidden or politically sensitive topic now. Planned degrowth is a preferable route to forced degrowth.
OFM- “Good bye political stability, such as it WAS. It’s going to be a lot worse from here on out. ”
Unfortunately, I agree.
>Good bye political stability, such as it WAS. It’s going to be a lot worse from here on out.
The good news is that renewables are decentralized, so small drone attacks only hit small targets. And this kind of attack would barely scratch a big solar array.
Also asymmetric threats are only a problem in a world where resources are spread asymmetrically.
It’s even more vulnerable.
Aim at central switchyards and transformer station and generate a big blackout.
But with everyone on renewables there would be less incentive to wage wars around oil. The SA / Jemen war is about oil, too.
Well, the electrical grid isn’t currently all that resistant to guerrilla attacks.
But…a grid with renewables is more resistant than a grid without. And a grid that’s redesigned to take advantage of the local nature of renewables can be much more resilient, with local microgrids, intelligent sensing and switching, local batteries, demand side management, adaptive EV charging, V2G, etc.
You’ll need much more overland lines than now.
For the USA: In summer pumping energy from the giant solar farms in Colorado up to New York.
In Winter pumping the wind energy from the storms at the east coast to all middle USA.
You’ll have battery storage – but how much. Most for day / night buffer of solar power.
Blowing up something that can’t be repaired in 24 hours and there is trouble – a lot of trouble.
Yes, it’s likely that long distance transmission will grow substantially. That might make the grid more vulnerable to disruption.
But, for better or worse , states and regions tend to want to minimize imports, and maximize internal production. That will raise costs, but increase resilience.
Off-shore wind will increase resilience, because it will power coastal cities. At the moment, the direction of wind power flows is from the center to the coasts.
” As can be seen in Fig. 4, every interglacial warming period over the last 800 kyr was preceded by several thousand years of dust storms.” That is nearly enough to get anyone’s attention. It is easy to reason why Mars has global dust storms, but to dry out the planet enough to produce thousands of years of dust storms that cover the glaciers is another thing.
An interesting read that covers albedo, orbital cycles, greenhouse gases and desertification during the Ice Age.
I want to buy a book, RECENT copyright, that lays out what we know about astronomy and climate in terms intelligible to well educated laymen. I have long since forgotten all the higher math I ever learned, and never learned enough anyway to deal with mathematically phrased astronomy.
So it just needs to lay out the cycles, as they actually happened, going back, and what the climate was, at any given time.
It’s easy to understand them, in principle, but it’s tedious as hell to compute them even if you know how. And then you still don’t have the climate record laid out for you, nice and convenient, right along side the astronomical record.
Any additional info, such as the history of volcanism included would the cherry on top of course.
Any suggestions will greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance!
It occurs to me that there might be websites that have this all wrapped up with bows and ribbons for the convenience of laymen, but I haven’t run across them.
Just mapping northern summer insolation changes to sea level or ice cover (related) is not enough. The ocean surface temperature is important as well. Also once there is enough ice coverage much of the insolation is reflected so there is a break point or threshold that is crossed and the extra sunlight does not have as much effect.
At first the heat of the ocean feeds the glaciers with precipitation. Eventually the ocean is cool enough that the glaciers are starved of precipitation and a warm period can then commence. During the last glaciation the glaciers receded several times but grew again and the temperature slowly kept falling despite several pulses of increased northern insolation.
In other words, once the earth atmosphere becomes dry enough, the potential for a deglaciation and a warm period exist.
Now we have plenty of water vapor in the air but the permanent ice is receding and the winter snows melt in the spring all the way to the Arctic Ocean (earlier as time goes on). A case of warmer winters up north even though there is lower summer insolation now.
System change.
OFM,
Look into Earth’s Climate, Past and Future; William Ruddiman. 3rd edition last I looked.
Why don’t you write a chapter on what you think the green new deal should look like to you. Let Dennis post it.
I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing as the author of this book, for quite some time, but I’m not actually polling anybody, so I’m not predicting a GOP wipeout in 2020, which he thinks might actually happen.
I think it’s almost SURE to happen, within ten years or so, due to demographic trends.
I’m telling you straight up, no chaser, preachers have learned they had better not say much about women wearing short skirts, or divorce, or working, these days, for fear their congregation will shrink to a size it won’t be big enough to support them any longer, and that the kids are playing alien invasion and dinosaur games on their phones in the back of the car on the way home from church.
It would be interesting to play this trend out, assuming it happens.
There would be a vacuum on the republican side.
Would it be filled by right wingers like Pence and Ryan
“Trumpistas, Tea Party members and Christian fundamentalist white evangelicals”- to quote the article,
or moderates like Kasich and Huntington.
Its crystalized in my mind a bit more, that the biggest mistake the Democrats could make in selecting a candidate is to pick one that the 20-30% middle ground would find ‘scary’.
That means different things to different people, and I’m not going to pretend to know where it shakes out, but there are many people who are afraid to go too far and fast on ‘socialism’ in health care. They still want the option of employer based insurance coverage, for example.
There are people who are afraid too go to far and fast on gay rights, women in leadership, non-whites in leadership, for example.
I am ready for a black lesbian women President, if she was the best, but many people are not.
Ruth B-G is getting old. Not at time to take a big risk, IMO.
I agree totally.
The best possible strategy for the D’s this time around in my estimation is to nominate a candidate that won’t scare the middle of the road, middle of the economy voter into voting R, or just staying home.
The D’s core is on board, the R’s core is on board.
The election will be won or lost in the middle ground.
A comparative examination of insect biodiversity through space and time. Another look at the Eocene, compared to modern times.
Global Biodiversity and Climate: What Fossil Insects Tell Us. Presented by Dr. Bruce Archibald, Simon Fraser University
Deep Time, Global Change and YOU lecture series
Why are there more species in the tropics? Why do species compositions of communities tend to change more across mountains in the tropics than the Temperate Zone? Understanding why we see patterns of change in biodiversity from the equator to the poles has been difficult using modern-world systems.
Dr. Archibald discusses a novel approach comparing the diversity of insect communities with fossil insect communities. This approach helps resolve longstanding questions.
Maybe things aren’t QUITE as bad as I thought they are locally, up until yesterday afternoon. I saw some bats for the first time in at least three years.
Two little bats have taken up residence in one our deck umbrellas, which had been folded up for about 2 weeks.
Hah! We have a tree frog living in ours!
The oil industry vs. the electric car
By GAVIN BADE
Groups backed by industry giants like Exxon Mobil and the Koch empire are waging a state-by-state, multimillion-dollar battle to squelch utilities’ plans to build charging stations across the country. Environmentalists call the fight a reprise of the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” battles that doomed an earlier generation of battery-driven vehicles in the 1990s.
Oil-backed groups have challenged electric companies’ plans in 10 states, according to utility commission filings reviewed by POLITICO, waging regulatory and lobbying campaigns against the proposals. The showdown is taking place as utilities, eager to increase the demand for power, push for approval to build charging networks in locations such as shopping centers and rest stops in more than half the nation.
“Fossil fuel interests control 90 percent of the transportation fuel market in the U.S. and are really feeling threatened,” said Gina Coplon-Newfield, director of the electric vehicle initiative at the Sierra Club.
The counterattack involves an array of trade associations and industry-funded political groups representing every segment of the petroleum sector.
In the Midwest, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group for gasoline makers, has filed comments against charging plans in Kansas and Missouri, and has opposed Colorado’s new zero-emission vehicle mandate as part of a “Freedom to Drive” coalition of auto dealers and oil groups. The typical consumer, they say, should not have to pay for incentives or charging stations that mainly benefit people wealthy enough to afford cars like Teslas.
In Illinois and Iowa, the American Petroleum Institute joined with Americans for Prosperity — a political group funded by the Koch oil empire — to oppose utilities’ electric vehicle investments. The owner of a large refinery joined other industrial interests to oppose utility charging and shared mobility plans in Minnesota.
In Massachusetts, API teamed with gasoline marketers and convenience stores to oppose an electric vehicle charging buildout from the utility National Grid. The Western States Petroleum Association has opposed utility charging plans in Arizona alongside AFP, as well as electric vehicle legislation in California. And in Maryland, API aligned with convenience stores, gasoline stations and truck-stop owners to oppose utilities’ electric vehicle plans.
Everybody in this forum should read this article TWICE.
While a lack of public charging stations will no doubt slow the adoption of electric cars to some extent, it’s my belief that most households that can afford a new car are two car households anyway, and can easily manage charging a cheap running day to day car used for commuting, shopping, hauling kids around by charging it at home.
Upscale rental properties are already installing charging stations in some cases in order to attract the right tenant mix.
The electric car revolution is HERE. How long it will take to take the lead in new car sales is an open question, but GM ALONE is promising a couple of DOZEN new electric models out within the next three years.
You have to go LOOKING for an electric car these days in order to just SEE one in most cities and anywhere out in small town and rural America.
In five years time, when you take your not yet paid for conventional car to the dealer for service or repair work, you will be looking at up to fifty or sixty different models available for IMMEDIATE on the spot sale, in any medium to large city in the USA. There won’t be that many models at any one dealer ship of course, but there may be even more, between all the various makes of cars.
They’re going to be MUCH cheaper to build, except for the batteries, and the cost of batteries is coming down fast.
It won’t be all that much longer before oil, and therefore the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, will go up sharply, because oil depletes and the population of wanna be car owners is growing.
The only reason oil WON’T go up like a rocket, eventually, is that electric cars and trucks MIGHT cut into demand for oil to such an extent that it’s a buyers rather than a sellers market.
At the moment still too expensive, too heavy = expensive to build around.
When the next generation of batteries hits the market, all current electric cars are version 1.0 I-Phones nobody wants anymore.
At the moment everybody is preparing something, inclusive Tesla, but nobody talks too loud about it for not driving off customers.
Some companies are already in industrial engeniering with test productions, other late development, others unknown but talking (Toyota).
For example a Tesla 3 could shrink it’s battery pack from 600 to 300 kg for the same performance – the car itself can be constructed lighter then, too. Or keep anything for double range.
The generation after this (still deep in labs) experiments with sodium instead of Lithium for really cheap batteries, perhaps only the same performance as today top models.
In any circumstances – the current generation is too heavy and clunky to roll out in really big numbers. But companies know about the improvements – and when you don’t get into the market now to collect knowledge it can be too late.
They are producing 432 wh/kg batteries – Tesla 3 has 240. And they are not the only one in this stage of development.
The EV is nowhere near it’s ultimate performance and efficiency. It has merely reached the level of practicality and is quickly moving to completely upset the whole transportation system. There is no standing still now, which means if you buy an EV today it may well be far outdated in just a few years.
We are committing to electric/electronic world faster and faster. That may be more efficient and less polluting but it also is placing ourselves on the wrong side of another limb that can be cut off.
“The typical consumer, they say, should not have to pay for incentives or charging stations that mainly benefit people wealthy enough to afford cars like Teslas.”
It’s always ironic when the big fossil corporations suddenly on the little guy’s side, so they can protect their profits. Meanwhile subsidies to the FF corps and ICE automakers are not mentioned. The pollution and global warming is not mentioned either.
Climate Activists Don’t Know How to Talk to Christians
By Jay Michaelson
Religious Christians are the key to America taking action on global warming. And yet, the way climate activists frame the issue often alienates the very people they most need to persuade.
Over half of Republican voters identify as conservative Christians—either evangelicals, Catholics, or others. These voters may be right-wing on social issues, right-wing on immigration, and right-wing on ‘big government.’ But they’re not necessarily right-wing on allowing the Earth’s climate to be radically disrupted—and if they move, the Republican Party will have to move too.
But according to two new studies conducted by the Yale Program for Climate Communication and published in the journal Science Communication, most religious Christians understand global warming in very different terms from others.
The first study “found that ‘protect God’s creation’ is one of the most important motivations that Christians report for wanting to mitigate global warming.” Resonant messages included “God made humans responsible for taking care of His creation”; “We can use nature for our benefit, but it is not OK to destroy God’s garden that He entrusted to us”; and the language of “stewardship” over the Earth.
And the second study found that framing the issue of global warming in moral and religious terms was crucial for Christians to care about it, because it suggested that “people like themselves” care about the issue.
“People derive values, a sense of self, and social norms from the groups to which they belong,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program and a co-author of the two studies. “Messages that resonate with group identities may be especially effective in influencing people’s attitudes.”
While I was studying in my dorm room, long time ago, the door opened to show another student. He stood in the doorway and exclaimed that none of this was real. I turned to him and said “How about if I punch you in the face since it won’t be real?”. He suddenly understood reality and left quickly.
You always were good at making friends.
I didn’t think you would get it.
Maybe Christian’s should open their fucking eyes. It’s not exactly carved on a stone tablet and hidden in the desert by Bronze Age tribal goat herders.
Bad Bronze Age Fiction, violent and poorly written.
And those are its good points.
Old Farmer Mac sez , ya don’t sell much acting like ah libtard pinko commie ‘roun Trump town. Ya gotta unnerstan that when ya wanna sell somebody a car, er a jug of corn, or a few buds, ya don’t go talking trash bout’em even if ya know its’ so.
SERIOUSLY, when you attack Trump and company, you are in essence attacking the people who voted for him, and that’s as sure a way to make sure they vote for him AGAIN as can be imagined.
I quit reading psychology texts back in the sixties or thereabouts, because I had only to read a couple of them to know the people who wrote them had their heads up their asses so far they would never see daylight, insisting on such bullshit as that animals have zero intelligence, only instincts, that humans are NOT really animals, etc. I was long since acquainted with what BIOLOGY professors had to say about such questions, and already well acquainted with a good bit of classic literature.
The psych profession has only in the last twenty or thirty years STARTED to catch up with what LAY psychologists such as used car salesmen,and before them, horse salesmen, knew about the workings of the human mind.
Every classic novelist knew everything that’s in the study referenced in the Cat’s 3;12 am post.
I’ve been trying for the last couple of years to get what this professor has to say across to the other members of this forum.
You can talk to conservatives, to religious people, to libtards, commies, Trump ass kissers or ANYBODY if you approach your subject matter in such a way that your listener doesn’t associate what you have to say with his enemies, real and or imaginary.
This is ALL ABOUT us and THEM, and hardly anything else at all matters, if you allow your enemy to frame the discussion as an US versus THEM issue, with you being THEM.Allow that to happen, and you’re already toast.
The FIRST thing you must do, if you want to win over some R voters, is quit attacking their intelligence, culture, ethics, morality, religion, the industry in which they earn their living, etc.
If you WANT to talk about clean water law in particular, and environmental problems in general, if your target is a fisherman, just talk about how all the garbage in the water these days means you can’t catch a fish in so many places anymore, and how some places still have clean water and how others have cleaned up their water, etc, and leave it to your listener to figure out what kind of politicians control the kind of places with fish, and what kind control the places without fish.
Little weeds of doubt will start popping up all thru his carefully tended garden of Trump beliefs, if you handle this little job correctly.
If you are talking to a hard core but basically kind hearted Christian,you will find that they are quite as troubled by holding two mutually exclusive beliefs as anybody else, including lots of Ivy League professors.
Such a person may be utterly convinced that free school lunches are a devil’s trick to turn the country socialist, and that sorry worthless parents should be responsible for feeding their kids.
DON’T talk R and D at them.
Talk about some particular hungry kid in their own neighborhood. Talk about Jesus teaching us that we are supposed to look after those less fortunate than we are, and STICK with Jesus, and when the conversation inevitably turns to paying for lunch, just sigh and say you guess since so many people don’t go to church and contribute enough for charity anymore, you guess Jesus would advise you to support free school lunches, that that’s your own personal conclusion. Don ‘t even MENTION R’s and D’s. Even the dumbest back woods hillbilly can figure it out from there….. given time.
Yeah maybe when I have a week off and nothing to do I’ll take it upon myself to enlighten the local idiots as to the painfully obvious truths that stands before them.
If you WANT political change, you have to be willing to work for it.
You can be sure that millions of others are working hard, around the clock around the calendar, for the changes THEY want.
Which means the most to you, a little time here and there meeting and talking to people you CAN win over to your side, with a little work and patience, or dealing with the consequences of allowing the Trump camp to control the country?
Your sarcastic reply is precisely the sort of remark, overheard by the people you refer to as the local idiots, that’s virtually guaranteed to keep them voting for Trump.
How likely are YOU to vote for a politician, or donate to a charity, whose spokes people refer to YOU and YOUR FRIENDS as idiots?
I rest my case.
I couldn’t give a lesser fuck about political change OFM, it’s meaningless; and within the context of the D vs R binary opposition disorder, change ain’t gonna happen. America is a political sewer pipe. You can ride the wave if you like, I got better shit to do than talk to fucking idiots in hopes it’ll improve the quality of their vote, and in turn improve the future.
I hope Trump gets four more years. I love watching America crash and burn (purely academic of course, nothing “personal”). It’s the best thing on TV these days.
OFM- the guy obviously cares only for himself. Its not much of a life, to survive for.
Well………
He HAS made his position perfectly clear with this last comment.
So from here on out, I will regard him as one of the people who are part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Or maybe he’s just having a tough day or something. I’ve said things sometimes that I didn’t really mean and regretted later.
Maybe he’s even more of a hard core Darwinist than I am, and expects to live out his own life someplace still pleasant and safe, and doesn’t give a shit about what happens later.
I’m programmed by evolution to care about my kin, my community and my tribe aka my country, and beyond that, my SPECIES as well.
And having intellect enough to understand that human welfare is entirely dependent on the welfare of the entire biosphere, I am also programmed and want to work to preserve as much of the biosphere as possible.
But no matter what happens short to medium term, I think it’s likely Homo Saphead will survive it in small numbers someplace on the planet for the next few thousand years anyway.
My money say’s Trump gets four more; not because I like him, but because the electorate is a bunch of fucking idiots. Forgive me if I don’t take a week off to enlighten the local knuckle daggers. I guess that job is all yours.
I’m sure all your problems will be resolved once you get the knuckle daggers up to speed on how to vote better. Good luck with political change.
Enjoy the famine. Or perhaps check out early if you’d like to avoid it. Google images for “Russian Famine” or “einsatzgruppen” if you want a preview, or if you prefer something more contemporary- anything by Kevin Carter will do.
You dudes get all butthurt when someone doesn’t smoke the hopium with you eh? Political change lol you guys are like a bunch of new-born calves.
I agree with those 6 myths in the link.
The last one- ‘there is nothing I can do’ is why I bother to care about who gets elected. I am pretty burnt out on politics, but I know there is a huge difference among the two parties on certain issues.
Just remember that the big oil and gas production boom in the US happened during the Obama administration.
“Confirmed” without a convenient link to a Navy press release (on an official Navy website) and no recording of a press conference with said “confirmation”?
Sheesh! Do the conspiracy nuts not realize it’s not the 80s anymore?
Guys, you need to up your game. At least publish a shaky, blurry video purporting to show the navy spokesguy “confirming” whatever you want while running down the hallway towards the toilets.
Hey Gerry,
Last time I checked radar systems don’t lie. They don’t have human psychology phenomena and they don’t participate in conspiracies.
Apparently, the US Navy which has all the data, recordings and such has labeled these objects as “unidentified”.
Where is there a conspiracy?
Your a dumb ass cartoon
lieing to congress has a stiff penalty!
Especially if your lies can be proven because the US Navy has the radar data and recordings!
‘Speak loudly and carry a small stick’ is America’s new motto (I think Iran has figured that out); and Trump seems to be on a “don’t forget to kick us while we’re down” world tour. Next 9/11 and nobody in the world will care.
OFM sez them there ijit si cholera jists er like a bunch of teenagers just old enough to figure out SEX as a real world experience. They think they INVENTED it.
It never ceases to amaze me that anybody with an iq high enough to find his backside using both hands doesn’t laugh his ass off at this sort of “research”.
I really do believe in the scientific method, but it’s not necessary to put animals in a cage and starve a number of them to death, over and over again, to verify that starvation is a real thing. I never knew any body who got a date with an attractive woman who referred to her parents as ignorant, superstitious, racist, etc.
And I don’t know any R type voters who changed their minds and vote D because they read or hear D’s and liberals describing them as fucking idiots, etc.
But now at least we have reasonably consistent names for various failings of the human mind, such as Dunn Kreuger Effect , which is faster and more specific than the old hillbilly saying he’s so dumb he doesn’t even know it, lol.
Now my over educated but terminally naive liberal friends who have never hunted coons or raised any corn or had a callus on their super clean hands can carry on a proper discussion of the behavior of “deplorables” without feeling like they’re soiling their minds and tongues with words such as STUPID or RETARDED , etc. Sarc light is ON.
The 2020 elections will be won or lost in the middle.
Maybe you should tell all your self-isolated buddies that oil and gas production in the US had it’s fastest rise during the Obama administration. That should get them on board with the Demoncrats.
Of course you are operating on a false premise. The false premise that humans are actually sapient creatures able to think rationally and use knowledge to direct their actions. There may be some who approach this quality but in general humans are merely clever not intelligent or sapient.
I have often said this upcoming election will be won in the middle.
Did you notice that my SARC light is/ was ON?
I presume that since you are obviously neither stupid nor ignorant, you failed to notice it.
I have often said the people on the hard left, and the people on the hard right are on board, respectively with the D’s and the R’s.
There are maybe twenty or thirty million million people whose collective vote will flip states in play from one column to the other.
You seem to be arguing that it’s impossible to convince a few people of these people, say anywhere from two to four percent of them, to think a little and consequently change their political stripes from red to blue.
I totally disagree with you in respect to this particular argument. I’m not operating on a false premise when I maintain that SOME people can be converted from R’s to D’s, in terms of their voting habits.
BUT I do agree with you that the majority of people don’t think much, if at all.
Who WHO WHO has been saying all along that our political and culture war boils down, in the last analysis to US VERSUS THEM? That people would RATHER be wrong than to be outcasts from their own culture and society ? ESPECIALLY when being wrong is so EASY, because all you have to do to be happy and wrong is just NOT THINK?
So you can be a Republican with a degree in physics, and believe the climate is heating up but that it’s all natural…… or you can be a Democrat, with a degree in econ or political science, and argue that American citizens won’t work on farms, but the fact of the matter is that tens of millions of American citizens do work that’s as hard or harder than farm work, such as putting on roofs, paving with asphalt, laying cinderblock, logging, welding, running machines in factories, etc.
I’m a rolling stone,and I have PERSONALLY done all these things, and I know that all of them are as tough as farm work, taken all around.
Pay enough to make the job more attractive than other available jobs, and there won’t be any farm labor shortage meaning there’s no NEED for migrant labor.
I expect any D’s with some expertise in business management know this as well as I do, but they won’t admit it, because it doesn’t suit their overall agenda….. just as the R’s lie about some other issues, such as forced climate change.
OLD FARMER MAC, THAT’s who has been saying such things all along.
So we’re really in the same book, and mostly in the same chapter, but once in a while we see some particular fact or point differently.
You missed the point by about the distance from moon to earth.
People are not sapient, they make decisions based on mixing fiction with cherry picked reality. Humans are excellent at ignoring reality, mapping distortions on it and claiming that their views are reality.
That has placed the whole human race and the general environment into a descent mode. All that activity we see now is about equivalent to the spinning water in a toilet bowl. It’s a great ride until the suction gets going.
People do not even see the reality around them that is in their faces let alone the broader picture, they generally run on habit not thought. There is a huge difference between a person acting through conscious thought/observation and those who just repeat what they did the day and year before because it is what they do.
Where the rubber meets the land and the people. Where would petroleum be without that ubiquitous device the vehicle tire?
Rubber Tires – A dirty business The booming global tire market is worth billions – but this comes at a high price, both to humans and the environment. Over 50 million car tires are sold each year in Germany alone. But where does the natural rubber for them come from?
The biggest producer of natural rubber for tires is Thailand. More than four million tonnes of rubber are harvested annually in plantations there. And demand is ever growing – because ever more tires are needed. But the labor conditions in Southeast Asia are harsh – with working days of up to 12 hours and very low wages. In addition, toxic herbicides banned in Europe are used to fight weeds on the plantations. After the harvest, the ‘white gold’ is sold to brokers, who, in turn, sell it on. German tire manufacturers, like Continental, for example, are keen to stress that they use “natural commodities conscientiously.” But many car drivers don’t give a second thought about where the rubber in their tires comes from – and why we don’t recycle used tires more effectively.
And here Scientific American reports on a “greener” tire manufacturing trend, but has it bass ackwards.
But now tire-makers have turned increasingly to finding renewably sourced raw materials to replace current oil-based ingredients of tires. Depending on the model, anywhere from 15 to 38 liters of petroleum are required to produce a standard tire. Low-oil content tires use various natural, sustainable ingredients as substitutes including chemically toughened natural rubbers, vegetable-based processing oils and fibers made of plant cellulose. They also found nonpetroleum versions of what the tire industry calls fillers—special functional additives that boost, for example, manufacturing processability or durability.
The New Green Deal is to turn more of our farmland soil and forests into industrial agriculture at an increasing rate. I guess you just need to listen to the words and not look behind the curtain at reality to not choke on that one. Well, at least they are trees, amidst the completely toxic land around them.
“The New Green Deal is to turn more of our farmland soil and forests into industrial agriculture at an increasing rate. I guess you just need to listen to the words and not look behind the curtain at reality to not choke on that one.”
Dammit GF, you KNOW better, and I know you know better, but this IS on the net. Ya have to put a sarcasm alert on such comments, because too many people read such words literally.
The phrase NEW GREEN DEAL is subject to being kidnapped, tortured, and sold on street corners like a sex slave, by unscrupulous business men, just as the words LIBERAL, PATRIOT, CONSERVATIVE, etc have been so abused for partisan purposes.
As Orwell himself put it, nobody even knows what the word fascist even MEANS any more, it’s just a word you throw at somebody you hate, regardless of why.
I will assume you watched the video and read the article. The article was from 201o. This whole greenwashing has gone on for a long time. Actions that look good on the surface but are really doing harm when one looks deeper.
You protest too much. I can see you don’t know that GDP is just a measure of how much we are wrecking the ecosystems. I used New Green Deal which is the larger set of actions and may include the political proposal The Green New Deal that has surfaced lately (not action, just proposal so far).
All of this is just various versions of BAU and ends in similar places.
Since you seem to think that destroying forest and productive agricultural land to produce tires is a good thing, that is your fictional mental reality. It is the typical response of people who know they are doing wrong things and refuse to stop.
However, continuing this sort of action, whether it is “greener” or not leads to a reality that will be tough to ignore, though that has been ignored in the past on national basis. When I grew up most children made it to adulthood. There were still some nasty diseases around to kill some but most made it. The generation growing up now, starting this year, all 130 million of them, could be facing a 50% loss rate by the time they are thirty. I could be off by five years but not much more.
If you disagree, please tell me how each of the colliding predicaments are going to be solved by 2040. Loss of soil, loss of water, desertification, loss of usable land due to sea level rise, accelerating destruction of land, water and ecosystems by civilization, increasing pollution, increasing temperatures, chaotic weather, crash of fish populations, over population, over consumption, antibiotic resistant germs, growing demand for meat, increasing industrialization, increasing urbanization, loss of oxygen production, falling ocean pH, and many more.
We can’t eat electricity or money or the internet of things. Without a lot of healthy soil, forests to moderate water storage and purification, clean water to drink and a healthy diverse biosystem it all goes to pieces.
Conscious beings would never do what people are doing to the biosystems and themselves. But anything can be justified on the smaller short term scale, in the mind.
Here’s another category for your list, as the bureaucrats insist everything we eat be wrapped in plastic.
COMPLEXITY OF PLASTICS MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHICH ARE DANGEROUS
“The problem is that plastics are made of a complex chemical cocktail, so we often don’t know exactly what substances are in the products we use. For most of the thousands of chemicals, we have no way to tell whether they are safe or not…
We studied eight types of plastics commonly used to make everyday products, such as yogurt cups and bath sponges, and examined their toxicity and chemical composition. Three out of four products contained toxic chemicals.”
“Since you seem to think that destroying forest and productive agricultural land to produce tires is a good thing, that is your fictional mental reality. It is the typical response of people who know they are doing wrong things and refuse to stop. ”
GF, I ‘m beginning to think you are as dumb as a fucking fence post, and that you react like Trump when somebody points out that you have made a mistake, and go off like a string of firecrackers, spewing accusations like a fire hose that’s been dropped, whipping around in every possible direction.
I have posted HUNDREDS of comments in this forum indicating that I am as well aware that we are looking at a baked in ecological and economic collapse as ANYBODY. I have probably posted MORE comments to this effect than any other individual who posts here.
So now you decide to paint me as an uninformed idiot. Trump tactics, to a T.
I’m laughing my ass off.
I hereby apologize for accusing you of having a working brain.
But I’m game to play, if you want to swap insults. Suppose you take the next turn by pointing out what it is that I’m doing ( or advocating) that’s wrong?
Am I wrong to point out that while industrial agriculture is bad, and unsustainable, we CAN’T give it up NOW, or anytime soon?
Am I wrong to point out that giving up fertilizers and pesticides, given the current REAL WORLD state of the art of agriculture, would mean putting what’s LEFT of most forests and wetlands to the plow? Or alternatively, trying to convince all the prosperous people in the world to give up their modern diet, and still see a billion or two or three people starve in short order?
Just what is it that I’m WRONG about, and what is it that I’m doing that’s wrong?
Am I wrong when I point out that people vote the way they do mostly because they see themselves as members of a GROUP, rather than because they believe or don’t believe in some particular scientific description of reality?
You just said upthread YOURSELF that ” The false premise that humans are actually sapient creatures able to think rationally and use knowledge to direct their actions. There may be some who approach this quality but in general humans are merely clever not intelligent or sapient.”
You said up thread “People are not sapient, they make decisions based on mixing fiction with cherry picked reality. Humans are excellent at ignoring reality, mapping distortions on it and claiming that their views are reality.”
I maintain that while such generalizations ARE true, AS generalizations, there are lots of people who are capable of critical thinking, and who do actually practice this intellectual art from time to time, even to the point of making a HABIT of it in some cases.
And I maintain that people in the environmental camp need win over only a couple of people out of every hundred that vote to take control of the federal government again.
Over the years I have personally witnessed HUNDREDS of people more or less abandoning the culture they grew up in, choosing to live their lives according to new rules of their own choosing, or rules that were chosen for them, as the case may be, by leaders who made a better case for new rules.
( I witnessed this phenomenon to a far greater extent than most people because I was working with large numbers of kids at times, and moving back and forth from one cultural milieu, the backwoods fundamentalist Christian milieu to a university centered urban milieu almost entirely dominated by well educated liberals. )
Old Fartmaster said “GF, I ‘m beginning to think you are as dumb as a fucking fence post, and that you react like Trump ”
Yep, just as I said, non-sapient and in your case often non-sentient. Thanks for proving my point.
I looked behind the curtain and found you! 🙂
Now calm yourself down and let’s get back to discussing things.
I see you have no answers to my questions about the coming intersection of predicaments. Continued forms of BAU will only aggravate the situations further. So it is necessary to think outside the box and conform to the limitations of the natural order.
GE got an order for 100 of the new big 12MW Haliade-X offshore wind turbines, to be installed off the east coastover the next 5 years, at two sites.
Its some good work for the port facilities/maritime workers who will support this industry.
Well, I can see the disadministration going all out to throw a spanner in the works of that deal especially with the turbines coming from France. Tariffs, lack of permits, taxes, anything else they can throw at it?
NAOM
And away goes another couple of coal burners.
New company is breaking ground in the “Smart Electrical Panel” space.
The former head of Tesla’s energy storage business, Rao spent years integrating Powerwall batteries, rooftop solar inverters and other distributed energy resources (DERs) with the ubiquitous grey boxes that connect household circuits to incoming grid power…
“We’re re-architecting it from scratch, to be a much more capable device — not to be just a passive current protection device, but more of a multiplexer, an I/O for energy and data.”
On Thursday, the San Francisco startup unveiled its flagship product, the Span panel. From the outside, it resembles an oversized white glass-and-metal smartphone mounted on the wall. Inside are the power electronics, sensors, processing power and software to monitor and control up to 32 household circuits, plus solar or battery inverters, EV charger controls, and grid connect-disconnect, all via smartphone app.
For those more interested in evolutionary biology and astronomy, rather than UFO’s, here is an interesting article-
They propose that cooling from asteroid debri (the big one) spurred on rapid bio-diversification at 466 mill yrs ago [ “Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event”] https://phys.org/news/2019-09-asteroid-collision-space-466m-years.html
Wow, that must have been one massive collision. Just goes to show, you wait long enough or look back far enough all kinds of things happen(ed).
“Amazon has agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian.”,
to be deployed between 2021 and 2024.
Yes, that is 100,000.
Amazon is an investor in Rivian.
The other big ‘writing is on the wall’ news in the EV press is that Daimler’s “latest generation of internal combustion engines will be its last.”
Two drones, one truck. The truck navigates the delivery route, the drones shuttle the packages from truck to doorstep. The truck never stops. The armed facial recog security drones surveil the route and take out any parcel thieves.
Just had a failed login attempt for my email here. I suggest people keep an eye open for unwanted activity and/or change passwords.
BIRD POPULATIONS IN US AND CANADA DOWN 3BN IN 50 YEARS
Bird populations in Asia and the US are “in crisis”, according to two major studies. The first concludes there are three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada today compared to 1970 – a loss of 29% of North America’s birds. The second outlines a tipping point in “the Asian songbird crisis”: on the island of Java, Indonesia, more birds may now live in cages than in the wild.
As the habitat and insects go, so go the birds. I remember when I lived under a coastal flyway sometimes the birds would stream in a wide seemingly never ending swath from horizon to horizon. But that was 40 years ago.
Naïve optimism is a pervasive problem in the West today, and that’s probably not surprising. Many Westerners have a lot to lose in the way of wealth and comfort, and thus, a significant interest in preserving a belief that “everything will be okay” in the near future.
While it’s very likely that the ship of global civilization as we know it WILL sink, and before too long, it’s possible that some people in some places will, figuratively speaking, make it into port in lifeboats.
We are not NECESSARILY doomed, because strange things DO happen sometimes.
It’s POSSIBLE that if we get enough of the wake up bricks I often mention upside our collective head that we MIGHT get our act together, and go proactive and do some things to preserve SOME part of our modern way of life, before it’s too late.
There are definitely some trends that lead me to think the odds aren’t NECESSARILY as bad as we might think.
Younger, better educated people are moving OUT of places like NYC, in ever increasing numbers, and TO places such as Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte, and just as importantly, out into the suburbs and even into rural areas in the formerly more or less all red south.
The net effect is that some formerly red states are turning blue, fast.
In the past, such people were concentrated in cities where their votes were discounted by the existing power structure all over the country, and especially so in southern and rural areas, via gerrymandering and the electoral college.
There will still be PLENTY of them in cities such as LA and NYC to maintain the D’s lock on political power in these long time blue cities.
If this trend continues, in combination with some other demographic trends, it’s altogether possible, and maybe even likely, that some states that went decisively for Trump will go D in 2020.
Ah yes the D’s. I’m sure they’ll fix everything. Voting Biden then OFM? Is he gonna bring about political change and save the civilization?
” I’m sure they’ll fix everything”
Of course not,
but I’d be happy with aggressive prosecution of hate crimes, enforcement of the voters rights act, aggressive plans to encourage adaptation to peak oil conditions, continued push on separation of church and state, less coddling of domestic terrorism (white supremacists), restrictions on sales of assault weapons, a fully staffed state department (you know- international relations), and a few items like that.
+1
+1
“There are definitely some trends that lead me to think the odds aren’t NECESSARILY as bad as we might think.“
OFM, who is “we” ? There are a lot of optimists, even on this forum, who think that with the transition to wind/solar energy and EV’s the growth path can just continue as if the world doesn’t have other problems than climate change and fossil fuels depletion.
Here is how the industrial complex is going to fix agriculture so we can have 10 billion or more people on the planet. Sounds complicated.
10 technologies that could combat climate change as food demand soars
With the global population projected to increase by nearly 3 billion people by midcentury, demand for food—as well as the land and energy required to produce it—is to set to soar.
If the world doesn’t figure out ways to cultivate far more food on less land, we’ll need to convert nearly two Indias’ worth of forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems to agricultural fields, according to a new study led by World Resources Institute researchers. That, in turn, would increase annual emissions by 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent gases—far exceeding the 4 billion tons permissible under models that hold global warming below 2 ˚C.
With annual CO2e of agriculture set to increase 15 gigatons due to an additional 3 billion people does that mean current agriculture is producing over 30 gigatons CO2e?
Ouch!
There is also supposed to be a tripling of biofuel devoted lands.
That leaves 1170 untended (wild) birds.
Yep, and no one is out protesting or filling government eboxes with protest letters because it’s “Green”. What a fake society we live within.
“Oh take me home where the tractors roam
Where the farmers and politicians play
Where seldom is heard a truthful word
And the skies are full of carbon all day”
A huge dip in the PNA next week will probably make people west of the Rockies question if their region is skipping fall and going straight into winter.
And people in the East will think summer is just starting?
And they will all be wrong.
Whats new.
Yep, soon to be the equinox, all things being equal. Leaves have been falling here for about two weeks now.
“soon to be the equinox, all things being equal”
Good one!
“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
— H.P. Lovecraft
“President Trump will not launch a military attack against Iran. Neither will the Saudis or anyone else. Iran has deterred them by explaining that any attack on Iran will be responded to by waging all out war against the U.S. and its ‘allies’ around the Persian Gulf.”
Probably right, but I’ve been hunting Chanterelle Mushrooms in Central Oregon lately—–
‘The other big challenge for wind in the 2020s is the lack of progress on transmission infrastructure that would connect potentially massive low-cost wind farms in interior states with bigger population centers. A hoped-for national infrastructure package that might address the issue has not materialized.’
Better hurry up, time to buy some Tesla cars while Tesla is still selling them and while they are affordable.
Will Tesla Stop Selling Cars?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf7uVYovqOk
And you will be all set up for using Boring Tunnels.
Boring Company Will Be Worth More Than Tesla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRi0bL484J0
Sheesh, with Tesla cars taking over for 5 to 10 ICE cars each car sales could plummet. They only have to produce a few million a year to completely change the industry and kill a lot of petroleum burn.
“Using the word fanatic is a wonderful way to avoid having to look beneath the surface at any of the human motivations that might be involved. Labelling somebody a fanatic is just an A to B knee jerk response in terms of the depth that factors need to be examined. Real people that might be extremely motivated, or feel extreme pressure and societal and cultural coercion to do something, might have some really interesting motivations and points of view. What sort of a range of options do they think they have?” ~ Dan Carlin Hardcore History
I’m personally willing to believe that fully autonomous cars will be a reality within ten years.
If the cards actually fall this way, I could see one new Tesla put into fleet rental service easily displacing five to ten conventional cars.
I have a so called “utility tractor” which is a toy compared to the ones most farmers have these days but it can out work ten horses, and if I wanted to, I could run it ten hours, park it, eat supper, grease it and fuel it up , and put another operator on it for another ten hours….. day after day, for a couple of weeks, when I would need to change the oil.
Change on such a scale could happen again.
It’s probably too little too late as far as the big picture is concerned, but I still believe some people in some places may pull thru ok.
Electric cars were no big deal since there were already cars everywhere. Sure if one had the funds and a more global consciousness, EV’s are the way to go. But most people are not that willing to change yet.
Horses to cars, trucks and tractors was a big leap.
However, a global system change such as what Tesla is proposing and seems about ready to engage is a game changer. Musk has made announcements before and he is never more than about one year off. Things might just happen fast. We will know in just a few years.
I would not be surprised if there was a lot of political (corporate driven) resistance to this new model. That means that other countries will run with it and the US might once again show it’s intransigence.
Replacing eight cars with one would be big deal, especially considering that the one will run primarily on wind and solar power, at some future time….. assuming of course that Old Man BAU hobbles on long enough.
I’m totally with you about corporate pushback. It will be huge, and will probably delay the adoption of fully autonomous cars by ten years in some countries.
Okay…but most cars have to be used at the same time, or close to the same time. Work starting time is not descretionary, nor is school, events, etc. Plus there is that pesky charge time.
Respectfully, 1 ev will not replace 10 cars.
Now, $10 gasoline and better transit options for city folks will, as well as a decent carpooling app will. Think ‘electronic hitchhiking’.
“Anyone going to San Antone, or….”
Oh yeah, I just wanted to say that until insurance and litigation solves that pesky autonomous car crash incident, it’s all on borrowed time. Who pays when the car kills someone?
“Who pays when the car kills someone?”
Its a really good question.
Same applies to other ‘robots’/drones.
If it is a military drone, apparently no one pays.
Is it less painful to be killed by an autonomous car, or a drunk/distracted/sleepy driver?
When it comes to vehicles, a big question is- Is it more or less likely for an autonomous vehicle to crash than a one driven by humans?
Also, autonomous vehicles have a learning curve, while individuals don’t.
Every individual accident in an autonomous vehicle can be analyzed and used to prevent all similar accidents in the future – that’s really not true for humans.
“Okay…but most cars have to be used at the same time, or close to the same time. Work starting time is not discretionary, nor is school, events, etc. Plus there is that pesky charge time.”
A taxi type car can have up to 6 passengers. Charge times are dropping down to minutes not hours. Buses and vans can be electrified too. Start times for work can be staggered and roads will be less crowded meaning faster transit times.
Watch the Boring Tunnel video up at the start of this thread to get an idea how a 1 hour commute can be done in 8 minutes.
Not much room for more railroads in dense areas but with a lot less cars on the roads, moving faster, the problems fade away.
Once travel goes all autonomous the speed and guaranteed flow will increase dramatically.
Disclaimer ( I doubt if we have time to accomplish all that before we get into deep shit in too many ways, but it’s nice to think about how a world could change as a mental exercise).
BTW, with machines, robots and AI taking over more each day one must consider that getting to “work” might not be a thing in the future.
“most cars have to be used at the same time, or close to the same time. Work starting time is not descretionary, nor is school, events, etc”
Why? 2nd if all cars go to the same place why is there a need for so many empty seats? It is this fixation about fixed times that is an issue here, plus that of single users. Let me give you 3 examples.
My working day started at 9am. If I aimed to be there by 9 it would take me 20-25 minutes, if I aimed to arrive just after 9 it would take me 5-10 minutes. 1 1/4 hrs a week wasted along with excess burnt fuel when there was absolutely no need for me to walk through the door by 9.
Try some of the roads around here at around 2pm. We have the siesta from 2-4pm so everyone is trying to drive at the same time and turn the roads into traffic treacle.
A lady who lived a few doors from the school who drove her kids all the way around the block to deliver them to school each day so she could be seen bringing them by car.
NAOM
I believe the same time needed won’t work argument fails because car sharing will save so many people so MUCH money that employers will find it very much to their advantage to stagger the times employees check in and out to a far greater extent than they do today.
My local situation is typical of a good many tens of millions of people. They live ten to thirty minutes driving time from work, and absolutely HAVE to have a car to get there and back. In the case of somebody who runs a cash register, the cost of owning and running their car can easily consume a third of their income.
BUT no car, no job. Moving closer to work is generally a pipe dream, because affordable housing close to work generally does not EXIST.
There will be an ENORMOUS incentive for them to take a job with an employer that schedules them so they can avoid rush hour, and so get a cheap OFF PEAK ride in autonomous car to and from work.
It won’t take long for employers in most businesses to adapt to such scheduling. They will have the same incentive, getting good help at the lowest possible pay rate.
The actual cost of running an autonomous car will be peanuts, on a per mile basis, because they can be super standardized, making them extremely easy and fast to repair, when repairs are needed, and it’s no problem whatsoever to build a car TODAY, using a CONVENTIONAL engine, that will last five hundred thousand or even a million miles.
The reason nobody builds cars that well, for now, is that nobody wants to keep a car that long. Hardly anybody that buys a new one expects to keep it long enough to even think about wearing it out these days. It’s about status, about new features, about creature comfort and that nice new car smell, rather than TRANSPORTATION.
There will be PLENTY of things to spend money on to demonstrate status, later on, but maybe there will be lots of autonomous LIMO’s.
Such limo’s may come with a DOORMAN, a ride along servant, in a spiffy uniform, to open and close the doors that would ordinarily open and close themselves, lol. He’ll still be quite useful, he can hold the passenger’s umbrella and carry the passenger’s suitcases, lol.
He can run into Starbucks and grab coffee, or the drug store, so the passenger won’t have to stand in line at the counter.
In the intermediate term, say next 15 years, I think a reasonable assumption is that 1 EV replaces 1 ICE. I doubt all that many will be shifting to owning no car in the next decade.
Here are few questions many people will be asking themselves within 5 years-
Do I get a new, or lightly used, ICE at negative interest loan rate, hoping that petrol will be reasonably priced for another 5-10 years?
Do I get one of those new EV/PHEV’s now available, or wait for that new solid state battery version that is supposed to be out in 2-3 years?
How will the auto makers be able to judge when to scale back ICE production? It will hard to get that right. Demand may shift suddenly.
Remember the ‘Osbourne Effect’- [delayed purchase while waiting for an upcoming innovation]
I wouldn’t suggest taking the graph literally, at specific dates or magnitude. Its the concept that is well displayed.
“In the intermediate term, say next 15 years, I think a reasonable assumption is that 1 EV replaces 1 ICE. I doubt all that many will be shifting to owning no car in the next decade.”
Think I will print that out and put it in the same frame as the ” Man will never fly” and “The war to end all wars.” quotes.
(smile)
I think the only way you will be correct on this is through the corptocracy stopping the EV/autonomous movement to protect their investments and profits.
Also, if SHTF, car ownership will fall like a rock anyway.
So I give your idea a 30 percent chance in the US, 15% globally over the next 10 to 15 years. The economics are heavily in favor of autonomous taxis and vans, as well as less pollution.
And then there is peak oil… whenever.
I hope you are correct,
but I wouldn’t put my dime on it.
“Also, if SHTF, car ownership will fall like a rock anyway.”
I suppose it depends how bad a crises is encounterd.
In a severe economic crises, people will stop buying new vehicles, and stick to their old ones for as long as possible. They will still own them,
and use them for critical functions, unless it is cheaper to get a robot taxi car to come (or feasible to walk).
BTW A historic global agreement aimed at halting deforestation and curbing dangerous carbon dioxide emissions has failed.
WORLD ‘LOSING BATTLE AGAINST DEFORESTATION’
Deforestation ‘accelerating’ … The amount of annual carbon emissions resulting from deforestation around the globe are equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by the European Union with an area of tree cover the size of the United Kingdom lost every year between 2014 and 2018.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49679883
Meanwhile, we have “exponential growth” of wildfires! 😉
INDONESIA FOREST FIRES SURGE
“It is just the latest such outbreak globally — huge blazes have torn through the Amazon in South America while bushfires are sweeping across eastern Australia in an unusually ferocious and early start to the wildfire season.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-indonesia-forest-surge-stoking-global.html
Woody biomass in the USA/% forest cover by state.
The darker green shading on the map indicates more biomass,
so for example the SE USA has extensive forest that is not very dense, compared to the Smoky Mountain zone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_territory_in_the_United_States
Calif has been drying out and has a huge stock of dead trees in the sierras – estimated at 149 million
You can drive up the mountains in certain areas and see 20-30 miles of burned off areas, where it once had big and thick with trees before the last couple decades. Seems like a version of desertification.
I understand much of the Mediterranean zone, from Greece to Portugal has a similar trend.
https://www.vox.com/2019/2/13/18221822/california-149-million-dead-trees-wildfire
Uh, oooh, the propaganda has gotten deeper. Now a war on natural gas is being declared. I guess suppressing coal, wind and solar has not been totally effective, so the campaign thickens as the public turns it’s back. A bit late though.
https://www.naturalgasintel.com/articles/118752-the-energy-wars-part-1-natural-gas-under-fire-as-states-favor-alternatives-in-climate-policy-push#
Perpetual negative interest rates in the ECB?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecb-policy-idUSKCN1VW2SN
Natural gas as an input for fertilizer was raised in the last non-petroleum post, but this comment got lost:
Natural gas (aka methane aka CH4) is used because it provides hydrogen, which is combined with atmospheric nitrogen in the Haber-Bosch process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
There are other sources of hydrogen – the most straightforward is electrolysis of water, using seawater and renewable electricity.
NG IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO PRODUCE FERTILIZER.
Absolutely true Nick.
However, no energy source, no industrial process has come anywhere close to reproducing the affordable product, for over 100 yrs. Its thermodynamically hard to match.
When one of the other sources can compete, at scale, advertise your business.
You will have customers, lined up.
Until then, its very hopeful.
There had been previous discussion of wind, or solar, to ammonia. Ammonia is also used widely as a nitrogen source on farms. There are many small-scale research projects on this going on, but no one seems to be claiming commercial viability that I am aware of.
NG IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO PRODUCE FERTILIZER- when you go around shouting things like this, do you think it makes it somehow believable, or practical?
Perhaps there will come a tipping point where N fert from renewable energy is cheaper than from Nat Gas. In the USA, I’ll bet that point comes in the late 2060’s.
The fact that H2 from electrolysis isn’t price competitive is very, very different from it not being viable. Beta VCRs couldn’t quite compete with VHS, but if VHS had never existed, Beta would have worked just fine. There are an infinite number of other examples of things that were viable, but couldn’t quite compete.
If the H2 input is 30% of the retail price of fertilizer, and fertilizer is 10% of the price of food, then a doubling of cost for H2 would only increase food prices by about 3%.
And, how much would farmers shift their crops towards less intensive fertilizer crops, and more careful fertilizer utilization?
The point is: a substitute for NG for fertilizer does indeed exist. If we transition away from NG (or it depletes) it won’t be the end of the world. No one would starve.
—-
That’s a worst case scenario, which assumes current pricing of electricity (and current electrolysis engineering). Large scale installation of wind and solar are likely to be over-built, to reduce the impact of intermittency. That will produce massive amounts of surplus power, which will be dirt cheap for this kind of off-peak, secondary consumption.
I’ve made the same basic argument that Nick is making about NG and fertilizer, in talking about the need for immigrant labor to keep our farms running.
We could get by without natural gas sourced nitrates here in the USA, and without immigrant labor, because we can AFFORD to, but a short term transition in either case would be next to impossible.
In the developing world, people would starve by the tens of millions, by the hundreds of millions, without cheap nitrate fertilizers, which are the KEY input of the so called Green Revolution.
So we’re in deep doo doo, on a global basis.
There’s no known way of obtaining elemental hydrogen in large quantities at a reasonable cost, other than stripping it out of natural gas.
Hickory is dead right about that.
Renewable electricity might eventually be cheap enough to use it to get H2 from H2O. But I’m willing to bet my farm on there never being enough H2 available to feed seven billion people except by sourcing it from natural gas.
It will be FAR more practical to divert gas from electric generation, heating, and other uses than it will to produce food without lots of nitrates.
This is NOT going to end well…… but just maybe the population will start falling off, globally, before we run short enough of gas that we can’t make enough fertilizer with it.
If we HAVE to, we can go back to eating bread, beans, onions and cabbage, with maybe a chicken on the family table on Sunday, in rich countries. That alone would cut the need for fertilizer by half, and quite possibly by three quarters.
Poor countries aren’t positioned to drop down the food ladder….. they’re mostly on the bottom rung already.
Depending on how fast the climate goes to hell, I may live to hear about people starving by the tens of millions well before we run critically short of any industrial inputs of any kind.
There’s some hope that we can develop new crops, new species, for all intents and purposes, that will produce well enough to cut WAY back on fertilizers.
But so far, we don’t even have much in the way of lab demo work supporting this argument. I don’t expect to live to see perennial wheat growing on most grain farms.
“I’m willing to bet my farm on there never being enough H2 available to feed seven billion people except by sourcing it from natural gas.”
But have you considered the lessons learnt from experiences in 1980’s VCR technology before coming to that conclusion?
The technology and science that make cheap electronics possible are consistent with the basic laws of physics.
There’s an approximately zero hope that anybody will ever prove the thermodynamic laws of physics wrong. It takes exactly as much energy to break a chemical bond as was released when it was formed, plus however much is lost due to inefficiencies in the process in the real world. All industrial processes run at less than perfect efficiency. Most involving industrial chemistry run at large losses.
Except for the odd molecule here and there, there’s no free hydrogen on Earth. Separating it from methane is the cheapest method, and will always be the cheapest method of getting it, in terms of the amount of energy required, because there’s nothing else available in large quantities that has hydrogen that’s as easily separated as methane.
There can be no disputing this observation. It’s sort of like saying it takes longer to walk two miles than it does to walk one mile. It’s totally cut and dried.
Having said this much,
I will be the first to admit and even argue the position that renewable electricity or fusion power MIGHT eventually be cheap enough that we can manufacture free hydrogen on the grand scale by way of separating it from water molecules, or organic materials other than methane.
But I’m not one to believe that we will build enough wind and solar farms to have electricity available to manufacture nitrates by the tens of millions of tons any time soon.
For now and for the easily foreseeable future, it will by far and away be more practical and economic to use whatever renewable electricity we can produce to operate cars and machinery and use any available methane to make nitrogen fertilizer.
But at some point, we may have a substantial excess of renewable electricity, because we will be forced to overbuild wind and solar farms by a factor of two or three in order to have enough when the wind and sun fail to cooperate.FF depletion GUARANTEES we will either build out renewables, or go back to muscle power, lol.
When that time comes, assuming the overall economy doesn’t crash and burn sooner, it will be possible to use this surplus electricity to manufacture free hydrogen on the grand scale.
I don’t think any of the regulars here will live to see that time, but our grandchildren might… if they survive, and Old Man BAU survives.
“There’s no known way of obtaining elemental hydrogen in large quantities at a reasonable cost, other than stripping it out of natural gas. ”
You guys need some education in chemistry. Ever heard of catalysts? They change the pathway of a reaction and lower the activation energy required to break bonds.
A newly discovered catalyst promises cheaper hydrogen production
“Experiments confirmed the performance of Mo6S4: the voltage required to drive the HER reaction was about 0.1 volts, 50 per cent lower than flawed lattice MoS2, and approaching platinum (~0.05 volts).
“It’s not quite as good as platinum, but considering that it’s very cheap and very stable, I think it has great potential,” Wang said. ”
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-newly-catalyst-cheaper-hydrogen-production.html
Jiggly Jell-O to make powerful new hydrogen fuel catalyst
“A cheap and effective new catalyst can generate hydrogen fuel from water just as efficiently as platinum, currently the best — but also most expensive — water-splitting catalyst out there. The catalyst, which is composed of nanometer-thin sheets of metal carbide, is manufactured using a self-assembly process that relies on a surprising ingredient: gelatin, the material that gives Jell-O its jiggle. ”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181215141352.htm
For those interested, it takes about 50 kWh of electric power to get 40 kWh of hydrogen energy (1 kg) using platinum catalyst.
So the loss is not at big as you think and the catalysts are getting cheaper and more available.
My beard is getting longer, waiting for all this magic stuff.
Catalysts are not magic. Platinum catalysis has existed for a long time. We are just now making cheaper alternatives so the systems can be upscaled for global energy.
Activity of fuel cell catalysts doubled
An interdisciplinary research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has built platinum nanoparticles for catalysis in fuel cells: The new size-optimized catalysts are twice as potent as the best process commercially available today.
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-fuel-cell-catalysts.html
Yes, airplanes do fly, very fast and very high.
So GF, any idea how close these new catalysts are to being ready to replace the magnetite catalysts that are used at industrial scale for the past 100 yrs?
Is it just wishful thinking, or close to implementation?
I’m no judge of this aspect.
Really don’t care about the Haber process, a process that has put us in a deadly corner of extreme population.
Talking about water to hydrogen for energy storage and use.
They use steam reforming on natural gas with a nickel catalyst to produce hydrogen for the Haber Process.
Magnetite is not used to produce hydrogen.
The cost of electrolysis is nearing the cost of SMR. Electrolysis avoids all the downsides of using natural gas so when the collective gets their heads out of their collective asses SMR will be eliminated.
The efficiency of both processes is about the same.
Well you entered the conversation late, so that probably explains being off topic.
we were indeed talking about N2 fertilizer production.
Well, I guess you missed the part where a source of hydrogen is needed for that process.
Haber essentially doubled the population of Earth with H2 process.
No person is of more importance in the last 200 years:
Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the “detonator of the population explosion”, enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[23] About 1–2% of the world energy consumption and 5% of the natural gas consumption is currently used for the Haber process.
I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m way behind and falling farther behind every day, technically, although I do try to keep up with major changes in the technologies involving energy.
Maybe H2 via electrolysis will be feasible on the grand scale within the foreseeable future.
Combined with fuel cell power generation , it could be THE technology that solves the intermittency problem holding back the transition to renewable electricity.
Storing H2 in large enough quantities isn’t at all easy, for mobile use , but stationary storage isn’t all that difficult, so long as you can live with some relatively minor losses due to leakage.
And there may be progress enough made in storing it that it will be practical to use it to run cars and trucks. But so far H2 tanks suitable for highway use cost an arm and a leg, and don’t hold much, in relation to the size of them.
My personal opinion is that if H2 is ever competitive as transportation fuel, compared to batteries, it will be twenty years or so, maybe even farther down the road. The tech will have to be perfected from lab level to large scale production, the infrastructure will have to be built, fuel cells cheap enough and durable enough will have to be developed and scaled up, and the public convinced that H2 is the way to go.
In the meantime, batteries will keep on getting cheaper and better……but it would take a battery as big as a baseball stadium to store as much energy as could be stored in H2 in one old salt mine or large natural cavern. It might be possible to pump it down old oil or gas wells as it’s produced, and allow it to come back out on it’s own, as it’s needed, on a daily cycle.
And if it’s cheap enough, it could be burned in gas turbines, which aren’t very efficient, compared to fuel cells… but gas turbines are a mature technology, and relatively cheap.
Practical electrical storage via H2 on a daily cycle would be awesomely helpful, in terms of CO2 pollution,and potentially extremely profitable as well, later on, when gas eventually goes sky high again due to depletion.
OFM,
Energy Storage Breakthroughs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGHX8OIaupk
Battery Fueled by Iron and Water Could Transform the Power Grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmtI8Wat7rY
Like I said many times before,
wake me up Nick when it is anywhere close to real world applicable.
Until then, my beard will get longer and longer.
“Beta VCRs couldn’t quite compete with VHS, but if VHS had never existed, Beta would have worked just fine. There are an infinite number of other examples of things that were viable, but couldn’t quite compete.”
The take home lesson for Nick from that little piece of history appears to be that anything is possible. Anything! It reminds me of when Fred, I think it was Fred, said that, and I’m paraphrasing, transcontinental flight was once unachieved and thought impossible, but then it happened, so don’t worry Elon Musk will save the planet.
It seems to me that Nick’s methodology for future trends analysis can be summed up by the following: “the things I like will happen, and the things I don’t like won’t happen”. From which I can pretty much conclude he doesn’t like hard work in the outdoors.
Honestly, Nick, 1980’s VCRs has got to be the stupidest example, analogy if you will, that I’ve ever heard in my life for why renewable fertilizer is a realistic scenario in the short term. Jesus Christ Nick, you’re like a new born calf!
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I was trying to explain the difference between “competitive” and “viable”.
There are many, many different situations where different products are in competition (VCRs were just one example). Often one product wins and the other product is eliminated from the market entirely, even though the difference between the two was relatively small (whether the difference was price or features – with simple commodities, there usually won’t be a difference in “features”, and the difference in price can be very, very small).
But, even though the loser was eliminated and may eventually be forgotten (like Beta VCRs), if it had been the only product in the market it would have worked just fine. IOW, it was viable, even though it wasn’t competitive.
I hope that helps.
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 Mil yrs ago (PETM)
presentation by Dr. Scott Wing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ExlYEpGy0&t=3039s
Thanks. As an adjunct where I teach, I can take classes for free and am currently taking Human Evolution. We have spent two weeks on climate of the Cenozoic, and the PETM came up just yesterday. Was able to forward this link to my prof.
If you liked that one, this one may be helpful also.
Dan Britt – Orbits and Ice Ages: The History of Climate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yze1YAz_LYM&t=42s
Yes. We’re learning all about this.
This confirms how knowledgeable the prof. of my evolution class is. He’s a biologist who loves geology.
Methane (CH₄) is a potent greenhouse gas.
Latest preliminary observations…
May 2019 – 1862.8 ppb
May 2018 – 1854.8 ppb
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/
I guess we will need to engineer lower methane cows.
Or maybe stop stuffing meat in our maws.
It’s being done by breeding and changes in the diet also help.
NAOM
Yesterday Germany announced its plan of climate mitigation in transport, which is to save 1/3 of CO2. As of now, transport in Germany has not yet saved any CO2. So the plan is: 7 milions of EVs until 2030 and increasing rail capacity by improved rail traffic managment. What is conspiciously lacking is building of new railway lines; on the main lines, like Rotterdam-Genua for example, there is a train every 10-15 minutes now.
You can see how we are prisoners of the past paradigm, here the car paradigm. EVs are for the sake of car industry. But batteries are expensive and limited in offer, cars need bitumen for roads, whereas railways are relatively free of both batteries and bitumen. Yet it is car industry that is the biggest industry of Germany, not the railway industry, which is just a Siemens division. What we really should be doing, is moving any load possible to rail, especially the entire long range transport. Yet 20 years ago in Europe post railway cars were common (cars were moving stuff just from a railway station to a post office). Now the post railway cars have disappeared completely. And yet they could be a solution to the growing packet traffic, which was a singled out as a “problem” by German goverment too .
But we won’t go to the past, no way! “Progress” is the another paradigm, so EVs must be.
However, the German goverment said fuels will soon become “more expensive” to push people towards change. So this is a picture of future: fuels expensive for climate sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_InterCity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_La_Poste
The electrification is a choice for high population density areas. In Russia cities have light rail and trolleybuses (for example, they go between cities around Crimea peninsula), but the long range trains still are moved by power of diesel. Hard to imagine an electrified Transsiberian Railway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-crimea-trolleybus-2018-htmlstory.html
“fuels expensive for climate sake”
That is excellent news!
fuels will be getting very expensive soon anyway in the coming decade, if not for the competition from EV/PHEV.
Yes. They are trying to prime and to nudge people.
In West Europe there is a problem of heating oil, it is much too popular here. In the East Europe, NG has been always the fuel of choice, with house gas installations being standard a long time already.
In heating, East Europe moved from coal to gas, whereas West Europe shifted from coal to heating oil.
What’s PHEV?
“Electrification of the last segment of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Khabarovsk (Хабаровск) to Vladivostok (Владивосток) was completed in 2002.[26] By 2008, the tonne-kilometres hauled by electric trains in Russia had increased to about 85% of rail freight.[19]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_the_Soviet_Union#Post-Soviet_era
Another picture: listened to an interview with a German captain of NG-powered ship, nothing big, some kind of local Helgoland craft. He said that in comparision to diesel motors, NG ships are slower. Slow manouvering is a bit of problem, especially against non-NG-ships.
Not many electric aircraft in the forecast!
“Between 2013 and 2018, aviation sector emissions grew from 710 to 905 million tonnes of CO2, according to the latest estimates by the International Air Transport Association. Flying now generates just under 3% of global emissions, roughly the same as Germany. Icao’s own forecast anticipates emissions to increase by up to 300% by 2050 under business as usual.”
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/09/12/non-disclosure-agreements-closed-doors-rising-co2-uns-aviation-body/
Meanwhile,
RAINFOREST FIRES TRIGGER SMOG ALERTS IN INDONESIA AND MALAYSIA
“Indonesia and Malaysia have issued severe smog alerts as fires rage in large sections of their rainforests. Both countries have closed schools and issued face masks. Satellite images show almost 1,000 fires are burning in the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra, while 10 are burning in Malaysia. Many of the fires are started by illegal land clearing to make way for palm oil plantations or for subsistence farming.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-49692533/rainforest-fires-trigger-smog-alerts-in-indonesia-and-malaysia?intlink_from_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fscience_and_environment&link_location=live-reporting-map
The PETM seminar I posted above explains how fires become commonplace in a warming world, even with more intense rains.
I have an old bridge to sell you if you believe that one!
Market based offset program? Key words for ” we are hiding our emissions on paper and are conning you”
Don’t worry, Elon will get interested in aviation if he thinks it will grow a lot. He will then make all short flights electric and long flights hybrid flying body designs that are super efficient using his new synthetic liquid fuel derived from sunlight and atmospheric CO2. Jets as we know them will cease to exist at the commercial level. You will arrive at the airport in a Tesla taxi or bus and part of the trip will be by Boring Tunnel. Then an AirX plane or SpaceX rocket will take you to the destination landing site where another Tesla taxi will take you to your destination via another Boring Tunnel.
Me, I am waiting for the VTOL electric taxis. Want to take at least one flight before I kick the bouquet. Should be within five years. 🙂 (smile face not coming through so smile)
Hi GF,
I get it, I really do. We’re collectively fucked.
But nevertheless, as one of his teammates said about Yogi waving his bat at the outfield fence, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.
And so far, Musk has done it.
Some of us may pull thru the bottleneck ok.
Ask any professionally educated farmer, and he will tell you that disaster is commonplace, but that so far, it’s never struck over the entire world simultaneously in modern times. The last time as best I remember the whole planet went to hell in a hand basket was some tens of millions of years ago.
Maybe half of us will die off soon enough that it takes enough pressure off the environment that the other half can continue to live. Or maybe ninety percent of us die off, leaving the last ten percent with enough resources to continue living life as we know it today, after a fashion.
Or maybe not.
Well, the PETM is somewhat of a good model for us to follow. Lots of land animal diversification. Populations fell but recovered after the PETM. Plants and animals moved north (in the northern hemisphere). Dwarfism was rampant but again, things got bigger later.
So it was tough times with lots of changes but not a major extinction. Some extinction with populations reduced in most cases. Recovery later with much more diversity.
We are doing it faster now, plus people are generally destructive, so that makes it different. But over the next 1K years the changes should slow down to a more “sane” pace. Especially if mankind reduces or changes his ways.
Of course there is a chance for species survival (or radiation of species) but even without global warming we were not headed to a good place. Maybe global warming will put us (the general us, not just people) in a better place in the long run. It’s the long run that really counts here. Anything can happen in the shorter runs, and apparently has in the past.
I have to admit I selfishly wouldn’t mind hitching a ride on a SpaceX Starship flight before I exit this asylum. Got no plans for dehydroepiandrosterone and metformin therapy, so 25 year window tops. Go Elon Go.
Unexpected Surge in Global Methane Levels
Last year global methane reached a new historic high, marking the second highest year-over-year jump recorded over the last 20 years. More importantly, the jump in 2018 extended an unanticipated multi-year resurgence of growth in global methane levels that has generated enormous concern in the science community. Scientists report that the new and unexpected methane math threatens to eliminate the anticipated gains of the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement built upon models that assumed stable methane.[3]
https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/methane-surge/
In a warming world we can expect swamps, bogs, fresh water bodies, permafrost to release methane as well as all the shallower methane hydrate to be released such as in the Arctic Ocean. Eventually some of the deeper methane hydrates will release too, further in the future.
CO2 will probably not fall, may even rise slowly in the future (next ten thousand years) and methane may stabilize on average at a higher level than currently present (though bursts could become common). Given the loss of sea ice and the loss of most land snow cover, along with the loss of the Greenland Ice sheet as a high altitude cooling region, the temperature will keep rising. Also add the increased insolation in the northern hemisphere over the next 10k years (12 w/m2 at 65 N) due to orbital changes and it’s going to be a very long time before things cool off again. over the next 30k years we get an additional 25 w/m2 at 65N. Essentially forever as far as humans are concerned.
Plus the continuous global dimming we have now will cease, adding another continuous heat independent of CO2.
Anyone for dwarf horses and buffalo?
Maybe large blooms of lily pads in the Arctic Ocean will reduce the carbon in the atmosphere and cool things off eventually? But by then, no one will care.
BTW, at this level of GHG and this temperature range, global temperature and radiative forcing are linear.
One of my favourite history lessons is how, in World War II, more oil spilled into the seas than has been spilled since. Miraculously, it all naturally decomposed. Beaches were fine allowing for pleasurable recreation and fish still thrived because there was ethical conservation. Life is a whole lot tougher than anyone will ever be able to comprehend.
Wow, got any favourite history lessons from WW1?
Your shit posting is weak
http://theconversation.com/how-oil-spills-from-wartime-sea-battles-nearly-wiped-out-famous-welsh-guillemots-68260
Alt right shit posting is notorious for its laziness. Fucking Millennials.
Happy, happy miracles!
Hi Gonefishing, thanks for sharing the article. But I would like to get some of the numbers clarified.
You said the Radiative forcing from orbital change will be 25W/m2 over the next 30000 years. I think a forcing of 4w/m2 is equivalent to a doubling of CO2 concentration or a warming of 3C. So a forcing of 25W/m2 would be equivalent to a six-doubling of CO2 concentration (an increase by 64 times). Are your sure the numbers are correct?
“You said the Radiative forcing from orbital change will be 25W/m2 over the next 30000 years.”
No, I said “the increased insolation in the northern hemisphere over the next 10k years (12 w/m2 at 65 N) due to orbital changes and it’s going to be a very long time before things cool off again. over the next 30k years we get an additional 25 w/m2 at 65N. ”
I did not say radiative forcing nor did I say anything about CO2.
The orbital cycles vary the amount of incoming radiation in total and in hemisphere and lately control the glaciations. It is likely, since there are no deep troughs in the northern insolation during the next 40,000 years that the Earth will resume it’s more normal warmer state and CO2 will follow to over 1000 ppm.
8000 years of humans changing the planet surface as well as the latest few hundred years of deforestation and fossil fuel burn is apparently enough to kick us out of the Ice Age.
The last warm period, the Eemian, was kicked off by a 75 w/m2 rise in insolation and ended by a more than 100 w/m2 fall.
Warm periods normally last about 2000 to 3000 years. We have been in one for over 11,000 years so there is a major system change. Otherwise northern Canada and northern Europe/Siberia would be covered in permanent ice by now instead of melting. The Arctic Ocean would be continuous ice instead of the partial slushy it is now.
Once the oceans warm up there is no going back without another major system change.
As far as CO2 and methane go, the melting permafrost and shallow seas will provide plenty of that over the coming millennia as the Earth system warms. They are typically followers and the stores of carbon are huge.
How certain are the numbers? Far more certain than the numbers from climate models and GHG calculations. Also, the link between the insolation changes due to orbital changes and climate change was verified in the 1970’s using deep sea ocean sediment cores.
(Hays et al. 1976). Specifically, the authors were able to extract the record of temperature change going back 450,000 years and found that major variations in climate were closely associated with changes in the geometry (eccentricity, obliquity, and precession) of Earth’s orbit. Indeed, ice ages had occurred when the Earth was going through different stages of orbital variation.
Since this study, the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has embraced the Milankovitch Cycle model.
Gonefishing, you did not use the term “radiative forcing”. But “insulation” derived from incoming solar radiation and numbers such as 12w/m2 or 25w/m2 are measures of radiative forcing.
I know you did not mention CO2. I said 25w/m2 is EQIVALENT to a six-doubling of CO2 concentration (or roughly a global warming effect of 18C).
In the past transition from glacial to interglacial period, the direct effect from orbital change was pretty small and the warming or cooling eventually happened because of cumulative change of CO2 and albedo effects. That 25w/m2 sounds more like the sum of all direct and indirect effects rather than direct effect from orbital change alone.
The least you could do is look up the definition of radiative forcing.
No, 6X CO2 is not comparable to 25w/m2 of additional insolation at 65N.
I see you are struggling with the basics of climate science, astronomy and paleontology, then coming to erroneous conclusions/interpretations.
Political economist
The number for 25 W/m2 at 65N is the increase at summer solstice from todays level. This was a bigger deal when there were large ice sheets in Northern hemisphere as was the case during glacial maximums.
Today the biggest ice sheet is in Antarctica so the dynamics may be very different.
“This was a bigger deal when there were large ice sheets in Northern hemisphere as was the case during glacial maximums”
Dennsi, you might want to reconsider that statement. With ice cover about 80 percent of the SWR is reflected back to space. Now the northern regions are dark and will absorb much of that SWR during the spring/summer months of up to and over 20 hours per day of sunlight.
Also the now fully exposed melting permafrost is a large source carbon when warmed and the shallow Arctic seas are also vulnerable.
Perhaps but it is a seasonal thing and winter will continue at 65N.
Perhaps? Are questioning the albedo change or the fact that there is now uncovered permafrost?
Yes, we have winter down here too and no permafrost, so what does winter have to do with it?
Climate change: Electrical industry’s ‘dirty secret’ boosts warming
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49567197
Sulphur hexafluoride, or SF6, is widely used in the electrical industry to prevent short circuits and accidents.
But leaks of the little-known gas in the UK and the rest of the EU in 2017 were the equivalent of putting an extra 1.3 million cars on the road.
Levels are rising as an unintended consequence of the green energy boom.
Hmm.. thats troubling. Its used for all things electrical.
Relative 100 yr GWP (global warming potential)
Carbon= 1
Methane= 25
SF6+ = 22,800 !!!
Move uphill. Aim for 30 ft above sea level or the local flood plain, minimum.
SF6, total is about equivalent to one month of CO2 atmospheric rise so not much effect. The article appears to me to be more twisted BS against renewables (even shows a wind turbine as it’s first picture) and more diversion. The annual EU release of SF6 they speak of is about equivalent to .02 percent of annual CO2 release globally. The “dirty secret” is the burning of fossil fuels and the methane leakage related to the generation of electric power. So even if SF6 use were doubled and no one took care to prevent leakage or capture it, it would make almost no difference at all to GW.
Yes SF6 is needed for 35kV and up. Not sure how that applies to all those lower voltage distributed networks. It’s all high voltage electrical, not just renewable.
Did a quick calculation and SF6 (produced since 1950’s) is about equivalent to 0.25 ppm of CO2 at present. Something to keep an eye on and dispose of properly. I know the US has been implementing regs to control and reduce leakage for a while now.
However it has had multiple uses, well beyond power switching. Even in tennis balls and shoe soles.
https://www.gasworld.com/sulfur-hexafluoride-the-gas-with-a-double-edged-sword/3704.article
Gonefishing,
How do they come up with the 100 year GWP numbers?
Wikipedia has a decent article on GWP, however don’t confuse those numbers with what is actually happening in the atmosphere and on the planet. They merely look at equal masses of CO2 and the subject gas and calculate how they might effect global warming relative to CO2 over different time periods. In the case of SF6 the GWP rises with time due to it’s inherent stability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
Up the price 10x.
NAOM
17 days record heat in Hawaii, their hottest summer yet and second hottest for Alaska.
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Hawaiis-Warmest-Summer-Record-and-Alaskas-Second-Warmest?cm_ven=hp-slot-3
Some geothermal exploration in Cornwall, UK
https://www.uniteddownsgeothermal.co.uk/
They’ve completed two wells:
the injection well to 2,214 meters (7263 feet)
the production well to 5,057 meters (16,591 feet)
going to be doing some testing now.
Lots of interesting videos on the site, the rig they used is a very automated top drive rig
with automated pipe handler.
https://www.uniteddownsgeothermal.co.uk/videos
About drones, war, and oil
I’m about as far from computer expert as anybody who posts here, but I’ve got a pretty good layman’s grasp of ordinary machinery.
Just about any third world country bigger than a postage stamp could build such drones as were used to hit the Saudi’s.
Airplanes are simple as shit, much simpler than cars.
I’ve built a vehicle myself that does everything a basic old model pickup truck does, but without any of the amenities such as a roof and windshield, out of scrap metal and salvaged parts such as wheels, engine, transmission, etc. Built it mostly JUST for the fun of it.Somebody someplace is probably riding it on their farm today, hauling a few bales of hay or some firewood or whatever.
I once made my mind up to build an airplane myself, but eventually lost interest. Computers ? For sale in every city on Earth, and so I’m told, a cheap laptop could easily be programmed to fly a drone to a given location. Programmers are a dime a dozen these days. Homing in, no problem, they did that back as far as WWII using a couple of radio stations as references, well before radar. Today, gps costs only a hundred bucks, retail.
So somebody tell me, why couldn’t just about anybody, or any country, capable of getting together a couple of million in cash, and hiring a dozen skilled mechanics and a couple of programmers, build such drones?
I could build one myself, buying the engine and electronics of course, hiring the programming done, given a couple of years and a couple of helpers and a small machine shop such as can be found in any small city with a couple of factories. Might have to build a couple of experimental models to get the exterior dimensions good enough to fly properly.
Plans would be a snap. There are PLENTY of pictures available on line, and the internals hardly matter at all for one one way trip, so long as it’s not too heavy to fly.
It appears as sure as sunrise tomorrow that we will see more of this sort of thing at an ever increasing rate. It would be easier to build one of these things than it would be to get hold of a couple of good ground to air missiles by a factor of ten, maybe a factor of a hundred. No connections needed in the international arms black market.
Good bye political stability, such as it WAS. It’s going to be a lot worse from here on out.
Autonomous cars which are still extremely tough to impossible to build will be a reality within a few more years, and once they’re for sale, anybody who can put his hands on hundred kilos of explosives will be as dangerous as a hundred well armed men in uniform.
But at least this attack on the Saudi’s should serve as one more wake up brick upside our collective head. If oil prices shoot up twenty or thirty bucks a lot more people will be thinking about buying their first electric car.
Every electric car on the road , so long as it gives good service, will get five or ten potential buyers to thinking about buying an electric car when the new car bug bites.
Maybe the US should actually become energy independent. Though that would involve lots of EV’s and renewable energy being added quickly.
I wonder whatever happened to degrowth? Is that now a forbidden or politically sensitive topic now. Planned degrowth is a preferable route to forced degrowth.
OFM- “Good bye political stability, such as it WAS. It’s going to be a lot worse from here on out. ”
Unfortunately, I agree.
>Good bye political stability, such as it WAS. It’s going to be a lot worse from here on out.
The good news is that renewables are decentralized, so small drone attacks only hit small targets. And this kind of attack would barely scratch a big solar array.
Also asymmetric threats are only a problem in a world where resources are spread asymmetrically.
It’s even more vulnerable.
Aim at central switchyards and transformer station and generate a big blackout.
But with everyone on renewables there would be less incentive to wage wars around oil. The SA / Jemen war is about oil, too.
Well, the electrical grid isn’t currently all that resistant to guerrilla attacks.
But…a grid with renewables is more resistant than a grid without. And a grid that’s redesigned to take advantage of the local nature of renewables can be much more resilient, with local microgrids, intelligent sensing and switching, local batteries, demand side management, adaptive EV charging, V2G, etc.
You’ll need much more overland lines than now.
For the USA: In summer pumping energy from the giant solar farms in Colorado up to New York.
In Winter pumping the wind energy from the storms at the east coast to all middle USA.
You’ll have battery storage – but how much. Most for day / night buffer of solar power.
Blowing up something that can’t be repaired in 24 hours and there is trouble – a lot of trouble.
Yes, it’s likely that long distance transmission will grow substantially. That might make the grid more vulnerable to disruption.
But, for better or worse , states and regions tend to want to minimize imports, and maximize internal production. That will raise costs, but increase resilience.
Off-shore wind will increase resilience, because it will power coastal cities. At the moment, the direction of wind power flows is from the center to the coasts.
” As can be seen in Fig. 4, every interglacial warming period over the last 800 kyr was preceded by several thousand years of dust storms.” That is nearly enough to get anyone’s attention. It is easy to reason why Mars has global dust storms, but to dry out the planet enough to produce thousands of years of dust storms that cover the glaciers is another thing.
An interesting read that covers albedo, orbital cycles, greenhouse gases and desertification during the Ice Age.
Modulation of ice ages via precession and dust-albedo feedbacks
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
Hi GF, and ANYBODY,
I want to buy a book, RECENT copyright, that lays out what we know about astronomy and climate in terms intelligible to well educated laymen. I have long since forgotten all the higher math I ever learned, and never learned enough anyway to deal with mathematically phrased astronomy.
So it just needs to lay out the cycles, as they actually happened, going back, and what the climate was, at any given time.
It’s easy to understand them, in principle, but it’s tedious as hell to compute them even if you know how. And then you still don’t have the climate record laid out for you, nice and convenient, right along side the astronomical record.
Any additional info, such as the history of volcanism included would the cherry on top of course.
Any suggestions will greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance!
It occurs to me that there might be websites that have this all wrapped up with bows and ribbons for the convenience of laymen, but I haven’t run across them.
Just mapping northern summer insolation changes to sea level or ice cover (related) is not enough. The ocean surface temperature is important as well. Also once there is enough ice coverage much of the insolation is reflected so there is a break point or threshold that is crossed and the extra sunlight does not have as much effect.
At first the heat of the ocean feeds the glaciers with precipitation. Eventually the ocean is cool enough that the glaciers are starved of precipitation and a warm period can then commence. During the last glaciation the glaciers receded several times but grew again and the temperature slowly kept falling despite several pulses of increased northern insolation.
In other words, once the earth atmosphere becomes dry enough, the potential for a deglaciation and a warm period exist.
Now we have plenty of water vapor in the air but the permanent ice is receding and the winter snows melt in the spring all the way to the Arctic Ocean (earlier as time goes on). A case of warmer winters up north even though there is lower summer insolation now.
System change.
OFM,
Look into Earth’s Climate, Past and Future; William Ruddiman. 3rd edition last I looked.
Why don’t you write a chapter on what you think the green new deal should look like to you. Let Dennis post it.
This link is one well worth reposting in various places, all over the web.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-can-renewable-energy-power-the-world/
I’ve been saying pretty much the same thing as the author of this book, for quite some time, but I’m not actually polling anybody, so I’m not predicting a GOP wipeout in 2020, which he thinks might actually happen.
I think it’s almost SURE to happen, within ten years or so, due to demographic trends.
I’m telling you straight up, no chaser, preachers have learned they had better not say much about women wearing short skirts, or divorce, or working, these days, for fear their congregation will shrink to a size it won’t be big enough to support them any longer, and that the kids are playing alien invasion and dinosaur games on their phones in the back of the car on the way home from church.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/rip-gop-polling-expert-predicts-2020-electoral-wipeout-will-devastate-trump-and-the-republican-party/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral
It would be interesting to play this trend out, assuming it happens.
There would be a vacuum on the republican side.
Would it be filled by right wingers like Pence and Ryan
“Trumpistas, Tea Party members and Christian fundamentalist white evangelicals”- to quote the article,
or moderates like Kasich and Huntington.
Its crystalized in my mind a bit more, that the biggest mistake the Democrats could make in selecting a candidate is to pick one that the 20-30% middle ground would find ‘scary’.
That means different things to different people, and I’m not going to pretend to know where it shakes out, but there are many people who are afraid to go too far and fast on ‘socialism’ in health care. They still want the option of employer based insurance coverage, for example.
There are people who are afraid too go to far and fast on gay rights, women in leadership, non-whites in leadership, for example.
I am ready for a black lesbian women President, if she was the best, but many people are not.
Ruth B-G is getting old. Not at time to take a big risk, IMO.
I agree totally.
The best possible strategy for the D’s this time around in my estimation is to nominate a candidate that won’t scare the middle of the road, middle of the economy voter into voting R, or just staying home.
The D’s core is on board, the R’s core is on board.
The election will be won or lost in the middle ground.
A comparative examination of insect biodiversity through space and time. Another look at the Eocene, compared to modern times.
Global Biodiversity and Climate: What Fossil Insects Tell Us. Presented by Dr. Bruce Archibald, Simon Fraser University
Deep Time, Global Change and YOU lecture series
Why are there more species in the tropics? Why do species compositions of communities tend to change more across mountains in the tropics than the Temperate Zone? Understanding why we see patterns of change in biodiversity from the equator to the poles has been difficult using modern-world systems.
Dr. Archibald discusses a novel approach comparing the diversity of insect communities with fossil insect communities. This approach helps resolve longstanding questions.
Global Biodiversity and Climate: What Fossil Insects Tell Us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un_E4hyekSs
Maybe things aren’t QUITE as bad as I thought they are locally, up until yesterday afternoon. I saw some bats for the first time in at least three years.
Two little bats have taken up residence in one our deck umbrellas, which had been folded up for about 2 weeks.
Hah! We have a tree frog living in ours!
The oil industry vs. the electric car
By GAVIN BADE
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/16/oil-industry-electric-car-1729429
Groups backed by industry giants like Exxon Mobil and the Koch empire are waging a state-by-state, multimillion-dollar battle to squelch utilities’ plans to build charging stations across the country. Environmentalists call the fight a reprise of the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” battles that doomed an earlier generation of battery-driven vehicles in the 1990s.
Oil-backed groups have challenged electric companies’ plans in 10 states, according to utility commission filings reviewed by POLITICO, waging regulatory and lobbying campaigns against the proposals. The showdown is taking place as utilities, eager to increase the demand for power, push for approval to build charging networks in locations such as shopping centers and rest stops in more than half the nation.
“Fossil fuel interests control 90 percent of the transportation fuel market in the U.S. and are really feeling threatened,” said Gina Coplon-Newfield, director of the electric vehicle initiative at the Sierra Club.
The counterattack involves an array of trade associations and industry-funded political groups representing every segment of the petroleum sector.
In the Midwest, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group for gasoline makers, has filed comments against charging plans in Kansas and Missouri, and has opposed Colorado’s new zero-emission vehicle mandate as part of a “Freedom to Drive” coalition of auto dealers and oil groups. The typical consumer, they say, should not have to pay for incentives or charging stations that mainly benefit people wealthy enough to afford cars like Teslas.
In Illinois and Iowa, the American Petroleum Institute joined with Americans for Prosperity — a political group funded by the Koch oil empire — to oppose utilities’ electric vehicle investments. The owner of a large refinery joined other industrial interests to oppose utility charging and shared mobility plans in Minnesota.
In Massachusetts, API teamed with gasoline marketers and convenience stores to oppose an electric vehicle charging buildout from the utility National Grid. The Western States Petroleum Association has opposed utility charging plans in Arizona alongside AFP, as well as electric vehicle legislation in California. And in Maryland, API aligned with convenience stores, gasoline stations and truck-stop owners to oppose utilities’ electric vehicle plans.
The auto industry itself sees the handwriting on the wall.
https://www.wired.com/story/shift-electric-vehicles-strike-gm/
Everybody in this forum should read this article TWICE.
While a lack of public charging stations will no doubt slow the adoption of electric cars to some extent, it’s my belief that most households that can afford a new car are two car households anyway, and can easily manage charging a cheap running day to day car used for commuting, shopping, hauling kids around by charging it at home.
Upscale rental properties are already installing charging stations in some cases in order to attract the right tenant mix.
The electric car revolution is HERE. How long it will take to take the lead in new car sales is an open question, but GM ALONE is promising a couple of DOZEN new electric models out within the next three years.
You have to go LOOKING for an electric car these days in order to just SEE one in most cities and anywhere out in small town and rural America.
In five years time, when you take your not yet paid for conventional car to the dealer for service or repair work, you will be looking at up to fifty or sixty different models available for IMMEDIATE on the spot sale, in any medium to large city in the USA. There won’t be that many models at any one dealer ship of course, but there may be even more, between all the various makes of cars.
They’re going to be MUCH cheaper to build, except for the batteries, and the cost of batteries is coming down fast.
It won’t be all that much longer before oil, and therefore the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, will go up sharply, because oil depletes and the population of wanna be car owners is growing.
The only reason oil WON’T go up like a rocket, eventually, is that electric cars and trucks MIGHT cut into demand for oil to such an extent that it’s a buyers rather than a sellers market.
At the moment still too expensive, too heavy = expensive to build around.
When the next generation of batteries hits the market, all current electric cars are version 1.0 I-Phones nobody wants anymore.
At the moment everybody is preparing something, inclusive Tesla, but nobody talks too loud about it for not driving off customers.
Some companies are already in industrial engeniering with test productions, other late development, others unknown but talking (Toyota).
For example a Tesla 3 could shrink it’s battery pack from 600 to 300 kg for the same performance – the car itself can be constructed lighter then, too. Or keep anything for double range.
The generation after this (still deep in labs) experiments with sodium instead of Lithium for really cheap batteries, perhaps only the same performance as today top models.
In any circumstances – the current generation is too heavy and clunky to roll out in really big numbers. But companies know about the improvements – and when you don’t get into the market now to collect knowledge it can be too late.
One example in pilot line state:
https://insideevs.com/news/370240/solid-power-producing-solid-state-batteries/
They are producing 432 wh/kg batteries – Tesla 3 has 240. And they are not the only one in this stage of development.
The EV is nowhere near it’s ultimate performance and efficiency. It has merely reached the level of practicality and is quickly moving to completely upset the whole transportation system. There is no standing still now, which means if you buy an EV today it may well be far outdated in just a few years.
We are committing to electric/electronic world faster and faster. That may be more efficient and less polluting but it also is placing ourselves on the wrong side of another limb that can be cut off.
“The typical consumer, they say, should not have to pay for incentives or charging stations that mainly benefit people wealthy enough to afford cars like Teslas.”
It’s always ironic when the big fossil corporations suddenly on the little guy’s side, so they can protect their profits. Meanwhile subsidies to the FF corps and ICE automakers are not mentioned. The pollution and global warming is not mentioned either.
Climate Activists Don’t Know How to Talk to Christians
By Jay Michaelson
https://news.yahoo.com/climate-activists-don-t-know-085617653.html
Religious Christians are the key to America taking action on global warming. And yet, the way climate activists frame the issue often alienates the very people they most need to persuade.
Over half of Republican voters identify as conservative Christians—either evangelicals, Catholics, or others. These voters may be right-wing on social issues, right-wing on immigration, and right-wing on ‘big government.’ But they’re not necessarily right-wing on allowing the Earth’s climate to be radically disrupted—and if they move, the Republican Party will have to move too.
But according to two new studies conducted by the Yale Program for Climate Communication and published in the journal Science Communication, most religious Christians understand global warming in very different terms from others.
The first study “found that ‘protect God’s creation’ is one of the most important motivations that Christians report for wanting to mitigate global warming.” Resonant messages included “God made humans responsible for taking care of His creation”; “We can use nature for our benefit, but it is not OK to destroy God’s garden that He entrusted to us”; and the language of “stewardship” over the Earth.
And the second study found that framing the issue of global warming in moral and religious terms was crucial for Christians to care about it, because it suggested that “people like themselves” care about the issue.
“People derive values, a sense of self, and social norms from the groups to which they belong,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program and a co-author of the two studies. “Messages that resonate with group identities may be especially effective in influencing people’s attitudes.”
While I was studying in my dorm room, long time ago, the door opened to show another student. He stood in the doorway and exclaimed that none of this was real. I turned to him and said “How about if I punch you in the face since it won’t be real?”. He suddenly understood reality and left quickly.
You always were good at making friends.
I didn’t think you would get it.
Maybe Christian’s should open their fucking eyes. It’s not exactly carved on a stone tablet and hidden in the desert by Bronze Age tribal goat herders.
Pagan Origins of Judaism
https://youtu.be/ZECezMYug8c
Bad Bronze Age Fiction, violent and poorly written.
And those are its good points.
Old Farmer Mac sez , ya don’t sell much acting like ah libtard pinko commie ‘roun Trump town. Ya gotta unnerstan that when ya wanna sell somebody a car, er a jug of corn, or a few buds, ya don’t go talking trash bout’em even if ya know its’ so.
SERIOUSLY, when you attack Trump and company, you are in essence attacking the people who voted for him, and that’s as sure a way to make sure they vote for him AGAIN as can be imagined.
I quit reading psychology texts back in the sixties or thereabouts, because I had only to read a couple of them to know the people who wrote them had their heads up their asses so far they would never see daylight, insisting on such bullshit as that animals have zero intelligence, only instincts, that humans are NOT really animals, etc. I was long since acquainted with what BIOLOGY professors had to say about such questions, and already well acquainted with a good bit of classic literature.
The psych profession has only in the last twenty or thirty years STARTED to catch up with what LAY psychologists such as used car salesmen,and before them, horse salesmen, knew about the workings of the human mind.
Every classic novelist knew everything that’s in the study referenced in the Cat’s 3;12 am post.
I’ve been trying for the last couple of years to get what this professor has to say across to the other members of this forum.
You can talk to conservatives, to religious people, to libtards, commies, Trump ass kissers or ANYBODY if you approach your subject matter in such a way that your listener doesn’t associate what you have to say with his enemies, real and or imaginary.
This is ALL ABOUT us and THEM, and hardly anything else at all matters, if you allow your enemy to frame the discussion as an US versus THEM issue, with you being THEM.Allow that to happen, and you’re already toast.
The FIRST thing you must do, if you want to win over some R voters, is quit attacking their intelligence, culture, ethics, morality, religion, the industry in which they earn their living, etc.
If you WANT to talk about clean water law in particular, and environmental problems in general, if your target is a fisherman, just talk about how all the garbage in the water these days means you can’t catch a fish in so many places anymore, and how some places still have clean water and how others have cleaned up their water, etc, and leave it to your listener to figure out what kind of politicians control the kind of places with fish, and what kind control the places without fish.
Little weeds of doubt will start popping up all thru his carefully tended garden of Trump beliefs, if you handle this little job correctly.
If you are talking to a hard core but basically kind hearted Christian,you will find that they are quite as troubled by holding two mutually exclusive beliefs as anybody else, including lots of Ivy League professors.
Such a person may be utterly convinced that free school lunches are a devil’s trick to turn the country socialist, and that sorry worthless parents should be responsible for feeding their kids.
DON’T talk R and D at them.
Talk about some particular hungry kid in their own neighborhood. Talk about Jesus teaching us that we are supposed to look after those less fortunate than we are, and STICK with Jesus, and when the conversation inevitably turns to paying for lunch, just sigh and say you guess since so many people don’t go to church and contribute enough for charity anymore, you guess Jesus would advise you to support free school lunches, that that’s your own personal conclusion. Don ‘t even MENTION R’s and D’s. Even the dumbest back woods hillbilly can figure it out from there….. given time.
Yeah maybe when I have a week off and nothing to do I’ll take it upon myself to enlighten the local idiots as to the painfully obvious truths that stands before them.
If you WANT political change, you have to be willing to work for it.
You can be sure that millions of others are working hard, around the clock around the calendar, for the changes THEY want.
Which means the most to you, a little time here and there meeting and talking to people you CAN win over to your side, with a little work and patience, or dealing with the consequences of allowing the Trump camp to control the country?
Your sarcastic reply is precisely the sort of remark, overheard by the people you refer to as the local idiots, that’s virtually guaranteed to keep them voting for Trump.
How likely are YOU to vote for a politician, or donate to a charity, whose spokes people refer to YOU and YOUR FRIENDS as idiots?
I rest my case.
I couldn’t give a lesser fuck about political change OFM, it’s meaningless; and within the context of the D vs R binary opposition disorder, change ain’t gonna happen. America is a political sewer pipe. You can ride the wave if you like, I got better shit to do than talk to fucking idiots in hopes it’ll improve the quality of their vote, and in turn improve the future.
“garbage in, garbage out”
https://youtu.be/07w9K2XR3f0
I hope Trump gets four more years. I love watching America crash and burn (purely academic of course, nothing “personal”). It’s the best thing on TV these days.
OFM- the guy obviously cares only for himself. Its not much of a life, to survive for.
Well………
He HAS made his position perfectly clear with this last comment.
So from here on out, I will regard him as one of the people who are part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Or maybe he’s just having a tough day or something. I’ve said things sometimes that I didn’t really mean and regretted later.
Maybe he’s even more of a hard core Darwinist than I am, and expects to live out his own life someplace still pleasant and safe, and doesn’t give a shit about what happens later.
I’m programmed by evolution to care about my kin, my community and my tribe aka my country, and beyond that, my SPECIES as well.
And having intellect enough to understand that human welfare is entirely dependent on the welfare of the entire biosphere, I am also programmed and want to work to preserve as much of the biosphere as possible.
But no matter what happens short to medium term, I think it’s likely Homo Saphead will survive it in small numbers someplace on the planet for the next few thousand years anyway.
My money say’s Trump gets four more; not because I like him, but because the electorate is a bunch of fucking idiots. Forgive me if I don’t take a week off to enlighten the local knuckle daggers. I guess that job is all yours.
I’m sure all your problems will be resolved once you get the knuckle daggers up to speed on how to vote better. Good luck with political change.
Enjoy the famine. Or perhaps check out early if you’d like to avoid it. Google images for “Russian Famine” or “einsatzgruppen” if you want a preview, or if you prefer something more contemporary- anything by Kevin Carter will do.
You dudes get all butthurt when someone doesn’t smoke the hopium with you eh? Political change lol you guys are like a bunch of new-born calves.
https://un-denial.com/2016/04/09/by-erik-lindberg-six-myths-about-climate-change-that-liberals-rarely-question/
I agree with those 6 myths in the link.
The last one- ‘there is nothing I can do’ is why I bother to care about who gets elected. I am pretty burnt out on politics, but I know there is a huge difference among the two parties on certain issues.
Just remember that the big oil and gas production boom in the US happened during the Obama administration.
So how has growth (environmental destruction) done for various presidential terms?
https://www.hudson.org/research/12714-economic-growth-by-president
And under Obama
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/25420/economics/us-economy-under-obama-2009-2017/
But don’t be fooled, most of the increases lately (since 1980) have gone upward. Barely a trickle down, more like a reduction.
Piomas
https://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2019/09/piomas-september-2019.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7474455/Navy-confirms-three-spectacular-videos-appearing-UFOs-genuine.html
Ron P, Fred Magyar
Big fan of your work and love skeptical thinking.
The US Navy just confirmed that the UFO (unidentified) are CREDIBLE.
US navy radar systems don’t fall for mass delusion and don’t have any incentive to lie.
And multiple people can see them as they are recorded.
And all the data is stored for evaluation.
Obsession?
Obsession with World Class radar systems picking up “unidentified” objects?
Yes, wouldn’t any intellectually curious person do the same.
Even if this is all bullshit…IT IS STILL INTERESTING….
what is being picked up?
It is interesting on MULTIPLE LEVELS….
That’s all folks ! We have a loser, “interesting bullshit”.
ok…fine with me.
thanks to the fine contributors to this website.
I think this site is great quality…
Let’s upgrade the US Navy..Apparently they are CRAZY!
“thats all folks”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9434BoGkNQ
“Confirmed” without a convenient link to a Navy press release (on an official Navy website) and no recording of a press conference with said “confirmation”?
Sheesh! Do the conspiracy nuts not realize it’s not the 80s anymore?
Guys, you need to up your game. At least publish a shaky, blurry video purporting to show the navy spokesguy “confirming” whatever you want while running down the hallway towards the toilets.
Hey Gerry,
Last time I checked radar systems don’t lie. They don’t have human psychology phenomena and they don’t participate in conspiracies.
Apparently, the US Navy which has all the data, recordings and such has labeled these objects as “unidentified”.
Where is there a conspiracy?
Your a dumb ass cartoon
lieing to congress has a stiff penalty!
Especially if your lies can be proven because the US Navy has the radar data and recordings!
sufferin succotash!
that are so good that a U.S. general described as “eye-watering”.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/21/russia-winning-the-electronic-war/
How Russian And Iran Beat Their Opponents’ Strategies
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/how-russian-and-iran-beat-their-opponents-strategies.html
‘Speak loudly and carry a small stick’ is America’s new motto (I think Iran has figured that out); and Trump seems to be on a “don’t forget to kick us while we’re down” world tour. Next 9/11 and nobody in the world will care.
Bob Baer of Syriana fame. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/09/09/robert-baer-russia-us-spy-extracted-bts-nr-vpx.cnn
OFM sez them there ijit si cholera jists er like a bunch of teenagers just old enough to figure out SEX as a real world experience. They think they INVENTED it.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-philosopher-s-350-year-old-trick-to-get-people-to-change-their-minds-is-now-backed-up-by?utm_source=pocket-newtab
It never ceases to amaze me that anybody with an iq high enough to find his backside using both hands doesn’t laugh his ass off at this sort of “research”.
I really do believe in the scientific method, but it’s not necessary to put animals in a cage and starve a number of them to death, over and over again, to verify that starvation is a real thing. I never knew any body who got a date with an attractive woman who referred to her parents as ignorant, superstitious, racist, etc.
And I don’t know any R type voters who changed their minds and vote D because they read or hear D’s and liberals describing them as fucking idiots, etc.
But now at least we have reasonably consistent names for various failings of the human mind, such as Dunn Kreuger Effect , which is faster and more specific than the old hillbilly saying he’s so dumb he doesn’t even know it, lol.
Now my over educated but terminally naive liberal friends who have never hunted coons or raised any corn or had a callus on their super clean hands can carry on a proper discussion of the behavior of “deplorables” without feeling like they’re soiling their minds and tongues with words such as STUPID or RETARDED , etc. Sarc light is ON.
The 2020 elections will be won or lost in the middle.
Maybe you should tell all your self-isolated buddies that oil and gas production in the US had it’s fastest rise during the Obama administration. That should get them on board with the Demoncrats.
Of course you are operating on a false premise. The false premise that humans are actually sapient creatures able to think rationally and use knowledge to direct their actions. There may be some who approach this quality but in general humans are merely clever not intelligent or sapient.
I have often said this upcoming election will be won in the middle.
Did you notice that my SARC light is/ was ON?
I presume that since you are obviously neither stupid nor ignorant, you failed to notice it.
I have often said the people on the hard left, and the people on the hard right are on board, respectively with the D’s and the R’s.
There are maybe twenty or thirty million million people whose collective vote will flip states in play from one column to the other.
You seem to be arguing that it’s impossible to convince a few people of these people, say anywhere from two to four percent of them, to think a little and consequently change their political stripes from red to blue.
I totally disagree with you in respect to this particular argument. I’m not operating on a false premise when I maintain that SOME people can be converted from R’s to D’s, in terms of their voting habits.
BUT I do agree with you that the majority of people don’t think much, if at all.
Who WHO WHO has been saying all along that our political and culture war boils down, in the last analysis to US VERSUS THEM? That people would RATHER be wrong than to be outcasts from their own culture and society ? ESPECIALLY when being wrong is so EASY, because all you have to do to be happy and wrong is just NOT THINK?
So you can be a Republican with a degree in physics, and believe the climate is heating up but that it’s all natural…… or you can be a Democrat, with a degree in econ or political science, and argue that American citizens won’t work on farms, but the fact of the matter is that tens of millions of American citizens do work that’s as hard or harder than farm work, such as putting on roofs, paving with asphalt, laying cinderblock, logging, welding, running machines in factories, etc.
I’m a rolling stone,and I have PERSONALLY done all these things, and I know that all of them are as tough as farm work, taken all around.
Pay enough to make the job more attractive than other available jobs, and there won’t be any farm labor shortage meaning there’s no NEED for migrant labor.
I expect any D’s with some expertise in business management know this as well as I do, but they won’t admit it, because it doesn’t suit their overall agenda….. just as the R’s lie about some other issues, such as forced climate change.
OLD FARMER MAC, THAT’s who has been saying such things all along.
So we’re really in the same book, and mostly in the same chapter, but once in a while we see some particular fact or point differently.
You missed the point by about the distance from moon to earth.
People are not sapient, they make decisions based on mixing fiction with cherry picked reality. Humans are excellent at ignoring reality, mapping distortions on it and claiming that their views are reality.
That has placed the whole human race and the general environment into a descent mode. All that activity we see now is about equivalent to the spinning water in a toilet bowl. It’s a great ride until the suction gets going.
People do not even see the reality around them that is in their faces let alone the broader picture, they generally run on habit not thought. There is a huge difference between a person acting through conscious thought/observation and those who just repeat what they did the day and year before because it is what they do.
Where the rubber meets the land and the people. Where would petroleum be without that ubiquitous device the vehicle tire?
Rubber Tires – A dirty business
The booming global tire market is worth billions – but this comes at a high price, both to humans and the environment. Over 50 million car tires are sold each year in Germany alone. But where does the natural rubber for them come from?
The biggest producer of natural rubber for tires is Thailand. More than four million tonnes of rubber are harvested annually in plantations there. And demand is ever growing – because ever more tires are needed. But the labor conditions in Southeast Asia are harsh – with working days of up to 12 hours and very low wages. In addition, toxic herbicides banned in Europe are used to fight weeds on the plantations. After the harvest, the ‘white gold’ is sold to brokers, who, in turn, sell it on. German tire manufacturers, like Continental, for example, are keen to stress that they use “natural commodities conscientiously.” But many car drivers don’t give a second thought about where the rubber in their tires comes from – and why we don’t recycle used tires more effectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fusUxEPwsw
And here Scientific American reports on a “greener” tire manufacturing trend, but has it bass ackwards.
But now tire-makers have turned increasingly to finding renewably sourced raw materials to replace current oil-based ingredients of tires. Depending on the model, anywhere from 15 to 38 liters of petroleum are required to produce a standard tire. Low-oil content tires use various natural, sustainable ingredients as substitutes including chemically toughened natural rubbers, vegetable-based processing oils and fibers made of plant cellulose. They also found nonpetroleum versions of what the tire industry calls fillers—special functional additives that boost, for example, manufacturing processability or durability.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greener-tires/
The New Green Deal is to turn more of our farmland soil and forests into industrial agriculture at an increasing rate. I guess you just need to listen to the words and not look behind the curtain at reality to not choke on that one. Well, at least they are trees, amidst the completely toxic land around them.
“The New Green Deal is to turn more of our farmland soil and forests into industrial agriculture at an increasing rate. I guess you just need to listen to the words and not look behind the curtain at reality to not choke on that one.”
Dammit GF, you KNOW better, and I know you know better, but this IS on the net. Ya have to put a sarcasm alert on such comments, because too many people read such words literally.
The phrase NEW GREEN DEAL is subject to being kidnapped, tortured, and sold on street corners like a sex slave, by unscrupulous business men, just as the words LIBERAL, PATRIOT, CONSERVATIVE, etc have been so abused for partisan purposes.
As Orwell himself put it, nobody even knows what the word fascist even MEANS any more, it’s just a word you throw at somebody you hate, regardless of why.
I will assume you watched the video and read the article. The article was from 201o. This whole greenwashing has gone on for a long time. Actions that look good on the surface but are really doing harm when one looks deeper.
You protest too much. I can see you don’t know that GDP is just a measure of how much we are wrecking the ecosystems. I used New Green Deal which is the larger set of actions and may include the political proposal The Green New Deal that has surfaced lately (not action, just proposal so far).
All of this is just various versions of BAU and ends in similar places.
Since you seem to think that destroying forest and productive agricultural land to produce tires is a good thing, that is your fictional mental reality. It is the typical response of people who know they are doing wrong things and refuse to stop.
However, continuing this sort of action, whether it is “greener” or not leads to a reality that will be tough to ignore, though that has been ignored in the past on national basis. When I grew up most children made it to adulthood. There were still some nasty diseases around to kill some but most made it. The generation growing up now, starting this year, all 130 million of them, could be facing a 50% loss rate by the time they are thirty. I could be off by five years but not much more.
If you disagree, please tell me how each of the colliding predicaments are going to be solved by 2040. Loss of soil, loss of water, desertification, loss of usable land due to sea level rise, accelerating destruction of land, water and ecosystems by civilization, increasing pollution, increasing temperatures, chaotic weather, crash of fish populations, over population, over consumption, antibiotic resistant germs, growing demand for meat, increasing industrialization, increasing urbanization, loss of oxygen production, falling ocean pH, and many more.
We can’t eat electricity or money or the internet of things. Without a lot of healthy soil, forests to moderate water storage and purification, clean water to drink and a healthy diverse biosystem it all goes to pieces.
Conscious beings would never do what people are doing to the biosystems and themselves. But anything can be justified on the smaller short term scale, in the mind.
Here’s another category for your list, as the bureaucrats insist everything we eat be wrapped in plastic.
COMPLEXITY OF PLASTICS MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHICH ARE DANGEROUS
“The problem is that plastics are made of a complex chemical cocktail, so we often don’t know exactly what substances are in the products we use. For most of the thousands of chemicals, we have no way to tell whether they are safe or not…
We studied eight types of plastics commonly used to make everyday products, such as yogurt cups and bath sponges, and examined their toxicity and chemical composition. Three out of four products contained toxic chemicals.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-complexity-plastics-impossible-dangerous.html
“Since you seem to think that destroying forest and productive agricultural land to produce tires is a good thing, that is your fictional mental reality. It is the typical response of people who know they are doing wrong things and refuse to stop. ”
GF, I ‘m beginning to think you are as dumb as a fucking fence post, and that you react like Trump when somebody points out that you have made a mistake, and go off like a string of firecrackers, spewing accusations like a fire hose that’s been dropped, whipping around in every possible direction.
I have posted HUNDREDS of comments in this forum indicating that I am as well aware that we are looking at a baked in ecological and economic collapse as ANYBODY. I have probably posted MORE comments to this effect than any other individual who posts here.
So now you decide to paint me as an uninformed idiot. Trump tactics, to a T.
I’m laughing my ass off.
I hereby apologize for accusing you of having a working brain.
But I’m game to play, if you want to swap insults. Suppose you take the next turn by pointing out what it is that I’m doing ( or advocating) that’s wrong?
Am I wrong to point out that while industrial agriculture is bad, and unsustainable, we CAN’T give it up NOW, or anytime soon?
Am I wrong to point out that giving up fertilizers and pesticides, given the current REAL WORLD state of the art of agriculture, would mean putting what’s LEFT of most forests and wetlands to the plow? Or alternatively, trying to convince all the prosperous people in the world to give up their modern diet, and still see a billion or two or three people starve in short order?
Just what is it that I’m WRONG about, and what is it that I’m doing that’s wrong?
Am I wrong when I point out that people vote the way they do mostly because they see themselves as members of a GROUP, rather than because they believe or don’t believe in some particular scientific description of reality?
You just said upthread YOURSELF that ” The false premise that humans are actually sapient creatures able to think rationally and use knowledge to direct their actions. There may be some who approach this quality but in general humans are merely clever not intelligent or sapient.”
You said up thread “People are not sapient, they make decisions based on mixing fiction with cherry picked reality. Humans are excellent at ignoring reality, mapping distortions on it and claiming that their views are reality.”
I maintain that while such generalizations ARE true, AS generalizations, there are lots of people who are capable of critical thinking, and who do actually practice this intellectual art from time to time, even to the point of making a HABIT of it in some cases.
And I maintain that people in the environmental camp need win over only a couple of people out of every hundred that vote to take control of the federal government again.
Over the years I have personally witnessed HUNDREDS of people more or less abandoning the culture they grew up in, choosing to live their lives according to new rules of their own choosing, or rules that were chosen for them, as the case may be, by leaders who made a better case for new rules.
( I witnessed this phenomenon to a far greater extent than most people because I was working with large numbers of kids at times, and moving back and forth from one cultural milieu, the backwoods fundamentalist Christian milieu to a university centered urban milieu almost entirely dominated by well educated liberals. )
Old Fartmaster said “GF, I ‘m beginning to think you are as dumb as a fucking fence post, and that you react like Trump ”
Yep, just as I said, non-sapient and in your case often non-sentient. Thanks for proving my point.
I looked behind the curtain and found you! 🙂
Now calm yourself down and let’s get back to discussing things.
I see you have no answers to my questions about the coming intersection of predicaments. Continued forms of BAU will only aggravate the situations further. So it is necessary to think outside the box and conform to the limitations of the natural order.
GE got an order for 100 of the new big 12MW Haliade-X offshore wind turbines, to be installed off the east coastover the next 5 years, at two sites.
Its some good work for the port facilities/maritime workers who will support this industry.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ge-wins-lands-first-big-deals-for-12mw-offshore-wind-turbine#gs.4rpygi
Well, I can see the disadministration going all out to throw a spanner in the works of that deal especially with the turbines coming from France. Tariffs, lack of permits, taxes, anything else they can throw at it?
NAOM
And away goes another couple of coal burners.
New company is breaking ground in the “Smart Electrical Panel” space.
The former head of Tesla’s energy storage business, Rao spent years integrating Powerwall batteries, rooftop solar inverters and other distributed energy resources (DERs) with the ubiquitous grey boxes that connect household circuits to incoming grid power…
“We’re re-architecting it from scratch, to be a much more capable device — not to be just a passive current protection device, but more of a multiplexer, an I/O for energy and data.”
On Thursday, the San Francisco startup unveiled its flagship product, the Span panel. From the outside, it resembles an oversized white glass-and-metal smartphone mounted on the wall. Inside are the power electronics, sensors, processing power and software to monitor and control up to 32 household circuits, plus solar or battery inverters, EV charger controls, and grid connect-disconnect, all via smartphone app.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/span-io-launches-smart-electrical-panel-for-the-solar-battery-equipped#gs.4rr3b4
For those more interested in evolutionary biology and astronomy, rather than UFO’s, here is an interesting article-
They propose that cooling from asteroid debri (the big one) spurred on rapid bio-diversification at 466 mill yrs ago [ “Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event”]
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-asteroid-collision-space-466m-years.html
Wow, that must have been one massive collision. Just goes to show, you wait long enough or look back far enough all kinds of things happen(ed).
“Amazon has agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian.”,
to be deployed between 2021 and 2024.
Yes, that is 100,000.
Amazon is an investor in Rivian.
The other big ‘writing is on the wall’ news in the EV press is that Daimler’s “latest generation of internal combustion engines will be its last.”
The focus is now on electric drive.
Full stop.
What happened to the drone delivery program?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/05/amazon-drone-delivery-shopping-giant-unveils-new-prime-air-drone/1358260001/
Are they mutually exclusive?
Two drones, one truck. The truck navigates the delivery route, the drones shuttle the packages from truck to doorstep. The truck never stops. The armed facial recog security drones surveil the route and take out any parcel thieves.
Just had a failed login attempt for my email here. I suggest people keep an eye open for unwanted activity and/or change passwords.
NAOM
Bird populations ‘in global crisis’
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49744435
Will Trump blame the wind turbines?
Iron mike —
From your link.
BIRD POPULATIONS IN US AND CANADA DOWN 3BN IN 50 YEARS
Bird populations in Asia and the US are “in crisis”, according to two major studies. The first concludes there are three billion fewer birds in the US and Canada today compared to 1970 – a loss of 29% of North America’s birds. The second outlines a tipping point in “the Asian songbird crisis”: on the island of Java, Indonesia, more birds may now live in cages than in the wild.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49744435
As the habitat and insects go, so go the birds. I remember when I lived under a coastal flyway sometimes the birds would stream in a wide seemingly never ending swath from horizon to horizon. But that was 40 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=-Q0xUXo2zEY
Naïve optimism is a pervasive problem in the West today, and that’s probably not surprising. Many Westerners have a lot to lose in the way of wealth and comfort, and thus, a significant interest in preserving a belief that “everything will be okay” in the near future.
The Prejudice of Naive Optimism
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/over-optimistic-people-arent-just-annoying-theyre-also-illogical
While it’s very likely that the ship of global civilization as we know it WILL sink, and before too long, it’s possible that some people in some places will, figuratively speaking, make it into port in lifeboats.
We are not NECESSARILY doomed, because strange things DO happen sometimes.
It’s POSSIBLE that if we get enough of the wake up bricks I often mention upside our collective head that we MIGHT get our act together, and go proactive and do some things to preserve SOME part of our modern way of life, before it’s too late.
There are definitely some trends that lead me to think the odds aren’t NECESSARILY as bad as we might think.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-history-how-democrats-conquered-city/597955/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral
Younger, better educated people are moving OUT of places like NYC, in ever increasing numbers, and TO places such as Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte, and just as importantly, out into the suburbs and even into rural areas in the formerly more or less all red south.
The net effect is that some formerly red states are turning blue, fast.
In the past, such people were concentrated in cities where their votes were discounted by the existing power structure all over the country, and especially so in southern and rural areas, via gerrymandering and the electoral college.
There will still be PLENTY of them in cities such as LA and NYC to maintain the D’s lock on political power in these long time blue cities.
If this trend continues, in combination with some other demographic trends, it’s altogether possible, and maybe even likely, that some states that went decisively for Trump will go D in 2020.
Ah yes the D’s. I’m sure they’ll fix everything. Voting Biden then OFM? Is he gonna bring about political change and save the civilization?
” I’m sure they’ll fix everything”
Of course not,
but I’d be happy with aggressive prosecution of hate crimes, enforcement of the voters rights act, aggressive plans to encourage adaptation to peak oil conditions, continued push on separation of church and state, less coddling of domestic terrorism (white supremacists), restrictions on sales of assault weapons, a fully staffed state department (you know- international relations), and a few items like that.
+1
+1
“There are definitely some trends that lead me to think the odds aren’t NECESSARILY as bad as we might think.“
OFM, who is “we” ? There are a lot of optimists, even on this forum, who think that with the transition to wind/solar energy and EV’s the growth path can just continue as if the world doesn’t have other problems than climate change and fossil fuels depletion.
Here is how the industrial complex is going to fix agriculture so we can have 10 billion or more people on the planet. Sounds complicated.
10 technologies that could combat climate change as food demand soars
With the global population projected to increase by nearly 3 billion people by midcentury, demand for food—as well as the land and energy required to produce it—is to set to soar.
If the world doesn’t figure out ways to cultivate far more food on less land, we’ll need to convert nearly two Indias’ worth of forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems to agricultural fields, according to a new study led by World Resources Institute researchers. That, in turn, would increase annual emissions by 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent gases—far exceeding the 4 billion tons permissible under models that hold global warming below 2 ˚C.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613979/gene-editing-will-help-far-more-than-organic-food-to-slow-global-warming/?
With annual CO2e of agriculture set to increase 15 gigatons due to an additional 3 billion people does that mean current agriculture is producing over 30 gigatons CO2e?
Ouch!
There is also supposed to be a tripling of biofuel devoted lands.
That leaves 1170 untended (wild) birds.
Yep, and no one is out protesting or filling government eboxes with protest letters because it’s “Green”. What a fake society we live within.
“Oh take me home where the tractors roam
Where the farmers and politicians play
Where seldom is heard a truthful word
And the skies are full of carbon all day”
A huge dip in the PNA next week will probably make people west of the Rockies question if their region is skipping fall and going straight into winter.
And people in the East will think summer is just starting?
And they will all be wrong.
Whats new.
Yep, soon to be the equinox, all things being equal. Leaves have been falling here for about two weeks now.
“soon to be the equinox, all things being equal”
Good one!
“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
— H.P. Lovecraft
“President Trump will not launch a military attack against Iran. Neither will the Saudis or anyone else. Iran has deterred them by explaining that any attack on Iran will be responded to by waging all out war against the U.S. and its ‘allies’ around the Persian Gulf.”
Probably right, but I’ve been hunting Chanterelle Mushrooms in Central Oregon lately—–
Should government policy favor wind, or solar?
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/solar-itc-extension-devastating-for-wind#gs.4z13fx
‘The other big challenge for wind in the 2020s is the lack of progress on transmission infrastructure that would connect potentially massive low-cost wind farms in interior states with bigger population centers. A hoped-for national infrastructure package that might address the issue has not materialized.’
New lead posts up.