Please post all comments not related to petroleum in this thread.
262 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, November14, 2018”
Coming to a future near you?
Rueters-Dateline Feb 3, 2020
In a move that shocked the world, China has indefinitely banned the exportation of photovoltaic (PV) panels and key components of their manufacture until further notice. This follows on the restrictions in place for the past 3 months. All ships at sea with PV cargo out for delivery have been recalled to China effective as of last evening (8 GMT). Additionally, all Chinese owned manufacturers and resellers in overseas markets have been placed under a ‘cease operations’ order, pending reorientation of their production towards the Chinese market.
The Chinese government has made a brief statement indicating they hope ‘this market adjustment will be temporary’. International observers do not see the move in this way, saying that such an abrupt and profound move does not appear to be one taken lightly.
Commentators see this as a reaction to the growing shortfall of oil and gas available on the international market, coupled with the many tens of thousands of heat related deaths this past summer during the big ‘El Nino’ event.
Regarding the ‘monster’ El Nino we are currently experiencing, the newest ocean temperatures recording compiled by the International Meteorological Society (IMA), shows even further heating in the indicator zones of the Pacific Ocean. ‘This will certainly be the strongest el nino disturbance we had ever encountered’ said the IMA spokesman.
the growing shortfall of oil and gas available on the international market
That would be nice – let’s hope. The quicker oil & gas production peaks and falls, the better.
From last thread…
“where Willits?”
On Highway 101, in the middle of Mendocino Co.
Yep, one of my old friends residence.
Yes I know where Willits is- I was guessing thats where you are from? Although I had thought maybe Briceland. My sister used to live there.
I’m about 20 miles north, in Laytonville.
I’ve been to the K.Wolf festival up there.
‘This will certainly be the strongest el nino disturbance we had ever encountered’ said the IMA spokesman.”
I thought it was to be moderate to light?
That was just a fabrication for 2020. Pardon for the confusion. You know- fake news.
Ok– I need to pay more attention.
(sigh) Same here, though I did catch it eventually.
I blame advancing maturity.
Not enough port 😉
Of course!
Words of wisdom, EFredM. On my way to the cellar, I am.
He seems to believe that other energy sources (solar, wind, nuclear, etc) simply can’t replace fossil fuels.
Would you’all agree with that description of Ophul’s ideas?
I agree with Ophuls that fossil fuels will not be “simple” to replace.
Not much to replace since fossil fuels are highly inefficient, mostly producing waste heat, plus have a lot of upstream and downstream energy losses.
Not much to replace since fossil fuels are highly inefficient, mostly producing waste heat, …
That is what is called a non sequitur. It does not follow that the inefficiency of fossil fuels means there is not much to replace. In fact, replacing just oil will be a monumental task. Coal, equally as difficult.
And about 99.something percent of them burn fossil fuel.* And most of the rest are powered by electricity that is generated by fossil fuel.
*I really have no idea what the actual percentage is. 99.something percent is just a wild ass guess. I would welcome someone posting the actual number.
A big project isn’t the same thing as an impossible project. Heck, producing 1.2B vehicles was a big project. They’d get replaced roughly every 12 years* in any case: building EVs instead of ICEs isn’t really much different.
Yes, the percentage of passenger vehicles that are fully or partly electric isn’t that large – perhaps 2% in the US. But, why is that especially meaningful? As counterthoughts: 1) obviously EVs are new, and are growing exponentially. And, 2) freight is a different story – it’s mostly electric motors. Yes, that electricity mostly comes from diesel…at the moment, and that applies more in the US than in many other places. That’s because US rail companies just don’t think it’s important to electrify – at the moment the savings would be a rounding error.
* The average life of US vehicles is longer, but older vehicles are used less: it’s a “long tail”. Vehicles less than 1 year old use about 12% of all Vehicles Miles Traveled, and those less than 6 years old do about 50%. So the “effective” life is about 12 years.
But it’s still a non sequitur. The fact that fossil fuels are inefficient has absolutely nothing with the difficulty of replacing them.
Seems to me they are already being replaced on a steady and fast growing basis. Apparently not very difficult, I see EV’s on the road. Solar panels around my area, wind turbines not too far away. Insulation in my house replaces lots of fossil fuel. Passive solar collection replaces even more. Bye Bye FF.
Oh, it’s just so difficult to replace an overly complex and wasteful system.
The major difficulty is in the mind, those with mentalities like Trump (he is sulking now).
Well…it has something to do with it.
I agree: the inefficiency of FF heat engines doesn’t necessarily tell you how easy it is to replace them with electric motors. Fortunately, it turns out that it is indeed pretty easy.
But, current FF powered energy *systems* are very inefficient, and that tells us a lot about how easy it would be to eliminate FF.
One big example: HVAC. Buildings (industrial, commercial and residential) account for about 35% of GHGs, and they currently are very inefficient. New homes can and are being made to use zero net energy. Existing buildings can be insulated and made more efficient very, very cost effectively.
Another example: the average passenger vehicle in the US only carries 1.2 passengers, and is only in use about one hour per day. If we doubled that occupancy rate we could cut oil consumption in the US by 25%, literally overnight. Sure, carpooling would be inconvenient, but with smartphones it would be a lot easier than it was 40 years ago. And, remember, you don’t have to have 5 people packed into your carpool: just going from one person to two cuts oil consumption by 50%. If we had an oil supply emergency, or got it into our head that climate change was an emergency, we could implement carpooling. Remember WWII, and the slogan “If your ride alone, you ride with Hitler!”?
Here is what I said “Not much to replace since fossil fuels are highly inefficient”
Much is an amount not a difficulty. Meaning that there was only a small percentage needed to be replaced since inefficiencies are across the board with FF.
Ron ran with the difficulty theme, which I take as non sequitur since PV is so much easier to install than finding oil, drilling, running pipelines and storage plus pumping systems, building refineries, setting up distribution systems, reducing pollution systems then drilling more. Same goes for the other FF’s.
Not that anyone in their right mind would want to burn FF’s, but we got stuck with them until we change it.
It’s amazing how simple PV is. It’s a rock that produces power!
No, only about 15% of the energy needs at the time will be “replaced”. Most of the rest is waste and lack of proper design. You need to look at the whole system including material waste and other inefficiencies. The centralized power network could become quite small.
Did I give a timeline? No. Is what I propose possible? Yes. Is it going to happen for sure. No, idiocy might prevail.
Did you see my graphs on the replacement of ICE’s I put up not long ago based on logistical functions derived from current production of EV’s?
Everything I talk about already exists and is working in many places around the world. This is nothing new or fantastic. Of course advances will occur, the world is not static.
Your inability to comprehend does not make me wrong about a potential future or how much energy we actually need.
If you can’t conceive of the possible, how are you ever going to deal with the advances being made over the next few years. You seem to have trouble with the advances made in the last decade.
” And about 99.something percent of them burn fossil fuel. And most of the rest are powered by electricity that is generated by fossil fuel.”
So what? What is your point? That EV’s are not growing at 50% a year around the world while ICE’s grow at less than 3 percent.
Here is an extrapolation from current growth. Crossover point where ICE fall in numbers is about 12 years from now when EV’s number about 150 million. Time to near zero ICE’s is about 20 years from now.
Of course this is just an extrapolation, others think it can be faster and many think fossil fuels will be burned to the Seneca Cliff point.
But I just point out the possible and the potential we have right now.
In addition, if the car as a service system grows the number of cars needed will drop dramatically, thus accelerating the changeover.
Non-sequitur to you too.
Hmm. I’d like to clarify what Ophuls has in mind. He seems to think that replacement is simply impossible, and that Peak Fossil Fuel will *necessarily* mean the collapse of modern civilization.
Does that seem like a fair characterization of his views?
If fossils steeply decline by 2040, there will be enough renewable energy for modern industrial civilization (capable of making photovoltaic cells and such equipment)…. for about 2.1 billion people.
The rest will have to live in modern nonindustrial way.
Wood, wool, and salvage of the leftovers.
‘trade you this goat for that wheel’
If fossils steeply decline by 2040, there will be enough renewable energy for modern industrial civilization (capable of making photovoltaic cells and such equipment)…. for about 2.1 billion people.
Again, I think you’re talking about something different: a bottleneck in a transition from FF due to excessive decline in FF or inadequate growth of substitutes. I think that might be an interesting discussion, but first: do you think that I have described Ophuls’ ideas correctly?
Well, in our 200,000 (maybe 3– the record is not sure) of homo sapiens being around, we have had 1-10 million (with a near extinction 70,000 years ago).
7.6 billion in a challenged ecology?
I would laugh——- but
How does that relate to what we were discussing: FF vs renewables?
And…back to what I was asking: is it accurate to say that Ophuls thinks that replacing FF is impossible? I’m not asking if you agree with his idea, just…is that what he thinks?
The system will keep propping up the population with techno fixes in food and health.
Right now a moratorium on DNA shifted mosquito research is in effect for central Africa. Idea being to eliminate mosquitos quickly to stop malaria. I think that might increase population a bit faster and definitely open up jungle regions for more development (farms and ranches).
If you reduce malaria deaths you’ll reduce fertility, and reduce population far more effectively: as death rates fall, people become more willing to risk having fewer children, and the impact on fertility is disproportionately large because people are risk-averse.
Nick, as more children made it past 5 and survived that is what fueled the big population boom in the world. Instead of 2 out 6 surviving, 4 out six survived, doubling the population in one generation.
It will take several generations to slow down that surge.
Sure. And, we could go back to women having 5-10 children until they died in childbirth, with many children dying immediately and only two surviving to adulthood. That’s a world of incredible misery.
But, something in the middle doesn’t work very well. If people are poor and need children to support them in their old age, and infant and child mortality is high, then people will have extra children as a safety buffer.
It works quite well to reduce child mortality, provide contraception and education and career opportunities. And fertility continues to fall: The world is at 2.4 children per woman, only .3 away from the 2.1 replacement level, and it was 2.5 only 2-3 years ago.
We’re quite close: There’s no need to go back to a Hobbesian world.
Sometimes birth rates just fall for no clear reason. For example, they fell rapidly in Iran after the mad mullahs took over. And they have fallen rapidly in the US since 2010.
82 million new humans on the planet this year.
Anyone paying attention?
That is the population of Germany.
Yes, it seems that most people want smaller families, if they’re not forced to have children.
Iran is an example of that: their birth rate fell because their government removed obstacles to family planning with changes in public policy: much easier access to contraception, sex ed in schools, public support for smaller families, etc.
On the other hand, Iran’s public policy has become more pro-natalist lately, and the people of the country are pushing back: they like smaller families.
Nick G,
I haven’t read anything else by Ophuls except the link you provided, so I can’t comment beyond this. But he appears to state that it is “ecological ruin” that is going to lead us towards collapse, not as you stated, “Peak Fossil Fuel.”
“For it is the energy subsidy afforded by these resources that has allowed our civilization to reach its current luxurious shape—one that has enabled more and more people to enjoy unprecedented political rights, social freedoms, and economic benefits but that has also put us on an unsustainable trajectory toward ecological ruin.”
Furthermore, I don’t see that Ophuls specifically addresses what can and can not be replaced by solar / renewable tech. In fact, it seems pretty open ended in the concluding paragraph:
“A future civilization will probably fall somewhere in the middle between those
who tout a technological paradise—or hell, depending on your point of view—and those whoanticipate a return to the Stone Age. Although much depends critically on the transition, we need not revert completely to pre-industrial conditions.”
anyway, make of it what you will.
Well, thanks for trying.
I read the reference to “ecological ruin” as one of several reasons he’s giving for fossil fuels being unsustainable.
And, yes, I don’t see any discussion of solar or wind power. Unfortunately, that’s common for people who think FF can’t be replaced: they really don’t know much about renewables, and just assume they can’t work. Sometimes they’re thinking of biofuels, sometimes they’re thinking of 80’s solar/wind tech. Sometimes they’ve just read other authors, and assume they’re correct that FF is irreplaceable.
Nick G,
I think what he is saying is that fossil fuels are a component of what is leading us to ecological overshoot and that is what will lead to “ecological ruin” and ultimately societal collapse.
But why do you think Ophuls “seems to think that replacement is simply impossible?” You keep asking the same question and it’s not even discussed in the essay. I am sure there are plenty of other sources out there that debate whether replacement is possible.
Plus what more do you need for society to collapse than ecological ruin?
There is no physical or thermodynamic reason for renewables to not be able to run a civilization. In fact the thermodynamics are much better.
Physics world seems to agree with the article linked above that renewables can handle 100% of our energy needs.
Note: I said ‘NEEDS’! ?
Ironically I’m not too far from Karlsruhe, at the moment.
Yes, harnessing solar is what makes you a type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. There is no type zero xD
I go by the Kardashian scale of civilization. How many of the people act like big buttheads. So far we seem to be pretty high on that scale, better than a 30.
I think the biosphere will collapse first and put severe constraints on the current systems that supports civilization as we know it. I still think there will be pockets where life will be reasonably tolerable for a lucky few. I don’t see 8 or 9 billion humans as even remotely sustainable so I expect major die off of humans in many places.
The world has 60 harvests left. 60 more years of food before our soil quality is diminished to the point of no return. In our zeal to produce more and more food at low cost, we are stripping nutrients from the soil, undermining our future capacity to grow food. We need a plan for a food system that works. Our guests in this show think that cities might hold the key.
I think the biosphere will collapse first
Fred, is that a reply to my comment? If so, are you familiar with Ophuls? Do you think my description of his ideas is accurate?
No, that was not intended as a specific response to anyone in particular. Just some generalised musings on my part..
Cheers!
Fred, I am not disagreeing with a biosphere collapse although I don’t know how comprehensive it will be. However, civilization as we know it is somewhat of a nightmare so we need to collapse and replace that ASAP. For the biosphere.
Between the geo engineers and the carbon sequestrationeers, we are in for a really strange ride that will be sucking money and materials from converting away from fossil fuels as well as causing more chaos.
Last week I had a nightmare. The year was 2068 and I was still alive to witness the collapse.
There is not much we can do to change what’s inevitable, of course, but I shall keep praying.
A system that can feed 8+ billion and is sustainable? I think they gave enough hints about yield reduction when switching to more organic methods and city farms only providing some key nutrients rather than calories to suggest they probably think that is unlikely. I think they also missed the salinization issues – either from groundwater concentration or salt water intrusion on the big rice producing deltas. Battisti’s presentations on climate impact on cereal crop yields are scary as well (at least 10% down per degree, but huge and growing variability with some years none, and with droughts and pest issues on top). So less soil producing less per hectare that is left trying to feed more people. And growing evidence that remaining fish stocks might be on the point of collapse in various places (maybe the next big environmental issue that might get some attention). Cue the hope police …
Yeah, I know…
On the one hand we have Brazil’s Bolsonaro appoint a religious fanatic to serve as Brazil’s new Foriegn Minister, who believes climate change is a Marxist plot…
Might be time to stock up on lots of popcorn and beer. We will have front row seats to the battle between ignorance vs. science. Let the games begin!
Good Luck folks!
I like this:
Hope is a creature of privilege….[T]he opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief. Even while resolving to limit the damage we can mourn. And here, the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort: we are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale, and inevitability binds us into one, broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere. We need courage, not hope…Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.
I used to think resource limits would be the big issue, then climate change, but now I think the ecological destruction, irrespective of either of those and directly correlated to population growth would do our civilization in anyway, the first two issues are just going to make it quicker. I also think technology, especially the worst bits of the internet, couple with the rampant advertising and consumerism that overproduction has produced, is destroying a good chunk of what it means to be an individual human.
I definitely have grief, also some guilt, and less and less denial.
So why don’t we just pasture more cows? Cows eat grass (but don’t harvest the root) and emit a constant stream of new fertilizer. Eat/rotate/repeat.
Beef for everyone.
The moral highground that plant eaters occupy is quickly eroding as the dangers of repeated land cultivation become apparent.
It’s interesting that I saw that video on network tv (don’t remember the station, not Fox) and it was not made clear that the bus had just unloaded. I assumed a lot of soldiers died.
There’s some talk of Kornets being used by Hamas in the past, but it’s quite possible they were not Kornets, but instead were older wire-guided anti tank guided missiles.
No fatalities are reported in the recent incident. Only one injured- the bus driver. Luckily for the bus driver the missile was aimed towards the back of the vehicle. This was perhaps done to prevent escalation, while still sending a message- armored incursions into Gaza will now come at a price.
Upstate New York heating degree days appear to be falling with time. Go figure.
The author of that piece is ignorant. Proponents of a Circular Economy are clear that ‘GROWTH’ is not sustainable. Given that many are also scientists with degrees in physics, chemistry and biology is ridiculous to state they are unaware of the laws of thermodynamics!
Just because someone is aware of something doesn’t necessarily mean they understand it. Just because someone practices science doesn’t necessarily mean they practice it intelligently or wisely, etc..
As for this ‘growth’ thing, well, there have been suggestions that it can be somehow decoupled, redefined and/or reconfigured, which is not to suggest that I am necessarily suggesting that.
I’d rather see the system collapse than reconfigure itself to other forms of idiocy.
I’ve already posted, hereon, commentary from others about issues of concern surrounding the ‘circular’ and ‘doughnut’ economics. It isn’t just Kris D..
Maybe a rule of thumb: If you have ‘The Machine’ and its operators embracing stuff like the above circular/doughnut, etc., concepts, question, extra hard, their validity.
Estimable DougL,
This just in: Barnard’s star has a planet, a super-Earth. It looks like this time they’ve nailed it down.
The Volkswagen Group has selected South Korea-based battery manufacturer SK Innovation (SKI) as the fourth major supplier of battery cells for electric vehicles based on the Modular Electric Toolkit (MEB).
Within the framework of Roadmap E, the Volkswagen Group brands plan to bring 50 new full-electric models onto the roads by 2025. The Group needs battery capacity in excess of 150 GWh per year through 2025 just to equip its own electric fleet. That corresponds to an annual capacity of at least four “Gigafactories” for battery cells.
Yeah but the lease on my Volt runs out next May and I’m ready for a full electric. I think VW may be able to make a better looking EV than what’s available now. Sorry but I just can’t stomach a Leaf or afford a Tesla.
Which state are you in? California has the widest selection of EVs available in the US since there are models that are only sold there. The Monthly Plug-In Sales Scorecard over at insideevs.com has the full list of all plug-ins available in the US (CA). By May next year there may be more. Insideevs.com is a good source for news on “coming attractions” like :
The vehicle in the link above has a stablemate from Kia, the e-Niro.
Also just in case you don’t know, the Leaf got a major refresh for the 2018 model year and looks far more conventional, looking pretty much like the rest of the Nissan range, as seen in the picture below. A version of the Leaf with a 60 kWh battery, good for over 200 miles of range is due out soon.
The article says the car starts at 49k, it’s 46k for smaller battery pack 260 rather than 310 miles.
The Tesla Model 3 starts at 46k for a “midrange” model with 260 miles of range (RWD, black only, and no enhanced autopilot). If you order by Nov 30 Tesla claims you will get your car by Dec 31 ensuring the 7500 rebate for US customers so a net of 38.5k for someone in a no sales tax state.
For those who don’t have an electric car, it is hard to explain what a revolutionary change it is.
To never have to go to gas station again.
To have a vehicle with such an incredible diminished maintenance requirement.
It is truly game changing. Cost/mile advantage over the coming decade will be very large.
The technology is advancing very quickly. Should scare the pants off the oil industries. Now if we could only get them to stop producing single use plastic items.
I-Boy:
I am in California. I’ve really looked at everything. The only cars above 200 mile range are the Teslas, the Bolt and the Hyundai Kona (that last one I just discovered this evening). the Bolt and the Kona are SUV-ish. I want something smaller.
Next May? The short-range Tesla Model 3 will be available by then. (It isn’t available now, but it will be by then.) You can afford it if you can afford a new Volt.
I doubt that Tesla is as useful a car as my Volt or as cheap. I think the rebates which made my Volt affordable will not be available next year.
The thing I really dislike about the Volt is the idiotic electronic raz-ma-taz I must tolerate every day. Somehow I think the Tesla with it’s dashboard-less dashboard will be even worse.
I’ll try to have an open mind but Tesla makes me nervous.
Volt 33520, Tesla 35000 for 220 mile range rwd version. Tesla should be available in May 2019.
Not that hard to get used to Tesla M3 system, but I am a Tesla fan.
Take a test drive or rent from Turo for a day to see if you can live with it. Probably not for everyone.
Nissan Serena’s e-POWER system named RJC Technology of the Year
Fun and comfortable to drive, the Serena e-POWER has been a hit in Japan. Since its launch, 40% of Serena buyers have chosen the e-POWER version. In addition to the system’s powerful acceleration, its e-POWER Drive mode offers the convenience of being able to speed up or decelerate by using only the accelerator pedal. Using the e-POWER Drive mode, stress is relieved as brake pedal application decreases by nearly 70%.
Ryan Zinke Says California Wildfires Are Getting Worse But Won’t Mention ‘Climate Change’
Brown attributed the worsening fires in California to the “changing of the climate” ― and noted that the scorched community of Paradise “looks like a war zone.”
“We’re in a different kind of world,” he said. “What causes these catastrophes … the changing of the climate, the winds, the dryness and the continuing drought.”
“We’re in for difficult times. It will never be the same,” Brown added.
In Northern California, the Camp fire has killed 48 people and burned over 6,000 homes as of early Wednesday ― making it the most destructive and deadliest fire in state history. Six days into the blaze, dozens of people were still unaccounted for, and it was only 35 percent contained.
The long range climate models predicting November’s 2m temp anomaly have generally not done well with the pattern through the first half of the month. Most models have severely underestimated the amount of cold air in the atmosphere. Now stratospheric warming is getting more active, pointing to a locked in cold pattern emerging during the winter.
Bob Frisky- “pointing to a locked in cold pattern emerging during the winter”
Yep, just like every winter for the past 457,000 yrs.
It’s the shift in polar vortex and Jetstream speeds caused by global warming. Rest of the planet is warm.
Actually it is very good of Bob to point this out. We get so many deniers here that make out that there is no evidence for global worming. Along comes Bob who demonstrates the effect of climate change on the polar vortex and shows that there is proof that the effects predicted by scientists are actually happening right now.
NAOM
What a difference a day makes. 11-25-18 temperature anomaly forecast. Looks like the blue blob is in Russia and Brazil.
Hi Bob,
Copernicus has a rather good monthly update if you like tracking regional and global trends.
Go figure, you mean renewable energy did not replace the world energy in a decade?
Yep solar only went from 8000 GWh production in 2007 to 328,000 GWh in 2016. In the same period wind power only rose from 168,000 GWh production to close to one million GWh in 2016.
Now if the world took renewable energy seriously we could have three times that two years ago. But as usual, it’s half baked time.
Obviously much of the world does not value the future. You sometimes end up where you aim.
The Spanish government is drawing up ambitious new renewable energy legislation.
A draft document with the main points of the new Law on Climatic Change was submitted yesterday to parliamentary groups and interested sectors, by Spain’s Ministry for the Ecological Transition. The government’s goal is to have a text of broad consensus before the legislation’s hearing by the Council of Ministers and the Parliament, to accelerate its progress.
The ministry affirmed the draft addresses energy networks, energy efficiency, building, transport and taxation, and that at least 20% of the national budget should have a positive impact on the fight against change climate.
According to Spanish agency EFE, sources at the Ministry for the Ecological Transition made the information public yesterday, in a meeting with journalists.
The details follow the above excerpted portion. I would not be surprised to hear that, at least two climate change denying, anti-renewable energy residents of Spain are suffering from the effects of their heads exploding!
100% renewable by 2050.
Sounds nice.
Even nicer if the world had proclaimed the same, with 2012 the target date.
By 2050, there won’t be much fossil fuel left at the current rate of burn.
By 2050. It will be warm.
Hey, the kids have a lot to look forward to and even more to work on. Just moving the towns and cities away from the ocean will keep them busy:-)
Snowing here now, two inches so far.
Got six inches but it is melting, the Bluish Blob is moving away and will be highs in the 40’s for the next week.
Australian renewable energy developers Energy Estate and MirusWind are proposing to build a 4,000MW (4GW) wind, solar and storage facility in New South Wales that will be the biggest single renewable energy project in Australia’s main grid.
The Walcha Energy Project is sited near the town of the same name, about 55km south of Armidale in the New England tablelands, adding to the extraordinary number and scale of wind and solar projects in the heart of ex National Party leader Barnaby Joyce’s electorate.
Energy Estate founder Simon Currie – a former head of energy at legal firm Norton Rose Fullbright – says the region has excellent wind and solar resources, and is close to the backbone of the transmission system and the coal plants in the Hunter Valley that are scheduled to be closed from 2022.
Australian renewable energy developers Energy Estate and MirusWind are proposing to build a 4,000MW (4GW) wind, solar and storage facility in New South Wales that will be the biggest single renewable energy project in Australia’s main grid.
The Walcha Energy Project is sited near the town of the same name, about 55km south of Armidale in the New England tablelands, adding to the extraordinary number and scale of wind and solar projects in the heart of ex National Party leader Barnaby Joyce’s electorate.
Energy Estate founder Simon Currie – a former head of energy at legal firm Norton Rose Fullbright – says the region has excellent wind and solar resources, and is close to the backbone of the transmission system and the coal plants in the Hunter Valley that are scheduled to be closed from 2022.
The plan is to combine the wind and solar, and add in storage such as pumped hydro and batteries, and create a new substation and “renewable energy hub” near the town of Uralla.
The proponents say this will ease congestion in the grid, and fits in with plans outlined by Transgrid, the NSW government and the Australian Energy Market Operator, to create the infrastructure to support a major renewable energy zone – one of many planned across the main grid as the country shifts to renewables.
How much longer before coal consumption in Australia starts to decline in earnest?
I should add that if countries like Australia and the USA are seen to be abandoning coal in favour of renewables, mainly on the basis of economics, why would developing countries not follow suit?
I can think of only a few justifications for building a new coal plant now.
1. You like the control you get with centralized generation. Charge charge a lot of customers.
2. You think you need electricity in the cold dark winter. Like in Seoul. Keep the factories running and the inside warm.
3. You have no space for 9 million PV panels [rough equivalent output to 1 coal plant, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on the calculation]
Seoul gets plenty of winter solar insolation. Not even that far north, 37.5 degrees N.
Population Seoul metro= 25.6 million people.
I don’t think that amount of winter solar radiation is “plenty”. Looks similar to the values at places like St Louis or Washington DC in January, , or NY in Feb.
I’m cold just thinking about relying on solar there in the winter.
That’s a lot of people, pack them tight and they can heat the buildings along with their computers.
Seoul gets 2.5 trillion BTU of sunlight per day in January. Same temps as here with more light. If they can’t figure it out now and start changing those R2 buildings or they can wait until the fuel stops coming in and figure it out later.
To put it simply, 1000 square feet of R30 wall loses 28000 BTU per day at average January temps while R2 loses 15 times that. 1000 square feet of south facing wall receives 670,000 BTU of solar energy every day on average in January.
This is a petroleum/non-petroleum comment.
One of the main geniuses behind the WUWT blog is an oil industry employee and there is a recent post concerning gas and oil fracking by another oil retiree
But from the first guy’s comment, it appears that he buys into the idea of abiotic oil! This is nuts. Jerome Corsi is about to be the next Trump crony to be indicted and he wrote a conspiracy book centered around the secret abundance of abiotic oil.
Synapsid and others might like this; Savage Garden narrated by Leslie Nielsen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDEwFsXD3Dw
Looks incomplete but still lots of great filming
I have a VHS copy of this.
The little dears have the mammalian equivalent of a hummingbird’s metabolism so eating is very important to them. Some species have venomous saliva, a rarity among mammals that makes them even more special.
Thanks GoneFishing.
Now this is something we all need to get rid of the pessimism.
23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better
By Dylan Matthews
For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. We have a massively unpopular, scandal-plagued president whose aides are being convicted of serious federal felonies. Overt, old-fashioned racism is publicly visible and powerful in a way it wasn’t only five years ago. More than 200 admired, powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct or assault.
This is all real, and truly alarming. But it would be a mistake to view that as the sum total of the world in 2018. Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn.
But many of us aren’t aware of ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias. Bad economic news gets more coverage than good news. Negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones.
Nothing’s permanent, and big challenges like climate change and the potential collapse of liberal democracy remain, but the world is getting much, much better on a variety of important, underappreciated dimensions.
1) Extreme poverty has fallen
2) Hunger is falling
3) Child labor is on the decline
4) People in developed countries have more leisure time
5) The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US
6) Life expectancy is rising
7) Child mortality is down
8) Death in childbirth is rarer
9) People have been getting taller for centuries
10) More people have access to malaria bednets
11) Guinea worm is almost eradicated
12) Teen births in the US are down
13) Smoking is down, too
14) In the long term, homicide rates have fallen dramatically
15) In the short term, they’re down in the US, too
16) Violent crime in the US is going down
17) We’ve rapidly reduced the supply of nuclear weapons
18) More people in the world live in a democracy now
19) More people are going to school for longer
20) And literacy is, predictably, up as well
21) Moore’s law isn’t quite over yet
22) Access to the internet is increasing
23) Solar energy is getting cheaper
Most importantly, we know most of the problems we face now. So we can act on them if we want.
A good film on soil. Most people are too busy with their devices to watch, but it is good-
The Living Soil https://vimeo.com/298616093
An example of how indiscriminate exploitation of a natural resource can come back to bite you.
There is a beach about 10 miles (16 km) from a point in the middle of the metropolitan region of the city of Kingston Jamaica, called Hellshire Beach. It used to be a fairly nice, white sand beach and was a convenient beach for the residents of Kingston and it’s environs, being only 35-40 minutes drive from the center of the metropolitan region. Since it was quite popular and got fairly crowded on weekends and holidays, vendors started selling snacks and drinks, evolving into seafood joints. Originally these seafood places were makeshift shacks set back 15 to 30 yards (m) from the water line, made from bamboo and driftwood with thatch type roofs made from palm fronds. Over the years they became more substantial with cinder block walls forming a perimeter on which wooden walls were built and corrugated steel hip roofs as shelter from the sun and rain . At the same I suppose many of the vendors got tired of schlepping their wares to and from the beach to wherever they lived and just built “temporary” housing behind the now line of “shops”. At some point piped water was installed in this community that had established itself on the beach. There is no evidence of any planning and no sanitary conveniences that I know of.
Being from the rural parts, the first time I ever went to that beach was some time in the 80s, by which time the line of shops on the beach was well established and there was already a small community of residences behind the shops. Some of the residents may well be fisherfolk since the seafood served at Hellshire Beach is typically brought straight on to the beach by small canoes every day. All in all, a nice arrangement for those making a living from the beach, that would draw nice crowds to come to the beach for recreation.
There were two problems. A series of hurricanes passing mainly just to the south of the island, brought strong wave action that supposedly destroyed the reef that provide the sand for the beach and protected it from erosion. Global warming combined with “nutrient rich” water as a result of the unplanned settlement on the beach has likely killed most, if not all the corals on what is left of the reef. The result is shown in the satellite image below. The beach is gone. The wide expanse of white sand between the shops and the water line has disappeared and the water line is now approaching the seaside entrance to most of the shops. As the erosion of the beach continues, it will probably undermine the foundations of the shops and eventually swallow them. As for business, who will want to go to beach where there’s no beach?
I have no hope for that public beach. Part of it’s destruction was due to the very people who depend on it for a living and I doubt any of them even realize that they are partly to blame. Will we ever learn? 🙁
Will we ever learn?
Dunno! Maybe someone needs to rewrite the song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ With lyrics asking where have all the corals gone? Could it be to a reggae beat?
Cheers!
We have the same phenomena here. Restaurants have encroached so far onto the beach that there is little room left for visitors and what remains is ‘claimed’ by the restaurants by covering them with parasols and loungers. Just after Kenna I walked along the malecon and could see that where the storm had pulled away beach sand there were the bases of old stalls several meters down.
The town complains of lack of touristas, ignoring these issues, while those touristas move to the resorts further north that still have wide open beaches.
NAOM
Will we ever learn?
Humans are evolved to compete for reproductive privilege and then nurture their genes within a tribe. In our civilization that means gaining status and wellbeing through wealth and consumption, long term consideration of the environment is well down the priority list – those entrepreneurs have learnt, and well.
My daughter spent a year on St Vincent doing environmental work. One project involved planting trees for free. She said the locals were open to fruit trees, especially mangoes, but often refused to allow her to plant trees to prevent erosion, improve soil, or provide shade, even though she was offering the service (and the tree) free of charge. A lot of the properties are badly eroded, and the locals often complain about the heat, so go figure.
They did like it when she planter vetiver on hillside paths to stop erosion though.
Incidentally I’d like to remark that it isn’t just the Vincies that have this perception problem. The Texans marched West in the Civil War not just to dodge the Union Army, but to conquer the grasslands of Arizona. Sadly, they immediately trashed them with overgrazing. Now the symbol of the state is a cactus. The locals are actually proud of that.
This is what land management in the American Southwest looks like:
PG&E stock dropped as much as 60% this week. Looks like grid started the Camp Fire.
Another cost added to the stupidity of Centralized Generation.
I don’t think it much matters in the long run in California, eventually some ignition source would occur. The ecosystems are currently out of balance with the prevailing climate and the trees are in overshoot. Nature will redress the balance and the south will become desert and the north savanna. The same is happening all over, it’s partly why wildfires are so much more fierce now (e.g. extensive but also sterilising the soil or starting permanent tundra or peat fires).
And America’s penchant for crappy third world transmission infrastructure.
Daily CO2
November 15, 2018: 409.15 ppm
November 15, 2017: 404.94 ppm
Consistently above trend now for 10 weeks, is it more than just noise?
Could it mean the final collapse and global famine will come very soon?
In the short term more CO2 means more greening in a lot of places, it’s not until the temperature effects catch up over a few decades that the negative impacts take over on crop yields. It’s more a question of where the CO2 might be coming from – i.e. non fossil fuel sources like perma frost melt or other sinks failing.
CO2 encourages plant growth like a type of food for plants. You can read articles about what happens when scientists with greenhouses put CO2 into the greenhouse. Now, obviously the fruits and veggies we eat came from plants at one point, so the concern that there could be a global famine due to additional CO2 in the atmosphere is actually misinformed. The additional CO2 will be useful to continue growing the increased food we need, for feeding all the new babies coming into the world each and every year.
Just curious, where did you get your doctorate in plant physiology? Your depth of knowledge is quite impressive..
Julian- I think I saw you in one of those Coen Bros movies.
‘No country for Old Men’ I think it was.
Now I realize that you weren’t acting!
Plant growth does not mean more food.
CO2 can increase the growth of the inedible parts of the plat while the crop yields remain the same. Also, the nutrient value of the edible parts reduces. This has been shown to be a problem in rice which is a vital food over much of the world. A further problem is that increased growth uses more soil nutrients so the land gets depleted more for the same or less yield of less nutritious food. Oh, then there is the problem that some crops reduce growth in higher CO2 levels and others stop growing at the higher temperatures caused by increased CO2 levels.
NAOM
Julian Radoni,
Note the short post printed directly above yours: It’s not until the temperature effects catch up over decades that the negative impacts on crop yields take over.
There’s growing evidence that more CO2 inhibits nitrogen uptake, so plants may be bigger but are less hardy and worth less for food for humans or animals.
Temperature also has indirect results by increasing droughts and losses to pests, plus sea level rise will remove a lot of the big food producing river deltas (already happening in Mekong) through sea water intrusion additional to eventual loss of important irrigation sources as freshwater lakes and glaciers disappear.
And independent of climate change we are losing topsoil at more than 1% per year, exhausting some of the big groundwater aquifers, destroying soil through salinization from over irrigation by groundwater, facing rapidly increasing pesticide resistance with food production dominated by cloned hybrids or monocultures that can’t regenerate their own resistance.
Most of the plants we eat have been selected for by humans over thousands of years and are optimised for pre-industrial conditions, it would be extreme good luck if they did better
as those conditions changed, and there’s no evidence of that happening. Also there are hard biochemical temperature and moisture limits where no amount of selective breeding can make crops productive, and areas outside those limits are expanding across the globe.
UK crop breeders, Rothamsted?, have stated that they cannot breed and commercialise new varieties fast enough to keep up with climate change.
NAOM
Hi Gene.
Sure final collapse and or famine very soon is possible.
It has been possible for atleast 10,000 yrs.
But much more likely now since-
there are almost 8 Billion people.
who have collectively treated the planet so very poorly.
Soil generally ain’t nearly so good as it used to be.
Closer to the edge.
Hi Gene, this is my fav video on the topic of climate change and food security. This link cuts to an interesting part featuring a quote I like and a Seneca cliff in yield. You might prefer to watch it from the beginning.
“Yield volatility is gonna go through the roof”
Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
Natural Log of atmospheric CO2 (trend data), 1958 to 2018, note I took natural log of CO2atm minus 278 ppm (about the average for most of the Holocene), so a one on the vertical axis would be the preindustrial average and 5.63 would be 2 times pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 on the vertical scale (about 5.4 would correspond to 500 ppm atmospheric CO2). For the current trend, we are at 4.87 on the log scale ln(409 ppm-278 ppm).
How to Prepare Your Home for the Effects of Climate Change
Jennie Dusheck
Climate change used to seem like something that would confront our grandchildren—a distant concern. Now, though, it’s staring us right in the face when we get up in the morning.
People wade through seawater on sunlit Miami streets; the Florida Panhandle, which rarely sees hurricanes, was recently flattened by a megastorm; and every year bigger and more frequent wildfires burn through Australia and California. As our planet warms up, the climate-related changes across the U.S. are well underway. Even if you haven’t had to cope with climate related problems yet, it may not be long before you have to protect your home from extreme weather, fire, flooding, or even sea level rise.
To find out how climate change may affect your area, check out climate risks by region using the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. A short video introduces the different parts of the website. You might want to go to the Steps to Resilience section that offers way to assess and reduce your risk.
For example, your flood risk depends not just on your own home and where it sits, but also on things like how the city has channeled nearby creeks and what size culverts your local department of public works has installed beneath your street or road. When it rains harder than ever before, undersized culverts may be overwhelmed and creeks can back up and jump their banks, flooding homes and roads.
In Santa Cruz, California, the city’s climate action manager Tiffany Wise-West, PhD, has posted a detailed action plan, including a Practical Adaptation Actions for Residents. We’re not covering every little thing, she says, but the City’s simple web page is a place for ordinary people to start.
Santa Cruz County is one of the rare places that already has a detailed plan for the future. Ask your city and county government if they have a Local Hazard Mitigation Plan like this one. But even if your area doesn’t, you can rough out a way to address the specific risks your home could face. In general, climate change experts talk about two ways of addressing climate change, preventing it and dealing with the consequences. Here we are focused on dealing with the consequences of climate change, sometimes called climate adaptation.
Don’t know why they have ignored this sort of construction, we’ve had it for years.
Nice. I always like the concrete dome houses built using an inflatable hemisphere as a form. They supposedly could withstand even tornadoes. Monolithic Domes meet FEMA standards for providing near-absolute protection and have a proven ability to survive tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, most manmade disasters, fire, termites and rot. https://www.monolithic.org/domes
Impervious to everything but an A.R.C.
Bob Nickson,
What is A.R.C. please?
The dreaded Architectural Review Committee. 🙂
Ah. Thanks.
Pipeline Vandals Are Reinventing Climate Activism
Grant Kratzer
On October 11, 2016, as they pulled up to an oil pipeline facility in the farm fields outside Leonard, Minnesota, the pair were bent on taking direct action to address climate change, since, they figured, the US government had failed to do anything about it. “This is the only way we get their attention. All other avenues have been exhausted.”
When asked, 6% of Germans would prefer a diesel car, 6% would prefer an electric car, and 15% would prefer a hybrid.
When asked, 100% of Germans say they hate traffic jams… ?
What is the gain if diesel engine is substituted with gasoline engine?
Diesel is more energy dense than gasoline.
Diesel fuel has a higher energy density than gasoline. On average, 1 gallon (3.8 L) of diesel fuel contains approximately 155×106 joules (147,000 BTU), while 1 gallon of gasoline contains 132×106 joules (125,000 BTU).
If my memory serves me, diesel is more energy dense mostly because it’s simply more dense, period. So, the energy per kilo of fuel isn’t much different.
Greater volumetric density is convenient, especially for long range commercial equipment, but it doesn’t reduce it’s pollution (including GHG) much.
True that diesel fuel is more energy dense by volume than gasoline (bigger molecules, therefore more bonds to oxidize in the same volume),
but also that the compression ratio on diesel engines is much higher than gasoline spark ignition engines,
thus overall more efficient than gasoline engines.
Air pollutants are another matter….
International Team, NASA Make Unexpected Discovery Under Greenland Ice An international team of researchers, including a NASA glaciologist, has discovered a large meteorite impact crater hiding beneath more than a half-mile of ice in northwest Greenland. The crater — the first of any size found under the Greenland ice sheet — is one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth, measuring roughly 1,000 feet deep and more than 19 miles in diameter, an area slightly larger than that inside Washington’s Capital Beltway. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/international-team-nasa-make-unexpected-discovery-under-greenland-ice
Mapping Carbon in 3D NASA’s new laser instrument, the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, or GEDI, has advanced laser technology that will reveal the makeup of remote forest ecosystems around the globe. GEDI will soar above Earth at 17,150 miles per hour onboard the International Space Station. Its measurements of the height of leaves, branches, trees, and shrubs below its path will help scientists map the structure of forests and better understand how ecosystems are storing or releasing carbon https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/index.html
Ever wonder where your income sits relative to the world population? The income groups are defined as follows: The poor live on $2 or less daily, low income on $2.01-10, middle income on $10.01-20, upper-middle income on $20.01-50, and high income on more than $50; figures expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices. http://www.pewglobal.org/interactives/global-population-by-income/
That takes no account of the cost of living into account. A Mexican who can get by and feed a family would be on the streets and living out of bins if they had the same income in the USA.
NAOM
You have discovered the plan. As one raises the wages and standard of living in a region or country, everyone gets paid more and thus costs go up accordingly.
There is even a wide disparity of cost of living across the US.
In Calif, there have been a series of severe wildfires that started from electric power line sources during wind ‘events’. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to string wind sensors all along the transmission lines, so as to trigger downtime when necessary. Might take 5-10 yrs to get it done, but it is doable.
When it comes to natural disasters, so much loss of life and destruction of infrastructure could be avoided by thoughtful landuse planning.
Fires in Australia, Greece, Portugal and California have hurt people primarily living at the ‘urban-forest interface’.
Hurricane damage is mostly within a couple miles of the coast.
Volcano deaths are mostly on the flanks of, and valleys draining big ________.
[yes you got it- Volcanoes].
Earthquake risk is magnified along, yes, earthquake faults.
We don’t have to do it this way.
Wake me up when we have changed.
American thinking:- ‘Ooooh, what a lovely forest, let’s build a wooden house with a roof covered in flammable material’, ‘Ooooh, what lovely flat lane next to a river, let’s build a house’, ‘Ooooh what a lovely beach here on the gulf coast, let’s build a house here’
My thinking:- ‘Higher ground – check, no uphill risks from flooding or landslide – check, not surrounded by fuel – check, not within reach of the stormy sea – check’ … you get the picture.
NAOM
You forgot the volcano above you… ?
And the thousands of nuclear missiles ready to launch at any time.
The 150 mile radius around Meteor Crater was considered safe at one time.
Hey, does anyone think a quarantine in a US city or suburb would hold for long?
Zombie Apocalypse…?
You talking about the educational system in the US?
The US still has an educational system?! I thought everyone was home schooled now..
Public school is a Marxist plot, according to Betsy DeVoss…
Cheers!
An uneducated citizenry is slavery in a capitalist system
Sounds like the current status, despite the overabundance of bachelor degrees.
Todays bachelor degree is yesterdays high school degree.
Computers can learn much faster and be reprogrammed by the millions in just an hour or less. They can also replicate at amazing speed and be “born” with full knowledge and capabilities. No such thing as a student.
I don’t think most humans have a chance once AI develops even to the level of a bug brain.
Nope, they are about 11-12 million years old so I don’t worry about them. The hot spot has moved a long way East or is it that we have moved a long way to the West? 😉
NAOM
Nasa has stopped issuing news summaries as they release monthly average temperature data but it looks like October 2018 is seconde hottest, between 2017 and 2016, although they do say there were a few countries with data missing so this may be revised. Copernicus had October 4th hottest, but the cooling trend they have since the 2016 El Nino seems to be bottoming out.
Is that a global average George?
Yes
The Calif electric utility ISO [CalISO]
has upgraded their website, including such features as realtime utility scale battery storage capacity.
The current year to date renewable electric supply is 27% of total.
I saw that the [alltime Max Solar Production] happened this summer at a level of 10,740MW
If I understand this properly, this is equivalent to almost 11 fullsize nuclear power plants running at full capacity (assuming 1000 MW nuc plants).
And I think Calif is, in effect, just getting started with this deployment.
They said 10% renewables would destroy the grid – we blew through that. They said 15% renewables would destroy the grid – we blew through that. They said 20% renewables would destroy the grid – we blew through that. Now, what is the latest renewables figure that will destroy the grid – 30% 40% 50%?
LOL!
Cry me a river, the utilities should be just as scared as the oil companies with regards EVs and reductions in demand for oil and other fossil fuels. Ain’t capitalism a bitch for creating a market for decentralized power generation and driving the old dinosaurs out of business. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys, eh?!
Oh and of course they are going to tell us that we need their grid to keep the lights on… So fuck them and Trump with his subsidies for inefficient coal, oil and nuclear.
Cheers!
I wouldn’t to listen to the noisy squealing sounds. Just remember though it took the development of a highly technical industrialized civilization to create the PV, wind turbines and EV’s, all driven by fossil fuels and the minds of scientists and engineers, along with the determination of businessmen.
Wherever the insanity leads, at least it will be less polluting and a lot quieter.
First commercial passenger all electric flights due next year, those are quiet too.
The hierarchy will invert, sort of, but it will still be a hierarchy. Now if we can only get the government to settle down and fly right. I am tired of the lies and the circus.
Gonefishing. Who is going to have electric commercial aircraft next year?
I can not find anyone claiming to be ready that soon and the aircraft are not of the size that anyone would associate with “commercial” aircraft.
Airbus E-Fan is only an engineering/certification demonstrator with one of 4 engines being electric is the current state of art in development. Other leaders in the field are at the concept/hype stage.
Remember certifying an aircraft is a multi-year process between announcement and first flight a couple more years between first flight and certification.
Commercial air travel will be one of the final holdouts in a transition away from fossil fuels. A long range aircraft is half fuel by weight at takeoff. Turbines are more thermally efficient than piston engines and regenerative braking is not going to aid efficiency.
Thanks for the long lecture, Easyjet says it’s nine passenger electric will fly next year. I didn’t say it was carrying paid passengers I said “First commercial passenger all electric flights due next year”. Meaning it’s not a private sport plane, but one built for commercial passenger. As a pilot, a flight is a flight. I could care less about the profit end.
The Norwegians are working on them but I am not sure of their schedule.
NAOM
My guess is that a 9 passenger short haul electric aircraft ain’t gonna be much of a game changer for humanity. As all reasonable analysts should perhaps be prone to ask- ‘a 9 passenger short haul electric plane; so what?’
Despite improvements, planes need a lot of lithium-ion batteries to achieve significant range. In electric cars, the main problem was the cost of the batteries, which is starting to come down. In planes, the biggest challenge is weight.
The jet fuel capacity of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner is about 223,000 pounds, according to an airport planning document released in December. The estimated weight of a battery pack with equivalent energy would be 4.5 million pounds, Anderson said.
“Unless there’s a cosmic change in the battery, it’s just not going to work for bigger, faster airplanes,” he said. “It’s going to be a really long time before batteries weigh less than liquid fuel.”
Small passenger planes are used as commuter buses in many places worldwide. When you see an old lady get on with a crate of chickens, on the way to market, you get to understand.
NAOM
Yep, I flew all over the Amazon in small planes!
NAOM,
In the Arctic too. During a field season in NW Alaska they were the main way to get between villages.
“My guess is that a 9 passenger short haul electric aircraft ain’t gonna be much of a game changer for humanity. As all reasonable analysts should perhaps be prone to ask- ‘a 9 passenger short haul electric plane; so what?’”
Were you born full grown?
The air game is changing, the X57 concept proves that. Game changing for humanity is in full swing, aircraft won’t change that much except maybe research and geo engineering aircraft.
No they are not going to jump into big passenger liners right away, but electrics have large advantages in low fuel cost, low maintenance, useful at airports with noise and pollution restrictions. Will probably be short and medium flights during the 20’s. Useful at shorter runways too.
The liquid fueled big passenger planes will change too, to higher efficiency engines and fuselages. Then some will become hybrids, and then who knows or cares.
To really enjoy flying and the world of the sky one needs a small plane, flying slower. I always preferred sailplanes to power planes, one gets to understand the dynamics going on everyday around us instead of just plowing along from A to B.
I’ve spent most of my time in a Cessna 150.
But the 172 is the plane everyone used.
Yeah, and heavier than air flying machines at one time were considered impossible, then there was Kitty Hawk!
Cheers!
P.S.
Small creatures scurrying around under the feet of the dinosaurs usually go unnoticed at first…
Resistance is Futile – You will be Assimilated or Die. US Utilities had a heavy hand in the CCS EV Fast Charge Standard. They crippled the Standard to have ZERO Utility as they did with roof top Grid Tied solar. As for now EV’s with CCS sockets have Z E R O UTILITY. Power flows in just one direction. The Nissan Leaf uses CHAdeMO which is bi directional.
How about a cup of tea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAdeMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Charging_System
You think? Yes, resistance is futile, the energy industry will soon be turned on it’s head. But like a hooked fish, they struggle.
The Energy Storage Disruption – End Of Peakers by 2020 and Baseload by 2030 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMg6_ShLleQ
Communities like those affected in California could easily be supplied by rooftop solar with excess production stored in a central power bank for nighttime/cloudtime use. No transmission lines needed. Stop throwing good money after bad by not rebuilding the grid, in these, areas and invest in local scale solutions.
As expected by serious observers, adaptation of the grid and operators is happening at a reasonable pace.
Out west, it is the fires that are the challenge.
Is it the lines collapsing or just the wires touching and sparking?
When hurricane Kenna struck the local grid operator cut all power in the town to avoid secondary damage and collateral damage. After the storm, as areas were declared safe they were reconnected. Seeing power on, traffic lights almost in the flood water and flashing like a disco in the USA storms seems totally crazy. Why on earth do the Americans keep power going in conditions that are totally contra-indications for electricity? People have even been electrocuted because of this.
NAOM
Last summer we had a nasty wind storm that put power out for days, took down a lot of trees. The repairman were fixing the lines further up the line but turned it on before checking my area. There were huge sparks along the line for hundreds of yards since the wires were compromised and wrapped around each other. Luckily the ground and vegetation was still wet and no fires started. Luck only.
It seems we are truly living in an era of “unintended consequences”!
We have a similar problem brewing in the east with the Pine Barrens, the Poconos, the Appalachians, etc. Many people don’t realize it but numerous counties are near 90 percent forest cover. Buried among them are swaths of homes, the trees so tight it was hard to see the houses when I overflew some of the areas in a Cessna. Of course fire suppression is rampant.
One long drought and it’s rolling the dice. Luckily it’s generally wet in the east, but droughts do happen.
“My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas
Not to worry, the cure is happening, first injections in the series.
GoneFishing,
Do you remember when the Pine Barrens actually were?
I canoe camped in them in the 70s and spent a lot of time there on land. Short trees, bog iron, abandoned towns, sandy roads. Lots of ticks. Never really liked flat country but the Pine Barrens are unique.
Only been on the edge of them in recent decades, for birding.
Will mostly go the way of things as the ocean rises, so visit soon. Too bad too since it contains a huge aquifer.
Yes indeed, a lot of ticks, and horse (or deer?) flies. And mosquitos by the ton. The water in those swamps looked like tea.
Beware the Greenheads.
GoneFishing,
Except for my first year of grad school in New England I’ve remained west of the Continental Divide largely because of the sorts of things you and Hickory have named.
Summer humidity plus the resulting blood-sucking organisms equals absence of Synapsid.
In my first 20 yrs, I had enough mosquito’s for a couple hundred yrs.
Put my girlfriend (when she graduated high school) in my VW and headed west. Only been bit a few times since.
Still been sucked on.
Sorry. Just recently watched a Coen Bros movie, and I tend to say all sorts of odd lines for weeks afterwards.
Maybe forever, my wife would say.
When I arrived and lived for a time in Vancouver, I was surprised at how few mosquitoes and blackflies there were relative to back east. As a relative newcomer to Nova Scotia, it has ticks, which I’d never experienced before until arriving out here. It has been only one main incident so far, and that was enough. I quite dislike the things. They’re really clingy too, and tough to smash to boot. (I tried to scrape one off a horse once but the horse would not have any part of it and so refused.) Deer flies are bad out here too in certain (deer-frequented?) areas at a certain time frame of the summer. If I have to deal with their turf again, I will probably try a bright-blue plastic hat and some ‘Tanglefoot’. He looks very distinguished.
Part two features quite a bit of footage on a boom in lithium mining in Western Australia. If the FF laggards would get out of the way in Australia, they could conceivably become a world power in lithium ion batteries, pun intended! For example, they could seek to have Tesla build a battery giga-factory in Australia.
I also found it interesting that Musk appeared visibly upset when the interviewer informed him that there were Australians living in energy poverty.
Yeah, they better get in on the lithium boom while it lasts.
“What motivated this post was an extremely optimistic article by Michael Liebreich called The secret of eternal growth. The basic argument is that there is no real limit to growth and that we can utilise unlimited energy sources to both grow our economies and minimise our negative impacts on the environment. There are, however, a number of responses to this article. One by Tim Jackson, who is mentioned in Liebreich’s article, called how the light gets in, and another by Rob Dietz called the secret of eternal growth? It’s wishful thinking.”
Quite a good article on the Camp Fire. The article is a bit hard to follow without a map because of how complex the situation was/is.
One thing that is so very hard to grasp is how these fires can travel. And jump.
Luckily in this fire, the road out was also away from the fire (heading SW). And its a good wide road.
Could have been much worse.
Many people live up access roads that are small and windy and crowded with people, some of whom are dimwitts, and many of whom are too old to be driving well. And sometimes the roads will head right towards the fire.
I am 140 miles away, and still the smoke is reducing visibility to about 200 yards. 200 thick, strange orange, burnt smelling yards.
Supposed to get first rains in N. Calif Tuesday night.
First since mid-spring. Bring it!
Yep, bring it on—
As a former resident of Marin, it is a disaster waiting to happen.
Lost some things in the Santa Rosa fire, and two houses I formally lived in were lost in Santa Barbara.
Interesting factoid, the earlier western Canada fires dimmed the sunlight over Western Europe by more than 20 times compared to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 92. A lot of the particles made it into the stratosphere.
Auke Hoekstra just tweeted the 2018 revision of his graphic (below)
Solar PV continues to grow exponentially and again, the IEA is having none of it!
I count 13 times that the IEA has been demonstrably out of touch, with one more year to find out how this year’s projection is going to fare. Looking at this years projection, it appears they have learned nothing from their past errors!
You can include a lot of people in that “out of touch” category. A large and sometimes quite wealthy and influential component of the population has lot to lose as renewables, EV’s, and efficiency increase. At least they think they have a lot to lose.
This is hilarious though, at this point it is like denying airplanes can fly at the end of WWI. Soon there were more and more and more. Now they occupy much of the sky.
This massive error of analysis by very large numbers of people and very large organizations creates investment opportunities for those who know what’s going on.
“Trump wants to Make Climate Great Again. His plan: deny climate science, lower fuel economy and emissions standards for vehicles, pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, silence government scientists, and rake the forests.”
Covering the environment is one of the most hazardous beats in journalism. According to one estimate, 40 reporters around the world died between 2005 and September 2016 because of their environmental reporting — more than were killed covering the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Environmental controversies often involve influential business and economic interests, political battles, criminal activities, anti-government insurgents or corruption. Other factors include ambiguous distinctions between “journalist” and “activist” in many countries, as well as struggles over indigenous rights to land and natural resources. In both wealthy and developing countries, journalists covering these issues find themselves in the cross-hairs. Most survive, but many undergo severe trauma, with profound effects on their careers.
As one example, in 2013, Rodney Sieh, an independent journalist in Liberia, disclosed a former agriculture minister’s involvement in a corrupt scheme that misused funds earmarked to fight the parasitic, infectious Guinea worm disease. Sieh was sentenced to 5,000 years in prison and fined $1.6 million for defamation. He served three months in Liberia’s most notorious prison before an international outcry pressured the government into releasing him.
In the same year, Canadian reporter Miles Howe was assigned to cover protests by the Elsipotog First Nation in New Brunswick against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Howe worked for an independent online news organization that sought to spotlight unreported and underreported stories.
“Many times, I was the only accredited journalist witnessing rather violent arrests, third-trimester pregnant women being locked up, guys tackled to the ground,” he recalls. Howe was arrested multiple times, and during one protest, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pointed him out and shouted, “He’s with them!” His equipment was seized, and police searched his home. They also offered to pay him for providing information about upcoming “events” — in other words, spying on the protesters.
GREENHOUSE GASSES TRIGGERING MORE CHANGES THAN WE CAN HANDLE
In a systematic review of thousands of papers, the study details 467 ways of how these hazards have already impacted human health, including death, disease and mental well-being; food supply from animals and plants on land and sea; quantity and quality of freshwater; infrastructure including electricity, transportation and “life line” services such as water and sewage lines, and economic losses including property damage and reduced labor productivity; all while triggering multiple cases of migrations and violence. Over 3,000 documented case examples, with supporting papers, are listed at http://impactsofclimatechange.info/.
“Greenhouse gas emissions pose a broad threat to humanity by simultaneously intensifying many hazards that have proven harmful in the past,” said lead author Camilo Mora, associate professor of geography in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa “Further, we predict that by 2100 the number of hazards occurring concurrently will increase, making it even more difficult for people to cope.”
MAJOR NATURAL CARBON SINK MAY SOON BECOME CARBON SOURCE
Peatlands in northwest Peru remain nearly intact, but this is isn’t the case in most places with significant peat stocks, which are being cleared to make room for agriculture. Peatlands in some parts of the world, including Canada, Siberia and Southeast Asia, have already turned into significant carbon sources. The same fate may be coming soon for the Peruvian peatlands.
RESEARCHERS FIND SOURCE OF DEADLY 2015 SOUTHEAST ASIA SMOKE CLOUD
… Combining this analysis with atmospheric modeling of the movement of smoke plumes from the fall 2015, the team sleuthed out the source of the hazardous cloud: smoldering peat on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The findings were published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our research shows that almost all of the smoke emissions originated from the burning of Holocene-aged peat,” …
Concerning the first two phys.org links, frankly a lot of the past dire predictions and correlations concerning greenhouse gases have been busts. Looking back at the worldwide “climate research conferences” of the 80’s and 90’s that brought together top climate researchers leading to work on the Kyoto Protocol is bemusing in a way today, for seeing all the predictions and certainty of immediate threats during the 1990’s and 2000’s that ended up not happening. The convenience prognosticators have always had, of course, is that anything bad will happen “some time down the road” and we’ll regret it, but there’s no way to be sure until we get there. Scientists should learn how to not chase after fads and not fall in to the easy trap of confirmation bias.
Utter bollocks. Can continued cognitive dissonance like this actually drive people nuts in the long run?
Dunno bout dat but the day may yet arrive when some of these morons will die miserable slow deaths because of climate change… no food and water plus lethal wet bulb temperatures might be Karma enough.
Hope you live a long long life and personally experience many of the climate change related horrors you can’t even imagine yet, you pathetic little denialist piece of trolling trash.
Let’s continue burning those fossil fuels and mining the shit out of the planet for those windmills and solar panels and other useless trinkets while some of you can get a solar panel ass tattoo with its bar code just below, assuming of course you haven’t already.
Thanks. I’m on the road, so I’ll download it for later.
In the absence of “windmills and solar panels” and might I add electric vehicles, what would CM pick on? Those fossil fuels are going to be burned and just so you know, every wind turbine, solar panel and EV produced using the energy produced by burning fossil fuel, lessens the likelihood that fossil fuels will have to be burned at some point in the future.
We all know that, but
Yep, every PV panel, wind turbine and EV is reducing the burning of fossi fuels. That is why the fossil fuel industries and the power generation industries are in such a panic. They spend huge amounts of time, money and political favors to try and stem their obvious and inevitable demise.
Avalanches start small then get bigger and faster.
Since We’re Fucked, Shall We Act Fucked?
Burn fossil fuels now in the face of increasingly dangerous climate change and other detrimental global changes later? So you want it both ways then? Increase the risk (and rationalize it away) of burning down the house now so that it’s too late to do anything about it later, but at least you’ll have PV-tech then, if not a viable planet?
You do realize that in order to have a functioning pseudoeconomy– a ‘heat engine’– that is able to run long enough to produce PV’s and the like and pay the working people to buy them, we need to continue to burn fossil fuels and to destroy/pollute the planet, right?
Do you guys sleep at night or am I missing something here?
Refresh your browser.
People, such as via their backgrounds like science and engineering and whatnot, rationalize away their dubious actions and sell themselves and their planet out/short all the time. It’s nothing new.
“Those fossil fuels are going to be burned…” ~ islandboy
Which fossil fuels? The ones you might be helping to burn?
“In the absence of ‘windmills and solar panels’ and might I add electric vehicles, what would CM pick on?” ~ islandboy
This is an energy/peak oil/collapse site, Alan.
“Employees dump toxic waste into rivers and oceans.
Employees slaughter cows and perform experiments on monkeys.
Employees throw away truckloads of food.
Employees are destroying the ozone layer.
They watch your every move through security cameras.
They evict you when you don’t pay your rent.
They imprison you when you don’t pay your taxes.
They humiliate you when you don’t do your homework or show up to work on time.
They enter information about your private life into credit reports and FBI files.
They give you speeding tickets and tow your car.
They administer standardized exams, juvenile detention centers, and lethal injections.
The soldiers who herded people into gas chambers were employees,
Just like the soldiers occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,
Just like the suicide bombers who target them—they are employees of God, hoping to be paid in paradise.” ~ crimethinc
As I walk around I can tell the unoccupied houses by their still having snow on the north or shady side of the roof. All the heated houses have no snow. Has doubled lately.. The edges are fraying. Demise and disintegration by degree.
Alex, have you asked yourself-
‘is there any particular threshold or event that would cause me to change my conclusion on greenhouse warming?’
For most people who don’t believe it is a problem, there probably is some level of disruption that would make them change their conclusion.
I think that for many of them, it would take an incredible catastrophe, and at that point it would be far too late to take action to avoid such catastrophe.
‘Give me proof’ says you. ‘Proof is too late’ says I.
There may not be proof but there is tons of circumstantial evidence!
Anyways skip the proof, just pass the pudding…
You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “467 ways of how these hazards have already impacted human health” ie past tense not a prediction. These are things that are going on right now.
NAOM
Amazing how one can put up a good article or post and get no comments but as soon as one of the villagers show up, the attraction cannot be resisted.
Well guys, the proof is in the pudding and even the scientists think so.
When dog bites man it does not tend to elicit as much of a response as when man bites dog. So, when the villagers finally get it, then more of us might sit up and take notice…?
Cheers!
On the other hand things might be shaping up to the point that I can finally sue the state goverment of Florida for damages due to their extreme negligence and have some hope of winning my case!
Should be fun!
Well, what’s way more appealing for most people to look at, a car crash or a scientificy research paper?
Definitely a research paper. If you like car crashes volunteer for the local rescue squad for a while. Usually that cures people, except the sick and twisted ones.
Minor quibble, ‘have already impacted‘ is not merely simple past tense, it is past perfect…
Then there is this:
Over 3,000 documented case examples, with supporting papers, are listed at
Freakin stupid humans.
Should say- ‘Aviation Biofuel may not be not quite as severely damaging to the climate, but nonetheless are an ecological catastrophe in many other ways’
There will be a distribution of responses, from the totally irresponsible to the very good and everything in between. Changes will be heavily promoted if they make a profitable business.
I don’t see any government agencies prepared to divert even smaller asteroids even though they can show up anytime. Is someone out there building a vehicle to land on and push an asteroid slightly?
As they are mostly tumbling or rotating, thrusting from a fixed point would not be effective let alone issues of attaching a thruster to such a low gravity body. Maybe a small nuke just far enough away not to disrupt it but close enough to vaporise some of the surface to give a thrust.
NAOM
No problem, it took me less than 3 minutes thinking to solve the thrust problems and the attachment problem (both axially and equatorially).
We already have the technology needed to acquire and soft land on one, so it’s just a matter of getting one there with the proper programming. Actually we should send four.
I’m confused. Push toward, or away from, earth?
A small push sideways would move the orbit away from Earth intersection if it was far enough away. One must eliminate future orbits that intersect with Earth but that is a secondary objective.
An impact on Ryugu might just create a shotgun effect. That would be better for atmospheric entry as lots of small rocks would be more likely to burn up but would probably do enough damage to satellites to render earth orbit unusable. That is why I am more in favour of vaporising one side of it. Mind you, a satellite with a powerful laser could do that as well.
It should be noted that landing and sticking to asteroids does not seem to be a proven technique as yet 🙂 .
NAOM
You need to understand physics and orbital mechanics. An impact is not an explosion, it imparts kinetic energy to the center of mass and even if the asteroid splits, it will tend to drift in a new combined vector.
However, it should be noted and that there are no fully proven techniques yet.
“Sticking” to an asteroid is easy. One does not even have to grab onto the asteroid.
Your idea of atomic weapons seems to come from sci-fi films where the answer is always nuke it. We can test that. Good way to get rid of those insane things.
Definitely NOT nuke it, how to shotgun the earth in 1 uneasy lesson. More like a low yield that will vaporise a layer off the surface. A few kilotons a few hundred meters away and let the radiation do the work. Should be quite doable with existing tech, just about everything needed is off the shelf. It also has the advantages that it can be used at short notice and reserve interdictors can be sent. OTOH sticking is not yet a proven art, little of the technology exists and would need sufficient time to work.
NAOM
You are hitting the rotating object with an intense pulse of radiation to melt an area and vent material out into space, using the melt as reaction material. How long is the venting, several hours, several days? What is the thrust rate and how controllable is it with different asteroid materials? How does the thrust not rotate with the asteroid?
Sounds like a recipe for an epic spiral event and lots of variables.
With a nuclear flash the venting should be fast, sublimation of the surface rather than a meltdown. Size and range of the device would need to be calculated by those who have the data to do that. Short, sharp pulse. If a sufficient thrust took place then any spinning probably won’t matter but I did note that several devices may need to be sent with the approach of each determined by the effect of the previous. As I mentioned a laser could also do the job with the ability to observe and refine but a much more complex mission probably needing a small space reactor to provide sufficient power, a long time to set up. If you only have 6 or 12 months then a nuclear pulse may the only option.
A further idea I have been considering is a satellite with motors either side giving opposing thrust. On one side the exhaust impinges on the asteroid moving it while the thruster on the other side of the satellite keep it in place. Rotation of the asteroid would not matter and no landing needed. A pig to set up and keep balanced though.
NAOM
Accelerate or decelerate too. A change of cms/second would be plenty if done early enough.
NAOM
Sure, we could make it a new moon and mine it. Or it could hit the moon instead. Talk about space debris.
Here’s something a bit off topic but, here goes:
I was searching for news on vitamin c to see if there was anything new to add to my body of knowledge on the vitamin. I have noticed that over the years my usual sources have sort of faded out of the picture. Instead searches including “vitamin c” seem to be unearthing a lot more negative pages, pages about studies showing vitamin c mega-doses to be ineffective or seeking to be debunk other views of the positive effects of the vitamin. All this negative stuff runs contrary to my personal experience with using vitamin C in doses way above the RDA.
I saw a name that I have not seen associated with the topic so I watched a video featuring a presentation by one Dr. Suzanne Humphries, MD to the Swedish Society for Orthomolecular Medicine. I am a big believer in orthomolecular medicine, a discipline that puts food and nutrition at the root of many medical problems and seeks to remedy many conditions with diet and/or vitamin/mineral supplements. Some aspects of it appear to be grounded in common sense scientific ideas while some borders on quackery. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two.
The video, Lecture on vitamin C by brilliant Suzanne Humphries had quite bit of material I have seen before and referenced quite a few familiar names. One of the most interesting aspects of the video was her criticism of the medical establishment for rejecting the science behind vitamin C without actually giving it a fair shot. Also interesting was her description of how she has been ttreated by the medical establishment for espousing the views that she does.
That brings me sort of back to energy. Her story reminds me of how the fossil fuel energy establishment looks at and relates to renewable energy. Renewable energy is looked at as if is not real energy sort of like vitamin based treatments are seen as not real medicine by the medical establishment. The FF establishment holds the view that renewable energy can never take the place of “real energy”, just like how the medical establishment holds the view that nutrition and supplement based medicine surely cannot work better than drug based medicine. In both instances it would seem that the status quo is actively deriding what they see as a threat to the staus quo. Not really surprising.
When you see something that supports the idea that, the stubbornness of the medical establishment may have contributed to a lack of measures that might have been able to prevent the death of your mother, it is particularly painful!
Come to think of it, “When you see something that supports the idea that, the stubbornness of the” FF energy “establishment may have contributed to a lack of measures that might have been able to prevent the death of your mother” (earth)”, it is particularly painful!
Linus Pauling was a big advocate of megadosing with vitamin C, it didn’t seem to harm him. Though the actual benefits of large doses have yet to be proven. Certainly a deficiency in vitamin C is a recipe for disaster.
Cheers!
Tons o’ disconfirmation here, if you’re interested.
Oil companies officially ask Republicans to kill EV tax credit
Gee I wonder why?!
While the Lilliputians argue in their publically provided halls and offices, the public is slowly awakening to the facts and are eating away at the demand for fossil fuels.
Some states and cities are pro-renewable energy and efficiency too.
I live in an area that should be pick-up truck heaven but more than two thirds of the vehicles are cars and small SUVs (cars with a different body on them).
Of course even if all vehicles only became hybrids that would cut the use by about 50%, enough to eliminate all the non-profit producers and more. Of course the EV makers will notice the problem and stop pouring so much glitz into the cars, making them cheaper and more efficient, thus opening up the bigger lower end market.
Since the US is not the biggest market for EV’s this is not a global problem but the oilheads will push against it and the electric providers will be for it.
Coming to a future near you?
Rueters-Dateline Feb 3, 2020
In a move that shocked the world, China has indefinitely banned the exportation of photovoltaic (PV) panels and key components of their manufacture until further notice. This follows on the restrictions in place for the past 3 months. All ships at sea with PV cargo out for delivery have been recalled to China effective as of last evening (8 GMT). Additionally, all Chinese owned manufacturers and resellers in overseas markets have been placed under a ‘cease operations’ order, pending reorientation of their production towards the Chinese market.
The Chinese government has made a brief statement indicating they hope ‘this market adjustment will be temporary’. International observers do not see the move in this way, saying that such an abrupt and profound move does not appear to be one taken lightly.
Commentators see this as a reaction to the growing shortfall of oil and gas available on the international market, coupled with the many tens of thousands of heat related deaths this past summer during the big ‘El Nino’ event.
Regarding the ‘monster’ El Nino we are currently experiencing, the newest ocean temperatures recording compiled by the International Meteorological Society (IMA), shows even further heating in the indicator zones of the Pacific Ocean. ‘This will certainly be the strongest el nino disturbance we had ever encountered’ said the IMA spokesman.
the growing shortfall of oil and gas available on the international market
That would be nice – let’s hope. The quicker oil & gas production peaks and falls, the better.
From last thread…
“where Willits?”
On Highway 101, in the middle of Mendocino Co.
Yep, one of my old friends residence.
Yes I know where Willits is- I was guessing thats where you are from? Although I had thought maybe Briceland. My sister used to live there.
I’m about 20 miles north, in Laytonville.
I’ve been to the K.Wolf festival up there.
‘This will certainly be the strongest el nino disturbance we had ever encountered’ said the IMA spokesman.”
I thought it was to be moderate to light?
That was just a fabrication for 2020. Pardon for the confusion. You know- fake news.
Ok– I need to pay more attention.
(sigh) Same here, though I did catch it eventually.
I blame advancing maturity.
Not enough port 😉
Of course!
Words of wisdom, EFredM. On my way to the cellar, I am.
So, we had a link to Ophuls ( https://ophuls.org/essays ) in the last Post, who seems to believe that the end of fossil fuels means the end of modern civilization. Here’s a quote: ” We may command more power than ever before, but the basis that power is dwindling, presaging a steep decline in available energy and with it an end to the industrial age as we know it.” https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/74b08727-45f3-470a-a2d5-5ee8efdc0403/downloads/1cbuvppp4_569601.pdf
He seems to believe that other energy sources (solar, wind, nuclear, etc) simply can’t replace fossil fuels.
Would you’all agree with that description of Ophul’s ideas?
I agree with Ophuls that fossil fuels will not be “simple” to replace.
Not much to replace since fossil fuels are highly inefficient, mostly producing waste heat, plus have a lot of upstream and downstream energy losses.
Not much to replace since fossil fuels are highly inefficient, mostly producing waste heat, …
That is what is called a non sequitur. It does not follow that the inefficiency of fossil fuels means there is not much to replace. In fact, replacing just oil will be a monumental task. Coal, equally as difficult.
1.2 Billion Vehicles On World’s Roads Now, 2 Billion By 2035: Report
And about 99.something percent of them burn fossil fuel.* And most of the rest are powered by electricity that is generated by fossil fuel.
*I really have no idea what the actual percentage is. 99.something percent is just a wild ass guess. I would welcome someone posting the actual number.
A big project isn’t the same thing as an impossible project. Heck, producing 1.2B vehicles was a big project. They’d get replaced roughly every 12 years* in any case: building EVs instead of ICEs isn’t really much different.
Yes, the percentage of passenger vehicles that are fully or partly electric isn’t that large – perhaps 2% in the US. But, why is that especially meaningful? As counterthoughts: 1) obviously EVs are new, and are growing exponentially. And, 2) freight is a different story – it’s mostly electric motors. Yes, that electricity mostly comes from diesel…at the moment, and that applies more in the US than in many other places. That’s because US rail companies just don’t think it’s important to electrify – at the moment the savings would be a rounding error.
* The average life of US vehicles is longer, but older vehicles are used less: it’s a “long tail”. Vehicles less than 1 year old use about 12% of all Vehicles Miles Traveled, and those less than 6 years old do about 50%. So the “effective” life is about 12 years.
But it’s still a non sequitur. The fact that fossil fuels are inefficient has absolutely nothing with the difficulty of replacing them.
Seems to me they are already being replaced on a steady and fast growing basis. Apparently not very difficult, I see EV’s on the road. Solar panels around my area, wind turbines not too far away. Insulation in my house replaces lots of fossil fuel. Passive solar collection replaces even more. Bye Bye FF.
Oh, it’s just so difficult to replace an overly complex and wasteful system.
The major difficulty is in the mind, those with mentalities like Trump (he is sulking now).
Well…it has something to do with it.
I agree: the inefficiency of FF heat engines doesn’t necessarily tell you how easy it is to replace them with electric motors. Fortunately, it turns out that it is indeed pretty easy.
But, current FF powered energy *systems* are very inefficient, and that tells us a lot about how easy it would be to eliminate FF.
One big example: HVAC. Buildings (industrial, commercial and residential) account for about 35% of GHGs, and they currently are very inefficient. New homes can and are being made to use zero net energy. Existing buildings can be insulated and made more efficient very, very cost effectively.
Another example: the average passenger vehicle in the US only carries 1.2 passengers, and is only in use about one hour per day. If we doubled that occupancy rate we could cut oil consumption in the US by 25%, literally overnight. Sure, carpooling would be inconvenient, but with smartphones it would be a lot easier than it was 40 years ago. And, remember, you don’t have to have 5 people packed into your carpool: just going from one person to two cuts oil consumption by 50%. If we had an oil supply emergency, or got it into our head that climate change was an emergency, we could implement carpooling. Remember WWII, and the slogan “If your ride alone, you ride with Hitler!”?
Here is what I said “Not much to replace since fossil fuels are highly inefficient”
Much is an amount not a difficulty. Meaning that there was only a small percentage needed to be replaced since inefficiencies are across the board with FF.
Ron ran with the difficulty theme, which I take as non sequitur since PV is so much easier to install than finding oil, drilling, running pipelines and storage plus pumping systems, building refineries, setting up distribution systems, reducing pollution systems then drilling more. Same goes for the other FF’s.
Not that anyone in their right mind would want to burn FF’s, but we got stuck with them until we change it.
It’s amazing how simple PV is. It’s a rock that produces power!
No, only about 15% of the energy needs at the time will be “replaced”. Most of the rest is waste and lack of proper design. You need to look at the whole system including material waste and other inefficiencies. The centralized power network could become quite small.
Did I give a timeline? No. Is what I propose possible? Yes. Is it going to happen for sure. No, idiocy might prevail.
Did you see my graphs on the replacement of ICE’s I put up not long ago based on logistical functions derived from current production of EV’s?
Everything I talk about already exists and is working in many places around the world. This is nothing new or fantastic. Of course advances will occur, the world is not static.
Your inability to comprehend does not make me wrong about a potential future or how much energy we actually need.
If you can’t conceive of the possible, how are you ever going to deal with the advances being made over the next few years. You seem to have trouble with the advances made in the last decade.
” And about 99.something percent of them burn fossil fuel. And most of the rest are powered by electricity that is generated by fossil fuel.”
So what? What is your point? That EV’s are not growing at 50% a year around the world while ICE’s grow at less than 3 percent.
Here is an extrapolation from current growth. Crossover point where ICE fall in numbers is about 12 years from now when EV’s number about 150 million. Time to near zero ICE’s is about 20 years from now.
Of course this is just an extrapolation, others think it can be faster and many think fossil fuels will be burned to the Seneca Cliff point.
But I just point out the possible and the potential we have right now.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-october-18-2018/#comment-656044
In addition, if the car as a service system grows the number of cars needed will drop dramatically, thus accelerating the changeover.
Non-sequitur to you too.
Hmm. I’d like to clarify what Ophuls has in mind. He seems to think that replacement is simply impossible, and that Peak Fossil Fuel will *necessarily* mean the collapse of modern civilization.
Does that seem like a fair characterization of his views?
If fossils steeply decline by 2040, there will be enough renewable energy for modern industrial civilization (capable of making photovoltaic cells and such equipment)…. for about 2.1 billion people.
The rest will have to live in modern nonindustrial way.
Wood, wool, and salvage of the leftovers.
‘trade you this goat for that wheel’
If fossils steeply decline by 2040, there will be enough renewable energy for modern industrial civilization (capable of making photovoltaic cells and such equipment)…. for about 2.1 billion people.
Again, I think you’re talking about something different: a bottleneck in a transition from FF due to excessive decline in FF or inadequate growth of substitutes. I think that might be an interesting discussion, but first: do you think that I have described Ophuls’ ideas correctly?
Well, in our 200,000 (maybe 3– the record is not sure) of homo sapiens being around, we have had 1-10 million (with a near extinction 70,000 years ago).
7.6 billion in a challenged ecology?
I would laugh——- but
How does that relate to what we were discussing: FF vs renewables?
And…back to what I was asking: is it accurate to say that Ophuls thinks that replacing FF is impossible? I’m not asking if you agree with his idea, just…is that what he thinks?
The system will keep propping up the population with techno fixes in food and health.
Right now a moratorium on DNA shifted mosquito research is in effect for central Africa. Idea being to eliminate mosquitos quickly to stop malaria. I think that might increase population a bit faster and definitely open up jungle regions for more development (farms and ranches).
If you reduce malaria deaths you’ll reduce fertility, and reduce population far more effectively: as death rates fall, people become more willing to risk having fewer children, and the impact on fertility is disproportionately large because people are risk-averse.
Nick, as more children made it past 5 and survived that is what fueled the big population boom in the world. Instead of 2 out 6 surviving, 4 out six survived, doubling the population in one generation.
It will take several generations to slow down that surge.
Sure. And, we could go back to women having 5-10 children until they died in childbirth, with many children dying immediately and only two surviving to adulthood. That’s a world of incredible misery.
But, something in the middle doesn’t work very well. If people are poor and need children to support them in their old age, and infant and child mortality is high, then people will have extra children as a safety buffer.
It works quite well to reduce child mortality, provide contraception and education and career opportunities. And fertility continues to fall: The world is at 2.4 children per woman, only .3 away from the 2.1 replacement level, and it was 2.5 only 2-3 years ago.
We’re quite close: There’s no need to go back to a Hobbesian world.
No need to go over the edge. If you don’t believe me, then watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
Sometimes birth rates just fall for no clear reason. For example, they fell rapidly in Iran after the mad mullahs took over. And they have fallen rapidly in the US since 2010.
82 million new humans on the planet this year.
Anyone paying attention?
That is the population of Germany.
Yes, it seems that most people want smaller families, if they’re not forced to have children.
Iran is an example of that: their birth rate fell because their government removed obstacles to family planning with changes in public policy: much easier access to contraception, sex ed in schools, public support for smaller families, etc.
On the other hand, Iran’s public policy has become more pro-natalist lately, and the people of the country are pushing back: they like smaller families.
Nick G,
I haven’t read anything else by Ophuls except the link you provided, so I can’t comment beyond this. But he appears to state that it is “ecological ruin” that is going to lead us towards collapse, not as you stated, “Peak Fossil Fuel.”
“For it is the energy subsidy afforded by these resources that has allowed our civilization to reach its current luxurious shape—one that has enabled more and more people to enjoy unprecedented political rights, social freedoms, and economic benefits but that has also put us on an unsustainable trajectory toward ecological ruin.”
Furthermore, I don’t see that Ophuls specifically addresses what can and can not be replaced by solar / renewable tech. In fact, it seems pretty open ended in the concluding paragraph:
“A future civilization will probably fall somewhere in the middle between those
who tout a technological paradise—or hell, depending on your point of view—and those whoanticipate a return to the Stone Age. Although much depends critically on the transition, we need not revert completely to pre-industrial conditions.”
anyway, make of it what you will.
Well, thanks for trying.
I read the reference to “ecological ruin” as one of several reasons he’s giving for fossil fuels being unsustainable.
And, yes, I don’t see any discussion of solar or wind power. Unfortunately, that’s common for people who think FF can’t be replaced: they really don’t know much about renewables, and just assume they can’t work. Sometimes they’re thinking of biofuels, sometimes they’re thinking of 80’s solar/wind tech. Sometimes they’ve just read other authors, and assume they’re correct that FF is irreplaceable.
Nick G,
I think what he is saying is that fossil fuels are a component of what is leading us to ecological overshoot and that is what will lead to “ecological ruin” and ultimately societal collapse.
But why do you think Ophuls “seems to think that replacement is simply impossible?” You keep asking the same question and it’s not even discussed in the essay. I am sure there are plenty of other sources out there that debate whether replacement is possible.
Plus what more do you need for society to collapse than ecological ruin?
There is no physical or thermodynamic reason for renewables to not be able to run a civilization. In fact the thermodynamics are much better.
https://physicsworld.com/a/100-renewable-electricity-is-viable/
Physics world seems to agree with the article linked above that renewables can handle 100% of our energy needs.
Note: I said ‘NEEDS’! ?
Ironically I’m not too far from Karlsruhe, at the moment.
Yes, harnessing solar is what makes you a type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. There is no type zero xD
I go by the Kardashian scale of civilization. How many of the people act like big buttheads. So far we seem to be pretty high on that scale, better than a 30.
I think the biosphere will collapse first and put severe constraints on the current systems that supports civilization as we know it. I still think there will be pockets where life will be reasonably tolerable for a lucky few. I don’t see 8 or 9 billion humans as even remotely sustainable so I expect major die off of humans in many places.
https://www.thinkdif.co/sessions/will-the-world-really-run-out-of-food
The world has 60 harvests left. 60 more years of food before our soil quality is diminished to the point of no return. In our zeal to produce more and more food at low cost, we are stripping nutrients from the soil, undermining our future capacity to grow food. We need a plan for a food system that works. Our guests in this show think that cities might hold the key.
I think the biosphere will collapse first
Fred, is that a reply to my comment? If so, are you familiar with Ophuls? Do you think my description of his ideas is accurate?
No, that was not intended as a specific response to anyone in particular. Just some generalised musings on my part..
Cheers!
Fred, I am not disagreeing with a biosphere collapse although I don’t know how comprehensive it will be. However, civilization as we know it is somewhat of a nightmare so we need to collapse and replace that ASAP. For the biosphere.
Here is what happens as people start to think the world is in a box canyon.
Peter Wadhams on Our Last Ditch Hope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wsmyng2HIo
Between the geo engineers and the carbon sequestrationeers, we are in for a really strange ride that will be sucking money and materials from converting away from fossil fuels as well as causing more chaos.
Last week I had a nightmare. The year was 2068 and I was still alive to witness the collapse.
There is not much we can do to change what’s inevitable, of course, but I shall keep praying.
A system that can feed 8+ billion and is sustainable? I think they gave enough hints about yield reduction when switching to more organic methods and city farms only providing some key nutrients rather than calories to suggest they probably think that is unlikely. I think they also missed the salinization issues – either from groundwater concentration or salt water intrusion on the big rice producing deltas. Battisti’s presentations on climate impact on cereal crop yields are scary as well (at least 10% down per degree, but huge and growing variability with some years none, and with droughts and pest issues on top). So less soil producing less per hectare that is left trying to feed more people. And growing evidence that remaining fish stocks might be on the point of collapse in various places (maybe the next big environmental issue that might get some attention). Cue the hope police …
Yeah, I know…
On the one hand we have Brazil’s Bolsonaro appoint a religious fanatic to serve as Brazil’s new Foriegn Minister, who believes climate change is a Marxist plot…
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/brazil-foreign-minister-ernesto-araujo-climate-change-marxist-plot
On the other we have this!
The Global Extinction Rebellion Begins.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-global-extinction-rebellion-begins/
Might be time to stock up on lots of popcorn and beer. We will have front row seats to the battle between ignorance vs. science. Let the games begin!
Good Luck folks!
I like this:
Hope is a creature of privilege….[T]he opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief. Even while resolving to limit the damage we can mourn. And here, the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort: we are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale, and inevitability binds us into one, broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere. We need courage, not hope…Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.
I used to think resource limits would be the big issue, then climate change, but now I think the ecological destruction, irrespective of either of those and directly correlated to population growth would do our civilization in anyway, the first two issues are just going to make it quicker. I also think technology, especially the worst bits of the internet, couple with the rampant advertising and consumerism that overproduction has produced, is destroying a good chunk of what it means to be an individual human.
I definitely have grief, also some guilt, and less and less denial.
So why don’t we just pasture more cows? Cows eat grass (but don’t harvest the root) and emit a constant stream of new fertilizer. Eat/rotate/repeat.
Beef for everyone.
The moral highground that plant eaters occupy is quickly eroding as the dangers of repeated land cultivation become apparent.
Gaza militants recently debuted the deployment of Kornet anti tank guided missiles, against a bus just after IDF troops had unloaded from it. Warning shot I suppose.
https://youtu.be/pAEFQH57erA
Game changer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M133_Kornet
It’s interesting that I saw that video on network tv (don’t remember the station, not Fox) and it was not made clear that the bus had just unloaded. I assumed a lot of soldiers died.
There’s some talk of Kornets being used by Hamas in the past, but it’s quite possible they were not Kornets, but instead were older wire-guided anti tank guided missiles.
No fatalities are reported in the recent incident. Only one injured- the bus driver. Luckily for the bus driver the missile was aimed towards the back of the vehicle. This was perhaps done to prevent escalation, while still sending a message- armored incursions into Gaza will now come at a price.
Upstate New York heating degree days appear to be falling with time. Go figure.
How Circular is the Circular Economy?
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/11/how-circular-is-the-circular-economy.html
More like a circle jerk.
California has ‘extraordinary’ budget surplus, analysts say
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/California-has-extraordinary-budget-13392995.php?t=bd3d2d1ec9
With the 5th largest GNP on the planet, it will eventually get tired of supporting our Red States, and they will become even more third world.
But they do need to get those fires out.
The author of that piece is ignorant. Proponents of a Circular Economy are clear that ‘GROWTH’ is not sustainable. Given that many are also scientists with degrees in physics, chemistry and biology is ridiculous to state they are unaware of the laws of thermodynamics!
Just because someone is aware of something doesn’t necessarily mean they understand it. Just because someone practices science doesn’t necessarily mean they practice it intelligently or wisely, etc..
As for this ‘growth’ thing, well, there have been suggestions that it can be somehow decoupled, redefined and/or reconfigured, which is not to suggest that I am necessarily suggesting that.
I’d rather see the system collapse than reconfigure itself to other forms of idiocy.
I’ve already posted, hereon, commentary from others about issues of concern surrounding the ‘circular’ and ‘doughnut’ economics. It isn’t just Kris D..
Maybe a rule of thumb: If you have ‘The Machine’ and its operators embracing stuff like the above circular/doughnut, etc., concepts, question, extra hard, their validity.
Estimable DougL,
This just in: Barnard’s star has a planet, a super-Earth. It looks like this time they’ve nailed it down.
Rejoice.
Maybe
Yet another reason to go electric – fast!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/14/diesel-pollution-stunts-childrens-lung-growth-london-study-shows
NAOM
The Volkswagen Group has selected South Korea-based battery manufacturer SK Innovation (SKI) as the fourth major supplier of battery cells for electric vehicles based on the Modular Electric Toolkit (MEB).
Within the framework of Roadmap E, the Volkswagen Group brands plan to bring 50 new full-electric models onto the roads by 2025. The Group needs battery capacity in excess of 150 GWh per year through 2025 just to equip its own electric fleet. That corresponds to an annual capacity of at least four “Gigafactories” for battery cells.
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/11/20181113-vw-1.html
Yeah but the lease on my Volt runs out next May and I’m ready for a full electric. I think VW may be able to make a better looking EV than what’s available now. Sorry but I just can’t stomach a Leaf or afford a Tesla.
Which state are you in? California has the widest selection of EVs available in the US since there are models that are only sold there. The Monthly Plug-In Sales Scorecard over at insideevs.com has the full list of all plug-ins available in the US (CA). By May next year there may be more. Insideevs.com is a good source for news on “coming attractions” like :
Hyundai Will Satisfy U.S. Hunger For Kona Electric
The vehicle in the link above has a stablemate from Kia, the e-Niro.
Also just in case you don’t know, the Leaf got a major refresh for the 2018 model year and looks far more conventional, looking pretty much like the rest of the Nissan range, as seen in the picture below. A version of the Leaf with a 60 kWh battery, good for over 200 miles of range is due out soon.
As for not being able to afford a Tesla:
Tesla’s $35,000 Model 3 is still coming and with a new battery module design
Hi all,
The article says the car starts at 49k, it’s 46k for smaller battery pack 260 rather than 310 miles.
The Tesla Model 3 starts at 46k for a “midrange” model with 260 miles of range (RWD, black only, and no enhanced autopilot). If you order by Nov 30 Tesla claims you will get your car by Dec 31 ensuring the 7500 rebate for US customers so a net of 38.5k for someone in a no sales tax state.
https://3.tesla.com/model3/design?#battery
For anyone interested you can get 6 months free supercharging by using my referral code below (first 5 people get it).
https://ts.la/dennis15569
For those who don’t have an electric car, it is hard to explain what a revolutionary change it is.
To never have to go to gas station again.
To have a vehicle with such an incredible diminished maintenance requirement.
It is truly game changing. Cost/mile advantage over the coming decade will be very large.
The technology is advancing very quickly. Should scare the pants off the oil industries. Now if we could only get them to stop producing single use plastic items.
Just for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IS5DcnyswM
I-Boy:
I am in California. I’ve really looked at everything. The only cars above 200 mile range are the Teslas, the Bolt and the Hyundai Kona (that last one I just discovered this evening). the Bolt and the Kona are SUV-ish. I want something smaller.
I may just buy the Volt when the lease is up. Here’s a comparison chart:
https://insideevs.com/electric-cars-us-price-range-comparison/
Next May? The short-range Tesla Model 3 will be available by then. (It isn’t available now, but it will be by then.) You can afford it if you can afford a new Volt.
I doubt that Tesla is as useful a car as my Volt or as cheap. I think the rebates which made my Volt affordable will not be available next year.
The thing I really dislike about the Volt is the idiotic electronic raz-ma-taz I must tolerate every day. Somehow I think the Tesla with it’s dashboard-less dashboard will be even worse.
I’ll try to have an open mind but Tesla makes me nervous.
Volt 33520, Tesla 35000 for 220 mile range rwd version. Tesla should be available in May 2019.
Not that hard to get used to Tesla M3 system, but I am a Tesla fan.
Take a test drive or rent from Turo for a day to see if you can live with it. Probably not for everyone.
Top Worst Car Crashes of 2017
Da?
Nissan Serena’s e-POWER system named RJC Technology of the Year
Fun and comfortable to drive, the Serena e-POWER has been a hit in Japan. Since its launch, 40% of Serena buyers have chosen the e-POWER version. In addition to the system’s powerful acceleration, its e-POWER Drive mode offers the convenience of being able to speed up or decelerate by using only the accelerator pedal. Using the e-POWER Drive mode, stress is relieved as brake pedal application decreases by nearly 70%.
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/11/20181114-nissan.html
Ryan Zinke Says California Wildfires Are Getting Worse But Won’t Mention ‘Climate Change’
Brown attributed the worsening fires in California to the “changing of the climate” ― and noted that the scorched community of Paradise “looks like a war zone.”
“We’re in a different kind of world,” he said. “What causes these catastrophes … the changing of the climate, the winds, the dryness and the continuing drought.”
“We’re in for difficult times. It will never be the same,” Brown added.
In Northern California, the Camp fire has killed 48 people and burned over 6,000 homes as of early Wednesday ― making it the most destructive and deadliest fire in state history. Six days into the blaze, dozens of people were still unaccounted for, and it was only 35 percent contained.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/interior-secretary-ryan-zinke-california-fires-climate-change_us_5beca3e1e4b09f46700663f7
The long range climate models predicting November’s 2m temp anomaly have generally not done well with the pattern through the first half of the month. Most models have severely underestimated the amount of cold air in the atmosphere. Now stratospheric warming is getting more active, pointing to a locked in cold pattern emerging during the winter.
https://twitter.com/commoditywx/status/1062779919195877376
Bob Frisky- “pointing to a locked in cold pattern emerging during the winter”
Yep, just like every winter for the past 457,000 yrs.
It’s the shift in polar vortex and Jetstream speeds caused by global warming. Rest of the planet is warm.
Actually it is very good of Bob to point this out. We get so many deniers here that make out that there is no evidence for global worming. Along comes Bob who demonstrates the effect of climate change on the polar vortex and shows that there is proof that the effects predicted by scientists are actually happening right now.
NAOM
What a difference a day makes. 11-25-18 temperature anomaly forecast. Looks like the blue blob is in Russia and Brazil.
Hi Bob,
Copernicus has a rather good monthly update if you like tracking regional and global trends.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-october-2018
A not very cheery look at progress in renewables
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/renewable-energy-is-surging-but-not-fast-enough-to-stop-warming/
Go figure, you mean renewable energy did not replace the world energy in a decade?
Yep solar only went from 8000 GWh production in 2007 to 328,000 GWh in 2016. In the same period wind power only rose from 168,000 GWh production to close to one million GWh in 2016.
Now if the world took renewable energy seriously we could have three times that two years ago. But as usual, it’s half baked time.
Obviously much of the world does not value the future. You sometimes end up where you aim.
Spain wants 100% renewable electricity by 2050 as part of climate change strategy
The Spanish government is drawing up ambitious new renewable energy legislation.
A draft document with the main points of the new Law on Climatic Change was submitted yesterday to parliamentary groups and interested sectors, by Spain’s Ministry for the Ecological Transition. The government’s goal is to have a text of broad consensus before the legislation’s hearing by the Council of Ministers and the Parliament, to accelerate its progress.
The ministry affirmed the draft addresses energy networks, energy efficiency, building, transport and taxation, and that at least 20% of the national budget should have a positive impact on the fight against change climate.
According to Spanish agency EFE, sources at the Ministry for the Ecological Transition made the information public yesterday, in a meeting with journalists.
The details follow the above excerpted portion. I would not be surprised to hear that, at least two climate change denying, anti-renewable energy residents of Spain are suffering from the effects of their heads exploding!
100% renewable by 2050.
Sounds nice.
Even nicer if the world had proclaimed the same, with 2012 the target date.
By 2050, there won’t be much fossil fuel left at the current rate of burn.
By 2050. It will be warm.
Hey, the kids have a lot to look forward to and even more to work on. Just moving the towns and cities away from the ocean will keep them busy:-)
Snowing here now, two inches so far.
Got six inches but it is melting, the Bluish Blob is moving away and will be highs in the 40’s for the next week.
Massive 4GW wind and solar and storage project proposed for NSW
Australian renewable energy developers Energy Estate and MirusWind are proposing to build a 4,000MW (4GW) wind, solar and storage facility in New South Wales that will be the biggest single renewable energy project in Australia’s main grid.
The Walcha Energy Project is sited near the town of the same name, about 55km south of Armidale in the New England tablelands, adding to the extraordinary number and scale of wind and solar projects in the heart of ex National Party leader Barnaby Joyce’s electorate.
Energy Estate founder Simon Currie – a former head of energy at legal firm Norton Rose Fullbright – says the region has excellent wind and solar resources, and is close to the backbone of the transmission system and the coal plants in the Hunter Valley that are scheduled to be closed from 2022.
Australian renewable energy developers Energy Estate and MirusWind are proposing to build a 4,000MW (4GW) wind, solar and storage facility in New South Wales that will be the biggest single renewable energy project in Australia’s main grid.
The Walcha Energy Project is sited near the town of the same name, about 55km south of Armidale in the New England tablelands, adding to the extraordinary number and scale of wind and solar projects in the heart of ex National Party leader Barnaby Joyce’s electorate.
Energy Estate founder Simon Currie – a former head of energy at legal firm Norton Rose Fullbright – says the region has excellent wind and solar resources, and is close to the backbone of the transmission system and the coal plants in the Hunter Valley that are scheduled to be closed from 2022.
The plan is to combine the wind and solar, and add in storage such as pumped hydro and batteries, and create a new substation and “renewable energy hub” near the town of Uralla.
The proponents say this will ease congestion in the grid, and fits in with plans outlined by Transgrid, the NSW government and the Australian Energy Market Operator, to create the infrastructure to support a major renewable energy zone – one of many planned across the main grid as the country shifts to renewables.
How much longer before coal consumption in Australia starts to decline in earnest?
I should add that if countries like Australia and the USA are seen to be abandoning coal in favour of renewables, mainly on the basis of economics, why would developing countries not follow suit?
I can think of only a few justifications for building a new coal plant now.
1. You like the control you get with centralized generation. Charge charge a lot of customers.
2. You think you need electricity in the cold dark winter. Like in Seoul. Keep the factories running and the inside warm.
3. You have no space for 9 million PV panels [rough equivalent output to 1 coal plant, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on the calculation]
Seoul gets plenty of winter solar insolation. Not even that far north, 37.5 degrees N.
Population Seoul metro= 25.6 million people.
I don’t think that amount of winter solar radiation is “plenty”. Looks similar to the values at places like St Louis or Washington DC in January, , or NY in Feb.
I’m cold just thinking about relying on solar there in the winter.
That’s a lot of people, pack them tight and they can heat the buildings along with their computers.
Seoul gets 2.5 trillion BTU of sunlight per day in January. Same temps as here with more light. If they can’t figure it out now and start changing those R2 buildings or they can wait until the fuel stops coming in and figure it out later.
To put it simply, 1000 square feet of R30 wall loses 28000 BTU per day at average January temps while R2 loses 15 times that. 1000 square feet of south facing wall receives 670,000 BTU of solar energy every day on average in January.
This is a petroleum/non-petroleum comment.
One of the main geniuses behind the WUWT blog is an oil industry employee and there is a recent post concerning gas and oil fracking by another oil retiree
But from the first guy’s comment, it appears that he buys into the idea of abiotic oil! This is nuts. Jerome Corsi is about to be the next Trump crony to be indicted and he wrote a conspiracy book centered around the secret abundance of abiotic oil.
https://imageshack.com/a/img921/3327/8vhofo.png
The whole system is nuts, Paul.
Synapsid and others might like this; Savage Garden narrated by Leslie Nielsen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDEwFsXD3Dw
Looks incomplete but still lots of great filming
I have a VHS copy of this.
Shrew fights scorpian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su-RH8uQg8c
Ferocious Killer Shrew – Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwVEkD1_USQ
The little dears have the mammalian equivalent of a hummingbird’s metabolism so eating is very important to them. Some species have venomous saliva, a rarity among mammals that makes them even more special.
Thanks GoneFishing.
Now this is something we all need to get rid of the pessimism.
23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better
By Dylan Matthews
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news
For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. We have a massively unpopular, scandal-plagued president whose aides are being convicted of serious federal felonies. Overt, old-fashioned racism is publicly visible and powerful in a way it wasn’t only five years ago. More than 200 admired, powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct or assault.
This is all real, and truly alarming. But it would be a mistake to view that as the sum total of the world in 2018. Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn.
But many of us aren’t aware of ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias. Bad economic news gets more coverage than good news. Negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones.
Nothing’s permanent, and big challenges like climate change and the potential collapse of liberal democracy remain, but the world is getting much, much better on a variety of important, underappreciated dimensions.
1) Extreme poverty has fallen
2) Hunger is falling
3) Child labor is on the decline
4) People in developed countries have more leisure time
5) The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US
6) Life expectancy is rising
7) Child mortality is down
8) Death in childbirth is rarer
9) People have been getting taller for centuries
10) More people have access to malaria bednets
11) Guinea worm is almost eradicated
12) Teen births in the US are down
13) Smoking is down, too
14) In the long term, homicide rates have fallen dramatically
15) In the short term, they’re down in the US, too
16) Violent crime in the US is going down
17) We’ve rapidly reduced the supply of nuclear weapons
18) More people in the world live in a democracy now
19) More people are going to school for longer
20) And literacy is, predictably, up as well
21) Moore’s law isn’t quite over yet
22) Access to the internet is increasing
23) Solar energy is getting cheaper
Most importantly, we know most of the problems we face now. So we can act on them if we want.
A good film on soil. Most people are too busy with their devices to watch, but it is good-
The Living Soil
https://vimeo.com/298616093
An example of how indiscriminate exploitation of a natural resource can come back to bite you.
There is a beach about 10 miles (16 km) from a point in the middle of the metropolitan region of the city of Kingston Jamaica, called Hellshire Beach. It used to be a fairly nice, white sand beach and was a convenient beach for the residents of Kingston and it’s environs, being only 35-40 minutes drive from the center of the metropolitan region. Since it was quite popular and got fairly crowded on weekends and holidays, vendors started selling snacks and drinks, evolving into seafood joints. Originally these seafood places were makeshift shacks set back 15 to 30 yards (m) from the water line, made from bamboo and driftwood with thatch type roofs made from palm fronds. Over the years they became more substantial with cinder block walls forming a perimeter on which wooden walls were built and corrugated steel hip roofs as shelter from the sun and rain . At the same I suppose many of the vendors got tired of schlepping their wares to and from the beach to wherever they lived and just built “temporary” housing behind the now line of “shops”. At some point piped water was installed in this community that had established itself on the beach. There is no evidence of any planning and no sanitary conveniences that I know of.
Being from the rural parts, the first time I ever went to that beach was some time in the 80s, by which time the line of shops on the beach was well established and there was already a small community of residences behind the shops. Some of the residents may well be fisherfolk since the seafood served at Hellshire Beach is typically brought straight on to the beach by small canoes every day. All in all, a nice arrangement for those making a living from the beach, that would draw nice crowds to come to the beach for recreation.
There were two problems. A series of hurricanes passing mainly just to the south of the island, brought strong wave action that supposedly destroyed the reef that provide the sand for the beach and protected it from erosion. Global warming combined with “nutrient rich” water as a result of the unplanned settlement on the beach has likely killed most, if not all the corals on what is left of the reef. The result is shown in the satellite image below. The beach is gone. The wide expanse of white sand between the shops and the water line has disappeared and the water line is now approaching the seaside entrance to most of the shops. As the erosion of the beach continues, it will probably undermine the foundations of the shops and eventually swallow them. As for business, who will want to go to beach where there’s no beach?
I have no hope for that public beach. Part of it’s destruction was due to the very people who depend on it for a living and I doubt any of them even realize that they are partly to blame. Will we ever learn? 🙁
Will we ever learn?
Dunno! Maybe someone needs to rewrite the song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ With lyrics asking where have all the corals gone? Could it be to a reggae beat?
Cheers!
We have the same phenomena here. Restaurants have encroached so far onto the beach that there is little room left for visitors and what remains is ‘claimed’ by the restaurants by covering them with parasols and loungers. Just after Kenna I walked along the malecon and could see that where the storm had pulled away beach sand there were the bases of old stalls several meters down.
The town complains of lack of touristas, ignoring these issues, while those touristas move to the resorts further north that still have wide open beaches.
NAOM
Will we ever learn?
Humans are evolved to compete for reproductive privilege and then nurture their genes within a tribe. In our civilization that means gaining status and wellbeing through wealth and consumption, long term consideration of the environment is well down the priority list – those entrepreneurs have learnt, and well.
My daughter spent a year on St Vincent doing environmental work. One project involved planting trees for free. She said the locals were open to fruit trees, especially mangoes, but often refused to allow her to plant trees to prevent erosion, improve soil, or provide shade, even though she was offering the service (and the tree) free of charge. A lot of the properties are badly eroded, and the locals often complain about the heat, so go figure.
They did like it when she planter vetiver on hillside paths to stop erosion though.
Incidentally I’d like to remark that it isn’t just the Vincies that have this perception problem. The Texans marched West in the Civil War not just to dodge the Union Army, but to conquer the grasslands of Arizona. Sadly, they immediately trashed them with overgrazing. Now the symbol of the state is a cactus. The locals are actually proud of that.
This is what land management in the American Southwest looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RluoQW0t2yQ
Look at all that valuable topsoil (“mud and debris”) being washed away. People just can’t grasp that it is a man-made land management problem.
This guys thinks flash floods are like totally cool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yCnQuILmsM
PG&E stock dropped as much as 60% this week. Looks like grid started the Camp Fire.
Another cost added to the stupidity of Centralized Generation.
I don’t think it much matters in the long run in California, eventually some ignition source would occur. The ecosystems are currently out of balance with the prevailing climate and the trees are in overshoot. Nature will redress the balance and the south will become desert and the north savanna. The same is happening all over, it’s partly why wildfires are so much more fierce now (e.g. extensive but also sterilising the soil or starting permanent tundra or peat fires).
And America’s penchant for crappy third world transmission infrastructure.
Daily CO2
November 15, 2018: 409.15 ppm
November 15, 2017: 404.94 ppm
Consistently above trend now for 10 weeks, is it more than just noise?
Could it mean the final collapse and global famine will come very soon?
In the short term more CO2 means more greening in a lot of places, it’s not until the temperature effects catch up over a few decades that the negative impacts take over on crop yields. It’s more a question of where the CO2 might be coming from – i.e. non fossil fuel sources like perma frost melt or other sinks failing.
CO2 encourages plant growth like a type of food for plants. You can read articles about what happens when scientists with greenhouses put CO2 into the greenhouse. Now, obviously the fruits and veggies we eat came from plants at one point, so the concern that there could be a global famine due to additional CO2 in the atmosphere is actually misinformed. The additional CO2 will be useful to continue growing the increased food we need, for feeding all the new babies coming into the world each and every year.
Just curious, where did you get your doctorate in plant physiology? Your depth of knowledge is quite impressive..
Julian- I think I saw you in one of those Coen Bros movies.
‘No country for Old Men’ I think it was.
Now I realize that you weren’t acting!
Plant growth does not mean more food.
CO2 can increase the growth of the inedible parts of the plat while the crop yields remain the same. Also, the nutrient value of the edible parts reduces. This has been shown to be a problem in rice which is a vital food over much of the world. A further problem is that increased growth uses more soil nutrients so the land gets depleted more for the same or less yield of less nutritious food. Oh, then there is the problem that some crops reduce growth in higher CO2 levels and others stop growing at the higher temperatures caused by increased CO2 levels.
NAOM
Julian Radoni,
Note the short post printed directly above yours: It’s not until the temperature effects catch up over decades that the negative impacts on crop yields take over.
There’s growing evidence that more CO2 inhibits nitrogen uptake, so plants may be bigger but are less hardy and worth less for food for humans or animals.
Temperature also has indirect results by increasing droughts and losses to pests, plus sea level rise will remove a lot of the big food producing river deltas (already happening in Mekong) through sea water intrusion additional to eventual loss of important irrigation sources as freshwater lakes and glaciers disappear.
And independent of climate change we are losing topsoil at more than 1% per year, exhausting some of the big groundwater aquifers, destroying soil through salinization from over irrigation by groundwater, facing rapidly increasing pesticide resistance with food production dominated by cloned hybrids or monocultures that can’t regenerate their own resistance.
Most of the plants we eat have been selected for by humans over thousands of years and are optimised for pre-industrial conditions, it would be extreme good luck if they did better
as those conditions changed, and there’s no evidence of that happening. Also there are hard biochemical temperature and moisture limits where no amount of selective breeding can make crops productive, and areas outside those limits are expanding across the globe.
UK crop breeders, Rothamsted?, have stated that they cannot breed and commercialise new varieties fast enough to keep up with climate change.
NAOM
Hi Gene.
Sure final collapse and or famine very soon is possible.
It has been possible for atleast 10,000 yrs.
But much more likely now since-
there are almost 8 Billion people.
who have collectively treated the planet so very poorly.
Soil generally ain’t nearly so good as it used to be.
Closer to the edge.
Hi Gene, this is my fav video on the topic of climate change and food security. This link cuts to an interesting part featuring a quote I like and a Seneca cliff in yield. You might prefer to watch it from the beginning.
“Yield volatility is gonna go through the roof”
Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
https://youtu.be/YToMoNPwTFc?t=45m36s
Week beginning on November 11, 2018: 408.72 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 404.89 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 384.15 ppm
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
Natural Log of atmospheric CO2 (trend data), 1958 to 2018, note I took natural log of CO2atm minus 278 ppm (about the average for most of the Holocene), so a one on the vertical axis would be the preindustrial average and 5.63 would be 2 times pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 on the vertical scale (about 5.4 would correspond to 500 ppm atmospheric CO2). For the current trend, we are at 4.87 on the log scale ln(409 ppm-278 ppm).
How to Prepare Your Home for the Effects of Climate Change
Jennie Dusheck
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-prepare-your-home-for-the-effects-of-climate-cha-1830387756
Climate change used to seem like something that would confront our grandchildren—a distant concern. Now, though, it’s staring us right in the face when we get up in the morning.
People wade through seawater on sunlit Miami streets; the Florida Panhandle, which rarely sees hurricanes, was recently flattened by a megastorm; and every year bigger and more frequent wildfires burn through Australia and California. As our planet warms up, the climate-related changes across the U.S. are well underway. Even if you haven’t had to cope with climate related problems yet, it may not be long before you have to protect your home from extreme weather, fire, flooding, or even sea level rise.
To find out how climate change may affect your area, check out climate risks by region using the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. A short video introduces the different parts of the website. You might want to go to the Steps to Resilience section that offers way to assess and reduce your risk.
For example, your flood risk depends not just on your own home and where it sits, but also on things like how the city has channeled nearby creeks and what size culverts your local department of public works has installed beneath your street or road. When it rains harder than ever before, undersized culverts may be overwhelmed and creeks can back up and jump their banks, flooding homes and roads.
In Santa Cruz, California, the city’s climate action manager Tiffany Wise-West, PhD, has posted a detailed action plan, including a Practical Adaptation Actions for Residents. We’re not covering every little thing, she says, but the City’s simple web page is a place for ordinary people to start.
Santa Cruz County is one of the rare places that already has a detailed plan for the future. Ask your city and county government if they have a Local Hazard Mitigation Plan like this one. But even if your area doesn’t, you can rough out a way to address the specific risks your home could face. In general, climate change experts talk about two ways of addressing climate change, preventing it and dealing with the consequences. Here we are focused on dealing with the consequences of climate change, sometimes called climate adaptation.
Don’t know why they have ignored this sort of construction, we’ve had it for years.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/rsg-3ds-building-panel-helps-homes-resist-natural-disasters.html
NAOM
Nice. I always like the concrete dome houses built using an inflatable hemisphere as a form. They supposedly could withstand even tornadoes.
Monolithic Domes meet FEMA standards for providing near-absolute protection and have a proven ability to survive tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, most manmade disasters, fire, termites and rot.
https://www.monolithic.org/domes
Impervious to everything but an A.R.C.
Bob Nickson,
What is A.R.C. please?
The dreaded Architectural Review Committee. 🙂
Ah. Thanks.
Pipeline Vandals Are Reinventing Climate Activism
Grant Kratzer
https://www.wired.com/story/monkeywrenching-vandals-are-reinventing-climate-activism/
On October 11, 2016, as they pulled up to an oil pipeline facility in the farm fields outside Leonard, Minnesota, the pair were bent on taking direct action to address climate change, since, they figured, the US government had failed to do anything about it. “This is the only way we get their attention. All other avenues have been exhausted.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-16/oil-demand-for-cars-and-transportation-is-already-falling
Kinda sorta was expected but as usual the IEA seems not to have seen it coming…
This is in German, but the chart is easy to read:
https://www.springerprofessional.de/dieselmotor/elektrofahrzeuge/nachfrage-nach-diesel-pkw-weiter-im-sturzflug/15675274
When asked, 6% of Germans would prefer a diesel car, 6% would prefer an electric car, and 15% would prefer a hybrid.
When asked, 100% of Germans say they hate traffic jams… ?
What is the gain if diesel engine is substituted with gasoline engine?
Diesel is more energy dense than gasoline.
Diesel fuel has a higher energy density than gasoline. On average, 1 gallon (3.8 L) of diesel fuel contains approximately 155×106 joules (147,000 BTU), while 1 gallon of gasoline contains 132×106 joules (125,000 BTU).
If my memory serves me, diesel is more energy dense mostly because it’s simply more dense, period. So, the energy per kilo of fuel isn’t much different.
Greater volumetric density is convenient, especially for long range commercial equipment, but it doesn’t reduce it’s pollution (including GHG) much.
True that diesel fuel is more energy dense by volume than gasoline (bigger molecules, therefore more bonds to oxidize in the same volume),
but also that the compression ratio on diesel engines is much higher than gasoline spark ignition engines,
thus overall more efficient than gasoline engines.
Air pollutants are another matter….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Diesel_engines
Example: the 2018 Chevy Cruzes are available in diesel or gasoline, with manual or automatic. One can see that the hatchback has worse aerodynamics, but diesel vs gas is a few mpg more efficient for same vehicle/transmission.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform&path=1&year1=2018&year2=2018&make=Chevrolet&baseModel=Cruze&srchtyp=ymm
TARGET EARTH
International Team, NASA Make Unexpected Discovery Under Greenland Ice
An international team of researchers, including a NASA glaciologist, has discovered a large meteorite impact crater hiding beneath more than a half-mile of ice in northwest Greenland. The crater — the first of any size found under the Greenland ice sheet — is one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth, measuring roughly 1,000 feet deep and more than 19 miles in diameter, an area slightly larger than that inside Washington’s Capital Beltway.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/international-team-nasa-make-unexpected-discovery-under-greenland-ice
Mapping Carbon in 3D
NASA’s new laser instrument, the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, or GEDI, has advanced laser technology that will reveal the makeup of remote forest ecosystems around the globe. GEDI will soar above Earth at 17,150 miles per hour onboard the International Space Station. Its measurements of the height of leaves, branches, trees, and shrubs below its path will help scientists map the structure of forests and better understand how ecosystems are storing or releasing carbon
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/index.html
Ever wonder where your income sits relative to the world population?
The income groups are defined as follows: The poor live on $2 or less daily, low income on $2.01-10, middle income on $10.01-20, upper-middle income on $20.01-50, and high income on more than $50; figures expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices.
http://www.pewglobal.org/interactives/global-population-by-income/
That takes no account of the cost of living into account. A Mexican who can get by and feed a family would be on the streets and living out of bins if they had the same income in the USA.
NAOM
You have discovered the plan. As one raises the wages and standard of living in a region or country, everyone gets paid more and thus costs go up accordingly.
There is even a wide disparity of cost of living across the US.
In Calif, there have been a series of severe wildfires that started from electric power line sources during wind ‘events’. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to string wind sensors all along the transmission lines, so as to trigger downtime when necessary. Might take 5-10 yrs to get it done, but it is doable.
Here is a good article from a Univ of WA meteorologist [I highly recommend following his blog] about the current fire- http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2018/11/why-did-catastrophic-camp-fire-start.html
He is speculating a bit, and he points that out.
When it comes to natural disasters, so much loss of life and destruction of infrastructure could be avoided by thoughtful landuse planning.
Fires in Australia, Greece, Portugal and California have hurt people primarily living at the ‘urban-forest interface’.
Hurricane damage is mostly within a couple miles of the coast.
Volcano deaths are mostly on the flanks of, and valleys draining big ________.
[yes you got it- Volcanoes].
Earthquake risk is magnified along, yes, earthquake faults.
We don’t have to do it this way.
Wake me up when we have changed.
American thinking:- ‘Ooooh, what a lovely forest, let’s build a wooden house with a roof covered in flammable material’, ‘Ooooh, what lovely flat lane next to a river, let’s build a house’, ‘Ooooh what a lovely beach here on the gulf coast, let’s build a house here’
My thinking:- ‘Higher ground – check, no uphill risks from flooding or landslide – check, not surrounded by fuel – check, not within reach of the stormy sea – check’ … you get the picture.
NAOM
You forgot the volcano above you… ?
And the thousands of nuclear missiles ready to launch at any time.
The 150 mile radius around Meteor Crater was considered safe at one time.
Be ready to hide out and repel all invaders.
Op-Ed: The Odds of a Devastating Pandemic Just Went Up
https://globalhealth.duke.edu/media/news/op-ed-odds-devastating-pandemic-just-went
Hey, does anyone think a quarantine in a US city or suburb would hold for long?
Zombie Apocalypse…?
You talking about the educational system in the US?
The US still has an educational system?! I thought everyone was home schooled now..
Public school is a Marxist plot, according to Betsy DeVoss…
Cheers!
An uneducated citizenry is slavery in a capitalist system
Sounds like the current status, despite the overabundance of bachelor degrees.
Todays bachelor degree is yesterdays high school degree.
Computers can learn much faster and be reprogrammed by the millions in just an hour or less. They can also replicate at amazing speed and be “born” with full knowledge and capabilities. No such thing as a student.
I don’t think most humans have a chance once AI develops even to the level of a bug brain.
Nope, they are about 11-12 million years old so I don’t worry about them. The hot spot has moved a long way East or is it that we have moved a long way to the West? 😉
NAOM
Nasa has stopped issuing news summaries as they release monthly average temperature data but it looks like October 2018 is seconde hottest, between 2017 and 2016, although they do say there were a few countries with data missing so this may be revised. Copernicus had October 4th hottest, but the cooling trend they have since the 2016 El Nino seems to be bottoming out.
Is that a global average George?
Yes
The Calif electric utility ISO [CalISO]
has upgraded their website, including such features as realtime utility scale battery storage capacity.
The current year to date renewable electric supply is 27% of total.
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx
I saw that the [alltime Max Solar Production] happened this summer at a level of 10,740MW
If I understand this properly, this is equivalent to almost 11 fullsize nuclear power plants running at full capacity (assuming 1000 MW nuc plants).
And I think Calif is, in effect, just getting started with this deployment.
They said 10% renewables would destroy the grid – we blew through that. They said 15% renewables would destroy the grid – we blew through that. They said 20% renewables would destroy the grid – we blew through that. Now, what is the latest renewables figure that will destroy the grid – 30% 40% 50%?
NAOM
Grid? Who needs a grid?
https://www.wired.com/story/electric-grid-rising-costs-renewables/
LOL!
Cry me a river, the utilities should be just as scared as the oil companies with regards EVs and reductions in demand for oil and other fossil fuels. Ain’t capitalism a bitch for creating a market for decentralized power generation and driving the old dinosaurs out of business. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys, eh?!
Oh and of course they are going to tell us that we need their grid to keep the lights on… So fuck them and Trump with his subsidies for inefficient coal, oil and nuclear.
Cheers!
I wouldn’t to listen to the noisy squealing sounds. Just remember though it took the development of a highly technical industrialized civilization to create the PV, wind turbines and EV’s, all driven by fossil fuels and the minds of scientists and engineers, along with the determination of businessmen.
Wherever the insanity leads, at least it will be less polluting and a lot quieter.
First commercial passenger all electric flights due next year, those are quiet too.
The hierarchy will invert, sort of, but it will still be a hierarchy. Now if we can only get the government to settle down and fly right. I am tired of the lies and the circus.
Gonefishing. Who is going to have electric commercial aircraft next year?
I can not find anyone claiming to be ready that soon and the aircraft are not of the size that anyone would associate with “commercial” aircraft.
Airbus E-Fan is only an engineering/certification demonstrator with one of 4 engines being electric is the current state of art in development. Other leaders in the field are at the concept/hype stage.
Remember certifying an aircraft is a multi-year process between announcement and first flight a couple more years between first flight and certification.
Commercial air travel will be one of the final holdouts in a transition away from fossil fuels. A long range aircraft is half fuel by weight at takeoff. Turbines are more thermally efficient than piston engines and regenerative braking is not going to aid efficiency.
Thanks for the long lecture, Easyjet says it’s nine passenger electric will fly next year. I didn’t say it was carrying paid passengers I said “First commercial passenger all electric flights due next year”. Meaning it’s not a private sport plane, but one built for commercial passenger. As a pilot, a flight is a flight. I could care less about the profit end.
The Norwegians are working on them but I am not sure of their schedule.
NAOM
My guess is that a 9 passenger short haul electric aircraft ain’t gonna be much of a game changer for humanity. As all reasonable analysts should perhaps be prone to ask- ‘a 9 passenger short haul electric plane; so what?’
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-electric-aircraft-20160830-snap-story.html
Despite improvements, planes need a lot of lithium-ion batteries to achieve significant range. In electric cars, the main problem was the cost of the batteries, which is starting to come down. In planes, the biggest challenge is weight.
The jet fuel capacity of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner is about 223,000 pounds, according to an airport planning document released in December. The estimated weight of a battery pack with equivalent energy would be 4.5 million pounds, Anderson said.
“Unless there’s a cosmic change in the battery, it’s just not going to work for bigger, faster airplanes,” he said. “It’s going to be a really long time before batteries weigh less than liquid fuel.”
Small passenger planes are used as commuter buses in many places worldwide. When you see an old lady get on with a crate of chickens, on the way to market, you get to understand.
NAOM
Yep, I flew all over the Amazon in small planes!
NAOM,
In the Arctic too. During a field season in NW Alaska they were the main way to get between villages.
“My guess is that a 9 passenger short haul electric aircraft ain’t gonna be much of a game changer for humanity. As all reasonable analysts should perhaps be prone to ask- ‘a 9 passenger short haul electric plane; so what?’”
Were you born full grown?
The air game is changing, the X57 concept proves that. Game changing for humanity is in full swing, aircraft won’t change that much except maybe research and geo engineering aircraft.
No they are not going to jump into big passenger liners right away, but electrics have large advantages in low fuel cost, low maintenance, useful at airports with noise and pollution restrictions. Will probably be short and medium flights during the 20’s. Useful at shorter runways too.
The liquid fueled big passenger planes will change too, to higher efficiency engines and fuselages. Then some will become hybrids, and then who knows or cares.
To really enjoy flying and the world of the sky one needs a small plane, flying slower. I always preferred sailplanes to power planes, one gets to understand the dynamics going on everyday around us instead of just plowing along from A to B.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/electric-planes-promise-big-benefits-air-passengers-planet-ncna862001
I’ve spent most of my time in a Cessna 150.
But the 172 is the plane everyone used.
Yeah, and heavier than air flying machines at one time were considered impossible, then there was Kitty Hawk!
Cheers!
P.S.
Small creatures scurrying around under the feet of the dinosaurs usually go unnoticed at first…
Resistance is Futile – You will be Assimilated or Die. US Utilities had a heavy hand in the CCS EV Fast Charge Standard. They crippled the Standard to have ZERO Utility as they did with roof top Grid Tied solar. As for now EV’s with CCS sockets have Z E R O UTILITY. Power flows in just one direction. The Nissan Leaf uses CHAdeMO which is bi directional.
How about a cup of tea?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAdeMO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Charging_System
You think? Yes, resistance is futile, the energy industry will soon be turned on it’s head. But like a hooked fish, they struggle.
The Energy Storage Disruption – End Of Peakers by 2020 and Baseload by 2030
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMg6_ShLleQ
Communities like those affected in California could easily be supplied by rooftop solar with excess production stored in a central power bank for nighttime/cloudtime use. No transmission lines needed. Stop throwing good money after bad by not rebuilding the grid, in these, areas and invest in local scale solutions.
NAOM
That is the way to go.
And UK is going there
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/19/rugeley-coal-plant-to-be-transformed-into-a-sustainable-village
NAOM
As expected by serious observers, adaptation of the grid and operators is happening at a reasonable pace.
Out west, it is the fires that are the challenge.
Is it the lines collapsing or just the wires touching and sparking?
When hurricane Kenna struck the local grid operator cut all power in the town to avoid secondary damage and collateral damage. After the storm, as areas were declared safe they were reconnected. Seeing power on, traffic lights almost in the flood water and flashing like a disco in the USA storms seems totally crazy. Why on earth do the Americans keep power going in conditions that are totally contra-indications for electricity? People have even been electrocuted because of this.
NAOM
Last summer we had a nasty wind storm that put power out for days, took down a lot of trees. The repairman were fixing the lines further up the line but turned it on before checking my area. There were huge sparks along the line for hundreds of yards since the wires were compromised and wrapped around each other. Luckily the ground and vegetation was still wet and no fires started. Luck only.
Ouch!
I don’t know the details on that.
Just watched this
The science behind California’s surging wildfires (PBS NewsHour)
It seems we are truly living in an era of “unintended consequences”!
We have a similar problem brewing in the east with the Pine Barrens, the Poconos, the Appalachians, etc. Many people don’t realize it but numerous counties are near 90 percent forest cover. Buried among them are swaths of homes, the trees so tight it was hard to see the houses when I overflew some of the areas in a Cessna. Of course fire suppression is rampant.
One long drought and it’s rolling the dice. Luckily it’s generally wet in the east, but droughts do happen.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/will-americas-worst-wildfire-disaster-happen-in-new-jersey-34156/
“My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas
Not to worry, the cure is happening, first injections in the series.
GoneFishing,
Do you remember when the Pine Barrens actually were?
I canoe camped in them in the 70s and spent a lot of time there on land. Short trees, bog iron, abandoned towns, sandy roads. Lots of ticks. Never really liked flat country but the Pine Barrens are unique.
Only been on the edge of them in recent decades, for birding.
Will mostly go the way of things as the ocean rises, so visit soon. Too bad too since it contains a huge aquifer.
Yes indeed, a lot of ticks, and horse (or deer?) flies. And mosquitos by the ton. The water in those swamps looked like tea.
Beware the Greenheads.
GoneFishing,
Except for my first year of grad school in New England I’ve remained west of the Continental Divide largely because of the sorts of things you and Hickory have named.
Summer humidity plus the resulting blood-sucking organisms equals absence of Synapsid.
In my first 20 yrs, I had enough mosquito’s for a couple hundred yrs.
Put my girlfriend (when she graduated high school) in my VW and headed west. Only been bit a few times since.
Still been sucked on.
Sorry. Just recently watched a Coen Bros movie, and I tend to say all sorts of odd lines for weeks afterwards.
Maybe forever, my wife would say.
When I arrived and lived for a time in Vancouver, I was surprised at how few mosquitoes and blackflies there were relative to back east. As a relative newcomer to Nova Scotia, it has ticks, which I’d never experienced before until arriving out here. It has been only one main incident so far, and that was enough. I quite dislike the things. They’re really clingy too, and tough to smash to boot. (I tried to scrape one off a horse once but the horse would not have any part of it and so refused.) Deer flies are bad out here too in certain (deer-frequented?) areas at a certain time frame of the summer. If I have to deal with their turf again, I will probably try a bright-blue plastic hat and some ‘Tanglefoot’. He looks very distinguished.
An interesting option
https://uk.reuters.com/video/2018/11/18/blinds-harness-the-suns-energy-to-double?videoId=483718189&videoChannel=4000&channelName=Technology
NAOM
An energy loser.
Elon Musk says Australia’s energy emergency is easily fixable – Part one | 60 Minutes Australia
Elon Musk says Australia’s energy emergency is easily fixable – Part two | 60 Minutes Australia
Part two features quite a bit of footage on a boom in lithium mining in Western Australia. If the FF laggards would get out of the way in Australia, they could conceivably become a world power in lithium ion batteries, pun intended! For example, they could seek to have Tesla build a battery giga-factory in Australia.
I also found it interesting that Musk appeared visibly upset when the interviewer informed him that there were Australians living in energy poverty.
Yeah, they better get in on the lithium boom while it lasts.
BTC-USD
5,144.35
-470.91(-8.39%)
That game is becoming over, I think.
BTC-USD
4,694.79
-114.83(-2.39%)
Limits to growth?
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/limits-to-growth/
“What motivated this post was an extremely optimistic article by Michael Liebreich called The secret of eternal growth. The basic argument is that there is no real limit to growth and that we can utilise unlimited energy sources to both grow our economies and minimise our negative impacts on the environment. There are, however, a number of responses to this article. One by Tim Jackson, who is mentioned in Liebreich’s article, called how the light gets in, and another by Rob Dietz called the secret of eternal growth? It’s wishful thinking.”
Quite a good article on the Camp Fire. The article is a bit hard to follow without a map because of how complex the situation was/is.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-tictoc-20181118-story.html?outputType=amp&__twitter_impression=true
One thing that is so very hard to grasp is how these fires can travel. And jump.
Luckily in this fire, the road out was also away from the fire (heading SW). And its a good wide road.
Could have been much worse.
Many people live up access roads that are small and windy and crowded with people, some of whom are dimwitts, and many of whom are too old to be driving well. And sometimes the roads will head right towards the fire.
I am 140 miles away, and still the smoke is reducing visibility to about 200 yards. 200 thick, strange orange, burnt smelling yards.
Supposed to get first rains in N. Calif Tuesday night.
First since mid-spring. Bring it!
Yep, bring it on—
As a former resident of Marin, it is a disaster waiting to happen.
Lost some things in the Santa Rosa fire, and two houses I formally lived in were lost in Santa Barbara.
Interesting factoid, the earlier western Canada fires dimmed the sunlight over Western Europe by more than 20 times compared to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 92. A lot of the particles made it into the stratosphere.
Auke Hoekstra just tweeted the 2018 revision of his graphic (below)
Solar PV continues to grow exponentially and again, the IEA is having none of it!
I count 13 times that the IEA has been demonstrably out of touch, with one more year to find out how this year’s projection is going to fare. Looking at this years projection, it appears they have learned nothing from their past errors!
You can include a lot of people in that “out of touch” category. A large and sometimes quite wealthy and influential component of the population has lot to lose as renewables, EV’s, and efficiency increase. At least they think they have a lot to lose.
This is hilarious though, at this point it is like denying airplanes can fly at the end of WWI. Soon there were more and more and more. Now they occupy much of the sky.
This massive error of analysis by very large numbers of people and very large organizations creates investment opportunities for those who know what’s going on.
“Trump wants to Make Climate Great Again. His plan: deny climate science, lower fuel economy and emissions standards for vehicles, pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, silence government scientists, and rake the forests.”
City in the sky.
The average number of people aboard flying aircraft at any given moment is over 1 million in almost 10,000 planes.
https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/number-of-planes-in-air
People are paying a lot of money to be strapped to a chair in the stratosphere.
Walking or boating is much more educational and healthy.
Why covering the environment is one of the most dangerous beats in journalism
By Eric Freedman
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/why-covering-the-environment-is-one-of-the-most-dangerous-beats-in-journalism/
Covering the environment is one of the most hazardous beats in journalism. According to one estimate, 40 reporters around the world died between 2005 and September 2016 because of their environmental reporting — more than were killed covering the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Environmental controversies often involve influential business and economic interests, political battles, criminal activities, anti-government insurgents or corruption. Other factors include ambiguous distinctions between “journalist” and “activist” in many countries, as well as struggles over indigenous rights to land and natural resources. In both wealthy and developing countries, journalists covering these issues find themselves in the cross-hairs. Most survive, but many undergo severe trauma, with profound effects on their careers.
As one example, in 2013, Rodney Sieh, an independent journalist in Liberia, disclosed a former agriculture minister’s involvement in a corrupt scheme that misused funds earmarked to fight the parasitic, infectious Guinea worm disease. Sieh was sentenced to 5,000 years in prison and fined $1.6 million for defamation. He served three months in Liberia’s most notorious prison before an international outcry pressured the government into releasing him.
In the same year, Canadian reporter Miles Howe was assigned to cover protests by the Elsipotog First Nation in New Brunswick against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Howe worked for an independent online news organization that sought to spotlight unreported and underreported stories.
“Many times, I was the only accredited journalist witnessing rather violent arrests, third-trimester pregnant women being locked up, guys tackled to the ground,” he recalls. Howe was arrested multiple times, and during one protest, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pointed him out and shouted, “He’s with them!” His equipment was seized, and police searched his home. They also offered to pay him for providing information about upcoming “events” — in other words, spying on the protesters.
GREENHOUSE GASSES TRIGGERING MORE CHANGES THAN WE CAN HANDLE
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-greenhouse-gasses-triggering.html#nRlv
In a systematic review of thousands of papers, the study details 467 ways of how these hazards have already impacted human health, including death, disease and mental well-being; food supply from animals and plants on land and sea; quantity and quality of freshwater; infrastructure including electricity, transportation and “life line” services such as water and sewage lines, and economic losses including property damage and reduced labor productivity; all while triggering multiple cases of migrations and violence. Over 3,000 documented case examples, with supporting papers, are listed at http://impactsofclimatechange.info/.
“Greenhouse gas emissions pose a broad threat to humanity by simultaneously intensifying many hazards that have proven harmful in the past,” said lead author Camilo Mora, associate professor of geography in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa “Further, we predict that by 2100 the number of hazards occurring concurrently will increase, making it even more difficult for people to cope.”
MAJOR NATURAL CARBON SINK MAY SOON BECOME CARBON SOURCE
Peatlands in northwest Peru remain nearly intact, but this is isn’t the case in most places with significant peat stocks, which are being cleared to make room for agriculture. Peatlands in some parts of the world, including Canada, Siberia and Southeast Asia, have already turned into significant carbon sources. The same fate may be coming soon for the Peruvian peatlands.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-major-natural-carbon-source.html#jCp
RESEARCHERS FIND SOURCE OF DEADLY 2015 SOUTHEAST ASIA SMOKE CLOUD
… Combining this analysis with atmospheric modeling of the movement of smoke plumes from the fall 2015, the team sleuthed out the source of the hazardous cloud: smoldering peat on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The findings were published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our research shows that almost all of the smoke emissions originated from the burning of Holocene-aged peat,” …
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-source-deadly-southeast-asia-cloud.html#jCp
Concerning the first two phys.org links, frankly a lot of the past dire predictions and correlations concerning greenhouse gases have been busts. Looking back at the worldwide “climate research conferences” of the 80’s and 90’s that brought together top climate researchers leading to work on the Kyoto Protocol is bemusing in a way today, for seeing all the predictions and certainty of immediate threats during the 1990’s and 2000’s that ended up not happening. The convenience prognosticators have always had, of course, is that anything bad will happen “some time down the road” and we’ll regret it, but there’s no way to be sure until we get there. Scientists should learn how to not chase after fads and not fall in to the easy trap of confirmation bias.
Utter bollocks. Can continued cognitive dissonance like this actually drive people nuts in the long run?
Dunno bout dat but the day may yet arrive when some of these morons will die miserable slow deaths because of climate change… no food and water plus lethal wet bulb temperatures might be Karma enough.
Hope you live a long long life and personally experience many of the climate change related horrors you can’t even imagine yet, you pathetic little denialist piece of trolling trash.
Let’s continue burning those fossil fuels and mining the shit out of the planet for those windmills and solar panels and other useless trinkets while some of you can get a solar panel ass tattoo with its bar code just below, assuming of course you haven’t already.
Here you go Caelan, something to listen to.
Tim Watkins: “We’ve Already Gone Past that Wile. E. Coyote Moment Where We’ve Gone Off the Cliff”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2XrSqwKjs0&t=525s
Thanks. I’m on the road, so I’ll download it for later.
In the absence of “windmills and solar panels” and might I add electric vehicles, what would CM pick on? Those fossil fuels are going to be burned and just so you know, every wind turbine, solar panel and EV produced using the energy produced by burning fossil fuel, lessens the likelihood that fossil fuels will have to be burned at some point in the future.
We all know that, but
Yep, every PV panel, wind turbine and EV is reducing the burning of fossi fuels. That is why the fossil fuel industries and the power generation industries are in such a panic. They spend huge amounts of time, money and political favors to try and stem their obvious and inevitable demise.
Avalanches start small then get bigger and faster.
Since We’re Fucked, Shall We Act Fucked?
Burn fossil fuels now in the face of increasingly dangerous climate change and other detrimental global changes later? So you want it both ways then? Increase the risk (and rationalize it away) of burning down the house now so that it’s too late to do anything about it later, but at least you’ll have PV-tech then, if not a viable planet?
You do realize that in order to have a functioning pseudoeconomy– a ‘heat engine’– that is able to run long enough to produce PV’s and the like and pay the working people to buy them, we need to continue to burn fossil fuels and to destroy/pollute the planet, right?
Do you guys sleep at night or am I missing something here?
Refresh your browser.
People, such as via their backgrounds like science and engineering and whatnot, rationalize away their dubious actions and sell themselves and their planet out/short all the time. It’s nothing new.
Which fossil fuels? The ones you might be helping to burn?
This is an energy/peak oil/collapse site, Alan.
“Employees dump toxic waste into rivers and oceans.
Employees slaughter cows and perform experiments on monkeys.
Employees throw away truckloads of food.
Employees are destroying the ozone layer.
They watch your every move through security cameras.
They evict you when you don’t pay your rent.
They imprison you when you don’t pay your taxes.
They humiliate you when you don’t do your homework or show up to work on time.
They enter information about your private life into credit reports and FBI files.
They give you speeding tickets and tow your car.
They administer standardized exams, juvenile detention centers, and lethal injections.
The soldiers who herded people into gas chambers were employees,
Just like the soldiers occupying Iraq and Afghanistan,
Just like the suicide bombers who target them—they are employees of God, hoping to be paid in paradise.” ~ crimethinc
As I walk around I can tell the unoccupied houses by their still having snow on the north or shady side of the roof. All the heated houses have no snow. Has doubled lately.. The edges are fraying. Demise and disintegration by degree.
Alex, have you asked yourself-
‘is there any particular threshold or event that would cause me to change my conclusion on greenhouse warming?’
For most people who don’t believe it is a problem, there probably is some level of disruption that would make them change their conclusion.
I think that for many of them, it would take an incredible catastrophe, and at that point it would be far too late to take action to avoid such catastrophe.
‘Give me proof’ says you. ‘Proof is too late’ says I.
There may not be proof but there is tons of circumstantial evidence!
Anyways skip the proof, just pass the pudding…
You don’t seem to understand the meaning of “467 ways of how these hazards have already impacted human health” ie past tense not a prediction. These are things that are going on right now.
NAOM
Amazing how one can put up a good article or post and get no comments but as soon as one of the villagers show up, the attraction cannot be resisted.
Well guys, the proof is in the pudding and even the scientists think so.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/
Well guys, the proof is in the pudding and even the scientists think so.
When dog bites man it does not tend to elicit as much of a response as when man bites dog. So, when the villagers finally get it, then more of us might sit up and take notice…?
Cheers!
On the other hand things might be shaping up to the point that I can finally sue the state goverment of Florida for damages due to their extreme negligence and have some hope of winning my case!
Should be fun!
Well, what’s way more appealing for most people to look at, a car crash or a scientificy research paper?
Definitely a research paper. If you like car crashes volunteer for the local rescue squad for a while. Usually that cures people, except the sick and twisted ones.
Minor quibble, ‘have already impacted‘ is not merely simple past tense, it is past perfect…
Then there is this:
Over 3,000 documented case examples, with supporting papers, are listed at
http://impactsofclimatechange.info/.
Picky, picky!
Nice summary table but would be nicer if they had a key for what a blue tick means v red tick.
NAOM
Troll alert
Ignore the troll, probably a brainless bot anyway, and inform the 3rd party.
NAOM
Headline- “Bio jet fuels good for the climate”
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-bio-jet-fuels-good-climate.html
Freakin stupid humans.
Should say- ‘Aviation Biofuel may not be not quite as severely damaging to the climate, but nonetheless are an ecological catastrophe in many other ways’
There will be a distribution of responses, from the totally irresponsible to the very good and everything in between. Changes will be heavily promoted if they make a profitable business.
I don’t see any government agencies prepared to divert even smaller asteroids even though they can show up anytime. Is someone out there building a vehicle to land on and push an asteroid slightly?
http://thechiefobserver.com/770/two-giant-asteroids-to-make-a-close-approach-to-earth-on-tuesday/
As they are mostly tumbling or rotating, thrusting from a fixed point would not be effective let alone issues of attaching a thruster to such a low gravity body. Maybe a small nuke just far enough away not to disrupt it but close enough to vaporise some of the surface to give a thrust.
NAOM
No problem, it took me less than 3 minutes thinking to solve the thrust problems and the attachment problem (both axially and equatorially).
We already have the technology needed to acquire and soft land on one, so it’s just a matter of getting one there with the proper programming. Actually we should send four.
I’m confused. Push toward, or away from, earth?
A small push sideways would move the orbit away from Earth intersection if it was far enough away. One must eliminate future orbits that intersect with Earth but that is a secondary objective.
Here is one that uses a kinetic impact to shift the trajectory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-5J7iSLkkA
An impact on Ryugu might just create a shotgun effect. That would be better for atmospheric entry as lots of small rocks would be more likely to burn up but would probably do enough damage to satellites to render earth orbit unusable. That is why I am more in favour of vaporising one side of it. Mind you, a satellite with a powerful laser could do that as well.
It should be noted that landing and sticking to asteroids does not seem to be a proven technique as yet 🙂 .
NAOM
You need to understand physics and orbital mechanics. An impact is not an explosion, it imparts kinetic energy to the center of mass and even if the asteroid splits, it will tend to drift in a new combined vector.
However, it should be noted and that there are no fully proven techniques yet.
“Sticking” to an asteroid is easy. One does not even have to grab onto the asteroid.
Your idea of atomic weapons seems to come from sci-fi films where the answer is always nuke it. We can test that. Good way to get rid of those insane things.
Definitely NOT nuke it, how to shotgun the earth in 1 uneasy lesson. More like a low yield that will vaporise a layer off the surface. A few kilotons a few hundred meters away and let the radiation do the work. Should be quite doable with existing tech, just about everything needed is off the shelf. It also has the advantages that it can be used at short notice and reserve interdictors can be sent. OTOH sticking is not yet a proven art, little of the technology exists and would need sufficient time to work.
NAOM
You are hitting the rotating object with an intense pulse of radiation to melt an area and vent material out into space, using the melt as reaction material. How long is the venting, several hours, several days? What is the thrust rate and how controllable is it with different asteroid materials? How does the thrust not rotate with the asteroid?
Sounds like a recipe for an epic spiral event and lots of variables.
With a nuclear flash the venting should be fast, sublimation of the surface rather than a meltdown. Size and range of the device would need to be calculated by those who have the data to do that. Short, sharp pulse. If a sufficient thrust took place then any spinning probably won’t matter but I did note that several devices may need to be sent with the approach of each determined by the effect of the previous. As I mentioned a laser could also do the job with the ability to observe and refine but a much more complex mission probably needing a small space reactor to provide sufficient power, a long time to set up. If you only have 6 or 12 months then a nuclear pulse may the only option.
A further idea I have been considering is a satellite with motors either side giving opposing thrust. On one side the exhaust impinges on the asteroid moving it while the thruster on the other side of the satellite keep it in place. Rotation of the asteroid would not matter and no landing needed. A pig to set up and keep balanced though.
NAOM
Accelerate or decelerate too. A change of cms/second would be plenty if done early enough.
NAOM
Sure, we could make it a new moon and mine it. Or it could hit the moon instead. Talk about space debris.
Here’s something a bit off topic but, here goes:
I was searching for news on vitamin c to see if there was anything new to add to my body of knowledge on the vitamin. I have noticed that over the years my usual sources have sort of faded out of the picture. Instead searches including “vitamin c” seem to be unearthing a lot more negative pages, pages about studies showing vitamin c mega-doses to be ineffective or seeking to be debunk other views of the positive effects of the vitamin. All this negative stuff runs contrary to my personal experience with using vitamin C in doses way above the RDA.
I saw a name that I have not seen associated with the topic so I watched a video featuring a presentation by one Dr. Suzanne Humphries, MD to the Swedish Society for Orthomolecular Medicine. I am a big believer in orthomolecular medicine, a discipline that puts food and nutrition at the root of many medical problems and seeks to remedy many conditions with diet and/or vitamin/mineral supplements. Some aspects of it appear to be grounded in common sense scientific ideas while some borders on quackery. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two.
The video, Lecture on vitamin C by brilliant Suzanne Humphries had quite bit of material I have seen before and referenced quite a few familiar names. One of the most interesting aspects of the video was her criticism of the medical establishment for rejecting the science behind vitamin C without actually giving it a fair shot. Also interesting was her description of how she has been ttreated by the medical establishment for espousing the views that she does.
That brings me sort of back to energy. Her story reminds me of how the fossil fuel energy establishment looks at and relates to renewable energy. Renewable energy is looked at as if is not real energy sort of like vitamin based treatments are seen as not real medicine by the medical establishment. The FF establishment holds the view that renewable energy can never take the place of “real energy”, just like how the medical establishment holds the view that nutrition and supplement based medicine surely cannot work better than drug based medicine. In both instances it would seem that the status quo is actively deriding what they see as a threat to the staus quo. Not really surprising.
When you see something that supports the idea that, the stubbornness of the medical establishment may have contributed to a lack of measures that might have been able to prevent the death of your mother, it is particularly painful!
Come to think of it, “When you see something that supports the idea that, the stubbornness of the” FF energy “establishment may have contributed to a lack of measures that might have been able to prevent the death of your mother” (earth)”, it is particularly painful!
Linus Pauling was a big advocate of megadosing with vitamin C, it didn’t seem to harm him. Though the actual benefits of large doses have yet to be proven. Certainly a deficiency in vitamin C is a recipe for disaster.
Cheers!
Tons o’ disconfirmation here, if you’re interested.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=vitamin+c&category_name=&submit=Search
I taken megadoses of C for over 40 years.
I think I’m still alive—–
https://electrek.co/2018/11/20/oil-companies-republicans-kill-electric-vehicle-tax-credit/amp/
Oil companies officially ask Republicans to kill EV tax credit
Gee I wonder why?!
While the Lilliputians argue in their publically provided halls and offices, the public is slowly awakening to the facts and are eating away at the demand for fossil fuels.
Some states and cities are pro-renewable energy and efficiency too.
I live in an area that should be pick-up truck heaven but more than two thirds of the vehicles are cars and small SUVs (cars with a different body on them).
Of course even if all vehicles only became hybrids that would cut the use by about 50%, enough to eliminate all the non-profit producers and more. Of course the EV makers will notice the problem and stop pouring so much glitz into the cars, making them cheaper and more efficient, thus opening up the bigger lower end market.
Since the US is not the biggest market for EV’s this is not a global problem but the oilheads will push against it and the electric providers will be for it.
http://evadoption.com/ev-market-share/
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/the-global-electric-vehicle-market-is-amped-up-and-on-the-rise
? because parts of the rest of the world are killing fossil fueled vehicles?
The latest, British Columbia to ban non-EVs by 2040.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-britishcolumbia-electric-vehic/british-columbia-moves-to-phase-out-non-electric-car-sales-by-2040-idUSKCN1NP2LG?il=0
China “New Energy Vehicle” requirements: ramping up from 10% requirement in 2019
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/15/chinas-nev-cap-trade-program-begins-january-1-will-it-make-china-the-leader-in-ev-manufacturing/
Israel Energy Ministry proposes to ban gasoline and diesel vehicles in 2030
https://www.autoblog.com/2018/10/09/israel-gasoline-diesel-vehicle-ban/
Germany passes resolution asking EU to ban ICE vehicles in 2030.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/future-cars/news/a31097/german-government-votes-to-ban-internal-combustion-engines-by-2030/
Hah, someone’s made a wiki page about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_banning_fossil_fuel_vehicles
n.b. some of these bans are not completely cast in concrete…