Climate Change

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...-make-landfall
.

Cute - but compare to Kos' front page, which is filled with soon-to-be-debunked (if not already so) Russia hacked US so-called-democracy! An act of war! hysteria. Apparently the Team D tribalists at Kos are highly selective in which agnotologies to mock as opposed to embace.

[kladner]

I don't give Kos any allegiance. I enjoy certain writers, and they have some favorite cartoonists.

[LaurV]

Not cute. People have a hundred reasons to "do something". Few reasons are really good, few are really silly. One can take the most stupid reasons, put them in a chart, and try to show that everybody who "does that something" is a moron. However, people are clever. At least, we do believe people are clever. OTOH, we understand that is only a cartoon...

Say, assume the climate is really warming up. But now we have another scenario, which tries to absolve us of any guilt for it ... Say that some event in the past (man caused, or not, like the WW2 or solar spots) caused the climate to heat to a point where the Siberian permafrost starts to unfreeze. This causes releasing into the atmosphere of millions of cubic metres of methane daily. Methane is trapped into the permafrost since hundred thousand years, and it is a lot of it there... And releasing it into the atmosphere causes more greenhouse effect, as the methane is more greenhousy (is that a word?) than carbon dioxide, etc. This is a cascade effect, and whatever we do, we cannot stop it.... (told you, you humans are puny ants... you believe that you are more significant that you really are...)

Combat that, scientifically! ...
Or... if not, then let's burn the methane...
Yarrr!!

[VictordeHolland]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Say, assume the climate is really warming up. But now we have another scenario, which tries to absolve us of any guilt for it ... Say that some event in the past (man caused, or not, like the WW2 or solar spots) caused the climate to heat to a point where the Siberian permafrost starts to unfreeze. This causes releasing into the atmosphere of millions of cubic metres of methane daily. Methane is trapped into the permafrost since hundred thousand years, and it is a lot of it there... And releasing it into the atmosphere causes more greenhouse effect, as the methane is more greenhousy (is that a word?) than carbon dioxide, etc. This is a cascade effect, and whatever we do, we cannot stop it.... (told you, you humans are puny ants... you believe that you are more significant that you really are...)

Combat that, scientifically! ...
Or... if not, then let's burn the methane...
Yarrr!!

Water Vapor actually causes almost 50% of the greenhouse effect, but it only remains in the atmosphere for a couple of days. BURN the WATER, uhmm, I mean FREEZE the WATER.

Global Warming Potential (GWP) is the unit you're looking for your greenhousy thingie I think. CH4 has more GWP than CO2 in a 20 year timeframe. Some fluoride compounds have very high GWPs (1000s of times CO2) . But the real underexposed gasses are NOx (at least untill the VolksWagen scandal). It is formed when fuel is combusted at high temperatures (for instance found in diesel engines) The nitrous oxides (NO, NO2, N2O etc) can be a heath hazard by themselves, but they also have GWP many times that of CO2. Ban the filthy diesels!

Bit offtopic, but on the subject of cars:
Best way forward for personal transportation is electric. From a excelent blog on the matter (sorry it's in Dutch) https://willemsenolivier.wordpress.c...ktrische-auto/

Indien 100% kolenstroom wordt gebruikt om de elektrische auto op te laden, veroorzaakt de elektrische auto, over de gehele levensduur, 4% minder CO2-uitstoot dan een vergelijkbare benzine of diesel auto (TNO, 14 July 2014).

Rough translation:

If 100% coal-fired power is used to charge a (battery powered) electric vehicle, than the electric car over its total life-cycle, produces 4% less CO2 emission than a comparable gasoline or diesel car. (TNO, 14 July 2014)

With the Dutch average energymix (355 grams CO2 per kWh ) a battery electric vehicle (BEV) produces 35% less CO2 emission over its total life-cycle (that includes production, 220 000 KM, maintenance and recycling) than a comparable gasoline/diesel car.

We should look more closely to Norway to see what is possible with the right (government) incentives: 27% of new cars being all-electric:
https://electrek.co/2017/07/04/elect...tesla-model-x/


Edit:
I forgot and don't care they're called wind-turbines in English: MOAARRR WINDMILLS!!!

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

Edit:
I forgot and don't care they're called wind-turbines in English: MOAARRR WINDMILLS!!!

Hehe, do you have any Romanian blood in your veins?
(more to say, but in hurry now, we will be back later)

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

I forgot and don't care they're called wind-turbines in English: MOAARRR WINDMILLS!!!

Well they're not exactly mills any more, are they?

[only_human]

EPA chief Scott Pruitt tells coal miners he will repeal power plant rule Tuesday: ‘The war against coal is over’

“Tomorrow, in Washington, D.C., I’ll be a signing a proposed rule to withdraw the so-called Clean Power Plan of the past administration, and thus begin the effort to withdraw that rule,” Pruitt said.

In a statement Monday, former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who shepherded the rule during Obama’s second term, said that a proposal to repeal it “without any timeline or even a commitment to propose a rule to reduce carbon pollution, isn’t a step forward, it’s a wholesale retreat from EPA’s legal, scientific and moral obligation to address the threats of climate change.”

“The Supreme Court has concluded multiple times that EPA is obligated by law to move forward with action to regulate greenhouse gases, but this administration has no intention of following the law,” McCarthy said.

Michael Greenstone, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who worked on climate policy for Obama, said in an interview Friday that the EPA had deliberately downplayed the benefits of curbing carbon to justify revoking the power-plant regulation.

“It does not feel like an effort to refresh the cost-benefit analysis to make sure it’s on the frontiers of science,” Greenstone said about the leaked proposal. “It seems like an effort to find the levers that will make the benefits go down.”

+++
There’s enough wind energy over the oceans to power human civilization, scientists say

“Over land, the turbines are just sort of scraping the kinetic energy out of the lowest part of the atmosphere, whereas over the ocean, it’s depleting the kinetic energy out of most of the troposphere, or the lower part of the atmosphere,” said Caldeira.

The study compares a theoretical wind farm of nearly 2 million square kilometers located either over the U.S. (centered on Kansas) or in the open Atlantic. And it finds that covering much of the central U.S. with wind farms would still be insufficient to power the U.S. and China, which would require a generating capacity of some 7 terawatts annually (a terawatt is equivalent to a trillion watts).

But the North Atlantic could theoretically power those two countries and then some. The potential energy that can be extracted over the ocean, given the same area, is “at least three times as high.”

It would take an even larger, 3 million square kilometer wind installation over the ocean to provide humanity’s current power needs, or 18 terawatts, the study found. That’s an area even larger than Greenland.

Hence, the study concludes that “on an annual mean basis, the wind power available in the North Atlantic could be sufficient to power the world.”

Alexander Slocum, an MIT mechanical engineering professor who has focused on offshore wind and its potential, and who was not involved in the research, said he considered the paper a “very good study” and that it didn’t seem biased.

“The conclusion implied by the paper that open ocean wind energy farms can provide most of our energy needs is also supported history: as a technology gets becomes constrained (e.g., horse drawn carriages) or monopolized (OPEC), a motivation arises to look around for alternatives,” Slocum continued by email. “The automobile did it to horses, the U.S. did it to OPEC with fracking, and now renewables are doing it to the hydrocarbon industry.”

[kladner]

The "war against coal" was mostly carried out by the Invisible Hand. Once fracked methane came online, there was no way for coal to compete.

The Mid-Atlantic wind farm reminds me of a similar concept of a solar farm in the Sahara powering all of Europe via HVDC (high voltage direct current) lines under the Mediterranean. Transmission is the real obstacle when lots of power is generated a long way away from the consumers.

[ewmayer]

Trump Picks Coal Industry Lobbyist to Help Lead EPA | Scientific American

As nauseating as one might expect from the headline and the fact of the top job at EPA having already gone to one Scott Pruitt:

[Senator and noted agnotologist James] Inhofe praised the selection of his “close friend” and former staffer for EPA’s No. 2 job.

“There is no one more qualified than Andrew to help Scott Pruitt restore EPA to its proper size and scope,” he said in a statement.
...
The Trump administration has pledged to bar appointees from working on issues that they lobbied on in the previous two years, but many top officials have been granted waivers.

White House energy official Mike Catanzaro, for example, received a waiver that allows him to work on broad energy and environmental policy issues, like the Clean Power Plan and other issues he focused on as a lobbyist. Catanzaro also worked on Inhofe’s EPW staff, joining the committee after Wheeler left in 2009.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Well they're not exactly mills any more, are they?

Devices which pump water from wells are universally called "windmills", at least in the States. I think that the Aeromotor is the most common. It has "windmill" in its name.

Also, all other sorts of things are called "mills," though they don't grind grain.
See: steel mill.

It seems that the big white things on tall towers are mostly called "turbines."

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kladner

Devices which pump water from wells are universally called "windmills", at least in the States. I think that the Aeromotor is the most common. It has "windmill" in its name.

Also, all other sorts of things are called "mills," though they don't grind grain.
See: steel mill.

It seems that the big white things on tall towers are mostly called "turbines."

The word "mill" has long had the meaning "processing engine". For instance, Charles Babbage called his Difference Engine's cpu its mill.