Climate Change

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by kladner

Devices which pump water from wells are universally called "windmills", at least in the States.

Language is such an interesting thing...

In North America wells are from where one pumps water from. In the Caribbean wells are where we dump our effluent.

This can become a bit of a problem when engineers from two different regions are working in the same space but don't communicate properly....

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by chalsall

In North America wells are from where one pumps water from. In the Caribbean wells are where we dump our effluent

oh? we were thinking that wells is where the time machine and war of the worlds come from...

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Language is such an interesting thing...

In North America wells are from where one pumps water from. In the Caribbean wells are where we dump our effluent.

This can become a bit of a problem when engineers from two different regions are working in the same space but don't communicate properly....

Sometimes, the two ideas become one. EPA Hurricane Maria Update for Wednesday, October 11th

There are reports of residents obtaining, or trying to obtain, drinking water from wells at hazardous waste “Superfund” sites in Puerto Rico. EPA advises against tampering with sealed and locked wells or drinking from these wells, as it may be dangerous to people’s health.

Of course, "may be dangerous to people's health" is as nothing compared to the prospect of dying of thirst...

[Dr Sardonicus]

It seems that, at least in the good ol' USA, the freeze season is getting shorter.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Sometimes, the two ideas become one. EPA Hurricane Maria Update for Wednesday, October 11thOf course, "may be dangerous to people's health" is as nothing compared to the prospect of dying of thirst...

It seems to me that drinking contaminated water and expiring from dysentery has the same cause as dying from no water: dehydration. Depending on what the contaminants are, drinking the bad stuff could lead to a more painful and prolonged expiration.

[Dr Sardonicus]

As covered, e.g. in this Ars Technica article, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume I is out. From the Executive Summary:

This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.

In addition to warming, many other aspects of global climate are changing, primarily in response to human activities. Thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor.
[...]
Global climate is projected to continue to change over this century and beyond. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases emitted globally and on the remaining uncertainty in the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to those emissions (very high confidence).

Prediction: the Admin will do everything it can to downplay and disregard the report.

[ewmayer]

One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week | Vice.com

Alex De Vries has come up with some estimates by diving into data made available on a coal-powered Bitcoin mine in Mongolia.

[He] estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to mine more Bitcoins.

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction — enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.

I asked de Vries whether it was possible for Bitcoin to scale its way out of this problem.

“Blockchain is inefficient tech by design, as we create trust by building a system based on distrust. If you only trust yourself and a set of rules (the software), then you have to validate everything that happens against these rules yourself. That is the life of a blockchain node,” he said via direct message.

Given the nature of the blockchain scheme, it's more appropriate to say that the issue is one of Bitcoin scaling its way *into* this problem. To paraphrase flamboyant O.J Simpson murder-trial defense attorney Johnny Cochran (he of "if it does not fit, you must acquit" fame w.r.to the bloody glove), "if it does not scale, it's bound to fail." But for now, the digital tulip mania is still going strong.

[kladner]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...kill-us-again/
This piece argues that the primary causes of mass extinctions are Large Igneous Provinces (LIP), such as the Deccan and Siberian Traps. These flood basalt eruptions can continue for millions of years. In the process they form "sills" which are underground magmatic intrusions.

These sills may encounter sedimentary rock, hydrocarbon-rich zones, and salt deposits. All of these produce vast gas releases. The sulfur, carbon, halogen, and metal emissions all affect the environment drastically.

Sulfuric acid rain of a concentration similar to battery acid damaged soil and killed sea creatures.

The halogens (chlorine, fluorine, etc.) lifted into the stratosphere, would have destroyed the ozone layer, adding harder radiation to the challenges life faced.

The upshot is to reinforce the idea that the Chicxulub impact was "frosting the cake" with regard to dinosaur extinction.

Our planet Earth has extinguished large portions of its inhabitants several times since the dawn of animals. And if science tells us anything, it will surely try to kill us all again. Working in the 19th century, paleontology pioneer Georges Cuvier saw dramatic turnovers of life in the fossil record and likened them to the French Revolution, then still fresh in his memory.
Today, we refer to such events as “mass extinctions,” incidents in which many species of animals and plants died out in a geological instant. They are so profound and have such global reach that geological time itself is sliced up into periods—Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous—that are often defined by these mass extinctions.
Debate over what caused these factory resets of life has raged ever since Cuvier’s time. He considered them to be caused by environmental catastrophes that rearranged the oceans and continents. Since then, a host of explanations have been proposed, including diseases, galactic gamma rays, dark matter, and even methane from microbes. But since the 1970s, most scientists have considered the likely root cause to be either asteroid impacts, massive volcanic eruptions, or a combination of both.

[ewmayer]

Re. the K-T event, I had a pet hypothesis (look for some thread hereabouts titled "antipodean arithmetic" or similar) about the curious near-contemporaneity of the Chicxulub impact the Deccan Traps flood-basalt eruptions in what is now India ... my surmise was that if the then-location of the Deccan Traps was near the antipode of the Chicxulub impact, geometric reconvergence of the resulting large-amplitude crustal surface waves might disrupt the continental crust sufficiently to allow a pre-existing bubble of hot magma to erupt on a massive scale. Alas, the plate movement reconstructions over that period don't place the Indian plate anywhere near the antipode 65Ma ago, but mayhap there is still a connection, just a less-obvious one.

The earlier and even-worse P-T extinction is believed to be causally associated with the Siberian Traps flood basalts, no evidence of any extraterrestrial impactor there, so ar as is known.

[kladner]

Here is mention in the Deccan Traps Wiki of connection between the traps, the asteroid, and the extinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps

There is some evidence to link the Deccan Traps eruption to the asteroid impact which created the Chicxulub crater in the Mexican state of Yucatán. Although the Deccan Traps began erupting well before the impact, argon-argon dating suggests that the impact may have caused an increase in permeability that allowed magma to reach the surface and produced the most voluminous flows, accounting for around 70% of the volume.[19] The combination of the asteroid impact and the resulting increase in eruptive volume may have been responsible for the mass extinctions that occurred at the time that separates the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods, known as the K–Pg boundary.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

The earlier and even-worse P-T extinction is believed to be causally associated with the Siberian Traps flood basalts, no evidence of any extraterrestrial impactor there, so ar as is known.

The Wilkes Land crater may be of interest in that regard.

BTW, I modified the URL in the quoted portion to make it work...