Alert readers will have noticed the fewer-than-normal postings over the last couple of weeks. This is related mostly to pressures associated with real work (remember that we do have day jobs). In my case, it is because of the preparations for the next IPCC assessment and the need for our group to have a functioning and reasonably realistic climate model with which to start the new round of simulations. These all need to be up and running very quickly if we are going to make the early 2010 deadlines.
But, to be frank, there has been another reason. When we started this blog, there was a lot of ground to cover – how climate models worked, the difference between short term noise and long term signal, how the carbon cycle worked, connections between climate change and air quality, aerosol effects, the relevance of paleo-climate, the nature of rapid climate change etc. These things were/are fun to talk about and it was/is easy for us to share our enthusiasm for the science and, more importantly, the scientific process.
However, recently there has been more of a sense that the issues being discussed (in the media or online) have a bit of a groundhog day quality to them. The same nonsense, the same logical fallacies, the same confusions – all seem to be endlessly repeated. The same strawmen are being constructed and demolished as if they were part of a make-work scheme for the building industry attached to the stimulus proposal. Indeed, the enthusiastic recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead and buried has been given a huge boost by the publication of a new book by Ian Plimer who seems to have been collecting them for years. Given the number of simply made–up ‘facts’ in that tome, one soon realises that the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared. This is troubling – and although there is certainly a role for some to point out the incoherence of such arguments (which in that case Tim Lambert and Ian Enting are doing very well), it isn’t something that requires much in the way of physical understanding or scientific background. (As an aside this is a good video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it).
The Onion had a great piece last week that encapsulates the trajectory of these discussions very well. This will of course be familiar to anyone who has followed a comment thread too far into the weeds, and is one of the main reasons why people with actual, constructive things to add to a discourse get discouraged from wading into wikipedia, blogs or the media. One has to hope that there is the possibility of progress before one engages.
However there is still cause to engage – not out of the hope that the people who make idiotic statements can be educated – but because bystanders deserve to know where better information can be found. Still, it can sometimes be hard to find the enthusiasm. A case in point is a 100+ comment thread criticising my recent book in which it was clear that not a single critic had read a word of it (you can find the thread easily enough if you need to – it’s too stupid to link to). Not only had no-one read it, none of the commenters even seemed to think they needed to – most found it easier to imagine what was contained within and criticise that instead. It is vaguely amusing in a somewhat uncomfortable way.
Communicating with people who won’t open the book, read the blog post or watch the program because they already ‘know’ what must be in it, is tough and probably not worth one’s time. But communication in general is worthwhile and finding ways to get even a few people to turn the page and allow themselves to be engaged by what is actually a fantastic human and scientific story, is something worth a lot of our time.
Along those lines, Randy Olson (a scientist-turned-filmmaker-and-author) has a new book coming out called “Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style” which could potentially be a useful addition to that discussion. There is a nice post over at Chris Mooney’s blog here, though read Bob Grumbine’s comments as well. (For those of you unfamiliar the Bob’s name, he was one of the stalwarts of the Usenet sci.environment discussions back in the ‘old’ days, along with Michael Tobis, Eli Rabett and our own William Connolley. He too has his own blog now).
All of this is really just an introduction to these questions: What is it that you feel needs more explaining? What interesting bits of the science would you like to know more about? Is there really anything new under the contrarian sun that needs addressing? Let us know in the comments and we’ll take a look. Thanks.
“Now that you mention it, Mark, native bee species in the American West are also declining fast”
And bees are the second biggest killer in Australia.
Look, you obviously feel VERY strongly about that whole birdies being whomped thing. Rather like James feels VERY strongly about that whole “Nuclear power” thing.
Notice something?
You are annoyed by James’ continued harping on about things that you think are not important or over-hyped or under-represented.
And so are others.
James is annoyed by your continued harping on about things that he things are not important or over-hyped or under-represented.
And so are others.
So take that rod out your backside and _relax_.
“Yes, I care about conservation. Yes, I know you don’t.”
Uhm, you’re not the “baseline” of caring about conservation. The minimum required standard to care about nature. That you consider anyone LESS concerned about conservation than you as not caring AT ALL about it shows your arrogance.
You know what?
Are you worried about the intended extermination of Bilharzia? The poor little snail that just wants to live?
No?
Well, you must not care about conservation as much as you think.
Are you paying to get woods back into the Scottish Highlands, so it gets back to it’s original pristine state?
No?
Well, you must not care about conservation as much as you think.
I do care about the natural system.
I don’t care as much as you.
But in my opinion (and in many others) you care on a level over neurosis over the natural system.
Mark Says (23 June 2009 at 3:06 AM):
“James, forecast and evidence are two different things.
Do you accept that?”
No, I don’t accept that, certainly not in the context of the question that I asked – which I notice you still haven’t even tried to answer.
After all, there are many different kinds of forecast, from those of Nostradamus to NASA’s forecasts of solar eclipses: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html They may either be products of imagination, or based on scientific evidence. So, as I keep asking, where’s your evidence? If I don’t see any, I’ll just have to keep discounting your forecasts as products of an overactive imagination :-)
[edit]
Barton Paul Levenson Says (23 June 2009 at 5:55 AM):
“Because that does less damage than the alternatives. Duh.”
But it doesn’t. Even leaving out nuclear power (to avoid more fruitless repetition), it seems quite obvious that the alternative of putting solar panels on existing roofs (or over parking areas, etc) would have essentially no additional impact on the land.
Mark Says (23 June 2009 at 7:48 AM):
“It’s “rhetoric”, James. daghoza has a bee in his bonnet about the poor little burdies. What he feels about bees confined to bonnets is anyone’s guess…”
I know it’s rhetoric. Your rhetoric, employed to try to persuade people to give credence to your lie, that there is plenty of land to spare.
Patrick 027 Says (23 June 2009 at 12:35 AM):
“For solar panels, the median energy density (MJ/kg)… 340.4 times coal electricity.”
Nice to see someone else try to do actual numbers! But a couple of questions/niggles:
“…might be replaceable in part by Fe or Al (average crustal abundances of 5 % and 8 %, respectively).”
But crustal abundance is not the same as economically recoverable ore. Consider aluminium…
“But if that is in the ballpark, it suggests that less mining disturbance would be required to produce solar power than coal electricity.”
I don’t doubt that at all. But the question is really nuclear vs solar/wind. If you’re looking at just uranium vs cadmium, tellurium, and other rare elements that go into solar cells, then (with good practice) either should produce orders of magnitude less disturbance than coal mining.
“…the amount that could be obtained from copper reserves would allow CdTe solar technology to supply about 0.037 TW of power…”
Which I think would be less than existing suitable roof area?
James, 704.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that just because I disagree with you over your stance on nuclear that I will disagree with you over everything.
Well, guess: I don’t disagree with you on this, I disagree with dag.
But when you read it again, you’ll not jump to erroneous conclusions again, yes?
““James, forecast and evidence are two different things.
Do you accept that?”
No, I don’t accept that, certainly not in the context of the question that I asked – which I notice you still haven’t even tried to answer.”
Because we haven’t yet got a common ground. You don’t agree that evidence and forecast are different words.
[edit – lets try to keep this civil]
Ray (695), then why shouldn’t the conclusion be, “we therefore expect the temperature to increase” — nothing more definitive than that.
Tom Fulller at the SF Examiner has a new multi-part series that channels Watts and Lomborg:
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner
Figures. James says the land between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies is, essentially, crowded, basing this apparently on dividing the area of the US by its population, and his personal experience in one particularly heavily populated portion of the Sierra Nevada slope.
On the other hand, having worked and lived out in the Great Basin for months at a time, I speak from personal experience and state that this isn’t true.
RichardC is correct about the “zillions” (which I doubt he meant to be interpreted as a precise term) of unpopulated land, though he’s incorrect to claim it’s “pristine” as most of our arid and semi-arid lands have been hammered quite hard.
Here’s a photo of Nevada’s Antelope Valley, looking west from the Goshute Mountains. The near range, the Pequops, is about 30 miles distance, the far range, the Ruby Mountains, about 80, to give you some sense of scale. There’s not a permanent resident that I’m aware of in the Antelope Valley, and only a few dozen in the valley separating the Pequops and Rubies. The Antelope Valley’s been subjected to grazing in the past (they may still graze sheep there today), and has an unreasonably high number of feral horses (which the BLM hasn’t been able to figure out how to control, trying everything from rounding them up for auction to shooting the mares with contraceptive darts).
A few more people live here, but it’s hardly overrun with houses.
There’s plenty of room in the west to site solar plants without building them on top of relatively untouched areas of high ecological value. It’s a political issue, not a geographical one.
Unfortunately, politics virtually ensures that the worst sites are among the most likely to be chosen, as Hank stated above, and as I’m sure Dave Foreman will be pointing out in his upcoming e-mail essay.
“Figures. James says the land between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies is, essentially, crowded,”
And you said zillions of acres were needed.
[edit – behave or don’t post]
“# Rod B Says:
23 June 2009 at 12:00 PM
Ray (695), then why shouldn’t the conclusion be, “we therefore expect the temperature to increase” — nothing more definitive than that.”
Because we can say more than that.
“Jim Bouldin, Thanks. It does sound like a nonsensical stretch, though. How about the lettuce cause, since farmers need their salad to keep working? :-P
Rod, not sure I follow on the lettuce analogy. If it were possible to both keep fertilizer from washing out of the soil, and apply exactly the right amount, then it would be a stretch, because that’s the proximate cause. But since it’s not possible, the two are related, because industrial ag promotes the use of mucho fertilizer.
captcha: cement Minnesota. Would certainly increase the albedo but seems a tad extreme at this point.
Huh? If that’s the take-home message you’re getting from me, either you’ve misunderstood me, or I’m guilty of not expressing myself clearly.
I did say this, above:
That’s not a statement that “zillions” of acres are needed, but rather that we have “zillions” of acres of heavily impacted lands to choose from.
See the difference?
[edit – no more insults please]
Well, mark, I’ve looked over each use of the word “zillion” in my posts, and can’t see where I said this.
Can you please cut and paste the sentence in which I made this claim?
[edit – please stay substantive and avoid pointless bickering]
dag: “The fact that RichardC wants to argue that most of our desert lands are “pristine”, and that industrial-scale development of solar power will “enhance biodiversity” in desert environments, doesn’t make him right, and science wrong.”
RichardC wants to argue thet the desert lands are pristing.
Have you asked what his basis for this is?
It’s not unaffected by us even if we NEVER SET FOOT THERE (or any other part of our anatomy). Not only AGW, but the removal of groundwater so that parts of Texas have sunk several feet because the water isn’t in the rocks any more.
And please prove that biodiversity will ONLY be harmed no matter HOW you manage the installation?
Here are ways it could be better:
1) Removal of a small fraction of the solar energy reduces the temperature by a small amount (OK, maybe real small).
2) Shade where there was none.
3) New habitats. See the effect of urbanisation on many rural species like, say, foxes or raccoons.
4) We don’t add MORE AGW. How boned will they be under “business as usual”?
5) Removal of redundant infrastructure. When we no longer have uranium ore moved by raid, no more nuclear waste to hide away, we don’t need the railroad. Pick it up and recycle. We don’t need to push nuclear waste under Yucca mountain (or other places until the decision is made where to hide it).
6+) Others.
Now it IS necessary for a voice that cries out WAAAAAY over the far side of sanity on the side of the little burdies. But mostly because we have voices crying out WAAAAAY over the other side of sanity telling us “it doesn’t matter, it’s cheaper and you’re all trying to get us to the Stone age, you econazi hippie treehuggers”.
It’s only by recognising the extremes we can say “the compromise is between them”.
And based on the voice strength “pro-business” it will be further away toward the protective burdies side. Whether it gets there depends on whether we RECOGNISE the extremes and have the strength to fight them.
BOTH OF THEM.
And even if the dessert gets decided as the place, would you throw your toys in the pram because it’s a terrible thing? Or would you be better checking that whatever is done there is done in the best way possible. E.g. not running unarmoured cables overground carrying current.
Mark @ 711:
[edit – pointless bickering removed]
At my latitude, and assuming fixed orientation, 1MW from polycrystaline panels is about 5 1/2 acres. To produce the 900GW of available capacity in the States would take about 24 million acres or 37,500 square miles, or a chunk of land about 610 miles on a side. There are states in this country that aren’t 610 miles on a side. If that’s not a “zillion acres”, I’m not sure what is.
James @ 705:
Well, it can be calculated, you know.
37GW is about 9 billion square feet. Yeah, a lot less than the available roof area.
manacker, Mark, Ike (and others)
The amount of CO2 released per kWh of nuclear or renewables is hardly interesting. Why? Because as more and more fossil power plants are being replaced by nuclear or renewables, the generation mix will change and less and less CO2 will be released in solar panel production or uranium enrichment, etc.
A thought experiment: envision a future of your liking with 100% electricity generation by either nuclear or renewables. All factories, mining equipment, cars, offices, etc run on electricity. Where then are the 34 grams or whatever amount of CO2 per kWh emitted?
CO2 emissions for both renewables and nuclear are a transient issue.
dhogaza wrote: “If you think you and I have different views, quote something specific I’ve said, please, that would support that conclusion.”
When I responded to your comment that you are “not at all convinced that there’s going to be much attention paid to siting issues”, I was not disagreeing or arguing.
I agree that siting issues are very important. I only meant to say that the amount of attention paid to siting issues is, at least in part, a function of people who care about siting issues demanding that attention be paid to them.
And, that there is so much land available for siting wind and solar where negative impacts on ecosystems and animals would be minimal, that there is really no need to put them in vulnerable and/or “pristine” locations.
James wrote: “So wouldn’t it be fair to give the same scrutiny to the mines that produce all the materials that go into PV cells (some interesting heavy metals there) …”
Well, here’s an interesting observation along those lines, from Martin Roscheisen, the CEO of Nanosolar:
“CO2 emissions for both renewables and nuclear are a transient issue.”
Uh, nope. Unless you’re putting your nuclear piles right next to the uranium mines.
Which is possible in Sim City.
Real life isn’t quite as nice to us…
However, it’s easy to place solar where the sun shines. Putting it where the sun shines not is the hard part!
The CO2 GHE per Hansen et al. (1988) is plotted here.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3607/3655295608_8fbf2cedce_b.jpg
PeterMartin (684) — Here is how BPL approximates planetary atmosphere temperatures:
Greenhouse101
http://www.geo-cities.com/bpl1960/NewPlanetTemps.html
(copy into your browser window and remove the – in geo-cities. For some reason the span filter is perjudiced again said site.)
For Charney sensitivity of about 3 K, appeal to IPCC AR4 WG1.
Don’t let the purveyors of FUD lead you around!
{but reCAPTCHA knows about the spam filter, “mailbox Police”.]
SecularAnimist: thanks, we’re in total agreement. Mark’s repetitive and intentional misrepresentation of my posts, combined with his constant abusiveness, has me a bit tetchy, I guess.
The desert is where they will, and should, go.
I have never said otherwise.
I also support wind power, and have never said anything to the contrary.
Please stop misrepresenting my views and using your misrepresentation as the basis for hurling a stream of personal abuse and insults my way.
Thank you.
Mark,
The point is that once all CO2 emission sources have been replaced with non-CO2 emitting energy supplies, it really just won’t matter where anything is, from a transportation perspective — by definition, that transportation will then be CO2 neutral. The giant trucks at the mines will be running on biodiesel, the employees will commute to work in electric cars, the processing plants will be running on green electricity, etc.
OK, I see what you’re saying now.
As long as we get electric EVERYTHING.
“The desert is where they will, and should, go.”
And with increasing CO2, they will go places they’ve not been for 300 million years!!!
Yeah, that’ll help.
Mark, Reur 694 of 23 June 2009 at 7:44 AM, in response to Manacker’s 693, 23 June 2009 at 7:13 AM , you wrote in part:
Here is a summary of Max’s post:
It contained 1045 words & 5 links.
It was an interesting summary concerning CO2 footprints of various methods of electricity generation, that took into account the plant production investment levels, payback, and lifetime/ maintenance/ replacement considerations etc. (for instance concrete and steel whatever CO2 footprints in creating the plant)
Here three questions for you:
1) How did you manage to digest his very substantial post, and then compose and then post your response in only ~31 minutes. That is, if there was zero lag in you picking up the arrival of his post… so it was more likely even less than 31 minutes?
2) Do you have any problems with the information that he supplied?
3) What provoked your blast: “But then if AGW is all a pack of lies by thousands of scientists worldwide”? What part of Max’s post had anything to do with that part of your response?
Martin,
Thank you for the reference. I should make it clear that the logarithmic approximation of CO2, for all practical levels, with temperature isn’t in dispute. Its just that I’ve asked the question of what would happen if CO2 levels were very low. Almost zero even. It is obvious that the relationship would no longer be logarithmic, even as an approximation, and that there must be a linear region at low concentrations. You’ve said that the logarithmic region is above 1ppmv. Incidentally, Gavin Schmidt suggested, in a personal correspondence, that the logarithmic region was approximately 100ppmv to 1000ppmv. I’ll keep looking into it.
At least we have established that there is a linear region. I can’t see how it can be a silly or controversial topic!
I’ve advocated renewable energy and energy conservation for over thirty years now, made a point of visiting Solar One on my next trip to the Mojave after it was built and put online (and as far as I knew then, and to my knowledge today, the site just outside Barstow and near Interstate 40 was a fine choice), etc.
Nothing I’ve posted warrants this snark.
In regard to global warming, you and I are on the same side. As I said above, quit bashing me over the head for positions I don’t hold.
[edit]
OK, dag, so where do we put those replacements for coal power stations?
You seem to be set on saying “no” to deserts, so where?
[Response: Conversations generally go more smoothly if people are listened too, rather than assuming what they might have said. Unless the tone of this conversation improves (with perhaps a little time out), I’m going to shut this thread down. Bickering is not what we are here for. – gavin]
dhogaza says, “Mark’s repetitive and intentional misrepresentation of my posts, combined with his constant abusiveness, has me a bit tetchy, I guess.”
and
“RichardC is correct about the “zillions” (which I doubt he meant to be interpreted as a precise term) of unpopulated land, though he’s incorrect to claim it’s “pristine” as most of our arid and semi-arid lands have been hammered quite hard.”
Goose and gander for sure. Scroll up and see how many times I’ve said that the typical US desert land is not pristine. How close to pristine is debatable; what you call hammered I might call not bad, but for the purposes of this debate we both are saying close to the same thing: For any rational mix of energy sources, the part produced by solar can be done without undue harm to deserts, assuming it is done in a sane fashion. Perhaps adding 10 acres to fully protected lands for each acre of solar might keep everyone happy.
(and yes, “zillions” translates to “a lot”. It has no specific order of magnitude)
I suspect this is true, though “sane” isn’t a fair description of our traditional energy and development policies on desert lands. I’m hopeful that the Obama administration won’t put the conservation community in the position of having to sue to force proper adherence to the ESA, NEPA etc while siting decisions are being made.
I have no expectation that industry’s going to pay any attention whatsoever to ecosystem conservation values unless they’re hit over the head with a hammer, though. Just my personal opinion based on being personally involved in conservation since the 1970s.
There are all sorts of possible solutions that would make conservationists happy, but there are many other stakeholders, including the extremely vocal ORV crowd. Someone’s going to be unhappy, that’s a certainty.
The LA exurbs out in the Mojave would be perfect, and there’s even an existing road network available for hauling construction materials, some of the housing could be preserved for workers, etc! You wouldn’t find a single conservationist in the West opposed to replacing these exurbs with solar power plants … :)
The Victorville Solar Plant .. not a bad idea at all!
(I’m joking … sort of)
At 717, FurryCatHerder said
Those numbers seem off to me.
900GW = 900,000MW
5.5 acres * 900,000 = 4,950,000 acres for 900 MW
4,950,000 acres / 640 acres/sq mile = 7,734 sq miles
Which is less than 90 miles squared.
Re: 735, dhogaza Says:
“The Victorville Solar Plant .. not a bad idea at all!
“(I’m joking … sort of)”
Actually, there already is a Victorville Solar Plant coming on line:
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/victorville/
Captcha calls it “subsidized up”
and a Victorville 2 Hybrid Power Project under review (although my contact at the California Energy Commission says this will be 10 percent solar and 90 percent natural gas).
http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/victorville2/documents/
Jim Bouldin, Sorry, I was too cute which made it too obtuse. I was questioning fossil fuels being thrown on the pile for causing dead zones. (I understand the other causes.) In essence the logic was that farmers need petrol to run their machines to spread the fertilizer for example. That seemed a long stretch. My analogy (also a stretch to make a point) was that the farmer has to eat his vegetables for the strength to drive the tractor to spread the fertilizer. Ergo veggies get thrown on the pile of dead zone causes.
(this lengthy explanation is not worth the point…) ;-)
FurryCatHerder, but not to be sneezed at. 37,500 square miles is about the size of the whole state of Virginia. Your watts/m2 sounds pretty good, though does that allow for non-peak production? And how much land for the storage systems?
James – my point about average crustal abundances was that however much ore we use up, we will never (in the foreseeable future) need to use ore at any grade below that average crustal abundance. So we would never need more than 125 kg of aluminum ore to get 10 kg of aluminum.
Although I think the resources of Al and Fe are actually quite large (see USGS mineral yearbooks and … etc.) so it would be a long long long time before we’d ever get to that point – perhaps never (recycling).
Yes, I don’t think CdTe would supply more than a few percent of world electricity, but that’s still a huge market and important contribution. Then there’s CIGS, amorphous Si, thin crystalline Si (with light trapping), (Ti,V,Cr,Mn,Fe,Co,Ni,Cu,Zn,Zr,Nb,Mo,W,La,Ce,Nd,Y,Sn,Al,Si,C…)x(O,S,P,N,Sb,Se,C…)y (in layers on the order of 10 microns, few (besides Se, …Y?…) if any of these elements are a limiting nutrient for solar PV, even for non-concentrating devices) and rarer elements (B (actually not hard to obtain, though), Ge, In, etc, … Se,Te,Ag,Pd,Au,Pt…)can be used in dopants, photosensitizers and very thin interfacing layers. Etc. And concentrating devices can use the more rare (Al,Ga,In,…)x(As,…) semiconductor compounds, in triple junctions and other efficiency boosting features.
More comiing…
dhogaza Says (23 June 2009 at 12:32 PM):
“Figures. James says the land between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies is, essentially, crowded, basing this apparently on dividing the area of the US by its population, and his personal experience in one particularly heavily populated portion of the Sierra Nevada slope.”
(Sigh) What gave you the idea that I stay at home all the time? I’ll grant that I haven’t gotten east of the Rubies in quite a while (I’m more likely to spend time in the Toiyabe & Toquima Ranges, or go northeast to the Black Rock or Santa Rosa Mountains). And it’s also possible that we have a different definition of crowded :-)
However, I’d remind you that there’s a major highway running through the valley in your first picture (I think that’s it in the foreground). Follow it south a bit, you come to Ely, where until this week there were plans to build a large coal-fired plant. Go north a few miles, and you come to the gambling metropolis of Wendover. Over on the other side of the Rubies you find the mining towns of Elko and Carlin
“RichardC is correct about the “zillions” (which I doubt he meant to be interpreted as a precise term) of unpopulated land…”
Again, there simply aren’t “zillions” of acres of such land, by any reasonable definition of zillion. That’s why it’s valuable: it’s part of the ever-decreasing area of unpopulated land in this country, and it ought to be kept that way.
FurryCatHerder Says (23 June 2009 at 2:11 PM):
“Well, it can be calculated, you know.”
Yeah, I know. But I was being lazy – and it worked, you calculated it for me :-)
“37GW is about 9 billion square feet. Yeah, a lot less than the available roof area.”
OK, so why bother about large PV plants (using this technology, anyway). Putting them on roofs saves the cost of building transmission lines, line losses, &c.
And when we’ve used up all the tellurium, why not turn southwestern cities into urban solar thermal plants? Take Las Vegas as a start (since nothing done there could possibly make it worse). Here you have dozens of square miles of suburban roofs, and you also have some tall, centrally-located towers. Mirrors on the roofs (with tracking), the molten-salt collectors on top of the towers, and there you have it. Solar power with no additional environmental impact.
FurryCatHerder Says (23 June 2009 at 5:21 PM):
“The giant trucks at the mines will be running on biodiesel…”
As a matter of fact, quite a bit of mining equipment is electric already: see http://www.phmining.com/equipment/shovels.html and http://www.mining-technology.com/contractors/used_equipment/lnh/ No reason most of the rest couldn’t be. And of course electric railroads are already widely used in Europe.,..
SecularAnimist Says (23 June 2009 at 3:20 PM):
“Well, here’s an interesting observation along those lines, from Martin Roscheisen, the CEO of Nanosolar:”
Would be more interesting if he showed his work. I suppose “CIGS” must be copper indium gallium disulfide? So here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium I read “The recent changes in demand and supply have resulted in high and fluctuating prices of indium, which from 2005 to 2007 ranged from US$700/kg to US$1,000/kg” and “based on content of indium in zinc ore stocks, there is a worldwide reserve base of approximately 6,000 tonnes of economically-viable indium. This figure has led to estimates suggesting that, at current consumption rates, there is only 13 years’ supply of indium left.”
“The Uranium is burned and then stored in a nuclear waste facility…”
If you run a once-through fuel cycle, which I think is the assumption on which his calculations are based. Reprocess the waste and/or breed some plutonium, and you might get a different answer.
Gavin, Reur editorial response appended onto Mark’s 733
As a NEW blogger here, I agree with you that from what I’ve seen just recently, some regulars here are stretching the boundaries of rational debate. As an example of my feelings on this, my 730 to Mark might hopefully prompt to him to change, and adopt a proper debate etiquette, but I rather doubt it, and he is not totally unique in this problem.
NEVERTHELESS, there IS some good stuff going on here!
You suggested closing the thread to fix the problem, but that would also convict/disappoint the innocent!
Would it not be more “democratic” to just block the currently known computer IP (or whatever) of repeat offenders. Sure, they might have a second computer, or change their primary computer IP, and ID, and/or Email address, but eventually the process should weed-out the habitual offenders.
Mark,
You say Nope. “It’s [the lagging thickness example -PM] not decreasing exponential (and I note you haven’t said what the heck THAT means scientifically), it’s logarithmic.”
Lets do a simple example which may explain:
thickness of lagging (arb units).. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
heat loss (arb units)…………… 16, 8, 4, 2, 1
So the heat loss follows a geometric progression and is therefore a logarithmic series.
However the heat loss is calculated from the (decreasing) exponential:
HeatLoss=16*exp(-thickness/1.4427)
I hope this isn’t considered to be a pedantic point. Of course logarithms and exponentials are closely related, but there is a difference and it is usually necessary to know which is which.
“I suspect this is true, though “sane” isn’t a fair description of our traditional energy and development policies on desert lands.”
And when we’re changing our traditional energy methods and have different energy policies, this is relevant HOW?
It’s a good reason to check to make sure we don’t *repeat* the mistakes of the past, but you seem convinced that “not doing the same old stuff” is the ONLY option, even when it’s not the same old stuff to be done.
Rod B.,
Science deals with quantitative comparisons. As such, I’m afraid I don’t understand your comment.
BobFJ, well, it seems to me that we could calculate the contribution due to broadening in this range. Have you checked the literature?
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080045430_2008044312.pdf
Also, are you misinterpreting the broadening effect? As I understand it, it’s not that increasing CO2 broadens the CO2 absorption lines. Rather it is that the lines are broader @ 1 atmosphere, and so saturation doesn’t occur, especially in the wings.
No, it’s to the south of the photo …
There is a stock tank in the foreground, though.
Nice! If they’re going to build an exurb out there, they might as well get the electricity for it rationally.