Happy New Year, and happy new open thread.
As per usual, nuclear energy is off-topic – it’s not that it’s uninteresting, but it ends up dominating conversation to the total exclusion of everything else and just becomes repetitive and dull. Recent excursions on this topic shows what happens when we relax the moderation, so back to being strict about this. If you want to discuss this, please go somewhere else.
Does anyone think the President’s SOTU speech moved the needle on Climate Change? It seemed to me that he devoted a pretty good portion of his speech talking about it without going into any real details as to what we might be looking forward to. Opinions?
192 SecularAnimist: Just so you’ll know: I am not hostile towards renewable energy, I am not profoundly ill-informed about renewable energy technologies today, I am not determined to protect any ignorance at all cost by diligently avoiding exposure to up-to-date information about the technologies, economics and business of renewable energy in the 21st century.
What I am is a degreed physicist and engineer able to calculate the results of various choices. As a physics major, I took more than enough math courses to qualify as a mathematician. I am retired after a long career in physics and engineering. Don’t you think that might help explain why I reference web sites where the math is actually done?
Where the wind resource is good enough to do the job at hand, I am actually in favor of wind energy. There are places on Earth where I would recommend wind energy, AFTER a wind study that proves the resource exists in that location.
Where solar energy makes the most sense, I am in favor of solar energy. NASA usually uses solar energy on spacecraft that stay in the inner solar system. Nasa has the math and science resources to know what works best where.
SecularAnimist: What are your qualifications to analyze the advertisements that you quote as fact?
PS: Nature isn’t just the final authority on truth, Nature is the Only authority. There are zero human authorities. Scientists do not vote on what is the truth. There is only one vote and Nature owns it. We find out what Nature’s vote is by doing Scientific [public and replicable] experiments. Scientific [public and replicable] experiments are the only source of truth. [To be public, it has to be visible to other people in the room. What goes on inside one person’s head isn’t public unless it can be seen on an X-ray or with another instrument.]
Science is a simple faith in Scientific experiments and a simple absolute lack of faith in everything else.
171 Zebra: If you change a town’s energy to renewables, but the steel mill still burns coal and has its own diesel generator, you can’t claim that the town is fossil fuel free. The steel mill burns a huge amount of coal. You can claim maybe 10% progress, but that really doesn’t count. You would have accomplished approximately nothing.
What’s not to like is that you are cheating. You have claimed to have quit making CO2, but you work at the steel mill.
Edward Greisch wrote: “What are your qualifications to analyze the advertisements that you quote as fact?”
I have never “quoted” any “advertisement” as “fact” and you know it. Your accusation is knowingly false, intentionally insulting, deliberately inflammatory, and a textbook example of trolling.
In fact, the last item that I quoted here (#157) was a peer-reviewed study by scientists from the Atmosphere/Energy Program at the Stanford University Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, published this year in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Tony Weddle wrote: “With many comments about renewable energy infrastructure … Not all comments here are strictly about the science of climate change …”
If you want “many comments” expressing ill-informed opinions, assumptions and guesses about renewable energy, then yes, you will often find that in these comment pages, even though the moderators have repeatedly asked us to stick to climate science.
If you want answers to serious questions about renewable energy from experts in the relevant fields, and thoughtful, well-informed discussion among renewable energy professionals and enthusiasts, you will not find that here.
I do my best to follow the moderators’ requests. Occasionally I post links to other sites and resources that I feel may be valuable to those interested in the potential of renewable energy and related technologies to reduce GHG emissions — see my comment at #157 for example.
I do that not to provoke discussion here, but simply to offer information to those interested, and perhaps steer them to other more appropriate forums for discussing energy topics.
And though I should know better, once in a while I let myself get “trolled” into noting that a comment like “wind energy doesn’t work” is nonsense.
@24:
>>Engineers are the *last* people to ask to design a sustainable system. They tend to be utterly clueless unless it involves resource-intensive toys and machines. What do they know about key lines, needs analysis, soil remediation and soil building? Nada.
I’ll go tell the environmental engineers at my university that they are utterly clueless. I think they will be a tad miffed at that: http://www.dtu.dk/english/Research/Departments-and-groups#institutes
@189 (and ditto in @136. )
>>Get a clue here and now: Sustainable systems are based in sane resource management, not economics.
You seem to be unaware of the _absolute_ basic definition of Economics being that ‘Economics is the study of how humans behave and interact in a world of scarce resouces;. Scarce Resources. Scarce Resources. Resources. Scarce.
All other definitions of E are variants and/or softened up.
Besides, do you really think that engineering these day is only about building fancy bridges, pouring concrete and making gadgets? EVERY branch of courses here have classes on environmental and societal considerations in the relevant fields. Frankly, this vitrolic disdain for various fields of engineering strikes me as quasi-primitivism.
==
Other than that: As for that N-energy thing: Just a there is no ‘alternative medicine’, there is no ‘alternative energy’. There is only energy. The OT-declaration on N-energy is due to it drowning out the CC-pertinent debate, and that is entirely reasonable. Question is whether to put up a separat forum where N-descussion is OK, or refer to another site or forum, as the OP did.
Lastly, does anyone here know of any pages that does an inventory of denialst / ‘skeptic’ pages (apart from SourceWatch)? I seem to run into quite a bit of them… if non, I’ll do one myself.
Galloping Camel,
OK. Let me make it clear–Malthus was a deplorable human being. That said, there are two questions.
First: Is there a maximum human population carrying capacity for the planet? The answer to this question is certainly yes. Eventually, if population increases without bound, it’s mass would equal the mass of the planet. So there is a limit.
The second question is whether that limit is close to the current population level. The answer is that we don’t know. Certainly, current human population is doing significant damage to the planet’s biosphere and its supporting systems. Malthusians may be wrong many times. They only have to be right once for the human species to have a really bad day–and the answer to that first question ensures they will eventually be right.
Last month I asked about the spike in sea level. Since then this graph, which looked like the red line was going to curve downward, has turned back up:
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_J2_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png
mapped:
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Map_J2_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
mapped:
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Map_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/fileadmin/images/data/Products/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png
@Edward Greisch 203,
I think that you may be the one “cheating”, or else exhibiting some cognitive issue. Did you actually read what I wrote carefully?
I didn’t want to use the N-word, but since you seem to have this problem of comprehension: You, as the owner of the steel mill, would be free to choose
1) To buy electricity from coal or diesel or anything else you like, as long as you pay whatever form of (steep) “carbon tax” has been imposed. Remember, that was condition 1.
2) Contract with a nuclear plant, or, buy one of those SMR you tout all the time, and generate your own electricity.
3) Or any other choice or combination of choices.
Remember, again, the government is disincentivizing FF (through whatever means), and then establishing a free market (defined as above) which will allocate resources Among! Non-FF! Sources! of electricity. The disincentive is independent and adjustable. But you decide how to power your furnaces, and the “townspeople” get to decide how to keep their homes and businesses supplied with electricity.
If a great mind like yours can’t keep two things in hand and understand this straightforward concept, maybe you do have a problem.
I don’t see that anyone has invoked the Salem Hypothesis as it applies to climate change yet!
#169, Ed G.–Ed, I can see I have to lay this out explicitly for you. I have mentioned previously that I am trained as a scholar in the humanities (music). That’s led you to quite a few derogatory references to that background, so let me show you one of its advantages in assessing evidence, even in fields as removed as ‘climate blogology.’ The relevant skill is called ‘following the chain of scholarship’–though ‘scholarship’ might be stretching it a tad.
#1: Bill (#120), in response to your musing about wind turbines and the geographical correlation thereof, provided this link:
http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere-again/
#2: You (#125) then responded:
#3: I set out to follow the chain of citation, which meant reading the linked piece. It turns out that the link was relying upon an underlying source, here:
http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere/
So, that underlying source was in fact what you were relying on. Accordingly, that was what I examined in the comments I made consequent to your post.
Let me gently suggest that failure to read the underlying source on your part does not constitute ‘me trying to fool’ you. It constitutes you fooling yourself. And I’d further suggest, not quite so gently, that you do that a lot.
Now, I had to part with good money to pay the tuition fees to learn that. So, in advance, “you’re welcome”. I sincerely hope you profit by the lesson.
“There are no regulations to stop the corporations that are OPEC. As a result they are manipulating the market to their benefit.”
Just sayin’, but last time I looked, membership in OPEC was 100% nation states. States entwined with corporations in many cases, sure, but nation states nonetheless. Some of them–yes, I’m looking at you, Venezuela!–have oil industries that are pretty much nationalized.
Urs Neu:
January 4th, 2016 at 6:10 AM
@ 11, 17: We should be very careful in linking two (or more) events just because they happened at the same time – unless we have a plausible physical mechanism
I’m not an expert but I think all this “might, maybe, could be, there’s a weak link” talk only creates more doubt with the public that we really have a serious problem on our hands. There’s enough certainty to establish strong links between individual events and Climate change. We know there are many events where direct links may not be possible at this time but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation. You may have a valid point but I fail to see how it’s helpful. In other words, you’re not telling us anything we don’t already know.
Here’s a brief but interesting piece on the integration of renewable energy into existing grids:
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/01/13/we-dont-need-storage-today-to-integrate-renewables/
The main takeaway is that the variability of wind is easily accommodated today because there is already a plethora of unused generation throughout most of the year.
So, to take an instance we discussed above, when in the early hours of Feb. 8, 2013, wind generation across 9 European countries only amounted to 2 or 3 GW, there were idle nuclear, fossil and hydro plants that could be brought online to balance demand. The article suggests that the penetration level for which that remains the case is around 40%; even Ed’s source, Euan Mearns, guesstimated that 20% is doable. That’s far higher than the numbers that we were seeing just a few years ago, and I can only conclude that the difference is due to operational experience in learning how to manage the variability.
The article concludes:
We’re not going to have an all-renewable grid any time soon. Nor are we going to have an all-nuclear grid any time soon. Right now, what is lowering emissions in countries where that is the case is: 1) energy efficiency, more measures for which are being implemented than widely reported; 2) demand management, which helps integrate renewables, but also saves money; 3) the explosion of renewable capacity; and 4) in North America, the growth of natgas generation capacity. We need to keep doing all of the above, perhaps with the partial exception of #4. (I don’t think the total carbon footprint of natural gas is well-enough known yet to say that the actual net emissions reduction is as significant as advertised.)
Recognizing that zebra is quite right in pointing out a total lack of evidence of any policy impact by RC Philosopher Kings to date, I’d say that we should #1: implement carbon pricing; #2: keep building up renewable capacity; #3: maintain the nuclear industry, and R & D toward the sorts of reactors that Ed thinks are already here; #4: support other mitigation and adaptation efforts, as called for in the Paris Agreement; #5: for the long term, keep developing the theory and practice of an economy that at the very least is zero energy growth.
I’ve clashed with Killian and Ed, and they with each other, but all three of us (and I suspect many others here) would agree that, no, infinite growth in a finite system really is not a physical (or practical or ecological) possibility. We have yet to really even think about that as a society (though I know there are a few brave & far-sighted souls out there who’ve put some time into developing some bases for the idea.) We need to know how such a society might work. We also need to have a more solid idea of what the actual constraints are; there’s a lot of uncertainty there, given the huge knowledge gaps that exist even about biological basics like how many species exist, let alone more sophisticated questions about ecosystem function, extent, interdependence, and resilience in the face of various challenges.
I know there are folks doing good work in all areas of this, but my sense is that levels of support are probably not nearly adequate to learn what we need to know to assess those limits as well as we’d like.
Daily CO2 per MLO
January 12, 2016 401.97 ppm
January 12, 2015 399.73 ppm
increase of 2.24 ppm over a year ago
Methane levels
Methane CH4 is the second most important long-lived greenhouse gas. Approximately 40% of methane is emitted into the atmosphere by natural sources (e.g., wetlands and termites), and about 60 % comes from human activities like cattle breeding, rice agriculture, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills and biomass burning. Atmospheric methane reached a new high of about 1833 parts per billion (ppb) in 2014 and is now 254% of the pre-industrial level.
https://www.wmo.int/media/content/greenhouse-gas-concentrations-hit-yet-another-record
This is where the shtf. Real world concentrations of the primary greenhouse gases that are heating the planet continue to rise and the rate of increase is increasing. We should at least be looking for a leveling of increase, then a drop in rate of increase, then an actual decrease in the levels if we want to move the planetary climate patterns into the range that existed during the time that our species evolved.
All talk about COP21, green energy, CCS, etc is meaningless if the real world concentrations of these gases are not reduced in the atmosphere and so far we are going in the wrong direction and picking up speed.
Everything that has been done to date by individuals, communities, nation states to reduce the production and accumulation of these greenhouse gases have been eclipsed by the increased production of the gases in other global sectors.
I think it’s important to keep the real numbers front and center in any discussion about global climate. I feel terrible about the situation we are creating for my grandchildren. Read’m and weep.
201 Chuck Hughes: I didn’t hear all of the SOTU yet, but from what I heard, the President’s SOTU speech moved the needle on Climate Change backwards. The Democrats are less bad than the Republicans, but none of them are engineers or scientists. The so-called “Greens” are no better. None of the politicians understand anything at all except how to get votes.
When you write or call or email to try to explain it to them, you are talking only to a person who understands even less and only counts opinions into this pile or that pile. You may as well say no more than left or right because they understand no more than left or right or yes or no. I had an argument with one of those answering “volunteers” one day. I think she finally pretended to get what I was saying just to quit talking.
The Democrats seem to be taking more money from wind turbine sales people and the Republicans seem to be taking more money from the fossil fuel industry. Neither is making any attempt to do anything more than that. Both are “leading” us into climate disaster.
From: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/01/12/back-work-what-comes-after-presidents-final-state-union-address#Technology
“Establishing the Clean Power Plan – Established the first-ever national carbon pollution standards for power plants, the largest source of carbon pollution in our country. The Clean Power Plan gives states flexible, cost-effective tools to cut carbon pollution from these plants by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 while preventing thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of childhood asthma attacks. Read more.”
“Read more” goes to:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/08/03/fact-sheet-president-obama-announce-historic-carbon-pollution-standards
which is where the lies are. For example pushing wind and solar while “ensuring grid reliability.”
Ensuring grid reliability has to be done anyhow, because: solar flares, EMP
The load balancing for small sources is gravy:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-energy-intermittency-explained-challenges-solutions-and-opportunities/
I regret the digression.
Shorter: search what you believe with Google/Scholar before posting it yet again. You’re out of date. Always.
Well worth a thoughtful read, for several reasons, from:
http://hannahlab.org/climate-skeptics-nasif-nahles-shaky-math/#more-937
<blockquoteI’ve been thinking a lot about how to tackle the problem of misinformation in the global warming debate. Shouting matches on the internet just feed the trolls and rarely achieve anything, and people don’t want to read accurate technical, science-y things, so what can we scientists really do? We can’t attack peoples’ character even when they attack ours, because that just makes us look bad, and fuels the global warming denier image of being an “underdog” or an “outsider”. These people are not on a crusade against science, they are just concerned (and a bit paranoid).
Global warming deniers are people too.
So I’ve decided there are two ways I can actually do something about this problem.
Make simplified explanations of work in climate science more widely available.
Write respectful critiques of contrarian ideas.
This is an information war, but unfortunately the right answers don’t win by virtue. Warming contrarians have made huge strides in convincing people of their wild ideas because they have drowned out the correct ideas within certain audiences. The best way to combat this problem is to be more vocal. In my case, I’m going to try and get more articles like this higher up in Google search results….
Ed and others. One thing physicists do, which is applicable beyond the field, is to think up different frameworks or points of view which might transform how we think about solving a given problem. Thinking about global carbon emissions, a useful framework is to think of the eventual disposition of carbon containing resources. At the end of the day (century whatever), where will the carbon currently residing in coal/oil/gas end up? The end points can be broadly categorized as (1) Left in the ground, (2) In the atmosphere -presumably in the form of CO2, and (3) Burnt, but captured and sequestered. With that framework, the goal is to maximize the size of categories (1) and (3).
Now I think we can largely discount (3), CCS is going to be expensive and most likely frought with
political difficulties (not under my backyard). So the end goal we are striving for is to maximize the amount of carbon left in the ground.
First lets think about coal.
I’d like to split coal into two categories, (a) Metallurgical coal -which is high quality bituminous, suitable for smelting. This is fairly scarce, and commands a premium price. Not much is used for power, as smelters can outbid power plants. Secondly is thermal coal, used for heating and power generation. There is enough thermal coal to cause great climate harm. I take it as highly unlikely that any metallurgic coal will be left in the ground, so the battle is to minimize the mining/consumption of thermal coal.
Similarly if we think about oil, it may be useful to break this into two categories, (1) Easy to extract sweet crude, and (2) hard to extract or refine stuff; high sulfur, very deep, shale oil, tar sands. I would argue that we are unlikely to end up with any of the first category left in the ground, so the battle ground is over the lower quality higher cost resources. This second category will be deferred or abandoned if the cost of extraction is higher than the market price. Clearly we can manipulate the market price via a carbon tax. Alternatively if we can push the market price of oil low enough, this second category of oil resources will be abandoned or at least its exploitation deferred. That’s essentially where we are today oil is roughly $30/barrel, and investment is these forms is being cut back. So at the very least we have deferred some mal-investment. So any way we can pressure oil demand downwards, including more efficient or electric vehicles serves to advance this strategy.
hm. Something’s changed about the blog software.
(Or maybe it’s me and Chrome, I just gave up on Firefox for the time being as it always crashes on opening RC.)
But this is odd:
I type something, go away, come back, place the cursor and click to paste something — and the cursor backspaces one jump, and selects the previous character, before pasting, overwriting that one.
That wipes out trailing spaces after words, or any punctuation.
Worse, it wipes out close angle brackets, mangling HTML.
SecularAnimist,
I’m still not sure why you chose to chastise me for my post when there are so many posts that are not directly about climate science (my guess is that there would be just a trickle of posts each month if those were the only comments allowed).
The AR5 carbon budgets has led people to suggest (quite rightly) that we need to reach a carbon neutral economy to avoid 2C (or any reasonable limit) of warming. And yet so many people translate that as a need to have all energy come from renewable sources. But, as far as I’m aware, none of the renewable energy infrastructures is carbon free and I haven’t seen any arguments that they can be made so. If this is true then wishful thinking comes into the equation when advocating for 100% renewable energy, since some form of negative carbon technology or behaviour needs to be employed to make renewable energy carbon neutral overall.
#220–That’s weird, Hank. Safari still works on RC for me, but I had to start using Firefox for Open Mind, otherwise I can’t click on new comments–which makes following the discussion as it unfolds pretty unworkable, given the way WordPress does the threading. (I think that started with the last update to Safari that I installed.)
Hope you find a workaround or something.
Any expert comments on the recent publications by Maya Tolstoy on the possible role of mid-ocean volcanism and the cycle of Pleistocene glaciations, particularly the way they abruptly end? I don’t have ready access to the big journals, so have only seen the summary on the National Geographic site:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150207-volcano-eruption-ridge-milankovitch-ocean-earth-science/
And now for some truly gonzo climate wars news .
209 Zebra: Yes, I read your comment carefully. You avoided telling me how the iron was going to be heated. The problems with your choice thing are:
The steel mill is part of the town
Steel mills are not in Obama’s clean energy plan. The government is disincentivizing FFs at power plants, but not in other industries. Concrete making will get decarbonized before steel making.
Steel mills traditionally and still use “coke” which is coal that has had the volatile gasses driven off.
Switching to electric arc heating is certainly a good idea, but the steel mill owner isn’t going to do it if he can move the mill to another country instead. Heating with an electric arc means having to learn something new and maybe [Heaven forbid!] doing research.
So I conclude that, if the steel mill is still in your town, it is going to continue making coke out of coal and burning the coke in whatever kind of furnace they use.
211 Kevin McKinney: They left out Portugal. And Italy and Switzerland and the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and several others. And they set almost-zero to zero. But wind energy is proportional to the third power of wind speed, so almost-zero can be modeled as zero. Does Portugal, a small country, have enough wind to make up for the rest? If so, was the wind was blowing so hard they had to shut down the wind turbines to prevent overspeed?
I think they got a good sample. Scotland has the best wind energy in Europe that I know of, and Scotland is part of the UK.
If you want to know why they left out Portugal, ask a question at the bottom of their page.
214 Kevin McKinney: Clean Technica is a marketing web site with special software to help you do marketing: Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Articles are sponsored by the companies that make the thing the infomercial is about.
http://cleantechnica.com/2016/01/13/we-dont-need-storage-today-to-integrate-renewables/
The articles/infomercials/advertisements are wrong. Like Siemens’ infomercial on wind energy. Nothing ever works out as sweet as it does in the advertisement. Buy one and you will not live happily ever after. Siemens is selling them, you find out the bad things after you pay for it. Just like when you buy a used car.
Everything that has been done to date by individuals, communities, nation states to reduce the production and accumulation of these greenhouse gases have been eclipsed by the increased production of the gases in other global sectors.
I think it’s important to keep the real numbers front and center in any discussion about global climate. I feel terrible about the situation we are creating for my grandchildren. Read’m and weep.
Comment by mike — 13 Jan 2016
When the gas levels start to increase faster than what we know humans are putting out then we’ll know we’re in trouble. I would take that to mean that feedbacks are kicking in and taking over. Who knows where that threshold is? How close are we to not having control of the situation? That’s what worries me the most. A certain level of heat should get us there but we don’t know what that level of heat is. Hence Climate Sensitivity.
Keeping us below the 2C level will be tough enough. Even if we do everything required the Earth will continue to warm. I think the 2C threshold also depends on the development and implementation of BECCS. If so it doesn’t look too good. We haven’t even started to bring CO2 levels down and we have no idea how to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
It may not be just your grandchildren in the cross hairs. I think the next few decades will be very interesting.
Somebody feel free to correct me on this.
@212 – “last time I looked, membership in OPEC was 100% nation states”
Not relevant. They are actors in an economy. They certainly are privileged but they are unregulated actors.
They act as an unregulated component of a free market.
Unregulated actors that arise from a free unregulated markets are products of unregulated markets.
Hence OPEC is a creation of the free market.
@216 – “The Democrats seem to be taking more money from wind turbine sales people”
Evidence?
Ray 207: Malthus was a deplorable human being.
BPL: No he wasn’t. The idea that he wanted to starve people is a late invention. His solution was what he called “moral restraint,” i.e., birth control, although by a very primitive method.
jgnfld 210: I don’t see that anyone has invoked the Salem Hypothesis as it applies to climate change yet!
BPL: Witches are doing it?
Oh, Edward, I know. But such fellows and lasses do things like push unsustainable, mechanistic sytems like nuclear to solve problems driven by consumption and ecosystem changes.
Set, match. Checkmate.
213 Chuck Hughes:
Maybe there is a misunderstanding. I agree that there are links between climate change and single events where we know quite a lot about it, where we know e.g. the mechanisms and sometimes even can quantify the influence of CC (has e.g. been done for some heat waves). And of course we should talk to the public about those. However, it doesn’t help to tell the public (if someone asks) about a relation that we don’t know much (or anything) about. There is a big risk that this relation breaks with the next event and we have to change the message. And this creates more confusion than saying sometimes that we don’t know (yet). For science to be honest always pays in the end.
Edward Greisch wrote: “… where the lies are. For example pushing wind and solar while ‘ensuring grid reliability’.”
More ignorant nonsense.
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/increase-renewable-energy/fact-renewable-energy-is-reliable
Huge amounts of wind and solar are ALREADY being integrated into the USA’s electrical grids (61 percent of new generating capacity added to the US grid in 2015 was wind and solar), and doing so is IMPROVING the reliability of the grid.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-and-wind-comprise-61-of-2015-capacity-additions-gas-contributes-35/411813/
Re bjorn
You mean “economically scarce” resources, not physically scarce. Endless substitution and all that nonsense.
And, yes, I am quite certain your env eng’s couldn’t design a sustainable community if their lives depended on it.
I could sketch one out in minutes to hours, given the appropriate info was available.
And I like engineers. No disdain. But eight years of watching 99.9999% of all people from all fields absolutely fail to understand sustainability, thus solutions, has left me little doubt anyone espousing unsustainable, deadly solutions has any real understanding of how to design a sustainable community.
@Kevin McKinney 214,
An interesting reference and a reasonable summary, and no problem with goals but I want to clarify one point of language.
It isn’t that the RC Philospher Kings (which sounds an awful lot like a street gang or 1950’s band) haven’t had an effect on policy (not likely they ever would); what’s lacking is “policy” itself.
To my mind, saying “we should have…” e.g. demand management is an aspirational statement. While I am more sympathetic to that than “an SMR in every basement”, I have to pose the same question I would to Edward. OK, how do you get there? What’s your plan for achieving that goal?
Mostly what I see is people going negative on the “other” technology, but offering no plan or path to achieve the positive outcome they supposedly believe is optimal. If, as I’m sure most of us agree, stable or reduced energy consumption would be a positive outcome, how do particular modalities contribute to that?
So, yes, I think I have proposed a policy directed to that goal, which is to use free market (as defined above) dynamics. Both because it can work, and because it is something the US government could actually do– rather than nationalizing the entire energy sector and dictating through martial law who gets the windmill or SMR in her backyard, which is the only way some of these fantasies would get realized.
@Tony Weddle 221,
You shouldn’t be chastised for getting in on the discussion that’s already going on, but you aren’t being particularly clear with your question.
1) Is the goal that no CO2 at all is produced?
2) Is the goal that everyone in the world will live a USA consumption lifestyle?
That’s what you seem to be talking about, but maybe you could clarify?
“ Heating with an electric arc means having to learn something new and maybe [Heaven forbid!] doing research”
Yes Ed, heaven forbid you do any research, which might find that the largest US steel producer has been using electric arc for decades, a process invented in the 19th century.
Russell, something’s eating your links.
I wonder if it’s related to the oddity I noted above (where ‘paste’ seems to first backspace and select the character left of the cursor, breaking html).
You might try using
(omit the spaces) -- that appears to tell the browser "display exactly what I typed not what you think I meant dammit"the result looks like this
and maybe this is your intended link?
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/01/climate-wars-terminal-culture-shock.html(the odd backspace-with-paste behavior isn't happening to me this time)
Ed, #s 225 & 226–
Irrelevant. The article reported actual generation, so that relation is already factored in automatically.
Er, no. There may be some sponsored content, and certain there are links to advertising, but most of the articles are by freelancers doing their own thing. (Others are mostly reprints from other sources, mostly other online news sites specializing in related issues.) In looking at any online source, one does of course have to do due diligence, and I’ve tried to do that WRT CT. IMO, a lot of very good information is available there, and you dismiss it out of hand unfairly–and also at the peril of your ability to understand what is really going on.
No offense intended, but repeatedly you’ve said things that are demonstrably incorrect with just a cursory reference to the real world. Considering something outside your usual run of sources would help with that.
#236–Thanks for the response.
This “RC Philospher King”–and should we become an actual band, I’d be glad to play, incidentally–is glad to have reached a stage where I feel reasonably comfortable proposing some semi-prioritized courses of action. The ‘how to get there’ bit remains a work in progress for me, which is less worrisome since, as noted, the larger world mysteriously remains pretty uninterested in my opinion.
However, I am active with the Citizen’s Climate Lobby, a congregational Green Team, and in my own writing and networking/educating. I’m hoping that participation in conversations like the present one will be helpful in developing strategy, both for me and for others.
Drat. Ok, to force the blog software to show exactly what you type without improvements, use HTML thingummies “code” and “/code” — using angle brackets instead of quotation marks. That should work.
217 Hank Roberts: Thanks for the Sciam reference. Yes, I know that, over 300 wind turbines, the power smooths out. But you need to put it together in DC and then invert to get the frequency and phase right. There is a discussion on BraveNewClimate on the subject of correlation distance in their unforced variations. The question is: How far do the 300 wind turbines have to be apart? Research is going on, as well as discussion.
EMP: I worked in that laboratory. The Electromagnetic Effects Lab, Lab 1000 of Harry Diamond Labs, US Army Labcom. ElectroMagnetic Pulse comes from a nuclear bomb explosion [burst, as we say in the trade] at high altitude, meaning low Earth orbit. We Americans have an Enhanced EMP bomb. If an EMP happens, we are having a “general exchange” with Russia, meaning all-out nuclear war. In that case, you don’t need to worry about anything any more. Could a “rogue” nation do it? Not very well.
The fact that there are multiple “interconnects” in the US is caused by the problem of transmitting electricity over long distances. We almost, but not quite, have the technology to do it. We don’t have a switch that can repeatedly turn off 60,000 amps at 1 million volts DC. We also don’t have the half century it would take to build a world wide interconnect.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/inside-the-lab-that-pushes-supergrid-circuit-breakers-to-the-limit
232 Killian: Wrong. Look up “Fan death” in BraveNewClimate.
234 SecularAnimist: Union of Concerned Scientists is now mostly non-scientists. The nons were allowed in and took over. Therefore, UCS cannot be relied on at all. What UCS says is nonsense.
A large percentage of a tiny amount is a small amount.
236 zebra: I’m going negative on economics. Economics is not a science. Economics is nonsense. Economists think we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. Economics is not a plan. Economics would lead to feudalism: The wealthy 1% get everything while the 99% die. Forget it. I don’t want economics.
238 fixible: “Nucor Corporation is a Fortune 150 company headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It is the largest steel producer in the United States, and the largest of the “mini-mill” steelmakers (those using electric arc furnaces to melt scrap steel, as opposed to companies operating integrated steel works with blast furnaces)” wikipedia
Melting scrap steel is not what I had in mind. What I had in mind was making new iron form ore and making the new steel from iron ingots.
Solutions?
Kevin McKinney:
CCL is not a way to sustainability. Can’t be. Sustainability cannot be top down, in any form. Managing resources based on power, access, wealth, will never lead to sustainability because sustainable systems allocate resources based on need and integrating elements, not income or wealth.
I was initially excited about CCL, but working with the system that must go bye-bye merely extends its life.
The pathway is simplification. The endgame is simplification. Go to Deep Simplicity on Facebook and look at the image there, the graphic with the circles, etc. Says “Horizontal Decisionmaking” at the top.
NOTE: Those of you looking for/asking for *A* pathway or *THE* pathway are completely not getting how sustainable systems are created/develop. Only in the broadest terms can this be stated, and I have done so here many times over since 2011.
#215 – Mike, thanks for the update.
I agree that it does not look good at all. We are so far from stabilizing the CO2 in the atmosphere (and not pushing it down as we should). The growth rate is not only positive, it is even increasing. If the reports are correct, that the anthropogenic emissions are about to stabilize, then we might be seeing the situation of reduced CO2 solubility into oceans, due to increasing water temperature (which is to be expected as your chemistry course tells you).
At the same time, it appears that the global annual temperature will be seeing another leap, at GISS anomalies as:
2015 0.86*
2014 0.75
2013 0.66
2012 0.63
2011 0.60
2010 0.71
2009 0.65
2008 0.54
2007 0.66
2006 0.64
*Estimated based on JMA December 2015 data
Zebra
The goal seems to be (reasonably, IMO) to get to zero emissions as quickly as possible (certainly by somewhere between 2050 or 2070, though that can, no doubt, be disputed), with a fairly aggressive reduction beforehand. From what I’ve read, all renewable energy infrastructure produces emissions of GHGs. But I haven’t read how those emissions can be reduced to zero in time. So that is what I’m questioning. It’s all very well to argue that this or that technology can do the trick but, if it’s not zero carbon, then it clearly can’t, it seems to me. Unless there is a commensurate negative carbon technology that will balance the emissions, which would, presumably, be wishful thinking (i.e. hoping that some, as yet untried or unscaled technology will do the trick).
If it’s highly debatable that renewables can run our societies at zero carbon, then we need to have that debate before having the debate about which renewables and at what scale.
Ray 207: Malthus was a deplorable human being.
BPL 230: No he wasn’t. The idea that he wanted to starve people is a late invention
Me: Yes, he was a thoroughly deplorable, nasty human being.
Here’s from his famous Essay on Population:
“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases: and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased … we might probably every one of us marry at the age of puberty and yet few be absolutely starved.”
So, by the lights of Malthus: let’s crowd the poor into sewers and cesspools, foster conditions that invite plague, and discourage any efforts to relieve their misery. By these means — if we can induce enough of them to DIE — we can live better lives ourselves.
Only one small step away from open advocacy of mass murder — for profit!
Thoroughly deplorable and nasty.
Edward Greisch #202:
“I am not hostile towards renewable energy”
It would appear that you are, very much so. I base that view on having read most of your posts for over a year.
“I am not profoundly ill-informed about renewable energy technologies today”
It would appear that you are. You’ve repeatedly made false statements and been called onto the carpet about them, but you persist in making them. I would think that you would be embarrassed by now.
“I am not determined to protect any ignorance at all cost by diligently avoiding exposure to up-to-date information about the technologies, economics and business of renewable energy in the 21st century.”
It would appear that you are.
@tony weddle 244,
Your vagueness has not diminished, so I guess you are not actually interested in a serious discussion. Can you answer my two questions?