quote:Originally posted by King of Men: This may be a stupid question. You mentioned that a strong El Nino had made 1998 a very hot year. What is the mechanism for this? Where does the additional energy come from?
The additional energy comes from the deep oceans, sort of.
I restate in my own words to check understanding: There is usually a heat sink in the deep oceans; under a strong El Nino the transfer to that heat sink is not as fast. Thus the 'extra' energy was there all along, but usually it doesn't pile up at the surface.
Pretty much. The oceans act as a heat sink during a La Nina and a heat source during an El Nino. The deep oceans aren't a true heat sink because a true heat sink has an infinite capacity to take up energy without changing. The deep oceans don't. If we had many decades of El Nino conditions, the temperature in the deep oceans would drop. If we had many decades of La Nina conditions the deep ocean temperatures would rise. Because we cycle fairly rapidly between the two, the deep ocean temperatures stay fairly constant.
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quote:Dan, I agree with you that nuclear is (a large part of) the way to go, but after a number of disasters and near-disasters, including the very recent one in Japan, do you really find it so hard to understand why people would oppose nuclear energy?
This is a bit of an old remark, but when cast against the steady, ongoing damage to the environment and human health posed by coal and the tyranny, suffering, terrorism, and human misery indirectly, but still in a very real way, fostered by demand for oil as well as the constant impact of fossil fuels...
Yeah, balking at nuclear power becomes less understandable, to me at least. It's not as though it's being proposed as a alternative to a clean, healthy, politically wholesome energy source.
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quote:Dan, I agree with you that nuclear is (a large part of) the way to go, but after a number of disasters and near-disasters, including the very recent one in Japan, do you really find it so hard to understand why people would oppose nuclear energy?
This is a bit of an old remark, but when cast against the steady, ongoing damage to the environment and human health posed by coal and the tyranny, suffering, terrorism, and human misery indirectly, but still in a very real way, fostered by demand for oil as well as the constant impact of fossil fuels...
Yeah, balking at nuclear power becomes less understandable, to me at least. It's not as though it's being proposed as a alternative to a clean, healthy, politically wholesome energy source.
Went back on the previous page and saw that I missed this reply, so first of all, sorry Destineer!
And yeah, I agree with Rakeesh. If catastrophic global warming is imminent, then I still don't understand balking at nuclear. Right now, with existing nuclear tech, we know how to build nuclear power plants that can actually meet our energy needs. The same is simply not true for "Green" energy. Not yet.
So if global warming due to fossil fuels is on the verge of destroying life as we know it, then the switch to nuclear is the next logical step, since the problems nuclear power poses are substantially less than "destroying the entire ecosystem."
This is what progress is to my mind, Destineer. You solve problems with imperfect solutions, and then solve the problems those solutions create, ad infinitum. The green movement seems to demand energy with zero negative side effects, which is unrealistic (so far) and extremely irrational in my opinion.
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Biological changes precipitated by fraud. That's another new one. I guess we've chanced upon disproving evolution alongside AGW.
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quote:Dan, I agree with you that nuclear is (a large part of) the way to go, but after a number of disasters and near-disasters, including the very recent one in Japan, do you really find it so hard to understand why people would oppose nuclear energy?
This is a bit of an old remark, but when cast against the steady, ongoing damage to the environment and human health posed by coal and the tyranny, suffering, terrorism, and human misery indirectly, but still in a very real way, fostered by demand for oil as well as the constant impact of fossil fuels...
Yeah, balking at nuclear power becomes less understandable, to me at least. It's not as though it's being proposed as a alternative to a clean, healthy, politically wholesome energy source.
Went back on the previous page and saw that I missed this reply, so first of all, sorry Destineer!
And yeah, I agree with Rakeesh. If catastrophic global warming is imminent, then I still don't understand balking at nuclear. Right now, with existing nuclear tech, we know how to build nuclear power plants that can actually meet our energy needs. The same is simply not true for "Green" energy. Not yet.
So if global warming due to fossil fuels is on the verge of destroying life as we know it, then the switch to nuclear is the next logical step, since the problems nuclear power poses are substantially less than "destroying the entire ecosystem."
This is what progress is to my mind, Destineer. You solve problems with imperfect solutions, and then solve the problems those solutions create, ad infinitum. The green movement seems to demand energy with zero negative side effects, which is unrealistic (so far) and extremely irrational in my opinion.
Well, off the top of my head, what's the problem with wanting energy sources with no negative side effects? Seems to me like that's what we should all be driving at, no?
Several sources of green power, like hydro and geothermal are actually cost competitive with nuclear if you're looking at price per kilowatt hour. Solar and wind are rapidly dropping in price and will approach price parity over the course of the next year. And even as that happens, nuclear is becoming more expensive.
Nuclear quite simply cannot happen without major state support. Private nuclear stations generally do not care liability insurance against accidents, it's too expensive, so governments generally assume the risk in case of an accident. They also usually guarantee massive loans for power plants. Yet ironically, people throw hissy fits when government tries to give the same level of subsidy to green power. Green power, on the other hand, has billions of venture capital dollars invested in it, which is driving down the cost rapidly.
Green power also comes online a lot faster than nuclear. Nuclear plants take years to build, and a massive capital investment. Green power can meet our energy needs just as well as nuclear can. It's just a matter of building the power plants. I don't, by the way, think most green advocates are pushing all zero-negative plans, just plans that have considerably fewer negatives than nuclear or fossil fuels.
I think nuclear has an important role to play in the near term. We should be building a new generation of smaller, cheaper, disaster proof nuclear power plants right now so they're ready to go in a few years. That will take up some of the slack and give green power the time it needs to really come into its own, which it is rapidly approaching.
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I think most of what the green movement does could be described as: trying to get society at large to consider negative aspects of energy beyond price at the pump or electric bill. But, like any political movement, their outliers will be louder and generate more press, but it's no more accurate to say they seem to want free, consequenceless energy than it is to, well, say libertarians want poor people to just die in the streets, Dan.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I think most of what the green movement does could be described as: trying to get society at large to consider negative aspects of energy beyond price at the pump or electric bill. But, like any political movement, their outliers will be louder and generate more press, but it's no more accurate to say they seem to want free, consequenceless energy than it is to, well, say libertarians want poor people to just die in the streets, Dan.
It's the free part where the rubber meets the road.
Greens are perfectly aware that, for the moment, green power is more expensive than the alternative. They simply make the argument that cheaper /= better. There are other factors to take into considering than just the cost that make green power superior. I tend to agree.
I also think that if you take a more comprehensive view of the ripple effects of fossil fuel power, you find that it's not nearly as cheap as we like to think it is. It's also incredibly volatile, price wise. You're never going to see Wall Street speculators driving up the price of sunlight.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: You're never going to see Wall Street speculators driving up the price of sunlight.
Just the costs of the components necessary to make solar panels, the costs of the infrastructure, the costs of the land necessary to have large-scale solar farms . . .
I'm all for green power sources, but they are neither free nor simple.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: You're never going to see Wall Street speculators driving up the price of sunlight.
Just the costs of the components necessary to make solar panels, the costs of the infrastructure, the costs of the land necessary to have large-scale solar farms . . .
I'm all for green power sources, but they are neither free nor simple.
I never said otherwise. In fact, I specifically said in that same post that they are expensive. Though I can't imagine there's going to be a run on land speculation in the desert, but hey, you never know. I also don't think price spikes for metal brackets are in quite the same category as trading commodities, so I'm not sure how solid your comparison is.
I was simply referring to the basic underlying source of energy production. No matter what the source, you're going to have the issues you mentioned regarding the physical building of something. But as for the thing that actually makes it run, green power has major advantages.
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posted
Metal brackets are not unique to solar panels. Some of the components in the actual solar cells are, though. There's not currently enough of a market in them for speculation to be profitable. But were solar power to become more prevalent, there would be a market -- and quite likely, there would be speculators driving up prices in short order.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I think most of what the green movement does could be described as: trying to get society at large to consider negative aspects of energy beyond price at the pump or electric bill. But, like any political movement, their outliers will be louder and generate more press, but it's no more accurate to say they seem to want free, consequenceless energy than it is to, well, say libertarians want poor people to just die in the streets, Dan.
Heh.
I didn't say they wanted free energy. Well, I didn't mean to, anyway. Sorry!
What I did mean to say was that they effectively say they want consequence-free energy. Specifically potential environmental consequences.
As Lyr said, that sounds like a good thing! It's the main reason I've seen that they balk at nuclear over solar/wind (not gonna touch hydro, since it's a situational energy source and not practical for all needs, plus its one that non-greens have no qualms about anyway).
All I was saying is, if solar/wind can't meet energy needs, and nuclear can, then greens should support nuclear in order to stop global catastrophe.
Apparently Lyr thinks that solar/wind will be equally viable to nuclear within a year, if they aren't already. That seems like a good reason to balk at nuclear!
It's also news to me. If true, great!
I don't have some deep-seated hatred of wind and the sun. If that works, I'm all for it.
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My bad, I did say that didn't I? I meant within a decade, not within a year.
fugu, at the very least, may stop by at some point to dispute that, but I stand by it.
And as I said, I think we should support nuclear in the near term, with plans to go totally green in the long term.
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I have no particular argument for that, aside from a bit of skepticism.
I suspect that nuclear with negligible waste and risk is actually more plausible than wind/solar so efficient it can truly replace fossil fuel. But I'm not an expert, and not setting policy, and would be happy to be proven wrong.
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Are you of the opinion that we can NEVER go all green? Or that it just isn't feasible in the next decade or two?
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If all green means all energy needs met by wind/solar (plus hydro where available)... I am a bit skeptical that we will. I don't think it's impossible, so much as impractical. Solar energy is incredibly diffuse and solar panels seem like a fundamentally inefficient method of collection.
Ultimately I just think the potential in nuclear is so much more impressive that it seems like it would be a much better tool of human progress. If we didn't have nuclear, yeah, I'd expect that eventually we might go all green.
But why bother? I guess my counter question could be: Do you believe nuclear will NEVER be safe?
If both alternate sources have problems and one of them produces dramatically more energy, it seems rational to me that we would want to focus on improving the higher energy source.
So, yeah, I get a lot more excited reading about thorium salt reactors than I do reading about more efficient solar panels.
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Hey Lyr it appears you asked me a question I didn't answer. Sorry about that!
Though I guess I'm not totally sure [i]how[/] to answer it, either. Certainly, a sufficient number of solar panels (or algae, that sounds neat actually) could provide as much energy as a nuclear power plant. That's a good point! So what was I trying to say?
Well, I'm not really an expert on solar or nuclear power. But it's generally my understanding that nuclear gives you an awful lot more energy by most reasonable comparative metrics (like cost or size of the facility). Solar energy as it naturally occurs is very diffuse, whereas nuclear involves a phenomenal amount of concentrated energy.
Is all that actually just totally, factually false?
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The vulture capitalists are now using the US government to sue China in the WorldTradeOrganization for failure to sell rare earth elements (used in making high-strength magnets for products such as wind turbines and electric car motors) in the open market as commodities*. ie The US is getting ready to sue China for refusing to allow financial speculators to drive up prices.
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Hey Lyr it appears you asked me a question I didn't answer. Sorry about that!
Though I guess I'm not totally sure [i]how[/] to answer it, either. Certainly, a sufficient number of solar panels (or algae, that sounds neat actually) could provide as much energy as a nuclear power plant. That's a good point! So what was I trying to say?
Well, I'm not really an expert on solar or nuclear power. But it's generally my understanding that nuclear gives you an awful lot more energy by most reasonable comparative metrics (like cost or size of the facility). Solar energy as it naturally occurs is very diffuse, whereas nuclear involves a phenomenal amount of concentrated energy.
Is all that actually just totally, factually false?
So you're talking kwh/$ or per square foot?
It's true that at the moment solar is more expensive per kilowatt hour, as I've already stipulated, but the space issue is perhaps a lot more complicated than you might think. Let's start with a basic question: Why does space matter? Why is it important that the energy production come from the smallest foot print possible? (more important, anyway, than the type of power being produced).
Nuclear and solar both have their ups and downs as far as location. A lot of solar locations are in the middle of nowhere, which means space isn't really an issue since the land its on is empty for hundreds of miles. But that requires expensive transmission lines and transmission power loss. There are technical work arounds for some of that, but it's still a ways off. Nuclear generally isn't right in a city either. People don't like to live next door to nuclear power plants, so they too come with established transmission loss and line production issues, though less than solar.
But the diffuse nature of solar is also a plus. You can't put a nuclear power plant on the roof of a building. One of the most popular applications of solar power in recent years is either roof top arrays with actual panels, or more popular solar shingles. It's a big business, and it's doing the work of slowly removing commercial and residential buildings from the grid entirely without need of any energy infrastructure. And it's something that only solar (or I suppose wind) can do. It's small enough that a property owner can potentially do it themselves, and when you take millions of property owners in charge of their own power generation off the grid, suddenly whole neighborhoods and commercial districts become giant power plants. That's something that is already price competitive across the country thanks to mass produced low cost solar and a new financing arrangements that third parties have worked out. It essentially comes down to a third party often leasing roof top space to produce power, or can involve the property owner buying the shingles outright and getting money back by selling power back into the grid.
And those small scale shingles are only getting more efficient and cheaper to produce.
And like I said, there's stuff like algae-based biofuels, which you can think of as a type of solar power, especially since most of the hardcore algae producers are in the south or southwest where there's abundant sunlight (and adjacent coal fired factories. A lot of them try to set up shop next to a coal fired power plant. Using CO2 capture, they take all the CO2 the plant produces and inject it into holding ponds or tanks. The algae in those tanks, mixed with a little food, CO2 and sunlight, reproduce prodigiously. Then the algae is removed and refined into gasoline. Sapphire Energy has a process that makes B100 that's chemically identical to gas, unlike corn-based ethanol which has a lower energy density and burns hotter. Anyway, it's another type of solar power, and it's foot print is closer to what you want.
So yeah, I've copped to the price parity thing. We're still a ways away from it, though solar is closing the gap with nuclear. It's not closing the gap with something like gas powered plants, because shale has pulled the rug out from under the price of natural gas. But it's getting closer and closer to nuclear. When you consider how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, I bet by the time we build our next plant, solar will be caught up.
I'm not saying don't build them, I've said the opposite in this very thread, but I don't think the arguments are as simple or clear cut as you might.
It was the warmest March on record for the 48 contiguous United States. Globally it seems unlikely to have broken records. January and February (March data not yet available) were appr. the 20th warmest on record, and the coolest since 2008 (when there was a strong La Niña).
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Global climate change doesn't just mean it gets hotter everywhere. Some places get hotter. Some get colder. Some have drought. Some get floods.
It's a complex world.
It is indeed; which is why pointing to a single month of record-breaking heat in the U.S. isn't very good evidence of global warming or even climate change in general. It's not wholly specious, but it seems to me to be closer to arguing by cherry-picked <edit>anecdote</edit> than substantive evidential reasoning.
posted
Of course, the reason I simply provided a link and did not spend time writing an argument claiming that the link proved global warming is that I'm aware it is just another data point. I did think it an interesting data point - hence the link. To avoid confusion in the future, I stipulate that my posts intended as arguments will have at least 6 words.
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Sorry if I was being nit-picky, natural_mystic. I've just had enough arguments with people (on both sides of the issue) about how local variations shouldn't be interpreted as proof of aggregate trends* that I maybe overreacted to your link.
That said, we had been talking about global temperature averages for the majority of this thread, so a link to 'Warmest March on record' without the additional context of it only being a record for a relatively small geographic area still seems like important context to me.
*There's some irony here, in that my dispute with Rabbit earlier in this thread was about how big temporally-localized variations need to be before they're meaningful in the aggregate, with me disputing that the 'local' variation we've seen over the past decade was significant.
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I like reading all these stories that are coming out about how global warming is being internalized by people as a true thing. What convinced them? SCIENCE? REASONED DEBATE? COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF METEOROLOGICAL DATA AND ATMOSPHERIC READINGS? no, not at all, that would be silly, people don't trust science, they trust their own eyes and ears. and so they reason just that it's been kind of hot this year people automatically internalize that as proof of global warming, hooray!
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"One disaster after another": poll finds most people tie extreme weather to global warming. 69% of those polled agree that "global warming is affecting the weather in the United States"... ...and believe that the weather is getting worse by a 2to1 margin. ...the polls suggest that direct experience of erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem is no longer just a vague and distant threat.
For the record, globally, March 2012 was actually the 16th warmest AND the 118th coolest on record... ...and, globally, the coolest March since 1999 AND the 16th warmest March since records began in 1880. ie March 1999 was either the 13th or the 14th or the 15th warmest March on record, and 12 of the 13 Marches since 2000 then have been warmer. Or 14 of the 16 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 1999
...the latencies of the long-haul international fiber connections are something of an issue [snip] right now, round-trip travel times between London and Tokyo are taking about 265milliseconds, with routing that runs on the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean bottoms and (effectively) along Route 66. [snip] [over] a quarter of a second round-trip is pretty slow. [snip] Things should get better in 2013, however, when the Arctic Link cable connects Japan to Britain via the Northwest Passage. This line will run at 170milliseconds round trip.
* ie The ArcticCableCompany is betting the farm that they'll be able to run cable-laying ships through enough of the NorthwestPassage in the Summer of 2012 (and possibly the Summer of 2013) to have their system operating in the Fall of 2013 (or earlier).
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The global land surface temperature was ..., making this the second warmest April, behind 2007... For the ocean, the April global sea surface temperature was ... —the 11th warmest April on record. ...
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I'm sure the anti-science...can you call them nuts when they make up the majority of the right wing?...people have a lot to do with this, but the people pushing it seem to be property developers who are pretty blatantly trying to scam people.
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I'm not sure there is a clear distinction between the "nuts" and developers. There are lots of reasons that people are "anti-science".
Property developers don't have to be involved in a conspiracy to scam people. It's likely they really don't believe the science.
Very few people have enough expertise to actually understand the scientific arguments and critically review them. Almost no one makes a decision about the seriousness of the scientific predictions on Climate Change for sound scientific reasons. People don't start off by trying to understand the strengths and weakness of the underlying science because for the most people, that is a practical impossibility.
So people generally decide whether or not they believe that Climate Science is sound based on their preconceived ideas about how the world works and then they cherry pick the data available to them to support their view. Human induced climate change just doesn't fit very well with a belief that God is in control of the weather. It's pretty incompatible with a desire for unlimited economic growth and an economy built on fossil fuels. The predictions of climate science demand global cooperation and government intervention.
It took me a long time understand why libertarian think tanks were leading the climate denial fight, but its actually pretty simple. Climate Change is the point at which libertarianism smacks into the wall of gritty reality and crumples like a Coke can. Climate Science says that all our every day activities from driving our cars to answering our cell phones are trespassing in real and severe ways on other people's rights.
When ever science faces off against peoples strongest personal values, its going to be a David and Goliath fight. People will always find it much easier to rationalize that the scientists are wrong than to alter their fundamental values.
The point is, there is every reason to believe that the more science weighs in on the side of limiting property rights, the more likely it is that property developers will become genuinely anti-science.
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Figures. Perfectly legal to advocate cold-blooded murder of people for being of the wrong ethnicity or religion or political affiliation or sexual orientation or ... ...yet one would not be allowed to express any perfectly reasonable expectation concerning presentday Climate trends.
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Also an EXCELLENT website containing More Sea Level Rise Maps at even greater detail due to larger sizing for those who wanna check out their own areas inregard to presentday storm-surge threat and future sea-level rises.
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