Okay - help someone that doesn't truly understand this.
Earth's surface can gain heat through 4 ways I can think of (and this is just what I can think of and is likely wrong):
1) Geothermal brings more heat from core/mantle up. I don't think this is currently any larger than normal, nor do I imagine this varies much.
2) Oceans can give up heat they are storing and provide it on the surface. I don't know if El Nino is this, or if that just means "surface" ocean temperatures are up from whatever source.
3) Solar radiation (including infrared) can be higher than normal. I honestly have no idea if there's any significant variation in this, ever.
4) Earth can retain more heat that it was previously (global warming, be it man-made or not)
When they say the annual variation is usually hundredths of a degree, that sounds to me like 1-3 are generally non-factors, but that's all gut interpretation. Can someone with actual knowledge validate this?
Solar radiation is variable but it's pretty predictable. There's an 11-year sunspot cycle that accounts for most of that variation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
Oceans so far have been storing heat, and keeping the average temperature increase down. No one knows how long that will continue. They also store a fair bit of CO2 which has lead to acidification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
4) is the biggest, yes. 3) does vary a bit ("Maunder minimum"). 2) is the other way round - the oceans are a big stabiliser of temperature.
A subtlety of (4) is the feedback loops, especially involving water. Water vapor increases heat retention and is increased by heat, but this is where weather interacts with climate and it gets non-linear.
The Earth can only "gain" heat through #3, solar radiation. The other 3 items you list can store and release heat at a later time, but they can not generate more heat than they already possess now. (This is not strictly true, conversion of mass to energy, e=mc^2, means that nuclear and fusion energy could create new heat at the expense of matter, but we generally assume that on planets, this is negligible.)
So if people talk about "El Nino" increasing the temperature for the year, this is only possible because previous "La Nina" cycles decreased the temperature by an equivalent amount in previous years, and the oceans are returning the heat to the atmosphere.
Geothermal energy was stored back during the formation of the planet and there is generally just enough to keep the planet a few degrees above absolute zero. The energy released is highly variable though, volcanoes can release lots on one particular day, but then diminished activity for years follows.
That's talking about radioactive decay, not fission. The article doesn't do a great job distinguishing between the two, but it's _not_ talking about the process of splitting atoms.
>The new measurements suggest radioactive decay provides more than half of Earth's total heat, estimated at roughly 44 terawatts based on temperatures found at the bottom of deep boreholes into the planet's crust.
Not only is this pedantic in the context of whether Earth's geothermal energy is "stored" or "generated", it's also wrong. Fission is when an atom breaks into smaller pieces. What is it that you think happens in radioactive decay?
From Wikipedia, first line in the article: "...nuclear fission is either a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts (lighter nuclei)."
Why would you assume that Scientific American got such an elementary thing wrong, then post it as an argument without even checking?
Fission is effectively catalyzed radioactive decay from neutrons at the right energy levels. There could be some differences in decay products, but simply waiting will eventually release that energy. http://www.mpoweruk.com/nuclear_theory.htm
[not an expert] What you say is mostly correct. Two things though I think are critical and under-appreciated in understanding climate change:
1) rate of change & sixth mass extinction - many natural systems can adapt to gradual change over the course of many millennia but cannot to the incredibly rapid change our planet is now undergoing. this leads to loss of ecosystems & biomass which help to regulate our climate/CO2 levels
2) positive feedback loops - many systems are also at risk of destabilizing feedback loops, e.g melting ice increasing solar radiation absorption, ice sheets whose disintegration will accelerate with rising and warming oceans warming them from frontally and from below and moulins turning them into swiss cheese, potential permafrost melting w/ massive methane outgassing, etc.
The combination of these effects mean this is not a simple "calories in/out" type calculation, but a complex system geared towards maintaining equilibrium, which as we rapidly push further and further out of that equilibrium will face rising risks of a highly nonlinear, rapid shift to a dramatically new equilibrium climate the likes of which our planet has not seen since well before the dawn of our species.
I live in one of those "Record Warmest" boxes, it really was hot during the past year.
Its funny how people you would consider uneducated and poor in my country would understand that there is clearly something going wrong with the world around us, while some people with lots of money, influence and education choose to believe that this is all a conspiracy by a foreign government.
It's just nuts, really, something is terribly wrong with our world, and we need to fix it.
Please, if you have the time, please join a local group that helps conserve the environment, learn how you could help reduce your carbon footprint, even a little could go a long way.
Of course, if someone says "My country was so hot last year, this proves global warming!" then it's BS. On the other hand, since we know that global warming is happening, it's totally legitimate to say "My country was so hot last year, it sucked, and thanks to Global Warming we can expect more such years to come in the future. Why aren't we doing anything about it?"
Let's say summer is 100 days, and "normally" there are 10 days of 90-degree highs (the hot days) and 90 days of 70-degree highs. That's an average high of 72 degrees.
Now, if you have a summer with one additional hot day, the average high is 72.2 degrees, which is about the 0.23 degree average increase observed.
Obviously these numbers are made up, but could you really just casually notice only one more hot day than normal? It seems like you'd need to be keeping count to have any sort of confidence that this summer was hotter than normal.
As you helpfully state, it is a 0.23F average temperature difference. That could mean the temperature was significantly warmer for a large period of time, then somewhat cooler. Depending on the magnitude, the temperature could have varied widely, but only increased 0.23F, on average.
The thing is, you can really tell the difference when you have to deal with this heat everyday there are some days you just do not feel like going outside. The sun just burns, especially when you get down from your car you can feel your whole face burning up.
See the thing is, growing up we never had an A/C in our house, no one complained, once in a while yes it would get hot, but a common table fan would fix the problem.
But now, everyday we many families around where I live need to keep a table fan running at all times.
Its 4 AM in the morning, and its still warm outside. And Jan is supposed to be a relatively colder month in my country.
The funny thing is, just how many people over here notice this increase in temperature.
You're definitely scared. It's also a El Nino year, it might be that the weather patterns in your region have been altered by this periodic oscillation. By the way, where do you live?
>> It's just nuts, really, something is terribly wrong with our world, and we need to fix it.
You should probably start with developing countries like China and India. The US has been actively reducing its carbon footprint for a while now:
Energy related carbon emissions in the United States declined by 12% between 2005 and 2012, back to a level not seen since 1994.
Per capita emissions fell 17% over the same period, and are now at their lowest level in 50 years.
This decline in emissions occurred across the US economy, with the switch from coal to natural gas in the power sector responsible for just 35-40% of the drop.
I agree that China and India need to reduce their emissions. But those don't seem like the US numbers we should actually be looking at. What are energy related carbon emission vs. total emissions? And what happened to US population over that period?
It would be helpful to have a number for total emissions.
Yeah, China and India are totally relevant to global CO2 emissions. The global climate doesn't give a damn about how many people are responsible for a given quantity of emissions, it's completely and utterly uncaring.
So, if China decides to divide itself into ten countries, each with 1.05 Gt emission, the earth will be so much better?
The global climate doesn't give a damn about national borders, either.
Of course China is important, because decisions made by its government can affect a billion people, but the same can be said for the US. (Good luck persuading Chinese people to reduce their emission, if the US doesn't commit itself to do the same.)
Both factors are important, period. Whether it's people who are emitting a lot per capita today or countries with lots of people who are increasing their emissions.
You cannot have a reasonable discussion about CO2 emissions without talking about India and China.
Let's say the US halves its per capita emissions tomorrow. Hey, that's fantastic right?
But then let's say China and India come up to match the US's per capita emissions levels. That would increase China's emissions by 25% and India's emissions by 5x. Increasing total emissions for all 3 countries by 50%.
Even if the US stops emitting CO2 tomorrow, if China and India reach 50% of the US's per capita emissions they will together account for 1.2x the total emissions of the US, China, and India today.
Pretending that because the US has much higher per capita emissions today means that it's ok to ignore the rest of the world is pure fantasy. That's the point. We should totally "talk" to China and India. Nobody gets a free pass.
> Also, enough with the blame game. All three countries have to put in all possible efforts.
That's the point. Some people seem to think that shouldn't be the point. But it has to be. There's only one biosphere, nobody gets a free pass for carbon emissions just because some other country had higher per capita emissions in 2015, that's not how that works.
Usually countries stop burning coal and use something that emits less CO2 as they develop. Except the US. It's still burning the most coal per capita, by far.
Countries get rid of it by burning it, then they stop burning it because its gone. Britain didn't intentionally start lowering production in 1910, they literally burned it all, then had to find something else.
Actually it was for economic reasons. The UK lost comparative advantage for coal production. The way they mine coal in the UK is positively archaic compared to monster open cut mines which out produce the UK deep pits by a wide margin.
Well, a bit of both. True it was not economically sound, but the NUM (coal miners union) had a lot of leverage. All coal power plants had to buy British coal for example, which in turn meant that the government had to capitulate to their demands or face a shutdown. Thatchers decision to shut the mines was incredibly unpopular and to this day large swathes of the north despise her (somewhat unduly), but in combination with a wave of privatization managed to break the union stranglehold. Without the Iron Lady taking that step the mines would have been open for far far longer.
Some of the mines she closed would actually be profitable now though, due to the rising cost of coal.
Yeah the way they were kept open and then shut down was purely political, no argument there. But they were doomed in an era of free trade. Arguably the UK should have moved to free trade earlier and reaped the benefits instead of arguing about coal mining. I don't have a lot of hope for people to ever agree on that though.
It's true that old mines can reopen during periods of high demand, but they'd be shutting again now as the coal price has plummeted again, probably due to the energy glut especially in gas. In an ideal world the mines would be owned by someone who would open them when it made sense, and close them again when it no longer made sense.
This isn't always a fair comparison. Some of the UK pits were high quality anthracite. Also some cost savings could surely have been made if the two political sides had been able to actually make meaningful compromises.
One cold morning, with a very clear sky, no clouds in sight, I overheard two old ladies discussing how when they were young the sky was bluer, they both agreed. This was in Salamanca, Spain, not Beijing, so no smog to account for.
Aging can cause a decrease in retain sensitivity: "Cells in the retina that are responsible for normal color vision decline in sensitivity as we age, causing colors to become less bright and the contrast between different colors to be less noticeable. ... In particular, blue colors may appear faded or "washed out." While there is no treatment for this normal, age-related loss of color perception, you should be aware of this loss if your profession (e.g. artist, seamstress or electrician) requires fine color discrimination."
I was also made suspicious to some of the claims about climate change by the fact that in Italy we've had, since I was a child, two common sayings:
"Summers are not as they used to be"
and
"there are no autumns and springs anymore"
They were used as examples of empty cliches that old people repeat - something to absolutely avoid. Somehow it was known that while everybody feels that it is so, it's also a form of mis-perception, much like "Nowadays young people have no manners any more". Then the climate change issue became prominent, and immediately everybody was transformed again in its own legitimate one-person weather station, complete with long and accurate temperature records.
In the "Dictionnaire des idées reçues", a long and hilarious list of vacuous cliches that Flaubert compiled in the 1870s, you can read the following line:
people ... understand that there's clearly something going wrong with the world
something is terribly wrong
This feeling of impending catastrophe, especially when prompted by signals as imperceptible to a human being as average change of 1.33 degrees Celsius (on land) on the average of the 20th century temperatures, to me is an indication of that kind of paranoia or panic that feeds on tiny when not completely imaginary cues.
This is not to say that I don't believe climate change is real; just that I think that the debate would be more rational and productive if people relied on scientific data and stopped using personal feelings, anecdotes and questionable reports to support their position.
Is it an anecdote, when every ice mass on the planet is melting/has melted? When 400 century old ice in Siberia is all gone in a matter of a few years? When the million-year-old Antarctic ice shelf is undergoing runaway melting because of seawater rushing in underneath because the margins have melted away?
The planet is undergoing irreversible change as we speak. The only 'imaginary' thinking is the denial that continues despite the overwhelming accumulation of data.
No, it's not, as long as you measure it and give precise figures. And we do it. I just tend not to trust somebody's personal assessment of the situation based on the fact that he thinks it's warmer than in the past: it might be local weather patterns, El Nino, simple suggestion.
It's not somebody's personal assessment. It's the scientific consensus of almost all scientists. Climate change is not in question, it's not a possibilty under discussion it's as close to scientific fact as gravity and evolution.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" by Upton Sinclair says everything about this issue.
It sounds bad but I'm very unoptomistic about our chances of stopping this. There is just too much pollution and too little meaningful global cooperation.
Just imagine if Trump did get into office as well...
IMHO the problem with stopping this and many other forms of environmental degradation is that it's better to reign in hell than serve in heaven so to speak.
Poverty is worse than all but the most severe natural disasters. Infant mortality in many poor countries is probably a lot higher than it is in Miami during a hurricane. Poverty is worse than pollution or storms. Even if the sea level rises it would be better to be forced to uproot cities and move them inland than it would be to go without modern sanitation, health care, food availability, education, etc. Only acute natural disasters like severe earthquakes and tornadoes approach chronic poverty in their destructive power.
As a result it is in the self-interest of everyone on Earth to prioritize some level of wealth -- say the achievement of a basic first-world middle class standard of living -- over any environmental problem save the most immediate, acute, and apocalyptic. That's why the response of the developing world to suggestions like CO2 reduction or limiting overfishing has so far been "screw you, we're poor."
This is also why I really think that what I call "abstinence based solutions" to these problems are dead on arrival. Telling people to forego the benefits of energy consumption or modern technology is like telling teenagers not to have sex. The only hope we have is to develop the world to the point that people can afford the luxury of caring about the future beyond the next 48 hours. Only then will we be able to transition to anything more sustainable. Desperate people can't afford to care. It's also a total non-starter to try to sell first world people on regressing their standard of living. They're not stupid.
> The only hope we have is to develop the world to the point that people can afford the luxury of caring about the future beyond the next 48 hours. Only then will we be able to transition to anything more sustainable
This condition still exists in the "developed" first world. We haven't gotten off the treadmill.
Artificially stimulating the economy into the unnatural state of inflation made sense when we had a scarcity of food and physical goods. Now it's just extremely wasteful, from both individual and global perspectives.
Desperate people living in poverty are not those most responsible for climate change. The developed countries, most prominently the US (in absolute terms), contributed most to the problem and have the economic power to start addressing it. The reason Canada (to take another example) hasn't done more to prevent climate change has more to do with greed and misallocation of resources than with poverty eradication.
The choice between lifting people out of poverty and addressing climate change is a false dilemma. Both can, and should, be worked on. Energy abstinence is not the solution. Instituting a carbon tax, ending the monopoly of rent-seeking energy utilities like NV Energy (who do all they can to stop renewables in their track, see [1] and [2]), and letting the market work would be far more effective. All that is needed is political will.
Desperate people living in poverty will be just as responsible as those living in developed countries as soon as they can work their way out of poverty.
Those in developed countries are never going to go back to the standard of living found in poor ones, or at least not without fighting it to the death.
I agree with the rest and I wasn't implying that we can't have both. But there do seem to be a lot of people who take a moralistic tone about this or who push solutions that amount to the same.
> Those in developed countries are never going to go back to the standard of living found in poor ones, or at least not without fighting it to the death.
Of course not, nor should they.
> I agree with the rest and I wasn't implying that we can't have both. But there do seem to be a lot of people who take a moralistic tone about this or who push solutions that amount to the same.
Understood, and I agree to a certain point, although I think a lot of the strident tone on the environmentalist side is more the result of sheer panic than a desire to moralize. Be that as it may, we can choose to filter out the tone and look at the substance, and when we do that the positions on both sides are not as irreconcilable as they appear (as you seem to agree).
I have this debate with my parents from time to time. They're big readers of James Kunstler, who seems to advocate for reverting to a primarily agrarian society as the only sensible and correct response to the impending climate crisis. My argument is primarily that the planet cannot support 7 billion people with 19th century technology, so best case we'd still be looking at a decimation of the human population. Additionally, as you said, people simply won't give up the security and comfort which technology provides for them (for which Kunstler deems them morons).
Technology got us into this mess, but only more advanced technology (along with good government policy and cooperation) will get us out of it.
I don't know if anyone else is like this, but I can't help but be slightly amused, when in the same thread that some people are thinking that this is a lost cause, other's are claiming the the exponential growth of solar and wind power will ensure nuclear's niche status (and which seems to imply that the problem is essentially already solved, we just have to wait a decade or two, "global cooperation" or not).
The problem of us using fossil fuels is essentially solved over a long enough timeline (60-100 years). The issue with global warming is that the amount of warming that can happen before it triggers certain irreversible events is on a shorter timeline than this (25-40 years).
There is no 'solution' to climate change becaus the climate changes. It's not even always a problem, either. It's like strong/weak currencies. Some people want a strong currency, others want a weak currency.
Adaptation to climate is what humans have always done and what humans will always do. The richer we are, the better we can adapt. It is beyond futile to wast percentage points of productivity growth futilely trying so change something which is not changeable.
The problems faced by humans 100 years ago are mostly not problems anymore, because of the use of technology and greater productivity. Framing productivity and technology as the problems simply is code for trying to freeze progress.
The greater issue is people using fear to try and gain more power. Fear of terrorism and fear of climate change are the major levers being used to increase the control by those in power. Mostly this is by people who think they can reduce the chaos of life though better planning. While that is possible at the margin and at the micro level (better city planning results in better cities) at a level above that it breaks down and makes things worse.
Central planning is, has been and always will be a disaster. Whenever you hear a politician advocating giving them more power so they can plan a better life for you, know that while they may sincerely believe it, it is more likely to make things worse for you.
> It is beyond futile to wast percentage points of productivity growth futilely trying so change something which is not changeable.
You sound like a climate change denier? There is most definitely a solution to pumping massive quantities of emissions into the air, and it involves not doing that.
> fear of climate change are the major levers being used to increase the control by those in power
Except as far as I can see it those in power (at least in the US) are doing their best to deny climate change. And my whole point is the people in power are not doing enough, hence... you know, climate change.
What is a climate change denier? Someone who denies that the climate has and will change?
Of course stopping all production will stop changing the makeup of the atmosphere as far as humans go. In the same way stopping people killing each other solves the murder problem. Most people are tryin to talk beyond a pat level of posturing.
I'm not ready to throw all my devices and vehicles and climate control in landfill to try and subtely change the weather 100 years hence. Nor do I think that intentionally retarding productivity and growth for the same hope. In this I am intellectually honest.
> what is a climate change denier? Someone who denies that the climate has and will change?
Clearly in this context someone who denies the impact man is having on the climate.
> In this I am intellectually honest.
And monstrously short sighted. American, I assume?
> Of course stopping all production will stop changing the makeup of the atmosphere as far as humans go.
Who said anything about stopping all production? That's obviously not going to happen. What should happen is a rapid reduction in the emission of gasses like CO2 through whatever means necessary. If that means you can't buy more cheap crap from China, or have to actually think about your fuel consumption so you can't drive down the block to buy a burger that's been frozen and flown in from thousands of miles away then so be it.
So you define someone with labels and then argue against what you think that person thinks. Labelling and then arguing against that label is a good way to feel correct but fail to persuade. I am not American nor do I fit into any of the labels you wish to press onto my argument.
I don't 'deny' that human activities have an impact on climate. There is scientific and physical evidence that this is true. It also passes the 'obviously' test because any change to the state of a system will have an impact on the system.
What I do understand is that previous predictions as to the level and severity of impact are completely incorrect after several decades of study and predictions. On this even ipcc contributing scientists agree. What I also understand is that current policies are inconsequential even if the current sensitivity levels (which appear overstated) are correct. On this most politicians and activists agree as we can read from the sober observations from Paris.
What is true is that trying to socially engineer changes by banning certain types of technology or use of technology, or by erecting grand schemes are all doomed to fail, and are a complete waste of time and resources. What will change things are the development of new technology. The best way to get that is to stop trying to distort resource allocation in a specific way, particularly as doing so diverts resources towards negative or low eroei reruns which further hampers the ability to deliver new tech and lowers the ability to adapt to a changing climate.
If you're an activist, that's fine. But I write for the people reading this and thinking through positions, not to sway people by using labels and stereotypes.
So the question is when did the effects of El Niño start having an impact in 2015? Unless it was significant for almost the whole year, it would still have been a record without it.
>2015’s sharp spike in temperatures was aided by a strong El Nino weather pattern late in the year that caused ocean waters in the central Pacific to heat up. But the unusual warming started early and steadily gained strength in a year in which ten of 12 months set all-time records, scientists said.
If this keeps up, I have no idea how countries are going to deal with displaced migrants. We barely have the capability right now to properly deal with Syrians and African refugees.
Moving is expensive. Cheaper to stay in place and work around it.
Note that I'm talking about overall total world costs. The only reason you have refugees now is the costs are being externalized. Bombing Syria is pretty cheap if Europe pays the refugee price, not sure the last time Germany bombed Syria, but they're paying the price for someone else doing it right now... Because of the ease of externalizing costs, I suspect we will get more refugees, but reducing it would be a wise goal.
Obviously there are very small exceptions to the very large general rule, like if your whole island submerges or whatever.
Ah yes, an El Nino "this proves global warming" versus a La Nina "weather is not climate" year.
I hate that this is the narrative. Can people just ... stop doing this? Maybe? If you try to use the "record breaking heat, it was warm this one year" argument to argue for acceptance of theories of climate change you are only going to be hoist by your own petard a few years later when natural weather cycles result in record breaking cold years. It's the wrong playing field to be on.
It's not that it was warm "this one year," it's another data point in the pattern of record-breakingly warm years over the past few decades. Checkout the animation in this Bloomberg report if you want a better idea.[1]
It's still fundamentally the wrong argument to make if you're trying to convince the public. As I mentioned, all of that precious work goes right out the window the very first year there's a record breaking cold snap (because there will be). And then you'll end up spending all your time trying to break people out of the logic you set them up for. Getting complex science across to the public is a difficult bargain but if you short cut it you're just going to pay the price later.
Nuclear Power, until those who care about the environment accept that the only clean at scale power solution for base load is nuclear power we will get no where. "Renewables" are great and should be in the mix but they are not an at scale solution.
Lots of people keep saying this, but I really don't think it's true. Solar and wind work fine at scale. There is nothing un-scalable about them. What they don't do is work at night, and in that case nuclear is a fine option. Although batteries that can run a house overnight aren't that expensive.
Given nuclear's huge expense, huge lead times, and intense local political opposition, and comparing it to how battery&renewable is getting much cheaper with time, I don't doubt that battery&renewable will be cheaper at scale than nuclear power will be by the time that either could be built out.
I've never seen convincing numbers that the expense is regulatory. And the nimby-ism is not regulatory in the least.
There are always grand claims of how cheap nuclear can be, but it has never been seen in practice. Sometimes people even claim that nuclear is cheap by only looking at the operating & maintenance costs, ignoring the true costs of nuclear, which are all upfront.
What type of nuclear constraints could be applied to wind generation? Validation of designs? There's very few turbine designs out there. I can't see how wind could be ever be made more expensive than nuclear, but am open to new data.
Where you can put wind power, how many approvals you must have, how long the lead times are.
If you can't see how regulatory process increase costs, use this thought experiment. You want to build a house. You buy some land for it, and submit the plans for approval. Now spend the next ten years paying an architect to complete forms and submitting them for review. You have to pay the carrying cost of the land and the architects salary. The cost of the building materials for house remains the same. Can you now afford the house?
If we went fully "renewable" how much industrial waste would these batteries that everyone needs create? Solar and Wind really doesnt work for everyone, where it is cost effective, available and reliable it makes sense to mix them in, but you cant tell me you fully expect every country to go 100% Solar and Wind?
The industrial waste caused by solar/wind would pale in comparison to the existing waste being generated by electric cars and mobile phones.
And of course you can't expect every country to go fully solar/wind. What you need are integrated, continent wide power grids and alternative energy storage mechanisms like molten sands etc.
Batteries are really not that bad for industrial waste. Lead-acid are terrible, but there are better options when it comes to daily storage of lots of energy.
Compared to coal, give me batteries any day! And we don't really yet know the full effects of all this cheap natural we're getting through fracking. Though I'm sure fracking is probably better than coal mining, we'll have to wait to see.
I don't expect every country to do it this year, or this decade. I also don't expect every country to have nuclear power either, because it's expensive. You think uranium mining is clean? Constructing all that stuff is free? Of course not.
The amount of solar panels needed for a house (or their share, in some solar farm) is miniscule. It's 4-7 panels. If we want to store excess for night, maybe 10. The batteries fairly small (using lithium, a sufficient battery could hang on the wall. Maybe two tesla power walls would do it). The waste isn't that bad (nowhere near the amount of waste people create yearly in plastic or other landfill garbage).
It's totally doable in first world countries. And it would go a long way in developing countries too, for the same reason cell phones gained popularity faster than landlines, because they require less infrastructure.
Any idea what proportion of Western Europe would need to be covered in solar panels and wind farms to reliably give 90% of the required kWh per day? The other 10% could come from tidal. But you'd need much of the potential hydro capacity to act as energy storage. (Assuming battery/hydro back up on a daily basis).
It certainly seems more feasible than some feeble attempt to cover the Earth with a reflective surface as a geoengineering measure to counteract global warming.
Promising. However naive extrapolation from that source would would be a significant underestimate of required capacity. Western Europe has significant seasonal deviations in sun. Our governments would not accept direct electrical imports from Africa. We also consume much more energy per capita that other regions.
What is expensive is replacing all the current energy infrastructure. Even if you went out and just re-built coal power stations and oil refineries it would cost trillions. We sometimes forget in first world countries that a lot of the reason we are so wealthy is because we have an enormous stock of physical capital paid for over the centuries.
I agree. And the fact that you need to store the energy during night and winter is not a big deal for technology either. We have been dealing with a similar problem with food supply since agriculture. I think it looks so unfeasible, because today people don't even recognize when we have a winter - that's how well we have solved the problem.
Please edit uncivil language like this out of your comments when posting here. Without that (well, that and the uppercase yelling), this comment would be a fine one.
Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy.
Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids.
We have 200 years of uranium left at current rates of consumption. But if we replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd consume 10 times more per year and we'd only have about 20 years of energy available before needing to move on to a new energy source.
Uranium exploration is pretty much non existent these days, I would'nt be comfortable saying how much there actually is. Peak oil has been coming for decades but they keep finding it.
"Adherents claim that with seawater uranium extraction, there would be enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy our energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy."
There are only four breeder reactors in operation, we'd need a lot more rather quickly for them to be useful.
Also as with all things nuclear there are an awful lot of claims and not a lot of known things here. Nuclear somehow always looks much better in theory than it does in practice.
There aren't a lot of problems though, there is just one: We rely on fossil fuels. Switching to nuclear fission won't change that in the slightest.
Also even if you could get sufficient agreement on the need for more nuclear power plants - which you won't - it would still take way to long to build enough of them to have an impact.
It makes much more sense to invest in renewable energy, the energy grid and research into nuclear fusion.
With breeder reactors, the Uranium should last much longer. I read somewhere that you get approximately 100 times as much energy out of the same amount of Uranium when you use a breeder reactor, and don't throw the fission byproducts.
So assuming we have 20 years of (currently discovered) Uranium, breeder reactors should make that last a theoretical 2000 years at current energy consumption levels.
> Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction.
I responded to your claim previously[0]:
> In that 200 years a whole lot more uranium will become available for economical extraction, exactly the same as what happened with oil and natural gas.
Do you have reason to believe this will not happen?
OK, but remember that the experts said the same thing about oil and natural gas, and were wrong in that case. Here the estimate of ~10 megatonnes assumes that seawater extraction will never be economically viable, one possible source of error.
If you're interested in the history of "peak resources" here is a good book about Paul Ehrlich's famous bet with Julian L. Simon:
> Do you have reason to believe this will not happen?
What's kind of amazing is that people don't believe that we will develop a solar powered technique to extract carbon the from the atmosphere and create liquid fuels.
Like an artificial plant? If it is possible to engineer something that works better (and there is no reason to believe it is impossible) that would be a huge event.
I think in your link "economical extraction" means "economical extraction at current or similar prices". At suitably high prices, even extraction from seawater becomes reasonable (google gave me http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514751/novel-material-s... with an estimate of $1e3–2e3/kg). I assume this would have a limited effect on electricity prices because uranium prices are probably a minor component of nuclear power costs.
This is the same argument that the proponents of peak oil put forth. Discovered uranium deposits != all uranium deposits on earth. When price pressure is put on uranium, we'll have more speculators looking for it. (Which the article addresses.)
Also, Economically unaccessible today != economically unaccessible tomorrow. Our mining technology gets better all the time, especially if there's price pressure on it. We're accessing deep-sea oil deposits that we weren't able to twenty years ago. (Which the article addresses, but you omitted the key point!!! We have a 60,000 year supply of uranium in the oceans!)
The chief problem with coal isn't pitmining, it's the pollution from burning the stuff.
Don't fall for the mistake of taking known reserves to be the actual amount in the earths crust.
'Oil is about to run out' predictions have been falling for this for a century now, and continue to make the same error.
There is no economic reason to find resources out beyond a set timeline. So they aren't looking for them, and so the reserves always look like they are going to run out in 30 years.
The actual environmental impact of mines is negligible over the long term, provided the mining is done in a country with good environmental protection in place.
As other people have mentioned, that's known 235U.
We have enough domestic 232Th to satisfy our energy needs for a very long time. If we use breeder reactors that can utilize 238U, we also have sufficient availability for well-beyond any reasonably foreseeable future ("many millenia").
Besides, that gives us plenty of time to actually develop other methods of providing energy. Right now every day we fail to deploy nuclear is another day of coal/gas. Even if we used your silly figure of 200 years, it shouldn't take that long to develop a proper solar+batteries replacement (heck, we should have fusion before the 200 years is up).
> mining
There are rare earth mines that we aren't operating right now because it's too expensive to dispose of the Th. In any serious nuclear deployment, the fuel itself would be free (or nearly free).
> far fewer
Comparing U or Th mining to coal mining is silly when you only need to do over 2,000,000x more coal mining.
> the only clean at scale power solution for peak load is nuclear power
Nuclear is fantastic for base load, but peak load? Steam bypassing costs as much as generating electricity does, but with nobody wanting to pay for power they didn't use. Technically a good solution, but falls apart economically.
If we can go mostly electric for our transportation, as you suggest, that means we have cheap and plentiful battery storage. If we can easily store power, there's not much advantage for using nuclear power over wind and solar.
Not necessarily true. Liquid fuels are used for transportation but only for niche generation, because they have higher costs, both in capital equipment and in fuel cost.
Likewise, battery cost for transport can make it attractive, but that doesn't necessarily make it better for stationary generation. Scale beats everything when it comes to generation.
Scale matters for massive thermodynamic processes for effieiceny, but 21st century technology has become much more decentralized. You don't need massive installations of solar or wind at one location, the can be distributed throughout the grid. Massive scale is possible, but it's not required once you get away from heat differentials as the core of your energy process.
It still matters for transmission, construction and maintenance costs, as well as resources like land and labor.
You may not need scaled installations, but they will still beat out the alternatives in any industry shakeout over the long term. We build large scale factories, farms, ports, airports, roads and retail outlets. These happen because they work. Even if the energy production at scale gave no advantage, all the other advantages of scale means that it wins out in the end.
This plan seems to ignore the growth curves of renewables.
By the time any nuclear power expansion plan gets into place exponential growth in photovoltaics and other renewable technologies will have taken over.
Nuclear power would have been a great idea, if we had started at least 10 or 20 years ago. It is unfortunate "environmentalists" did such a disservice to the environment, but we're long past the point of Nuclear being a viable solution.
That ignores the price curve of batteries. Right now, wholesale prices for lithium ion batteries are $150/kWh of capacity, which translates roughly to $0.15/kWh of stored energy. This is less than the price swing in spot prices for energy currently, so we'll start seeing this market expand drastically.
And as electric car batteries lose capacity and need to be replaced, those batteries will still have plenty of storage left for use at home or on the grid.
When batteries get down to $75-$100/kWh capacity, storage will be able to take over much more of the grid. And there are lots of promising flow batteries that can beat lithium ion on price, when it comes to grid-level storage.
1) I think you're off by about 2x for wholesale lithium battery prices; they are closer to 300 USD/kW-hr.
2) a) The economics of battery energy storage are effectively a type of arbitrage in time, where you get some fraction of depth-of-discharge over the time in question.
2) b) In the most limiting case, lets assume that battery energy storage is only being used for daily cycling, that the maximum cycle depth is 75%, and that the investor expects to break even in 5 years. In order to be viable at that breakeven time, the price of energy needs to swing by over 0.22 USD/kW-hr over the day (RMS !). Considering that bulk energy is only 0.05 USD/kW-hr now (average!), that's a huge amount of volatility that needs to be exposed to the market.
I suspect that if customers are exposed to that volatility instead, that we will see enough voluntary adjustment on the demand side of the market to prevent 5x swings in price. With that much volatility available, consumers will demand the savings that aggressive time-of-use pricing offers in such a market.
On the other hand, the economics become much more favorable for energy storage in the frequency support market. For example, the market for primary frequency reserve (PFR) operates on 15 minute time scales and faster. Therefore, the time between battery cycles is two orders of magnitude smaller than the bulk storage market. Right now, there is enough PFR on the US grid (via coal-fired steam and gas-turbine power) that the price for PFR is very low. But as renewables continue to displace fossil fuels as a fraction of total power, the price for PFR will start to creep up.
Agreed, storage is arbitrage, but arbitrage that's going to have a ton of economic purpose and necessity, not just somebody being a middleman.
The Chevy Bolt's batteries have been widely reported to cost $145/kWh, see for example [1]. I'm not sure what's excluded from the whole component to get to the price, but it's a point of reference at least.
The full life of various lithium ion batteries is still being studied and will vary with chemistry, but roughly a partial cycle seems to count as a partial cycle in terms of battery life. So if you're only cycling 75% capacity on a day, then you'll make up the extra 25% in longer life. Most studies I've read of lithium ion battery life but the number of cycles at 1000 +/- 200, to maintain "most" of the battery's capacity, which is why I used the conversion factor of 1000. I would believe a 25%-40% swing in practice, in either direction.
Peaker power plants quite frequently operate at over $0.30/kWh, more than 6x the cost of bulk energy. Energy storage is already gaining in this space [2]. Of course, consumers never see $0.05/kWh pricing, averaging $0.12/kWh nationwide, which is why residential solar makes so much sense for so many people. Consumers that choose demand-based pricing are already exposed to price swings on the order of $0.20/kWh in time-of-use plans both on Southern California Edison [3] and PG&E [4].
The speed with which solar and batteries are changing is going to catch a lot of people in the energy industry completely flat-footed.
With regards to cycle life, the amount of cycle life you get by reducing the depth of discharge is very nonlinear. Some internal studies show it be a strong power ((1/fractional_depth)^4 or more).
Photovoltaics have a cap even if the panels are produced for free, simply based on land cost and infrastructure cost. That is also because they are not matchable to the demand curve. As a batch technology (like charging batteries for new electric cars, or powering irrigation) they are great. It for regular on-demand electric use it will always remain an in-fill.
We've had this discussion before, but nuclear is already more expensive than renewables, and getting more expensive. Renewables are getting cheaper.
In addition, nuclear takes longer to setup, and the most feasible solutions being considered that are supposed to solve nuclear's current problems are all in the prototype stage at best.
This neglects how the great expense of nuclear and the long amount of time it takes to build is at least in part due to decades of anti-nuclear propaganda. There are certain activist groups who have created this problem and are now disingenuously pointing to the problem as if they had nothing to do with it.
No, even the French nuclear build showed negative learning effects that had nothing to do with anti-nuclear propaganda. A global nuclear build is going to do much, much worse than France did:
Abstract
The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times.
Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs. Conversely, operating costs have remained remarkably flat, despite lowered load factors resulting from the need for load modulation in a system where base-load nuclear power plants supply three quarters of electricity.
The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
Only if you agree, that you move into a unpopulated area, that the nuclear power plants are built in your garden, that everything is paid by you and you also take care of the waste. Thank you.
I'd be happy to live near a nuclear plant and waste disposal. Why not? It sure would beat living downwind of a coal power plant like many of us do now.
It is a well-known and fully solved problem of how to deal with nuclear waste. The reason it is not dealt with is purely political, at least in the United States: an anti-science Senator who was pandering to anti-science constituents in his state by killing the waste disposal site.
The former head of the IAEC has come out on record against this notion. She said that the paltry few nuclear power plants in development are no where near far along enough to make a difference for over 20 years from now, while renewables are delivering, albeit still too slowly, right now.
The technology has the potential of destroying huge areas for good. Do we want that?
A complex system that is attacked on multiple threat vectors is likely to fail - no matter how many redundandancies are put into safety. I can tell you that from looking at CS/network security.
A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly.
Even Chernobyl isn't destroyed for good, though it's still an expensive mess to clean up. Fortunately, nobody builds reactors with such an idiotic design (a positive void coefficient[1]).
The actual site at Fukushima Daiichi is going to to be a long, expensive cleanup, but that's about the extent of the damage. Concerns about the surrounding area is just radiophobia and an extreme overreaction by the Japanese government. With how incredibly destructive the tsunami was, Fukushima Daini (which was also badly damage by the tsunami) showed us how incredibly safe nuclear power can be.
> can tell you that from looking at CS
More CS people need to study the lesson of incidents like therac-25[2]. It's very important to learn what fail safe means, which is very possible to implement, usually by avoiding as much of that "complex system". I trust the inherent and engineered safety systems of a nuclear reactor much more than I would trust any software project - including my own.
> A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly.
So are fly ash slurry spills. You're holding coal to the same standards, right?
Caesium 137 has a fucking halflife of 30.7 years. There is still a lot of that material in Ukraine and Belorussia. The economy and agriculture of both countries sustained severe damage as a result http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/5-social-economic...
now were just very lucky that there was no full meltdown of the reactor core. Can you claim without flinching that this will never ever happen? I doubt it.
The fact that an accident of similar magnitude happened after Chernobyl sort of invalidates the point that it was all exclusively due to faulty reactor design.
In Germany this assessment led to a full shutdown of all nuclear power plants.
I never said there wasn't. The cleanup is ongoing and will take a very long time, but it still isn't "destroyed for good". At least the caesium eventually goes away. The Pb, Hg, and As in the 1.1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry that the Tennessee Valley Authority spilled[0] over homes and into the Emory and Clinch rivers doesn't have a half life.
> economy and agriculture
The tsunami also did incredible damage to the economy and agriculture of Japan.
> Can you claim without flinching that this will never ever happen?
Absolutely. Even the idiotic RBMK design can be run safely after being modified to fix the void coefficient. I suggest actually reading my link[1] above, which explain in great detail the problems in the design of that reactor. Even with those problems, it took incredible effort[2] to trigger the steam explosion.
> 'heroes of Chernobyl'
I'm give a lot of respect and thanks to those that had to deal with Chernobyl's immediate aftermath and the 600,000 liquidators that were part of the cleanup afterwords. In particular, the 3828 people that cleaned up the worst section of roof in two minute shifts. Their story - in their own words[3] - is something I will never forget.
You're going to have to show some proof for this claim, because you seem to have the risk assessment backwards.
> Tsunami
The tsunami in Japan killed over 15,000 people (with several thousand more missing, likely dead). Radiation from Fukushima Daiichi (or anywhere else) hasn't killed anybody yet, though a handful of unfortunate workers and others in the immediate vicinity may have cancer problems in the future. Hopefully those cases will be treatable, but we won't know for some time.
15,000+ dead seems to indicate some tsunamis are far more dangerous than nuclear power.
> coal dusts
You might want to look again at the contents of fly ash. It's radioactive, full of a long list of heavy metals, with trace amounts of nasty things like dioxins.
Why? The tsunami killed more people than the radiation is estimated to even with the most generous estimates of how many people will get sick from radiation. Hell, even the stress/evacuation caused by the worry of radiation is likely to kill more people than the radiation itself would have if they didn't take those steps.
There is a 10F difference in temperature between my upstairs and downstairs without any heat turned on. There is a 4F difference in temperature between the front of the house and the back of my house.
There are so many factors as to how temperature is calculated, how exactly can we take a temperature today and compare it to values from years ago? I'll buy that satellite imaging will produce values that are useful over large areas, but those only go back 20-30 years. To compare against values before that seems like pseudoscience at best.
Do you think people have systematically moved the locations of thermometers to warmer places? There's a thing called averages, medians, and other statistics that can remove or put error bars on that kind of uncertainty.
Please don't conflate some sort of political viewpoint to my my strictly scientific criticisms. I didn't say anything except that the idea of comparing data today to many decades ago seems ridiculous when there are so many factors involved with what the temperature is, including location, sun, wind, etc. I'm more interested in accuracy rather than politics or news-grabbing headlines.
Regardless, your point doesn't have any validity. There is a systemic difference between the front of my house and the back of my house in terms of temperature. My thermometers are extremely accurate, with 0.5F if I remember correctly. And the average/median would still show a net 4F difference. So no, your point is invalid, there is still a problem with the data due to location.
It's not a political criticism. For there to be a steady, statistical rise in temperature over time due to how people measure temperatures, you have to come up with some mechanism for how that could possibly happen. It would have to be a deliberate effort to game temperature readings so they look warmer slowly over the course of decades. Someone would have to come up with a rate of change such that thermometers don't all go from a shady place to direct sunlight in one year, so it looks all gradual.
Your argument holds no water. We're not talking about one person with a thermometer they've been moving to increasingly warmer parts of the house for a hundred years. If you don't trust the data sets we have, then you might as well throw almost all science away because most of it is built on shakier data sets than this.
[Not the op] I neither think that someone moved a thermometer to a warmer place. The problem is that some weather stations were originally placed outside a city many years ago, but the city grow until the weather station is surrounded by the city. Cities are 2°F or 3°F warmer than the countryside, so this creates a fake temperature. Obviously, this changes are not ignored, so the temperature tables have corrections for this kind of problems.
Some of the weather stations were moved the countryside, to avoid the problem or because the office they were placed was relocated. So when the place changes, it necessary to adjust the temperature tables to compensate any differences between the locations.
So, there are a lot of corrections that have to be calculated correctly to have reliable temperature values.
That's a good point about cities growing to encompass weather stations, and it would be a slow steady change. But like you said, that can be corrected for and I presume you or the gp are not the first to have thought of it. So I still strongly disagree with the assertion that using this data is pseudoscience. Almost everything in science has to compensate measurements for known anomalies or biases.
Is anyone aware if there is reliable data prior to say 1880? [1]
Is there any possibility that large scale climate trends could be outside of the observed window of time available? For instance, some large scale natural state-shifting appears to occur on the order of hundreds of years (reference is about earthquakes, but maybe relevant?) [2].
Based on everything I've heard/read/etc about this, it seems unlikely that humans are not impacting climate, but I get concerned I'm hearing lots of motivated agendas about it rather than facts.
The people making these predictions do not have the power to extract taxes. The people who do have the power to extract taxes (Congress) are ignoring the predictions.
And? Are you trying to make a case for conflict of interest? Because, time and time again, it's a pretty weak one(unless you want to invoke some global conspiracy involving carbon credits).
With respect, that simply is not true at all. People (activists and their politicians) are continually using the constant threat of disaster to try and gain power. Witness how many times have we heard a politician say 'we have (insert timeframe here) to save the planet'?
The fact that the U.S. Congress has only done a little bit of tax and power extraction on the issue ignores the fact that most of the rest of the developed countries have extracted huge amounts of taxation by throwing around planetary doom. Personally I am thousands of dollars worse off from the application of this power, and my (enforced) sacrifices have not done anything at all to change the planets temperature.
The activists and politicians are irrelevant to this particular question. You have to look at the origin of the information, which is the climate scientists who gather this data and make predictions.
What's their motivation to make dire predictions? Sure, anyone with the slightest political awareness can see why politicians are motivated this way, but that doesn't matter to the question of "what is actually happening?" If you want to tell me that the climate change threat is made up, you need to tell me why all these climate scientists are either consistently wrong, or conspiring to hide the truth.
Here you go [1]. If you don't want to read the whole thing, a relevant part: "News media is tightly entwined with the attention economy. Newspapers try to capture people’s attentions through headlines. TV and radio stations try to entice people to not change the channel. And, indeed, there is a long history of news media leveraging fear to grab attention, often with a reputational cost."
This argument ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence. There is no one who deserves to be taken seriously arguing that climate change doesn't exist or isn't caused by humans.
This really should not be downvoted. It's absolutely true. Yes, there are good reasons politicians and news organizations would want to peddle fear. But in this particular case, the origin of the fear is the work of thousands of smart people who have made it their life's work to study this stuff, and they almost all come up with the same answers over and over and over again.
The media wants to scare us? Sure. Politicians? No doubt. But tell me why (and how!) all these climate scientists would want to predict disaster when there isn't any.
I used to evaluate the work of scientists for the US government. You would be surprised at the rampant amount of fraud in science.
To answer your last question, job security. Many other reasons... adulation, professional competition. Generally the types who go into environmental science are true believers to begin with.
In rare cases, there is some money to be made by whoring yourself out.
I don't doubt there's fraud in science. Stories pop up pretty frequently that show researchers claiming some new breakthrough with fudged data.
But what would be required here would be far more than that. Individual fraudsters wouldn't be enough. Even systemic fraud wouldn't do it. It would need to be universal fraud, across basically the entire world. And it would need to be coordinated, to ensure everybody gives the same kind of fraudulent results.
It's especially unbelievable because many countries have a vested interest in the world's ability to continue burning fossil fuels. If climate change were a fraud, they would have a huge incentive to show that. Why would places like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and indeed even the United States not massively fund climate science to debunk the climate change fraud?
I could buy the fraud argument if it were a few people. I could even buy it if, for example, there were a massive schism in the field, with one big group saying climate change is real, and another big group saying it's not. But when they all speak with one voice, aside from a few tiny dregs of dissent, fraud isn't a good explanation.
Another reason: the evidence is worldwide and obvious. Siberia melting in a couple of years, which it hasn't done in 40,000 years. All the glaciers receding drastically. The Antarctic ice shelf undergoing irreversible melting. It doesn't take a century of temperature measurement to see the result of heating up.
Did a scientist tell you this? That is not how science works. You cannot attribute events around you to some notion of obviousness. That reasoning would not pass any physicist's approval.
Climate science is predicated upon a proper understanding of physics. Any scientist who tells you that worldwide evidence is obvious should be treated with the same level of respect as Dr. Oz.
The typical response would be that the physics is proven. Well, AFAIK, yes, at least to the degree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that it has SOME effect on climate. The magnitude of contribution to toal effect by various sources and sinks seems far from certain.
To draw a parallel, which a physicist (scientist) would do when instructing - this is like saying salt makes blood pressure go up, so it's bad for you... And ignoring all the ways the body can come to equilibrium. Stop eating salt, today, or you'll burst.
So if a physicist calls it bullshit, that's pretty much your trump card. Which is why people put so much stock in Dysons opinion, because he was an expert in properly using the tools that most climate scientists are not experts in.
Were you to go study physics at a masters level for a bit, and then read scientific studies yourself with a critical eye, you'd learn how much of what we call science is grade A bullshit.
Until then, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to debate with you. It's kind of like me arguing American football with John Madden.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. The earth is heating up, we know, because all the ice is melting. And that hasn't happened for hundreds of centuries - long before people were a significant actor on this globe. What is in dispute? The cause, sure. That's still very much an interesting subject. But the fact of the earth heating up is, yes, obvious.
Many of the sciences do suffer from systemic incompetence, if not fraud.
There is evidence that dissent in climate science is punished. That alone is enough for me to pull out the microscope and take the words of minority researchers seriously.
"Reliable" is obviously a spectrum, and nothing beats a thermometer. However, there are multiple independent reconstructions of temperatures over the past 2000 years using a variety of proxy sources, from rings in trees to coral growth to bores in Antarctic ice [0]. They provide sufficient evidence that the IPCC thinks it's "likely" (a technical term) that temperatures are higher than anytime in the past thousand years.
I actually just posted about this -> http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-interme... the co2 lag in the ice core records indicates temperature rise prior to co2 emissions but 90% of the temperature rise then occurs AFTER co2 levels rise so its both natural cycles AND co2 where co2 is the more significant culprit. I was in your camp but got out.
Yes, the central England temperature series (CET). Now run by the met office, it goes back to 1659.
There is no scientific doubt about the roman and medieval warm periods being as warm or warmer than today. The anthropological evidence of this is abundant, and it shows up in most proxies as well.
The most likely case is that the natural variations swamp whatever changes humans make. Based on evidence, it's unlikely that co2 is a major driver of climate, but more of a minor player that has a ceiling on how much effect it can make.
The "It was warm 1000 years ago, so climate change is a lie" bit. Choice quote from the link:
> "Even if the world were incontrovertibly warmer 1,000 years ago, it would not change the fact that the recent rapid rise in CO2 explains the current episode of warming more credibly than any natural factor does—and that no natural factor seems poised to offset further warming in the years ahead."
I didn't write any of that. You have inserted words into my argument and then gone on to debate something I didn't say.
There is no scientific argument about the fact that the roman and medieval periods were as warm or warmer than today, because there is a lot of evidence. Even the linked article acknowledged this fact.
> The various studies differ in methodology, and in the underlying paleoclimate proxy data utilized, but all reconstruct the same basic pattern of cool "Little Ice Age", warmer "Medieval Warm Period", and still warmer late 20th and 21st century temperatures.
This is a good time to remind folks that the theory of anthropogenic warming doesn't rest on historical climate reconstructions. Past climate helps us understand the implications but without those reconstructions we would still have a clear and strongly supported theory.
There are plenty of motivated agendas on both sides, for sure.
But if you strip that away by going back as close to the original sources as you can, to the scientists who gather the data and do the grunt work and make the best predictions they can, you'll find they overwhelmingly lead to one conclusion: the planet is warming and human activity is the major cause.
If you try to trace back the "skeptic" positions, it just sort of peters out. You'll find some articles and a little bit of data, but there's little rigor or corroboration.
I wonder if there is a planned study of the melting of the permafrost, since I've seen on Cosmos that it will be one of the "irreversible" side effects of global warming.
My home country is suffering enormous climate anomalies, that are becoming usual for the population. We have big floods, forest fires, enormous heat waves and huge snow storms.
This is so obvious that people are having hard time to talk about it. First years this happened it was "just a nature glitch", but recently it is becoming more and more "climate has changed".
So next year, when there's a modest decrease in global temperature (as per regression to the mean, even if the mean is monotonically increasing), the climate skeptics will be out in force with their 'I told you so - it goes up and down'. Such a huge record seems like good news for climate change deniers, just deferred.
Well the US government is at fault here to make such a big deal out of data from a single year. That really tells you there is more politics at play here than Science.
That's what happens when you combine people who have fixed ideas, with noisy data. As you say, once this spike subsides (pushed higher by El Nino), we'll probably have another 5-10 years of people talking about the next global warming pause. Meanwhile the baseline carries on creeping up.
Maybe 2015 was the regressing to the (increasing) mean after slower increases before, rather than 2015 being an unusual spike.
Certainly what you describe seems to have happened after the record hot year of 1998, though. It sure would be nice if we could all stop trying to play silly "gotcha" games and get on with the serious business of figuring out 1) what's happening and 2) what to do about it.
>Every person on the planet should have a carbon consumption rating and have exponential taxes applied accordingly.
Anyone know how practical it might be to have a "progressive" carbon tax, similar in nature to a progressive income tax? I can't think of a good way to measure individual carbon-dioxide generation offhand, but that doesn't mean that there isn't. Maybe in a piecemeal fashion? Bringing back carbon based Luxury taxes on airline tickets, with a $100 tax on the first transoceanic flight, $200 for the second, $400 for the third, etc.?
Would piecemeal through household/business energy bills and fuel costs cover the bulk of it? I'd guess transport, home heating/cooling, etc to be a significant portion?
2015 was a strong el nino, I dunno if it's gonna tell us much about global warming...
It's actually alarming to me that this post is being given any traction on here, when I know everyone here is smarter than to attribute one year to global warming. How many times have we mocked Fox News for saying shit like, "It was -10F outside today, so much for global warming!"
Climate change is clearly a big deal, and one of (if not the) biggest threats to every nation's national security, but it's not the cause of a warm 2015. Sorry folks, it just isn't.
You talk about how smart everyone here is but you offer no data for your assertion. You mention the el nino being the cause but some might argue that climate change lead to a a bigger el nino. You have evidence showing that there is no link?
What kind of data do you want to see that something isn't causing something else? That's a pretty insane thing to ask for, if you know about falsifiability.
Usually this works by me saying "there's no known link between a single year's temperature and overall global warming", which is a falsifiable statement, and then you/anyone else can go ahead and provide any evidence that what I said is false.
If you can prove that a single year's temperature variance is primarily explained by global climate change, now would be the time to do it.
I'm recently come to US and currently live in (rented) apartments where gas stove with pilot light is used. 24x7 small fire inside stove turns gas into heat and CO2 with water. I was very surprised - it is waste of energy. I never seen pilot light before (in other countries).
What's a good book for someone who wants to know more about climate change? I recently bought the most scientific, written by scientists book I could find on Amazon, and the gist of the book is that any amount of warming that is happening is due to geologic cycles and not human activity. The consensus here seems to be that it is due to human activity, so if that's the case can you point me to a good explanation of what's happening? I'm not biased either way, I just want to know the truth according to science, which seems to be really hard to find for some reason.
Not hard at all. Assuming you have the required stamina, just look at the IPCC Working Group I's reports, like http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Change-2013-Contribution-Inter.... From there, you can find thousands of references if you really want to track things down.
It's definitely one sided, I just thought the author list consisting of climatologists, professors, and scientists would be more fact-based than a lot of the other books out there. Which is why I'm frustrated that that does not appear to be the case.
Nate Silver's "The signal and the noise" had an excellent chapter on it. Did a good job getting to the core of the argument, putting it into non-specialist terms, and evaluating the results skeptically, but with scientific rigor. And no agenda. Highly recommended.
You see references to the IPCC here. Safely ignore those. The ipcc is a political organisation - it's in the title. It was setup specifically to find evidence for a set theory, not to study the problem.
Plus the models that the IPCC uses to forecast disaster have been proven to have zero predictive power.
I would continue to read books written by scientists on both sides of the argument, and ignore anything said by a politically connected person or group.
I somewhat agree with this. The IPCC book looks like it's got all the information I'm looking for (maybe a little long for my level of interest), but it's from a non-objective organization so it could be as biased as the book I've got, just in the other direction.
Every book you read is biased one way or the other, because the issue has created pathways to power. Given that they are all biased, it's safe to ignore the ones created by governments, which can reap the most benefit.
The ipcc reports are two things - a bundling of scientific literature, and a policy statement. There is always a gap between the two, and the policy report comes out before the scientific statement, and is developed with the type of diplomatic horse trading that comes with any type of government report, only more so because it is international diplomacy.
I think it depends on what kind of article you're looking at. It's related to a political issue early in the U.S. election year, so there's alot of noise from people who don't usually comment. Only 10.5 months until the nonsense goes away for awhile.
Is this a typical thing on HN in election years? This is where I come to escape, dammit! :)
I would give a finger to have an entire forum of people from various technical backgrounds who could have intelligent conversations about various topics without the bumbling interference of the devoted true believers of whatever creed.
What if all these guesses & models are WAY OFF?? What happens when the average temperature change is 10C, not 2C?
A family member works at Nasa & he says that their model is written in Fortran.
And those models do not really take into account feedback loops. (like Siberia thaws & releases giga giga tons of methane.. Greenland disintegrates instead of melting slowly)
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadEarth's surface can gain heat through 4 ways I can think of (and this is just what I can think of and is likely wrong):
1) Geothermal brings more heat from core/mantle up. I don't think this is currently any larger than normal, nor do I imagine this varies much.
2) Oceans can give up heat they are storing and provide it on the surface. I don't know if El Nino is this, or if that just means "surface" ocean temperatures are up from whatever source.
3) Solar radiation (including infrared) can be higher than normal. I honestly have no idea if there's any significant variation in this, ever.
4) Earth can retain more heat that it was previously (global warming, be it man-made or not)
When they say the annual variation is usually hundredths of a degree, that sounds to me like 1-3 are generally non-factors, but that's all gut interpretation. Can someone with actual knowledge validate this?
Oceans so far have been storing heat, and keeping the average temperature increase down. No one knows how long that will continue. They also store a fair bit of CO2 which has lead to acidification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
I think this Ars Technica article does a better job of showing how short-term weather patterns like El Niño and La Niña cause variations from the overall trend https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/2015-was-official-th...
A subtlety of (4) is the feedback loops, especially involving water. Water vapor increases heat retention and is increased by heat, but this is where weather interacts with climate and it gets non-linear.
So if people talk about "El Nino" increasing the temperature for the year, this is only possible because previous "La Nina" cycles decreased the temperature by an equivalent amount in previous years, and the oceans are returning the heat to the atmosphere.
Geothermal energy was stored back during the formation of the planet and there is generally just enough to keep the planet a few degrees above absolute zero. The energy released is highly variable though, volcanoes can release lots on one particular day, but then diminished activity for years follows.
"Nuclear Fission Confirmed as Source of More than Half of Earth's Heat"
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/nuclear-fis...
>The new measurements suggest radioactive decay provides more than half of Earth's total heat, estimated at roughly 44 terawatts based on temperatures found at the bottom of deep boreholes into the planet's crust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission
From Wikipedia, first line in the article: "...nuclear fission is either a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts (lighter nuclei)."
Why would you assume that Scientific American got such an elementary thing wrong, then post it as an argument without even checking?
So it's not clear if only record-setting years have small variation, or whether year-to-year is also very small variation.
1) rate of change & sixth mass extinction - many natural systems can adapt to gradual change over the course of many millennia but cannot to the incredibly rapid change our planet is now undergoing. this leads to loss of ecosystems & biomass which help to regulate our climate/CO2 levels
2) positive feedback loops - many systems are also at risk of destabilizing feedback loops, e.g melting ice increasing solar radiation absorption, ice sheets whose disintegration will accelerate with rising and warming oceans warming them from frontally and from below and moulins turning them into swiss cheese, potential permafrost melting w/ massive methane outgassing, etc.
The combination of these effects mean this is not a simple "calories in/out" type calculation, but a complex system geared towards maintaining equilibrium, which as we rapidly push further and further out of that equilibrium will face rising risks of a highly nonlinear, rapid shift to a dramatically new equilibrium climate the likes of which our planet has not seen since well before the dawn of our species.
Not that we will, but it gives a sense of how close we've come to the precipice, if indeed we have any < 2C carbon budget remaining.
Its funny how people you would consider uneducated and poor in my country would understand that there is clearly something going wrong with the world around us, while some people with lots of money, influence and education choose to believe that this is all a conspiracy by a foreign government.
It's just nuts, really, something is terribly wrong with our world, and we need to fix it.
Please, if you have the time, please join a local group that helps conserve the environment, learn how you could help reduce your carbon footprint, even a little could go a long way.
You can sense a 0.23 degree F average temperature difference? Or maybe you are unhelpfully confusing weather with climate?
We mock idiotic politicians who use snowstorms to "debunk" global warming; we should hold the other side to the same standard.
Of course, if someone says "My country was so hot last year, this proves global warming!" then it's BS. On the other hand, since we know that global warming is happening, it's totally legitimate to say "My country was so hot last year, it sucked, and thanks to Global Warming we can expect more such years to come in the future. Why aren't we doing anything about it?"
Now, if you have a summer with one additional hot day, the average high is 72.2 degrees, which is about the 0.23 degree average increase observed.
Obviously these numbers are made up, but could you really just casually notice only one more hot day than normal? It seems like you'd need to be keeping count to have any sort of confidence that this summer was hotter than normal.
So it could be incredibly easy to sense.
I know which one I'd bet on.
The thing is, you can really tell the difference when you have to deal with this heat everyday there are some days you just do not feel like going outside. The sun just burns, especially when you get down from your car you can feel your whole face burning up.
See the thing is, growing up we never had an A/C in our house, no one complained, once in a while yes it would get hot, but a common table fan would fix the problem.
But now, everyday we many families around where I live need to keep a table fan running at all times.
Its 4 AM in the morning, and its still warm outside. And Jan is supposed to be a relatively colder month in my country.
The funny thing is, just how many people over here notice this increase in temperature.
It's scary.
You should probably start with developing countries like China and India. The US has been actively reducing its carbon footprint for a while now:
Energy related carbon emissions in the United States declined by 12% between 2005 and 2012, back to a level not seen since 1994.
Per capita emissions fell 17% over the same period, and are now at their lowest level in 50 years.
This decline in emissions occurred across the US economy, with the switch from coal to natural gas in the power sector responsible for just 35-40% of the drop.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/us-carbon-emissions-decline
It would be helpful to have a number for total emissions.
Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?order=wba...
The global climate doesn't give a damn about national borders, either.
Of course China is important, because decisions made by its government can affect a billion people, but the same can be said for the US. (Good luck persuading Chinese people to reduce their emission, if the US doesn't commit itself to do the same.)
You cannot have a reasonable discussion about CO2 emissions without talking about India and China.
Let's say the US halves its per capita emissions tomorrow. Hey, that's fantastic right?
But then let's say China and India come up to match the US's per capita emissions levels. That would increase China's emissions by 25% and India's emissions by 5x. Increasing total emissions for all 3 countries by 50%.
Even if the US stops emitting CO2 tomorrow, if China and India reach 50% of the US's per capita emissions they will together account for 1.2x the total emissions of the US, China, and India today.
Pretending that because the US has much higher per capita emissions today means that it's ok to ignore the rest of the world is pure fantasy. That's the point. We should totally "talk" to China and India. Nobody gets a free pass.
By the stats I posted, it seems we're doing quite a lot actually. Unless you have other data that would indicate otherwise.
Also, enough with the blame game. All three countries have to put in all possible efforts.
That's the point. Some people seem to think that shouldn't be the point. But it has to be. There's only one biosphere, nobody gets a free pass for carbon emissions just because some other country had higher per capita emissions in 2015, that's not how that works.
By that metric China is among the worst in the world and India isn't far behind.
Or for the matter, where do you think all the American safe, high-paying, manufacturing jobs went?
Outsourcing to a hitman does not make it a non-murder.
Getting rid of coal is a great place to start.
Well, a bit of both. True it was not economically sound, but the NUM (coal miners union) had a lot of leverage. All coal power plants had to buy British coal for example, which in turn meant that the government had to capitulate to their demands or face a shutdown. Thatchers decision to shut the mines was incredibly unpopular and to this day large swathes of the north despise her (somewhat unduly), but in combination with a wave of privatization managed to break the union stranglehold. Without the Iron Lady taking that step the mines would have been open for far far longer.
Some of the mines she closed would actually be profitable now though, due to the rising cost of coal.
It's true that old mines can reopen during periods of high demand, but they'd be shutting again now as the coal price has plummeted again, probably due to the energy glut especially in gas. In an ideal world the mines would be owned by someone who would open them when it made sense, and close them again when it no longer made sense.
http://www.allaboutvision.com/over60/vision-changes.htm
"Summers are not as they used to be"
and
"there are no autumns and springs anymore"
They were used as examples of empty cliches that old people repeat - something to absolutely avoid. Somehow it was known that while everybody feels that it is so, it's also a form of mis-perception, much like "Nowadays young people have no manners any more". Then the climate change issue became prominent, and immediately everybody was transformed again in its own legitimate one-person weather station, complete with long and accurate temperature records.
In the "Dictionnaire des idées reçues", a long and hilarious list of vacuous cliches that Flaubert compiled in the 1870s, you can read the following line:
"Hiver. Toujours exceptionnel"
something is terribly wrong
This feeling of impending catastrophe, especially when prompted by signals as imperceptible to a human being as average change of 1.33 degrees Celsius (on land) on the average of the 20th century temperatures, to me is an indication of that kind of paranoia or panic that feeds on tiny when not completely imaginary cues.
This is not to say that I don't believe climate change is real; just that I think that the debate would be more rational and productive if people relied on scientific data and stopped using personal feelings, anecdotes and questionable reports to support their position.
The planet is undergoing irreversible change as we speak. The only 'imaginary' thinking is the denial that continues despite the overwhelming accumulation of data.
Just imagine if Trump did get into office as well...
Poverty is worse than all but the most severe natural disasters. Infant mortality in many poor countries is probably a lot higher than it is in Miami during a hurricane. Poverty is worse than pollution or storms. Even if the sea level rises it would be better to be forced to uproot cities and move them inland than it would be to go without modern sanitation, health care, food availability, education, etc. Only acute natural disasters like severe earthquakes and tornadoes approach chronic poverty in their destructive power.
As a result it is in the self-interest of everyone on Earth to prioritize some level of wealth -- say the achievement of a basic first-world middle class standard of living -- over any environmental problem save the most immediate, acute, and apocalyptic. That's why the response of the developing world to suggestions like CO2 reduction or limiting overfishing has so far been "screw you, we're poor."
This is also why I really think that what I call "abstinence based solutions" to these problems are dead on arrival. Telling people to forego the benefits of energy consumption or modern technology is like telling teenagers not to have sex. The only hope we have is to develop the world to the point that people can afford the luxury of caring about the future beyond the next 48 hours. Only then will we be able to transition to anything more sustainable. Desperate people can't afford to care. It's also a total non-starter to try to sell first world people on regressing their standard of living. They're not stupid.
This condition still exists in the "developed" first world. We haven't gotten off the treadmill.
Artificially stimulating the economy into the unnatural state of inflation made sense when we had a scarcity of food and physical goods. Now it's just extremely wasteful, from both individual and global perspectives.
The choice between lifting people out of poverty and addressing climate change is a false dilemma. Both can, and should, be worked on. Energy abstinence is not the solution. Instituting a carbon tax, ending the monopoly of rent-seeking energy utilities like NV Energy (who do all they can to stop renewables in their track, see [1] and [2]), and letting the market work would be far more effective. All that is needed is political will.
[1] http://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/jan/12/nv-energy-puc-price-...
[2] http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/01/review-of-net-metering-s...
Those in developed countries are never going to go back to the standard of living found in poor ones, or at least not without fighting it to the death.
I agree with the rest and I wasn't implying that we can't have both. But there do seem to be a lot of people who take a moralistic tone about this or who push solutions that amount to the same.
Of course not, nor should they.
> I agree with the rest and I wasn't implying that we can't have both. But there do seem to be a lot of people who take a moralistic tone about this or who push solutions that amount to the same.
Understood, and I agree to a certain point, although I think a lot of the strident tone on the environmentalist side is more the result of sheer panic than a desire to moralize. Be that as it may, we can choose to filter out the tone and look at the substance, and when we do that the positions on both sides are not as irreconcilable as they appear (as you seem to agree).
Technology got us into this mess, but only more advanced technology (along with good government policy and cooperation) will get us out of it.
Adaptation to climate is what humans have always done and what humans will always do. The richer we are, the better we can adapt. It is beyond futile to wast percentage points of productivity growth futilely trying so change something which is not changeable.
The problems faced by humans 100 years ago are mostly not problems anymore, because of the use of technology and greater productivity. Framing productivity and technology as the problems simply is code for trying to freeze progress.
The greater issue is people using fear to try and gain more power. Fear of terrorism and fear of climate change are the major levers being used to increase the control by those in power. Mostly this is by people who think they can reduce the chaos of life though better planning. While that is possible at the margin and at the micro level (better city planning results in better cities) at a level above that it breaks down and makes things worse.
Central planning is, has been and always will be a disaster. Whenever you hear a politician advocating giving them more power so they can plan a better life for you, know that while they may sincerely believe it, it is more likely to make things worse for you.
You sound like a climate change denier? There is most definitely a solution to pumping massive quantities of emissions into the air, and it involves not doing that.
> fear of climate change are the major levers being used to increase the control by those in power
Except as far as I can see it those in power (at least in the US) are doing their best to deny climate change. And my whole point is the people in power are not doing enough, hence... you know, climate change.
Of course stopping all production will stop changing the makeup of the atmosphere as far as humans go. In the same way stopping people killing each other solves the murder problem. Most people are tryin to talk beyond a pat level of posturing.
I'm not ready to throw all my devices and vehicles and climate control in landfill to try and subtely change the weather 100 years hence. Nor do I think that intentionally retarding productivity and growth for the same hope. In this I am intellectually honest.
Clearly in this context someone who denies the impact man is having on the climate.
> In this I am intellectually honest.
And monstrously short sighted. American, I assume?
> Of course stopping all production will stop changing the makeup of the atmosphere as far as humans go.
Who said anything about stopping all production? That's obviously not going to happen. What should happen is a rapid reduction in the emission of gasses like CO2 through whatever means necessary. If that means you can't buy more cheap crap from China, or have to actually think about your fuel consumption so you can't drive down the block to buy a burger that's been frozen and flown in from thousands of miles away then so be it.
I don't 'deny' that human activities have an impact on climate. There is scientific and physical evidence that this is true. It also passes the 'obviously' test because any change to the state of a system will have an impact on the system.
What I do understand is that previous predictions as to the level and severity of impact are completely incorrect after several decades of study and predictions. On this even ipcc contributing scientists agree. What I also understand is that current policies are inconsequential even if the current sensitivity levels (which appear overstated) are correct. On this most politicians and activists agree as we can read from the sober observations from Paris.
What is true is that trying to socially engineer changes by banning certain types of technology or use of technology, or by erecting grand schemes are all doomed to fail, and are a complete waste of time and resources. What will change things are the development of new technology. The best way to get that is to stop trying to distort resource allocation in a specific way, particularly as doing so diverts resources towards negative or low eroei reruns which further hampers the ability to deliver new tech and lowers the ability to adapt to a changing climate.
If you're an activist, that's fine. But I write for the people reading this and thinking through positions, not to sway people by using labels and stereotypes.
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/hottest-year-on-record/
So the question is when did the effects of El Niño start having an impact in 2015? Unless it was significant for almost the whole year, it would still have been a record without it.
They can also be relocated to cold but uninhabited places such as Siberia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDceLiPLHWQ
Note that I'm talking about overall total world costs. The only reason you have refugees now is the costs are being externalized. Bombing Syria is pretty cheap if Europe pays the refugee price, not sure the last time Germany bombed Syria, but they're paying the price for someone else doing it right now... Because of the ease of externalizing costs, I suspect we will get more refugees, but reducing it would be a wise goal.
Obviously there are very small exceptions to the very large general rule, like if your whole island submerges or whatever.
I hate that this is the narrative. Can people just ... stop doing this? Maybe? If you try to use the "record breaking heat, it was warm this one year" argument to argue for acceptance of theories of climate change you are only going to be hoist by your own petard a few years later when natural weather cycles result in record breaking cold years. It's the wrong playing field to be on.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-01-20/2015-was-t...
http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/images/ghgemissions/source...
By going mostly electric for our transportation and nuclear for power generation we could really make a dent in 58% of this pie.
There are people who simultaneous worry a tremendous amount about global warming who will actively protest against nuclear power.
All while an extremely large amount of pollution is being burned all around us. Be reasonable we need a now solution or there wont be a when.
If you apply the same constraints to wind generation (which is increasingly happening) it looks even worse than nuclear.
There are always grand claims of how cheap nuclear can be, but it has never been seen in practice. Sometimes people even claim that nuclear is cheap by only looking at the operating & maintenance costs, ignoring the true costs of nuclear, which are all upfront.
What type of nuclear constraints could be applied to wind generation? Validation of designs? There's very few turbine designs out there. I can't see how wind could be ever be made more expensive than nuclear, but am open to new data.
If you can't see how regulatory process increase costs, use this thought experiment. You want to build a house. You buy some land for it, and submit the plans for approval. Now spend the next ten years paying an architect to complete forms and submitting them for review. You have to pay the carrying cost of the land and the architects salary. The cost of the building materials for house remains the same. Can you now afford the house?
And of course you can't expect every country to go fully solar/wind. What you need are integrated, continent wide power grids and alternative energy storage mechanisms like molten sands etc.
Compared to coal, give me batteries any day! And we don't really yet know the full effects of all this cheap natural we're getting through fracking. Though I'm sure fracking is probably better than coal mining, we'll have to wait to see.
The amount of solar panels needed for a house (or their share, in some solar farm) is miniscule. It's 4-7 panels. If we want to store excess for night, maybe 10. The batteries fairly small (using lithium, a sufficient battery could hang on the wall. Maybe two tesla power walls would do it). The waste isn't that bad (nowhere near the amount of waste people create yearly in plastic or other landfill garbage).
It's totally doable in first world countries. And it would go a long way in developing countries too, for the same reason cell phones gained popularity faster than landlines, because they require less infrastructure.
http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count...
It certainly seems more feasible than some feeble attempt to cover the Earth with a reflective surface as a geoengineering measure to counteract global warming.
Please edit uncivil language like this out of your comments when posting here. Without that (well, that and the uppercase yelling), this comment would be a fine one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob...
And the mining of uranium looks awfully similar to the mining of coal. (Of course you need far fewer uranium mines for the same amount of energy.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ara...
- mining is pretty much a necessity of life at this point.
- 200 years to come up with solutions to energy production while not turning the planet into an oven sounds pretty good.
We have 200 years of uranium left at current rates of consumption. But if we replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd consume 10 times more per year and we'd only have about 20 years of energy available before needing to move on to a new energy source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
"Adherents claim that with seawater uranium extraction, there would be enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy our energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy."
Also as with all things nuclear there are an awful lot of claims and not a lot of known things here. Nuclear somehow always looks much better in theory than it does in practice.
Also even if you could get sufficient agreement on the need for more nuclear power plants - which you won't - it would still take way to long to build enough of them to have an impact.
It makes much more sense to invest in renewable energy, the energy grid and research into nuclear fusion.
So assuming we have 20 years of (currently discovered) Uranium, breeder reactors should make that last a theoretical 2000 years at current energy consumption levels.
I responded to your claim previously[0]:
> In that 200 years a whole lot more uranium will become available for economical extraction, exactly the same as what happened with oil and natural gas.
Do you have reason to believe this will not happen?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623187
If you're interested in the history of "peak resources" here is a good book about Paul Ehrlich's famous bet with Julian L. Simon:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bet-Ehrlich-Julian-Earth%C2%92s/dp...
What's kind of amazing is that people don't believe that we will develop a solar powered technique to extract carbon the from the atmosphere and create liquid fuels.
"A New Dawn for Industrial Photosynthesis"
http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11120-011-96...
Also, Economically unaccessible today != economically unaccessible tomorrow. Our mining technology gets better all the time, especially if there's price pressure on it. We're accessing deep-sea oil deposits that we weren't able to twenty years ago. (Which the article addresses, but you omitted the key point!!! We have a 60,000 year supply of uranium in the oceans!)
The chief problem with coal isn't pitmining, it's the pollution from burning the stuff.
'Oil is about to run out' predictions have been falling for this for a century now, and continue to make the same error.
There is no economic reason to find resources out beyond a set timeline. So they aren't looking for them, and so the reserves always look like they are going to run out in 30 years.
The actual environmental impact of mines is negligible over the long term, provided the mining is done in a country with good environmental protection in place.
As other people have mentioned, that's known 235U.
We have enough domestic 232Th to satisfy our energy needs for a very long time. If we use breeder reactors that can utilize 238U, we also have sufficient availability for well-beyond any reasonably foreseeable future ("many millenia").
Besides, that gives us plenty of time to actually develop other methods of providing energy. Right now every day we fail to deploy nuclear is another day of coal/gas. Even if we used your silly figure of 200 years, it shouldn't take that long to develop a proper solar+batteries replacement (heck, we should have fusion before the 200 years is up).
> mining
There are rare earth mines that we aren't operating right now because it's too expensive to dispose of the Th. In any serious nuclear deployment, the fuel itself would be free (or nearly free).
> far fewer
Comparing U or Th mining to coal mining is silly when you only need to do over 2,000,000x more coal mining.
Nuclear is fantastic for base load, but peak load? Steam bypassing costs as much as generating electricity does, but with nobody wanting to pay for power they didn't use. Technically a good solution, but falls apart economically.
Likewise, battery cost for transport can make it attractive, but that doesn't necessarily make it better for stationary generation. Scale beats everything when it comes to generation.
You may not need scaled installations, but they will still beat out the alternatives in any industry shakeout over the long term. We build large scale factories, farms, ports, airports, roads and retail outlets. These happen because they work. Even if the energy production at scale gave no advantage, all the other advantages of scale means that it wins out in the end.
By the time any nuclear power expansion plan gets into place exponential growth in photovoltaics and other renewable technologies will have taken over.
Nuclear power would have been a great idea, if we had started at least 10 or 20 years ago. It is unfortunate "environmentalists" did such a disservice to the environment, but we're long past the point of Nuclear being a viable solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
And as electric car batteries lose capacity and need to be replaced, those batteries will still have plenty of storage left for use at home or on the grid.
When batteries get down to $75-$100/kWh capacity, storage will be able to take over much more of the grid. And there are lots of promising flow batteries that can beat lithium ion on price, when it comes to grid-level storage.
If renewables had had a small percentage of the money thrown at nukes in subsidies and sponsorship, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
2) a) The economics of battery energy storage are effectively a type of arbitrage in time, where you get some fraction of depth-of-discharge over the time in question.
2) b) In the most limiting case, lets assume that battery energy storage is only being used for daily cycling, that the maximum cycle depth is 75%, and that the investor expects to break even in 5 years. In order to be viable at that breakeven time, the price of energy needs to swing by over 0.22 USD/kW-hr over the day (RMS !). Considering that bulk energy is only 0.05 USD/kW-hr now (average!), that's a huge amount of volatility that needs to be exposed to the market.
I suspect that if customers are exposed to that volatility instead, that we will see enough voluntary adjustment on the demand side of the market to prevent 5x swings in price. With that much volatility available, consumers will demand the savings that aggressive time-of-use pricing offers in such a market.
On the other hand, the economics become much more favorable for energy storage in the frequency support market. For example, the market for primary frequency reserve (PFR) operates on 15 minute time scales and faster. Therefore, the time between battery cycles is two orders of magnitude smaller than the bulk storage market. Right now, there is enough PFR on the US grid (via coal-fired steam and gas-turbine power) that the price for PFR is very low. But as renewables continue to displace fossil fuels as a fraction of total power, the price for PFR will start to creep up.
The Chevy Bolt's batteries have been widely reported to cost $145/kWh, see for example [1]. I'm not sure what's excluded from the whole component to get to the price, but it's a point of reference at least.
The full life of various lithium ion batteries is still being studied and will vary with chemistry, but roughly a partial cycle seems to count as a partial cycle in terms of battery life. So if you're only cycling 75% capacity on a day, then you'll make up the extra 25% in longer life. Most studies I've read of lithium ion battery life but the number of cycles at 1000 +/- 200, to maintain "most" of the battery's capacity, which is why I used the conversion factor of 1000. I would believe a 25%-40% swing in practice, in either direction.
Peaker power plants quite frequently operate at over $0.30/kWh, more than 6x the cost of bulk energy. Energy storage is already gaining in this space [2]. Of course, consumers never see $0.05/kWh pricing, averaging $0.12/kWh nationwide, which is why residential solar makes so much sense for so many people. Consumers that choose demand-based pricing are already exposed to price swings on the order of $0.20/kWh in time-of-use plans both on Southern California Edison [3] and PG&E [4].
The speed with which solar and batteries are changing is going to catch a lot of people in the energy industry completely flat-footed.
[1] http://cleantechnica.com/2015/10/05/chevy-bolt-battery-cells...
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/batteries-...
[3] https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-O...
[4] http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/saveenergymoney/plans/tou/index...?
Photovoltaics have a cap even if the panels are produced for free, simply based on land cost and infrastructure cost. That is also because they are not matchable to the demand curve. As a batch technology (like charging batteries for new electric cars, or powering irrigation) they are great. It for regular on-demand electric use it will always remain an in-fill.
In addition, nuclear takes longer to setup, and the most feasible solutions being considered that are supposed to solve nuclear's current problems are all in the prototype stage at best.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510...
Abstract The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times.
Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs. Conversely, operating costs have remained remarkably flat, despite lowered load factors resulting from the need for load modulation in a system where base-load nuclear power plants supply three quarters of electricity.
The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
Chernobyl? Fukushima?
The technology has the potential of destroying huge areas for good. Do we want that?
A complex system that is attacked on multiple threat vectors is likely to fail - no matter how many redundandancies are put into safety. I can tell you that from looking at CS/network security.
A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly.
Even Chernobyl isn't destroyed for good, though it's still an expensive mess to clean up. Fortunately, nobody builds reactors with such an idiotic design (a positive void coefficient[1]).
The actual site at Fukushima Daiichi is going to to be a long, expensive cleanup, but that's about the extent of the damage. Concerns about the surrounding area is just radiophobia and an extreme overreaction by the Japanese government. With how incredibly destructive the tsunami was, Fukushima Daini (which was also badly damage by the tsunami) showed us how incredibly safe nuclear power can be.
> can tell you that from looking at CS
More CS people need to study the lesson of incidents like therac-25[2]. It's very important to learn what fail safe means, which is very possible to implement, usually by avoiding as much of that "complex system". I trust the inherent and engineered safety systems of a nuclear reactor much more than I would trust any software project - including my own.
> A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly.
So are fly ash slurry spills. You're holding coal to the same standards, right?
[1] http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html
[2] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
now were just very lucky that there was no full meltdown of the reactor core. Can you claim without flinching that this will never ever happen? I doubt it.
Just look up 'heroes of Chernobyl' - we were very close http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/04/13/when-three-divers-swam-i...
The fact that an accident of similar magnitude happened after Chernobyl sort of invalidates the point that it was all exclusively due to faulty reactor design.
In Germany this assessment led to a full shutdown of all nuclear power plants.
I never said there wasn't. The cleanup is ongoing and will take a very long time, but it still isn't "destroyed for good". At least the caesium eventually goes away. The Pb, Hg, and As in the 1.1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry that the Tennessee Valley Authority spilled[0] over homes and into the Emory and Clinch rivers doesn't have a half life.
> economy and agriculture
The tsunami also did incredible damage to the economy and agriculture of Japan.
> Can you claim without flinching that this will never ever happen?
Absolutely. Even the idiotic RBMK design can be run safely after being modified to fix the void coefficient. I suggest actually reading my link[1] above, which explain in great detail the problems in the design of that reactor. Even with those problems, it took incredible effort[2] to trigger the steam explosion.
> 'heroes of Chernobyl'
I'm give a lot of respect and thanks to those that had to deal with Chernobyl's immediate aftermath and the 600,000 liquidators that were part of the cleanup afterwords. In particular, the 3828 people that cleaned up the worst section of roof in two minute shifts. Their story - in their own words[3] - is something I will never forget.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[1] http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html
[2] https://leatherbarrowa.exposure.co/chernobyl
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDa8tR25dk
> Tsunami
The tsunami in Japan killed over 15,000 people (with several thousand more missing, likely dead). Radiation from Fukushima Daiichi (or anywhere else) hasn't killed anybody yet, though a handful of unfortunate workers and others in the immediate vicinity may have cancer problems in the future. Hopefully those cases will be treatable, but we won't know for some time.
15,000+ dead seems to indicate some tsunamis are far more dangerous than nuclear power.
> coal dusts
You might want to look again at the contents of fly ash. It's radioactive, full of a long list of heavy metals, with trace amounts of nasty things like dioxins.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-isn...
There are so many factors as to how temperature is calculated, how exactly can we take a temperature today and compare it to values from years ago? I'll buy that satellite imaging will produce values that are useful over large areas, but those only go back 20-30 years. To compare against values before that seems like pseudoscience at best.
Regardless, your point doesn't have any validity. There is a systemic difference between the front of my house and the back of my house in terms of temperature. My thermometers are extremely accurate, with 0.5F if I remember correctly. And the average/median would still show a net 4F difference. So no, your point is invalid, there is still a problem with the data due to location.
Your argument holds no water. We're not talking about one person with a thermometer they've been moving to increasingly warmer parts of the house for a hundred years. If you don't trust the data sets we have, then you might as well throw almost all science away because most of it is built on shakier data sets than this.
Some of the weather stations were moved the countryside, to avoid the problem or because the office they were placed was relocated. So when the place changes, it necessary to adjust the temperature tables to compensate any differences between the locations.
So, there are a lot of corrections that have to be calculated correctly to have reliable temperature values.
Based on everything I've heard/read/etc about this, it seems unlikely that humans are not impacting climate, but I get concerned I'm hearing lots of motivated agendas about it rather than facts.
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land/... [2] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-...
What motivation does anyone have to predict disaster?
The fact that the U.S. Congress has only done a little bit of tax and power extraction on the issue ignores the fact that most of the rest of the developed countries have extracted huge amounts of taxation by throwing around planetary doom. Personally I am thousands of dollars worse off from the application of this power, and my (enforced) sacrifices have not done anything at all to change the planets temperature.
What's their motivation to make dire predictions? Sure, anyone with the slightest political awareness can see why politicians are motivated this way, but that doesn't matter to the question of "what is actually happening?" If you want to tell me that the climate change threat is made up, you need to tell me why all these climate scientists are either consistently wrong, or conspiring to hide the truth.
[1] http://www.poynter.org/2012/fear-undermines-an-informed-citi...
The media wants to scare us? Sure. Politicians? No doubt. But tell me why (and how!) all these climate scientists would want to predict disaster when there isn't any.
To answer your last question, job security. Many other reasons... adulation, professional competition. Generally the types who go into environmental science are true believers to begin with.
In rare cases, there is some money to be made by whoring yourself out.
But what would be required here would be far more than that. Individual fraudsters wouldn't be enough. Even systemic fraud wouldn't do it. It would need to be universal fraud, across basically the entire world. And it would need to be coordinated, to ensure everybody gives the same kind of fraudulent results.
It's especially unbelievable because many countries have a vested interest in the world's ability to continue burning fossil fuels. If climate change were a fraud, they would have a huge incentive to show that. Why would places like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and indeed even the United States not massively fund climate science to debunk the climate change fraud?
I could buy the fraud argument if it were a few people. I could even buy it if, for example, there were a massive schism in the field, with one big group saying climate change is real, and another big group saying it's not. But when they all speak with one voice, aside from a few tiny dregs of dissent, fraud isn't a good explanation.
Climate science is predicated upon a proper understanding of physics. Any scientist who tells you that worldwide evidence is obvious should be treated with the same level of respect as Dr. Oz.
The typical response would be that the physics is proven. Well, AFAIK, yes, at least to the degree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that it has SOME effect on climate. The magnitude of contribution to toal effect by various sources and sinks seems far from certain.
To draw a parallel, which a physicist (scientist) would do when instructing - this is like saying salt makes blood pressure go up, so it's bad for you... And ignoring all the ways the body can come to equilibrium. Stop eating salt, today, or you'll burst.
So if a physicist calls it bullshit, that's pretty much your trump card. Which is why people put so much stock in Dysons opinion, because he was an expert in properly using the tools that most climate scientists are not experts in.
Were you to go study physics at a masters level for a bit, and then read scientific studies yourself with a critical eye, you'd learn how much of what we call science is grade A bullshit.
Until then, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to debate with you. It's kind of like me arguing American football with John Madden.
There is evidence that dissent in climate science is punished. That alone is enough for me to pull out the microscope and take the words of minority researchers seriously.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large-scale_temperatur...
There is no scientific doubt about the roman and medieval warm periods being as warm or warmer than today. The anthropological evidence of this is abundant, and it shows up in most proxies as well.
The most likely case is that the natural variations swamp whatever changes humans make. Based on evidence, it's unlikely that co2 is a major driver of climate, but more of a minor player that has a ceiling on how much effect it can make.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/seven-answers-to-c...
> "Even if the world were incontrovertibly warmer 1,000 years ago, it would not change the fact that the recent rapid rise in CO2 explains the current episode of warming more credibly than any natural factor does—and that no natural factor seems poised to offset further warming in the years ahead."
There is no scientific argument about the fact that the roman and medieval periods were as warm or warmer than today, because there is a lot of evidence. Even the linked article acknowledged this fact.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period.htm
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
> The various studies differ in methodology, and in the underlying paleoclimate proxy data utilized, but all reconstruct the same basic pattern of cool "Little Ice Age", warmer "Medieval Warm Period", and still warmer late 20th and 21st century temperatures.
But if you strip that away by going back as close to the original sources as you can, to the scientists who gather the data and do the grunt work and make the best predictions they can, you'll find they overwhelmingly lead to one conclusion: the planet is warming and human activity is the major cause.
If you try to trace back the "skeptic" positions, it just sort of peters out. You'll find some articles and a little bit of data, but there's little rigor or corroboration.
We literally smashed it Thomas? Literally? The record is broken into pieces and scattered around the literal floor?
This is so obvious that people are having hard time to talk about it. First years this happened it was "just a nature glitch", but recently it is becoming more and more "climate has changed".
Certainly what you describe seems to have happened after the record hot year of 1998, though. It sure would be nice if we could all stop trying to play silly "gotcha" games and get on with the serious business of figuring out 1) what's happening and 2) what to do about it.
1. Every person on the planet should have a carbon consumption rating and have exponential taxes applied accordingly.
2. Automobiles should be banned from cities, roads should be turned into parks maybe with some commuter trains.
3. The top 62 richest people on the planet should give their money over to make wish number 1 and 2 come true.
;)
Anyone know how practical it might be to have a "progressive" carbon tax, similar in nature to a progressive income tax? I can't think of a good way to measure individual carbon-dioxide generation offhand, but that doesn't mean that there isn't. Maybe in a piecemeal fashion? Bringing back carbon based Luxury taxes on airline tickets, with a $100 tax on the first transoceanic flight, $200 for the second, $400 for the third, etc.?
I hope you don't mind not making it to hospital in a medical emergency.
If you can't bring me to the hospital then bring the hospital to me. We would just need many more doctors and better/bigger electric drones.
Amazon can figure it out - I'm sure of it.
It's actually alarming to me that this post is being given any traction on here, when I know everyone here is smarter than to attribute one year to global warming. How many times have we mocked Fox News for saying shit like, "It was -10F outside today, so much for global warming!"
Climate change is clearly a big deal, and one of (if not the) biggest threats to every nation's national security, but it's not the cause of a warm 2015. Sorry folks, it just isn't.
Usually this works by me saying "there's no known link between a single year's temperature and overall global warming", which is a falsifiable statement, and then you/anyone else can go ahead and provide any evidence that what I said is false.
If you can prove that a single year's temperature variance is primarily explained by global climate change, now would be the time to do it.
Edit: it is significant, although the citations are impossible to follow. I am amazed. But I see nothing that indicates it unique to the US.
Perhaps you should start with The IPCC Reports.
> The authors of Climate Change: The Facts number some of the most prominent dissenters from Big Climate alarmism
Plus the models that the IPCC uses to forecast disaster have been proven to have zero predictive power.
I would continue to read books written by scientists on both sides of the argument, and ignore anything said by a politically connected person or group.
The ipcc reports are two things - a bundling of scientific literature, and a policy statement. There is always a gap between the two, and the policy report comes out before the scientific statement, and is developed with the type of diplomatic horse trading that comes with any type of government report, only more so because it is international diplomacy.
I would give a finger to have an entire forum of people from various technical backgrounds who could have intelligent conversations about various topics without the bumbling interference of the devoted true believers of whatever creed.
A family member works at Nasa & he says that their model is written in Fortran.
And those models do not really take into account feedback loops. (like Siberia thaws & releases giga giga tons of methane.. Greenland disintegrates instead of melting slowly)