Happy New Year, and happy new open thread.
As per usual, nuclear energy is off-topic – it’s not that it’s uninteresting, but it ends up dominating conversation to the total exclusion of everything else and just becomes repetitive and dull. Recent excursions on this topic shows what happens when we relax the moderation, so back to being strict about this. If you want to discuss this, please go somewhere else.
148 Kevin McKinney: Your one reference https://www.apg.at/en/market/generation/wind-energy
shows a range of 5 to 1 in energy output over 12 hours. That is very bad. Are you cherry picking an argument against yourself or are you proving your own argument wrong? It appears to me that you have proven that my argument is correct. Wind is not useful energy.
It appears to me that http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere/ picked the best data available to them. If data was not available for Portugal, Italy, Norway Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, how could they have included it? Roger Andrews has proved his point that merely spreading more wind turbines over more area does not guarantee 100% of nameplate power. Wind has to be backed up by burning fossil fuel of some sort.
Kevin McKinney:
Well, humph, I guess you guys haven’t been paying attention. Asked and answered.
The reason you get someone like EG is because everyone wants to play Philosopher King, and EG and Killian, for example, are taking that to its logical conclusion. I’ve pointed out that there is no UN Black Helicopter fleet, nor is Hillary going to be an absolute dictator worse than The Kenyan, so [your] carefully crafted, detailed, perfect solution, is not going to be imposed from above, however many spreadsheets you provide. The “energy mix” and the “transportation paradigm” and so on will be optimized if and only if you have:
1. Created disincentives to producing CO2.
2. Established an actual free market.
If there’s a free market in electricity– everyone can buy and sell to everyone, and it is delivered just like UPS delivers packages– someone will provide electricity to those people in upstate NY, whether the wind is blowing or not. What’s so hard to get about that? Maybe some people will opt to buy from a 24/7 N-plant, or maybe some will make adjustments on the consumption end.
What business is it of EG or anyone else to tell them otherwise?
And while it may spoil the fun of “analysts” and factoid fanatics, a price on CO2 will deal with lifetime production just fine. It will obviously be factored in to business decisions, as long as there is an actual free market.
The thing EG almost gets right is that what matters is communicating with and educating and motivating the public. But it is much more fun to natter on about recipes than the hard problem of catching the rabbit in the first place.
136 Killian>The answers do not lie in building things. (See Tainter on diminishing returns on complexity.) They lie in restructuring society. All the engineering knowledge needed already exists, along with most of the “stuff.” The knowledge needed now is how to apply it to meeting needs in harmony with natural systems. That ain’t you.<
You mean that we are stuck with the 19th century technology we use to produce electricity for ever? Or don't you believe we should be using electricity?
> If there’s a free market in electricity– everyone can buy and sell to everyone,
> and it is delivered just like UPS delivers packages
That assumes the storage problem solved. The grid doesn’t ship discrete packages yet.
Meanwhile, the approach can be tested — market-making people urge the same approach for water and sewage, you know.
Pay for what you want more of, sell what you don’t want, and the market will match buyer and seller, and the market-makers will take their cut on each transaction. Not in kind, but in money. They don’t need shit.
Remember — the free market has transaction costs, it costs you whatever the market will bear.
@Hank Roberts #154
No, you too are just stuck in how you think about this stuff. And you have been brainwashed into using the right-wing-think-tank redefinition of “markets”.
I’ll repeat this one more time.
“Free market” doesn’t mean “there’s no government involvement and corporations are ‘free’ to create monopolies and cheat the consumer.”
Free markets only exist with strong government intervention to keep the market power approximately balanced between buyers and sellers. Ask Adam Smith if you don’t believe me.
Roads and water and sewers and the grid and air traffic and so on are natural monopolies, and so they must be regulated as such or actually operated by the government.
(It is depressing to realize how successful the propaganda has been, since I learned this as basic HS economics principles, but now I find myself explaining it to otherwise intelligent and educated people.)
So no, there is no “cut”. Shipping companies don’t charge a percentage of the cost of the item shipped; they may charge by weight, distance, or package dimensions. That’s what regulation does. There’s no reason for the company that keeps the wires up and the system balanced to be a retailer or to generate electricity– which is what you people keep arguing about. Generation. Which method of generation is “best”…
Which method is “best”, once you establish a price on CO2 emissions, is best determined by an actual free market, since it will be highly dependent on the end use and geography. Optimization of resource allocation is what (real) free markets do best.
Likewise, this “storage problem” you think exists. (No idea what you mean about “discrete packages” of electricity. Utilities use multiple sources every day.)
zebra, you came here to learn climate science. Let’s not sidetrack learning climate science by arguing “Freedom” rhetoric. Opinions differ.
Don’t help that digression here, please.
You’ll find a congenial argument, long since in progress. Pick a recent thread there, eh?.
<blockquote“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Recommended reading:
100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States [PDF]
Jacobson, Delucchi, Bazouin et al
Energy & Environmental Science 2015, 8, 2093–2117
DOI: 10.1039/c5ee01283j
“This study presents roadmaps for each of the 50 United States to convert their all-purpose energy systems (for electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) to ones powered entirely by wind, water, and sunlight (WWS). The plans contemplate 80–85% of existing energy replaced by 2030 and 100% replaced by 2050 … They nearly eliminate energy-related U.S. air pollution and climate-relevant emissions and their resulting health and environmental costs while creating jobs, stabilizing energy prices, and minimizing land requirements.”
Hank Roberts wrote: “That assumes the storage problem solved.”
How closely do you follow developments in the energy storage industry?
The “storage problem” has been solved many times over. We are now in the phase of reducing costs and scaling up deployment.
Watts’ favorite Canadian Tar sand publicist , Dr. Tim Ball is trying to counter Hot Whopper with a hot shopper.
EG 151: Wind has to be backed up by burning fossil fuel of some sort.
BPL: No, it does not. It can be backed up by solar, hydro, or biomass just as easily.
157: you misspelled alarmist again. If that’s not what your animist mean?
#151–Um, Ed, hello! It’s not my reference, it’s yours, adopted from Bill Bedford’s answer to you at #117. And it doesn’t say what you claimed it did. Again.
“It appears to me that http://euanmearns.com/wind-blowing-nowhere/ picked the best data available to them.”
Maybe. But I found the Austrian data in just a few minutes of searching, which Mearns mysteriously did not include. Had I been writing that blog post, I’d have included it, and I’d have explained clearly which data were selected and why–if the Italian and Portugese data were not available, I’d have specifically said so.
And I’d have included a caveat in interpreting results. You ask, “If data was not available for Portugal, Italy, Norway Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, how could they have included it?”
Let me answer that with another question: “If data was not available for Portugal, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, how could Mearns (or you) claim to have shown that there was ‘no useful wind’ in Europe during the hours in question?”
160 BPL: Where I am, those other backups do not exist and solar never works at night. And again, the price of the US battery is about a quadrillion dollars, whichn means it isn’t going to happen. Advertising is never fact.
152 Zebra: I am not at all interested in being a philosopher-king. Nor do I consider economics to be a science. Economics is a mathematized humanities. Your free market idea will only work if choosing an energy source gets you that source and nothing else and the playing field is level and everybody understands it. None of those are the case.
On the philosopher-king thing: I think of myself as, at this time, filling in for the high school physics teacher that half of all people never took a course from. The project is not to dictate. The project is to educate and possibly to fix some psychological problems. Reference book: “The Rise of Nuclear Fear” by Spencer Weart. The biggest problem is the fear that the fossil fuel companies and journalists keep stirring up. My fear is that only another million years of evolution can turn homo Sap into homo Rational Sapiens.
Aside on the physics teacher thing: It would take a lot more than one high school level course. It would require giving everybody a masters degree in physics. The psychology part would require a “disbelieving ray or gas.” There is just too much wrong with the average human brain with the world average education. That is why we are in trouble in the first place.
I am saying that, without the psychological problems, without ulterior motives and with all of the knowledge and numeracy, everybody would come to the same conclusion. There should be no need to dictate.
Most people don’t know what the word “truth” means, but they think they do. They think it means exactly whatever they want it to mean. When you take laboratory courses where Nature does not agree with your preconceptions, you find out what truth means.
Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_bad_beliefs_dont_die/
================================================
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney
================================================
Maybe one of these will help.
EG 163: solar never works at night
BPL: It does in California, apparently. At solar thermal plants, excess heat from the day is stored in molten salts and used to run the turbines at night. They have already achieved better on-line time than nearby coal plants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2016/01/08/scientific-american-offers-some-really-unhelpful-advice-on-the-climate-issue/
166 BPL: A Nation-Sized Battery
Do the Math
Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options―by Tom Murphy
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
You have to store heat enough to keep the turbine spinning for a whole week. The one you mentioned in California almost makes it through one night. If I owned a steel mill, I wouldn’t risk it on anything that chancy. You loose the whole investment if there is any interruption over at least 4 days.
BPL; See http://euanmearns.com/hinkley-point-c-or-solar-which-is-cheaper/
162 Kevin McKinney: Following your my “reference” back there is no reference by me there. Who were you trying to fool?
@Hank Roberts,
“you came here to learn climate science”
Yes, and I found you and others engaging in an unproductive discussion about alternative sources for electricity, contrary to the expressed wishes of the moderators.
Since it’s going on, I am pointing out that it is unproductive (in fact, it’s something the FF crowd would applaud) because it consists of
1. Denigrating alternatives,
2. Except for one’s own grandiose unrealistic choice, for which
3. You can’t provide even the suggestion of a political/economic path by which it might be implemented.
As I said originally, I’ve seen FF trolls take exactly that approach in an attempt to promote do-nothingism.
What I proposed is something which actually could be implemented by a government seeking to decarbonize. Tomorrow. The technology exists, the practices are standard, and the legislation exists and can be adapted.
And I figure I have as much right to express my opinion here as anyone, even if it interferes with the endless repetition of the same pointless points by the same people.
@Edward Greisch,
I refer you to my answer to Hank Roberts just above. Particularly with respect to the fact that everything I have suggested is already happening, except the carbon tax. So,
“if I owned a steel mill…”
If you owned a steel mill, you would contract for a steady source of electricity, which is what steel mills do now. It’s your business decision which generator can do that at a price you like.
You could also get together with your fellows and buy one of those little modular thingies you keep talking about, so you would have real control and maybe save some money. Again, in-house generation is hardly a radical idea.
Those of us who don’t own steel mills, on the other hand, should be free to decide what best suits our need for lights, motors, heat and cold and so on. If it involves electricity, again, there are already places where you can choose your source, and generate your own to use or sell. Nothing even slightly difficult about the technology, which is already in use; it’s just a matter of deploying it universally and establishing a non-monopolistic market structure.
What’s not to like?
@152 – Opec is a creation of the free market.
@168 “You have to store heat enough to keep the turbine spinning for a whole week.” – EG
Your implicit assumption is that society must not change it’s pattern of energy use.
No thinking person would make that assumption.
@163 – “Where I am, those other backups do not exist and solar never works at night.”
Hmmm.. Perhaps we don’t need to base the economy on producing worthless trinkets that are designed to fail.
Perhaps consumptive efficiency could be improved rather than relying on increased energy production.
Increasing product lifetime by 100% means reducing energy consumption by to about 50% of the original value.
@Vendicar 172,
No, it isn’t. Please read my 155.
https://www.snl.com/InteractiveX/Article.aspx
Monday, January 11, 2016 5:26 AM ET
Arch Coal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization
I saw a report on how London already breach it’s NO2 levels is nitrogen dioxide another heat trapping gas like CO2 and Methane?
[Response: No. NOx (which include NO2) are shortlived gases that are nitrate and ozone precursors and while extremely unhealthy to breathe, are (small) net negative climate forcings. You are thinking perhaps of N2O (‘laughing gas’) which is a GHG. – gavin]
Missing or down: http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/
Recommended by Dr. Marvel on her blog
http://marvelclimate.blogspot.com/2014/09/our-grubby-little-fingerprints.html
for an explanation of why CO2 warms the lower atmosphere and cools the upper atmosphere.
[Response: I think this is a cached version of the page. We’ve referenced it here before. – gavin]
VD 172: Opec is a creation of the free market.
BPL: A cartel is, by definition, interference in a free market.
Killian @136,
You want to reverse the “Industrial Revolution” even though that would wipe out most of humanity.
You may get a few to agree with you here but society at large enjoys electricity, motor vehicles, central heating/cooling, cellphones etc.
Malthusians have been proved wrong time after time yet they persist in the face of evidence. Malthusians will be making their gloomy predictions when Cornucopians set foot on Kepler 62c:
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/bussard-revisited/
Still much discussion of renewable energies. But the question is: is renewable energy infrastructure actually zero carbon (or can it be made so) during its whole lifecycle? If not, we are keeping our collective fingers crossed that negative carbon technologies can get us to zero carbon (which seems to be a requirement for any target warming limit).
Follow up to 177.
No actually the artical did say NO2
See Here:http://www.iflscience.com/environment/london-breaches-yearly-limit-nitrogen-dioxide-after-just-eight-days
Gallopingcamel,
Please raise, significamtly, your knowledge base on climate,resources and sustainable design. Had the “discussion” you are trying here for too many years. Not even slightly interested.
It’s really simple math. Go figure it out.
A quick technical question:
Looking at Antarctic sea ice extent, there seems to have been a pronounced shift around mid-2015 from a pattern in recent years of being about 1 million km^2 above the 1979-2008 mean down to hovering right around that mean.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
Could this be related to the current El Nino, or is it more likely just coincidence?
Just doing some reading into methane release in the arctic and what came up on google was an article written on 9th Feb 2012 by Malcolm Light. Titled “Global Extinction within one human lifetime as a result of a spreading atmospheric arctic methane heat wave and surface firestorm.” a) has anybody read it? and b) what credibility has the author or the article got?. I managed to get to the bottom of the article and read the biblio and many of the links given are dead? His work seems to hinge around the sudden dramatic methane release from the east Siberian shelf and Svalbard in late 2010. He states that the arctic seabed especially at the higher latitudes is rapidly destabilising and that exponential over a short time frame quantities of methane is and will increasingly be released. Googling arctic news blogspot seems to verify that finding. That nearly all of the worlds additional methane increase comes from the arctic seabed and that the rate is increasing quite quickly indeed. Light’s finding is that the world’s biology will be dead before 2050. I really would like him to be proven as a crackpot but if not- don’t sugarcoat the truth. I need to know the current situation!
180 gallopingcamel and I have definitely “parted company,” as the saying goes. Malthus was a few centuries ahead, but infinite growth is definitely impossible on a finite planet. Kepler 62c is out of reach and will remain out of reach until centuries after the crash. We could go extinct by 2040, which would put Kepler 62c permanently out of reach.
The bad things [GW, overpopulation and resource depletion] are happening too fast and research is happening too slow. GW, overpopulation and resource depletion have to be set back to 1950 first.
Gallopingcamel:
1. Don’t lie about what I say.
2. Stuff your ideology. Homey don’t give a rat’s.
Cheers
Edward Greisch said
136 Killian: “The answers do not lie in building things.”? The answer lies in a population crash. Because Nature has a sure-fire answer. Once the human population gets back to thousands rather than billions, the survivors, if any, can all live in the stone age. That is what you are asking for.
“All the engineering knowledge needed already exists” False if you want to use renewables. False anyway. A technological civilization dies if there are no engineers.
Are we killing them all? I hadn’t heard. What I said was, they are not the solutions folk because they do not understand the systems needing change, being all porned up by nuts and bolts and such.
Applying what we already know requires engineers.
Very much depends on what’s being done with the stuff. And, again, are we killing them all off?
The job of science is to invent new branches of engineering.
Ohhhhhhh, myyyy! Um… nope.
Everything you touch indoors has been acted upon by engineers. Everything made by man has had engineers involved in it.
Um… nope. Little arrogant.
Tainter on diminishing returns on complexity: “Sustainability of complex societies” paywall
There is nothing in Tainter that says anything bad about engineering or engineers.
Agreed. Why in the world do you pretend I said feck all about killing off all the engineers? What I said was, engineers are not the source of the change we need, systems designers – regenerative systems designers – are. We like engineers. Don’t worry, we’ll tell you the parameters for replacing the key line plow. Now, get yerself over to the workshop and git ‘er done!
”energy per capita will be a constraining factor” Tainter requires much more energy per capita. Ain’t going to happen without engineers. Tainter is in favor of scientists and engineers solving the big problems.
I’ve spoken with Senor Tainter. I know what his pessimism was in 2010. Now? Who knows. But you know what Tainter ain’t that you also ain’t? A designer of regenerative systems. Thus, you’re pretty darned clueless on solutions, as he is.
Our civilization would last longer if everybody had equal income and wealth.
Let me fix that for you: Our system will last longer if it has no income or wealth as they are meaningless terms in a sustainable society.
I find no support in Tainter for Killian’s opinion.
How could you? You chose to believe I said he said kill all the engineers, they be evil!, which, of course, I did not.
I think I see a lot of people assuming that “opinion” X is caused by membership in political group Y. Such an assumption is a very bad one. I find no political party that I agree with.
Huh? What you smokin’? I said only that you, as an engineer, are not the type of thinker needed to create sustainability. It cannot be done with reductionist or mechanistic thinking.
That was entertaining, though. Long time since I got to respond to someone who so thoroughly made up out of thin air an entire invented slight to respond to.
62 Lawrence Coleman said 26:Killian. I also have a 10y/o son… leaving this unfolding mess to our children is to me truly unthinkable. We know that in 15-20 years time the horses have bolted and it is essentially all over.
Nah. Remember: 1. All it takes is simplicity. For simplicity, let’s say, stop using so much shtuff. 2. A return to sub-300 was modeled! Finally! After all these years asking someone to! Result? Ice caps started stabilizing within decades.
Re: 152 zebra said The reason you get someone like EG is because everyone wants to play Philosopher King, and EG and Killian, for example, are taking that to its logical conclusion.
Now jes watch whut yer spittin out that pie hole, son! Ain’t not a lick a philospherphizing in nuttin I says here.
In all seriousness. You think I’m philosophizing, you truly are tone deaf on these topics. You wanna ask a question, do so. Don’t assume. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s a miss.
Then you say this, “as long as there is an actual free market.”
Get a clue here and now: Sustainable systems are based in sane resource management, not economics. While it surely is hard for you to follow, you need to get that the use of resources sustainably can only be achieved by managing them at the scale and in the locations where they exist. Since economics is a made up construct devoid of any physical basis or natural First Principles, all it does is distort the natural world int0 financial chunks, and using finance to determine what is needed and how to create it is absurd.
How ironic you are the one mired in philosophy, which is all economics is, literally.
Re #153 Bill Bedford said 136 Killian>The answers do not lie in building things. (See Tainter on diminishing returns on complexity.) They lie in restructuring society. All the engineering knowledge needed already exists, along with most of the “stuff.” The knowledge needed now is how to apply it to meeting needs in harmony with natural systems. That ain’t you.<
You mean that we are stuck with the 19th century technology we use to produce electricity for ever? Or don't you believe we should be using electricity?
Forever is a long time. I actually suggest some of what little unsustainable stuff we use be used for continued R&D. In the short term (meaning now to 2100 or so), we need to end virtually all unsustainable practices. The primary reason is simple and pragmatic: The best solution for Climate Change is a return to 280 or lower ppm. If we bite the bullet, hard, we can do this in 20-100 years. If we do that, we can stabilize the ice sheets, even start to regrow them. We do that, there’s a chance the methane bomb never fully blows.
Et viola! Saved!
So, for about five generations, yup, pretty much.
| The Unsung Heroes of Scientific Software |
| from the coding-for-science dept. |
| posted by cmn32480 on Monday January 11, @06:03 (Software) |
| https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/01/11/0334253 |
[0]Phoenix666 writes:
Enter [1]Depsy, a free website launched in November 2015 that aims to
“measure the value of software that powers science”.
Schliep’s [a post-doctoral researcher who has contributed to
scientific software projects] profile on that site shows that he has
contributed in part to seven software packages, and that he shares
34% of the credit for phangorn. Those packages have together received
more than 2,600 downloads, have been cited in 89 open-access research
papers and have been heavily recycled for use in other software —
putting Schliep in the 99th percentile of all coders on the site by
impact. “Depsy does a good job in finding all my software
contributions,” says Schliep.
Depsy’s creators hope that their platform will provide a transparent
and meaningful way to track the impact of software built by
academics. The technology behind it was developed by Impactstory, a
non-profit firm based in Vancouver, Canada, that was founded four
years ago to help scientists to track the impact of their online
output. That includes not just papers but also blog posts, data sets
and software, and measuring impact by diverse metrics such as tweets,
views, downloads and code reuse, as well as by conventional
citations.
In effect, Depsy recognizes the “unsung heroes” of scientific
software, says Jason Priem, co-founder of Impactstory, which is
funded by the US National Science Foundation and various
philanthropic foundations.
Is there something like Depsy for FOSS? If not, we could use one.
————————————————————————
[2]Original Submission
Discuss this story at:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=16/01/11/0334253
Links:
0. https://soylentnews.org/~Phoenix666/
1. http://depsy.org/
2. https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=11494
I think this is good:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface_temperature_or_satellite_brightness.html
Tony Weddle wrote: “the question is: is renewable energy infrastructure actually zero carbon (or can it be made so) during its whole lifecycle?”
You are asking that question in the wrong place. This is a CLIMATE SCIENCE site. The hosts of this site are climate scientists, who have no particular expertise in renewable energy infrastructure, or ANY energy infrastructure for that matter, so they are not especially well-equipped to answer such questions — and they have repeatedly asked commenters to refrain from discussions of energy technologies here.
The only responses you are likely to receive are from other commenters, many of whom are hostile towards renewable energy, and are profoundly ill-informed about renewable energy technologies today, and appear determined to protect that ignorance at all cost by diligently avoiding exposure to up-to-date information about the technologies, economics and business of renewable energy in the 21st century.
gallopingcamel wrote: “Malthusians have been proved wrong time after time yet they persist in the face of evidence.”
Be that as it may, Malthus has absolutely nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.
>Zach Osterman …No actually the artical did say NO2
Right. The story you asked about mentions NO2 levels in London air.
NO2 is an air pollution problem.
NO2 is not a greenhouse gas.
Gavin answered your question — you asked if NO2 is a greenhouse gas.
@175 & @179
Without regulation to stop them, corporations will manipulate the market to their benefit.
There are no regulations to stop the corporations that are OPEC. As a result they are manipulating the market to their benefit.
It is obvious that OPEC is unregulated and hence a creation of a free unregulated market.
I just wanted to point out for the record that Kepler-62c is almost certainly not a habitable planet. More likely a sort of mini-Venus.
Talk about cheesy biofuels
Talk about cheesy biofuels
Comment by Russell — 12 Jan 2016
Don’t forget to cut the cheese before you leave the room.
188 Killian: So you have never heard of systems engineering? Or systems integration engineering? Killian, you do not know what engineering is. You have confused engineer with technician or mechanic.
189 Killian: So what you mean by “sane resource management” is return to the stone age? Your word choices are terrible.
Thanks for nothing, SecularAnimist.
With many comments about renewable energy infrastructure, it seems reasonable to ask whether the target of a zero-carbon economy can be met with that technology. Not all comments here are strictly about the science of climate change; I would have thought you’d realise that, as you’re quite a regular commenter here.