When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-20 20:29:16

elderflower wrote:

Equilibrium would take thousands of years to be established, because of the slowness of isostatic adjustment of the crust. This process is still going on in and around the formerly glaciated areas.
On the other hand, ice melting is, and has been, very rapid. The effect of these two processes is that initially the sea level will rise very quickly as warming proceeds and then will slowly retreat, over thousands of years, in areas that previously had big masses of ice, whilst shorelines advance further in the peripheral regions as mantle material slowly flows from one region to the other.

There is a way to lower the ocean level without refreezing the Earth. We can build a vast system of resevoirs on Antarctica, and store the water there as water, it would be a monumental engineering project, but I think Antarctica has enough material that if we redistribute it towards the coastline, we can make a vast fresh water/sea lake in the interior of the Antarctic continent.

This is a map of Antarctica, not imagine if we dug a giant artificial crater in the center of this continent and moved all the dirt and rock we excavated over to the shoreline to make a giant 360 degree earthen dam surrounding the South Pole and then filled it with water, making sure most of it stays in this giant lake. the Ocean level would then stay low instead of rising with the melting glaciers adding their water content to the oceans, We can instead cup all this water in the center of Antarctica and have it remain there as water. humans can act swiftly compared to climate change, and Antarctica has a very sparse ecology, no forests etc. We can import out own flora and fauna to the rim of this giant artificial lake we wish to make, and we can even have human settlements there in this largely vacant continent.

Here is the New Antarctica I would propose!

SpaceNut · 2017-03-20 21:40:45

Not sure where you are going but in case we are talking about global conditions... Peru struggles with devastating El Niño flooding

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Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-21 10:41:55

Creating a giant fresh water reservoir in East Antarctica is sure as heck a lot easier than terraforming Mars. The main problem with global warming is the rise in ocean levels as the polar ice caps on land melts, so basically Antarctica already has a reservoir of fresh water, except this water is in frozen form. We simply need to devise a way for Antarctica to hold onto this water in liquid form, and unlike Mars Terraforming, this I something we can start doing today. Usually the way you build a reservoir is to find certain land features such as mountains and a river valley and you build a wall to hold back the water from pouring through the gap, but there is nothing in physics that says we can't build a wall that completely encloses the major par of East Antarctica and retains most of the water from melting glaciers. The Earth will get warmer, but the oceans will not go higher, and to combat desertification, we have this giant reservoir that covers most of a continent, if we can do that, we can build aqueducts that can irrigate most of the dry places across the globe. You see the problem, as many have stated is that it my already be too late to halt global warming, the amount of carbon-dioxide is already too high, and it can't be removed very easily, but we can still halt global flooding with a massive engineering project, and it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to put a wall around East Antarctica that one around the six other continents, I mean that is just stupid, and why spend the resources to cut carbon emissions if it is already too late, seems to me the effort should be applied more directly to prevent global flooding. Do you disagree?

SpaceNut · 2017-03-21 21:05:00

Unless its move thats a huge power source to keep it from freezing and a very deep hole to by used for that new large not just a lake but an ocean when it comes to something that large. Sure the time scale for when its no longer at the poles will come to pass thou we will no long need to worry about it.

So now back to why the extreme weather patterns to which have and are still changing as we see it raining non stop it would seem in places that have not had this happen for centuries.

Where is the energy coming from that is pushing these to that level of distruction?

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-22 09:50:14

We would basically need to build artificial mountains to ring this lake, What is the time scale for the ice caps completely melting? Some people are predicting a century. In a century, I am predicting that we will build sophisticated robots that are capable of building copies of themselves and moving the amount of Earth required to build these artificial mountain ranges. I believe there is enough dirt and rock in Antarctica to accomplish this. Since the ice sheets average about a mile high, that is how high this earthen dam would have to be to contain the melt water. Either way it would be a global effort, one effort would require the cooperation of every single nation on Earth in regulating the carbon emissions which contribute to the greenhouse effect, the other thing wouldn't be. If the United States were to do this alone, I would say it should be allowed to add the remaining dry land of Western Antarctica and the Transantarctic Mountains and the other artificial mountain ranges and the coastlands of Antarctica to its territory, after all if it is making this enormous investment in Antarctica for the benefit of the rest of the World, it should get the Continent of Antarctica, I think that is a fair payment for the expense in doing this! Just look at that map, its still a lot of land even after sacrificing most of East Antarctica to build this dam. Would it be worth the investment if the rest of the World were to see the United States as doing a service and preventing many nations from getting flooded by rising ocean levels?

The "ringlands" are quite a bit of territory and the coastline would be preserved!, and he water collected in the reservoir can be used to irrigate the dry regions of the world through a global pipeline system, that water would evaporate and make its way back to the south pole where it would precipitate and be recycled.

This is much as Percival Lowell thought was going on the surface of Mars when he thought he saw canals through his telescope. I don't know much about the finer points of global climate regulation, but it we use brute force techniques we don't have to worry about climate models, we can fight desertification directly through irrigation rather than by attempting to make it rain. We could in fact make the Australian Outback, one of the driest places on Earth bloom with vegetation. the mountains of Antarctica when all is said and done would still make fantastic ski resorts, there will be some ice and snow left for this.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-03-22 09:58:55)

GW Johnson · 2017-03-25 20:56:56

The east Antarctic ice cap varies between 1 and 2 miles thick. Discounting the difference between ice and water densities, you are looking at a lake of meltwater around a mile to two miles deep, to retain all that melted ice above current sea levels atop east Antarctica.

While the Chinese did build their Great Wall with the lengths crudely on the scale required (1000's of miles), it was only around 3 m tall. We have since learned to construct walls that are taller, but there are no walls taller than those of the 1/3-mile-tall building in the middle east, and its footprint is quite small (around 100 m).

The wall you are talking about is not a wall, it is an impoundment dam holding back water under gravitational pressure. The tallest such things men have ever built are about 1000 feet tall (Hoover Dam), holding back a base level pressure of about 400 psi, or about 28 atmospheres.

What you are talking about is 5000 to 10,000 feet tall, with a base pressure in the 340 to 680 atmosphere range. That is substantially more than an order of magnitude beyond anything ever attempted. Just what materials could we make such a thing from? Just how could we pay for marshaling the effort to construct a thing 500 to 1000 times taller than the Great Wall of China, and as long to longer than that same Great Wall?

You are talking about something only God could build, not anything humans can build. Please get real, Tom. Your flights of fancy are ridiculously unrelated to human capabilities.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-03-25 21:02:02)

SpaceNut · 2017-03-26 15:46:40

Back to the science of global climate change...

What are the factors that when changed just a little bit results in a rise or fall of temperature accross the globe?

It is long thought that sun spots are one of the factors, earth wobble is another that can alter the localized climate..are there others from outside of the earth which can make the change?

It is surmized that asteriod or very large meteors can also alter the climate dumping large levels of dust into the air to cause cooling.

We know those that man can introduce will alter local climate a bit as well as volcanic activity that is greater than normal.

With all the variables are there any that influence them more than others?

RobertDyck · 2017-03-26 15:58:13

NASA studies using radar satellites indicates the volume of ice at Antarctica is increasing. This was a surprise, but it's increasing. Floating ice shelves are melting, but inland ice is increasing.

The sky is not falling.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-28 07:37:41

GW Johnson wrote:

The east Antarctic ice cap varies between 1 and 2 miles thick. Discounting the difference between ice and water densities, you are looking at a lake of meltwater around a mile to two miles deep, to retain all that melted ice above current sea levels atop east Antarctica.
While the Chinese did build their Great Wall with the lengths crudely on the scale required (1000's of miles), it was only around 3 m tall. We have since learned to construct walls that are taller, but there are no walls taller than those of the 1/3-mile-tall building in the middle east, and its footprint is quite small (around 100 m).
The wall you are talking about is not a wall, it is an impoundment dam holding back water under gravitational pressure. The tallest such things men have ever built are about 1000 feet tall (Hoover Dam), holding back a base level pressure of about 400 psi, or about 28 atmospheres.
What you are talking about is 5000 to 10,000 feet tall, with a base pressure in the 340 to 680 atmosphere range. That is substantially more than an order of magnitude beyond anything ever attempted. Just what materials could we make such a thing from? Just how could we pay for marshaling the effort to construct a thing 500 to 1000 times taller than the Great Wall of China, and as long to longer than that same Great Wall?
You are talking about something only God could build, not anything humans can build. Please get real, Tom. Your flights of fancy are ridiculously unrelated to human capabilities.
GW

Is terraforming Mars easier or harder than building that wall? A 2-mile high earthen wall? There are plenty of mountains that are taller than 2 miles high, Mount Everest is for example 5 miles high! As for never having done it before, we have also never terraformed Mars before, we haven't even deliberately altered the Earth's climate before. You talk about the resources that need to be marshalled to build that wall, yet getting everybody to lower their carbon-dioxide output also requires a lot of resources, it is expensive, it costs jobs! The only difference is we are not guaranteed results if we lower our carbon-emissions, its going to cost a lot of money, but the percentage of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere might not be the only thing that is warming this planet up. (If indeed it s warming up at all!) But if we take your assumption, there maybe other things that are also causing the Earth to warm up, such as the Solar output for instance, and there is the fact that we already added to the carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere, and that amount is going to stay there for a while until plant life can remove it. I heard it cited in many cases that the Earth would continue to warm even if the human race became extinct, and didn't add a single kilogram of carbon-dioxide more. The oceans would continue to rise if we stopped all our carbon dioxide output, it will still costs a lot of money to do so, but we would not be achieving the result we need to if we are going to spend the money, the oceans will still rise and flood our homes, in spite of the sacrifices we make to cut carbon emissions, building an Earthen dam will stop the oceans from rising regardless of the cause of global warming, whether its man made or not, I think that would be a better investment of our resources than in cutting carbon emissions, and we don't have to get the whole planet to cooperate if we do choose to build that wall.

You want an example of walls that are 2-miles high, this O'Neill cylinder is 4 miles wide and 20 miles long, the important part of it for us to know is that it is 4 miles wide, that means its walls are 2 miles high to hold in atmosphere. The size of this structure is entirely without precedent in human history, nothing like it has ever been built by humans whether on the ground or in space. O'Neill has even stated that a structure up to 5 times the size of this O'Neill Cylinder could be build, that would mean a cylinder 20 miles wide and 100 miles long! A society which is building space colonies and terraforming Mars is also a society which can solve the problem of a rising sea level, that is where Kim Stanley Robinson was off in his Mars novels, he describes a society that had completely terraformed Mars in his third novel, but where an Earth is suffering from the effects of global warming and sea level rising due to the melting Antarctic ice sheets. Yes I know he wanted to embed a political statement about global warming in his novel, but the existence on unintended global warming is inconsistent when he has shown that humans have terraformed Mars, it is hard to believe that Mars would have a higher priority than Earth, or that there would till be a Third World left after all this time and technological progress! We don't actually see much of Earth in his novels until the third one! Doesn't prove a thing of course, it is fiction after all, but the only examples we can cite for the stuff we want to do are ficticious examples. If building that wall is folly, then so is cutting our carbon emissions, one leaves a physical trace, while the other leaves only the absence of some carbon-dioxide in our atmosphere if successful, but require a lot of resources, I can't really say which would require more. You have not proved which project would be more expensive.

GW Johnson · 2017-03-28 14:51:20

Tom, there are lots of mountains on Earth that a a mile or two (or more) tall. And humans did not build a single one of them!

The largest structures ever built by man are the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and they pale into insignificance, in comparison to any of those mountains, much less your wall idea, which is orders of magnitude larger in volume and mass.

I don't care that Gerard O'Neill (and some others) ran "designs" (they are concepts, they are NOT designs) for gigantic habitats in space. Those claims rest on the assumptions that (1) we can summon the collective will to embark on a project that utterly dwarfs the Pyramids, and (2) that we will learn how to construct real engineering materials with tensile strength and significant ductility out of whatever rocks we can find out there.

The first assumption is denied by the 3000 years of history since the pyramids were built. Nothing since, not even the Great Wall of China, is of that scale. The second assumption is denied by existing technology: we DO NOT KNOW how to make real engineering materials out of space rocks.

That second is why there are lots of inspiring illustrations, but NO engineering drawings and material specifications, for anything even remotely like an O'Neill habitat. Maybe some day. But no time soon.

As for climate change, I myself tend to think we are already past any "tipping points", because of the 3-century estimated lifetime of any given ton of CO2 we add to the air. And no, I don't think all the ice will melt, although it has in the geologic past. About half of Greenland, perhaps half of west Antarctica, and pretty much all the mountain glaciers is what I think will melt.

That's about 6-8 meters sea level rise. The majority of Earth's population will get flooded out. The majority of our largest cities and institutions will have to be moved. Without mountain glaciers feeding rivers, a lot of currently arable land will desertify. Ain't that enough to cause catastrophic problems? Does it really matter if it takes 200 years or 50 years?

The sky hasn't fallen yet, but sooner or later it will. What we might (or might not) be able to do is slow the rate of the disaster, by reducing those activities of ours that we know act in the wrong direction. That being said, I oppose attempting "geoengineering", because most of those ideas are so irreversible, and we have proven ourselves so fallible throughout history.

Putting some giant reflective film structures in orbit about the Earth to reflect sunlight before it hits the atmosphere? Such a scheme is much lighter in scale and volume than a pyramid, and it is reversible. That is crucially important if we are wrong, and/or the crisis passes. THAT I could support. That is something we could actually do. As is reducing CO2 emissions, which I actually think is too little, too late, but it cannot hurt.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-03-28 14:57:10)

SpaceNut · 2017-03-28 19:15:46

To reduce CO2 in the air one can put solar powered units out in the oceans that pump and spray the water high into the air to create a means to obsorb it on the way down. Allow the unit to move as the sun crosses more like a sail boat tacking its turns north to south in order to keep mixing the ocean concentration as we go.

The same solar shade that would benefit venus we can design for use here on earth if it is indeed solar caused.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-28 20:01:37

GW Johnson wrote:

Tom, there are lots of mountains on Earth that a a mile or two (or more) tall. And humans did not build a single one of them!
The largest structures ever built by man are the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and they pale into insignificance, in comparison to any of those mountains, much less your wall idea, which is orders of magnitude larger in volume and mass.
I don't care that Gerard O'Neill (and some others) ran "designs" (they are concepts, they are NOT designs) for gigantic habitats in space. Those claims rest on the assumptions that (1) we can summon the collective will to embark on a project that utterly dwarfs the Pyramids, and (2) that we will learn how to construct real engineering materials with tensile strength and significant ductility out of whatever rocks we can find out there.
The first assumption is denied by the 3000 years of history since the pyramids were built. Nothing since, not even the Great Wall of China, is of that scale. The second assumption is denied by existing technology: we DO NOT KNOW how to make real engineering materials out of space rocks.
That second is why there are lots of inspiring illustrations, but NO engineering drawings and material specifications, for anything even remotely like an O'Neill habitat. Maybe some day. But no time soon.
As for climate change, I myself tend to think we are already past any "tipping points", because of the 3-century estimated lifetime of any given ton of CO2 we add to the air. And no, I don't think all the ice will melt, although it has in the geologic past. About half of Greenland, perhaps half of west Antarctica, and pretty much all the mountain glaciers is what I think will melt.
That's about 6-8 meters sea level rise. The majority of Earth's population will get flooded out. The majority of our largest cities and institutions will have to be moved. Without mountain glaciers feeding rivers, a lot of currently arable land will desertify. Ain't that enough to cause catastrophic problems? Does it really matter if it takes 200 years or 50 years?
The sky hasn't fallen yet, but sooner or later it will. What we might (or might not) be able to do is slow the rate of the disaster, by reducing those activities of ours that we know act in the wrong direction. That being said, I oppose attempting "geoengineering", because most of those ideas are so irreversible, and we have proven ourselves so fallible throughout history.
Putting some giant reflective film structures in orbit about the Earth to reflect sunlight before it hits the atmosphere? Such a scheme is much lighter in scale and volume than a pyramid, and it is reversible. That is crucially important if we are wrong, and/or the crisis passes. THAT I could support. That is something we could actually do. As is reducing CO2 emissions, which I actually think is too little, too late, but it cannot hurt.
GW

It can because it will cost money! and my mountain scheme will at least give you something to show for the expense CO2 reduction will not!

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-28 20:06:24

SpaceNut wrote:

To reduce CO2 in the air one can put solar powered units out in the oceans that pump and spray the water high into the air to create a means to obsorb it on the way down. Allow the unit to move as the sun crosses more like a sail boat tacking its turns north to south in order to keep mixing the ocean concentration as we go.
The same solar shade that would benefit venus we can design for use here on earth if it is indeed solar caused.

Seems like a lot of trouble just to store water as ice, why can't it be stored as water? My solution is simpler, it tackles the problem directly instead of trying to freeze the Earth so water forms glaciers on land, just build a big reservoir.

SpaceNut · 2017-03-28 20:24:27

The oceans are already a storage facility with no costruction or costs...The side problem with ice being water is that the amount of land that no longer has vegetation on it to obsorb the CO2 further making the temperature run higher and higher as plants are not obsorbing it. Why have you not drawn the connection to the increasing arid desert area growth which are occuring while the glaciers are melting.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-28 20:55:02

Because that connection is counterintuitive to make, when glaciers melt, you get more water not less. Seems to me that if the water cycle fails, you just irrigate to make the difference, if you can build an artificial mountain chain that is 2 miles tall, irrigating the globe as if it were Lowell's Mars should be "small potatoes."

GW Johnson · 2017-03-29 13:57:17

"Because that connection is counterintuitive to make, when glaciers melt, you get more water not less." -- NO it is NOT counterintuitive when you consider the passage of time with physical processes, instead of just the rhetoric of words on a page.

The way glaciers feed rivers is by a time delay. During the warm months, that's when the ice slowly melts, feeding the rivers. Once the ice is gone, the rivers dry up. If the ice is gone permanently, those river cease to flow altogether, at any time.

Honestly, Tom, don't you know ANYTHING about how this world really works? I learned about this stuff for the first time in the third grade about 6 decades ago. And in every Earth science topic of every science course since. This is the stuff that keeps you alive, you blithering idiot! You really ought to understand it.

GW

GW Johnson · 2017-03-29 15:38:05

"The oceans are already a storage facility with no construction or costs" -- true, Spacenut, but there are three really big "buts".

(1) adding water to the oceans raises mean sea levels, with all the flooding that implies. OK for hunter gatherers. Farmers and city builders, not so much.

(2) adding CO2 to the oceans creates acidity (carbonic acid for the chemists out there), which in the lab seems detrimental to life, especially that kind of life that forms calcium carbonate shells. It is unclear at best whether this effect has kicked-in yet. It is clear that ocean pH has decreased in the last several years.

(3) adding heat to the oceans has two rather serious effects: (a) thermal expansion, which raises sea levels, which raises flooding risks, and (b) it seems detrimental to at least some forms of life, as evidenced by coral bleaching.

When you add overfishing to those three, the viability of the ocean as a continuing source of food and oxygen becomes questionable, and this is directly due to human activities that up to now have known no bounds. That last as a matter of plain common sense suggests that we understand these effects and put some prudent limits on our activities.

Idiots like Tom will deny it, but most reputable scientists in oceanography and biology agree that if the ocean dies, we die. That dead-ocean effect does seem to be the root cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction, according to them and the geologists. Largest of them all, at an estimated 95% of all forms of life.

GW

GW Johnson · 2017-03-29 16:05:48

"It can because it will cost money! and my mountain scheme will at least give you something to show for the expense CO2 reduction will not!" -- from Tom post 37 above, who could only make that comment in response to what I wrote in post 35. Other readers: please go read what I wrote for yourself.

Tom, your mountain scheme is technologically infeasible for anyone but God, and I already took you to task for that idiocy in post 35 above.

It ain't the money, it's simply orders and orders of magnitude beyond any earth-moving capabilities we have ever had. If you could read at a 6th grade level, you would've understand that's what I said in that post.

We are already ahead of schedule reducing emissions of CO2 in the marketplace, because at today's prices, natural gas is a more cost-effective fuel than coal in power plants, and it simply has less tons of CO2 emission per MW-hr of electricity produced. THERE's a market-driven solution in operation for you, right there! AND, it is cleaner in terms of poisonous emissions: no fly ash, no acid rain, no radioactivity (and don't kid yourself, there is radioactivity in natural coal). Win-win for everyone!

And the extraction methods for natural gas are less objectionable: no piles of mine tailings leaking acid in surface streams, no disfigured mountaintops clogging valleys with moved earth, and such like. The only real downside folks are talking about is earthquakes induced by the too-enthusiastic deep injection disposal of used frac fluid. Spread it out some, and they don't happen at perceptible levels. That's simple enough, and economically acceptable to all but the most criminally greedy.

No one is talking about freshwater shortages induced by massive freshwater consumption as frac fluid, but that's coming. Until they start reusing frac fluid, and figuring out an additive package that works with brine instead of fresh water. And they will, once conditions force the issue. THAT's how the market really works: enlightened self interest, but operating within the bounds and rules acceptable to us all.

Plus, more jobs have already been created doing wind and solar than have been lost in coal mines. That's because those are installer jobs, which are (for the near term) invulnerable to automation. The coal mine jobs were lost to automation and to coal mine closures as natural gas outcompeted coal. Simple as that.

Automation is what cost the factory jobs, too, in automotive, steel, and similar. Bringing car factory work home will just not add many assembly line jobs, precisely because those were automated out of existence after the original outsourcing, for the most part.

What Mr. Trump is doing rescinding all this energy and environmental policy will not create that many jobs. It will kill Americans with dirtier air and fouler water, all for the profit of the giant corporate few. That's not to say outfits like EPA don't need serious reform, because they do. The Byzantine EPA rules bullshit was written by lawyers who want to litigate, instead of scientists who mostly want to serve mankind, at EPA. So fix that!!!! Our stupid congress and senate doesn't seem to even be aware of that as the real problem.

Lest you think I am some sort of "liberal", I am most definitely not. I hate both party's ideologies and belief systems. Neither makes good public policy. No ideology or belief system ever has. No ideology or belief system ever will. THAT is the lesson of millennia of political history.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-03-29 16:20:44)

SpaceNut · 2017-03-29 17:56:29

GW post #42 with 1.) we have the levels of ocean rising under current sistuation of glacier melt as not changing any time soon so I was not even going to point that out to Tom.
2.) is a chance to mineral mine the oceans to allow them not become overly concentrated with carbonic acid or other run off chemicals from glacier water pickup while it is going to the ocean. The process can be all solar powered for drawing in the water into a floating chamber to be processed into a mineral salt.
3.) adding heat to the oceans is really bad as GW said it also will continue to create dead zones as the plant and animal life will not be able to survive due to the temperature rise, shift in oxygen levels and PH.....The deep sea locations with methane ice would also cause the releasal of it into the atmospher which would accelerate the warming effect....

When we build storm systems drains to collect and steer run off water from rain into lagoons and other systems to move the water to other areas draught stricken then we can slow the rising sea level and give life a chance on land where it is struggling now due to climate change.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-30 07:20:32

GW Johnson wrote:

"Because that connection is counterintuitive to make, when glaciers melt, you get more water not less." -- NO it is NOT counterintuitive when you consider the passage of time with physical processes, instead of just the rhetoric of words on a page.
The way glaciers feed rivers is by a time delay. During the warm months, that's when the ice slowly melts, feeding the rivers. Once the ice is gone, the rivers dry up. If the ice is gone permanently, those river cease to flow altogether, at any time.
Honestly, Tom, don't you know ANYTHING about how this world really works? I learned about this stuff for the first time in the third grade about 6 decades ago. And in every Earth science topic of every science course since. This is the stuff that keeps you alive, you blithering idiot! You really ought to understand it.
GW

The fabled Martians had a solution for this, they irrigated their entire planet, or at least that is how astronomer Percival Lowell imagined it! Is that such a bad idea? The Earth has as much land area as Mars does, but I don't think our irrigation project would have to be as extensive as what Percival Lowell thought he saw through his telescope on Mars. I see us becoming a great civilization, just as we once imagined the Martians to be, not a bunch of idiots in mud huts helpless as the oceans rise to flood their homes. There are technological solutions to climate change, what Percival Lowell thought he saw on Mars was an example of a technological solution to climate change on Mars! You see building mountains in Antarctica requires industry, cutting down on our carbon emissions requires deindustrialization, I'd rather go with industry and rework the surface of our planet to make it more habitable. Deindustrialization requires reducing our population and living in ecological balance with nature, that means forever giving up the dream of ever colonizing space and living like the primitives do, in mud huts! I think building artificial mountain chains is more consistent with colonizing space and terraforming Mars, than living in mud huts in hunter gatherer societies in ecological balance with nature. You see sooner or later an extinction level even will occur and wipe us out if we live in a sustainable society. You have to remember the dinosaurs lived in ecological balance with nature, they had no industry to prevent what befell them, and that is why they are today extinct. The Dinosaurs did not produce industrial emissions of carbon-dioxide, they did not cause global warming, the lived the same primitive lifestyle without technology and nature in the form of an asteroid of comet eventually did them in!

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-30 07:31:46

GW Johnson wrote:

"The oceans are already a storage facility with no construction or costs" -- true, Spacenut, but there are three really big "buts".
(1) adding water to the oceans raises mean sea levels, with all the flooding that implies. OK for hunter gatherers. Farmers and city builders, not so much.
(2) adding CO2 to the oceans creates acidity (carbonic acid for the chemists out there), which in the lab seems detrimental to life, especially that kind of life that forms calcium carbonate shells. It is unclear at best whether this effect has kicked-in yet. It is clear that ocean pH has decreased in the last several years.
(3) adding heat to the oceans has two rather serious effects: (a) thermal expansion, which raises sea levels, which raises flooding risks, and (b) it seems detrimental to at least some forms of life, as evidenced by coral bleaching.
When you add overfishing to those three, the viability of the ocean as a continuing source of food and oxygen becomes questionable, and this is directly due to human activities that up to now have known no bounds. That last as a matter of plain common sense suggests that we understand these effects and put some prudent limits on our activities.
Idiots like Tom will deny it, but most reputable scientists in oceanography and biology agree that if the ocean dies, we die. That dead-ocean effect does seem to be the root cause of the Permian-Triassic extinction, according to them and the geologists. Largest of them all, at an estimated 95% of all forms of life.
GW

Is that what killed these dinosaurs? Presumably when these dinosaurs lives the ocean levels were much higher, the ice caps were almost nonexistent, there were still glaciers high in the mountains, particularly in places like Antarctica. I wonder what the carbon-dioxide levels were back then? If we lived 65 million years ago, could we have farmed in this climate? I think so. Lots of plants grew in the age of the dinosaurs, there was a huge variety of life back then, probably extensive rain forests as well. We have fossil evidence for plant life from this time period.

So are farmers and city builders stupid, are they just going to sit their on their primitive farms and not move them as the ocean level rises, because they are as dumb as the dodos? If we can't adapt to a changing environment, I think we probably deserve to become extinct!

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-30 07:40:34

GW Johnson wrote:

"It can because it will cost money! and my mountain scheme will at least give you something to show for the expense CO2 reduction will not!" -- from Tom post 37 above, who could only make that comment in response to what I wrote in post 35. Other readers: please go read what I wrote for yourself.
Tom, your mountain scheme is technologically infeasible for anyone but God, and I already took you to task for that idiocy in post 35 above.

You just need a large enough work force, we can move small amounts of Earth around, and if we had enough bull dozers and shovels, we can move mountains! We can build robots to do it, according to one prediction, in just six years we will have computers powerful enough to do as much processing as the human brain! We can manufacture a workforce to do this. Most left wing projections assume no technological progress, funny that they call themselves "progressives" yet they don' believe in progress! They worry about the people living in mud huts in the year 2100 AD getting flooded out of their homes by rising ocean levels and being unable to adapt because they are Third World and stupid, so we need to make enormous sacrifices in reducing our carbon emissions to save these dumb primitives who can't adapt!
1476686942255.jpg?ve=1&tl=1
If people are still living this way in 2100 AD, there is something wrong with them.

It ain't the money, it's simply orders and orders of magnitude beyond any earth-moving capabilities we have ever had. If you could read at a 6th grade level, you would've understand that's what I said in that post.

How many orders of magnitude is terraforming Mars, surely doing this is orders of magnitude less that terraforming Mars!

We are already ahead of schedule reducing emissions of CO2 in the marketplace, because at today's prices, natural gas is a more cost-effective fuel than coal in power plants,

Of course natural gas otherwise known as methane, is a super-greenhouse gas! Do you think all the natural gas we drill for gets burned? The only solution in the long term is to move off planet. Mud hut people and their goats are not going to colonize space!

and it simply has less tons of CO2 emission per MW-hr of electricity produced. THERE's a market-driven solution in operation for you, right there! AND, it is cleaner in terms of poisonous emissions: no fly ash, no acid rain, no radioactivity (and don't kid yourself, there is radioactivity in natural coal). Win-win for everyone!
And the extraction methods for natural gas are less objectionable: no piles of mine tailings leaking acid in surface streams, no disfigured mountaintops clogging valleys with moved earth, and such like. The only real downside folks are talking about is earthquakes induced by the too-enthusiastic deep injection disposal of used frac fluid. Spread it out some, and they don't happen at perceptible levels. That's simple enough, and economically acceptable to all but the most criminally greedy.

We could strip mine the Moon and Mars with no problem.

No one is talking about freshwater shortages induced by massive freshwater consumption as frac fluid, but that's coming.

You mean it doesn't rain? Does fracking destroy water?

Until they start reusing frac fluid, and figuring out an additive package that works with brine instead of fresh water. And they will, once conditions force the issue. THAT's how the market really works: enlightened self interest, but operating within the bounds and rules acceptable to us all.
Plus, more jobs have already been created doing wind and solar than have been lost in coal mines. That's because those are installer jobs, which are (for the near term) invulnerable to automation. The coal mine jobs were lost to automation and to coal mine closures as natural gas outcompeted coal. Simple as that.

How many people have died in coal mining accidents? I've seen robots that can walk, there are cars that can drive themselves, do you think we will still be sending people down in the mines to die for a paycheck when that happens?

Automation is what cost the factory jobs, too, in automotive, steel, and similar. Bringing car factory work home will just not add many assembly line jobs, precisely because those were automated out of existence after the original outsourcing, for the most part.
What Mr. Trump is doing rescinding all this energy and environmental policy will not create that many jobs. It will kill Americans with dirtier air and fouler water, all for the profit of the giant corporate few. That's not to say outfits like EPA don't need serious reform, because they do. The Byzantine EPA rules bullshit was written by lawyers who want to litigate, instead of scientists who mostly want to serve mankind, at EPA. So fix that!!!! Our stupid congress and senate doesn't seem to even be aware of that as the real problem.
Lest you think I am some sort of "liberal", I am most definitely not. I hate both party's ideologies and belief systems. Neither makes good public policy. No ideology or belief system ever has. No ideology or belief system ever will. THAT is the lesson of millennia of political history.
GW

Do you think Trump is an ideologue or is he just the wrong man in the wrong place and the Democrats need someone to serve as their piñata. I've never seen Democrats do much negotiating with them, they wouldn't even vote on his heathcare bill, by not voting for his healthcare bill, they have ensured that a more conservative one will be proposed in its place, as it ultimately failed in congress without their support. Obamacare will fail, it is unsustainable, at least if the Republican's American Care Act was passes, they would have shared some of the blame had it failed too, but the Democrats were at war with the President, too bad for them! Now the Republicans will hash out a new bill amongst themselves and with 52 Senators they will pass it and Trump will sign it! Obamacare will be repealed, it will just take a little longer without the Democrats input.

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-03-30 08:03:04)

GW Johnson · 2017-03-30 13:46:19

Tom:

1 able-bodied person can move about a ton of dirt and rocks a day with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and the like. For about 1/3 of Earth's population, that's all they have to work with. We in the industrialized third can move about 10 or 20 times that with power equipment. If we had that much equipment, which we don't. The rest fall in between somewhere.

Say by some unprecedented means (that also does not exist) we can put all 7 billion of us to work building your ring of mountains. Just for an approximation, half with hand tools move 7 billion tons in one day, the other have moves 70 billion with power equipment. 77 billion tons at specific gravity 2.5 is some 31 million cubic meters, or 0.031 cubic kilometers. (Denser is even less volume.)

Now, assuming 40-degree angle of repose and 3 km tall, the cross section of your ring wall is 3 km x 7.2 km triangle, whose area is 10.7 square kilometers. Using the circumference of a 3000 km dia circle to represent the length of your ring wall (about 9400 km), the volume to be moved is 101,000 cubic kilometers. Dividing by the 0.031 cubic km per day just above, the job is 3.2 million days long.

Tom, that's 8,900 years to build your wall. That's a bit late, don't you think?

Even if all 7 billion of us had big power equipment (and we don't, that many power shovels and dump trucks do not exist on the planet, not by an overwhelming long shot), the rate is only about .06 cu.km per day, only about a factor of 2 faster. Still a 4400 year job.

NOW do you understand why your ring wall idea is impractical to the point of being extremely silly to even suggest?

And yes I know methane is a greenhouse gas. But it's also a clean fuel. That which is lost due to careless extraction and transport has a short life before being oxidized to CO2, a few years. It does greenhouse damage during that time, but it also clears much more quickly. Trying to slow the careless leak rate is one of the things your precious Trump is rescinding. Or didn't you know that?

As for claiming I said frac water stops rainfall, that is absolutely the STUPIDEST thing I have ever heard anyone say! You claim to be a free market conservative. Do you NOT understand what happens when there is more demand for freshwater in a river than there is supply of fresh water in that river? Some go without (imagine that!!!, and it's fatal, too), prices skyrocket, and there is chaos and tumult until something can be done to relieve the shortage. HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT?

I swear, arguing with you is like arguing with an ignorant 3 year old child who knows nothing. Sometimes I think you cannot be real. You must be a "bot" programmed to say stupidly-irritating things just to start arguments.

No real human could be that ignorant and stupidly argumentative ... no, strike that. Middle eastern religious extremists certainly are.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-03-30 13:59:59)

SpaceNut · 2017-03-30 17:54:45

Any movement of earth to another location will not be solid when moved and will cllapse with rain and flow right back to a flat mound in no time at all it is not solid like rock.....So now you add a layer of out shell solid rock blocks to fit and contain the soil inside them, so basically is a very large pool...
It would be easier to build smaller more local ponds to lakes where it is arid to pump capture water to and make use of nature occuring locations to move water to while in capturing mode before pumping it to where its needed.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-03-31 08:24:14

GW Johnson wrote:

Tom:
1 able-bodied person can move about a ton of dirt and rocks a day with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and the like. For about 1/3 of Earth's population, that's all they have to work with. We in the industrialized third can move about 10 or 20 times that with power equipment. If we had that much equipment, which we don't. The rest fall in between somewhere.
Say by some unprecedented means (that also does not exist) we can put all 7 billion of us to work building your ring of mountains. Just for an approximation, half with hand tools move 7 billion tons in one day, the other have moves 70 billion with power equipment. 77 billion tons at specific gravity 2.5 is some 31 million cubic meters, or 0.031 cubic kilometers. (Denser is even less volume.)
Now, assuming 40-degree angle of repose and 3 km tall, the cross section of your ring wall is 3 km x 7.2 km triangle, whose area is 10.7 square kilometers. Using the circumference of a 3000 km dia circle to represent the length of your ring wall (about 9400 km), the volume to be moved is 101,000 cubic kilometers. Dividing by the 0.031 cubic km per day just above, the job is 3.2 million days long.
Tom, that's 8,900 years to build your wall. That's a bit late, don't you think?

Assuming there will be no technological progress at all in those 8,900 years! That's a very big assumption, and the last time we had such a span of time where there was no technological progress, we were living in the Stone Age! So the first assumption in your analysis is all technological progress will come to a halt for almost 9 thousand years! What evidence do you have that technology will come to a screeching halt? That hasn't happened since civilization began. I would say that if all technological progress came to a halt, we would have bigger problems than global warming! Your assumption that the poor will always be with us is also not supported. I don't think the Third World will exist in 100 years, advances in robotics and AI will see to that. Human stupidity is what keeps people poor! Replace the limitations of human intellect with machines and there will be no reason for anyone to be poor at all, whether one has a job would be irrelevant, since machines will be doing all the work. So no, there won't be toothless idiots with wheel barrels and shovels moving dirt. Most things in 100 years will be built by machines, not us!

Even if all 7 billion of us had big power equipment (and we don't, that many power shovels and dump trucks do not exist on the planet, not by an overwhelming long shot), the rate is only about .06 cu.km per day, only about a factor of 2 faster. Still a 4400 year job.

Still that's assuming we'll be living in the year 2017 forever with no changes, you assume the needed equipment can't be built, but we really have to take technological progress into account, we do so when we talk about building space colonies, so why shouldn't we do so here? The time scale in which this problem needs to be solved will have quite a substantial amount of technological progress in it, part of the work is developing the technology we need, we can start with human beings shoveling dirt if you like, and that's a good way to get started, but technology will overtake those human dirt shovelers.

NOW do you understand why your ring wall idea is impractical to the point of being extremely silly to even suggest?
And yes I know methane is a greenhouse gas. But it's also a clean fuel. That which is lost due to careless extraction and transport has a short life before being oxidized to CO2, a few years. It does greenhouse damage during that time, but it also clears much more quickly. Trying to slow the careless leak rate is one of the things your precious Trump is rescinding. Or didn't you know that?
As for claiming I said frac water stops rainfall, that is absolutely the STUPIDEST thing I have ever heard anyone say! You claim to be a free market conservative. Do you NOT understand what happens when there is more demand for freshwater in a river than there is supply of fresh water in that river? Some go without (imagine that!!!, and it's fatal, too), prices skyrocket, and there is chaos and tumult until something can be done to relieve the shortage. HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT?

In the age of Steam, people did not worry about running out of water for their boilers. I kind of doubt that there is more fuel to be extracted from the ground than there is fresh water. Do you live in a desert or something? People sometimes imagine the world to be like what their local part of it looks like. People who live in cities tend to worry about overcrowding much more than people who don't. People who life in deserts worry much more about the future availability of fresh water than people who don't live in deserts. Where I live, water is not in short supply there is something called a water cycle going on where water that ends up in the ocean evaporates and recondenses on land in the form of precipitation (rain, snow, hail, etc.)

I swear, arguing with you is like arguing with an ignorant 3 year old child who knows nothing. Sometimes I think you cannot be real. You must be a "bot" programmed to say stupidly-irritating things just to start arguments.
No real human could be that ignorant and stupidly argumentative ... no, strike that. Middle eastern religious extremists certainly are.
GW

Is it really smart to assume that there will be no technological progress in the future, when you look to the past and see a lot of technological progress in the past 100 years. And you do know that SpaceX successfully relaunched one of its rockets after landing it and recycling it, that is an example of technological progress. This changes our assumptions of what it will cost to send people to the Moon or Mars. People who assume there will be no technological progress are building the SLS right now!

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