When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

GW Johnson · 2021-03-07 11:00:54

Latest news reports indicate that the Texas legislature is (finally) looking at making some cold weather hardening mandatory at power plants, particularly the gas plants. It seems to be ERCOT alone that they want to throw under the political bus. PUC seems to be more teflon-coated, at least so far.

Yet, the "lege" is still ignoring the cold weather hardening needed at the gas wellheads and along the big transmission pipelines, particularly at the compression stations. And THAT is where most of the gas plant shutdowns derived: from pipeline supply stoppages due to the wellhead and pipeline troubles. THAT was the worst (of several) problems.

I contacted my state rep and state senator, and told them both exactly what had to be done, and that I wanted them to do it, in no uncertain terms. Never heard back from either. So far, there is no movement toward fixing the worst problem we encountered. It's still mostly political CYA games.

Update edit: CYA = "cover your ass".

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2021-03-07 17:47:21)

SpaceNut · 2021-03-08 20:50:59

GW Johnson wrote:

Hi Quaoar:
We did pretty good out here on the farm in central Texas, but many of my fellow Texans did not. Statewide, the polar vortex event was pretty much a disaster. A really bad one, too.
We did as well as we did out here on the farm because we never lost power. We're on a country co-operative for our power (and another one for our water). Over the years, those have simply proven to be more reliable. But city dwellers do not have that as a choice.
It is extremely rare to see temperatures get near 0 F (-18 C) here in central Texas. Not that it doesn't happen, it is just extremely rare. When it did, it was usually a 1-3 day event. This one was 9 days below freezing without a break. It reminded me of what I experienced in Minnesota about a quarter century ago (which was 2.5 months continuously below 0 F = -18 C).
We lost some garden plants and some in the greenhouse, too. But not everything. Some of the shrubs and trees suffered damage, particularly the ones that got coated solid with re-freeze ice coming off the roof.
This event had 3 ice events embedded in it, coming after a separate system had already snowed us in before. That's 4 significant icing events (so far) in one winter. We normally see only one of those per winter here.
GW

SpaceNut · 2021-03-08 20:57:03

Part of the grid would have wanted this Tesla is making a giant battery to plug into the Texas power grid, and it could store enough energy for 20,000 homes

100-megawatt ya thats big for sure...

The project in Angleton - a town of around 3,000 people, about 40 miles from Houston - was initially proposed by Plus Power.
In the documents, the Power Plus and city officials said the project would connect to the grid through the existing Angleton Substation and would use "proven, reliable, and safe lithium-ion batteries."

kbd512 · 2021-03-09 09:14:19

SpaceNut,

Tesla made another battery, much like the Tesla PowerWall batteries we have that provided no power whatsoever during the winter storm. Well, then. Problem solved.

SpaceNut · 2021-03-30 17:49:40

https://www.spacedaily.com/m/reports/Di … e_999.html

SpaceNut · 2021-04-18 17:00:51

Biden takes on Democrats’ ‘Mission Impossible’: Revitalizing coal country

BB1fMhNv.img?h=533&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f

Biden’s infrastructure bill touches on many policies that energy states say they will need to withstand job losses — including retooling defunct factories — they have yet to show much progress in winning the hearts and minds of people in places it would directly affect.
The median solar worker is paid $24.48 per hour compared with $30.33 per hour for natural gas employees, Secretary Kerry trying to equate the job of an electrician in a coal mine who makes $110,000 to a solar tech, who might make $35,000 to $40,000, is not a good analogy for our state.

low wages are always problem

mine the coal but use it in newer ways needs to happen.

send it to mars.....

SpaceNut · 2021-05-20 17:53:48

No warming going on here right as the Largest iceberg in the world breaks off from Antarctica

AAKcvqd.img?h=799&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f

only 70 times the size of Manhattan Island

Mars_B4_Moon · 2021-05-29 20:18:48

After a high point in the Obama administration, philanthropies no longer drive education policy
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/5/13/224 … -broad-czi

It's racist to be good at math?
https://onenewsnow.com/education/2021/0 … od-at-math

Six Obama Era Education Policy Mistakes Joe Biden Should Avoid
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreen … uld-avoid/

Fired Space Force commander's warning of 'Marxist trends' in America is 'completely true': Murray
https://news.yahoo.com/fired-space-forc … 58606.html

Air pollution in the US is ‘racist’
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-c … 39792.html

The Space and Air Forces Launch an LGBTQ Task Force
https://www.wired.com/story/the-space-a … ask-force/

With Biden’s first budget, annual federal spending would top $6 trillion
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/ … 6-trillion

SpaceNut · 2021-06-12 17:13:20

Ice shelf protecting Antarctic glacier is breaking up faster as ice shelf has retreated by 12 miles between 2017 and 2020,

SpaceNut · 2021-06-18 22:27:12

A sign of things to come as ‘Potentially the worst drought in 1,200 years’: scientists on the scorching US heatwave

Salt Lake City hit a record-breaking 107F (42C), while in Texas and California, power grid operators are asking residents to conserve energy to avoid rolling blackouts and outages.

2 times as much energy from the sun since 2005.

edit correction of the 5 to a 2 as it was a miss type

Ocean circulation is key to understanding uncertainties in climate change predictions

kbd512 · 2021-06-20 15:46:34

SpaceNut wrote:

we are receiving 5 times as much energy from the sun since 2005.

SpaceNut,

When you make a statement like that, not only is it objectively false in nature, but you're doing the cause of spreading awareness of climate change a profound disservice. If we had been receiving 5 times as much energy from the Sun since 2005, implying that the Sun's output had increased by a factor of 5, then every other planet in the solar system would also have received 5 times as much energy from the Sun, so the temperatures of all other planets would have to increase accordingly. Since that clearly hasn't happened, there must be some other reason why Earth's average temperatures have been increasing. Earth, specifically, also hasn't received or trapped, via the greenhouse effect, 5 times as much energy from the Sun. Wild exaggeration is anathema to science, and should remain within the realms of religion and politics.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-20 16:20:53

Here is the actual story New research shows that the amount of heat the planet traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land

We are absorbing as much as being reflected at about 240 w m^2.

Earth is trapping twice as much heat as it did in 2005 AALvhne.img?w=538&h=380&m=6

tahanson43206 · 2021-06-20 16:41:19

For SpaceNut ... did your device enter 5 when you meant 2 ?

we are receiving 5 times as much energy from the sun since 2005.

if so, it is OK for you to go back and correct the error.

Otherwise, if you can show where you found that figure, we can point out the error to the publisher.

This forum is open for viewing by people around the Earth. The small number of visible users does NOT mean no one sees the forum or its posts.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2021-06-20 17:43:18

Sort like fake news being repeated when its actually an error...

In either case what is causing the heating has still not been recognized let alone a solution that reverses its upward trend.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-26 16:25:24

Why is the water getting so low

AALtxn3.img?w=768&h=458&m=6

kbd512 · 2021-06-26 20:32:40

SpaceNut wrote:

Here is the actual story New research shows that the amount of heat the planet traps has roughly doubled since 2005, contributing to more rapidly warming oceans, air and land
We are absorbing as much as being reflected at about 240 w m^2.

SpaceNut,

We're receiving a global constant of ~240W/m^2 and prior to 2005 we were radiating ~239.5W/m^2 back out into space. This is what the scientists call the "energy imbalance". In 2021, we are now absorbing 1W/m^2 versus 0.5W/m^2. Earth's surface area is roughly 5.1 * 10^14 square meters (510 trillion square meters), though only half of that is being illuminated by the Sun at any given time, but that's still a lot of Watts of power (127.5 trillion watts or 127.5TW of additional thermal power being absorbed by the Earth). Every hour of every day, Earth receives 173,000TW of power from the Sun. Most of that gets rejected back into space, one way or another. However, the portion that's being trapped and absorbed (down-converted to IR wavelength photons that get thermalized when they strike CO2 molecules or other greenhouse gases), has doubled. I guess that was too complicated to put into a news article. The net net is that approximately 1/1357th of the solar power that would otherwise be radiated into space during the course of a second / minute / hour / year / decade, is now heating up the planet.

kbd512 · 2021-06-26 20:33:52

SpaceNut,

The water levels are so low because humans are using more and more water, but rainfall isn't replenishing the reservoirs of water we draw from at the same rate.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-26 20:41:38

Thanks for the number run down kbd512...

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentM … .aspx?West

any thoughts on the weather pattern which is not giving back the water or is it just simply mans interference with nature which has lessened the amount that would normally come back as rain....that said is the water being diverted to not going back into the oceans that are causing the rain not to happen. Last I checked the oceans were rising ever so slightly due to ice cap melting so the levels of water should not be the cause for the lessening of rain....

kbd512 · 2021-06-27 13:30:50

SpaceNut,

1/1357th of 173,000TW happens to be a seriously huge number 1,116,787TWh per year- a multiple of the total amount of energy, from all sources, that humanity consumes in a year. That's a little over half an order of magnitude greater than the total yearly energy consumption of humanity, if you want to get technical. There is no way in hell that that much thermal power can have zero effect on the global average temperatures. It's going to heat up the planet, albeit very slowly, because that is the only thing that can happen from a basic thermodynamics perspective.

The answer to your last question is a simple "no". Consuming fresh surface water before it reaches the oceans is not the driver behind the shifting weather patterns. It does have some effect, but precipitation cycles are very short. Water is evaporated through solar heating, lofted into the atmosphere, and dumped out of the atmosphere as precipitation in a matter of hours to days, which is why it's so hard to get a handle on what effect water vapor has on climate change. We know that water vapor is the single greatest contributor to heat / thermal energy accumulation because it dwarfs all other contributors in terms of total weight and distribution around the world, but not enough to truly track how precipitation cycles have changed over time, due to a lack of technology. Heat energy, or the redistribution and increase of it, has very unpredictable effects on weather patterns, namely precipitation and storms. That's why the meteorologists cautioned everyone in Congress about immediately jumping to conclusions about how climate change would affect weather patterns. Naturally, everyone ignored them and jumped to their own conclusions.

All areas of the western US were subjected to prolonged and severe drought conditions long before we started burning coal / gas / oil. There was plenty of physical evidence of that left behind, but there's no serious study of it. It's well known to geologists, though. All of the same climate features that existed before tens of millions of Americans were living there are still in effect today. Deserts are still deserts without irrigation. For example, the grass on golf courses didn't grow in Arizona prior to irrigation. That said, the question remains as to whether or not watering golf courses is a prudent use of water resources in places where people will die without water and nature only provides a limited supply of it. If this trend is to be reversed, then we need to start pumping sea water inland, desalinate it at the great salt flats, and then deliver the fresh water to the traditional water reservoirs such as lakes, craters, and aquifers in the Midwest and Great Plains areas.

If the oceans were rising at rates that the alarmists predicted, then lots of islands would already be underwater. It's not hard to understand why that didn't happen, though. All of the snow and ice caps on the planet, a significant portion of which is already below sea level, only accounts for 1.7% of the total water supply (approximately the same amount as all existing liquid ground water supplies excluding oceans, meaning both fresh and saline), although that does represent 68.7% of the total fresh water supply. If we could collect this water before it mixes with ocean water, then our drinking water supply problems would be solved, at least for a time.

USGS - How much water is there on Earth?

To continue to grow more food and to green the Earth (reclaim deserts as farmland), more ocean water diversion to farms and cities is required. If we consumed as much water as is being dumped into the ocean from the ice bergs, then the end result would be more fresh water "in the system, available for human and wildlife consumption", and no net sea level rise.

We need to use nuclear power to pump the sea water inland, solar thermal power to convert the sea water into fresh water, and then dump the salt in the great salt flats. Adding more salt to nature's land speed record race track won't hurt anything. The Russians and the Chinese can do the same, in order to stop the spread of the Gobi Desert.

SpaceNut · 2021-06-27 13:38:35

So the severe rains, huricane soakings ect we should collected and pumped immediately to the west to stem the tide of draught as that would be less energy to clean up and it would not allow so much damage in the impact areas that these storm hit. One will add detergents to break down oils from run off collection which will happen but at least the water will go to where its needed.

So a water pipeline needs to be created from holding ponds that are away from the soaking zones to handle the flow of water into the system.
Other locations to remove water from would be the Missouri river, Missippi, and ohio nd when they oftern igh as to breach the banks...
ex location
six inches of rain to parts of Detroit in less than 24 hours
More than 6.6 inches of rain was measured in Garden City, Michigan, closed multiple freeways

Void · 2021-06-27 14:34:26

Good thinking by my evaluation. Not very far from many other things.

This is particularly similar to some of my past and recent thinking:

Quote:

We need to use nuclear power to pump the sea water inland, solar thermal power to convert the sea water into fresh water, and then dump the salt in the great salt flats. Adding more salt to nature's land speed record race track won't hurt anything. The Russians and the Chinese can do the same, in order to stop the spread of the Gobi Desert.

I would try to get a pilot project for Southern California, presuming Mexico can get favor from it, and that Southern California can have enough power against Northern California to get it done.

This would involve the Salton Sea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea

What I am thinking of is Hydro Storage between the Gulf of California and the Salton Sea. As it is I believe that the Salton Sea is becoming too salty for fish.
A solution would be to generate energy during the night by dropping sea water into it, and then using energy, hopefully solar, perhaps thermal, to pump the water back up into the sea. So then the Salton Sea would experience something like tides, and perhaps the salinity could be reduced in that little salty lake. There is plenty more that I am interested in, but with the permission of the high powers I will open a terraforming topic for the expansion of this, so that I do not further interrupt your conversation any further.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2021-06-27 14:38:55)

tahanson43206 · 2021-06-27 15:18:17

For Void re #571

Your mention of the Salton Sea caught my eye .... I like your ideas ...

Having looked into it previously, I can report that there is a concern ... the Salton Sea is (unhappily) situated directly over a major part of the earthquake fault line that runs up the middle of California.

It is entirely feasible to run a line (a ditch/canal) directly from the Pacific Ocean to the Salton Sea. Sea water would flow vigorously for a while, until the Salton Sea reaches "sea" level. The flow of water can continue from the ocean, because (as you suggested) evaporation will harvest water from the "sea".

The issue of concern is that a restoration of the mass previously stored in the Salton Sea due to a human error many decades ago, might be sufficient to trigger the San Andreas fault, let alone the mass that would be added if sea level were achieved.

There are some who might argue that relieving the pent up energy in the San Andreas fault is a good idea, since it is overdue.

However, that point of view would seem most likely in the minds of those situated well away from the region.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2021-06-27 16:58:15

Not sure that putting new sea water in an existing inland sea is much for terraforming earth so here is my post here.

It is the residual remains of what once was a much larger ocean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway
his is where the geologists in oldfarts1939 crew of 17 comes in.

One I did know of the US having some inland seas but this name did not ring any bells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea

The most well known is the Great Salt Lake, lake in northern Utah, U.S., the largest inland body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most saline inland bodies of water in the world.

Sounds to me like these could also use some of the water to bring them back to life being conditions as well...

tahanson43206 · 2021-06-27 17:16:25

For SpaceNut re Salton Sea ...

The Salton Sea was created by accident when the Colorado River was rerouted in a burst of enthusiasm in the 19th Century. It was (and is) a region sunk below sea level. The unintentional flow of the Colorado River lasted for several years until the mistake was corrected.

Without a supply of water, the Salton Sea has been slowly evaporating.

I can't tell from reading Void's posts on the subject if he realizes or knew the history of the Salton Sea, but as always, I am glad to see his creative thinking back in the forum.

"The Salton Sea in south California was created in 1905 when spring flooding on the Colorado River breached a canal," NASA's website spells out. For 18 months, the most important river in the West flowed along what appeared to be a novel course through the Salton Basin, which lies 227 feet below sea level.May 8, 2020
Well-known Salton Sea origin story questioned by new research

(th)

Last edited by tahanson43206 (2021-06-27 17:18:10)

kbd512 · 2021-06-27 18:12:30

SpaceNut,

I don't see any other practical way to do it. If the goal is to supply the interior of the US and the Midwest with sufficient water supplies, then serious continuous pumping power is required in areas with very unpredictable and severe weather.

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#551 2021-03-07 11:00:54

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#552 2021-03-08 20:50:59

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#553 2021-03-08 20:57:03

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#554 2021-03-09 09:14:19

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#555 2021-03-30 17:49:40

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#556 2021-04-18 17:00:51

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#557 2021-05-20 17:53:48

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#558 2021-05-29 20:18:48

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#559 2021-06-12 17:13:20

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#560 2021-06-18 22:27:12

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#561 2021-06-20 15:46:34

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#562 2021-06-20 16:20:53

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#563 2021-06-20 16:41:19

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#564 2021-06-20 17:43:18

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#565 2021-06-26 16:25:24

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#566 2021-06-26 20:32:40

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#567 2021-06-26 20:33:52

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#568 2021-06-26 20:41:38

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#569 2021-06-27 13:30:50

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#570 2021-06-27 13:38:35

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#571 2021-06-27 14:34:26

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#572 2021-06-27 15:18:17

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#573 2021-06-27 16:58:15

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#574 2021-06-27 17:16:25

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#575 2021-06-27 18:12:30

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

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