The Science of Climate Change

SpaceNut · 2019-02-18 20:13:31

Here is another part of the global warming in that if we stay with fossil fuels to create power we will see a Global energy demand to soar one third by 2040: BP

"Even so, China remains the largest market for energy: roughly double the size of India in 2040."

SpaceNut · 2019-02-21 19:14:38

Meantioned that a possible source for increasing CO2 could be coming from Venus and here is what would indicate that we just might..

I hope that we will not wait 2 decades before in order to find ou the details of Mars Atmosphere as thats how long we have for Earths atmosphere stretches out to theMoon and beyond
ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, shows that the gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630 000 km away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet.
"The Moon flies through Earth's atmosphere,"

SpaceNut · 2019-02-28 22:00:44

Is the walking pole location a cause to Where's winter? Western Europe basks in record temperatures

On Monday Britain saw its hottest winter day on record, with the mercury in the Welsh village of Trawsgoed hitting 20.6 Celsius (70 Fahrenheit).

That is warm....

elderflower · 2019-03-01 05:14:47

Memories are short. It wasn't like that last year.
Our west coast location exposed to the North Atlantic and to a large ,cold (in winter) continent means that variability is the dominant feature of our climate and prolonged settled periods are not frequent, although they do happen.

GW Johnson · 2019-03-04 12:30:49

The cause of the wild weather swings (both hot and cold) is a weakened polar jet, whose exaggerated wiggles lead to persistent strong highs and lows. The persistent highs in summer lead to local or regional heat waves and droughts. The persistent lows lead to excessive storms, rainfall, and flooding. Warming oceans and a warming arctic lead to polar jet weakening, something all the models predict, even though they individually give different numbers for it. Seems fairly conclusive, therefore.

GW

SpaceNut · 2019-03-04 21:07:02

Wildfire risk in California no longer coupled to winter precipitation

th?id=ON.855A1DE9BA8B6AAC0C77A6F499BE6C73&pid=News&c=7&rs=2&sz=243x132&qlt=90

So we are seeing wind and draught caused conditions

kbd512 · 2019-03-07 19:01:21

Josh,

I was wrong about their basic math. For that, I apologize to you and to our other readers here. I very clearly did not understand the fundamentals of heat transfer physics. There were no mathematical errors that I could find and the explanations given, despite my initial lack of understanding, were accurate in conveying the basic concepts.

Thanks for imparting the knowledge through your examples. That caused me to continue reading until I understood more about the work being done. I believe I have a rudimentary understanding of how the heat transfer process works now. Learning about it took a lot more reading than I thought it would at first. I haven't posted back for awhile because I was busy learning.

Although I can't find anything wrong with their mathematics, the models do not appear to include effects from charged particles, x-rays, and gamma rays interacting with Earth's atmosphere / surface / oceans. If Earth's atmosphere is attenuating x-rays and gamma rays, assuming that what I've read about where most of that energy ends up is correct, then I would think that they're adding to the warming effects caused by CO2.

What resistive heating effects do you imagine that the constant flux of GCR's or protons and electrons from the Sun would have in Earth's atmosphere and how fast would those interactions deposit their energy as heat? Is some or all of that effect being attributed to CO2 forcing caused by humans?

Terraformer · 2019-03-08 12:17:37

Any energy contributed by cosmic radiation would be dwarfed by their effects on cloud formation, as I understand it.

SpaceNut · 2019-03-08 19:15:42

The disappearane of ice globally is telling the world something is hotter than it should be.

Scientists track deep history of planets' motions, and effects on Earth's climate

Up to now, researchers are able to calculate the relative motions of the planets and their possible effects on our climate with reasonable reliability back only about 60 million years - a relative eyeblink in the 4.5 billion-plus life of Earth. Last year, by comparing periodic changes in ancient sediments drilled from Arizona and New Jersey, Olsen and colleagues identified a 405,000-year cycle in Earth's orbit that apparently has not changed at all over at least the last 200 million years - a kind of metronome against which all other cycles can be measured.
With two major coring experiments to date, we've we learned that changes in tropical climates from wet to dry during the time of early dinosaurs, from about 252 to 199 million years ago, were paced by orbital cycles lasting about 20,000, 100,000 and 400,000 years. On top of that is a much longer cycle of about 1.75 million years.
The shorter cycles are about the same today, but the 1.75 million year cycle is way off --it's 2.4 million years today.

Was reading about how 5.5 million miles of power lines in this country - each one is losing energy right now. This ongoing 2 to 4 percent overhead loss. Not sure how to figure the watts on that....

kbd512 · 2019-03-08 19:53:45

SpaceNut,

I'd imagine that US EIA is the source for the link below, but I'm not paying to find out.

Total electricity end use in the U.S. from 1975 to 2017 (in billion kilowatt hours)

America consumed 3.82 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2017.

So...

3,820,000,000,000 * .02 = 76,400,000 kWh

1kWh = 1,000Wh

76,400,000 * 1,000 = 76,400,000,000Wh

or...

a minimum of 76.4 Gigawatt-hours of energy lost to the electrical resistivity of power line conductors

JoshNH4H · 2019-03-09 16:12:47

Hey kbd512,

It's extremely rare for someone with a strong opinion to change it via online debate and discussion, and the fact that you are willing to do so shows great strength of character and laudable intellectual honesty. It's an example I will seek to follow.

I myself am no expert on climate modelling. Terraformer says that GCR's have an effect on cloud formation. I don't know anything about that.

My initial, first-order guess would be that, outside of sunlight, no other source of energy input to Earth's thermal system is important. But that's not a satisfying answer so I'd like to drill down into it.

I might categorize the energy inputs to Earth's thermal system as follows:

-Sunlight: 1366 W/m^2 parallel to the direction of the rays or 342 W/m^2 if averaged over the surface of the Earth

And:

-Solar Particle Radiation (Both the solar wind and higher energy solar flare particles)
-Solar Electromagnetic Radiation (X-rays and Gammas; I know sunlight is technically electromagnetic radiation but I am not referring to blackbody spectrum radiation)
-Cosmic Radiation (including both high energy particles, the cosmic microwave background, starlight, and other radiation from outside the solar system)
-Reflected sunlight from the Moon and planets
-Geothermal Energy (originating from radioactive decay inside the Earth)
-Human Generation (Nuclear energy contributes to Earth's thermal equilibrium, and the energy that went into fossil fuels was sequestered long enough ago that it also does, for all intents and purposes)

Let's run some numbers.

Solar Particle Radiation

Comes in two flavors: The Solar wind and solar flare particles. The solar wind averages roughly 2 protons per cubic centimeter at a speed of roughly 400 km/s. 400 km/s corresponds to 80 GJ/kg (800 eV/amu). 2 protons per cubic centimeter at 400 km/s corresponds to 8e11 protons per second or 1.3e-15 kg/s. Multiplying the two and then dividing by 4 to distribute the energy over Earth's surface, the total is 2.6e-5 W/m^2. I don't imagine that this actually gets deposited in Earth's atmosphere directly because it is stopped by the magnetosphere. It's entirely possible it gets deposited in Earth's outer core. It's also possible that it radiates away into space. Very hard to say.

Solar flares are much rarer, although I struggle to find information on exactly how rare. While they release much higher energy particles and may release more of them, major storms seem to occur with a frequency of once every few years and don't last for very long. Given the paucity of easily available information, it seems reasonable to round my estimate up to 3e-5 W/m^2, minus that fraction which does not enter Earth's thermal system which I would estimate (Based on no data) as 50%.

Solar Electromagnetic Radiation

Thanks to this explanation on Spaceweather.com, I feel that I have a pretty good handle on the magnitude of photon radiation from the Sun. Anything above 1e-6 W/m^2 is a flare. Considering that the Sun typically is not in a flare state and we have to divide by 4 to distribute the energy over Earth's surface, mean energies are presumably in the range of 1e-8 to 1e-7 W/m^2. This energy will presumably become part of Earth's thermal system.

Cosmic Radiation

Consisting of Cosmic Ray Particles, the Microwave Background Radiation, and nonsolar X-rays and gamma rays.

Wikipedia happens to have some highly useful figures on this score. From the article on Cosmic Rays:

Cosmic Ray Flux wrote:

The magnitude of the energy of cosmic ray flux in interstellar space is very comparable to that of other deep space energies: cosmic ray energy density averages about one electron-volt per cubic centimetre of interstellar space, or ~1 eV/cm3, which is comparable to the energy density of visible starlight at 0.3 eV/cm3, the galactic magnetic field energy density (assumed 3 microgauss) which is ~0.25 eV/cm3, or the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation energy density at ~ 0.25 eV/cm3.[68]
[...]
[68] Castellina, Antonella; Donato, Fiorenza (2012). Oswalt, T.D.; McLean, I.S.; Bond, H.E.; French, L.; Kalas, P.; Barstow, M.; Gilmore, G.F.; Keel, W., eds. Planets, Stars, and Stellar Systems (1 ed.). Springer. ISBN 978-90-481-8817-8.

For particles with energies this high, it is reasonable to assume speeds comparable to the speed of light. Summing the four given terms and rounding up you have roughly 2 eV/cm^2; At the speed of light this corresponds to 6e14 eV per cubic meter per second or 1e-4 W. More than half of this comes from cosmic rays, which are substantially attenuated by the Sun's own magnetic field and particle radiation; I'm not sure how the galactic magnetic field behaves in a practical sense. Taking just starlight and CMB you have about 3e-5 W/m^2 with cosmic rays adding another 1-5e-5 W/m^2. This page, where NASA summarizes results from Voyager, suggest that the Sun manages to block a big part of the cosmic rays and therefore perhaps the lower end of that spectrum is reasonable.

Moonlight and Planetlight

I am going to disregard planetlight, because it seems plain to me that moonlight is orders of magnitude bigger than everything else combined.

Per Wikipedia, the apparent magnitude of the mean full moon is -12.74; This corresponds to 0.26 lux. Assuming the luminous efficacy is 20 lumens per watt (this is a guess which is intended to also include thermal radiation from the Moon) the energy received from the Moon is 0.013 W/m^2. Divide by 4 to account for Earth's surface area and 2 to account for the average phase of the Moon (which is a half Moon) and you have 2e-3 W/m^2.

Geothermal Energy

Estimated at around 87 mW/m^2 globally, 8.7e-2 W/m^2.

Human Generation

A reasonable first-order approximation is that virtually all human generation comes either from nuclear or fossil fuels. Total human energy usage is about 18 TW. Averaged over the surface of the planet this is 3.5e-2 W/m^2.

So, I have the following estimates, from biggest to smallest:

Geothermal Energy: 0.09 W/m^2
Human Generation: 0.04 W/m^2
Moonlight: 0.002 W/m^2
Cosmic Radiation: 0.00004 W/m^2
Solar Particle Radiation: 0.00003 W/m^2
Solar Photon Radiation: 0.00000005 W/m^2

Of these, geothermal energy is most significant at ~0.03% of the incoming solar energy and solar photon radiation is the least significant at a level that is not meaningfully different from zero. Naturally all of these numbers are approximate but I believe that if the numbers I have provided are close to accurate they show that (absent some other effect which multiplies their significance relative to their magnitude) none has a major effect on Earth's heat balance.

SpaceNut · 2019-03-10 15:55:13

The difference of freezing and to warm is a degree or so depending on celius and fra but a degree is all it takes.

https://sciencing.com/how-8643971-conve … grees.html
https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae538.cfm
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/thre … ius.88752/

https://mhi-inc.com/Converter/energy-converter.html

SpaceNut · 2019-03-13 19:58:28

More evidence of past climate change as caused by fires.
Ancient comet impact triggered fires, climate change

This is further evidence that the Younger Dryas climatic onset is an extreme global event, with major consequences on the animal life and the human life at the time,"
Scientists have uncovered new evidence that a cosmic impact sparked wildfires and triggered a period of global climate change at the end of the Pleistocene epoch some 13,000 years ago.

kbd512 · 2019-03-15 14:31:20

Since nearly everyone hates nuclear, and presumably doesn't like the idea of burning more coal and gas, that just leaves fuel cells or batteries for storage. The batteries are still a joke compared to what's required to store at least 12 hours of electrical power, so we should implement a crash program to develop Ammonia fuel cells. The excess power generated from the wind and solar farms should store the power as LNH3. I haven't seen any other economically / technologically / politically viable proposals. Oddly enough, both Republicans and Democrats are now proposing subsidizing the nuclear industry to keep the plants operating because they can't compete with LNG. That's a strange way to combat climate change, but logic and politics seldom converge.

We also need to downsize our military. The term I heard when I was still in was "right-sizing". I'm going to start a new thread about that later. For now, this is the big and small of it. We're continuing to field the least efficient machinery to achieve simple goals, and at extreme expense and resource consumption.

louis · 2019-03-15 15:50:32

I'd say there were other options.

One option is to use electricity to manufacture methane from air and water, so taking CO2 out of the atmosphere (before returning it when you burn the methane). Sounds expensive but if you live in a country which already has a substantial methane infrastructure (like much of W. and Central Europe) it makes a lot of sense. What was wasted solar and wind energy during periods of energy surplus becomes usable. The overall cost per unit of wind and solar energy will fall.

Another is to create offshore pumped storage on artificial islands.

https://www.reuters.com/article/belgium … GU20130117

Pumped storage is one of the cheapest forms of storage. Yes, the cost of the islands will be huge but amortised over time it becomes trivial (a bit like La Rance tidal energy which produces v. cheap energy now).

I think for the military the answer is definitely robotic weapons systems. I am slightly surprised that no one has yet put together a combined unit that can work on land, sea and air. But we need an international treaty on robot weaponry...there is a blurred line between espionage and military action. Is it OK for an agent of yours to use a robot "fly" say to spy on a nuclear installation in an enemy country? Maybe...but is it OK for you to send the robot fly in over a recognised border to undertake the same mission? I can see dangers ahead on this unless we agree on rules of application.

kbd512 wrote:

Since nearly everyone hates nuclear, and presumably doesn't like the idea of burning more coal and gas, that just leaves fuel cells or batteries for storage. The batteries are still a joke compared to what's required to store at least 12 hours of electrical power, so we should implement a crash program to develop Ammonia fuel cells. The excess power generated from the wind and solar farms should store the power as LNH3. I haven't seen any other economically / technologically / politically viable proposals. Oddly enough, both Republicans and Democrats are now proposing subsidizing the nuclear industry to keep the plants operating because they can't compete with LNG. That's a strange way to combat climate change, but logic and politics seldom converge.
We also need to downsize our military. The term I heard when I was still in was "right-sizing". I'm going to start a new thread about that later. For now, this is the big and small of it. We're continuing to field the least efficient machinery to achieve simple goals, and at extreme expense and resource consumption.

Terraformer · 2019-03-15 16:30:58

Nickel-Iron batteries could do it...

...if we had the nickel. A few 1km asteroids would do the trick.

More realistically, we need sodium-ion batteries. There isn't enough lithium for the storage we need (but muh seawater!).

louis · 2019-03-15 17:05:54

Yes, there's a huge amount of lithium in the ocean...way beyond human battery storage or any other uses.

Terraformer wrote:

Nickel-Iron batteries could do it...
...if we had the nickel. A few 1km asteroids would do the trick.
More realistically, we need sodium-ion batteries. There isn't enough lithium for the storage we need (but muh seawater!).

kbd512 · 2019-03-15 17:21:02

Louis,

I'm talking about things that can be built with reasonable resources. We can't build these pumping stations and artificial islands all over the place for any reasonable amount of money / manpower / time. If we could, we'd have done it already for lots of other reasons. It'd take decades to do it, even if we didn't give a damn about the money. We have LNG coming out the wazoo over here in America, but burning more of it doesn't solve the problem. Tidal energy isn't "on-demand" energy, either.

Regarding robotics, the US already has the largest deployed military robotics forces in the world. There are some things they do really well and other things they'll never be able to do without AI advancements that aren't here... yet.

louis · 2019-03-15 18:59:23

Nonsense. The Netherlands has grown by about 30% thanks to huge land reclamation projects and the country only continues to survive because it erxpends huge amounts of resources on pumping water from below sea level. Yet it is a highly successful country that produces IIRC 17% of the world's (!) food exports despite being a tiny country in size and population.

For a country like the USA creating a series of artificial islands for pumped storage would not be problematic. They can be combined with wind turbine installations which will reduce the cost of course. That said, I think that methane manufacture is probably the way to go. You probably only need to cover 10% of your annual energy use (well I'm basing that guesstimate on what I know about UK climate) - the equivalent of say a month's use. Methane storage is a well established technology. The 10% mark is a probably a worst case scenario - it doesn't mean that every year you need to produce 10% of overall energy usage. I suspect you might get by on 3-5% of annual energy usage. One can see how all this becomes v. manageable, especially if you factor in other storage and transcontinental grids.

kbd512 · 2019-03-16 07:07:35

Louis,

We're not going to create artificial islands or artificial mountains in the desert, which would be the western half of the US. Furthermore, fabricating more wind turbines does not reduce the cost of anything. Any object to be built must be purchased. Anything power plant we build comes at an increase in cost, even if it eventually generates revenue for the operator at some point in time in the future. My conceptualization was to put the fuel cells wherever the power plants already are. That seems to make more sense, to me at least, than building artificial islands in Nevada or Utah.

In any event, USGS has a neat little tool you can use to view quite a bit of data about our wind turbines (note: down now due to maintenance, apparently):

Mapping the Nation's Wind Turbines

Since you like wind turbines so much, here's a link to a little Canadian company that may be of interest to you:

WhalePower Corporation

Maybe they can provide sufficient torque at low wind speeds to negate the requirement for a gearbox for onshore wind turbines so we can use Magnax's axial flux generators to decrease the weight at the top of the tower.

Like so:

Magnax axial flux electric generator - wind turbine animation

I believe it incorporates the same type of load control feature as Haliade.

Re: The Netherlands...

The US, China, and India export more food than all the countries in the EU combined. It's impressive that The Netherlands exports as much food as it does, which is considerable, but it doesn't hold a candle to the three named countries. Quoting numbers that pertain to dollar figures rather than quantities is misleading at best. China and India typically produce more food than the US, but they also eat most of what they produce. The volume of food that the US produces for export or surplus for sale on the world markets is far out of proportion to the number of people involved.

GW Johnson · 2019-03-16 11:11:00

Myself, I'd like to see some resources and priority placed on the flow battery concept. It seems well-suited for grid-scale energy storage using tank farms of a type we already build anyway. The idea would be to take the intermittency out of solar and wind, so that they could be more than 15-20% of the source mix. Really good near-term potential there: years, not decades, away.

GW

JoshNH4H · 2019-03-19 14:31:04

The question of storage is an important one and a difficult one. If I were in charge I would lean heavily into nuclear power. While the benefits of nuclear power accrue a little bit to everyone (potentially lower energy bills as a result of lower land usage and energy storage costs and less climate change) the potential costs (i.e. the danger of a meltdown) are concentrated among the people who actually live near the reactor. While there's a lot you can do to reduce the risks to the public to lower and lower levels it's not possible to reduce the odds to zero--and it's quite difficult to convince people to accept any level of risk when there are alternatives. Add on top of this that you may not want nuclear power to be as widespread, globally, as it would need to be to supplant fossil fuels and you have a reasonable political argument that nuclear power alone is not the solution to climate change.

In descending order, the most important sources of non-emitting energy in the United States are as follows:

Nuclear
Hydro
Wind
Biomass
Solar
Geothermal

Of these, we've placed nuclear outside the scope of conversation. Hydro is mostly tapped out (our rivers already have about as many dams as they feasibly could have), and geothermal could just barely support human civilization even if we tapped the energy at 100%. Biomass tends to have poor energy return on investment, which increases its cost substantially.

This leaves solar and wind, the two energy sources which are currently booming (combined they are 8.2% of total US energy generation, 6.6% wind + 1.6% solar). The downside of these sources is that they are intermittent. This intermittency comes in two forms, which I think of as being "scheduled" and "random" intermittency. For solar, scheduled intermittency is mostly about the diurnal and seasonal cycle: As we all know, there is no sunlight at night and more sunlight at high (solar) noon than at other times of day, and longer, sunnier days in the summer. Wind is a bit more location-dependent and to my understanding has much less predictable variation. Random intermittency is mostly governed by weather: cloudy days have less sunlight than clear ones and windier days generate more wind energy than still ones.

Now, there's also variation in demand. In large markets, random variation mostly cancels out and demand is mostly seasonal, higher when temperatures are either much warmer or much colder than room temperature (especially if we're going to push people to use emissions-free electric heating in lieu of oil or gas), higher during the day, and lower at night. It looks like peak demand is roughly 50% higher than minimum demand. The point is that to a certain extent variations in demand correlate positively with variations in supply for solar energy.

I don't think I've said anything really groundbreaking here, but the paradigm of scheduled vs. random intermittency can be really helpful in thinking about what the needs for storage really are.

Dealing with random intermittency first: A great way to deal with random intermittency is to increase the size of the grid. It might not be windy in southern Indiana on a given morning, but stiff winds blowing off lake Michigan might generate power in Wisconsin. It might be cloudy in Salt Lake City and sunny in Denver. It's usually sunny in Phoenix. Now, it's certainly possible for the whole grid to be covered in cloud but these occurrences become rarer the bigger the network is. If you consider an Americas Energy Union that spans North, Central, and South America it would be almost inconceivable that the entire hemisphere would be cloudy and wind-free at the same time.

When taken to geographical extreme, this strategy can even counterbalance scheduled intermittency. An Americas Energy Union would always be a third in winter, a third in summer, and a third equatorial latitudes with small seasonal variation. This would effectively eliminate seasonal intermittency. Taken a step further, you might build an electric grid that spans the whole world. Flat Earthers to the side, the Earth is a sphere; therefore it's always daytime somewhere. A project to knit the Earth together into one (or perhaps a small number) of electric grids (probably transmitting power via HVDC for its higher efficiency) is a massive, ambitious undertaking, requiring an unprecedented degree of political, economic, and technical cooperation (as well as interdependency) between nations. But the technology is there. The payoff--not needing to design, build, and implement energy storage systems orders of magnitude better and bigger than the biggest and best we have now--seems big enough to me that it's worth considering in lieu of storage.

Terraformer · 2019-03-19 15:51:52

Solutions that just get ever more complex and prone to failure. I don't fancy spending weeks in darkness because the trans-Pacific-pipeline got severed.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/got- … can-it-be/
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

7 days of storage @ 2TW is 336 TWhr of energy. A cubic meter of water lifted to a height of 100m will provide ~250Whr of energy storage. If we were to provide the nations energy storage using pumped storage @ 100m height difference, we'd need ~1.5e12 cubic meters of water - with storage at both the top and the bottom.

If distributed across 10,000 sites, that would be 1.5e8 cubic meters at each. Assuming the ponds are 10m deep, they'd have to be 15 km^2 each. But perhaps we could put them underground...

Or we could go mine a load of Nickel from space and build a load of Nickel-Iron batteries, which is my preferred option.

JoshNH4H · 2019-03-19 16:45:36

The question of failure is a key issue for all electric grids and making the grid as failure-resistant as possible is a critical design consideration. I would propose that rather than a single world-spanning cable, it should be a true network. Looking at the Americas you might build one or several cable(s) to Eurasia across the Bering Straight; one or several cables to Eurasia on the North Atlantic route (Canada mainland to Canadian Polar Islands to Greenland to Iceland to the Faroe Islands to the Shetlands to Scotland and Norway); one or several cables encircling the world around the Arctic circle (this would be a prime candidate for a superconducting cable); One or several undersea cables between North America and Europe; One or several undersea cables between South America and Africa; One or several cables between southern Chile and Australia by way of Antarctica; One or several cables between Southern Chile and South Africa by way of Antarctica; One or several cables encircling the world at the Antarctic Circle (this is another prime candidate for an upgrade to superconducting cables); And, depending on how ambitious we are, one or several undersea cables across the Pacific.

The system I have proposed works great for those along the spine of the planetary power grid and increasingly less well for those farther and farther from a spine. At some distance there will be a frontier where batteries beat out grid power. The cost of batteries will determine where that frontier is and whether either system makes sense at all, but I believe that in most cases a planetary power grid will be the better option.

I believe that the existence of, and access to, undersea power cables may make seasteading a real possibility. By floating an array of panels on the ocean and plugging into the grid (which you may also help maintain?) your seastead has a reliable source of income and a good reason to exist.

kbd512 · 2019-03-19 17:28:38

Josh,

I think we need to resolve our own energy issues before we start dictating energy policy to the rest of the world. If we're unwilling to go to war with China or Russia or start knocking over third world governments on a weekly basis simply because they burn coal and oil to live, then we'll have a hard time convincing them that we have better solutions to their energy problems until we've resolved our own problems.

From a basic math perspective, nuclear makes the most sense. If we built 2 new reactors at each of the nuclear plants already in operation, that removes the need for coal entirely. Unfortunately, we have a lot of people in this country that our unscrupulous media has terrorized with absurdly overblown reports of nuclear contamination in order to create irrational fear of nuclear power. All the while, vastly greater quantities of radioactive materials are spewed into the air from burning coal and gas. I'm tired of arguing with them about this. The arguments haven't helped to resolve the problem. Nothing said or done will make them stop and think about the opportunities wasted. I guess the ultimate answer is that our so-called environmentalists want to kill a lot of poor people by pricing energy out of their ability to pay or burn lots more coal and gas until the great miracle happens whereupon quantum-leap solar panels and batteries that can replace gas fall from the sky.

Since people are so adamant about wind and solar power, I just want serious effort applied to creating more practical wind and solar farms. A national or Canada-US-Mexico grid would be a great. Prior to that, we need far more practical fabrication techniques and lighter materials for wind turbines and solar panels. I think automated composite molding for wind turbine blades and towers, reel-to-reel fabrication of thin-film solar panels, and near-term realistic energy storage, like fuel cells, is required until these magical batteries arrive on our doorstep. I don't see an international grid as a realistic near-term endeavor. Think about how long it took to create the grid that we have. For a national grid, an upgrade of the existing grid of unprecedented scale would have to take place. Absent room-temperature superconductors, moving enough power around the entire country to actually matter would be a first order electrical engineering challenge. I suppose we could cover a few states in the midwest with solar panels, but even if we did that the power transfer capabilities of the grid would have to be thoroughly upgraded or we'd turn all those Aluminum high voltage power lines into molasses just trying to get the power out of state.

Terraformer,

According to US EIA, in 2018 US commercial electric utilities generated 2,614 billion kWh worth of electricity from coal and gas. That is the figure of merit that must be supplanted by cleaner technology.

US EIA FAQ - What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?

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#176 2019-02-18 20:13:31

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#177 2019-02-21 19:14:38

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#178 2019-02-28 22:00:44

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#179 2019-03-01 05:14:47

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#180 2019-03-04 12:30:49

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#181 2019-03-04 21:07:02

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#182 2019-03-07 19:01:21

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#183 2019-03-08 12:17:37

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#184 2019-03-08 19:15:42

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#185 2019-03-08 19:53:45

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#186 2019-03-09 16:12:47

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#187 2019-03-10 15:55:13

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#188 2019-03-13 19:58:28

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#189 2019-03-15 14:31:20

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#190 2019-03-15 15:50:32

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#191 2019-03-15 16:30:58

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#192 2019-03-15 17:05:54

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#193 2019-03-15 17:21:02

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#194 2019-03-15 18:59:23

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#195 2019-03-16 07:07:35

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#196 2019-03-16 11:11:00

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#197 2019-03-19 14:31:04

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#198 2019-03-19 15:51:52

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#199 2019-03-19 16:45:36

Re: The Science of Climate Change

#200 2019-03-19 17:28:38

Re: The Science of Climate Change

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