Climate Change

We are in the mess we are in because of massive industrialization of a good part of the world. It's hard for me to believe that more massive industrialization--carbon capture plants, wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants, not to mention pie in the sky projects like space based solar--is the answer. Plus the nonindustrialized world will not take kindly to being told they can't develop.

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Originally Posted by old goat

We are in the mess we are in because of massive industrialization of a good part of the world. It's hard for me to believe that more massive industrialization--carbon capture plants, wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants, not to mention pie in the sky projects like space based solar--is the answer. Plus the nonindustrialized world will not take kindly to being told they can't develop.

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Come on. Best way to put out a fire is to smother it with more fuel. Right?

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Originally Posted by old goat

We are in the mess we are in because of massive industrialization of a good part of the world. It's hard for me to believe that more massive industrialization--carbon capture plants, wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants, not to mention pie in the sky projects like space based solar--is the answer. Plus the nonindustrialized world will not take kindly to being told they can't develop.

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I think some of this concern is well placed, but I’ve never like the argument that we can’t change because the developing world won’t follow. For one, the developed world is by far the biggest producer of CO2, and secondly, the developed world, and the US in particular drive markets. You don’t think if electric cars become the thing in America that the rest of the world won’t be 5-10 years behind?

We have a ton of soft power if we want to use it.

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Originally Posted by old goat

We are in the mess we are in because of massive industrialization of a good part of the world. It's hard for me to believe that more massive industrialization--carbon capture plants, wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants, not to mention pie in the sky projects like space based solar--is the answer. Plus the nonindustrialized world will not take kindly to being told they can't develop.

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The numbers don’t lie. Zero carbon energy and carbon capture must happen. It’s not hard to believe. It just is. Again this is from having many long sit down interviews with scientists all over the globe who devout their lives to studying this stuff in depth.


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Originally Posted by east or bust

IMO the real issue with nuclear at this point is the build duration and related costs. Due to the heavy opposition that nuclear energy faced we're coming out of ~30+ year hiatus from when the bulk of our reactors were constructed and commissioned. The people who were in charge of those projects are now retired and there's a huge lack of experience in this field, which accounts of a fraction of a percent of the construction industry as a whole.

Just look at reactors 3 and 4 at Vogtle. They're only a cool 7ish years behind schedule and $17B over budget. It's been an absolute shit show.

Next let me direct your attention to the SFHP at the NRF. That project is just a fucking storage facility and it will be years behind schedule and over budget as well. I believe the initial completion date was slated for 2024 and it's been adjusted to 2027.

"Construction costs on the Naval Spent Fuel Handling facility in 2023 alone will total more than $500 million. In 2017, the facility was expected to cost $1.65 billion, according to a Naval Nuclear Laboratory news release."

https://www.postregister.com/news/in...580f850b7.html


The real saving grace for the nuclear industry will be the (hopeful) success of SMRs. Anything we can do to streamline and simplify the process while keeping safety and quality at the forefront is a good thing.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/n...idaho-national

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It's not like knowledge how to build nuclear power plants is lost like the pyramids.

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Originally Posted by Atrain505

I’ve shot interviews with a lot of leading scientists around the world about this very topic. Pretty much everyone agrees carbon capture is a necessity. We also need to plant a shit load of trees along with transitioning everything possible to zero carbon. Carbon capture facilities need to be built at massive scales but the plan is to build them in areas where trees can’t grow. Deserts and the artic. I’ve been to the test facility in Squamish. I’ve been driven by the Icelandic facility (here they have the advantage of powering it via geothermal). These are all ready to go. As always we just need the political and societal will to make it happen. Vote for people who care about this stuff. In Canada we continue to give subsidies to fossil fuel companies which is totally asinine (we did just stop that for foreign companies so a small step in the right direction). All of those subsidies should be going to renewables and things like carbon capture.

I also really have to say that I’ve been traveling all over the globe this year shooting a doc on a different subject (I know my carbon footprint is huge) and if you currently don’t believe in climate change I don’t know what to tell you besides for you have to be totally ignoring the obvious. Literally every place I’ve been too the locals are saying this type of stuff. “Most amount of weeks without rain ever in history here.” Then a different country. “Hottest month ever in our history.” “Most precip in a month ever here.” And on and on and on in every single place. The planet is literally slapping everyone in the face with this reality everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.


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Is there any website to visualize data that supports claims like "hottest month" and "driest month"? It really shouldn't be this hard to display such data per weather station, but all I can find is the raw data from environment Canada.

Anybody else watching the sleeping crowd freak out about all the airline delays and blaming Pete Betelgeuse for it not realizing it's the fucked up chaotic weather causing all the air travel chaos?

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Originally Posted by Cocximus

Is there any website to visualize data that supports claims like "hottest month" and "driest month"? It really shouldn't be this hard to display such data per weather station, but all I can find is the raw data from environment Canada.

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I’m not aware of one. Sounds like a good idea for a website. Cataloging all the climate records being broken on a location by location basis.

In Canada, just by memory, the most obvious example was a couple years ago in Lytton, BC. Broke the Canadian highest daily temperature record ever 3 days in a row. And not by decimal points, but each day by multiple degrees. Then on the 4th day the entire town burned to the ground. Slapping us in the face with this new reality.


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Originally Posted by Atrain505

In Canada, just by memory, the most obvious example was a couple years ago in Lytton, BC. Broke the Canadian highest daily temperature record ever 3 days in a row. And not by decimal points, but each day by multiple degrees. Then on the 4th day the entire town burned to the ground. Slapping us in the face with this new reality.


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I was on a ferry from our home in AK to lower 48 then, after living in AK for 7 years. Landed in Bellingham and it was 100+, hot as fuck all down the inside passage. Brutal heat dome that year.

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Quote Originally Posted by old goat View Post
We are in the mess we are in because of too many fucking people. It's hard for me to believe that more massive industrialization--carbon capture plants, wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants, not to mention pie in the sky projects like space based solar--is the answer. Plus the nonindustrialized world will not take kindly to being told they can't develop.

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FIFY.

I remember the days when there were hardly ever (like years in between) shark attacks north of Myrtle Beach on the east coast. Now it seems that every beach all the way up past Cape Cod has several each year. I do like catching waves in warmer water though..

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Originally Posted by Atrain505

The numbers don’t lie. Zero carbon energy and carbon capture must happen. It’s not hard to believe. It just is. Again this is from having many long sit down interviews with scientists all over the globe who devout their lives to studying this stuff in depth.


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When you're at the bottom of a hole you that's over your head, stop digging. If we've learned anything from 300 years of industrialization it's the law of unintended consequences. Plus we're talking about essentially replacing the world's energy infrastructure that took 150 years to build in a decade or two. The only hope we have would be to drastically change western life styles--eliminate private cars, eliminate air travel, live in much smaller houses with much less stuff, stop eating meat, stop making babies, eat only food that can be grown locally, etc etc. We have to rid ourselves of the idea that we can just replace all our cars and furnaces with electric and keep living the way we have been.

And I still don't think the earth can sustain anywhere close to the current population. Humans have always dealt with hard times by migrating but we've run out of places to migrate to, and the places people are migrating to are themselves trying to cope with climate disaster.

Cross post to the Upstates thread???

Old goat I agree with everything you said but we still need to take carbon out of the atmosphere. Numbers don’t lie. You want some real numbers I learned this last year direct from the scientists who did the research? For decades we have speculated how high the seas levels will rise with the current amount of co2 in the atmosphere. Some people speculated a meter. Some people 100 meters. Well now we finally have a real number from deposits in a cave in Mallorca that are accurately dated to the last time the earth naturally had this much co2 2.5-3 million years ago in the Pliocene.

The answer is 16 meters. 50+ feet. Every coastal city on the planet is fucked. You think migration is bad now? You haven’t seen anything yet.

What the scientists do not know is how delayed the feedback loop is. These natural carbon cycles that we have records from in ocean cores all over the world took millions of years. So the seas level pretty much followed the carbon because it was a slow process. We have now done what takes millions of years in 150 years. So will it take 50 years or 200 or 1000 for the sea levels to rise that much? They aren’t sure. But they are sure that is where sea levels are going to get to if we only stop producing carbon entirely. If we continue on our current trajectory then we are getting into myocene or Eocene levels. And quite frankly we do not want to go there.

So yes I can say with a lot of confidence we need to actively take carbon out of the atmosphere if the majority of human beings want to continue to survive on this planet for the more than a few generations.

Let’s put it another way. Northern Greenland is currently ice, 2.5 million years ago it was a rich boreal like forest ecosystem. See the December cover of Nature about ancient dna. Another team of scientists I’ve been lucky enough to interview this last year.

Vote for people who are going to do everything they possibly can to do the right thing.


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North Americans and Europeans have declining population trends, but our economy is basically a ponzi scheme, requiring continuous population growth. Something's got to give. We are fucked.

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-atlant...gh-agency.html

Fuckkkked for sure

And yet. To solve the problem means the end of lift served skiing. With no air travel, resorts can’t be profitable. Sure, 15 minute cities with electric trains to the resorts could work for some. Assuming there’s snow.

https://ukfires.org/impact/publicati...absolute-zero/

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Check that timeline. If we really clamp down on carbon, life as you knew it is over.

As it is if we DON'T clamp dow on carbon as well. The Future is a scary place.

AI Overlords need to drop the hammer.

In the not too distant future there will be no need for actual humans. AI and VR will render such things as bodies as obsolete, robots that can withstand the new climate will do all the chores. Meanwhile we will exist in the servers and hopefully the box fan doesn't break and crash our app.

Da da da daaaaaaaaaaaa. (scary music)

Servers and processors definitely still need cooling.

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Originally Posted by Atrain505

Old goat I agree with everything you said but we still need to take carbon out of the atmosphere. Numbers don’t lie. You want some real numbers I learned this last year direct from the scientists who did the research? For decades we have speculated how high the seas levels will rise with the current amount of co2 in the atmosphere. Some people speculated a meter. Some people 100 meters. Well now we finally have a real number from deposits in a cave in Mallorca that are accurately dated to the last time the earth naturally had this much co2 2.5-3 million years ago in the Pliocene.

The answer is 16 meters. 50+ feet. Every coastal city on the planet is fucked. You think migration is bad now? You haven’t seen anything yet.

What the scientists do not know is how delayed the feedback loop is. These natural carbon cycles that we have records from in ocean cores all over the world took millions of years. So the seas level pretty much followed the carbon because it was a slow process. We have now done what takes millions of years in 150 years. So will it take 50 years or 200 or 1000 for the sea levels to rise that much? They aren’t sure. But they are sure that is where sea levels are going to get to if we only stop producing carbon entirely. If we continue on our current trajectory then we are getting into myocene or Eocene levels. And quite frankly we do not want to go there.

So yes I can say with a lot of confidence we need to actively take carbon out of the atmosphere if the majority of human beings want to continue to survive on this planet for the more than a few generations.

Let’s put it another way. Northern Greenland is currently ice, 2.5 million years ago it was a rich boreal like forest ecosystem. See the December cover of Nature about ancient dna. Another team of scientists I’ve been lucky enough to interview this last year.

Vote for people who are going to do everything they possibly can to do the right thing.


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Seems to me mother nature invented a carbon capture system better than anything humans have devised or are likely to devise. If that system can't keep up how do you think our carbon capture machines will. Problem is, climate change has already decreased the area where trees will grow. The mountainside behind my house--a south facing slope--burned in 1959 and is still tree free. The same will happen to many of the burns in the Sierra. Maybe as time goes on trees will be able to be grown farther and farther north. Of course algae are the greatest agent for carbon capture--perhaps the warming seas will create a negative feedback loop by promoting algae growth.

I am very well aware of the disastrous predictions. I just don't believe massive technology will solve the problem; it may buy us some time, at the expense of further environmental degradation and unforeseen consequences. And putting our faith in technology to solve our problem makes it a lot easier to avoid the very painful, politically impossible life style changes that are the only hope for everting disaster.

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Originally Posted by Cocximus

North Americans and Europeans have declining population trends, but our economy is basically a ponzi scheme, requiring continuous population growth. Something's got to give. We are fucked.

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Huge demographic problem--I'd suggest putting our elders out on ice floes except there will be no ice floes. I asked Robert Reich about this, sitting in on my kid's class with him at Cal--why does the economy keep having to grow. No good answer.

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Originally Posted by old goat

We are in the mess we are in because of massive industrialization of a good part of the world. It's hard for me to believe that more massive industrialization--carbon capture plants, wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants, not to mention pie in the sky projects like space based solar--is the answer. Plus the nonindustrialized world will not take kindly to being told they can't develop.

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Well, the only answer that works, is not to over-power the situation, but to put less demand on the physical environment. Use less power, because all the power of technology has come from some substance of the earth burning, somewhere, the exhaust of which we all breathe. Sorry to all, for being exhausting at times.

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Originally Posted by old goat

Seems to me mother nature invented a carbon capture system better than anything humans have devised or are likely to devise. If that system can't keep up how do you think our carbon capture machines will. Problem is, climate change has already decreased the area where trees will grow. The mountainside behind my house--a south facing slope--burned in 1959 and is still tree free. The same will happen to many of the burns in the Sierra. Maybe as time goes on trees will be able to be grown farther and farther north. Of course algae are the greatest agent for carbon capture--perhaps the warming seas will create a negative feedback loop by promoting algae growth.

I am very well aware of the disastrous predictions. I just don't believe massive technology will solve the problem; it may buy us some time, at the expense of further environmental degradation and unforeseen consequences. And putting our faith in technology to solve our problem makes it a lot easier to avoid the very painful, politically impossible life style changes that are the only hope for everting disaster.


Huge demographic problem--I'd suggest putting our elders out on ice floes except there will be no ice floes. I asked Robert Reich about this, sitting in on my kid's class with him at Cal--why does the economy keep having to grow. No good answer.

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It's partly because people are cutting down/removing the system to make room for more people and other resources for those people..

Kind of makes you think twice about "affordable housing".

Billionaires are working at winning climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/202...chest-rushkoff


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