The environmental movement are their own worst enemy. They fail to take advantage of natural alliances within the right wing whenever they present themselves. For example they are the natural allies of the health insurance industry if they were to propose more energy efficient / warmer homes because it reduces the number of people getting respitory illnesses in colder climates. They are natural allies of the energy independance right wingers as well however their reluctance to accept nuclear as an option prevents this. Furthermore they tend to stand up on the public stage and declare what seems like insurmountable goals when they need to get back to basics and drive first for efficiency rather than massive renewable energy installations based on technology which isn't yet proved to be as cost effective as other options.
Global warming
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The environmental movement are their own worst enemy. They fail to take advantage of natural alliances within the right wing whenever they present themselves. For example they are the natural allies of the health insurance industry if they were to propose more energy efficient / warmer homes because it reduces the number of people getting respitory illnesses in colder climates. They are natural allies of the energy independance right wingers as well however their reluctance to accept nuclear as an option prevents this. Furthermore they tend to stand up on the public stage and declare what seems like insurmountable goals when they need to get back to basics and drive first for efficiency rather than massive renewable energy installations based on technology which isn't yet proved to be as cost effective as other options.
The primary problem is that they don't have money. There are a lot of promising and very profit-friendly possibilities where climate change is concerned. The problem is that they are just possibilities. The old guard, the ones that own and profit from our current energy infrastructure, have all the money. They have all the power.
There just isn't sufficient money to fight the noise that is continually spewing forth from the denialist camp. I can only hope that reality sets in before it's too late. But then, it may already be too late to avoid catastrophic climate change.
As long as the only realistic option for near future energy independence is based on liquid sodium breeder reactors, I can't blame them.
MSR is very interesting, but not on the cards for the near future. All the money is going into liquid sodium breeder reactors and I don't want them in my back yard ... I also don't see the point. I think CSP + HVDC + thermal energy storage will be able to ramp up faster.
I thought that everybody, but the japanese, had abandoned liquid sodium (or NaK) cooled fast breeders. We've had research reactors for more than 40 years, several large scale installations and no commercially viable solutions so far.
Molten salt are at least two decades away from first full scale installation. South Africa killed their research into pebble bed reactors. IMO, sodium and sodium-potassium fast breeders is a dead end. Helium cooled fast breeders looks interesting, it is certainly safer than liquid metal, but requires material research (high pressure vessels @ 1000 degree C). All are decades away from commercialization.
IMHO, the only realistic option right now is more of the same ol' light water reactors. Put money into reprocessing and run them on MOX. Evolve the designs to run at higher temperature and increase efficiency above the 28-30% we see now. Coal fired power plants today operate at much higher steam temperatures than nuclear power plants
Cheers
Blazkowicz
Legend
I believe too much attention is given to conventional ideas (windmill farms, electric or hybrid cars, incremental efficiency improvements), some deeply flawed (the carbon cycle of windmills on the grid with backup natural gas power plants sucks).
major issues are not given consideration at all such as trucks, boats and planes. Nothing is in sight for the transport of goods, except perhaps putting nuclear reactors on a few huge ships with military personnel on board.
I would like more funny and potentially workable technical solutions to be considered.
why not use wood pellets to fuel a steam engine or gasification + ICE?, what about real low power homes with a mix of high and low tech? (heavy insulating, use of led lighting, class D amplifiers, 5W computers with fiber to the home, knives instead of food processors, hanging laundry on cables and no A/C)
e-bikes with supercapacitor + battery and pedal input, pedal+solar for generating power.
Why not a horse/electric hybrid cart with an electric motor that provides a level of mechanical power proportional to the horse's pull!
surely our nanotech materials, silicon industry, huge knowledge bases, deep understanding of nature and human cultures, instant communication abilities and huge computing resources could be used to enable actual low power solutions.
major issues are not given consideration at all such as trucks, boats and planes. Nothing is in sight for the transport of goods, except perhaps putting nuclear reactors on a few huge ships with military personnel on board.
I would like more funny and potentially workable technical solutions to be considered.
why not use wood pellets to fuel a steam engine or gasification + ICE?, what about real low power homes with a mix of high and low tech? (heavy insulating, use of led lighting, class D amplifiers, 5W computers with fiber to the home, knives instead of food processors, hanging laundry on cables and no A/C)
e-bikes with supercapacitor + battery and pedal input, pedal+solar for generating power.
Why not a horse/electric hybrid cart with an electric motor that provides a level of mechanical power proportional to the horse's pull!
surely our nanotech materials, silicon industry, huge knowledge bases, deep understanding of nature and human cultures, instant communication abilities and huge computing resources could be used to enable actual low power solutions.
My guess is that to get the more inventive solutions, at the very least the governments of the world need to enact some sort of significant economic incentives to reduce carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.
It seems to me that the only real solution to this problem will be to pursue a wide array of technologies, not just one or two.
arjan de lumens
Veteran
As far as incentives are concerned, I would think that a natural place to start would be to get the governments of the world to stop subsidizing fossil fuels so heavily; according to IEA's World Energy Outlook 2010 report released earlier today, such subsidies amounted to $312 billion in 2009 alone.
Yeah, that would seem to be a good first step
Mintmaster
Veteran
Chalnoth just told you: history's perspective. To me, this is the biggest flag that humans were responsible.
Oil's biggest threat is PHEV, and they're not doing a very good job at blocking progress there. Wind/solar will increase natural gas usage for power, which is an industry that has a lot more to gain than oil has to lose. Heck, it'll probably increase oil use for heating homes because we'll need gas for power.
As an aside, I still don't understand why PHEV isn't bigger in Europe. Gas is like $10/gallon there so PHEV is bound to be cheaper, especially for corporate fleets. A 3 kWh battery ($1500) saves you 10 miles of gas per charge. At 33 mpg, a normal car will cost $3 per 10 miles, so it's only going to take 500 charges to break even on the battery and a few hundred more to break even on the hybrid powertrain.
No way do advocates of conservation want your home hotter in colder climates. They want better insulation and less use of heating/AC.
Their actions made the single biggest contribution to global warming today. For 50 years they rallied against nuclear power while sitting idly by as coal proliferated. Now we have aging nuclear expertise that is raising costs, are decades behind in research and commercial advancement, and it'll take forever to replace coal with carbon free energy now.
They have nobody to blame but themselves.
Why do you say that? Because of waste?
What do you like so much about CSP? Even without worrying about much storage, the biggest plants today are like $5/W and run at maybe 25% capacity. Thats many times more than we paid for "costly" nuclear.
No, because without fast reactors any large scale movement towards nuclear energy is going to run into the fact there is limited Uranium. A quick google estimate leads me to believe the US within its own borders has economically exploitable reserves of ~30x the yearly use of France for instance (and of course France has a reprocessing industry, something the US has always opposed because it would set the wrong example proliferation wise).
PS. I put as much stock in sea water extraction techniques as you put in CSP
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What do you know of the number of people who can share a similar perspective? The average person is hardly going to stop and think about it. To be honest, most people do what they are told.
A better insulated and warmer home also means fewer visits to the ER for respitory diseases. Hence they could be natural allies of the health insurance industry. They may as well piggy back on pre-existing lobbyists whenever their interests coincide.
I have to agree.
Large scale nuclear needs either reprocessing or fast reactors. Both present proliferation risk. Reprocessing because you seperate the Pu from the waste, fast reactors because it is easy to blanket a high neutron economy reactor with U-238 and get weapons grade Pu,- almost all operating fast reactors today exists to produce Pu for weapons.
Pushing large scale nuclear power generation and opposing reprocessing out of proliferation worries is borderline idiotic.
Cheers
Of course, the much-mooted LFTR doesn't require much in the way of Uranium, other than a starter charge of U-233 to get the ball rolling...
Typically, the US is planning to spend about half a billion dollars to downblend their stocks of U233 - around a tonne of the material, I believe - instead of putting it to good use. Sheer idiocy. I wonder how much lobbying from the current Nuclear industry that took?
LFTR=MSR, but as I said ... not a near term option, since it hasn't been getting any real funding for ages. The only real funding lately has been going to liquid Sodium cooled reactors.
The nuclear industry has shown me which way they want to go for energy independence, and I for one am not buying it ... I'd rather have CSP, regardless of the cost difference.
The nuclear industry has shown me which way they want to go for energy independence, and I for one am not buying it ... I'd rather have CSP, regardless of the cost difference.
Mintmaster
Veteran
Has there been any discrediting of the existing research on that matter?PS. I put as much stock in sea water extraction techniques as you put in CSP
Uranium ore is a very tiny part of electricity cost. Looking here, a $0.01/kWh price increase would be able to support a uranium oxide price increase from $115/kg to $517/kg. The latter is well over the cost estimate of seawater extraction even without improvement from the initial research.
The cost estimates are not based on experiments with the real methods which have to be used.
Which is to say unimaginably huge curtains of polymer hanging inside ocean boundary currents (there are simple capacity problems in scaling it up which can only be met by using ocean currents).
Which is to say unimaginably huge curtains of polymer hanging inside ocean boundary currents (there are simple capacity problems in scaling it up which can only be met by using ocean currents).
Mintmaster
Veteran
Well, I suppose there's no way to know for sure until it's tried. Mooring cost dominates, and putting 500kg of absorbent into the ocean and pulling it back out for maybe $300 seems reasonable to me, if I may naively look at the cost of cheap fish.
That a five-fold increase in fuel cost only results in a 10% increase in electricity cost at the outlet makes me brush off peak uranium concerns.
That a five-fold increase in fuel cost only results in a 10% increase in electricity cost at the outlet makes me brush off peak uranium concerns.
I have been thinking about all this for a bit, and I think I can pinpoint my main gripe.
Before the hockey stick theory, few people cared or were interested in AGW. But after that, many people started to investigate, and discovered the vast amount of feedback mechanisms underneath.
It also helped, that it was comparatively easy to find research money to fund those interests.
And yes, they discovered a whole lot of feedback loops, which are all influenced by the human-induced CO2 increase, in one way or the other.
Gosh! We really do have a far-fetching influence! See, it all connects, and reacts to that increase of CO2 in one way or the other! AGW is definitely something!
Then again, the actual effects tended to be small, and more or less countered by other feedback mechanisms. It's just, that now many thousands of scientists are interested in it, researching it and talking about it to one another, that they have a much better grasp about it. They can make long lists about all those things that are influenced by a CO2 increase, because that's the main interest for the vast majority of scientists who are working on climate. Volcanic eruptions and such interests have become things of the pasts.
If it doesn't connect to the impact CO2 has, you're wasting your time and research money. Or so it seems.
Then again, because they now know better what is actually happening, doesn't mean that it didn't happen like that in the past as well. Or, while those feedback loops did react to the increase of CO2 and thereby changed the global mechanism in some measurable way (that would be your basic definition of a feedback loop), does that mean that the total impact is larger than, say, a single volcanic eruption?
Those will definitely change all those feedback balances as well, in a much shorter time frame, but... with little or no measurable long-term effects, while the small effect the CO2 has will disrupt everything irreversible?
"Yes, but that's because there have been very many volcanic eruptions in the past, so nature is used to counter them."
I dunno. As we started out with CO2 being the main atmospheric gas next to methane, I think nature has a long history coping with it.
Then again, I even hear (or rather, read) people stating that not only the increase of hurricanes over the last years, but also the increase in volcanic eruptions is a direct effect of the increase of CO2...
Yes, you CAN retrace the CO2 influence of any change, but to say that because you can, it was the major contributing force, is making a mockery of the whole climate model.
Before the hockey stick theory, few people cared or were interested in AGW. But after that, many people started to investigate, and discovered the vast amount of feedback mechanisms underneath.
It also helped, that it was comparatively easy to find research money to fund those interests.
And yes, they discovered a whole lot of feedback loops, which are all influenced by the human-induced CO2 increase, in one way or the other.
Gosh! We really do have a far-fetching influence! See, it all connects, and reacts to that increase of CO2 in one way or the other! AGW is definitely something!
Then again, the actual effects tended to be small, and more or less countered by other feedback mechanisms. It's just, that now many thousands of scientists are interested in it, researching it and talking about it to one another, that they have a much better grasp about it. They can make long lists about all those things that are influenced by a CO2 increase, because that's the main interest for the vast majority of scientists who are working on climate. Volcanic eruptions and such interests have become things of the pasts.
If it doesn't connect to the impact CO2 has, you're wasting your time and research money. Or so it seems.
Then again, because they now know better what is actually happening, doesn't mean that it didn't happen like that in the past as well. Or, while those feedback loops did react to the increase of CO2 and thereby changed the global mechanism in some measurable way (that would be your basic definition of a feedback loop), does that mean that the total impact is larger than, say, a single volcanic eruption?
Those will definitely change all those feedback balances as well, in a much shorter time frame, but... with little or no measurable long-term effects, while the small effect the CO2 has will disrupt everything irreversible?
"Yes, but that's because there have been very many volcanic eruptions in the past, so nature is used to counter them."
I dunno. As we started out with CO2 being the main atmospheric gas next to methane, I think nature has a long history coping with it.
Then again, I even hear (or rather, read) people stating that not only the increase of hurricanes over the last years, but also the increase in volcanic eruptions is a direct effect of the increase of CO2...
Yes, you CAN retrace the CO2 influence of any change, but to say that because you can, it was the major contributing force, is making a mockery of the whole climate model.
Not really. The hockey stick was basically a PR issue. Global warming research has been going on since around the early-middle of the century, the case for it getting steadily stronger with time. As with all science, it was a slow, gradual process of adding one piece on top of another. There may have been particular events that congeal in the public's mind, but within science this sort of thing tends to have relatively little effect.
This is false.
Also false. Take a quick glimpse at the IPCC reports sometime. It should be plainly obvious it's false from the start, however, as obviously before settling on one particular explanation, you have to rule out other potential explanations. If you look at the IPCC reports, which summarize the research on climate science, you'll see that they go into great detail on the impacts of a wide variety of other causes. Just to name an example, we now have satellites which measure total solar irradiance.
The total impact is very different. A single volcanic eruption, for instance, releases CO2, but also releases lots of dust. Typically what happens for lower-latitude volcanoes is the dust rises into the upper atmosphere and reduces the sunlight that reaches the ground for a couple of years, lowering global average temperatures (something like this happened in the mid-90's, for instance). We humans release lots of CO2 over time, but don't release much dust into the upper atmosphere (there is some, but not as much compared to the CO2 release).
I don't know who you're thinking would make this argument, but it's false. If we had a supervolcano eruption, for instance, we'd be rapidly plunged into an ice age and human civilization would be on the brink of extinction. There would be no counter, from us or from nature. It's just that the vast majority of volcanic eruptions are nowhere near big enough to cause such significant changes in climate.
When the Earth was young, the Sun was also dimmer. The added greenhouse effect from CO2 helped prevent it from being a frozen ball of ice.
Well, that would be positively insane. There is no way volcanoes can be linked to changes in atmospheric CO2. That'd be like suggesting a gnat could pick up a boulder. Not happening.
Because the previous post was so long, and I didn't want this point to be buried among the rest, I dedicated this post to it:
We can be extremely certain that the recent warming we've seen is real, and that it's caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect. The increase in atmospheric CO2 matches the measured increase in the greenhouse effect.
How can we be so certain? It's rather simple: a warming caused by an increased greenhouse effect has a very distinct signature. The greenhouse effect causes an increased opacity of the atmosphere to the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. This makes it so that there is an increased temperature differential between the surface of the Earth and the upper atmosphere. The increased temperature differential is the cause of the warming: the outgoing radiation temperature is determined by the radiation incoming from the Sun, so if there is a greater difference in temperature between the surface and the upper atmosphere, and the atmosphere itself is relatively opaque to the outgoing radiation, then the temperature of the upper atmosphere is fixed by the Sun.
But if the greenhouse effect increases, this lowers the temperature of the upper atmosphere, which reduces the outgoing radiation, which increases the temperature of the Earth. The temperature of the surface of the Earth will continue to increase until the upper atmosphere warms back up. As long as the temperature of the upper atmosphere remains lowered, the Earth will continue to heat up.
And has this temperature drop in the upper atmosphere been measured?
Indeed it has!
http://www.wunderground.com/education/strato_cooling.asp
We can be extremely certain that the recent warming we've seen is real, and that it's caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect. The increase in atmospheric CO2 matches the measured increase in the greenhouse effect.
How can we be so certain? It's rather simple: a warming caused by an increased greenhouse effect has a very distinct signature. The greenhouse effect causes an increased opacity of the atmosphere to the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. This makes it so that there is an increased temperature differential between the surface of the Earth and the upper atmosphere. The increased temperature differential is the cause of the warming: the outgoing radiation temperature is determined by the radiation incoming from the Sun, so if there is a greater difference in temperature between the surface and the upper atmosphere, and the atmosphere itself is relatively opaque to the outgoing radiation, then the temperature of the upper atmosphere is fixed by the Sun.
But if the greenhouse effect increases, this lowers the temperature of the upper atmosphere, which reduces the outgoing radiation, which increases the temperature of the Earth. The temperature of the surface of the Earth will continue to increase until the upper atmosphere warms back up. As long as the temperature of the upper atmosphere remains lowered, the Earth will continue to heat up.
And has this temperature drop in the upper atmosphere been measured?
Indeed it has!
http://www.wunderground.com/education/strato_cooling.asp
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