Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

liveforphysics said:
The percentage values dont change that if you find yourself in a gas tight sealed room, you die if you dig up things and burn them, and the precise amount that induces death is just trivia.......
In a gas tight seald room....even if you do not dig things up, you will die anyway eventually from either dehydratiion, starvation, heat or cold.
So you will have to decide what action to take to extend your life.
Digging something up is one of your options.
 
Increasing atmospheric CO2 levels and the following positive feedback release of Methane and decreasing ice cover albedo cause the Earth's average temperature to increase. In the past, de-glaciation was initiated by orbital cycles or volcanic eruptions and then maximized in the second half by released CO2. But this time humans are doing it right from the start with CO2. Fortunately, we are headed into a Grand Solar minimum. The next three cycles and maybe more, are predicted to be much lower than normal. Which will give us an additional 50 years at least to adapt to a much hotter Earth whenever the Sun picks back up again.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBF6F4Bi6Sg
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https://youtu.be/FBF6F4Bi6Sg
 
Punx0r said:
Stop trolling. You cannot possibly be that ignorant or misinformed.
Since when is questioning unproven "scientific" statements considered trolling ?
Do you realise how much you sound and behave like those arcitypal fanatical characters with "sandwhich boards" on claiming.."THE END OF THE WORLD IS NYE".
you should not accept everything you read/hear without questioning the facts.
 
Punx0r said:
Stop trolling. You cannot possibly be that ignorant or misinformed.

There's literally 70+ pages of him being that ignorant and misinformed.

Economics, scientific principles, energy market dynamics - it takes impressive dedication to be so incorrect about so many topics!

The oil age will not end for a lack of oil. Oil/Gas scarcity is a myth worth perpetuating if you're an oil exec, it drives prices higher. Unfortunately this kinda backfired when increased prices created justification for a new wave of R&D and exploration, leading to the rebirth of the United states domestic oil/gas market. We're still dealing with a glut of supply amidst flat demand, gradually getting back to prices increasing - though only because the Oil cartels have artificially constrained member production.

As Cephalotus touched on, we have MORE than enough fossil energy that's economically accessible to burn ourselves into extinction, or at least a dramatically less comfortable life on this planet.

What this thread has demonstrated many times is that there now exist feasible alternatives for energy production that don't result in mutual destruction, largely thanks to visionary technical leadership from countries like Germany and companies like Tesla. The challenge is now primarily one of societal change. The only real way to influence this is economics.

At this point we're reliant on picking leaders that can look beyond their immediate term, to make policy decisions that return Human emissions to sustainable levels, either by providing incentive or penalties to overcome the inherently selfish behavior of corporations and individuals. Right now many places actually subsidize the fossil fuel industries in the interest of attracting a handful of jobs to their particular corner of the planet. This behavior needs to stop. As Luke said, we're in a room - regardless of what corner of that room you create noxious gases, we're all going to choke.
 
Liquid fuel will begin to leave us long before we (8 Billion) are ready (never) to leave it. Fracking and deep water drilling will get us another 30-40 years of drinking through a bigger straw until we are desperate enough to go big into tar sands. At which point oil prices will go forever into the $200/ barrel range. Unfortunately for the air, we have hundreds of years of coal left to keep the growth based economic spinning plates from crashing to the floor.
 
Ohbse said:
.....
What this thread has demonstrated many times is that there now exist feasible alternatives for energy production that don't result in mutual destruction, largely thanks to visionary technical leadership from countries like Germany and companies like Tesla. The challenge is now primarily one of societal change. The only real way to influence this is economics..
What this thread has shown many times also is, few of those alternatives are practical or economical for large scale reliable power production and lead to major economic consequences for those countries (like Germany, Spain, S Aistralia).. that adopt them and often with little impact on emmissions.
PS... Exactly what "visionary technical leadership". has Tesla given to power generation ??
 
Hillhater said:
Since when is questioning unproven "scientific" statements considered trolling ?
Do you realise how much you sound and behave like those arcitypal fanatical characters with "sandwhich boards" on claiming.."THE END OF THE WORLD IS NYE".
you should not accept everything you read/hear without questioning the facts.
It's "archetypal" "sandwich" and "nigh." Not NYE.

(Nye, ironically, is a mechanical engineer who does a children's science show - and he is a staunch proponent for renewable energy. "The big unexploited renewable resource on the East Coast of the United States, and Canada and Mexico, is wind . . .I encourage everybody to check out The Solutions Project, a bunch of civil engineers who have done an analysis that you could power the United States, you could power most of the world, renewably if you just decided to do it, right now. There's enough wind and solar resources, a little bit of tidal and some geothermal, to run the whole place.")

You can believe whatever you like. However, getting the science (and spelling) consistently wrong doesn't help your claims that you are a special snowflake who "sees the truth" while everyone else is wrong.
 
Hillhater said:
Ohbse said:
.....
What this thread has demonstrated many times is that there now exist feasible alternatives for energy production that don't result in mutual destruction, largely thanks to visionary technical leadership from countries like Germany and companies like Tesla. The challenge is now primarily one of societal change. The only real way to influence this is economics..
What this thread has shown many times also is, few of those alternatives are practical or economical for large scale reliable power production and lead to major economic consequences for those countries (like Germany, Spain, S Aistralia).. that adopt them and often with little impact on emmissions.
PS... Exactly what "visionary technical leadership". has Tesla given to power generation ??

Yeah as this Reuters report says, Germany's electricity just keeps getting more expensive and this is obviously because their government has been forced to actually pass on more of the real costs of their wind/solar to the consumers/retail market as the whole thing just gets more and more crazy expensive, even a massive economy of Germany the richest country in Europe can't eat the costs of wind/solar internally and must be at least partially passing it on to consumers.
https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-electricity-retail/german-household-power-prices-at-record-high-verivox-idUSL8N1MZ30X

On the whole massive argument about co2 levels being a climate control knob/ocean sea level control knob on the planet, it goes in some ways against the foundations of the geological and indigenous migration history of Australia, basic history stuff that everyone was taught in Australian in school as shown in the Wikipedia link below.
I very much accept sea level rise/"climate change" has been happening over 1000s of years, its the only logical way to explain Australian history and its original inhabitants of humans and wild-life. The problem is that it doesn't fit with increased co2 levels.
Another way 400ppm should be remembered is that its 0.04% co2 of the atmosphere/air which is made up of many gases, water vapor is 1% many many times more than the 0.04% of co2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_chemistry#Atmospheric_composition

The basic history of Australia/Tasmania is that aboriginals wandered down to Australia/Tasmania when there was no sea in the way about 40,000 years ago, in other words, the sea hadn't risen to marroon aboriginals on Australia/Tasmania until around 8000-10,000 years ago is a rough estimate, according to Wikipedia.

This is pounded into us as the basic history of Australia and its printed in all the history books, but back then when this was printed into all the history books there was no co2 debate, its just about the history of humans settling on the Australian/Tasmanian land and how they got there. But it all flys in the face of co2 ppm charts because the co2 levels around 10,000 years ago are nothing.

Read this Wikipedia page below, this is key.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians#Before_European_settlement
Quote from Wikipedia "
The Shoreline of Tasmania and Victoria about 14,000 years ago as sea levels were rising showing some of the human archaeological sites – see Prehistory of Australia
People crossed into Tasmania approximately 40,000 years, ago via a land bridge between the island and the rest of mainland Australia, during the last glacial period. According to genetic studies, once the sea level rose, flooding the Bassian Plain, the people were left isolated for approximately 8,000 years, until the time of European exploration, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
"
Bassian_plain_14000_BP.jpg

The reason why increased co2 can be argued as a climate control knob causing sea level rise is due to the fact that CO2 levels have been rising over the last 100 years, but of course out of sync with the well known geological science history has established the sea levels have been rising over 1,000s of years.
As the wikipedia page states, Sea levels were around 130 meters lower 10,000 years ago compared to where they are now. Since then the sea has risen that 130m, thus cutting off Tasmania from the mainland and marooning the Aborigines who were already there (among many other things).
All this happened BEFORE the Industrial Revolution and flys into the face of historical co2 charts.

What makes it the ultimate bullshit of our modern time is the fact anyone can verify these two facts, what makes climate change such a big lie is to fuse them together and directly link increased co2 levels which have only substantially risen over the last 100 years with the natural sea level rise that has been happening over 1000s of years.
I have no doubt the people who first decided to link this stuff together knew they were coming up with the ultimate bullshit of our lifetime.

These two issues fused together, in my opinion, make the best bullshit we have ever seen in our lives, and ever will see in our lives.

The reason why the first Europeans to reach Australia setup a sea level marker on the Isle of the Dead 177 years ago caved into the stone was because they could see the historic 1000s of years effects of sea level rise in the area.
http://soer.justice.tas.gov.au/2003/casestudy/4/index.php
http://soer.justice.tas.gov.au/2003/image/47/index.php
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/climate/tasmania-global-warming-shoreline-erosion.html

The first Europeans to visit Tasmania/Australia took a lot of interest in endemic animals in Australia and the surrounding islands (endemic means landlocked due to sea level rise) like the King Island emu, which was like the mainland one but considerably smaller, this was because it was stuck on a tiny island after the sea level rose and couldn't get off just like the aboriginals in Tasmania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Island_emu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_emu

Australia is famous for endemic animals like the Kangaroo etc.. https://www.slideshare.net/alisawilliams/australias-endemic-species

DMMAUviVwAAR_XM_small.jpg
The logical science and history of our planet suggests this marker will eventually be underwater because everything and I mean everything points to the fact the sea level has been rising very slowly over 1000s of years, but nothing is proving that co2 is accelerating it,
the one really good thing about the increasing co2 levels of the last 20 years is that its forced the IPCC etc to completely redo their doomish modeling. They have continued to half and half again the expected sea level rising estimations because we have had many years now to not see anything out of the unexpected other than whats been happening over 1000s of years.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/02/Curry-2017.pdf
But the whole thing makes really good bs, really good bs but only for those who live on mainstream-media injecting them with bad hyperbolic information, just like the year 2000 computer bug which the MSM just wouldn't let go because it was good BS, but as soon as we hit 2000 and nothing happened the media forgot about it and moved on, they got their ratings etc and moved on. The MSM got people just so worked up about it but it was just silly bs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

To me its really bad science to blame co2 on everything just like how Green Peace Founder Patrick Moore talks about co2 in the youtube videos below.

There are two main forces that drive climate change alarmism, this is either money or political power gains.
Normally in this world, folks choose to believe the person's claims who isn't doing it for money (Patrick Moore), but instead people are choosing to believe guys like Al Gore who is up to his eyeballs in investments in renewable energy companies, and made a commercial movie An Inconvenient Truth, which made $49 million dollars on a $1.5million production budget.
The extra twist with Al Gore is that it also funnels political power gains to the Democrats, so uniquely Al Gore takes both of these forces, this is the guy most people choose to believe in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkdbSxyXftc
[youtube]RkdbSxyXftc[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWEjSDYfxc
[youtube]WDWEjSDYfxc[/youtube]

https://youtu.be/qZN2jt2cCU4
[youtube]qZN2jt2cCU4[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwqIy8Ikv-c
[youtube]OwqIy8Ikv-c[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWtaackIJU
[youtube]3PWtaackIJU[/youtube]

https://youtu.be/SSrjAXK5pGw
[youtube]SSrjAXK5pGw[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZN6QuAdxLI
[youtube]KZN6QuAdxLI[/youtube]

If you want a 2hour marathon video on it all here it is https://youtu.be/qufEhDXdGnc

Like I said before I am happy to go nuclear if it makes people happy lowering co2, but I think its a waste of money trying to lower co2, I still think nuclear is far more effective than wind-farms, SA wind farms hit as low as 2% generation today and 1% yesterday. It doesn't matter how many wind-farms you build if there's no wind then there is no wind. And building wind-farms first and then expecting sometime soon a truly unimaginably huge battery will fix it all is reckless spending. SA at 1% generation is about 20 times more co2 than the entire country of France emissions.

Windfarms that do such a crap job of actually lowing co2 like SA or Germany shows its all just panic based bad policy, its really just symbolic attempts to reduce co2. Carbon is the 4th most abundant element in the universe and Oxygen is the 3rd most abundant element in the universe, this stuff bonded together is always going to be in our atmosphere in large amounts as long as we have as many humans as we have and are projected to have. The question is how much pain do you want to inflict on your self for no change in actual co2 levels. All the 3rd world countries (is China even a 3rd world country? I dont think so) are free to build as many coal power-stations as they want and they are building pretty huge ones.

I think its silly to lower co2 as it is, we are just killing the habitat of the planet instead of helping it as this co2 ppm chart shows, trees/plants do not grow without co2 period, they waste more water trying to absorb co2 via photosynthesis if there isn't enough co2 in the air, which as far as plants are concerned there never is enough co2 in the air, lowing co2 levels just makes it harder on all vegitation harder to survive, which is everything on the planet that lives in an ecosystem, especially in Australia as the increased co2 makes it easier for everything grow in dryer environments.
main-qimg-1e6d602bb6a94e0357aedf6650b5380e (2).jpg
 
A very polarizing topic. But either side you want to look at climate change from, it is distracting us from a much bigger problem. Which is a growth based economic system that has no escape plan for the coming era of resource depletion. Oil is the most important. Crucial. And there is no conceivable replacement at the scale that we are addicted to it for farming, mining, and building big things like wind farms. We use all resources acording to the easiest first. Everything we need gets more remote with time. Oil will peak sometime mid Century and the price will skyrocket. wrecking the economy and leaving us with little energy surplus to try to do anything about making a change as ER/EI for unconventional oil and alternatives continues to slip away.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lH1MpDLxUg
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https://youtu.be/-lH1MpDLxUg
 
For what it's worth and contrary to an uninformed comment above, the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is not a theory. It is an observation. It is measurable. It is a fact. Similarly, the LAWS of thermodynamics are not the theories of thermodynamics. The known greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide combined with the Laws of thermodynamics make it a fairly straightforward exercise to calculate the extra heat that will be retained by the atmosphere for a given increase in CO2 concentration. The only theories involved are how that retained heat gets distributed around the Earth and those theories are well validated by observations and can be used to make increasingly accurate predictions. Only a fool who gets all his scientific knowledge from right wing propaganda would argue otherwise.
 
billvon said:
....."The big unexploited renewable resource on the East Coast of the United States, and Canada and Mexico, is wind . . .I encourage everybody to check out The Solutions Project, a bunch of civil engineers who have done an analysis that you could power the United States, you could power most of the world, renewably if you just decided to do it, right now. There's enough wind and solar resources, a little bit of tidal and some geothermal, to run the whole place.")
And if you are serious with an open mind, you should read read this also..
http://www.roadmaptonowhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/RTN-Jan-11-2018.compressed.pdf
 
I have seen many different people posting The Solutions Project site as a guide to show how easy it would be to switch to renewables. But I have then looked at the site many times and can't find anything of real substance explaining for example how many wind turbines would be required, capacity factor, service life, how much they cost, or where you would put them.
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http://thesolutionsproject.org/why-clean-energy/
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jimw1960 said:
For what it's worth and contrary to an uninformed comment above, the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is not a theory. It is an observation. It is measurable. It is a fact. ...
There has never been a verified, controlled , repeatable, scientific experimment, to quantify , Or even measure, the "Greenhouse effect" of CO2
 
Hillhater said:
There has never been a verified, controlled , repeatable, scientific experimment, to quantify , Or even measure, the "Greenhouse effect" of CO2
The first one was in 1896. Svante Arrhenius used data on IR losses through the atmosphere (taken by Samuel Pierpont Langley and Frank Washington Very at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh) to calculate the effect that CO2 had on reduction of re-radiation of longwave IR. Since then the experiment has been repeated literally hundreds of times.

So you're only 122 years out of date.

Are you an anti-vaxxer, too? According to them, there's never been a single, verified, controlled, repeatable, scientific 'experimment' to prove that vaccines work.
 
billvon said:
Hillhater said:
There has never been a verified, controlled , repeatable, scientific experimment, to quantify , Or even measure, the "Greenhouse effect" of CO2
The first one was in 1896. Svante Arrhenius used data on IR losses through the atmosphere (taken by Samuel Pierpont Langley and Frank Washington Very at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh) to calculate the effect that CO2 had on reduction of re-radiation of longwave IR. Since then the experiment has been repeated literally hundreds of times.
... His was a "calculation". ( or Theory in other words) not even using his own data , and not from experimental work.
And if you are so well informed, you should also know that his calculation (theory) has been criticised by many for its lack of rigor and omission of such factors as cloud influence , thermal convection, adsorbtion spectrums etc.
....but maybe you are stuck in a 122 yr old mind set ?
Now ,..how about a real scientific experiment that can prove conclusively what the world climate will do with increasing co2 ?
And please try to keep on topic rather than resorting to childish random jibes !
 
Scientific understanding on absorption of CO2 is higher than scientific understanding on gravitation.

So I assume you also don't "believe in gravitation", do you?
 
Hillhater said:
Now ,..how about a real scientific experiment that can prove conclusively what the world climate will do with increasing co2 ?

and presumably your assertion is that CO2 has no effect on global temperature? Can you produce even a single piece of even semi-scientific research to support that?

if you want to repost stuff from denialist media websites perhaps just join thebeastie in this, more appropriate, thread: https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=62745
 
In 2017 Denmark met 44% (14.7 TWh) of its annual electricity demand with wind power: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/06/44-wind-denmark-smashed-already-huge-wind-energy-records-2017/

It's targeting 50% by 2020 with solar and biomass taking the total to 80% generated from RE.

Closer to home, the UK has been replacing its coal plants with gas, which emit half as much CO2 and 1/10th the air pollution for the same energy: https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/natural-gas/natural-gas-and-its-advantages.html

They can also be used for load-following as they require only 30 minutes to go from cold start to full load (or 10mins from warm start).

The Drax 4GW coal plant is being kept open for the short term but is gradually being converted to biomass (currently at 12%). And, yes, the wood is sustainably sourced... https://www.drax.com/sustainability/biomass-demand-control/ Of the coal that's burnt, some is sourced from the UK but some is also imported from as far away as Australia (boo!).

They're also adding 200MW of battery storage. Current battery storage in the UK is only 80MW, but 500MW is in the pipeline for the next year and the total pipeline of planned battery storage projects is 3.5GW: https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/utility-scale-pipeline-hints-at-a-diverse-future-for-uk-energy-storage

The UK is at over 25% RE, Sweden is 50%, Costa Rica is at 99% and Iceland is at 100%

Growth of RE in the UK:

 
Magazine feature by Octopus Group investment group in the UK. They have fingers in many pies but have an arm for energy projects. The leader of this group says RE is the future and that the intermittency of wind & solar is not a major problem and can be solved with battery storage and load management.

For example, Reactive Technologies is our utilising modern communication network to balance demand with supply, for example by turning a supermarket's freezers up and down. This is already being done by one hypermarket chain - in nuclear-loving France (Carrefour)!

The prediction is that fossil fuel generation won't be eliminated any time soon: there will be a demand for "ultra-reliable, on-demand baseload power", but these is best served not by large thermal plants (like Drax) but by "small, efficient, gas-burning plants such as reciprocating gas engines" which much, much quicker to start up and can run for a few hours before shutting down.

So, it looks like South Australia has got it right after all: solar and wind backed by battery storage and reciprocating gas plants.

In summary: building a green energy infrastructure is described as a "hard-nosed investment decision".
 
Hillhater said:
... His was a "calculation". ( or Theory in other words) not even using his own data , and not from experimental work.
And if you are so well informed, you should also know that his calculation (theory) has been criticised by many for its lack of rigor and omission of such factors as cloud influence , thermal convection, adsorbtion spectrums etc.
Yes. It has been criticized by thousands - anyone who stands to profit from fossil fuels.

Here's a more recent experiment that shows how CO2 absorbs IR if you don't like history: http://jvarekamp.web.wesleyan.edu/CO2/FP-1.pdf

Here's a Youtube video if you are one of the "modern generation" who can't process anything unless there's a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX4eOg2LaSY

I'll let you deny those.

(BTW you never answered the question - are you an anti-vaxxer, too? Same sort of denial at work.)
 
You are all missing the point.
Shure there are many facinating properties of our atmoshpheric gas's, IR adsorbtion being one (but what about re-radiation ?) ..but none of these allow for the multiple other factors..clouds, thermals etc...let alone for the sheer scale of a planetary system, so how can anyone suggest that the science of CO2 influence is proven, let alone quantify it to a time scale....Its little more than guessing.
And you really should quit trying to psyco analyse anyone via forum posts, you are no good at it.
 
Wow. Just wow. The ignorance is strong with this one. So strong it has to be willful. Now he's trying to say that calculations are theories? Don't waste your time with this guy.
 
Hillhater said:
You are all missing the point.
Shure there are many facinating properties of our atmoshpheric gas's, IR adsorbtion being one (but what about re-radiation ?)
So now you admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas - but you don't understand re-radiation of absorbed longwave IR?

For God's sakes, read a science book. You are trying to use the classic "argument from ignorance" - "I don't understand the greenhouse effect, therefore no one understands it!"
 
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