How to respond to climate change

[ZNP]

50% of the energy used by an automobile is used to manufacture it. So, even if a car uses half the greenhouse gases when it is driven it doesn't mean it uses half the greenhouse gases in total, rather it means it uses 25% less. Second, scrapping less efficient cars to get newer, cleaner cars is not going to show a decrease in greenhouse gases since so much of the energy goes into manufacturing those new cars. Also, as the US adopts cleaner technologies the old factories are shipped to Mexico or some other country where they continue to roll out old, polluting cars.

No matter how you look at this decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases is not a solution, at best it is part of the ultimate solution. The only solution is to produce power and electricity and heat in a way that does not produce any greenhouse gases at all. Fission would do that but Chernobyl and Fukushima are very real in a terrorist prone age. So, the only real solution is Fusion.

 

[Subduction Zone]

50% of the energy used by an automobile is used to manufacture it. So, even if a car uses half the greenhouse gases when it is driven it doesn't mean it uses half the greenhouse gases in total, rather it means it uses 25% less. Second, scrapping less efficient cars to get newer, cleaner cars is not going to show a decrease in greenhouse gases since so much of the energy goes into manufacturing those new cars. Also, as the US adopts cleaner technologies the old factories are shipped to Mexico or some other country where they continue to roll out old, polluting cars.

No matter how you look at this decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases is not a solution, at best it is part of the ultimate solution. The only solution is to produce power and electricity and heat in a way that does not produce any greenhouse gases at all. Fission would do that but Chernobyl and Fukushima are very real in a terrorist prone age. So, the only real solution is Fusion.

There is a lot of wind out there. And sunlight as well. And fission is far safer than most realize. The deaths from the very very very rare nuclear incidents are overblown and the deaths from coal mining are totally ignored. Fission may be the greenest fuel out there right now when the big picture is considered. And there are low tech ways to store energy. For example an elevated lake is an excellent place to store energy by pumping water uphill into it when there is excessive wind or solar energy and using it to run a generator when there is a greater need.

 

[timothyu]

Whatever the solution you can count on the fact that all the right people are able to make their fortunes as a result. God isn't upset with mankind for no reason.

 

[ZNP]

There is a lot of wind out there. And sunlight as well. And fission is far safer than most realize. The deaths from the very very very rare nuclear incidents are overblown and the deaths from coal mining are totally ignored. Fission may be the greenest fuel out there right now when the big picture is considered. And there are low tech ways to store energy. For example an elevated lake is an excellent place to store energy by pumping water uphill into it when there is excessive wind or solar energy and using it to run a generator when there is a greater need.

I am not ignoring coal, you were the one who said that electric cars using coal have less greenhouse gases than gasoline cars.

Fission may be the greenest, but are you going to get a community to agree to put a new plant in their town? If you can't do that then what is the point? It is hard to imagine that Chernobyl was "overblown" when you are familiar with exactly how bad it was. Fukushima might be overblown, but I don't know enough of the facts to determine that. Also, the nuclear waste is a massive problem of tons and tons of incredibly toxic and dangerous waste in the age of terrorism. No one wants a nuclear waste dump in their state, much less their town, as a result we have to ship the stuff all the way across the country in trucks and trains, again making a very easy target for terrorism.

Wind and sunlight are both intermittent, once storage of the electricity is required the cost becomes exorbitant.

The solution is fusion.

 

[timothyu]

Tesla ran his car on the ether.

 

[timothyu]

What? I don't understand your question about engines.

Diesel trains are electric.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I am not ignoring coal, you were the one who said that electric cars using coal have less greenhouse gases than gasoline cars.

Yes, and you did not understand that claim obviously.

Fission may be the greenest, but are you going to get a community to agree to put a new plant in their town? If you can't do that then what is the point? It is hard to imagine that Chernobyl was "overblown" when you are familiar with exactly how bad it was. Fukushima might be overblown, but I don't know enough of the facts to determine that. Also, the nuclear waste is a massive problem of tons and tons of incredibly toxic and dangerous waste in the age of terrorism. No one wants a nuclear waste dump in their state, much less their town, as a result we have to ship the stuff all the way across the country in trucks and trains, again making a very easy target for terrorism.

Wind and sunlight are both intermittent, once storage of the electricity is required the cost becomes exorbitant.

The solution is fusion.

Fusion does not exist right now. It may never exist. You might as well say coordinated butterflies are the answer. Let's try to keep this real.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Diesel trains are electric.

Yes and no. I do not think that that technology can be scaled down. Though hybrid cars are close.

And both still rely on fossil fuels so that are not really "electric".

 

[lordjeff]

Wow! So much wrong in one post. Where would you like to start?

If you do not think that carbon is a driving force in climate then your claim of a MS in Earth science becomes highly dubious. Perhaps we should start there. Do you accept the fact of the Greenhouse Effect? The physics necessary to understand that is not all that difficult to understand.

Disagreement does not imply incorrectness. The greenhouse effect & global warming are 2 different processes. CO2, which is an invisible, odorless gas (not a pollutant), is a polar molecule that vibrates & because it vibrates, it can absorb specific wavelengths in the infrared spectrum (I believe there are 3 of them). CO2 is taken up by major reservoirs on our unique planet: oceans/seas (72% of the global surface); all vegetation including plankton; locking up in the rocks such as limestone & dolomite & spar; plus absorption into corals & bivalves. CO2 comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere, remarkably low. The largest greenhouse gas is water vapor. I'm surprised the media has not tried to evaporate that. It is too simplistic to create a correlation-causation argument with CO2. As I have stated previously, we will not be planet Venus which lacks oceans, vegetation, & tectonics. CO2 is also put out by vegetation at night during normal respiration; it is put out during plate tectonic action as well. One needs to be familiar with the Milankovich cycles & quaternary geology to understand the different paradoxes of the sun & the evolution of greenhouse & icehouse states. I can assure no journalist is going to take the sheer amount of courses on that. We have had a medieval warm cycle & a Little Ice Age. I was just watching a WWII film & noticing the extreme winter conditions then. I remember my senior year of blizzard after blizzard & in the 2010s some 5 foot drifts in my area. The universe does respond to a computer. A one degree change in temp is hardly a cause for alarmism. The planet is just too big & there are too many other feedback cycles.

 

[lordjeff]

Obviously some of you would appear to troll & don't appear to keep up on pure info. Fusion is very much getting closer. MIT has already designed a tokokap & has emplaced magnets to hold a plasma. They have far exceeded the 15 million degree Kelvin prereq to ignite fusion. They're actually up around 100 million. As for fusion cars-aka hydrogen fuel cells, that may not occur to the extent the public wants. It may be shifted to buildings rather than cars as the waste product is warm water which has a higher heat capacity.

 

[lordjeff]

Someone here brought up the loss of trees 1/3 of them as prophesied in the book of Revelation.
It strikes me that AOC has a socialistic plan to take over privately owed homes and demand they be replaced with homes which will not (in her estimation) add to the climate change problem...so claimed problem. One such picture of her proposal is to switch to lumber homes. Hence my reference to Revelation and the loss of trees (which is actually figurative for the degradation of the earth over time.) So, AOC may be inadvertently helping to usher in that aspect of end times!)

Anything that comes out of her mouth pertains to communism & the loss of freedom. She cannot even observe her own correlation-causation problem as you specified with the trees. The idea is to get away from wood. While some wood is still employed in the house frame there are many more synthetics available now that are not subject to wood rot.

 

[lordjeff]

Diesel trains are electric.

The MagLev train is better & state of the art. If they're trying to facilitate trains they have to quicker. On the east coast, you can only go so fast w/o worrying about going off the track so investment in the MagLev is a good choice.

 

[ZNP]

Fusion does not exist right now. It may never exist. You might as well say coordinated butterflies are the answer. Let's try to keep this real.

Are you sure about that? You must have a security clearance for the US Navy.

A Breakthrough In American Energy Dominance? U.S. Navy Patents Compact Fusion Reactor



A Breakthrough In American Energy Dominance? U.S. Navy Patents Compact Fusion Reactor

We are as close to having an economically viable fusion reactor right now as we were to walking on the moon when JFK made it a goal.

Is Fusion Power Within Our Grasp?

I am keeping it real. If you think you could get the US to adopt Fission then you have a case, I don't see how that is a realistic goal. Fusion is far more realistic than Fission as far as getting the US to adopt it.

We have done other very great projects -- Panama Canal, US Highway system, and Space race. Developing Fusion should be put on that level. We have demonstrated the feasibility of Fusion reactors. With AI and quantum computers we have the tools to greatly enhance what we have already accomplished.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Are you sure about that? You must have a security clearance for the US Navy.

A Breakthrough In American Energy Dominance? U.S. Navy Patents Compact Fusion Reactor



A Breakthrough In American Energy Dominance? U.S. Navy Patents Compact Fusion Reactor

We are as close to having an economically viable fusion reactor right now as we were to walking on the moon when JFK made it a goal.

Is Fusion Power Within Our Grasp?

I am keeping it real. If you think you could get the US to adopt Fission then you have a case, I don't see how that is a realistic goal. Fusion is far more realistic than Fission as far as getting the US to adopt it.

We have done other very great projects -- Panama Canal, US Highway system, and Space race. Developing Fusion should be put on that level. We have demonstrated the feasibility of Fusion reactors. With AI and quantum computers we have the tools to greatly enhance what we have already accomplished.

Did you read the articles? They do not support your beliefs. Promising developments, but we have had promising developments for decades. When a working model is built then it is time to start to have a realistic hope for fusion power.

 

[lordjeff]

The difficulty with more fission plants is expense & slight danger. We are pretty broke. Given that MIT is close to conquering fusion I'd say this is the way to go. On a smaller level hydrogen fuel cells might serve a role. The other difficulty with the renewable stuff is of course storage. AKA battery. What the media won't tell you is battery disposable as a problem down the line. So here it is we're removing some plastic from society & good riddance & this will slightly help reduce landfills, but then will we fill them up with dead batteries.

 

[lordjeff]

Did you read the articles? They do not support your beliefs. Promising developments, but we have had promising developments for decades. When a working model is built then it is time to start to have a realistic hope for fusion power.

I have not read the one about the navy but I have seen the MIT one which is essentially built. They can reach 100 million Kelvin which is well more than they need & then the problem was containment in something that won't melt. Well obvjiously 100 million kelvin will melt everything so the idea was to suspend the goop as a plasma & hold it up in giant magnets & lasers. Next step I guess would be to maintain the reaction for more than 1 second & then connect the lego blocks to turn a turbine.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I have not read the one about the navy but I have seen the MIT one which is essentially built. They can reach 100 million Kelvin which is well more than they need & then the problem was containment in something that won't melt. Well obvjiously 100 million kelvin will melt everything so the idea was to suspend the goop as a plasma & hold it up in giant magnets & lasers. Next step I guess would be to maintain the reaction for more than 1 second & then connect the lego blocks to turn a turbine.

There are many ways that that temperature can be obtained. Maintaining fusion and releasing enough energy steadily is nowhere near being a reality yet. Once again, after a working model is built is when it is time to get excited. For more than fifty years we have been "five years away from fusion".

 

[ZNP]

Did you read the articles? They do not support your beliefs. Promising developments, but we have had promising developments for decades. When a working model is built then it is time to start to have a realistic hope for fusion power.

Read the articles we have several working models. They have been able to control a fusion reaction in the lab and generate electricity. The issue is that they are using more power than is generated, which means it is not economic. So the issue is no longer that it is not realistic, so your comment in post #87 "Fusion does not exist right now. It may never exist. You might as well say coordinated butterflies are the answer. Let's try to keep this real." is wrong. Fusion is real, not being economic is not evidence of not being real. Fission is also not economic because of the lawsuits and difficulty in getting permits and the difficulty in dealing with the nuclear waste. When we started working on the Panama canal they argued it wasn't economic, France had tried and failed, tropical diseases were an issue, etc.

In 2016

Germany's Wildly Complex Fusion Reactor Is Actually Working

Germany had a working fusion reactor. It generated electricity from the controlled fusion reaction. It wasn’t economic, but it was a proof of concept.

Full Page Reload

Over the past several years, more than two dozen research groups—impressively staffed and well-funded startups, university programs, and corporate projects—have achieved eye-opening advances in controlled nuclear fusion. They’re building fusion reactors based on radically different designs that challenge the two mainstream approaches, which use either a huge, doughnut-shaped magnetic vessel called a tokamak or enormously powerful lasers.

What’s more, some of these groups are predicting significant fusion milestones within the next five years, including reaching the breakeven point at which the energy produced surpasses the energy used to spark the reaction. That’s shockingly soon, considering that the mainstream projects pursuing the conventional tokamak and laser-based approaches have been laboring for decades and spent billions of dollars without achieving breakeven.

In Cambridge, Mass., MIT-affiliated researchers at Commonwealth Fusion Systems say their latest reactor design is on track to exceed breakeven by 2025. In the United Kingdom, a University of Oxford spin-off called First Light Fusion claims it will demonstrate breakeven in 2024. And in Southern California, the startup TAE Technologies has issued a breathtakingly ambitious five-year timeline for commercialization of its fusion reactor.

 

[ZNP]

There are many ways that that temperature can be obtained. Maintaining fusion and releasing enough energy steadily is nowhere near being a reality yet. Once again, after a working model is built is when it is time to get excited. For more than fifty years we have been "five years away from fusion".

The changes since 2016 with AI and quantum computers is tremendous. These are the tools that we will need to develop this technology. I would also point out that it was prophesied that we would have fusion power in the book of Revelation.

 

[ZNP]

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

They say that this $22 billion fusion reactor is 65% completed and will be ready in 2025.

I suppose if people spent $22 billion on a coordinated butterfly project you might suspect they were onto something as well.