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Will Wind Power Change Earth's Climate?
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:45 PM
from the hot-breeze dept.
from the hot-breeze dept.
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail is currently running an article on a recent wind power study. A group of Canadian and American scientists has modelled the effects of introducing massive amounts of wind farms into North America and have come up with surprising results. While still having only 1/5th the impact of fossil fuels, wind power will still adjust the earth's climate with the equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder. Could this be a boon for the nuclear lobby, or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?"
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Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think not.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:5, Informative)
[and I've got a degree in atmospheric physics and hate to see people believing crap...]
The jet streams are quite a bit higher than the wind mill which resides in the lower boundary layer. The wind mill is at 100m. The jet stream above 10 kilometers. By definition the jet has high shear, and a tiny bit of turbulence miles below is really just a grain of sand on the beach to it..
Sure there's an effect, it is just so small in a practical sense that it sums to near zero.
You got the bit about solar energy being transported to the poles correct. That doesn't make the rest of your argument float one bit though.
I wish you had taken the forest vs building thing further.. forests absorb *way* more energy than a few thousand windmills ever could. (look at mean wind conditions in Antarctica for example)
Of course if you do a study where you fill all of Canada with windmills spaced every 100m you start to increase drag.. so what- it isn't a realistic scenario.
You've got a theoretical and small problem from wind power. You've got a actual and large problem from fossil fuels. Therefore keep the status quo! Brilliant.
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Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. I can't argue that coal pollution also has effects on the environment. Who's to say which is worse, I cannot. Certainly to someone living near the coal plant, inhaling the smoke is worse than for someone living far away in Greenland. Conversely, that Greenlandian would be more affected by possibly reduced gulf/jet streams than the person living by the coal plant in a temperate clime.
2. As I said in the original post, the wind is constantly 'pushing' against the force of the back-EMF of the turbine/generator. If the wind didn't apply any force against the blade then the power produced would violate 1st law of thermodynamics.
Windmills will extract MW's of power from the wind. Please quantify the energy absorption rate of a building, or an entire city. Wind blows around buildings, not so around turbines.
3. At least you made no effort to justify your attempted 'estimates' of 1000 trees per windmill in terms of frictional shear losses. Also guessing out of my ass I think you might be close here, maybe a little closer to 10000 trees per windmill, though.
4. I've responded elsewhere on that issue. Basically after each successive row of windmills, the resultant wind will rarefy somewhat. So for many windmills downwind, they will have at least some effect on the streamlines well above their height. How much I don't know.
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Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:4, Insightful)
It shouldn't come as a surprise that any form of energy capture, no matter how you do it is going to take energy out of the environment and that as a result changes the environment. I'm pretty sure if we had massive solar panels all over the place, that'd effect the temperature by taking sunlight that would have heated the ground and diverting it. There's no free source of energy, you've gotta take it from somewhere!
Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, that's easy. Giant fusion powered air conditioning units.
</humor>
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Re:No, even fusion isn't FREE (Score:5, Funny)
That HEAT changes the environment, because it is a net addition of energy. The earth must dissipate that energy (presumably the atmosphere losing heat into space) or the environment will still be changing.
Hmm... maybe we could use wind turbines to remove some of this energy from the air?
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Nothing to do with Newton! (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway this is nothing to do with the amount of energy in the system is to do with how the energy within the system is distributed, the wind fans increase the mixing of air levels (Turbulance). This has little affect during the day (apparently) but in the night results in warming air from higher up being mixed in.
James
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Newton said what? (Score:4, Informative)
Renewable sources such as wind or solar energy may disturb what happens in the atmosphere one way or another (cooler here, warmer there..), but they don't upset the overall energy balance. Energy that would have gone directly into heating the atmosphere, is channeled through our widescreen TVs and electric vehicles first, where it ultimately converts to heat that is re-radiated back to the universe.
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Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:5, Informative)
And I believe that statement is not the actual scenario. If it was, we would long since have been toasted, say about 4.5 billion years ago because this planet started out far hotter then than it is now.
This planet, for all its cold weather here and there, still has a molten iron core from its original formation days. It loses heat to the night sky, heat both from the previous daytime solar influx over the past few weeks AND a certain amount of heat coming up from below as this iron core continues its several billion year cooldown.
One should never forget that the tempurature of the clear night sky is about 2.3 degrees absolute, and thats damned cold. Give thanks for these few miles of air, it not only has oxygen for us to breath, but often furnishes a very effective insulating blanket with its clouds of water vapor.
My take is that the night time heat loss exceeds that of the solar influx by a very small but measurable amount. Probably far less than 0.001% of the total, but there none the less. Perhaps someone who has studied this can further comment with some solid facts?
As far as the buildings not taking any energy out of the moving air because they don't move, there is still some net loss of energy from the viscosity losses if nothing else. Since the buildings are generally a much larger cross section than the windmill blades, I'd think that it would be a tossup as to which disturbs the air flow more.
Big trees OTOH, would seem to effect it to a much higher degree simply because they have so much more surface area per foot sticking up for the air to eddy and swirl about, losing energy in the process as it moves by.
In the really tall tree areas, like in Big Trees National Monument in central CA, what might be a 35 mph wind swaying the tops of those 300 foot trees, is reduced to a very gentle breeze at ground level. You are not really aware of it till you look up wondering where the wind noise is coming from.
Ditto for some of the high country that I've walked around on in Colorado. 14 foot of powder at 10,800 feet in February, makes for real work getting around when you have a microwave site sitting on the very peak of the mountain thats died and must be fixed. That rocky peak might have a 50mph 'breeze' carrying a 3 foot thick blanket of heavy powder going by it, but drop 200 feet down the hill into the trees and even 20 below becomes tolerable if you are dressed right.
But that last 1/4 mile from the end of trees to the shack, and back to the trees when you are done could kill you very easily. Been there, done that, carrying 25-35 pounds of tool boxes, spare parts and test gear, several times. On North Mountain, TBE. Thankfully, theres not that much snow to slog thru at the peak, the wind keeps it cleared away rather nicely.
Cheers, Gene
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Re:Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:4, Funny)
Cluelessness concerning the laws of thermodynamics is grounds for revokation of your
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Wouldn't that be a good thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nucular (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nucular (Score:4, Insightful)
Between mining tailings, waste disposal, and the risk of a meltdown or reactor breach, we're talking about a lot more than a few square miles. (Chernobyl affected dairy farms in the U.S., for example.)
Yes, some people are unreasonably scared of nuclear power. Other are unreasonably enamored of it, some Gersbackian techno-fetish of Big Science to Save The World
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Re:Nucular (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Nucular (Score:4, Insightful)
- outside security risks such as earth shakes and BIG F*CKN missiles (remember, these sort of threats are taken in to consideration (today) when building a powerplant - it's not you're average shed)
- neglection of maintenance
The big problem nuclear activists (with any sort of clue and who don't resort to FUD campaigns) showcase is how we're dealing with nuclear waste. That is how do you store contaminated material and burnt out fuel (low rate uranium - it decays you know...). Over the years this waste piles up big time and it isn't really responisble to ship it away to a third world country or to dig it down.Today there exists quite a lot of technology to improve this situation, but it still is mostly both expensive and somewhat inefficient.
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Re:Nucular (Score:5, Informative)
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Because there are better, cheaper alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Its too expensive, the last plant to come on line in the eighties in the US, generated electricity a cost higher than solar power of the same era (the luz plant). After around $3 trillion in R&D funding, subsidies, loan guarantees, insurance no fault legislation, etc nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins. Its not IF there's going to be a serious accident (there have been many already), its WHEN. Reliability and safety only comes in nines - no such thing a 100% perfect.
3. Nuclear proliferation. The nuclear power industry is the only other major user and generator of nuclear materials other than nuclear weapons. You eliminate nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is easily controlled. Remember it only takes 5lbs of plutonium or 25lbs uranium to make a bomb. Once you've got the material, the bomb itself is literally garage science.
4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks. Nuclear power only wins on one account: energy density. And yet, outside of a nuclear submarine, this isn't an advantage! Transmitting power is twice the operation costs and ten times the capital cost compared to the generation of that power. Small decentralized power souces such a solar, photovoltaics, wind, etc is far cheaper overall.
5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies if you have to wait 5 years just to begin to make some income, and 15 years to breakeven. Modular power technologies that are built on an assembly lines, such as photovoltaics generate returns within days.
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. Nuclear energy is a fun science experiment, but commercially we should cut our losses and run.
Solar power is after all fusion power already done for us, at a safe distance, and transmitted free nearly equally around the world with sufficient energy density to suit the worlds needs for millennia to come.
Interpretation for computer guys:
Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.
Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking
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Well I have to say I told you so. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and yes. Of all the alternative power sources wind is just about the least practical for large scale explotation. Use the right system in the right place.
I'm sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
Having stood next to one of these things (Score:5, Interesting)
- how big it was (huge!)
- how noisy it was (I sort of thought it'd be silent; not sure why...)
- how still the air was immediately below it, even though the windmill itself was turning at a moderate rate
Quite an amazing piece of gear; if you ever get the chance to get up close to one, take it.
Re:Having stood next to one of these things (Score:5, Funny)
take it? and where the heck am I gonna go with a big noisy windmill sticking out of my pocket?
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Why is there an assumption... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. OK, so a few species will go extinct. But who's to say that some species won't flourish as a result. The ecosystem will be different, but it won't necessarily be worse. The ecosystem will adapt.
I think it's safe to say that the poisons introduced by fossil fuel burning have a net negative effect. But wind farms? I mean, solve the bird blender problem and what's the harm otherwise?
I also wonder what effect huge solar farms would have on the ecosystem. Extracting energy from sunlight that would normally heat the crust of the earth might also have an interesting impact. But again, I don't think we should automatically assume that change is bad.
This blows (Score:5, Funny)
For the environment, everybody go, and... (Score:5, Funny)
Be quick about it, OK? OH, and when you kill yourself, do it in a forest by yourself so that you can be converted into plant material with the minimum of impact.
We can't get all of that last fifth of the 5 fifths -- though you worthless schmuck should do your part ASAP and stop ruining the environment with each extra breath or moment that you block the wind.
Thanks!
hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard numerous times that for the same power output, a nuclear reactor generates less radioactive material than, say, a coal fired plant. The problem is that the nuclear waste is in a big chunk, and must be stored somewhere. My question is, why not pulverize said nuclear waste and pump it into the atmosphere? At worst, we'd be doing slightly better than coal plants right? And we'd have solved the waste storage problem... right? I'm sure there's something I'm missing (other than the obvious: that's just insidiously stupid).
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Moderators, please save your mod points for other comments. I don't think it would be right to get more karma for the same post.
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Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:5, Informative)
Part of the problem is that pulverizing the waste and putting it into the atmosphere is hard to do. Particularly when you want to distribute it evenly, so that you don't inadvertently create hotspots downwind. Heavy metal dust will have a tendency to settle rapidly--in a nuclear war, we'd call it fallout. You've probably noticed that the smokestacks of an operating coal-fired generating station very quickly become stained black. It's a very bad situation if that unsightly blackness is high-level nuclear waste instead of just soot.
The uranium content of coal in the United States is about one part per million. To dilute nuclear waste to a similar concentration for disposal, each gram would have to be mixed with a full ton of other matter...might be a bit impractical. And grinding it up to push it up the stack is likely to be both difficult and energy intensive.
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Nuclear heat (Score:5, Insightful)
No magic bullet to generate power yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Wind -- Mentioned in article, provides a place for raptors to perch, allowing them to expend much less energy when hunting for prey, which decimates rodent populations (bad thing? depends on who you ask...) Also has been known to kill birds in the rotors. Plus rather complex and expensive engineering problems in generating the power to begin with as well.
Hydroelectric -- Trouble with fish populations, sediment issues, changes some local ecosystems. Removes hiking areas from lobbyists, prompting them to protect their recreation in the name of environmental protection (google 'drain Lake Powell.') But it's more straightforward to generate power than wind.
Coal -- Cheap, mature technology -- becoming MUCH cleaner than it has historically been. Lots of coal. Still quite polluting.
Oil -- Mature, relatively cheap -- also becoming more efficient, but still quite polluting, oil prices skyrocketing.
Biomass -- Uses biological sources (plant matter, leaves, food scraps, paper, etc.) to generate power -- less polluting than many think, since the 'fuel' used releases the same carbon into the atmosphere anyway (often within a few weeks/months) -- it just accelerates the process. Still, it's not the most optimal of solutions, and there are always valid concerns about toxic chemicals being released from burning garbage.
Natural Gas -- Cheap, cleaner than oil or coal, can be placed near suburban areas with few complaints (My job is next door to one, and I don't even hear it). Prices going up, limited fuel.
Nuclear Fission -- Can be very cheap, very little airborne pollution. Becoming very mature. Also has nuclear waste, public paranoia, U.S. refusal to reprocess used nuclear fuel that is 98% unburned -- they just 'dispose' of it. No new power-generating reactor has been built in the US in my lifetime. Although I hate to admit it, I personally think it may be something we'll have to rely on until well after I'm dead. Hopefully it'll buy time to get Fusion to a more practical state.
Nuclear Fusion -- Still experimental/unable to generate useful power, hopefully clean. Depending on the type of fusion, can be anywhere from near zero radiation (and radioactive waste) to levels (both instantaneous, and in terms of high-level waste) that have the same problems as fission.
Solar -- Woefully inefficient, one of the most expensive methods of generating electricity, although prices are dropping.
Geothermal -- I've heard this is (or has been) a maintenance nightmare, and is only practical in certain geological locations anyway.
Cold 'Fusion' -- not really sure if it belongs here, but there are still question marks about where the 'excess energy' generated is coming from. It simply sounds too good to be true - clean, safe power? I want to believe...
There are other types -- but I still haven't heard of the magic bullet. The best thing we can do as a society is strive for the highest efficiency in electrical use -- from generation to transmission to expenditure. Turn off those lights when you're not in the room (and, even if you are in the room if they aren't necessary...)
The Original ResearchPaper (Score:4, Informative)
You've gotta love journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
These guys are magic. Measuring an angular velocity in linear units.
Is it just me or is there something about journalists where, in technical articles, they have to put in gratuitous meaningless figures for no reason? Maybe it's to prove that they understand the subject.
Irrelevance be damned!
There is something wrong with this study (Score:5, Informative)
The lower kilometer or so of the atmosphere is called the planetary boundary layer (PBL). It is not really modeled well in numerical atmospheric models, but is typically treated as a friction layer (i.e., given a single coefficient of friction). It is very hard to get these "lumped" coefficients of friction right - for example, they tend to be too low over mountain ranges.
The equator to pole temperature exchange occurs in the 20 km or so of the troposphere ABOVE the PBL. The PBL is barely involved, and is frequently ignored entirely in numerical models. Vertically averaged and spatially averaged, the pole to temperature heat exchange causes a wind of about 10 meters per second (in the 20 km of the troposphere above the PBL). To first order the PBL is decoupled to this and doesn't move at all (mean wind speeds of a few meters / second at most).
So how in the heck are even a forest of wind farms in the PBL (basically all of them except for any on mountain tops will be in the PBL) significantly slow down the heat exchange up in the troposphere when
- they hardly interact with it and
- the PBL has about 1
This doesn't pass the back of the envelope smell test; it's no wonder that they had such a hard time passing peer review.
Energy.... (Score:5, Funny)
2. Buy 2 bean burritos.
3. Walk home.
4. Wait 8-16 hours.
5. Energy in the form of gas.
6. Sell gas to power company.
Repeat steps 1-6.
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Re:Energy.... (Score:5, Funny)
2. Buy 2 bean burritos.
3. Walk home.
4. Wait 8-16 hours.
5. Energy in the form of gas.
6. Sell gas to power company.
7. Taco Bell uses the energy to cook 2 bean burritos.
8. Go to step 2.
Ahh... the Circle of Life.
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Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen.
So we would need wind farms to produce 10% of the world's energy to see the effect they're talking about.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
Like the study covered in the Globe and Mail, this is a simulated study of a specific type of turbine in a specific wind farm. Unlike the G&M study, this researcher was interested in microclimatological effects of windfarms.
Personally, I take these sorts of results with a whole shaker full of salt as the researchers need to make a whole raft of assumptions in order to get any result at all. (For instance,who says someone won't build a better windfarm?)
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it is wise to take these with grains of salt, particularly when they are based on computer simulations that haven't necessarily been correlated with reality extensively.
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Probably a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).
The results of this research doesn't surprise me in the least. I agree that the actual results may be a bit different, but the general result is almost a no-brainer.
For the most part, winds are convection currents -- generated by the difference in temperature and humidity between different spots in the world -- but heat is the serious driver in this. As an overall results, physics will call for an equalization of states -- this means cooling the equator and heating the poles.
Windmills bleed off some of the kinetic energy from this process, as such, they're almost guaranteed to slow the process of pumping heat from the equator to the poles.
This is, however, probably a good thing, because other studies have concluded that the arctic will be (and has been) more affected by global warming than the temperate and tropical regions, so slowing the process would actually help to cut back some of the side effects of global warming, and possibly help to protect the polar ice caps (and thus moderate the resulting ocean level rise).
It's not a question if projects like this on a large scale would affect the weather. The answer to that is a no-brainer (yes). The question is how, and (probably more importantly) how we could most beneficially manage the resulting side-effects.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I just had to say it. Apart from that, I find it a bit funny to see that on one side a lot of people reject the thought that burning fossil fuel is a major factor in the global heating, because 'it isn't sufficiently proved', but the all jump at this one, which is not in the least as well founded, scientifically.
This is not to say that I don't think the result is valid; but if one accepts this result, there is no good reason to reject that our pollution with CO2 etc is causing the global heating; and that if we want to improve our outlook, we must take steps now by drastically reducing our burning of fossil fuel.
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windpower != dependence (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I'm Off Grid [greenbits.com] and loosely affiliated with an Alternative Energy Resource Site [reresource.org] (btw, we could use some help !)
Also, I have designed and constructed a 2.4 KW Windmill [fieldlines.com]
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Re:my thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
I like having electricity to run my computer, a car I can drive across the country in, a hospital with fancy chemicals and plastics. However I believe it is utterly foolish to continue using the sources for these things that we are at the rate that we are and expect that we can maintain our way of life forever. Refusing to change our way of life at all is a sure way to ensure that we lose it entirely.
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Re:my thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't a problem with environmentalists -- not real ones, anyway. It's a problem with people use the environment to push their own personal agenda -- like promoting their personal choice in recreation (hiking is a good example), by 'preserving' public land using a definition that only allows human use in the form of hiking, with no other way to access the area, or recreate in it (even horseback riding is verboten). This, of course, doesn't go well with the rest of the voting public that prefers to recreate in other ways, and often paints a negative image of environmentalism in general.
Real environmentalists look at the facts and are willing to say that it's better to go with a less damaging source of power, than it is to stonewall for decades demanding a perfect source of power, forcing us to use the current/old massively polluting methods. (The damage there is already done, goes the mantra of the stonewall crowd.)
Honestly, the faux environmentalists seem more like religious fanatacists: The similarities are striking - they use their cause (environment or diety/dogma) to support their (frequently narrow) worldview, often in disagreement with non-fanatics of the same group. This allows the fanatics to strike down any kind of disagreement (even facts) with impunity, and en masse. The result is the same to those of us who at least attempt to reason: It gives the group (either environmentalism or religion) an undeserved and unfair black eye.
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Re:Kyoto (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is by far the highest emissions per capita, and its worse in that the US doesn't even do much of its own manufacturing....(imports far exceed exports)
Global warming will affect everyone, and the costs of not acting will be far greater than the cost of implimenting the protocol- that's why every other country is still going ahead with the plan, even without US participation. Yes, even Russia agreed to the plan, with the terrible shape its economy is in, because it knows the costs of not acting will be greater.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
And considering that cutting greenhouse gasses will require substantial investments in technology by companies all around the world, and the fact that the US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies than it stands to lose from job cuts at the oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
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Re:Mix and match! (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to like space travel, but the Columbia shuttle incident shows just how bad an accident could get.
I want to like sex, but AIDS shows just how bad an accident could get.
I mean, seriously, are you honestly trying to make this sort of argument? In the development of any technology or process, mistakes are made, and they are learned from. Are you under the impression that there's never been a fatal accident at a coal-based power plant, in the history of their development? Are you under the impression that there have never been accidents with dams? With the development of air travel? Space travel?
Here's a news flash for you: production of energy, at its most basic level, involves the harnessing of an exothermic -- or at least exergonic -- reaction, either chemical or nuclear, at some level or another. This essentially means that if you are dealing with large amounts of energy all concentrated in one place, there always remains the distinct possibility that it could all blow up in your face.
This is true of every single energy production method that actually generates large amounts of energy in a small space. Wind and solar aren't dangerous because the amount of energy generated per square foot is very small; and this is exactly what makes them (at this point in time) unworkable solutions for large scale energy production.
For everything else, you're dealing with potentially explosive, volatile (but hopefully controlled) chemical or nuclear reactions. That's how you get the energy out of them. (Fusion may be an exception).
However, despite the fact that your car runs by constantly harnessing the energy produced by an exploding gasoline/air mixture, it itself doesn't explode. Why is this? Engineering. See, despite the fact that gasoline is volatile (less so now than fuels used in the past, when combustion engines were first being developed) we have figured out how to stabilize engines running on them. They don't blow up in your face. But I'm willing to bet you that when people were first messing around with driving pistons by explosive force, someone got hurt. It was inevitable. It's part of the process.
Look, no one likes accidents, but the Chernobyl thing is silly to bring up. In terms of design, it's like comparing modern cars to Pintos, and concluding that every car will behave that way in an accident -- but Chernobyl, like the Pinto, was flawed from an engineering perspective, not from a technology perspective. When the Pinto was recalled, people didn't say, "Man, this automobile technology is bunk, let's never use it again, and use pogosticks for transportation from now on", they said, "Damn, Ford sure fucked up the design of that car. Let's never design cars like that again."
Throw in the word nuclear, and suddenly, everyone is saying, "Yeah, Chernobyl was poorly designed, and to boot, the operators were running it in a deliberately unsafe manner, and there was an accident; so let's stop the development of nuclear energy completely, and just use our radioactive reserves to build weapons of mass destruction instead." I mean, WHAT?
If someone had suggested that same idea wrt to automobile technology right after the Pinto incident, people would have rightly thought he was looney. But if it's nu-cu-lar, well, darn! I guess that logic makes perfect sense!
Nevermind that current reactor designs are completely different from Chernobyl's, and that the same accident would not be possible again, even if they tried.
Yeah, let's just kill the most promising means of producing renewable, clean energy because, during early development of the engineering principles needed to control such a powerful reaction, an accident occured. Let's wax lyrical about wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power solutions solving all our problems when a) they don't scale b) are prohibitively expensive and c) have problems
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Re:Woohoo! (Score:5, Informative)
Your hair dryer doesn't produce enough thermal pollution to affect the weather and produce storms. But the CO2 from the coal that was burned to power your hair dryer interferes with the ground's radiation of IR into space. For every BTU of power extracted from coal to produce electricity for your hair dryer, x BTUs will be trapped in the Earth's atmosphere by the CO2 that was released from burning that coal. To calculate a good lower limit on x you can compute how many kilowatt-hours of energy would be required to, say, account for the melting of the 1,000,000 square km of sea-ice that disappeared over the past 30 years (a figure from an article on the wires today), and divide by the actual kilowatt-hours that have been generated from burning carbon over the same 30 year period.
So assume the ice is 3m thick: 3,000 cubic km of ice is 3*10^12 cubic meters of ice. The density of ice is
That was the numerator. Now for the denominator. How many kilowatt-hours have been obtained from generating CO2 over the past 30 years? You could gather data from all countries regarding vehicle emissions, electricity usage, etc. But there is a direct way to calculate it: use the increase in atmospheric CO2 that occurred between 1970 and 2000. The concentration increased from 330 ppm to 370 ppm, a net change of 40 ppm. (Pre-industrial was 280 ppm.) Atmospheric pressure is 10 tons per square meter. There are 4.4*10^14 square meters on the earth, so the atmosphere weighs 4.4*10^15 tons, 0.04% of which is new CO2, or 1.76*10^11 tons. Since 1 ton of carbon produces 3.7 tons of CO2, 4.76*10^10 tons of this is carbon. You get about one kilowatt-hour of energy from burning one pound of coal. That would mean about 10^14 kilowatt-hours have been gotten from fossil fuels in the past 30 years, uncorrected for CO2 sinks like the Amazon which are estimated to be absorbing about 25% of our yearly output.
THEREFORE x is at least 2.7 from melting Arctic sea ice alone. If we are to make the reasonable assumption that the ice's sudden disappearance over my lifetime has something to do with CO2 being one-third more abundant than it used to be when I was a kid, it means that if you burn enough coal to melt one pound of ice, 2.7 pounds of Arctic sea-ice will disappear as a result. If we took all the coal, oil, and natural gas that's been burned since 1970 and did nothing with it except melt ice, we would have melted only 40% as much ice as this. And that's just in one place. This lower limit calculation only considered the Arctic sea-ice in today's wire story. But the rest of the planet- continents, oceans, land ice in Greenland - warms up too. The true ratio may be in the hundreds or thousands. And this is a figure only covering excess heat observed over the past 30 years. The CO2 will take time to dissipate, causing the ratio to rise even if we stopped all CO2 production today.
The problem is obviously not direct thermal pollution. Over just a few decades a liter of CO2 will retain much more thermal energy from the sun than we got out of it when we burned it. This should also put our windmill problems into some perspective.
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