Greenland is Melting Away Before Our Eyes (rollingstone.com) 321
Amid an ongoing heat wave, new data show the Greenland ice sheet is in the middle of its biggest melt season in recorded history. It's the latest worrying signal climate change is accelerating far beyond the worst fears of even climate scientists. From a report: The record-setting heat wave that sweltered northern Europe last week has moved north over the critically vulnerable Greenland ice sheet, triggering temperatures this week that are as much as 25 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Weather models indicate Tuesday's temperature may have surpassed 75 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of Greenland, and a weather balloon launched near the capital Nuuk measured all-time record warmth just above the surface. That heat wave is still intensifying, and is expected to peak on Thursday with the biggest single-day melt ever recorded in Greenland. On August 1 alone, more than 12 billion tons of water will permanently melt away from the ice sheet and find its way down to the ocean, irreversibly raising sea levels globally.
[...] Even just a few decades ago, an event like this would have been unthinkable. Now, island-wide meltdown days like this are becoming increasingly routine. The ongoing melt event is the second time in seven years that virtually the entire ice sheet simultaneously experienced at least some melt. The last was in July 2012, where 97% of the ice sheet simultaneously melted. In the 1980s, wintertime snows in Greenland roughly balanced summertime melt from the ice sheet, and the conventional wisdom among scientists was that it might take thousands of years for the ice to completely melt under pressure from global warming. That's all changed now. With a decade or two of hindsight, scientists now believe Greenland passed an important tipping point around 2003, and since then its melt rate has more than quadrupled.
[...] Even just a few decades ago, an event like this would have been unthinkable. Now, island-wide meltdown days like this are becoming increasingly routine. The ongoing melt event is the second time in seven years that virtually the entire ice sheet simultaneously experienced at least some melt. The last was in July 2012, where 97% of the ice sheet simultaneously melted. In the 1980s, wintertime snows in Greenland roughly balanced summertime melt from the ice sheet, and the conventional wisdom among scientists was that it might take thousands of years for the ice to completely melt under pressure from global warming. That's all changed now. With a decade or two of hindsight, scientists now believe Greenland passed an important tipping point around 2003, and since then its melt rate has more than quadrupled.
IT'S A SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS... (Score:3, Insightful)
When we can predict with 100% accuracy that one political party (of the mere 2) will come into this discussion to lie, obfuscate, FUD and distracto-dance away from this important realization, because they are so politically full of dogshit...
That they consider lying their job.
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But her emails!!
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"I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"...Bill Hicks.
Bill Hicks is Alex Jones.
Re:IT'S A SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS... (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole fucking point of his post was to say this "a plague on both your houses" line is fundamentally at odds with the facts. Do you see a single post with Democrat talking point that doubts the veracity of this story about the Greenland melt? Of course you don't, because there are no such Democrat talking points. Only Republicans have talking points about this.
It's really fucking fundamental: it is only Republicans who are politically committed to denying climate change.
Not true (Score:5, Insightful)
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Biden thinks he can solve it for $500B
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The "both parties are the same" trope is such utter garbage. It calls into question your agenda and intelligence.
CItation Please (Score:2, Informative)
I cannot find any reference where a single Republican member of Congress or the Administration proposed the construction of nuclear power plants as a way to reduce carbon emissions and fight global climate change.
I agree that nuclear might be a stop-gap measure but not seeing anything supporting your claim that Republicans have supported the idea.
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No one wants to pay for nuclear, especially conservatives, when coal and natural gas is cheaper.
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Because of a little thing called economics.
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No one wants to pay for nuclear, especially conservatives, when coal and natural gas is cheaper.
All energy is heavily subsidised. Coal and gas aren't cheaper, you're just taking out an exorbitantly expensive loan then your grandkids will have to pay back with interest.
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"Base load" is a great word. Whenever someone uses that word in a discussion about electricity production or distribution, you can safely assume that they have no idea what they are talking about.
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Hey, did you cite me?
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There is nothing to LOL about.
The question only is: is it 12 (questionable) or 30 (possible) or 50 (likely) years.
Quick... (Score:5, Funny)
... Everybody should get on a jet or a cruise ship to go see it before it all melts away.
Re:Quick... (Score:4, Funny)
I reject your suggestion and condemn your frivolity. I plan to fly to several conferences in the next few months for the purpose of formulating plans to thwart your activity.
Re:Quick... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the tired, old "but Al Gore" argument.
If his/your plane journey stopped two people who would otherwise have taken one, then it's a net reduction of carbon use.
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Or, we can all take our private jets to discuss the problem of our CO2 emissions at a seaside resort, all while enjoying large air conditioned spaces and steak dinners.
https://pagesix.com/2019/07/30... [pagesix.com]
Then when we are done with this three day vacation... I mean debate and discussion, we can all fly home again in our private jets and tell everyone else how they need to reduce their CO2 output.
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Or, we can all take our private jets to discuss the problem of our CO2 emissions at a seaside resort, all while enjoying large air conditioned spaces and steak dinners.
And here's the thing that's going to really get your goat, when those very rich people do that it actually works. The movement to reduce CO2 is really ramping up, but it's not going to really stick without very influential people pushing it. Those people can affect literally millions, so if they merely use 100x carbon per person their lavish
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Assuming this is true (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is true, part of me is ashamed to admit that I am very curious what a ice-free greenland would look like. I bet its going to be some amazingly fertile soil once the chlorides are dealt with. Oh the Irony that Eric Torvaldson named it Greenland out of spite. Some 1000yrs later it may come to be true.
Filled with humans (Score:5, Insightful)
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Greenland and other northern places will start rapidly filling up with humans over the next few decades.
Decades? From the story it seems clear that Greenland will be ice-covered for hundreds more years.
Re:Filled with humans (Score:4, Insightful)
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I am very curious what a ice-free greenland would look like
The wildest part will be all the old cold war Air Force bases that get uncovered.
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You can find out [smithsonianmag.com] if you want [wikipedia.org].
It will have a ginormous lake in the middle of it (due to the weight of the ice pressing it down, spring back will take millenia though), and most of the rest will be barren mountains. Not a lot of "amazingly fertile soil".
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curious what a ice-free greenland would look like
It will look exactly like the Yuma Proving Ground, but with seagulls instead of tanks.
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It is going to be mostly under water. Greenland is really a bunch of small islands that just happened to trap a huge ice sheet.
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Well,
they named Iceland as well out of spite.
Anyway, when Greenland was reached/discovered by the Vikings, they found the south tip.
Which was as green as it is now since 30 years again, which means: very green.
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Ah, Slashdot... where statements of undisputed fact get voted down.
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Everything gets voted down. It is to be expected. First rule of downvotes: Never talk about downvotes.
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B. When Greenland was green, New York and Miami and all of the world's largest coastal cities didn't exist.
C. Climate change is a big fucking problems for humans. If you don't understand that, you should start here: https://www.ipcc.ch/ [www.ipcc.ch]
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Really. You can't think of any problems with coastal cities being destroyed by rising sea levels? Are you stupid, psychopathically uncaring about other humans who live in those places, or both?
The only problem is the morons trying to build and rebuild at or below sea level, using my goddamned money.
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Oddly enough they're the same types who love borders, those things that are going to make adaptation deadly difficult.
Re: Assuming this is true (Score:2, Informative)
I can assure you that the parts of Greenland that are covered in an ice sheet a mile and a half thick have not been green during any period that modern humans have been around. I can also assure you that, even if all the ice melts in the next decade, it will probably be a thousand years before the land underneath it stops being bogland that no one will live or farm.
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when we realized that despite some variations in coverage, Greenland has had ice on it for over 11 million years, and some of the ice presently there is a million years old, comfortably predating homo sapiens?
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Soil gets fertile from biodiversity.
No it fucking doesn't. There are a handful of chemicals the vast majority of plants rely on. "Biodiversity" doesn't enter into it. You can just have pigs and corn, and as long as the pigs keep dying in the corn fields, you'll reach a stable, steady state.
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Chlorides are not any kind of fertilizer. If the associated anion is potassium or calcium then the chloride salt can be used as fertilizer, but is problematic since chloride toxicity is a problem. Usually other salts like sulfates (which are much more necessary for plant growth) are used. If you think chlorides are fertilizer you must imagine the ocean, which is 3.5% sodium chloride, must be a vast pool of rich fertilizer, instead of something that will kill plants if they encounter it (ever heard of "salti
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The elevation maps I have seen recently do not show separate islands (I had heard in the past this myself), even after the water rises, it looks like all major sections will be connected, though possibly by narrow isthmuses.
XKCD # 1732 (Score:5, Insightful)
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
Hindsight being 20/20, why do I feel like "Current Path" was the "Optimistic Scenario"?
Re:XKCD # 1732 (Score:4, Insightful)
why do I feel like "Current Path" was the "Optimistic Scenario"?
Mainly because of cognitive bias. You haven't looked at the data or anything.
Re:XKCD # 1732 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Show me where the bad data point touched you ?
Seriously who cares what the medium is, which points on that plot do you think are incorrect. The data is either valid or not, the plotting software is immaterial.
Yeah but it still snowed in NYC this year (Score:2)
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So obviously climate change and global warming is farce, amirite?
And tomorrow New York could fry or get hit by a hurricane or the Hudson could freeze solid next winter. The models of what is happening to the weather are spot on. The aberrations that cause wild swings in weather is what is more concerning. Global warming simply means that the frequency of swings in temperature in both directions will increase as the atmosphere heats up globally. However the overall trend will be toward hotter with the amplitude of the graph increasing accordingly. If you believe that noth
Geenland vs Iceland (Score:4, Insightful)
At this rate, Greenland will soon become as icy as Iceland.
Andrew Yang (Score:3)
Last night said it was too late. I agree with his premise that people should start migrating away from the coast.
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Hooray! (Score:2)
So Greenland is becoming green, after all (Score:2)
I have the only idea that will work (Score:2)
Then we'd better get busy ... (Score:2)
All natural ice is doing that. (Score:2)
This isn't news for anyone paying attention. Natural ice is melting around the globe, and buffering off the hothouse state we're headed for in a decade or so.
The data is conclusive. The climate change rate along with a sixth exciting is in full tilt now and the Earth's climate zones are most likely to experience a large scale shift and contraction within our lifetime.
Germany had 3 never-before heat peaks this year alone and when the ice still chilling is now will have completely melted away the party will r
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You know how much carbon is trapped in that permafrost right?
Re: No, it's not. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Earth is becoming more inhabitable for humans and has been for hundreds of millenia, as currently outgoing ice age has ended in cyclical warming.
No, the point in the Milankovitch cycle should be one of cooling. It had been cooling for the previous 8000 years. The current warming is counter cyclical.
Global warming is one of the key reasons why we have almost beaten world hunger,
No, it's a change in farming practices, the use of fertilisers from the Haber process and improved shipping.
a massive problem just twenty years ago.
No, it wasn't a massive problem 20 years ago. If you had said 35 years ago, e.g. Ethopia, then it would be more convincing, but it's believed that the drought that caused that famine may well have been due to climate change.
Ice ages and global cooling are the phases in planet history when life actually dies.
Some of the biggest extin
Re:No, it's not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Greenland is a large landmass, and solid land never melts.
Yes, it does - that's what lava is. In a few billion years, as the sun starts to enter its red giant phase, we are going to get some really serious global warming and that's actually going to happen.
A mere 25,000 years ago...
Yes, there is a natural, and well understood, cycle of ice ages due to natural climate change. However, that predicts that temperatures should be dropping now, not increasing. I think it is extremely fair to say that the evidence now is pretty overwhelming that humans are causing climate change and we need to start doing something about it.
I'm a scientist (but in physics, not climate science) and I was certainly very sceptical initially due to the very sketchy evidence. However, the climate scientists have kept working and gradually improving the standard of evidence so that now nobody should doubt that climate change is real and the human contribution is significant.
Evidence (Score:3)
These (and similar plots from different sources) were the data that I fi
Re:No, it's not. (Score:4, Informative)
Ever wonder why Greenland was named "green land"?
Since the Greenland ice sheet has been there since the Miocene, a long time before human language, or even humans were a thing, I'm going to keep wondering.
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Greenland never produced any grapes or wine. Zilch. Nada.
And they never exported any agriculture products of any kind from Greenland. They needed everything they could grow for their own use. What they did export was skins, hides, ivory, and dried fish (possibly).
I suspect that you are fantasizing based on some stuff you heard and never bothered to understand. Like Vikings discovering "Vinland", the north-eastern shore of Canada, named because of the native grapes found there. And since "vin" sounds sort of
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He's right though.
Greenland was settled by Erik the Red and his followers, after he was exiled from Iceland for murder.
It was named either Gronland (Greenland; to attract settlers) or Gruntland (Shallow-bay-land; to attract shipbuilders) but that is disputed.
What isn't disputed is their exports, because the people importing the stuff kept records that survive today. They had the very best walrus ivory available on the market. It was a legendary place that few people knew how to get to, but many had heard of
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A relevant XKCD [xkcd.com]. Denialists will always claim that every extreme high temperature is just "weather", even as these events get more and more extreme, and more and more frequent.
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The Vikings had a thriving colony there; they even produced agricultural products including grapes and wine. It's called Greenland for a reason. If it were covered in ice they might have called it Iceland.
Greenland was always dependent on imports of goods and even food from Iceland. When those imports began to dry up (not enough demand for things made of walrus tusks) the colony died out.
Re:No, it's not. (Score:5, Informative)
Lynwood Rooster of course presents his own carefully picked cherry to deny that the ice on Greenland is melting by linking to data on 2017, which was an anomalously low melt year.
Snopes [snopes.com] has a nice article about this, and includes a graph from the very same Polar Portal that LynwoodRooster endorses as an unassailable source of data that shows Greenland ice trending down steadily from 2002-2016. It mentions 2017(the year which LR cherry-linked to) as an anomalous one of low ice loss, and of course ice loss is way up again.
But just as the El Nino year of 1999 which had a temperature spike, and was then cited by denialists for 15 years "proving" that temperatures were decreasing, LR will cite 2017 as proving that Greenland is not melting for years to come.
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2017, I was getting cooked by "The Blob" that's probably why it was colder up there. The models show Pacific events like that repeating more frequently in the future.
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The 2017-18 season in the Arctic has once again been extraordinary. A cold summer with high levels of precipitation has benefitted the Ice Sheet, whilst glaciers have continued the development seen during the last six years in which they have more or less maintained their area.
Better to have snopes tell you what to believe, eh? Keep that brain pristine, let someone else do the thinking for you because learning stuff is hard!
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The data does not say otherwise.
You are just an idiot troll who links troll posts here. A few weeks ago you denied the ice melting on Greenland, moron.
The "danish metrological institute" is https://www.dmi.dk/ [www.dmi.dk] not www.trolportal.dk or www.polarportal.dk
What kind of moron are you?
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Re:No, it's not. (Score:4, Informative)
I did. It's both weather and climate in this case. Weather in the sense that this is the most intense melt event on record due to the warm air mass that has been moving north from Europe, and climate in the sense that it has been the most intense melt season on record in a long run of intensifying melt seasons going back to 2002.
So yes, Greenland is melting before our eyes.
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What's up with that? It's like a bad stand up comedy act!
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Nice quotes... unattributed, no link to source material. Who said "10 years NYC will be underwater" in 1988? Where is your proof?
Re: No, it's not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Some fringe crackpot probably said it which is enough to establish the accepted mainstream scientific position for his argument.
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https://www.houstonchronicle.c... [houstonchronicle.com]
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Oh I totally agree, the biggest real problem in climate science is that it didn't alarm us enough:
https://www.sciencealert.com/i... [sciencealert.com]
Re: No, it's not. (Score:4, Informative)
"10 years NYC will be underwater" in 1988? Where is your proof?
One over-excited person said that. Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies made no such 10 year predictions. They did agree climate change will likely be very bad for humans over at least the next 100 years, and it's possible to prevent if we actually do something, instead of denying facts.
Oh ya, and there is indeed a worst case scenario where NYC floods within 100 years. This was released recently, showing much worse outcomes (6.6ft) than previously predicted [pnas.org] (2013 IPCC said 1.7-3.2ft). Here's some graphics of 8ft [curbed.com].
But 6.6 is the 5% chance part. So if someone said there's a 1/20 chance you'd get run over and die if you cross the street, would you say 'aw, 5% is nothing!' and ignore all warnings? Most people would want to avoid being Darwin'd.
out of ice? (Score:5, Informative)
WTF does this mean? Do you think that Greenland is the world's ice cube factory, and without it, we have no source of ice? Nobody mentioned Greenland being "out of ice" nor is that the crux of this discussion.
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Who "we"?
The main problem with nuclear is that it doesn't make a very good business case. The US being a capitalist wonderland, if nuclear was profitable, Washington would be crawling with nuclear lobbyists, and companies would be trying to build it all over. But that doesn't seem to be happening. And really, it makes sense. With wind and solar getting cheaper and cheaper, what bank wants to finance a powerplant that might not ever break even? What company wants to spend years building a single powerplant t
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Who "we"?
We. You, me, us, voters, citizens, investors, customers, residents, and passengers on spaceship Earth. We. All of us.
The main problem with nuclear is that it doesn't make a very good business case. The US being a capitalist wonderland, if nuclear was profitable, Washington would be crawling with nuclear lobbyists, and companies would be trying to build it all over. But that doesn't seem to be happening. And really, it makes sense. With wind and solar getting cheaper and cheaper, what bank wants to finance a powerplant that might not ever break even? What company wants to spend years building a single powerplant that won't make money?
So, you are telling me we should just let the global warming happen because the solution costs too much? That's what I'm hearing.
We should just let the oceans rise and the glaciers melt because it must be cheaper to just move all the coastal cities to higher ground than to build some nuclear power plants.
So what else can be done? Perhaps throw massive amounts of government funding into research to make better, cheaper or more profitable powerplants? Or just build them on the government's dime? Neither seems particularly likely to happen with Trump in charge.
Trump is the only POTUS since Ford to take nuclear power seriously. It doesn't make
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That doesn't quite answer my question. I don't recall any time during my life being involved in funding a powerplant.
So what specific policy are you proposing here? Don't give me vague stuff. Specifics please. Who do you imagine building nuclear powerplants? Why aren't they building them now, and how do you make them do it? What regulations do you change? Do you just give them a bunch of money? Specifically how is this idea supposed to happen?
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Maybe this video will answer your question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The video is a panel of people from companies trying to build the next generation of nuclear reactors. What I got from there is that the largest problem is politics. The investors will come with funding but they need to know that the politicians won't pull the rug out from under them in the middle of the project. This has happened many times before in the nuclear power industry and so the investors are a bit nervous to invest in
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A dollar is better spent on buying wind or solar generation capacity than on nuclear power, even when factoring intermittent production and curtailment during times of low demand.
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A dollar is better spent on buying wind or solar generation capacity than on nuclear power, even when factoring intermittent production and curtailment during times of low demand.
So we shouldn't even try to bring down the cost of nuclear power? You do realize that wind and solar power are only competitive now because of decades of investment into research and development, don't you? I believe we can do more than one thing at a time. We can keep building windmills and solar collectors while we develop nuclear power.
Another thing we should all realize is that nuclear has provided 20% of our electricity for decades. It's done so with incredible safety, low CO2 and pollution, has be
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If we cannot have nuclear power then you are telling me that nuclear power is a greater threat than global warming.
No, we're telling you it's too late for nuclear power to do any good.
It takes too long to build the plants, and the skills to build a plant are highly specialized and limited to very few companies. So construction can not be scaled up rapidly.
highest return on investment
That is definitely not nuclear, btw.
This means a plan that includes onshore wind, hydro, and nuclear.
Hydro's done. There are already dams on all the good places to build dams.
Unfortunately, your plan from 1963 isn't going to help much in 2019.
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Good response. All your points are on target.
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Hydro's done. There are already dams on all the good places to build dams. ... no idea where this myth is coming from.
Not even 1% of the places are covered
River flow plants, most countries have none at all.
False. (Score:2)
False.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
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False.
Well it's among the lowest. The lowest three have similar means and moderate variances, so from that document you can't reasonably assert that nuclear is either better or worse than wind and hydro. Hydro is irrelevant to large scale power since there's a really limited number of appropriate sites.
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There are no leftist in the US.
A Leftist is someone who wants to take away all private ownership.
A Communist is someone who wants to take away all private ownership. There are plenty of leftists that love money and want bigger government at the same time. Silicon Valley and universities and megacorps are full of them.
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I live in Texas, so compared to everyone around me I'm an extreme leftist and:
I don't mind the government shrinking. gasp!
BUT the important part is I want it to be much more efficient.
I.e. Norway has a tiny recidivism rate - people don't return to jail, but if they land themselves there, it's a communist dream - free education - to the Ph.D. level, sometimes you can come & go as you wish. But the taxpayer ends up saving money because people don't return. And the "criminal" ends up saving their life a
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I live in Texas, so compared to everyone around me I'm an extreme leftist and:
I don't mind the government shrinking. gasp!
This does not seem to be related to the ice in Greenland?
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Thing is on Linux, whether you think a userland daemon layer is a good or bad idea, everyone can agree that systemd is not a very good implementation of such and it was written by a guy who's audio daemon is notoriously buggy.
On climate change you have a bunch of raging morons denying reality.