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Ken Fabian

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Posts posted by Ken Fabian

  1. @MigL I wasn't suggesting runaway CO2; the releases will be finite, but some carbon feedback tipping points are capable of raising CO2 levels beyond what we presently have, bringing damaging climate changes over decades and centuries, whilst the natural processes that can reverse them are more like centuries to millennia. Beyond the lifetimes of children now living, to whom - I think - we have ethical obligations to minimise forseeable harms from our actions. 

    The "ratchet mechanism" as I describe it is of course, rhetorical - applicable to the shorter term, like the scale of human lifetimes. If you are aware of viable and cost effective means to bring CO2 down on decadal timescales - disengage or reverse that ratchet - I'd be interested.

  2. 12 hours ago, MigL said:

    I don't want to undermine the seriousness of AGW.

    I recently watched the BBC  Walking with Monsters/Dinosaurs/Beasts/Cavemen,  as suggested in another thread.
    Apparently at one time CO2 levels were up to 40 times higher than they are today.

    Was the ratcheting mechanism broken back then, or is this hyperbole that illustrates the premise of the OP ?

    Within the human related timeframes that this round of warming is occurring it is a lot like a ratchet; processes like CO2 uptake by oceans and vegetation can bring some reductions to raised CO2 fairly quickly in the absence of continuing emissions from fossil fuel burning but not nearly enough to bring us back down to pre-industrial; centuries to millennia for that and still highly dependent on what humans are doing.

    My understanding is that a rapid switch to very low/zero emissions would see enough CO2 (in the process of reaching a new equilibrium) taken up by oceans and vegetation to nullify the increased warming from reduced atmospheric aerosols and "in the pipeline" committed warming from CO2 ... but not much more. And that only so long as significant tipping points are not passed - things like soils and permafrost releasing a lot of additional GHG's due to warmer temperatures or ice sheet collapse - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/climate-change-commitments/ 

    Impacts like sea level rise are likely to continue for a long time after surface air temperatures stabilise - and that will be all cost and loss; the rise in value of "new" coastal property cannot offset the permanent loss of old coastal property, plus all those people who have to move somewhere. And a lot of that "new" coastal property is going to get inundated in time as well.

    I don't know think examples from warmer conditions of geological ages past provide any reason to believe the warming and changes we are experiencing will turn out being harmless or easily managed - nor that periods of stable warmer climates of the past in any way are representative of rapidly changing climate; for most of the species, rapid climate change has been cause for extinctions.

    I am also of the view that repeat  opportunities for global civilisation will be hard to come by if things go badly; there won't be the readily accessible high quality mineral ores used to make our first attempt for example and I am not convinced the buried waste of our age will be quality resources enough to compensate.

  3. I understand what "alarmist" means and the mainstream expert advice we've been getting and the experts giving it on climate change is not alarmist.

    18 hours ago, drumbo said:

    It is ridiculous to believe that human beings could not survive in an environment where dinosaurs could.

    Human civilisation arising under such conditions, maybe. This human civilisation survive conditions changing that much? No. I don't believe our global population and civilisation and the infrastructure and global economy that supports us can survive the change into the kind of environment the dinosaurs had.

    18 hours ago, drumbo said:

    If you believe that climate change is a threat solely because it introduces change then that is an alarmist position, since you have only considered the downsides of possible changes and not the benefits.

    The conclusions that the effects of the change global warming introduces will be bad for people, infrastructure, agriculture and remnant natural ecosystems emerged out of science based investigation to understand how it will proceed and what impacts it will have. The grandfather of global warming, Arrhenius - living in a climate with freezing winters - thought like you that warming would be good, but had not - was not capable - of climate modeling and was guessing. Me, I live in a climate where adding 3 or 4 or 5 degrees is truly terrifying - drought and heatwave would kill livestock and crops and forest and the fires would turn the remnants to ash every summer. A large part of the human population lives in places like that. Your belief that only downsides were considered is false; global warming really is overwhelmingly damaging.

    Scientists are raising alarms because it is seriously alarming - and it has already gone beyond any "might happen" to "how much and when". We are way past holding out for scientist to come up with different answers; we aren't going to get any. And it is a cumulative problem; waiting just makes it worse, in ways that we can't ever get back from. CO2 is a thermostat with a ratchet; we keep turning it up just by keeping on as we are and we can stop it from going up further by stopping emissions (so long as carbon feedback tipping points aren't crossed) but we can't turn it back down. People are legitimately alarmed.

  4. 8 hours ago, farsideofourmoon said:

    Some day in the far, far future mankind will travel the stars; this is inevitable, it is in our genes. Believing this I have been contemplating how we get to where we want to go. I do not believe we can carry enough fuel to propel us, nor do I believe we could find the fuel we need along the way.

    Having said that the only choice we have is to use another source of energy that we have not considered before. That source of energy gravity. Gravity has an almost limitless power; it holds planets in orbit around our sun and solar systems together.

    I believe we need to find a way to use the pulling force of gravity to pull us in the direction we want to go. We lock on to the gravity waves of a far-off galaxy and let it pull us in that direction. The speed at which we travel will along this wave will increase exponentially exceeding the speed of light and beyond.

    Just a thought

    What's your thoughts on this-?

    I don't think there is anything inevitable about interstellar travel and it is living on Earth, not space, that is "in our genes"; we will be remaking the environment around us to mimic the conditions of Earth wherever we go. I suspect the urge to seek new horizons when opportunities appear constrained may be in our genes - a primitive urge that worked well when humans were not yet spread across a world that was overflowing with natural and readily exploitable resources. I don't think it is so well suited to extremely hostile environments; we need well made plans with high levels of confidence for things that complex, not primitive urges and optimism.

    I also have serious doubts about colonising any planets that have their own life - even unicellular "primitive" life; not only because that biology and biochemistry, uncontaminated, may be the most valuable resource such a planet has, there is a high likelihood of biochemical incompatibility, poisons and allergens. And any mission that can reach another star ought to be capable of builing operating space habitats - and probably find that easier than attempting a colony on a planet.

    I agree that carrying enough fuel and other essential resources will be very difficult, however I think the "most possible" means of crossing interstellar space as I see it will rely on fuel found along the way and it will not be anything like a one shot trip; if self reliant colonisation of deep space objects becomes possible and new colonies are preferentially chosen further along a line to another star then in a distant future humans could reach there. Each colony would have to grow large enough to be a large industrial economy - nothing less being capable of the high technology requirements for survival, growth and providing the technology for the next colonisation.

    I have serious doubts about any direct travel across interstellar distances in one go; any ship itself (or fleet) would have to carry the equivalent of a large, advanced - and working - industrial economy to sustain itself over the extreme distances and multigenerations of time. I am not convinced that will be possible.

    Gravity as a way to get ships to where you want? The difficulties of interstellar travel are enormous and gravity is not a space 'drive'. There is no known way to get it to preferentially attract any spacecraft in a chosen direction to the exclusion of existing local gravitational fields and unlikely such technology will be possible.

  5. 4 hours ago, MigL said:

    That being said, CO2 is not waste.
    It is essential for life on the planet, and part of a 'cycle'.
    ( its constituents are the basis for all life on the planet )
    Certainly not the definition of waste

    I disagree; the products of combustion of fuels are waste, just as food scraps and sewage solids are - which are also (potential) nutrients for other living things. They are especially problematic waste products when the flows of them exceed the capacity of natural as well as technical cycles to recycle and re-use them.

  6. So the world's number one waste product - about 5 times more than all other waste combined but a gas not a solid, ie CO2 - is not included? It does get it's own studies, lots of them but the enormous scale of that waste stream does leap out when you list it together with the rest.

  7. 23 hours ago, StringJunky said:

    "Alarmist" is used by people who don't believe a threat is real; with dismissive connotations.

    Used that way, yes, but falsely about people taking decades of consistent top level expert advice - alarm calls - seriously; sounding an alarm when the threat is real is not "alarmist". Climate scientists expressing alarm are not "alarmists".

    According to dictionaries it is variants of "someone who exaggerates a danger and so causes needless worry or panic."

    23 hours ago, MigL said:

    That interpretation is in the 'ear of the listener'.
    An alarmist, by definition, sounds, or voices, an alarm.

    MigL - I think the meaning is clear and has remained unchanged (other than by misuse) over time; the changing of definitions that alarms me is using it to denote a political extremist irrespective of whether there is real cause or not to raise an alarm.

  8. It may not be intended that way but "alarmists" usually means people making exaggerated or false claims of impending doom. Being alarmed because multiple (independent) studies all show we face a real problem of unprecedented scale is not the same as being "alarmist".

    That aside, the impacts of current warming are expected to harm people now living in ways that look ongoing and irreversible; our responsibilities to "the planet" or it's remnant natural ecosystems may be unclear and not universally accepted but our responsibility to people generally is. I am one who think we do have that broader responsibility - and that issues like climate stability and unsustainable land use practices are inextricably linked to enduring human prosperity and security.

    It doesn't matter what the CO2 levels and global temperatures were millions of years ago or how much life (but not humans) thrived under those conditions -  the life and lives of humans now living would be ruined by a return of similar conditions.

  9. We can have a lot of confidence in the things we know about the things we can observe and examine, directly and indirectly. The things we cannot observe and examine are less significant. Purely hypothetical things, having no known existence, can be completely insignificant; rather than being reason to doubt everything we know that lack of observable existence of things we cannot observe is reason to doubt the existence of things that are purely hypothetical and cannot be observed.

  10. At the end of all the energy production the mass of the fission waste products will be less than the mass of the nuclear fuel. That missing mass will equal all the energy produced, waste heat included, ie m= E/C2, aka E=mC2. There is no energy from nothing and fission is not over unity.

  11. 19 minutes ago, studiot said:

    Yes indeed, but there is another viewpoint about this, other than defeatism.

     

    These kinds of schemes have been proposed again and again - some in great detail; they are not failing for lack of imagination. But I would not call assessing such plans on their merits and finding them wanting defeatism; that very ability to use foresight and understand what will and won't work before committing valuable resources is important progress. And besides the many schemes that are found wanting there will be projects that do pass, potentially more as engineering capability advances. Flood mitigation dams do work in many events that would cause flooding even if they can still be overwhelmed.

    The most effective solution - and most ignored - is to use foresight and stop building vulnerable infrastructure in flood prone areas. I would call that realism from applying intelligence and foresight to planning, rather than call it defeatism.

  12. This is hardly a new idea that no-one has thought of before. There are archives full of proposals for diverting flood water long distances to more arid but potentially agriculturally productive areas. They almost always fail on grounds of engineering difficulty and the high costs of overcoming them.

    Simply, the volumes of water during floods is enormous, far exceeding what any pipes or canals could manage.

    Leaving aside the transporting of that water to other regions and just looking at pumping water away as flood control we face the issue of just how much volume of water that will be. Consider a flood - how that volume of water flow compares to the normal watercourses. A smallish river will have much more flow than a large pipe or canal can carry and the volume during a flood far exceeds that capacity. Dams up stream are often used (and preferred) for flood mitigation - they catch a large part of the water before it reaches vulnerable cities and towns and bleed it away more slowly after the rains stop. These also work well for other water uses - at higher elevations it can be delivered for irrigation or town water supply to places downstream. As soon as you try to deliver it to higher elevations - or over them if intended for more distant regions - the costs and engineering difficulties rise.

    From US Geological Survey, (USGS)an example of how much more water flows due to rain events, in this case a modest 2 inches (52mm) in one day. Flow rate increased over to 150 times of base flow rate -

    Quote

     

    On Dec. 24, 2002, about two inches of rainfall fell in the Peachtree Creek watershed. This provides a good example to describe streamflow characteristics during a storm since the rain fell for only a few hours on that day and Peachtree Creek was at base-flow conditions before the rain started.

    The chart below shows rainfall, in inches, during each 15-minute increment on Dec. 24th and the continuous measure of streamflow, in cubic feet per second (ft3/s).

    Bar/line chart showing streamflow and rainfall for Dec 24, 2002 at Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Georgia.

    On Dec. 24, 2002, about two inches of rainfall fell in the Peachtree Creek watershed. This provides a good example to describe streamflow characteristics during a storm since the rain fell for only a few hours on that day and Peachtree Creek was at base-flow conditions before the rain started.

     

    Serious floods make that look small change.

    There are environmental consequences to flood mitigation and diverting water for agriculture - flood plains with ecosystems that rely on those floods are often much changed by human uses, uses that are disrupted by flooding. Human uses almost always take priority. But even all those mitigation efforts are routinely overwhelmed during serious rain events.

  13. I think we can expect a lot of normal activities to get suspended but I have no doubt that ideological agendas will get pushed through under the guise and cover of this emergency. With governments often inclined towards authoritarianism - getting stuff done so much easier without those annoying checks and balances - the potential for those tendencies to come to the fore looks obvious; it can be an opportunity for dissent and opposition and alternative views, legitimate or not, to be eliminated.

    As someone deeply concerned about global warming I fear that people who don't understand or accept the seriousness of climate change - most conservative-right leaning governments - will see pressing forward with a low emissions transition as frivolous and wasteful whereas keeping coal and gas and oil mining viable will be seen as essential, (as they currently are, for all they do need to be non-destructively phased out) - this despite use of low emissions energy already at "essential" levels in many places and new build costs being competitive or having shorter build times making their potential for future energy security look more important not less. And perhaps because they present a growing commercial threat to fossil fuels, we will see support withdrawn or diverted back to prop up fossil fuels.

  14. @AviiPk

    You are suggesting we wreck the biosphere, atmosphere and climate of planet Earth and increase exposure to radiation so you will be better adapted to live in places much less livable than Earth?

    Please, NO! If your suggestions were being undertaken they would be serious crimes against humanity. Not to mention crimes against the environment - and I like trees and the life that lives in them as well as liking wood as a material to make things with.

    The ability of biological organisms to adapt to extreme conditions is greatly exaggerated - no ordinary evolutionary adaptations are going to make the biology we are built of survive and thrive in the below freezing temperatures and near vacuum conditions of Mars. The adaptations needed are technological - making artificial environments that suit humans. Perhaps, if the technology is successfully developed, genetically engineered adaptations - but only for environments that are not too different to what we have.

  15. GM just committed 20 billion USD to new battery electric vehicles, including a joint battery plant with LG Chem. They hope to bring down battery costs with reduced Cobalt/reduced cost chemistry in pouch cells. They intend to build battery electric vehicles with plug in (level 2 240V?) charging as well as Fast Charging. They are talking "could be" 400+ mile range.

     

    Whoever invents seriously better batteries will become rich beyond all imagination and there is a lot of active R&D.

     

  16. @Moreno With EV's nudging 5% of new passenger vehicle sales - and the strongest growing section of the market - they are well ahead of MHD powered vehicles at 0%. This would not be the case if battery powered vehicles did not work satisfactorily now - and they will almost certainly work even better and be cheaper in 10 years time, let alone 50.

    Battery technology is still improving and does not need to approach the energy densities of hydrocarbon fuels to work more than well enough. EV's also complement growing levels of Renewable Energy very well and are likely to become fully integrated into home energy systems as well as electricity grids;  a single connected EV can be backup power to a home but a million connected EV's can be backup power for a city. Just responsive, smart scheduling of charging makes them a means of load levelling for stability for electricity networks.

    If it is to be zero emissions MHD needs fuels that are zero emissions - renewable Hydrogen or bio-ethanol? Synthetic fuels made with RE? Higher efficiencies for fossil fuel use has serious limits with respect to emissions reductions - it can be a transitional option but is not a solution. I'm not convinced bio-ethanol is going to be a significant fuel replacement and Hydrogen (if/when MHD beats fuel cells, that are also subject to continuing improvement) as transport fuel is struggling to gain traction.

    Our transport technology choices cannot be independent of the need to reduce emissions - and that requirement is running on a shorter time frame than 50 years.

  17. What do the proposed MHD devices use as fuel/energy? The Wikipedia description fails to say where the energy required is coming from; they must be powered with something. I admit I don't really understand how these are expected to work as automobile "engines".

    In any case I think it is not ICE vehicles that it must prove significantly better than; MHD will struggle to compete with battery electric - which, for all the well known limitations, appears well capable of delivering enough range for most practical purposes, with fast charge stations becoming common enough and fast enough that long trips are not being found to be problematic. Everyday commuter use charging is mostly a matter of plugging in when garaged, saving time, not adding to it - and added up, most ICE vehicle users spend more time refueling than EV users spend waiting at charge stations.

     300 - 500 km range is common (not far short of range with many ICE cars) and over 600 km (390 miles) is already commercially available; any significant improvements in battery energy density (and I think we will see improvements) will extend that.

    I think the range "problem" for EV's, like the related battery energy density issue, is getting overstated. 

    It does seem likely that most Tesla EV's will manage more than 500,000 miles/800,000km with reduced but still useful range without battery replacement - longer than we could expect an ICE drive train to last. Tesla is claiming improved batteries are being developed - not greater range if I understand it, but longer life, up to 1,000,000 miles/1,600,000 km.

    Any competing technology has a high - and continually rising - bar to get over.

  18. Punishment is more popular than rehabilitation because lots of humans get a sense of satisfaction and pleasure from knowing people they believe are bad being made to suffer. And conversely, the idea that someone who commits crimes should be treated humanely and helped to become a more capable and productive citizen is unpopular. Rehabilitation can be perceived as about the best for the offender, despite preventing further crime, and that offends sensibilities of those who have been victims. I think popular opinion - often deliberately encouraged, through dramatic entertainment and political debate - has more to do with supporting punishment over rehabilitation than studies about recidivism; the good cop beats a confession out of someone bad or the nasty sex offender gets put in a cell with the biggest, nastiest sex offender of all. How satisfying! But our society's institutions and systems can put the issues into a context where it is not about how it makes people feel; facts are sought, wider consequences are considered, including genuine efforts to rehabilitate offenders and prevent recidivism.

    The ability to feel good about something bad happening to someone, so long as we believe they are bad and therefore deserve it is one of humanity's most problematic traits. It doesn't require investigation and weighing of evidence to believe someone is bad and deserves harsh treatment; just being told they are bad can be enough. Worse, just sharing the religion, ethnicity, political ideology or just appearance as people deemed bad can be enough. It means brutal treatment is not automatically and intrinsically considered bad, but is dependent on what we think of the victims. What we think of the victims may have nothing to do with any direct or actual knowledge.

    I suspect that in evolutionary terms this protected homo sapiens sensibilities in the face of recurring violence and conflict; we can support and participate in brutal acts but not have our sanity destroyed by it.

  19. Promoting less taxes through not having "socialist" welfare makes a voter winning slogan but is not a good way to run a nation. Some nations do have political parties and governments that manage to look further than simplistic ideas about presence of welfare/health/education programs being an unnecessary burden on the productive people, meaning them not paying makes them - and the economy as a whole - better off. I don't think that is true.

    My own view is the presence of an underclass of unemployed poor that gets none of those kinds of support comes with costs that may be difficult to predict and quantify but don't stay neatly confined to society's losers and, on the contrary, impact the whole society and economy in costly ways. Those costs can be as simple as more policing and enforcement to prevent beggars and homeless camps messing up the streets and more security measures to prevent petty and not so petty theft. Not having such programs becomes an absence that can lead to costs that can blow out spectacularly, when social discontent becoming social disruption; social disruptions can be incredibly destructive. Extremist ideology as well as criminal gangs can thrive amongst people who have few options to better themselves.

    People who get little or no access to education or health services may never become productive employees, let alone paying consumers of products and services that grow the economy; they represent lost opportunities at least as much as they represent a drag on an economy.

  20. I am not aware of any actual program to teach climate science denial in Australian schools. If that is not the case I would like to see a link. Perhaps within the non-government private schools sector? The disgraced Cardinal George Pell certainly encouraged climate science denial within the Catholic school system, despite the current Pope's position - he consistently portrayed concern about climate change as a kind of paganistic false belief and pricing on emissions as false offerings to false heathen Gods.

    The idea that toxic stuff from the bowels of the Earth, that burn fiercely with a notable brimstone fragrance, that offers wealth and power beyond all prior imagination might come with a catch was apparently as outside his reckoning of how the world works as the idea that thousands of scientists could be conducting their studies honestly and presenting the conclusions that observation and data and reason led them to without bias or ulterior motives.

    There has been a proposal by Senator Pauline Hanson - one of those "I'll fight for what I believe in and fight for the right to not examine or think deeply about what I believe in" nationalistic jingoistic populist type politicians - to introduce such an "education" program in Australian schools (with a strong anti gay rights component) but, despite the current Australian government being dominated by climate science deniers who would probably wholeheartedly approve, the Morrison led government prefers to maintain an outward pretense of taking climate seriously, to avoid having to debate the issue and look stupid; I suspect they find obstructing climate and emissions actions easier that way. Which position supporting Hanson's bill openly in parliament would jeopardise. It is currently unlikely such a program would get sufficient support to get introduced.

  21. It is becoming common in Australia for homes to divert "grey" water (pretty much all waste water barring that with faeces and urine) to storage for garden use and sometimes toilet/bathroom flushing, with separate pipework. It does come with potential health risks. I don't expect community infrastructure for that to be widely deployed but I am sure there are people proposing it. Reducing demand for water, especially during periods of drought, makes it worth doing; municipal water supply usage can be tightly capped during dry periods. Although such restrictions can be lifted during times of water abundance.

    Salt water would have limited uses and is likely to present difficulties - any that gets into soils will contaminate them and kill plants and soil life and cause corrosion to anything metal; in effect it would need to be managed as if it were toxic. Which, for practical purposes, outside of ocean and salt rich environments, it is.

  22. Thylacyne skulls are quite distinct from Canine - competent experts won't have any trouble telling them apart. Especially the teeth, which for a Thylacine, are distinctly marsupial. Thylacine teeth are not well evolved for crunching bones.

    It is worth keeping in mind that marsupials and mammals do share much in common; evolution will make variations around what already exists and works.

  23. 19 hours ago, guidoLamoto said:

    because it wouldn't fit the narrative to say otherwise

     

    On 2/8/2020 at 10:04 AM, guidoLamoto said:

    But if they don't make the claim, then no more research funds

     

    Bluntly, I think these are the conclusions you start with and the facile sciency sounding but substanceless arguments are chosen to fit the narrative. You need to try them on an audience that has poor comprehension of climate science and are more inclined to take those arguments as true without checking.

     

    19 hours ago, guidoLamoto said:

    Before we let dictatorial govt regulations force us to return to an 1880s lifestyle with an inability to feed 7.5B people at a cost estimated to be $4 QUADrillion (that's 50x the  Gross WORLD Product), we probably ought to make sure we have the science right

    Alarmist economic fear of the costs of acting appropriately in response to decades of consistent top level science advice has been one the most potent Doubt, Deny, Delay arguments of all. Which works best if doubt is thrown on that science based advice - allowing the economic costs of not acting appropriately to be left out entirely.

  24. 40 minutes ago, jenb said:

    wouldn’t increased atmospheric CO2 result in so much less energy arriving at the earth’s surface during the day that it should at least partially offset the increase in trapped radiation from the earths surface at night?

    What incoming IR that can reach the surface directly will be mostly short or "near" IR, which is less absorbed by greenhouse gases than long IR. A lot of the re-radiation from sun warmed earth back upwards is long IR. Any short IR that is absorbed along with long IR (which is more strongly effected and doesn't penetrate all the way through, going up or coming down) is absorbed in the atmosphere and will be retained within the climate system, not lost. Bulk air movement will carry it around and mix it.

    So, no it isn't going to offset the warming from raised CO2.

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