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Post by fascinating on Apr 30, 2019 7:00:59 GMT 1
The balance between 173,000 TW coming from the sun and an equal amount being radiated away is what produces an acceptable equilibrium surface temperature. If you add any amount of heat to the atmosphere, it will increase the equilibrium temperature, which is what people are concerned about: not the natural equilibrium 287 K but a creeping, inexorable, tiny amount of another 0.01 degrees per year or so. You seemed to be saying that the capture of heat itself, by human methods, is the cause of the rise in the heat of the world. It's true that, if we use solar energy to make a car go, we are delaying the re-radiating of that energy into space. But in fact that energy will be stored as chemical energy in a battery, not in the atmosphere. When the car is driven, the heat energy is put into the atmosphere, but it is soon radiated away into space. For the time that the energy is held in the atmosphere, there is only a very small increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere. Where the energy is used to heat a house, it is captured in the air that is in the house. It doesn't take long for that heat to escape the house, and that will warm up the air around the house (which might be an issue within a city of many close-built houses) but for the Earth's atmosphere as a whole, the increase in air temperature is small and very temporary. I should also mention the urban heat island effect caused by buildings absorbing energy from the Sun and increasing the night-time temperature as they radiate into the cooler air, but that will affect less than a thousandth of the Earth's surface. The main point is, capturing solar energy, storing it then using it for our purposes, will slightly delay the re-radiation of a very small part of the solar energy back into space, but it is not a cumulative effect. The real issue is the emission of over 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, which is cumulative, and causing a change in its composition which, it is held, slows down the re-radiation of the energy and heats the atmosphere up, more and more each year.
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Post by alancalverd on Apr 30, 2019 7:25:16 GMT 1
Just going back to the 18 TW figure, that represents about 2 kW per capita present consumption. If the population doesn't increase but everyone aspires to a western lifestyle, we will need to generate 5 times more power than we do now. If you want to do that with wind and solar sources only, you need to install peak capacity of 25 times our current total power use (since these systems only deliver an average 20% of peak output).
If the UK is a good model, less than 25% of our energy consumption is in the form of electricity, 75% is necessarily chemical. But renewables only produce electricity, so we're not talking about 25 times present installed electrical generating capacity, but a requirement for 100 times.
Next problem is that chemical fuels are easy to store, but we have no efficient means of storing electricity. Not easy to calculate how much we store at present but it's a tiny amount and no obvious technology for doing better.
And then we will have to convert all our existing vehicles and industries to run on electricity instead of chemical fuels. How long did it take to electrify the Great Western Railway? Oh, sorry, the program hasn't even started, but if the East Coast Main Line is any guide, about 20 years.
The loss of heat from the earth's surface is determined primarily by cloud cover, so whether the heat from your activities is radiated into space or just absorbed by a rise in atmospheric temperature, depends on the distribution of water in the sky. Problem is that increasing cloud cover increases the mean air temperature (because clouds absorb both incoming and outgoing radiation) which promotes evaporation and the formation of more clouds....Water is vastly more important than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and completely beyond our control.
Not that the detail matters. Whether you look at anthropogenic CO2, deforestation, anthropogenic heating, whatever, it is quite likely that human life will become very uncomfortable in the tropics over the next 1000 years, and in the shorter term we will be unable to meet per capita energy demand by any means. The simple solution, indeed the only solution, is to reduce the human population. No cost, no effort, and an immediate benefit. What could be better?
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Post by fascinating on Apr 30, 2019 8:47:05 GMT 1
Your scheme to reduce the population, by paying women of child-bearing age who are not pregnant, is not cost free. I am also not confident that paying women money, even a substantial amount, is enough to override the natural biological imperative to bear a child, at some point. In many places, the fertility rate is already below replacement level, and even in poor countries, birth rates have been very much reduced. Development (development that is of advantage to most of the population), is the best contraceptive.
I think that industries mostly do use installed electricity already. Electricity can be used to produce hydrogen from water, and can be stored, and/or used to drive cars and trains.
Water vapour is the main greenhouse gas but I am happy to let natural cycles regulate that. I disagree that clouds warm the atmosphere, but anyway I don't see any reason why cloud cover should increase, or decrease, so long as we don't destabilise the system by pollution.
Even if your policy was adopted worldwide (I think you will have to face it, that is unlikely) that might cut the population over decades by 50%, but it is has been said that we must reduce emissions to zero.
Population isn't the problem, pollution is the problem.
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Post by alancalverd on Apr 30, 2019 12:30:00 GMT 1
The saving in public costs of cash benefits, healthcare and education, plus the gain in working life, if each woman were to bear only one child, amounts to considerably more than the £1000 per year I suggested as the cost of my scheme. Development may well be a powerful contraceptive, but so far, development equals fossil fuel consumption or farming meat.
The fact that 75% of UK energy use is chemical rather than electrical suggests that industries do not "mostly use electricity". I have long advocated a hydrogen grid but it still needs to be built, then all industrial machinery and cars have to be rebuilt (using existing power supplies) to use it. Not that cars are the problem: trains trucks and buses use far more fossil fuel, and the hydrogen-powered airplane is a long way off.
All living things from yeast to humans alter their environment - it's called living. The trick is to limit the rate of pollution to what other living things can use to restore the balance, hence sewage farms and organic fertilisers. Trouble is that the present population cannot feed itself on organic fertilisers and we need an additional 30% (and growing) input of fixed nitrogen, which can only be obtained in the required quantities by burning fossil fuels in the Haber-Bosch process.
I do not expect my policy to be adopted worldwide until riots and starvation make people think before breeding. But I do see a defensible island as an ideal trial site - say the post-Brexit UK. If my scheme were adopted, our great-grandchildren would inhabit a fully sustainable island with a vastly better standard of living and 10 - 20% of the current population. Whether anyone else follows is their problem.
Apropos the effect of clouds on surface and atmospheric temperature, I can only refer to any standard textbook on meteorology, or those nice people on the telly who say "cloudy tonight so frost is unlikely". Or indeed the arctic novels of Jack London.
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Post by fascinating on Apr 30, 2019 21:45:41 GMT 1
I don't expect there to be starvation and riots. The world has 8 billion people and less people than ever are starving, and there are a lot of people who are eating too much. If the population peaks at 12 billion, we will need 50% more food, but I am optimistic that fertilisers, including those based on fixing nitrogen, will be applied more widely and more food will be grown.
Clouds can prevent a dramatic fall in temperature during the night, but during the day they reflect back radiation and it is cooler on the surface as a result.
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Post by alancalverd on May 2, 2019 23:53:09 GMT 1
Full marks to the UK Climate Change Committee for recommending a shift away from meat farming, but the rest of their program looks like sheer fantasy.
At present we get around 20% of our electricity from renewables. Increasing that proportion will seriously reduce the stability and reliability of the supply, but even if this is tolerable (no trains, industry or domestic heating on cold days - essential services only) we will need to increase the capacity of wind farms by a factor of 5 to eliminate all present fossil-fuelled power stations, then multiply by 3 to replace all other fossil fuel use. Where, one wonders, can we possibly install 15 times as many windmills as we already have? And that just accounts for "current" consumption, never mind the "capital" fuel consumed in replacing everything that uses fossil fuels.
We need to replace all vehicles with electric ones, so someone, somewhere, has to make them, presumably by burning fairydust because you can't use fossil fuel to mine the raw materials or process them - that would just be passing the buck, not solving the problem. Likewise new home insulation will have to be made and installed without burning more fuel, and your gas boiler will need to be replaced by something that works on the electricity we haven't generated yet.....
It's all a very good idea, but with so many chicken-and-egg problems, it surely can't be left to market forces and venture capital to electrify Britain. The ghastly alternative is State Control of Practically Everything for the next 30 years. They might at least start by nationalising the railways, which would be the least controversial move of all, then making a state-owned energy storage and distribution grid (nem con, probably).
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Post by fascinating on May 3, 2019 7:19:54 GMT 1
Full marks to the UK Climate Change Committee for recommending a shift away from meat farming, but the rest of their program looks like sheer fantasy. At present we get around 20% of our electricity from renewables. Increasing that proportion will seriously reduce the stability and reliability of the supply, but even if this is tolerable (no trains, industry or domestic heating on cold days - essential services only) we will need to increase the capacity of wind farms by a factor of 5 to eliminate all present fossil-fuelled power stations, then multiply by 3 to replace all other fossil fuel use. Where, one wonders, can we possibly install 15 times as many windmills as we already have? And that just accounts for "current" consumption, never mind the "capital" fuel consumed in replacing everything that uses fossil fuels. We need to replace all vehicles with electric ones, so someone, somewhere, has to make them, presumably by burning fairydust because you can't use fossil fuel to mine the raw materials or process them - that would just be passing the buck, not solving the problem. Likewise new home insulation will have to be made and installed without burning more fuel, and your gas boiler will need to be replaced by something that works on the electricity we haven't generated yet..... It's all a very good idea, but with so many chicken-and-egg problems, it surely can't be left to market forces and venture capital to electrify Britain. The ghastly alternative is State Control of Practically Everything for the next 30 years. They might at least start by nationalising the railways, which would be the least controversial move of all, then making a state-owned energy storage and distribution grid (nem con, probably). Building 15 times as many wind turbines as we already have, before 2050, is conceivable, considering the UK's offshore marine area is larger than Britain, with a large chunk that extends well to the West of the Hebrides, where the wind has never been known to cease (OK, I exaggerate).See jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-4552 Anyway, I doubt if there is a need for that much extra capacity, solar energy is now viable, in price. Yes, there is the problem of calm and cloudy periods in winter - but it surely isn't insuperable; perhaps a few gas power stations will need to be kept for back-up (they are suggesting ways to bring emissions down to virtually zero, not absolutely zero). I am actually hoping for new developments in battery technology that will solve the storage problem, or maybe we can buy electric power from abroad - hopefully Morocco, or other states, will be able to use solar and sell the electricity generated to Europe. As for the cost, take for example cars. A car lasts on average about 8 years before it scrapped, so theoretically the entire car population will be renewed nearly 4 times over in the the 31 years to 2050. Building, renewing, re-tooling, as well demolishing and re-building are par for the course for heavy industry, including power stations, most of which seem to only last about 40 years, so most of our power generation has to be renewed anyway, before 2050. It would only take increase in renewables of about 3% (3% of total UK energy) per year to reach nearly 100% by 2050. It's been increasing at nearly that rate in the past 10 years anyway. See 3rd picture in this link www.itv.com/news/2019-01-03/renewables-rise-to-new-record-as-overall-electricity-generation-falls/(For some reason I cannot seem to post a picture on here, even if I click on the Insert Image icon).
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Post by marchesarosa on May 26, 2019 11:56:19 GMT 1
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Post by alancalverd on May 27, 2019 22:15:23 GMT 1
Good heavens! Do you mean that windmill makers are motivated by economics? I thought they were philanthropists, paying out of their own pockets to save the planet and vying with one another to fill the land with steel and plastic for the greater good of mankind, not subsidy parasites looking for a quick buck.
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Post by fascinating on May 27, 2019 23:10:44 GMT 1
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Post by alancalverd on May 28, 2019 8:29:40 GMT 1
The article tickles the surface and misses a trick.
Everyone from gutter government to gutter journalists talks about "keeping the lights on". That ain't the problem. The adoption of LED lighting in the last 10 years has virtually eliminated the need for wiring and switches for outdoor signage, and reduced household lighting bills as much by improved reliability as by reduced power consumption. Putting solar + LED panels on a train makes it lighter, faster and cheaper than low-voltage cabling and switchgear, but it doesn't move the train: you save about 20W and 2 kg per passenger on lighting but still need 1 - 5 kW per passenger to get from A to B.
The aside that today's windmills could have supplied all the UK's power in 1958 is interesting if true. There is no doubt that electricity consumption has increased severalfold since then, but at the expense of direct coal and gas burning for transport, industry and space heating, and UK transport energy consumption has increased almost exactly in step with the decline in manufacturing since 1970. Overall, I doubt that UK energy consumption has more than doubled in the period.
The key element in Marchesa's source is, I think,
In short, we can't replace fossil fuels and nuclear electricity with more intermittent sources until we find a means of storing electricity at zero cost.
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Post by jonjel on Jun 3, 2019 9:29:09 GMT 1
I hear this mob are now threatening to shut down Heathrow for 10 days with the aid of drones. Maybe strategically places people with shotguns would help - not to shoot the drones down but to have a pop at the people operating them.
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Post by alancalverd on Jun 3, 2019 19:51:42 GMT 1
I have sympathy with one US federal statute: endangering an aircraft is punishable by death. I would widen it to any form of transport.
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