Global Warming
rjo__
Posts: 2,114
There is a thoroughly captivating discussion about heat going on in the P2 forums, and it got me thinking again about global warming.
10,000 years ago, where I am currently sitting would have been near the edge of an ice sheet that extended from the North Pole. That ice sheet
would have been more than a mile thick in most places.
I have no problem with the concept of global warming… there isn't an ice sheet within thousands of miles of me, so we definitely are warmer now than
we were 10,000 years ago. My problem is that we are blaming civilization for this and I'm not sure that it is fair to blame civilization.
It is cold here in the winter. If I wanted, I could fill my front room with a sheet of ice. And then the average temperature in my house in the spring would be
less than it is outside… but as the ice melted, my house (my atmosphere) would heat up. And as the ice melted, it would it would heat up faster and faster…
because we are talking about a sheet… not a cube and we are talking about America… not Canada.
Where is the evidence that we can stop any of this by restricting our carbon exchanges?
If you can help me with this… then maybe we can discuss relativity in the future:)
10,000 years ago, where I am currently sitting would have been near the edge of an ice sheet that extended from the North Pole. That ice sheet
would have been more than a mile thick in most places.
I have no problem with the concept of global warming… there isn't an ice sheet within thousands of miles of me, so we definitely are warmer now than
we were 10,000 years ago. My problem is that we are blaming civilization for this and I'm not sure that it is fair to blame civilization.
It is cold here in the winter. If I wanted, I could fill my front room with a sheet of ice. And then the average temperature in my house in the spring would be
less than it is outside… but as the ice melted, my house (my atmosphere) would heat up. And as the ice melted, it would it would heat up faster and faster…
because we are talking about a sheet… not a cube and we are talking about America… not Canada.
Where is the evidence that we can stop any of this by restricting our carbon exchanges?
If you can help me with this… then maybe we can discuss relativity in the future:)
Comments
I am already planning to restrict my usage during daylight hours. Wouldn't want to cause a brownout. My other idea would be to swap out the motors on my S2 and install sterling engines.
It's amazing what 2 watts can do for a rational person.
But back to the topic… global warming… it is real, but is it your fault?
Until we get that end of the problem solved, a healthy mix of sources seems best. As far as I know, no-one has figured out how to poison an entire region with solar energy.
It makes me wonder if blaming a solar gain from green house gases is adequately explaining where the global warming is coming from.
I can live in 45 degree centigrade weather. Just as long as I have my air conditioner and ample electricty. Otherwise, I suspect that I'd just fold up and die from heat stroke.
Of course, I cannot help but think Jim Rogers is right - world stock markets down, world commodity prices up.. especially food.
It gets a bit morbid to think about this, why there is no political solidarity to stop it, or whether people really ever had the power to stop it.
It just makes great news... endless blah, blah, blah with a bit of guilt, shame, and indignation. Is there any real leadership is a random-walk world? Does freedom of speech make us better informed? I dunno.
If we are going to do something about global warming, it might require a huge expenditure of carbon resources to develop a project aimed at that single problem.
I am not even sure we need to do anything, except adapt to the long term inevitability, which means moving our agriculture North… and we all know what is to the North of us, don't we?
(We are going to be paying 12 cents for a pound of Canadian bacon and $16 for the postage.)
I am not sure that we need to worry about climatic instability… it might be the result of the short term losses of cooling effect of polar ice. When that is gone, the
climate might become boringly predictable.
No, with the huge population and the rapidly diminishing resources I would worry more about the forthcoming world war three in which billions of people are going to die.
And I'm an optimist.
Humans are making more than a blip. In Australia, we are seeing the effects of global warming on an almost daily basis now. Hottest months, worst storms, biggest floods, longest droughts, etc etc. The records are falling faster than you can possibly keep up with.
But even so, large parts of the population are still in complete denial, and our anti-science government is busy dismantling any institutions that continue to annoy the people with such bad news.
So much of our economy is based on carbon-emitting industries that many simply can't acknowledge that anthropogenic global warming even might be happening.
Our current Prime Minister was elected largely because he famously announced global warming was "Smile", and even though he obviously a complete cretin, many people have a vested interest in promoting this belief, and many others just want to believe it. If you don't believe it, you don't have to do anything about it.
Bad days ahead.
Ross.
1st Warning.
Wise man!!
Humans certainly love their drama. In the 1950s, Americans were building backyard fallout shelters with the idea of surviving underground for months until radiation dropped. Good for the economy sold a lot of shovels and concrete.
to someone who didn't experience it. My dad, who was in Patton's 3rd didn't build a bomb shelter. He explained that
we live in a valley… a direct hit on the nuclear plant seven miles east should have almost no effect on us… (the winds blow east here).
But he also said that we had the purest drinking water in the world "from an aquifer that came all the way from Canada").
It turns out that the radium concentration in our water was so high that the State of Illinois had to change its standards so that we could drink it… much later of course.
But back to global warming. Do we have any Russian scientists looking in? Any comments?
Well, I do most of my P1 work in the evenings or early mornings, and it would be the same for the P2 so I'm ok on the brownout front.
As for global warming, if people are at fault I'm pretty sure we all make a contribution so no fair blaming it all on Rick.
Seriously though there is no doubt that global warming is happening, and not much doubt that we are contributing to that. With that in mind it would be wise for us to reduce the amount of CO2 and other pollutants that are being dumped into the atmosphere. There are health and quality of life benefits to making that reduction, so even if we are wrong about the cause of global warming (unlikely IMHO) it would be worth doing.
I also prefer to err on the side of caution. Much better to have my descendants say “Well, I guess we were wrong about us contributing to global warming.” than “Too late now, we're doomed. In a few years it will all be desert.”.
The most compelling argument for the human contribution to increased greenhouse gases is the isotopic composition of carbon in the atmosphere, namely the ratio of carbon 14 to other isotopes. The data show that the increase in atmospheric carbon comes from deep underground (i.e. from fossil fuels) where carbon 14 is not being produced by cosmic ray bombardment. Anyway, that's the Cliff's-Notes summary. Read the article for a more thorough explanation.
-Phil
Well, the Russian view may have been a bit smug. We tested a 15 megaton weapon at Bikini Atoll, they produced a 50 megaton... the largest ever. Both caused huge environmental messes that are with us to this day.
Global warming... we still lack the political will across the globle to resolve it. While China might finally clean up their air, I have doubts they are going to import a lot of Teslas to help the cause;
It is quite ironic that a grew up at a time when Taiwan and China transport for the average guy was a bicycle and lots of the. And these days, I am getting a lot of pressure to stop riding a motor scooter and to use a bicycle. I imagine that might be the ultimate air quality solution for Beijing and Shanghai.
You never know though. A few volcano erruptions and we might cool down for a decade or so.
That shows you fail to understand the energy flux on this planet. The solar radiation hitting the earth is of the
order of 1.5e17 watts (150,000 million giga-watts, or 1200 W/m^2). The greenhouse gasses affect the balance between incoming
and outgoing radiation, in other words they tweak the behaviour of a system that handles this enormous energy flux.
All the heat/fuel/electricity due to man is way down in the noise compared to this - the heat released isn't significant,
but the change in composition of the atmosphere after a century of emissions is. Also the change in the earth's albedo
due to changing snow cover and land-use is significant.
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The reverse argument can also be made that even without the C02 production that we have now, the Earth has managed to heat up enough to destroy a continent sized ice sheet in the last 10,000 years. How much could carbon production possibly impact this process?
Where is the model that explains the first 9500 years of this natural process and what does it show us about the last 100 years?
Even if we reduce our carbon usage to zero… through advanced use of nuclear technology:), I think the Earth would still be heating up.
We need a plan to feed 10 Billion people in the foreseeable future. This problem is going to cause real international tension unless it solved.
I don't see carbon usage reduction to possible or desirable.
Even if we could reduce global CO2, the only thing we would accomplish would be to reduce crop yields… since our crops depend upon CO2.
A question I would have… if we intentionally increase CO2, how many more people could we feed?
Zero evidence but the "false flag" keeps funding rolling in to those that would have a vested interest in believing this nonsense!
It's a shame that a community of techies can't discuss this stuff without a moderator worrying about becoming political.
It's the same with 911....can anyone show me a pilot that would agree that it's even possible for a commercial airliner to perform such a manoeuvre in to the Pentagon? No! But there is a huge list of those that say it's impossible (can't even be replicated on a sim!)....yet we act like little kids who stick their hands over their ears shouting "I'm not listening, don't care, not listening, don't care, nah-nah!"
Techies, engineers, etc., would laugh at the ridiculousness of Tom Cruise unloading a 9mm Glock on a Cadillac causing it to flip upside down and explode but Hollywood has people believing all kinds of ridiculous stuff is real.
I'm not wanting to get political...I just want to understand HOW!
It's my job to worry about such things.
Please read the Forum Guidelines found here:
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/134682-Forum-Guidelines
I would like to know more.
One thing I've learned about Global Warming is that facts don't carry a lot of weight in these arguments.
I grew up in the Midwest, where there was -- and maybe still is -- a strong current of anti-intellectualism.That's not to impugn everyone who lives in certain areas, just that it was noticeable where I lived, even to my young mind. That's also not to say that some global-warming adherents aren't just as belief-driven as global-warming deniers. But the "preponderance of evidence" does point a finger at mankind as the culprit, which is adequate to award damages in a civil case. Perhaps "beyond a reasonable doubt" will follow on its heels.
-Phil
To start at the end, I believe the Propeller chip may be able to contribute to solving this problem. How? Well, I'm glad you asked!
Politics - brief summary because the technical propeller stuff is more interesing. Thankyou Al Gore for your movie that got me thinking about this. Thankyou to my fish tank for showing me that pH imbalance is critical to fish health. Thankyou to a patient of mine who works in marine biology for explaining how pH buffers work and how ocean acidification from CO2 may be a greater problem than global warming. Thankyou to all those on the right of politics who pumped oil and gas to give me a wonderful standard of living. And thankyou to the left wing greenies who doubled the price of electricity and forced me to get off my backside and actually do something constructive to solve the problem.
I've just finished installing 12kw of solar panels. There is also 40kw of solar hot water and for completeness a little 30 watts of wind turbine.
The hot water is currently going through a titanium heat exchanger and is heating the pool, and in winter I plan to use the hot water to heat the house. I have another 12kw of hot water systems on the roof doing the shower and house hot water. These evacuated tube systems will heat to boiling point even when ambient temperatures are freezing.
There is 2kw of solar electricity on the roof, but my wife won't let me use the best part of the roof as she thinks panels look ugly, so I had to put them out in the yard. Normally, the roof is the perfect place for panels.
The panels in the photo are 11kw and there is another 1 kw on a shed.
Regardless of global warming, and regardless of electricity costs and solar panel costs, there is really only one number that matters - how many years does it take to pay back?
For the solar hot water, it is about 1.5 years, but that figure is based on replacing bottled gas, and for mains gas the figure might be 2-3 years.
For solar electricity the figure is 2 years with no government subsidy.
For the wind turbine, oops, that was a bad investment. 15 years to pay back.
Will this help the planet?
Well, I'd like to think so. The solar electricity is saving a big bag of coal about the same weight as me every two days. Ok, the pool is a luxury and so maybe I can't count pool heating, but I can count house heating in winter, so that saves more coal. And the solar hot water meant we went from one $70 propane cylinder every 6 weeks to one a year.
There is another perspective. Fossil energy I save today, is fossil energy my kids can use tomorrow.
So - if anyone wants to do this, the answer is yes, you can. Do it save the planet. Or do it to save money.
It is interesting watching more panels go up in my city and noting how they seem to be particularly popular in the less well off suburbs.
Now - the propeller chip. Well, once the panels are up, the next challenge is switching loads on and off. One could use a computer, but they use power and the propeller uses less. There are all these subsidies and rebates with solar panel. They are different in every state, and depending on which party is in power, they change every few years as well. Right now it pays to pump energy into the grid in the day and draw it back using off peak rates at night, but that will change in a few years. I think the figures are going to be that they will pay 9c for your solar electricity and if a cloud goes over and you turn on a pump, 5 mins later you will be paying 45c to buy the electricity back.
So what is needed is smart load controls. This is a whole untapped market that doesn't exist now but it will grow as solar gets cheaper and governments wind back subsidies.
So loads will need some rules. For the fridge - you don't want it turning on and off every time a cloud goes over because that is bad for the compressor. You can turn it off for a time, but not so it gets too warm inside. You may want to run it a bit more when the sun is shining and cool it down a bit more. So maybe it runs between 2C and 8C instead of a fixed thermostat at 4C. For the washing machine - you don't want to make it too complicated, but maybe you have a delay controller so it comes on a few hours later when the sun is shining. Pumps are perfect for load controlling. I have the pool pump coming on from 9am to 3pm, but even that is not the best solution as there have been some very cloudy days where there was not enough energy to run the pumps, and then I was buying it from the grid at the expensive rate. So a better solution would have been a smart controller.
And then there are the other loads. The fish tank air pump, water pumps, parasitic loads like the TV when it is off etc. And maybe down the track, the electric car.
If each load needs a computer, the computer might use more than the load.
I believe the propeller has just the right amount of smarts for this. You can program it with a touchscreen so set up all the rules. It has enough grunt to talk RS232, or wireless RS232 to a central hub, or even to talk Ethernet. Not sure about WiFi - maybe with the USB hub and some of those WiFi dongles? Possibly the most convenient would be some sort of comms link using the mains wiring - X10 etc, but with the propeller doing this.
Right now, my solar set up almost exactly balances my electricity consumption. But not at the right times.
Batteries are not the answer yet - they have a large capital cost and they wear out after a certain number of charges.
I see little propeller powered load controller boxes on appliances, all chatting to each other, all working out a way to use up the solar electricity being produced.
We actually need an all of the above strategy because the cost of everything is going up and we can not keep wasting precious resources. One way or another we will pay for it. Now of later.
Dr Acula, you have a good point but you need batteries or baseline power since solar doesn't work in the dark.
More and more products have embedded microcontrollers and in some cases the Propeller would be a good choice.
Moderator Monkey, where art thou.
This is not the monkey you are looking for, move along.
A̶L̶ ̶G̶O̶R̶E̶.̶
And now for some thing religious:
J̶E̶S̶U̶S̶!̶
Buts its ok, I crossed them out.
DO NOT look into the Milankovitch Cycles
And what ever you do, do not read the following.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Other_planets_in_the_Solar_System
Sure, CO2 affects the earth, but plants love it, will grow faster, and feed the planet, but we have a solution for that...
Patent #5003186
Why would someone waste good money on a patent that has been officially declared as conspiracy theory nut job science? (aka chemtrails)
GOOD QUESTION.
The mention of patents proving that chemtrails are real, and even mentioning the word chemtrails, should get moderator monkey in here real quick.
There HE IS~!!!