Why the water isn’t killing the fire?

Could be anything from sodium to calcium carbide to fluorine. :) Sodium makes hydrogen with water, carbide makes acetylene with water, and flouride just oxidizes water by grabbing hydrogen away from oxygen.

If the character’s plan is to try fascism next, I think they’re into fairly agressive substances. :P

While the article takes no solid position about the benefits and harms of alleviating global warming with solar geoengineering, it does correctly point out that discussion and governance of the subject is lacking.

Some hypothetical examples:

Case A:

• a coastal country experiences increased storm surges, a large percentage of its population stands at risk, it perceives climate change as an existential risk
• this country decides to engage in solar geoengieering to cool the planet, however its neigbours on higher ground don’t perceive a risk from warming, instead they fear that wind patterns could change and deprive them of rainfall
• they accuse each other of violating each other’s rights, start a trade dispute and eventually make war

Case B:

• lots of people are convinced that efforts to control climate change by reducing carbon output have failed
• they decide to go for solar geoengineering, but the predicted impact on food production is -10%
• this affects the poorest of people most adversely, but there is no compensation mechanism
• cooling the planet succeeds, but results in outbreaks of famine

Case C:

• lots of people are convinced that efforts to reduce emissions have failed
• solar geoengineering allows to cool the planet to pre-industrial levels
• does incentive to reduce emissions disappear now?
• if the cooling effect is terminated, extremely fast warming may now happen

Myself, I perceive this as a last resort. If reasonable measures don’t save the day, this is one of the less reasonable measures that could buy time. I would like people to research this, so that capability would exist. But I would not be easily convinced of the necessity of taking action, as long as alternatives remain.

So it’s mainly asthma that people develop due to exposure to nitrogen oxide - and treating all the patients puts a considerable burden on society.

Unrelatedly, as a side note, I got curious about Portuguese cooking - for some reason the graphs show that cooking food in Portugal requires a three times higher percentage (30% as opposed to 10%) of overall energy consumption, implying either lower energy use for everything else, or higher energy use for cooking.

I wonder if there’s some secret sauce that is only made in Portugal and which is extremely energy-intensive? Or just a case of broken statistics…

I mean sure, if you’re at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications.

Currently, solar still makes economic sense, but from April to October. Lots of it was built rather fast, now the adoption is slowing since the grid can’t accept it everywhere.

Consequently, summer is when oil shale miners rest and prepare for the next season.

Since the goal is to get rid of mining oil shale, big plans exist to install a lot of wind power. Sadly, this has gone embarrassingly slow, and it cannot cover winter consumption, and there is not enough storage.

As a result, some companies and building out storage, but only enough to last a few hours.

…and in the next country southwards, there is a huge gas reservoir that could accept methane, enough to last the whole winter, but nobody has a good enough handle on methanation to renewably produce a considerable quantity and store it there. :o

With regard to reactors, it seems likely that getting one would take 10 years and the local country here doesn’t even have legislation built out for nuclear power. They’re drafting it. Starting from zero is quite slow.

That’s a pretty big gap to cover with spamming more panels. I would venture to guess: this approach would work up to latitude 45 or so.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-solar-radiation-d_1213.html

Where I live, in midwinter, the day is 6 hours long. Over here, wind turns more heads than solar. But yes, solar is riduculously quick to install.

Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.

Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.

Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week… that’s about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.

To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren’t fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There’s electrolysis and methanation, there’s iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there’s seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)…

…but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.

Also relevant: “Always shoot the messenger first.” :)

If news unsettles a person, and there’s a cognitive dissonance upon processing their world model (“everything OK with climate”) and sensory input (“another big freaking hurricane”) then if the person isn’t a model of rational thought and already has a fad for conspiracies…

…one might find it easier to add another conspiracy theory to one’s collection, as opposed to harder steps like refreshing one’s model of how the world functions. :o

Seems like a useful monitoring and accountability tool. :) Especially if its quantity estimates can be made accurate.

I think the study analyzed the footprint of the person, not the vehicle:

In this new study, the research team investigated whether consumers who purchase and drive such vehicles have a smaller carbon footprint than other consumers

The merits of electric vehicles are irrelevant to their study - and their study is irrelevant to the merits of electric vehicles.

So maybe they’re not lying (or maybe they are, if they made a direct claim about the power mix of the Finnish grid), but they’re definitely far from barking under the correct tree. They’re barking in a different forest, not of transport economy, but of wealth and consumption. :)

The proliferation of a new technology typically doesn’t start from poor people.

It starts from fanatics first. I built my first EV. It was crap, I cut it apart and sold the metal (environmental footprint: awful). Then I built my second EV. It drove around 10 000 km, but had to be retired due to metal fatigue (enviromental footprint: neutral at best, lesson learned: big).

I bought my third EV on a crashed vehicle auction. New front axle, stretching the frame back to correct dimensions… I drive it every day, but it’s a crap car that I’d not recommend to my worst enemy. :) Environmental footprint: positive, I can produce fuel for myself from April to October. But if the same vehicle would be used by someone who doesn’t produce (or buy) renewable power, the footprint would be less positive.

Anticipating the demise of my factory-made electric microcar, I am however building another EV. Again the footprint is negative, but I need information about how to easily manufacture one, and obtaining information has a cost in resources. :(

Meanwhile, of course, truly rich folks buy fancy and electronics-laden self-driving EVs which some then proceed to crash or mishandle due to lack of clue. People are like that and it will stick out in statistics.

IMHO: if they hadn’t bought an EV, they’d have bought another kind of status symbol and would have used it even more wastefully. What matters more is what the average person can and will do. And how do we influence the auto makers to produce less resource-intensive vehicles?

I have a solar panel that died. A piece or plywood flung by a storm went right through it, leaving a 30 cm “wound”.

Well, to be honest, it’s alive, just weaker - the panel remains suitable for pumping water on the field during muddy season. I wouldn’t take a good panel to such a bad place, but this panel, I have no worries about.

As for what happens when they really, really die - they get disassembled. The aluminum frame gets taken off and goes into metal recycling. Junction boxes go to where plastic goes - not a nice place. The glass and doped silicon go into a crushing mill, after which they get separated. The glass is easy to recycle, but the doped silicon is difficult to refine again to such a purity, so it likely won’t become a solar panel. But it’s a very small fraction of the panel’s mass.

On individual scale, precisely that - a split type AC with one half indoors (or in a water tank) and the other half in an outdoor environement (air, water or ground).

If you’re extracting heat from the environment, the machine lets the working fluid evaporate into the outdoor heat exchanger and compresses it back into the indoor heat exchanger. If you’re cooling your premises - reverse that.

However, on a city scale, it’s like “you’ve got a lot of sewage at 30 C” -> “your heat pump is a large building” -> “your sewage outflow is now at 10 C, but your underground heat reservoir gets charged to 140 C (stays liquid because of water column pressure), and you spend much less energy pumping the heat than you would spend heating the water directly”.

As an anarchist who would welcome other anarchists - sadly, I doubt if that’s a reliable recipe to stop climate change.

Limiting (hopefully stopping) climate change can be done under almost any political system… except perhaps dictatorial petro-states. However, it takes years of work to tranform the economy. Transport, heating, food production - many things must change. Perhaps the simplest individual choices are:

• going vegetarian (vegan if one knows enough to do the trick)
• avoidance of using fossil fueled personal vehicles
• improving home energy efficiency (especially in terms of heating)
• avoidance of air travel
• avoidance of heavy goods delivered from distant lands

The rest - creating infrastructure to produce energy cleanly and store sufficient quantities - are typically societal choices.

As for corals - I would start by preserving their biodiversity, sampling the genes of all coral and coral-related species and growing many of them in human-made habitats. If we’re about to cause their extinction, it’s our obligation to provide them life support until the environment has been fixed.

Also, I would consider genetically engineering corals to tolerate higher temperatures. Since I understand that this is their critical weakness, providing a solution could save ecosystems. If a solution is feasible, that is.

Corals reproduce sexually so a useful gene obtained from who knows where would spread among them (but slowly - because typical colonies grow bigger asexually). Also, I would keep in mind that this could have side effects.

As for tempeature - it will be rising for some time before things can be stopped. Short of geoengineering, nothing to be done but reduce emissions, adapt, and help others adapt. The predictable outcome - it will get worse for a long while before it starts getting any better.

News of the sentencing reached the public broadcaster here in Estonia, including Dale Vince’s comment that “this resembles Russia or maybe North Korea” and Chris Packham’s assessment that “this is a threat against freedom of speech”.

I hope the judgement gets overturned on appeal, and the law that enabled the judgement gets scrapped or rewritten.

I also suspect that the next people who want to stop traffic will not choose peaceful assembly as their method, but will use far more dangerous methods - sabotage from distance, e.g. no more traffic lights on a big intersection. Needless to say, state will cry “terrorism” then, and that is not a desirable outcome, so I hope nobody feels compelled to prove the point.

The Ugandan military playing security guards for a China-controlled oil project… I think explaining human rights over there will have to start from zero - and may have to be backed with “or else” statements - if there exists an institution in a suitable position to issue them. :o

1 C more temperature -> air can hold 7% more water vapour

…but the peaks of fringe events are quite a bit taller than +1 C. Raising the average by 1 C raises the peaks considerably more.

Summary:

But then, in the geologically abrupt space of only a few decades, this great river of ice all but halted. In the two centuries since, it has moved less than 35 feet a year. According to the leading theory, the layer of water underneath it thinned, perhaps by draining into the underside of another glacier. Having lost its lubrication, the glacier slowed down and sank toward the bedrock below.

/…/

“The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. If it stops moving, Tulaczyk told me he wants to try to secure permission from Greenland’s Inuit political leaders to drain a larger glacier; he has his eye on one at the country’s northeastern edge, which discharges five gigatons of ice into the Arctic Ocean every year. Only if that worked would he move on to pilots in Antarctica.

It’s not wild at all. :) The plan makes sense from a physical perspective, but should not be implemented lightly because:

• it’s extremely hard work and extremely expensive to drain water from beneath an extremely large glacier
• it doesn’t stop warming, it just puts a brake on ice loss / sea level rise

Interestingly, warfare also has the effect of:

• causing houses to be abandoned, necessitating houses elsewhere while the abandoned ones likely get bombed

• decreasing the number of future consumers, whose future footprint would depend on future behaviour patterns (hard to predict)

• changing future land use patterns, either due to unexploded ordnance or straight out chemical contamination (there are places in France that are still off limits to economic activity, because World War I contaminated the soil with toxic chemicals), here in Estonia there are still forests from which you don’t want trees in your sawmill because they contain shrapnel and bullets from World War II

I have the feeling that calculating the climate impact of actual war is a difficult job.

But they could calculate the tonnage of spent fuel and energy, that would be easier.

Well, a heat wave cannot last forever. And in terms of cold storage - it’s +30 C over here currently already for a week, it has been 1.5 months since the last snowfall - and the last pile of snow on the local airport is still melting. Darkened, not recognizable as the substance it used to be, but existing, without people making the slightest effort to protect it. :)

what the hell are we going to do?

In the very long term, stop climate change.

In the long term - dig in and design heat shelters, most likely. Because it’s cooler underground and heat waves will pass. When a bad one comes, people would stop working and find shelter from it. One can even accumulate cold in a thermal store during cool periods and distribute the cooling effect to premises during heat waves.

In the short term - those who can (there will be an equality and access problem) and those who must (who cannot stop working) would install air conditioners and similar stuff.