Don't Go Being Politically Insane You Climate Change Skeptics

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[lucklucky]

Time to remember

http://www.globalwarming.org/2010/12/27/headline-2000-snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past/

Quote

On March 20, 2000, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported that “Snowfalls are just a thing of the past.” Global warming was simply making the UK too warm for heavy snowfalls. The column quotes Dr. David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia — yes, the epicenter of what would become the Climategate scandal — as saying that within a few years snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event.” Indeed, Viner opined, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Similarly, David Parker, at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said that eventually British children could have only “virtual” experience of snow via movies and the Internet.

 

Edited December 7, 2022 by lucklucky

[rmgill]

Well if they're not allowed to travel more than 25 miles to protect the climate they won't have any live experiences of anything else outside their local area. 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[Harold Jones]

I bought some solar Christmas lights (really battery powered with a built in solar charger) for the new house since I thought it would be nice to not have to run extension cords around the deck. They worked really well, until we got 4 days of overcast sky in a row.  Thankfully it was a cheap experiment.   

[DB]

The batteries won't have liked sub-zero temperatures either, which may be what's killed the lights rather than there being no solar energy available. 

[Harold Jones]

Might be a contributer but it's not been that cold, 40s to 50s during the day high 20s to mid 30s overnight, last week was colder but generally sunnier and they did ok. In the end it doesn't matter much what the root cause is since winters here tend to be both cold and overcast. I suspect they would have worked better in Colorado.

[rmgill]

You could always run a low voltage connection to a DC regulated power source if you like. 

[NickM]

11 hours ago, Harold Jones said:

Might be a contributer but it's not been that cold, 40s to 50s during the day high 20s to mid 30s overnight, last week was colder but generally sunnier and they did ok. In the end it doesn't matter much what the root cause is since winters here tend to be both cold and overcast. I suspect they would have worked better in Colorado.

There's a guy on Y/T who tends to poo poo climate alarmism, and Colorado figured on one of his vids: It's a still pic of a Coal Fired Power Station outside Denver (which is under threat of of being shut down)--and surrounding the power plant are solar panels and windmills. The steam plume is going straight up and the ground is covered with a thick coating of snow. So, in a nutshell, there's no wind to turn the windmills and the snow is covering all the solar panels so there's no 'juice' coming from either of them==and the powers that be want to shut down that coal plant.

[Harold Jones]

The front slope gets about 330 days of sunshine a year, the snow there tends to be very dry and melt fairly quickly especially on south facing surfaces. For snow falls of 8 inches or less my driveway generally melted clear in a day.  I expect that Denver's plan for the rare convergence of heavier than normal snow fall and a lack of wind is to buy power from less enlightened jurisdictions. I wish them well, but think they'd be better off keeping a couple natural gas plants in their back pockets.

[rmgill]

Boiling water and spinning turbines still seems to be the most reliable and low cost method of power generation. 

[Ssnake]

Reliable: Yes

Low-cost, depends on where you draw the system boundaries, and the point in time for your comparison. No significant cost reductions can be expected for fossile fuel based powerplants. Rather, their costs may be rising (be it rising costs of production, be it regulatory costs such as carbon cap&trade). Wind and solar used the be quite expensive, are now competitive, may become cheaper. But we don't have a solution for matching supply and demand with these renewables because supply is more or less random (wind) or pretty predictable (solar) but still intermittent while power demand has a stable base load and then some variation depending on weather, time of day, season, etc.

We don't know what kind of energy storage will eventually emerge, and how costly it will be. We are also not quite sure about the long-term effect of burning fossils (but we do know that coal plants emit a lot of bad stuff other than CO2 into the air; if we want to include the costs of storage for renewables it's only fair to include the environmental pollution from coal in the balance for fossile fuels).

Right now, a mix of nuclear and renewables seems to be the lowest CO2 emission profile, with gas to fill the gaps between elevated demand or low supply from the renewables. The question is, is that scalable. Could the whole world operate like this? With Uranium reactors alone, probably not. There simply isn't enough U235 around to increase the powerplants by a factor of 100 to supply the future Chinese, Indian, and African economies with electricity. Maybe Thorium reactors or SMRs will become a thing, but their commercial viability is as of yet unproven.

[sunday]

11 hours ago, rmgill said:

Boiling water and spinning turbines still seems to be the most reliable and low cost method of power generation. 

Big hydro is cheaper, and could allow energy storage also. Really big dams need special emplacements, however.

Thermal power generation is a very mature, very reliable technology. Cost of generation is mainly dependent of the cost of fuel. Coal is cheap. Natural gas could be, especially from fracking. Some countries are suicidal enough to put some kind of "enviromental" tax for CO2 emissions. I think that could be defined as some kind of primitive religious tax, as the scientific basis about the bad effects of CO2 are shoddy, at best, then other "third world" countries continue commissioning a coal power plant a week. Without religious taxes.

Nuclear fission has currently the most potential. Current proven reserves of uranium are enough for 90 years considering costs up to triple of today, and without much reprocessing of fuel "burnt" once. Moreover, fuel costs contribution to the cost of nuclear power generation is quite low.

So there are some decades to develop economical breeder reactors, until commercial fusion becomes feasible, in about 100 to 200 years.

 

[DB]

Geothermal needs more love, I think. Sure, it's not perfect, but there is significant exploitable capacity, particularly for large scale heating.

[Ssnake]

There'll be cases where this will work very well (Reykjavik, obviously). There were cases where it went horribly wrong (pumping a lot of water into an undetedcted anhydrite deposit created a bit of a "ground swell" in Germany in at least two places, cracking houses in the process). I also seem to remember some (mild, by Californian standards) reports of resulting earthquakes, similar to shale fracking.

[NickM]

Something on my local CBS affiliate, CBS channel 5. Now, the weather blurbs are saying "ice crystals", instead of "frost", like normally. 

Is this indicative of "something Suss"?

[rmgill]

Sure, if government taxes the snot out of coal through carbon taxes and what not, it's more expensive than the solar that they're then taking those taxes and paying the subsidies to.... Comparing technology and including the government fist on the scale as part of the "true cost" is of course an issue of a self inflicted wound. 
 

[Ssnake]

It's not just a taxation issue. As long as coal can externalize its environmental costs, an honest comparison isn't possible.

[rmgill]

Are the environmental costs of the other methods internalized? 

 

[Ssnake]

Sure, honest accounting should be applied to all options. Obviously, those with a vested interest (be it political or financial) have often little interest in full disclosure. That's why we're having these debates in the first place.

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[rmgill]

The models not matching or predicting what we have seen is still a glaring problem. 

[Ssnake]

I'm not saying that coal isn't useful. Of course it is, and right now with the supply shock for natural gas it's indispensable. But if I could freely choose, I'd rather substitute the coal with gas while we're working out the energy storage for the renewables, simply because of the lower emissions. I'm referring to primarily the particulate emissions. The lead to numerous respiratory system diseases (and then there's also the radioactive emissions). Gas doesn't emit particles in meaningful quantities, it also releases considerably less CO2 (on the off chance that CO2 is as harmful as the dopomsayers tell us; not that I find them particularly credible).

I don't get to choose, so coal it has to be - for the moment. That should give us an extra motivation to boost research on energy storage. Build test facilities, see what works, then ramp up production to scale.

[DB]

On 12/17/2022 at 3:25 AM, rmgill said:

Are the environmental costs of the other methods internalized? 

 

This isn't a new argument - it's been around as long as people started to hate on nuclear, which has pretty much always been required to estimate waste storage costs.