The weekend? But it’s Monday; I’m sure we’ll address all of your skepticism by Friday.
Anyways, which quantities do you think we need a better handle on? Is it the temperature increase range? The financial cost of making a difference? I can preempt your topic of concern: There’s a lot of information about it if you search it out.
The politics are awful, somewhat true (especially in the US), but so what? The answer to that is to learn and act. Could be as simple as your next vote, or your next car purchase, or your discussion around the dinner table. Or hey, you live in the US, I just read that the administration wants to reopen the fuel economy standards Obama set. Why not oppose that vocally? But let me guess, you’re too old, it’s pointless, the world is going to hell anyway, etc. Etc.
Solar power is awesome by the way. It is literally electricity falling from the sky.
Just like lightning and that shit is dangerous, yo. SAY NO TO SOLAR POWER!!
/This is a community announcement brought to you by your friendly neighborhood coal industry lobbyist.
None
3244
Smithers: Well sir, you have certainly vanquished your enemies. An elementary school, the local tavern, the old age home. You must be very proud.
Mr. Burns: No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy, the sun.
Some news Republicans can get behind - Trump EPA hastening the Rapture:
(Reminder, Pruitt lied under oath.)
WASHINGTON — Days after the Senate confirmed him as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and was asked about addressing a group that probably wanted to eliminate his agency.
“I think it’s justified,” he responded, to cheers. “I think people across the country look at the E.P.A. the way they look at the I.R.S.”
In the days since, Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, has moved to stock the top offices of the agency with like-minded conservatives — many of them skeptics of climate change and all of them intent on rolling back environmental regulations that they see as overly intrusive and harmful to business.
Mr. Pruitt has drawn heavily from the staff of his friend and fellow Oklahoma Republican, Senator James Inhofe, long known as Congress’s most prominent skeptic of climate science. A former Inhofe chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, will be Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff. Another former Inhofe staff member, Byron Brown, will serve as Mr. Jackson’s deputy. Andrew Wheeler, a fossil fuel lobbyist and a former Inhofe chief of staff, is a finalist to be Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, although he requires confirmation to the position by the Senate.
“He’s the most different kind of E.P.A. administrator that’s ever been,” said Steve J. Milloy, a member of the E.P.A. transition team who runs the website JunkScience.com, which aims to debunk climate change. “He’s not coming in thinking E.P.A. is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Quite the opposite.”
Mattis tells Congress climate change requires a “whole-of-government response”. Unfortunately Trump’s response is to tell the whole-of-government to ignore climate change.
Well, carbon is, like, from nature, dude, so it can’t cause harm to nature, see?
This sort of stuff underlines the need for education, though sometimes one has to wonder whether that ship has sailed already. The ability of people to use buzzwords and slogans to rile up their supporters, while the actions those slogans reflect do nothing for their supporters, or even hurt them, is based solely on the ability to abuse the gullibility and ignorance of the desperate.
I don’t even think it’s fixable at this point. Science is not a source of truth, and once that happens then what?
**
In other news, Westinghouse has filed for bankruptcy. Not looking good for nuclear power ever gaining ground.
Timex
3254
Costs for the projects have soared due to increased safety demands by U.S. regulators, and also due to significantly higher-than-anticipated costs for labor, equipment and components.
I would be interested to know what increased safety demands were made, whether they were reasonable or overly burdensome.
Ah… looks like they were based on trying to harden the reactors against potential terrorist attacks.
But delays were inevitable: the reactor company claims that safety regulations passed to prevent terrorist attacks against targets like nuclear reactors forced redesign and relicensing of the two power plants, which “created additional, unanticipated engineering challenges that resulted in increased costs and delays on the US AP1000 Projects.”
Stupid…
This was remarkable that it was done on Fox.
Michelle Thaller (NASA scientists, often appears on How The Universe Works and other Discovery network shows, or use to) on science denial with an anecdote about appearing on “Fox and Friends.”
Via New Republic: A climate-denying congressman compared himself to Einstein. His constituents booed him
That irked Biggs. “It’s hard to get to the point because you want to shout me down,” he said. As the crowd continued its ruckus, Biggs compared his plight to Albert Einstein, whose theories were attacked vociferously before they were accepted and applauded. “Oddly enough,” Biggs told the audience, “the same attitude you take is the exact same attitude that Einstein faced over physics. That’s exactly what happened to him. They shouted him down until he was able to demonstrate.”
This prompted one audience member to yell: “You’re not Einstein!”
The next thing that audience member said was, “Oh my God.”
MikeJ
3260
The article doesn’t mention how the Chinese secretly buried heaters under the buildings.
[quote]
“It scares me,” said Kumari Karunaratne, a permafrost expert who works for the Northwest Territories Geological Survey. “This methane that’s being released is being released over huge areas across the north. And it’s continually seeping out.”
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So, as climate change speeds up the permafrost melt, the permafrost melt will exacerbate climate change.
By exactly how much, it’s impossible to say. Karunaratne won’t even try to guess, because measuring it is difficult and imprecise. The area where it’s happening is vast and much of it remains uninhabited and unexplored.
But there are dramatic examples that show just how much methane is bubbling up from underground. Some lakes in the Arctic are so full of it, if you punch a hole in the ice you can light the escaping gas on fire.[/quote]
Timex
3262
“Base load power” isn’t some old, outdated term.
It’s the minimum amount of power required on the grid at any time. Base load stations are the suppliers capable of generating this much power at any time (generally nuclear and fossil fuels, just because their production is not limited by environmental situations).
That site talks about places like California closing nuclear sites, and how this is “an end to baseload power plants”, but sorry… it’s kind of full of shit. Because while California has done (in my opinion, foolish) things like shut down nuclear plants and not replace them with other base load plants… the reality is that it kind of doesn’t work for them in California.
That is, greentechmedia is citing California as an example, without mentioning that the example is one of failure.
This failure is manifested in two forms:
- California has resorted to massive imports of electricity from OTHER states. So they haven’t reduced their dependence upon baseload power plants, they’ve just moved that dependence to plants located elsewhere, like Washington state. (average import in California is around 200 million kWh, daily)
- Even with those imports, California still has absurdly frequent power shortages. People are told to conserve power during peak usage hours, to prevent blackouts. They’ve instituted rolling blackouts to try and deal with the shortages.
