Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable 1108
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
Wrong Premise (Score:3, Insightful)
"Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter"
They are NOT agreed.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's some top notch marketing tactics, there, Dave.
Back in reality, lakes are drying up [wikipedia.org] and deserts expanding [wikipedia.org] due to human activities.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no more evidence of that, than carbon emissions affecting pirate population.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Funny)
than carbon emissions affecting pirate population.
Funny you should mention pirates. We get pirates seizing tankers of oil and boatloads of weapons, and London gets a blizzard.
Coincidence? I think not. This is simply additional data points to demonstrate the centuries-old connection between pirates and global temperatures.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Funny)
London gets a blizzard? Sorry. I've been in London for a week now and coming from Minnesota I find it very hard to relate to all of the sentiment by everyone about "oh no, there are some flakes and falling and now no one can drive". It boggles the mind I tell you. A friend of mine here in London (who is from Singapore originally) said he did not have anything to scrape the snow off his car so he had to pull out a broom dust pan. I told him to just use his hand, it's only snow after all not poison. Also stop bitching about the COLD... it's BARELY below freezing so I was able to go with just an insulated flannel shirt whereas everyone else is walking around with several layers and what not.
Oh yeah... renewable energy is a myth so please just vote for clean coal everyone because it must be clean right? I mean it has "clean" right in the name of the energy source so how can you refute its cleanliness, you fickle commies!
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop being a hypocrite, correlation does not equate causation, especially when we're talking about the globe. Picking two places off the map doesn't mean jack shit.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Desterification is happening in California, Africa, and Madagascar. Lake Chad drying up is directly attributable to human activity, though not necessarily due to CO2. It's a form of anthropogenic climate change, in any case. And it's also happening to Lake Superior [thedailygreen.com].
Meanwhile, Oceans are acidifying [wikipedia.org] all over (the chemistry involved is directly attributable to CO2). Polar caps are melting, putting pressure on the polar bear population. Being the alpha predator of the region, this will remove the ecosystem's ability to keep prey species in check, causing far-reaching problems elsewhere.
None of this is from some sketchy model formed up by some graduage student as a doomsday scenario. It's stuff we can go out and directly observe right now.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
The data we have on the Earth presents a pretty good picture of warming, and the scientific consensus is that it's human caused. The trend in scientific consensus is also increasingly towards it being human caused.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Funny)
The data we have on the Earth presents a pretty good picture of warming, and the scientific consensus is that it's human caused. The trend in scientific consensus is also increasingly towards it being human caused.
So not only all do all true scientists agree [wikipedia.org], but the percentage of scientists agreeing is increasing every day.
Does that mean the true scientists are breeding or something? Should they all believe that overpopulation is a problem, just like global warming?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
But, now we need to determine HOW MUCH he has contributed. For those who have missed it, Mars is also undergoing global warming.
Let me tell you something about the Mars climate change. Its cause is due to albedo changes due to dust on Mars, and has nothing to do with climate change on Earth.
I happen to know the gal who write that Mars global warming paper. In fact, she's one of my best friends. So I certainly didn't miss it. I also didn't miss it when she told me that people who hold up her paper to deny anthropogenic climate change on Earth are "clueless" and probably didn't read past her title, either.
The whole "Mars is warming" thing is crap. You are looking at a tiny amount of data, from a couple of spacecraft that aren't even really designed to measure that.
Sorry Charlie, it's not crap, either. Those couple (three actually... was four for a while until MGS died) of spacecraft are designed and used to measure surface temperature, albedo, and all kinds of other nifty properties. It's amazing what you can do with spectrometers, IR imagers, and bolometers. And the data we have on Mars isn't exactly tiny, either. But as I said above to the other guy, the reasons are albedo change due to dust patterns and have nothing (NOTHING!) to do with the Earth.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
When your pretty graph goes back "millions" of years, then you might have a point, but 400k out of 3.5 billion years, this is about as useful as grabbing a handful of random people from a barney the dinosaur concert and using them to stereotype the other 6.5 billion people on the planet.
You overestimate how far back you have to go to realize the rate of increasing CO2 is a problem (not so much the level of CO2 as much as the speed at which we get there). The fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter that's formed and been sequestered underground over many millions of years. It happened very very slowly. Humans have taken millions of years worth of coal and oil, and reintroduced all that ancient carbon back into the biosphere. We'll have returned all that ancient carbon into the environment within a mere couple hundred years. That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before.
And yes while CO2 concentrations for millions of years ago are interesting (such data has been reconstructed for the Phanerozoic at least, that I know of) it describes a vastly different world. The more you shuffle the continents to where they used to be, the less like our world it is. A focus on the more recent half-million years is warranted over the last 500 million. For example, we want to know what melting glaciers will to THIS Earth's albedo, not the Triassic Earth.
Also, your CO2 graph is not the same as many others available in your average google search.
Cite them. I'm willing to bet they're simply in different units, use a different range or scale, or may even use a different proxy for CO2 concentrations than ice cores. Keep in mind, that graph was compiled from multiple sources of data (sources of data correspond to the color of the line). You don't need to use an ice core to tell you what the temperature was 20 years ago.
I don't disagree that humans are spewing shit in to the atmosphere, and common sense says this can't be good, but as others have pointed out, there is a whole lot more to this climate change than just CO2.
We also put out lots of methane and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 actually. CO2 just happens to be the primary cause of the warming because we put out so much more of it than other gasses.
Almost, but not quite (Score:5, Informative)
As it happens, we have one (1) known occurrence of similarly abrupt increase in CO2 level. At the end of the Permian, a volcano system known as the "Siberian traps" set huge coal beds afire (think pacific "ring of fire" meets middle east oil fields). A large percentage of the worlds coal was burned in a geological eye-blink.
The was immediately followed by the Permian mass extinction, the largest mass extinction event in the worlds history, when pretty much every living thing on Earth died and only a handful of species (think things like cockroaches) had enough surviving members to struggle through.
--MarkusQ
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
You may wish to double check those ice core data.
The ice core data is legit. You're not a climatologist. You're not a paleoclimatologist. They did their homework. Don't pretend that you somehow know more than they do unless you've got your own data and methods to publish.
At least twice in history, CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today[...]
Not within the last 400,000 years covered by that chart it didn't. Before then, many millions upon millions of years ago it has, but that Earth is a very different Earth. You don't want Paleozoic CO2 levels imposed upon present day ecosystems in less time that it could have occurred naturally. It's bad in terms of evolution. Even IF CO2 didn't cause warming, it will cause other problems (ocean acidification, and many plants will likely have difficulty retaining water as elevated CO2 can cause the pores in the leaves to transpire more). Evolution works, but only so quickly.
CO2 levels have shot up higher than they are today, in very short periods of time.
Not in as-short periods of time as we've had present CO2 shoot up. The slope of that line is higher than any slope elsewhere. If you don't believe me, you can download CO2 concentrations from several places, throw them all into a spreadsheet, and calculate the delta-CO2 ppm. All the data is publicly available as txt files.
Something that isn't clear, is whether CO2 levels preceded temperature increases, or the other way around.
Oh not at all. It's quite clear. You just don't know what you're talking about. It's also abundantly clear you don't study climatology, environmental science or physics. You are actually entertaining the idea that the Earth first retains more heat than normal, THEN the heat-trapping gases follow. Please explain the physics that would allow for such a thing to be remotely plausible.
It is indisputable that our fossil fuels account for the increase in CO2, as the correlation with the industrial revolution is damning. We also know that CO2 is opaque to thermal radiation. We can take a thermal camera, put it behind a glass container of CO2, and not see heat through the camera. I'm pretty sure we've never magically seen thermal radiation get blocked by a tank of warming air, then seen the CO2 concentration in that air spike as a result. Admittedly, I could be wrong since magic, sorcery, and thermodynamic witchcraft aren't fields I research in.
And, no, solar activity has NOT been dismantled. It HAS been cast into disrepute by the "consensus". But, popular opinion does not make science.
Nobody here suggested popular opinion made the science.
The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works. If you've got a more scientific approach to global warming than those people did, by all means, enlighten us.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Interesting)
I know this wasn't your point, so don't take this the wrong way; your comment about aether reminded me of a talk I heard once about evolution, given at a church (!); to paraphrase one particularly fun segment: "science changes its mind all the time, so it's essentially always wrong; you should instead rely on the Bible, which never changes its mind." It's wrong on so many levels, I needn't go into it directly; I should however point out that the talk was given by someone who styled himself a scientist, collected dinosaur bones, and was asking for money from the church so he could go buy more dinosaur bones, so he could put them in a museum display intended to prove that evolution (and history in general) never actually happened.
Analyzing data is hard. Asking the right questions, with the right assumptions, arriving at the right conclusions, and communication all of this clearly and fully to anyone else ... is hard. And even then, we still get it wrong, at least for a while. Cherish your differences!
Don't assume that counter-data is a counter-argument: in mathematics, finding an exception to the rule is a sure sign that something's wrong; in applied sciences, it's only an exception to the rule if you meet all sorts of criteria about the circumstances of the event. Saying "CO2 has risen before" is not the same as saying any of:
a) it is not rising right now
b) this event has the same cause has previous events
c) this event will have the same effects
d) same effects at different points in time are equivalent
is Mars warming? (Score:5, Informative)
...Mars is also undergoing global warming...
Mars [realclimate.org] is not warming.
Falcon
deadzones (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm beginning to wonder just what IS in those deadzones.....
Little to no oxygen. Which I think is a more immediate problem than acidification.
If we have documentation about alkaline runoff - there ought to be more documentation about acid runoff.
It's not so much there would be acid runoff, not because of CO2 at least. CO2 is an acidic oxide [wikipedia.org], which water will absorb. On land though plants will use it to grow.
Oh, something I just recalled. You know how some people say "let's plant more trees"? While CO2 [sciencedaily.com] boosts the growth of some trees, it slows the growth of other trees [mongabay.com]. And guess what plant loves CO2? Poison ivy [nytimes.com]. It grows faster with higher CO2 levels.
Falcon
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
But we won't care, because he's not an expert on climate...
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
they're less agreed on what to do about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
Do the right thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Trashed econmomy."
BS. Seriously. We buy new cars anyway, so why NOT more efficient ones? Besides, if everyone drove dramatically more efficient vehicles it ALSO mean reducing (or eliminating) our trade deficit in oil. How does THAT trash the economy?
Eliminate dependence on foreign oil, and it also means we don't have to spend billions sending our kids off to die every time the Middle East hicups. How does THAT trash the economy?
And there are as many economic OPPORTUNITIES in doing the right things as there are not doing them. Solar cell have to be manufactured and installed. Wind turbines constructed. And so on. That spells jobs.
Less polution. Reduced environmental impact. Economic growth. Reduced trade deficit. Eliminate dependence on foreign oil. And perhaps, taking out some insurance on our planet. There are many, many, many reasons for making the investment.
And practically none for NOT doing so...
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the IPCC says that humans are the cause, it is their job to say that:
The IPCC's job is to study human-induced climate change, so their jobs depend upon finding human-induced climate change.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
The greenhouse effect has been known for hundreds of years, even Mythbusters have managed to reproduce it.
What you need to do next is draw a circle on some paper then draw another circle outside it which represents the atmosphere.
The Earth's radius is about 4000 miles and about 99% of the atmosphere is below 25 miles.
Clue: You'll have trouble doing it unless your pencil is very sharp.
If you can look at that and say that man can't change the composition or that burning 100 million barrels of oil per day will do nothing, you're an idiot.
And that's just oil. There's still natural gas and cow burps, which are nearly as bad.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientists who study climate are in agreement. Some non-experts who study unrelated fields disagree. I'll stand with the people who know what they're talking about, and whose arguments I find sensible. Feel free to review the evidence yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
I have to say, I've heard some of the most ridiculously bad physics in arguments from the climate-change deniers. Now, not all of the climate change deniers argue physics, but the ones who do have pretty much made me lose respect for the position. My overall opinion is that if they can't bother to understand physics, I'm not interested.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
"Scientists who study climate are in agreement. "
Of course. Because any climate scientist who isn't in agreement suddenly finds he has no govt funding, and loses credibility in his field. That's how most research grants work. If your final results don't support the underlying theory that the sponsor wants proved, then that sponsor doesn't use you the next time. Same deal for "independent" pharmaceutical research.
It's undeniable that the climate is changing. It has been for as long as we've kept records, and archeological evidence suggests even bigger swings in the past. What is debatable is how large of a role humans are playing in it.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever heard of Bjørn Lomborg [wikipedia.org]? He is a nutcase who published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he (who has only one peer-reviewed publication in an unrelated field) said that all environmental scientist were were wrong about pretty much everything.
So, what happened to his career? While he was denounced by Scientific American and Nature, he was defended by The Economist [economist.com], not exactly a climatology publication. The Danish government gave Lomborg the chair of a newly created "Environmental Assessment Institute", he published further books, and ended up in TIME's list of the 100 most influential people of 2004.
So, that's what happens when one is not in agreement with the scientific consensus, but says things that governments want to hear: lots of money, media attention, skyrocketing career. Lomborg was just a mediocre associate professor with only one peer-reviewed paper from 1996, who was looking at a very boring and uneventful career. By cherry-picking and fabricating data, he's a world star of climate-change denial now (note that last time I checked, he did not deny climate change outright, or even that it is anthropogenic, only that it is "inefficient" to do something about it, in practice reaching the same conclusion as deniers).
If anything, it amazes me that so few scientists do the same.
Nope, no ice age. [Re:Wrong Premise] (Score:5, Informative)
... these same climate experts were also spouting off that there would be an ice age not so long ago.
Citation needed.
Try this one: Study Debunks Global Cooling myth of the 90s [abcnews.com] (or here [usatoday.com])
"The supposed "global cooling" consensus among scientists in the 1970s -- frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds -- is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era....
But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends. The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it...." is regularly attributed to Joseph Goebbels. However, I have found no evidence that he said it. Everyone quotes everyone else, but no one ever gives a source. See: http://www.bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm [bytwerk.com].
"A lie told often enough becomes truth" Vladimir Lenin.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter, if we keep repeating that Goebbels made that quote, then people will believe it.
Problem solved.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
Climate scientists are not in complete agreement. It is always possible to find a few scientists that disagree with consensus opinion. Sometimes these mavericks are even right. See and the continental drift hypothesis. [wikipedia.org]
However, many of the commenters above appear to be using some disagreement to deny climate change (forgive me if I'm reading too much into the comments. Attacking the consensus is a common tactic of deniers).
I would suggest that people look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [wikipedia.org]. This is a United Nations effort with a very large number of scientists involved. So many, from so many different countries, that I would suggest that the information represents consensus opinion and should be listened to very carefully.
Let me quote their latest major report from 2007 (taken from Wikipedia).
" * Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
* Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
* Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the timescales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the likely amount of temperature and sea level rise varies greatly depending on the fossil intensity of human activity during the next century (pages 13 and 18).[34]
* The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.
* World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 ÂC (2.0 and 11.5 ÂF) during the 21st century (table 3) and that:
o Sea levels will probably rise by 18 to 59 cm (7.08 to 23.22 in) [table 3].
o There is a confidence level >90% that there will be more frequent warm spells, heat waves and heavy rainfall.
o There is a confidence level >66% that there will be an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones and extreme high tides.
* Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium.
* Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years
"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As is often the case, people who try to deny global warming think they are not only entitled to their own opinion, but also their own facts.
The Earth's climate is getting warmer. I'm not sure it matters too much why at this point, but rather what we can do about it.
Seems to me that the technologies involved in "sustainable energy" would be beneficial no matter what the reason for the earth's warming. We're still going to need non-fossil energy, advances in insulation, etc.
And for those of you who believe
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
you can't be serious? what if in your attempts to "fix" the problem you end up fucking with the earths natural cycles, making things worse?
frankly i'm horrified people are taking the stance that any action is better than no action just because we don't understand the situation.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Interesting)
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research.
There is a trap here, however. To be published in a peer reviewed journal, your peers have to agree to it. So in a highly politicized area these sampling parameters have a bias, which invalidates any statistics: to be published, you must agree with what others are saying - otherwise they will not let you pass the peer review. Many people believe this is going on - almost everyone agrees that this is a highly politicized area of research.
Personally, I don't care that much who causes global warming - because the benefits of reversing global warming do not currently outweigh the costs. I think we should carry on studying global warming (so that we can start to predict what will really happen), and keep on our normal path of technological progress. By the end of the 100 year time frame used by the reports, we will have advanced so much technologically that we will be laughing at our current proposals to deal with climate change - just like how we laugh at the people from 1908 meeting to try to avoid the horrors of horse poop.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
When has there ever been a unanimous consensus in something like this, exactly?
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether global warming is true or not really doesn't matter much. We still need to take precautions to prevent pollution and switch to cleaner energy sources. It will benefit our own health and safety as well as be a matter of prudence.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
YES IT DOES, RTFA!!!!
Also the UK government didn't buy any salt for the snow we had this week because they thought global warming wasn't going to make it cold enough. Another example of why it matters when people lie about global warming.
To say repeating the same bullshit line has no consequences is just moronic.
Please stop turning the global warming debate into a religion, you're being part of the problem including your silly little precaution speech.
Here's another speech, Why not believe in God just to be sure you're going to heaven even though there is no data either way?
See how you're saying the exact same thing?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm 33 and have lived in the UK all my life. It snows several times every year, but there hasn't been snow like this since I was a kid. We had over six inches here and it's stayed for a week, in the past decade the most we've had is 3 or 4 inches and it's been gone in two or three days.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A comet is crashing towards the area you live in. Scientists have a raging debate as to whether or not it will completely disintegrate before hitting your house. Do you stay in your house till they reach a "consensus" or get the hell out of there?
Add an "insurance company" selling "anti-comet credits" into the picture, with payments to said company quickly adding up to about twice what your house is worth now, and *then* think if you should be following special interests-induced paranoia so blindly...
This
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Those that bother to look at the math instead of the politics, at the history instead of the hype, are agreed.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Informative)
They are NOT agreed.
Yes. They. Are.
According to this recent study [uic.edu], 97% of specialists and 82% of scientists in general agree with anthropomorphic climate change.
So, what's your evidence that scientists do not agree? Put up or shut up.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously, the 3% and 17% are right.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here, try actually getting a clue before spouting the party line. You may want to believe that you are so important that you can start and stop climate change but no, You're not.
I know your next move will be to discredit and belittle the people that believe other than you do so I included all their names and credentials.
I know it's long, so try really hard to focus and concentrate and you might be able to make it through the whole letter.
The following is the Dec. 13th 07 letter to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-Gen
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
If I'm reading that study correctly, the list of potential respondents was drawn only from academic institutions and government agencies, and from that list, the actual respondents essentially self-selected.
And you think that's an accurate reflection of reality?
The argument all along has been that the scientists with the most to gain from government action -- through grants or regulation or whatever -- are the ones most likely to agree on anthropogenic climate change. In that much, the study seems right on target...
EDIT: If other users can keep posting the same study, then I can keep posting the same reply. Bite me, asinine Slashcode spam blocker.
Re:Wrong Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
hence the statement "scientists are agreed" is not true, assuming the statement is meaning "all scientists" as opposed to "most scientists".
Nobody without an agenda (or a fondness for excessive pedantry[1]) uses the "absolutely all X" definition of "agreed" when talking about large groups of people, because you never get 100.00000000% agreement. If a large majority of scientists and an overwhelming majority of specialist scientists agree it's both reasonable and accurate to say that "scientists are agreed".
[1] I do have a fondness for excessive pedantry, but I try to keep it under control.
Wind? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even narrower than that (Score:5, Insightful)
Take it even further. Neither nuclear nor geothermal suffer from this supposed problem. And not even all solar power systems face it--molten salt and biomass-mediated systems, for example, won't suffer either.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
Bah.
--MarkusQ
Because you can't make a magnet without neodymium? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
--MarkusQ
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing the power company can do is sell that energy for a cheaper price. They are a power company, not a "salt melting company". Building a plant to perform these kinds of activities costs a lot of money and needs a very complicated business plan that depends heavily on logistics-related factors.
A salt-melting (or any other kind of process)
Re:Because you can't make a magnet without neodymi (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, I think you missed the point there.
Making ice, melting salt, and running pumps are methods for storing energy (like a battery) so when you are making too much power you can save up the excess and extract it later when you are producing too little power.
The poster wasn't suggesting that power companies become molten salt salesmen.
Re:Because you can't make a magnet without neodymi (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".
Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.
Re:Electricity cables? (Score:5, Funny)
But there's no easy and efficient means of stepping the power down.
Why not? You could just wire Germany, France and Italy in series.
Re:rtfa (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no, it's not right in the article. It's in the comments. And we all know what comments are worth.
C'mon, at least try to be effective in your deliberate deception.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no expert on the subject, but wouldn't these sort of magnets be necessary to construct any sort of conventional power plant as well?
(Similarly, every hard drive manufactured for the past ~20 yearas has contained two of these magnets each. That sort of quantity makes me think that the supply of these materials is not as scarce as the commenter in that article would have us believe)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Plants use solar, but very few natural things use wind or tidal power. Nature has had a very long time to try and fill these energy niches, so it is a safe guess that they can't produce enough energy to sustain a large population at a reasonable standard of living.
It may not be true in some parts of the world but the US has plenty of potential wind energy. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States [nrel.gov] lists the potential of various places. For instance just as the Picken's Plan [pickensplan.com] covers, the Rocky Moun
Re:Wind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because something is not found in plants doesn't make it a non-viable energy source... or do you really mean to tell me that because nature never found a way to burn petroleum or coal for energy that they aren't effective? Heck, almost nothing except for humans even uses FIRE for energy, and that one's dead obvious.
That fallacy aside, think about what would actually be required for a plant to use wind or tidal power effectively in terms of habitat and engineering. Wind would actually require free-moving parts just to function, and they'd probably use solar too (it works well, so it would be a distinct disadvantage NOT having it as an energy source). Tidal would require plants to grow, essentially, semi-submerged along open coast, vulnerable to things like crashing waves and migrating sand... even seaweed has trouble growing along beaches because the habitat is so turbulent and marginal.
That said, I agree that solar is by far the most obvious and readily available renewable energy source we have, and I still don't get why we're so concerned with the others when so little has been done so far with that one.
Why You Don't Focus on One Thing (Score:3, Insightful)
The article points out Indium in some of the better solar cells in the lab (40% efficient), and Platinum as an important catylist in a hydrogen fuel cells. Both of these are already valuable metals for existing applications, and will easily see minable reserves dry up if you add on renewable energy applications.
However, this is why you don't focus on one and only one solution to this problem. Solar reflectors, wind, tidal, and nuclear all have roles to play.
Re:Why You Don't Focus on One Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Also what the fuck do they mean with non-renewable? It's not like they do any radioactive stuff with them is it? So obviously they are "renewable", just recycle whatever you trashed. Sure they may not be easy to come by but that's a totally different story.
Oil = Abundant, non-renewable in a short time perspective.
1 TW solar panels the size of a propeller cap = Rare but would give renewable energy as long as we have the sun close alive and kicking.
"Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable" (Score:5, Insightful)
ore supplies and reserves are *always* limited (Score:5, Interesting)
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ore supplies and reserves are *always* limited (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:5, Insightful)
.. is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
Nuclear is clean, safe and practically inexhaustible. The latest advances could provide small nuclear "batteries" the size of a hot tube that could provide power to an entire neighborhood decentralizing much of the power systems (and huge networks of wires) we've come to think of as unavoidable. Making our power systems virtually fool proof. For too long we've lived in the fear from the propaganda of the illiterate press. It's time to start using the miraculous energy source we uncovered and made practical nearly 3/4 of a century ago. It's there, it's understood, it's completely doable and for a hell of lot less money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US right now.
Go nukes! Go nukes! Go nukes!
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Uranium is non-renewable energy. It would deplete very quickly if world usage were ramped and it's peak even is not to far away [wikipedia.org].
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:4, Insightful)
This destroys the landscape and has a lot of waste (i.e. dirt)
Yes, we must not get dirt on the nature - we wouldn't want our beautiful outdoors getting dirty.
While most mines aren't exactly candidates for national parks, they're relatively small and contained, and may cover a few tens of thousands of acres. In comparison to the huge amount of space out there, they're trivial. Plus, in western countries, mining companies are almost always required to do reclamation work when they leave to restore the landscape to something usable.
I find a big hole in the ground no more visually disagreeable than an equivalent surface area of solar arrays, or buried under the waters impounded behind a dam. Both just aren't natural, but such is the cost of the industrial society most of us want.
Re:Nothing is fully renewable that... (Score:5, Informative)
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU PUT THE WASTE?
Nuclear waste isn't magically dangerous. There are nuclear materials that are super "hot", emitting scary amounts of radiation; these have a half-life that is very short. Given a few years, they radiate themselves down to about nothing. There are nuclear material that have a half-life of 10,000 years or so; and they are hardly radioactive at all, much less of a threat than the radioactivity that goes up the chimny stacks of a coal power plant every day. There are NO nuclear materials that are scary hot for tens of thousands of years. Its one or the other.
Various posters here on /. have made the claim that if we use "breeder" reactors, that we can re-use much of what is called "waste" now. We can re-use it over and over, and what is left will be a small amount of waste that isn't hard to manage.
Remember also that the best thing about nuclear power: you don't need very much fuel for the amount of power you get. With coal, you need tons and tons of the stuff every day, and that means tons of ash flying out of the chimny stacks (much of that ash radioactive). If you could filter out the ash, instead of putting it in the air, you would then have tons of ash waste to dispose of every day. The nuclear waste is comparatively nastier and harder to dispose of, but there is oh so much less of it.
Why are there so few responses to the easy fixes? (Score:5, Informative)
We need research into different energy sources, it's true, but what boggles my mind is why people don't address the simple things in their own lives, if they're concerned about energy conservation. The funniest thing I can see in this particular arena is the moron who rails against the oil companies and middle eastern governments, terrorists, and whatever else, then gets in his Explorer to commute to work by himself, getting 3 mpg, while babbling on his phone about how bad the energy situation is. If you drive a truck (no, I don't use the euphemistic 'SUV'), then shut the F up- you're part of the problem.
There is so much BS going around about alternative energy sources, but we could make a big difference now. I haven't ever owned a car that got less than 25 MPG, and I work half of my time from home; when I don't, I often ride a train. I doubt there are many alternative energy advocates that are close to my carbon footprint, but they put their faith in technology that doesn't exist instead of getting their supersized butts out of their trucks. And people listen to them anyway.
Real sustainable power available since decades (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, IRTFA. Sheesh, talk about using bazookas to swat flies. Is this anything more than FUD to scare people back to coal? Let me spell it out:
Solar-thermal plants using mirrors, steam turbines, and if you want 24/7, underground heat reservoirs. Completely buildable using some of the more common materials on the planet: sand, steel, concrete, copper, salt, etcetera. Who cares if they're inefficient compared to the super-fancy super-rare stuff in TFA, just build lots of them.
Maintenance? Bugger all in comparison to a coal plant, the bloody things run on sunshine. There's no toxic+radioactive coal dust/ash/soot getting into everything, no gas-guzzling trucks and trains leaving said dust billowing in their wake over nearby towns and farms as they go between mine and plant... blah blah bloody blah.
There are only three real reasons that the countries with plenty of sunshine (e.g. my own) haven't gone this route long ago: vested greed, common ignorance, short-term thinking.
non-re-new-able (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation with renewable energy is different. Yes when it takes energy to manufacture biomass into fuels. But if is done right, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere one year, and putting it back in the next, creating a steady state. Clearly there are some issues now, but that is political. In the US, instead of using weeds, the corn growers, which have been pushing the US for years to a deadly philosophy of monoculture, is using food crops. On the other point, I don't think that biofuels is causing food prices to increase any more than lack of oil is causing the current high prices at the pump. demand for luxury food is increasing, the economic expansion of the past several years means that people are buying more, and there is much less focus on the needs of those that have no food.
As far as rare metals, these are not consumed. All these products can be remanufactured. The issue is political. In my US town, trash is picked up once a week at every house, but recycling is picked up only every other week at some houses. Houses are allowed to throw away dangerous materials without any fine. The only way to send electronics for remanufacture to go to the drop off on a work day. Of course a lot of this has to do with the costs involved. it is cheaper to mine new material rather than reuse old. for these materials the economics might be reversed, and we might the trend reversed.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are always losses in any recycling process. You cannot cheat thermodynamics.
a lot more platinum is coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA is complete BS, at least in terms of platinum.
I work for a company which is in the process of adding several centuries' supply of PGEs (platinum group elements) to proven reserves. Platinum and fuel cells are going to get a lot cheaper, within 10 years.
We know where PGEs are, but it's often in politically unstable places, or those that are busy strangling their domestic exploration industry (e.g. Canada).
This global recession will likely help finally unjam a lot of political roadblocks. When people are hurting, they don't tolerate environmental protests as much, and aren't as willing to turn a blind eye to eco-terrorism, which has wracked the industry in the last decade. Even the first world is finding it harder to ignore potentially adding a hundred billion to one's GDP for decades.
Asteroids (Score:5, Interesting)
One small nickel-iron type asteroid will also yield plenty of platinum, iridium and similar metals. Heck, there's still some disagreement over what they're mining in Sudbury, Ontario, [wikipedia.org] is there because of magma upwelling after the original impact (circa 2bya) or remnants of the original impactor.
Separating them out can be done in space with a number of processes using large reflectors and solar heating. (Zone refining, fractional distillation, carbonyl extraction, etc..)
If we'd had the guts to start moving towards that when some people first started suggesting it seriously, we'd be there or nearly so by now.
One word (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh!
Anyone who has believed otherwise has been caught drinking too much of the spiked Kool-Aid.
We live in an effectively finite ecosystem with finite resources. Had we not allowed human population to explode as it has, particularly in the last 200 years, virtually none of what we consider "crises" would even be problems worth noting yet. We would still have had to address them eventually perhaps, but we would have had centuries more to learn before then. Unfortunately the species is very adept at burning the candle at both ends. What we're experiencing now is not much different than the crash of withdrawal after binging on some hallucinogen. The morning after is always a bitch.
Again, human overpopulation is the 800-pound Samsonite gorilla in the room. Until we deal with that, none of the rest is anything but posturing.
Wind, waves and water (Score:5, Insightful)
The WWW is the solution.
Wind, waves and water can be harnessed for renewable enegy without exotic metals.
The premis of the title is wrong as it makes the assumption that the only way to get good energy is through current solar cell technologies.
No exotic metals here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
or here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I'm saying conspicuous consumers should cut down a little. If one commutes less distance or drives a more efficient vehicle, for example, is one therefore poorer?
And I'm also also that everyone can benefit from energy savings. That does not make us poorer... it makes us richer. What do you think the whole "Green IT" thing is about? Does big enterprise really care about environmentalism, or are they thrilled about cutting the huge energy costs for traditional data centers?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, I'm saying conspicuous consumers should cut down a little.
Hey, you are starting to sound like a communist. The whole point of wealth is so that you can show it off. :-)
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
My new windows reduced my heating bill, but don't detract from my standard of living.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
*ducks*
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's an investment. I'll get the money back on my heating bills over the next few years, and those windows should last 20-30 years.
I don't have to dick around with storm windows in the fall/spring.
I don't have to run around every damn autumn morning wiping off condensation.
I don't have entire windows frosted over in the morning after a cold night.
It's hard to put a dollar value on those things, but fewer boring house maintenance chores == win.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there something wrong with turning down the thermostat and applying more insulation? To getting a more efficient means of transportation?
Don't be retarded.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
aka "be more poor".
Righto.. Because this past year I bought a new fridge that uses 1/5 the energy of my old fridge and replaced all the bulbs in my house with CF ones. This year I'll insulate my home (it currently has very little).
So in your opinion I'm now "more poor" than I was before? That's a bit odd, because all those decisions were purely economic ones, and I expect the fridge to pay for itself in 5-6 years. The lights are harder to calculate, but they shouldn't be more than a couple years. The insulation will pay for itself in one winter. So in my case using less energy makes me LESS poor because it winds up costing me less money.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dunno about energy requirements, but fiberglass is melted sand so I think we're good for a while.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The average consumer could cut their energy use quite a bit (say 30%) without affecting their lifestyle one bit.
Conservation is not the same as going back to the stone age. That's just a lousy attempt to use reducto ad absurdum to avoid taking even simple steps to reduce energy waste.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but that's a bullshit answer.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But although silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen, it makes relatively inefficient cells that struggle to compete with electricity generated from fossil fuels. And the most advanced solar-cell technologies rely on much rarer materials than silicon...
...The efficiency of solar cells is measured as a percentage of light energy they convert to electricity. Silicon solar cells finally reached 25% in late December. But multi-junction solar cells can achieve efficiencies greater than 40%.
Hmm, so Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust at 25% efficiency and the alternative at a measly 15% performance gain will dry out in around a decade. Disclaimer: I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
Do the math. Looks like we'll be melting down more sand and (hopefully) augmenting our nuclear power in the near future.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wish there was more information in TFA on what "greater than 40%" is.
III-V material tandem multijunctions. At the moment, these would be a germanium bottom cell, a gallium arsenide middle cell, and a gallium-indium phosphide top cell, but to get over 40% they're going to tweak the materials materials, probably going to some sort of indium-gallium arsenide on the bottom, and very likely adding some more junctions. Nitride materials (e.g., gallium-indium arsenide nitride) are possibilities, too. You can substitute in small amounts of other group-III and group-V elements to
Re:indium (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been hearing about indium and platinum shortages from chicken littles for a couple of years now. In fact, there is 3 times more indium than silver in the Earth's crust and I haven't heard anyone shouting about a silver shortage - especially since digital camera's became popular. When the price goes high enough, more money will go into mining, extracting, and refining both minerals. And only solar cells, out of the currently common "sustainable" technologies, require these rare minerals.
The Indium Corp couldn't be biased. [indium.com]
It's an open market, so it must be true. [openmarket.org]
Back in 2006 this blogger noticed we use indium. Scroll down a bit. [wordpress.com]
The price is going up, but hey, copper prices sure fell. [siemens.com]
I'm not worried. This just someone wanting some attention and web page hits.
try 5 years (Score:4, Informative)
when indium dries up your going to have to coat your roof in cadnium.
When indium price rise then it will be economically feasible to mine it from places it is not feasible now, much like happened with oil.
i've said for years that PV is no good
PVs aren't the only way to generate power from the sun. At large scales solar concentrators [wikipedia.org] may be more efficient. And PV tech may improve.
Falcon
Re:indium (Score:4, Informative)
With that said, You missed Wind and Geo-thermal. In particular, geo-thermal is the only base-load type of AE out there. What has amazed me is how many fools there are do not realize that there is SHALLOW wells, and then there are DEEP wells [wikipedia.org]. The good news is that smart groups like Google, the state of CA and NM are investing heavily into geo-thermal and those that are making it cheap [potterdrilling.com].