Local Atmosphere Heated Rapidly Before Japan Quake 202
eldavojohn writes "A new paper presented at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland shows the rapid heating of the atmosphere directly above the fault days before the devastating earthquake hit. This is theorized to be the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling mechanism that occurs when large amounts of radon are released due to massive stress in the fault right before the quake. This can be detected with satellites analyzing infrared waves: 'The radioactivity from this gas ionizes the air on a large scale and this has a number of knock on effects. Since water molecules are attracted to ions in the air, ionization triggers the large scale condensation of water. But the process of condensation also releases heat and it is this that causes infrared emissions.' This is a shift from the Haiti earthquake where DEMETER was used to monitor ultra low frequencies. The presence of radon could also possibly explain erratic wildlife behavior prior to an earthquake."
Holy grail? (Score:3, Interesting)
So does this mean we just might have a reliable earthquake detector, or is it only a sometimes-thing?
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My question is whether you can determine the strength/magnitude range beforehand......there are so many quakes all over the world all the time....its only the 5's, 6's and up when people really care (maybe a 4 if its somewhere that doesn't normally get a quake)
Need to predict magnitude (Score:2)
So does this mean we just might have a reliable earthquake detector, or is it only a sometimes-thing?
Or it may be a too-often-thing. Many earthquakes are small, barely noticeable. It would be more useful if the magnitude could also be predicted.
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It will only help if we can just figure out how to employ sheep's bladders to prevent earthquakes.
Re:Holy grail? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly.
The next time a phenomenon such as this is detected I suppose a warning could be issued, but what if people ignored it? Except for governments that have the authority and capability to force people to comply, something as vaporous as 'there might be an earthquake in the next few days' isn't going to change routines.
Giant quakes don't exactly happen often and the further removed generations are from one the more likely they are to have an 'it can't happen to me' mindset. Japan had warnings carved int
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something as vaporous as 'there might be an earthquake in the next few days' isn't going to change routines
Please tell me you're kidding.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread701933/pg1 [abovetopsecret.com]
http://www.cnkeyword.info/taiwan-14-earthquake-predicted-wave-triggered-evacuation-helicopter-apron-shift/ [cnkeyword.info]
http://gardencityquake.blogspot.com/2011/03/false-earthquake-prediction-sparks.html [blogspot.com]
People are willing to evacuate cities based upon the predictions of this guy: "He is co-author of Pawmistry: How to Read Your Cat's Paws, which teaches ways to read a cat's mood and "explores the psychic influences that numerology and the z
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Now I understand why I always had this strange feeling or air beeing heated just "seconds" before earthquakes (relatively common here in Morocco) until today I was convinced it was a psychological effect, well maybe it is ! as this probably needs more scientific analysis !
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http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] Lots of data available, have fun.
Do you know what Radon is? No? Goodnight. (Score:4, Interesting)
As an aside, studies have shown that naturally released radon will considerably increase the levels of radiation in the area. Could this, in part, be responsible for the increased rad levels measured around Japan in the time following the quake, and perhaps around the world (considering the magnitude of the earthquake)?
Why haven't we heard of this radiation "concern" following other quakes? Probably because no Nuclear Plants were melting down at time to draw public attention away from the quake itself.
Radon release (Score:2)
If there was a large release of Radon days before the quake; is it possible that a certain proportion of the elevated radiation levels locally are due to this, rather than releases of radioactive material (iodine/caesium/etc) from the Fukushima power station? Was there anything detected on local radiation detectors prior to the nuclear incident?
This isn't a "there was no release from Fukushima it was all radon!!" post (because there quite clearly was), I'm just intrigued
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No, radon and daughter products make different nuclides than uranium daughter products. Also radon (and daughters) only last a few days.
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No, radon and daughter products make different nuclides than uranium daughter products. Also radon (and daughters) only last a few days.
It becomes a real problem when trapped by an inversion layer.
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Nah. But it does become a real problem with trapped inside your house.
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Nah. But it does become a real problem with trapped inside your house.
Actually, no. The Radon gas has a short half life, and in a few days it is gone. What causes a problem in a house, or any building is not the radon gas trapped there, but the continual radon gas leaking into the building.
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The usual remediation technique is to ventilate when you have elevated radon levels, and tests are used to confirm that this works (and it basically always does).
Obviously you need both radon coming in and a house that traps it.
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"Cesium exposure can only kill through radiation sickness", or cancer. Cesium-137 releases a gamma-ray at about 660 keV and exposes you when it is not in your body--though you can also eat it and get the beta particle it releases as well.
After above ground nuclear testing, the radiation level down wind from the test sites would increase after a rain fall, and only return to normal with cesium-137's 30 year half-life.
Iodine has other pathways of exposure as well, it is not just thyroid cancer that it can cau
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*facepalm* That is right. There are three main sources of naturally occurring radiation: thorium, uranium, and potassium. Radon is part of the uranium series. Though, the natural uranium series does not include fission products.
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If there was a large release of Radon days before the quake, was the sea effervescent?
I'm serious. Enough of a substance to raise the temperature of that much atmosphere is a lot of that substance. I'd expect simmering if not outright foaming. We should see the sea getting warmer and bubbling like soda, too.
Otherwise, I call simple weather.
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You can't come to the conclusion until you get the definition for larger release.
Sure. it's about normal, but how much is that?
Unlikely (Score:2)
I got pulled away from my office before submitting this, so everything has probably already been said, but in case it hasn't:
I wondered that myself, but I don't think that would be case for a couple of reasons. Many of the detections of radioactivity did identify the radioactive specific isotopes (such as iodine, cesium) that were causing them. The ones that didn't were centered around Fukushima, unlike what you would expect from a large, distributed Radon release like the article is talking about.
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There were some reports of higher than normal radioactivity as far away as Maine, it was reported that they thought this was from a radioactive release from Fukushima. Apparently, this could have been from the large Radon release instead.
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There is this thing called causality. It tends to keep things in chronological order. I know that concepts like "before" and "after" an event are strange to you, but they do make a difference. The math just won't let you swap them around like that unless you're very bad at carrying the signs.
Eh?
So the real question this raises is (Score:2)
what are "knock on effects"?
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Effects caused by the original effects.
E.g., giant earthquake has the effect of causing a giant tsunami, the knock-on is that the tsunami knocks out the generators at the nuke plant, and so on and so on, knocking on until eventually someone gets fired for not wearing their dosimeter at the Tepco HQ in Tokyo.
I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ball lightning is unexplained?
Earthquakes cause changes in stresses in piezoelectric rock (e.g., quartz, which is very common). Massive piezo charges form, causing discharges, causing plasmas, i.e., ball lightning.
Now, while this is explainable, it's incredibly difficult to prove, because to prove it you need objective evidence, and to do that you have to have systems in place to observe an earthquake, which means you have to, in some way, predict an earthquake to occur at some time in some locale, which i
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When was ball lightning explained?
Wiki's summary [wikipedia.org] states: "the true nature of ball lightning is still unknown".
There was an article [newscientist.com] going around about a year ago theorizing that some ball lightning may be "magnetically induced hallucinations".
Doesn't seems very explained to me. Am I missing something?
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Ball lightning is unexplained?
That is correct. There are a few ideas on what it could be, some more convincing than others, but due to the difficulty of observing the natural ball lightning, we can't really be sure which (if any) is correct.
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That's more expensive than putting a few hundred thousand of them on the ground.
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No. This is scientific, and called a "hypothesis." And, based on all available data about the creation of ball lightning and the activity of earthquakes, is a predictable result. I.e., if nobody had ever seen it before, we should have been able to predict that someone eventually would see it. Then their seeing it would be considered data. Oh wait, we can just pretend nobody'd seen it before this quake, then reason that because they saw it, it's data. So the prediction is accurate, and it's no longer m
In rural Greece we have a word for that (Score:5, Interesting)
In my mother country, Greece, we have a word for this: koufovrasi. Supposedly (or so the superstition goes), a few hours before an earthquake, the weather becomes hot, stale, like you're choking, and it's like the sound doesn't travel as much (that's why it's called as such, which in free translation it means "deaf, boiled weather"). In the villages of the mountain Epirus, this is a known "sign" that an earthquake might hit soon. I personally experienced this kind of weather once or twice during in my early life there, but I don't remember if an earthquake ever hit soon afterward or not.
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Here in California, we call it "earthquake weather" when you have a real hot day out of nowhere.
No we don't.
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In San Francisco, we call a real hot day out of nowhere "some time in October".
And, by "real hot" you mean 71 F?
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That's interesting. Here in Portugal we also have that superstition, although no special word for it, afaik. Curiously, hours before the latest strong quake (6.0, Richter scale, 12/2009), I remember thinking to myself about the "earthquake heat" that could be felt on that particular hot night. Weird coincidence, I am sure, since the epicenter was located 265 km (165 miles) away.
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In reality, they call it confirmation bias. as has been shown many times.
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In reality, they call it confirmation bias. as has been shown many times.
Or (in Greece) it might have to do with the stress caused by thermal expansion of large amounts of sun heated rock surface during extreme hot weather: providing the last straw to the thousands of years build-up of rock layer stress which finally breaks the back of the camel.
Just like a single person can trigger a big avalanche.
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The Californian who equated "earthquake weather" to a hot day surprise is off the mark. But long-time Californians (moreso Los Angeles and San Francisco denizens I suspect) know of earthquake weather, and it's more that feeling of suffocating, stale stillness in the air that you mention. I have a remembrance of that sort of weather when the Northridge, CA quake struck. Perhaps the feeling is attributable to an increase in barometric pressure? I think in LA it's more associated with humid, partly overcast we
'Earthquake clouds' in Colombia (Score:3)
When i was in Colombia I once saw the sky full of small round clouds. The locals told me that was a sign there would be an earthquake, and it effectively happened the next day. I never saw clouds like those again anywhere.
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You've never lived in a quake zone, have you. (Note the lack of question mark.) When I lived in California, the typical reaction was "did you feel that, too? Anyway, as I was saying...."
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Epirus in Greece, where I'm coming from, is a quake zone btw, we have "feel-able" earthquakes regularly there (at least once or twice a year). The biggest ones, where people died, were in 2004, and then back in 1981.
Crazy Quantum Scientist Conspiracy Theory... (Score:2)
Or, they were experimenting with quantum physics, and the heat up was a backwards time release of energy from the meltdown to occur days later... oOoOoOo!
I don't believe what I just said, but it sure sounds cool.
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Meh, that's really more Syfy than Sci-Fi....
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Next all you need to do is direct that backwards time release of energy from the meltdown to cause the meltdown to occur. Closed time loop!
Quake heat effects? (Score:3)
it traveled for miles through the water? (Score:5, Insightful)
Radon is a gas and that part of the ocean is very deep. How would it have traveled a few miles to the surface so quickly and without dissolving? You might think that all noble gases are not soluble in water, but radon is actually fairly soluble.
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most radiation travels at near-c so.............
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Yeah, but most radon doesn't.
Re:it traveled for miles through the water? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article does not explain any of this. I was a radiation physicist, I've done more than cursory research.
"The radiation" presumably means the gamma-rays, beta and alpha particles emitted by the radon and its daughters. However, none of thee could travel more than a meter in water (a lot less than the several kilometers that the ocean is deep at this point).
The radioactive material, is the material that will decay and eventually emit radiation. The only bit of radioactive material that is potentially mobile is the radon (which is a gas at room temperature/pressure). But I don't see how it move through the water column.
Re:it traveled for miles through the water? (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, as the radon rises, the pressure of the ocean will decrease, the radon bubbles will expand, and the temp will drop, facilitating the dissolution of the radon. I think you're probably spot on, the radon would just hang around in the ocean, slowly ionizing it instead of rising and ionising the air. Here [nat-hazard...st-sci.net] is one of the sources about radon being released prior to a quake, but it has no data about bubbling through bodies of water first. That paper cites a Science article [sciencemag.org], but it seems to be just about ground water, and for some reason I can't access it, though my university has a subscription.
If anyone wants to do the math, the 50th ed. CRC lists the solubility of radon as 51 cc/100cc hot water, and 13 cc/100 cc cold water (no idea what actual temperatures those might be). I'm not sure how to reasonably estimate a volume of water for this, though.
I also just realized that I've been reading too many British papers, since I spelled it "ionising" instead of "ionizing." Or maybe it's because I just read Thunderball [wikipedia.org]
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Start a bubble of a soluble gas under a few feet of water and watch it dissolve as it goes up the water column. Nitrogen (the main component of air) is almost completely insoluble in water, so experiments performed with your lungs at the pool do not give you intuition about what happens to soluble gases.
there would be false negatives and false positives (Score:2)
but it wouldn't take a lot of money to get an early warning system up and running. its worth a try at least
Radon released before an earthquake? (Score:2)
Nice try (Score:2)
They are trying to cover up the fact that Fukushima melted down several days before the tsunami, and actually caused the quake. But they are not fooling me! *clutches tinfoil hat*
Radon transport through water (Score:2)
How does one account for the fact that the fault is underwater, and the radon would have to bubble up through all that water, and not dissolve in it or be carried elsewhere by currents as it came up? Also, is the activity of the radon at the concentration it might reasonably achieve in the atmosphere sufficient to account for significant ionization?
My tinfoil hat tells me.. (Score:2)
Released from the preshock? (Score:2)
No it did not. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the atmosphere did not heat up rapidly as a result of the quake. This article is total bullshit.
1) Geology: There is no "buildup of unusual stresses" in the days before an earthquake. The stresses build up over decades: the only thing that changes suddenly is the Earth's motion in response to them.
2) Oceanography: Any radioactive gases released by the fault (the mechanism claimed by the authors) would be released *at the bottom of the ocean*. From there it would have to dissolve in the ocean and be carried to the surface. This takes a *LONG* time.
3) Meteorology: Any gases released will mix rapidly in the atmosphere, forming a plume stretching hundreds of miles from the source in a matter of hours. It will not form a coherent blob hovering over the fault.
4) Statistics : the plot in question is supposedly based on "NOAA OLR data". It's been massaged to within an inch of its life, using a statistical technique which is highly sensitive to what happened not just during 2011, but to the vagaries of weather in 2006-2010. The result is a massive exercise in small-number statistics, which is then amplified by:
5) Data visualization: Notice that the OLR "spikes" form nice concentric circles, and they seem to line up along a latitude line. Why? Because what you're seeing is data smoothed to a radius smaller than the actual size of the atmosphere being measured. The link below is to the *actual* raw NOAA AVHRR OLR data over Japan: there are only 9 real data points in the field of view shown by TFA, and they do not show any sign of a peak in OLR over northern Japan.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/veC_EraWL5NUXaCbH6iROcyKBwp3MOnR9qYUE-fJ7v0?feat=directlink [google.com]
Re:No it did not. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's exactly what I *did* use to create my figure. Though I had to use uninterpolated OLR data [noaa.gov] to get March 2011 data. Both data sets we've linked to are at 2.5 degree resolution. That doesn't prove that the paper's authors don't have access to higher resolution data, but no high-res data is available at the link they cite, and, I find it extraordinarily suspicious that their little blobs of peak OLR are spaced at exact multiples of 2.5 degrees apart, and lie exactly on the grid boxes for the ESRL data.
No I cannot. Or rather, I can, but only by engaging in statistical and graphical flimflammery. You try it.
As for the rest of your points:
1: Yes, contentious, but I'm quoting the geology party line here. The extraordinary claim is that despite seismological evidence to the contrary, earthquakes are preceded by warning signs: that claim is the one which requires extraordinary proof.
2: Very clear. The fault in question is in 7 km of water, close to a gigapascal of pressure. Because of Henry's Law, you don't have gaseous bubbles of anything at that pressure: all gases are in liquid solution. Thus, the gas molecules move with the water. Which is sloooowly.
3: The figures do not match the expected behavior of a plume of material released from a point source on the Japanese coast. [nature.com]
Oh, while we're quoting figures in the article, how about Figure 3, which show OLR "events" in Tohoku which are as large or larger than the ones they're interested in, occuring on Feb 22, 2011, and Jan 28, 2010. These are ignored because they're not larger than the error bars. But these error bars are bullshit: do we really believe that the natural variability of weather on March 9 is one sixth as much as on Feb 24? I sure don't. They're computing standard deviations using 6 data points, which is a recipe for disaster.
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See, that's the thing. Some of it isn't sasquatch science. The challenge we're struggling with in the sciences is how to bail out of the physical-paper-and-copyright fiasco that is traditional publishing, while maintaining the useful peer review, editing, and reputation services the traditional publishers provide. It's an evolutionary process, and ArXiv is a duckbill platypus in that evolution.
Q: How did the radon get up? (Score:2)
I would expect it would easily dissolve in a couple of kilometers of ocean water above it, especially at those pressures.
Bert
Connect the dots for us (Score:3)
We have been blinded by the Vast Oligarchical Masonic Banking Illuminati Conspiracy (or VOMBIC) and we can not see the forest for the trees. Please enlighten us, how did the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project cause the release of radon, local ionization of the lower atmosphere, and subsequent water vapor condensation leading to localized lower atmospheric heating?
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VOMBIC did not do that, the reptilians did. They are in charge of High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project for Sea Earth Air and Land.
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Hey now! Wait just one minute! We reptilians strongly deny any involvement, and are disgusted with this slandering of our good name. We suggest trying the World Zionist-Nazi International Alien Conspiracy (WZNIAC).
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HARRP SEAL is indeed terrifying.
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Do not be fooled by their furry cuteness. They would just as soon kill you and everyone you love, for fun.
Aahh! It's the Mr. Hell Show! (Score:2)
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You have only the word of the VOMBIC-controlled media that any of that happened - these "facts" that make you doubt that HAARP was responsible are disinformation planted for just this purpose!
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We have been blinded by the Vast Oligarchical Masonic Banking Illuminati Conspiracy (or VOMBIC) and we can not see the forest for the trees. Please enlighten us, how did the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project cause the release of radon, local ionization of the lower atmosphere, and subsequent water vapor condensation leading to localized lower atmospheric heating?
Piezo-electric effect.
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The Wombles?????
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Is your last name actually Noory?
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I really wish people would quit haarping about weather weapons. Jeez. Now excuse me, the water is creeping up my desk, and I have been told I have to evacuate.
- Dan.
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Is there, realistically, an area on Earth that does NOT have some likelihood of natural disasters?
Speaking about the US specifically, North Dakota not at much risk for earthquakes or tsunamis, but they do get tornadoes, blizzards/heavy snow, spring flooding, etc. Not to mention that its pretty far away from the population centers that actually *need* the electricity being generated, so then you are looking at transmission costs, capacity, maintenance (and of course the risks associated with those).
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Yes, Sweden.
Please move all valuable infrastructure here.
(I'm only somewhat joking - the only real risk is that we're far enough up north to be quickly affected when the next ice age comes along)
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Avoiding natural disasters is a canard. Systems can be designed to tolerate worst-case scenarios. The problem at Fukushima is they didn't design for worst-case. They designed for events that weren't nearly far enough out on the tail of the distribution. Someone murdered Japan for a couple of bucks.
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Not to mention that its pretty far away from the population centers that actually *need* the electricity being generated
Its apparently much cheaper to move the population than to build provably perfectly indestructible infrastructure.
One big problem is attitude. A blizzard (of which I've survived a hundred or so) is pretty much no big deal for the non-darwin award winners who live there and know what to do. Its just windy snow, who cares other than journalists trying to hype it up. A coastie transplant who never saw snow before might run around like a chicken with its head cut off before their first blizzard, but for the
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A Blizzard can shut down infrastructure; which has a hole lot of risks involved.
Either a blizzard is a big deal, or you are all lazy slackers who take a day off for events that aren't a big deal.
I've been to the midwest, so I wouldn't put my money on you all being slackers.
Bore? certainly, but slackers? no, not really.
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Tornadoes are easy to guard against (build it beefy or ideally underground). Hurricanes and floods are easy to avoid if you have your pick of any location. Blizzards and heavy snow are more of an inconvenience than a danger. So you can pick just about any inland location on any big continent, as long as you avoid Asia.
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green, renewable energy
No such thing. Not in the quantities needed to supply our activities. We'd have to ration light, heat, all mechanical activities, and food (which is energy too) to fit into the budget that would give us. And ban breeding.
We need to stop using fossil fuels, build nuke plants, and continue in the search for high-efficiency solar power.
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"I don't get people that think that directly using solar power will be better for nature. We have to steal the energy from plants directly when using solar or wind power"
I can think of several locations where you aren't stealing from plants, because plants simply don't exist.
And they just so happen to be pretty much uninhabited by anything else due to the extreme conditions, such as a lack of available water and insane heat (or lack of,) which means they can't survive there at all.
It's called the desert, an
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it would take covering 15% of all flat land in Japan
Why do PV panels require flat land? Or, for that matter, land?
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Except you'd get MORE power building on mountains where photon flux density is higher, and floating barges would be a waste when you've got tidal energy.
Next?
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The point you missed is that panels can be mounted to the roofs of already existing buildings. It's a simple fact but if we covered the roofs of every building with solar panels we would have more power than we could use (probably ever) during daylight hours.
The OP also made a serious mistake in taking the initial build-out costs as a yearly cost. Solar panels are typically warrantied to not fail for 25 years. Depending on type they can reliably produce power for an unknown period (there are panels built in
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PRODUCING renewable energy is relatively cheap and easy. STORING renewable energy is not.
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You're also an idiot.
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> I'm a man, not an animal.
Thanks for clarifying that, my brother primate.
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haha. If we learned anything from Katrina, the recent earth quakes and tsunami..it' a pretty on reliable way to kill people in any quantity to be effective.