Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years (go.com) 201
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Worldwide emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide have flattened out in the past three years, a new study showed Monday, raising hopes that the world is nearing a turning point in the fight against climate change. However, the authors of the study cautioned it's unclear whether the slowdown in CO2 emissions, mainly caused by declining coal use in China, is a permanent trend or a temporary blip...
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry is projected to grow by just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant. According to the article, almost 30% of the world's carbon emissions come from China.
Too early to celebrate (Score:5, Insightful)
That the rate increase is going down isn't good enough, alas. That means it's still increasing. We need a reversal, with less CO2 pumped out than what is absorbed, and we're nowhere near that yet.
Still, it's a good first sign, but we're still getting worse, not better.
Re:Too early to celebrate (Score:5, Insightful)
So my feeling is that we need to 'clean up our act' very generally as a philosophy, rather than concentrate only on C02. And yes, cheap solar/wind is turning out to be very important. But we need car-free cities as well.
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While that may be so, methane was only 11% of the greenhouse gas composition in 2014, while CO2 was 81%.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... [epa.gov]
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Agree, but, for example, methane (MOO!) is a more potent greenhouse gas and (another poster has partially said it) we're pumping all kinds of random shit into the air all the time.
So my feeling is that we need to 'clean up our act' very generally as a philosophy, rather than concentrate only on C02. And yes, cheap solar/wind is turning out to be very important. But we need car-free cities as well.
Methane isn't as much of a concern as it has a relatively short atmospheric lifetime. CO2, on the other hand, sticks around for centuries.
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Very odd that this story comes out now, as I just read study about CO2 and fossil fuel emissions that concluded there is no correlation between emission and CO2 concentration. Here's a link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... [ssrn.com] I'm not a statistician, so I can't attest to it's accuracy or validity, but it was an interesting read.
It's not a study, but just an analysis. And it is neither peer-reviewed nor properly published, but just uploaded to the Social Science Research Network [wikipedia.org] - think arXiv, but without any pedigree for natural sciences. The author is an Emeritus - and was a professor of Business Administration (!). Google Scholar shows an h-index of 6, with a153 citations in total [google.com]. But nearly all the publications are on SSRN or equivalent, and nearly all the citations are self-citations - indeed. ResearchGate computes the h-ind [researchgate.net]
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> So my feeling is that we need to 'clean up our act' very generally [...]
This.
> But we need car-free cities as well.
Very *much* this. Moving from internal combustion engines to electrical is (potentially, depends what you charge the batteries with) a good step, but the elephant in the room is having to move a ton (with an installed power envelope of well above 50kW) to haul around about 80kg of flesh (plus a smartphone). Something is highly inefficient in this way of transportation.
Problem is, people have become highly attached to it and react *very* irrationally whenever they feel this "life style" somewhat threatened.
How to convince them?
Disclaimer: I own no car. Heck, I never posessed a driving license, and I'm very happy about that.
I really sympathise with your position and thats the position I've taken myself. But I ask you this; do you have kids? Because I feel that now basically have to get a driving license and car because kids have come into the picture. I see no way around this. Public transport and taxis do not cut it.
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Oh, it's reason to celebrate, because while we need a reversal, we need a reduction in the rate of increase too.
It's not heat per se that's the issue, nor is it even change per se; it's the rate of change. Ideally we keep the rate of change low enough so that ecosystem distress is not widespread. There's always going to be some ecosystems in trouble and some doing fine, but it makes a difference whether you have a lot of them collapsing or just a few.
Even if the rate of change is fast enough to produce wi
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This isn't a reversal or even slowing down. (Score:2)
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Get California to spearhead a proposition to make volcanoes and wildfires caused by lightning strikes illegal. Surely that will reduce the production of greenhouse gasses.
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Get California to spearhead a proposition to make volcanoes and wildfires caused by lightning strikes illegal. Surely that will reduce the production of greenhouse gasses.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but in case you are actually serious, I will point out that volcanos put out somewhat less than 1% of the greenhouse gasses as the amount we create by burning fossil fuels.
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The Keeling curve is going up steeper than ever. If these numbers are correct then positive feedbacks have taken over.
Re:Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
So why did the UK & USA go to war in Iraq on the basis of chasing weapons of mass destruction that probably did not exist at a cost of some $1.1 trillion [wikipedia.org]? Answer: because it suited other goals that politicians wanted. So: today politicians are chasing short term goals and keeping their eyes shut tight to the probable huge long term consequences of not dealing with climate change.
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And yet there are politicians and various groups who are pushing for climate change action. Are they just the honest ones, or just the ones who have figured out how to profit from it?
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You can't say that because it's racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, evidence of white privilege, and means you hate puppies and want unicorns to die. You monster.
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No, its 'cuz if we were wrong about WMD in Iraq, it was likely that Saddam, who hated our guts over Gulf War 1, would have given said WMD to terrorists who would have deployed it on our densest population centers, the east coast and California. An anthrax attack could have possibly killed a million people. Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think? I live on the east coast, BTW, but have, or at least had immunity to anthrax due to having traveled to Iraq a cou
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Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think?
You seem to be forgetting the ~1 million civilian dead.
Okay, it's hard to estimate, I'll give you 500k. And helping ISIS grow in the subsequent power vacuum. And some torture.
What is the exchange rate of American lives to everyone else's lives?
Does nobody ever look at Saddam's Iraq? (Score:2)
Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think?
You seem to be forgetting the ~1 million civilian dead.
Okay, it's hard to estimate, I'll give you 500k. And helping ISIS grow in the subsequent power vacuum. And some torture.
What is the exchange rate of American lives to everyone else's lives?
How many dead from Saddam's war against Iran? How about his genocide of the Kurds? How about his war against Kuwait? How about his genocide of the Shia Iraqis? How many people did Saddam kill beyond that just for suspicions of disloyalty in his decades of rule?
If you can't already answer those questions you can't pretend to appreciate the cost of inaction on Saddam's regime. You think ISIS didn't equally find it's roots from the brutal dictatorships of guys like Saddam and Assad? Do you honestly believe tha
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So your argument is that the US is better than Saddam, which considering what has happened is actually debatable. By very convincing.
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So your argument is that the US is better than Saddam, which considering what has happened is actually debatable. By very convincing.
My argument is more that nearly 3 decades of brutal repression, sectarian warfare and genocide at the hands of Saddam might have played a larger formative role in the Iraqis troubles than the much shorter lived, incompetent, American occupation.
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Saddam was the thing keeping the country together. Like Afghanistan and Libya, you can't just get rid of the big baddie and suddenly democracy springs forth and everything is lovely. As bad as those dictators were, if you look at the numbers who died during the Iran-Iraq war, the US invasion was no better. And just saying some event in the past was as bad doesn't excuse what the US went on to do. It's an on-going disaster.
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Ahem, shit brain. We could have just left it all alone.
Ignoring problems doesn't always make them better.
Like when Saddam was left in power after the Iran-Iraq war, he went on to commit a genocide because he was left alone.
He then went on to invade Kuwait, because he was left alone.
He then was pushed out of Kuwait, but otherwise left in power, he then committed another genocide because he was left free to.
You noticing a trend?
It's folks like you willing to ignore everyone else's suffering that Bill Clinton catered to during the Rwandan genocide. He played it ex
Re:Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fashionable to pretend that it was all based on bloodlust but for those of us who were alive at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. The decision was made with the best information at the time and in retrospect it was a mistake.
I was alive at the time, and it was a transparently stupid thing to do. It never looked like the right thing to do, and it was obvious before we even went in that it would spiral out of control. The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
It wasn't all bad (Score:2, Informative)
It's fashionable to pretend that it was all based on bloodlust but for those of us who were alive at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do. The decision was made with the best information at the time and in retrospect it was a mistake.
I was alive at the time, and it was a transparently stupid thing to do. It never looked like the right thing to do, and it was obvious before we even went in that it would spiral out of control. The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
It's transparently stupid to declare anything as the obvious 'best' answer to Saddam era Iraq.
Saddam's attempted genocide of the Kurdish people in his Al-Anfal campaign through the use of chemical weapons, massacres of villages with conventional weapons, concentration camps for the captured, mass graves for the captured males old enough to bear arms, and systematic rape of the women. The rape wasn't about punishment or intimidation but an attempt to impregnate the victims with half-Arab children and effecti
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Why did the USA have to go and protect all those enemies of saddam hussein?
If the millions of victims that Saddam murdered aren't a reason without some manner of paperwork or legal justification there's always the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. All 147 signatories are obliged to act to prevent genocide, and failing that to act to punish those who have committed it. So, by 1990 already, 147 countries around the world were obliged to go and protect those 'enemies' of Saddam Hussein. The world failed to do what they signed on for though, as they
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The administration sold it on lies and misinformation, and a lot of people bought it.
Speaking as someone who was not only alive at the time but actively serving in the military at the time, you seem to forget Saddam himself was being conned by his own scientists who feared for their lives if they reported failure. Furthermore, the CIA believed they had WMD's, and the head of the CIA advised the Bush administration that WMD's were present.
So here you are, the President, sitting in the Oval Office. You've got a murderous thug of a dictator, someone who has shown no compunction about using W
Re: Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:2)
Scott Ritter (Score:2)
How about the numerous reports indicating that the CIAs reports were completely wrong.
They had a single expatriate source that had serious credibility problems bit the directive was go at all costs. So it was ignored.
Cheney would go on talk shows claiming that leaks in the media confirmed the Govs position. When the Gov had been the original leaker.
I believe one of the most prominent voices you are talking about is former Iraqi weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He very vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion and has been on of the leading voices in discussing how awful the intelligence was and obvious it was before hand that there were no WMD's in Iraq.
Regrettably for him and other revisionists his comments and those like him sang a different tune before the war. Ritter was quoted shortly before the war cautioning against it because Saddam would use his WM
Re:Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:5, Informative)
Oh except that we found stockpiles of said chemical weapons all over the country, troops were killed when they hit IED's made of chlorine rounds that we missed, and Syria who never had a known stockpile has been able to use Chemical weapons a few times, meaning the suspected export of unknown quantities of Chemical weapons during the run-up to the invasion occurred as feared.
The only thing we did not find was an active production system but they had six months to dismantle and hide or ship such to Syria.
Re:Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:5, Insightful)
I would add that Gaddafi after seeing what happened in Iraqi decided to own up to a whole bunch of WMD that we basically didn't have a clue about and allowed them to be removed. It is highly unlikely this would have happened without the Iraqi invasion.
The problem with the invasion of Iraqi was not the invasion itself but the utter lack of post invasion planning by Bush and his fellow bunch of morons.
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There may have been a few WMDs, it's always hard to get rid of everything, but they got rid of the vast majority. Not 100%, but imagine how many weapons would mysteriously disappear were the US to be forced to destroy all their weapons; people would patriotically hide them or hide them for sale later. Not to mention general incompetence, like the CDC losing vials of anthrax or smallpox.
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The WMD not only did exist, their presence was covered up possibly due to concerns over the public reaction over how much should have been there verses how little was found and possibly due to expected public reaction over people realising "Gulf War Syndrome" was caused by low level exposure to chemical agents.
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There was and wasn't weapons of mass destruction in the middle east. Depending on you view of what mass destruction is.
Well, the Israeli atomic bombs certainly should qualify.
Re:Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously?
The problem exists.
The models aren't failing.
There is scientific consensus.
The "good news" here is that the problem isn't worsening as fast as it used to.
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Any evidence to back up your claim that the scientific consensus is now that CO causing climate change is a hoax?
Or is it just some "think tank"-organization's claim?
Re:Also too early to spend trillions of dollars (Score:5, Informative)
CO2 does not cause warming. This has been shown to be a hoax.
If you want to be extremely pedantic, CO2 does not cause warming, the sun does. And no molecule that doesn't undergo a reaction (either chemical or physical) causes any warming. But that's pushing it a bit too much.
What a chemist will tell you is that CO2 or any molecule with three or more atoms has a scissoring motion that absorbs infrared wavelengths around the heat emissions that you can expect for a black body around the Earth's current temperature. So, rather than these emissions escaping towards outer space and having radiative cooling, you have them being partially absorbed by CO2 and other gases (water, methane, CFC gases and so on) and then emitted once again as the molecule relaxes to a more fundamental state. These emissions then happen in every direction, including back down to Earth, for a further chance at heating the planet. The important part here is the scissoring motion and the three atoms it needs. A diatomic molecule (oxygen, nitrogen, etc) will not cause this because the frequencies at which it absorbs energy are substantially different.
How you can judge this as being a hoax, it's a mystery to me or anyone else with more than 2 brain cells.
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>How you can judge this as being a hoax, it's a mystery to me or anyone else with more than 2 brain cells
Just like it needs three atoms to be a greenhouse gas, it needs 3 braincells to understand.
CO2 absorption (Score:2)
There are both stretching and bending modes. There are also a lot of rotational modes, but these tend to be longer wavelength.
Models so far are pretty good (Score:2)
The models are not overpredicting warming; that's a denier talking point, but it is not based on actual data.
Right at the moment, the measured warming is very close to what the models predict; well within quoted error bars.
Models are available (Score:2)
The models are all closed so you can't really inspect what they attribute to what.
Huh? The main global circulation models are all available. You can look them up on the internet. And even run them yourself, if you have access to a supercomputer-- dozens of universities do this.
Null hypothesis is rejected (Score:2)
The models are indeed failing. Just because the earth is warming don't mean the models are right.
The data is:
1. The Earth is warming
2. The warming rate fits the models to within the quoted error bars.
3. The warming rate does not fit the null-hypothesis ("anthropogenic gasses have no effect on global climate.")
This is how science is done: the null hypothesis is rejected. If you wish to say "the models aren't right", what you need to do is find a different model which fits the data, and is not already ruled out by other known facts (like, for example, if your model is "the sun is increasing in output,"
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3. The warming rate does not fit the null-hypothesis ("anthropogenic gasses have no effect on global climate.")
That is not actually the null hypothesis for the data currently being collected, since "greenhouse gas" and "anthropogenically sourced greenhouse gas" are not synonyms.
To rule out the null hypothesis, you actually have to test based on that null hypothesis. That means removing all other potential causes and varying only the parameter under study. If you want to disprove the null hypothesis as you have stated it, you need to have two systems: one with AGG and one without. The one without is the control. Whe
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The fact that you seem to be missing is that we have good measurements.
We have reasonable measurements of concentration of CO2 and temperature. Not "good" since the sampling is very very sparse compared to the volume of the planetary atmosphere and area of the surface. We don't have measurements of "anthropogenic gasses" since that would require a huge amount of instrumentation at the sources. Yes, we also can measure isotope ratios in the samples we do have, and from that try to back out the sources of the gasses, but that's limited in scope.
If you are proposing that some other input is accounting for the temperature increase, you need to identify that input .
"We can't think of any other cause
Re: Too early to celebrate (Score:2)
Too early to celebrate because data is not there (Score:4, Informative)
It's too early to celebrate because the data really doesn't show this purported downturn yet. Here's the measured carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the last five years:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c... [noaa.gov]
And the full record:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/c... [noaa.gov]
If there's a recent downturn, I can't see it.
(A different link graphing the same data: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/progr... [ucsd.edu] )
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In the past, we've been adding more CO2, each year-on-year, than in each previous year.
Now, we have three consecutive years where we are adding the same amount, not more than each previous year.
Total atmospheric CO2 is still increasing, but the increase has stopped being a curve and is currently a straight line.
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In the past, we've been adding more CO2, each year-on-year, than in each previous year. Now, we have three consecutive years where we are adding the same amount, not more than each previous year. Total atmospheric CO2 is still increasing, but the increase has stopped being a curve and is currently a straight line.
That may be true, but you sure can't see it in the data yet.
I trust the Mauna Loa CO2 measurements. I don't trust the estimates of how much fossil fuel was used worldwide, particularly since the main part of the proposed decrease is in Chinese emissions, of which the reference cited says "Chinese emissions were down 0.7 percent in 2015 and are projected to fall 0.5 percent in 2016, the researchers said, though noting that Chinese energy statistics have been plagued by inconsistencies."
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Dude Methane feedback is so 2000, even the RealClimate.org echo-chamber debunks [realclimate.org] your position [realclimate.org]. Do try to keep up.
cost (Score:5, Informative)
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Ultimately I think its this factor that will make the difference. Although sadly the Fukushima incident has shattered public faith in the best solution of the lot, Nuclear. At this stage I'm hoping for breakthroughs in Thorium, or Fusion if it is indeed possible. Both are easier to sell to a pesimistic public than uranium fusion (That thorium has no outputs that can be used in nuclear
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Is it? It has always been touted as being very,very cheap, but it never was. And the reason is very simple: every nuclear power plant you build is one of a kind, which raises cost to build it immensely, while turbine and panels are coming of an assembly line.
Re:cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it? It has always been touted as being very,very cheap, but it never was.
And I am sure the nuclear industry didn't factor in the long-term costs of how to store away the nuclear waste safely, for generations. Or the costs of dismantling a plant. Or of course the costs when something bad happens. 100 billion $ total cost of Fukushima disaster.
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Actually Fukushima has nearly spent all the original estimate for clean-up, and has barely started on the hard stuff yet.
Compensation costs are still to be determined, it's gone to court now.
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> every nuclear power plant you build is one of a kind
That's a United States problem. France uses a template. Bad policy tends to stick around, just like any statistical disaster...which leads me to my problem with nuclear power. It's set up and run by humans.
Yes you can generate power very cheaply for a few decades, but it ruins the site for a couple hundred years. Long term, it doesn't work out either. Now, if there is an accident (over what time period, how many will there be?) you end up contaminatin
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Yes you can generate power very cheaply for a few decades, but it ruins the site for a couple hundred years. Long term, it doesn't work out either. Now, if there is an accident (over what time period, how many will there be?) you end up contaminating more than just the site (fukishima, chernobyl).
The first part would be worth it if not for the second part. If you knew with absolute certainty (ha!) that you would never have a problem with the reactor, and that it would absolutely last for x years producing y amount of power per year, and then the site would be useless for 200 years, that would probably be a pretty good tradeoff. We have lots of places we could put them. Sadly, it doesn't work that way... instead, it works just as you describe.
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No you dont " ruins the site for a couple hundred years" here is a list of dissmantled nuclear powerplants and as you can see it did NOT take 100+ years to release the sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
as for accidents, chernobyl will never happen again, fukushima contaminated a very small area (yes small) and the contamination will be gone in 30-40 years.
The fact is that nuclear power is magnitudes better than fosil fuels from a health point of view.
se:http://www.nextbigfuture.c
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And don't forget that burning fossil fuels releases a whole lot of radiation into the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And mercury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And a whole lot of other undesirables apart from CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And don't forget that burning fossil fuels releases a whole lot of radiation into the air....
That may be true, but the fossil fuel industry does not pay for it, whereas the nuclear industry does. Until there is some sort of cap-and-trade program, nuclear will not be economically attractive.
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It depends how you define "decommissioning". If you mean how long until the land can be put back to normal, general use then 100 years is only a little high. Current UK sites being decommissioned are looking at 90 years, and sites in Japan don't even bother to give a date. Do you have any examples in the US where the site has been returned to, say, farming or housing?
With Fukushima, it's not just the area affected (several towns), unknowns. Essentially the government took on an unlimited liability cost that
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French nuclear plants aren't all that great either. There is a template but each site is still unique, due to variations in geography. You need a source of water for cooling, for example, and no two rivers or shores are quite the same.
The biggest issue though is that the French nuclear industry is costing France a fortune. It's been leeching off the government since it started, on promises of cheap and clean every that never materialized. That's why France has gone off it now. French nuclear companies are b
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All power plants, all over the world, have a strong history of incidents. Because they are major undertakings and they generate... POWER.
The French incidents have had no fatalities and have been dealt with efficiently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In fact, there are very few, historically, nuclear incidents with fatalities. Not so with ANY other power generating technologies, including solar and especially Wind.
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Fatalities are not the measure of how serious energy production accidents are. That's just cherry picking the best metric for nuclear, and this isn't a game of Top Trumps.
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Not as much as you would think, the westinghouse AP1000 [wikipedia.org] is eligable for Combined Construction and Operating License [wikipedia.org] which means no changes can be made to the design of a plant.
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While I'm optimistic about the thorium fuel cycle, it won't be the best solution to our future energy needs. The best solution will be getting our energy from a mix of carbon neutral sources. Plus greater efficiency, of course.
Every means of generating energy is going to have marginal costs that increase with scale, and that includes nuclear. Putting all our energy eggs in the nuclear basket has several undesirable consequences that are more manageable if nuclear is just a contributor. First there's the
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Although sadly the Fukushima incident has shattered public faith in the best solution of the lot, Nuclear.
I rather like this statement.
I mean, if people get over the whole radiation possibly killing them and destroying their towns, cities, livelihood, etc., nuclear is a much better solution than solar or wind. Fucking whiny crybabies--"Oh, I've got cancer! Oh, the house I've lived in for the last 40 years is now a worthless hunk of radioactive real-estate! Oh, I lost my fishing business because all the fish are radioactive and nobody wants to eat radioactive fish!" I mean, c'mon! Take one for the team!
Yeah
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A big LIE is of course the cost of solar and wind, which are now already cheaper than coal and oil, even without subsidies.
FTFY
If that were true that they were cheaper everyone would be figuratively storming the gates to use wind/solar, the wind/solar equipment makers couldn't keep the stuff on the shelves, and they'd be abandoning other generation means within a couple years because they'd make more money.
That's not happening.
Is wind/solar getting cheaper? Yes, of course. Is it more economical than other types? Not yet. I'm sure we'll get there, but "we ain't there yet".
What higher prices for electricity and other forms of ene
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Well, no, that's not quite the case [wikipedia.org]. Onshore wind is already cheaper than coal, and photovoltaic solar energy is essentially pretty much at even when it comes to the costs of a more advanced/modern coal power.
The reason the rush
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[...] germany where the well-intentioned but shortsighted Green party has put a ban on new nuclear power plants and they're driving the existing ones down.
The Green Party in Germany has never been in power. It has been the minority partner in a coalition with the Social Democratic Party for 7 years (1998 to 2005) - over ten years ago. The current exit from nuclear energy in Germany is due to a law supported CDU (conservatives), SPD, FDP (liberals) and Greens in 2001.
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Erhm.
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That sum is ONLY fair if you also factor in all the thousands of people who are indirectly harmed and killed to produce cheap fossil fuels. Forget climate change for a moment (which would only increase it), think of the respiratory illnesses that plague towns near coal mines and coal plants. Think of the thousands of kids dying from asthma attacks every day to keep it going.
These are overwhelmingly poor people (richer people can afford to not live near coal mines and plants). Think of all the people killed
Slowing isn't enough - with a graph. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.climatecentral.org/... [climatecentral.org] contains the graph
http://assets.climatecentral.o... [climatecentral.org]
This shows the rise in the CO2 level in the atmosphere over the last 5 years.
For over a year now, it's been over 400ppm, and the rise in 2015-16, over the same period the year before has been the largest this past year than any time in the last five years.
Re:Slowing isn't enough - with a graph. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tamino doesn't see evidence of a slowdown:
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2... [wordpress.com]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
CO2 in the atmosphere, and the world's CO2 output over a year, isn't the same thing. They're correlated, but with a long delay (in the order of decades or longer IIRC). The atmosphere itself, oceans, forests etc all act like buffers. So if the world (read: mankind's) CO2 output would drop to 0 instantly, CO2 in the atmosphere will stay high for a long time no matter what. Adding more CO2 just makes the problem worse. So a more accurate way is saying that the rate at which we're making the problem worse, ha
Re: (Score:3)
Humanity didn't exist 5 million or a hundred million years ago -our kind of society could not have existed then and would not survive such a change now (and since those climates changed very slowly - at the timeline we're talking about, it's a mass extinction event for most creatures which BY ITSELF could cause OUR extinction since we probably cannot survive independently of other animals - we evolved for a world with them in it).
But that's unlikely since our society will collapse long before we get there.
Re: (Score:2)
Data from Mauna Loa Hawaii contradicts this report (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
Last year broke the record with a growth rate over 3PPM / Year. Looking at this years monthly data, in 2016 we're on track to smash last year's record with somewhere around 3.5PPM / Year. Every year this decade has been at or above the average for previous decade. Rather than a levelling off, the data looks like continual growth.
Confused as to how any report can be claiming a "levelling off". Mauna Loa is seen as the de-facto standard for global CO2 levels as it's in the middle of the pacific and therefore isolated from localised effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory
Re:Data from Mauna Loa Hawaii contradicts this rep (Score:4, Informative)
They're not comparing the same thing (human emissions versus atmospheric levels).
Well thank god.... (Score:3, Funny)
Another Study Finds Earth's CO2 Emissions Have Flattened Over The Last Three Years
I just heard that President Elect by popular vote, Donald Trump has pledged to fix this problem so you can all breathe easier now. The president is hard at work assembling a crack task force from among the ranks of Big Oil and Big Coal to bring CO2 emissions growth back on track.
Re: (Score:2)
>by popular vote is it ? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11... [nytimes.com]
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Technically the vote for the president hasn't taken place yet. The vote for who will vote in the electoral college will. By tradition, and sometimes by state law, those people vote by the will of the people the represent. There was at least one person in Washington State this election who stated they wouldn't vote for Clinton on December 19 even if she won the state. Of course this one case won't make a difference if everyone else votes the way they are expected to.
New administration says (Score:3)
Misleading headline (shock!) (Score:3)
Note that the (near) flat line is only for fossil-fuel derived CO2: not all human produced CO2, and certainly not all Earth produced !!
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Re: (Score:2)
We're talking about the *net CO2 increase*. Human activity is responsible for more than 100% of that.
Re: (Score:2)
We're talking about the *net CO2 increase*. Human activity is responsible for more than 100% of that.
For sure, everybody know that magic fairies sort out the 801 Gigatons of CO2 from natural sources and puts them in a separate bin so Gaia's green goodness can digest it, but totally reject the 30 Gigatons of nasty anthropogenic CO2! [skepticalscience.com]
But but but...consensus!!! (Score:3)
Which is almost as dumb as knowing the rules of the American electoral process, which have been in place for literally centuries, and then complaining when they don't like the results.
Emissions vs airborne fraction (Score:2)
Last week a study suggested earth's plant life is absorbing a greater percentage of global CO2 emissions -- although reductions in China could also be significant.
That sentence seems to confuse two different phenomena. This story is about emissions - how much we emit. The previous story is about the airborne fraction - how much of what we emit stays in the atmosphere vs. being absorbed by plants or the ocean.
The green line here shows the trend in atmospheric CO2: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g... [woodfortrees.org]
No No No! (Score:2)
Excellent news (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Those figures are not in the right ballpark, hell they are not even in the same sport.
In reality the single largest CO2 emission source after human activity is volcanoes. The American Geophysical Union published a report that compared volcanic CO2 to human CO2. The short version is that the total annual volcanic CO2 contribution is 0.025% of what humans produce JUST from coal plants (which is a tiny fraction of our total CO2 production - but the easiest one to accurately measure).
Whoever gave you that numbe
Re: (Score:2)
AC Said "I've read one estimate where the global, yearly CO2 generation is 800Gt (Giga tons). Human actions account to 30Gt (~4 % )." you replied
Whoever gave you that number was lying through their teeth.
30/ (439 + 332 +30) = 0.037~ [skepticalscience.com], OBTW (439 + 332 +30) is 801 ; so round-off error is hardly "lying through their teeth", the numbers that SkepticalScience used are from Figure 7.3, IPCC AR4.
Most of us irredeemable deplorable climate deniers consider SkepticalScience to be a pack of rabid Climate Alarmists, it's kind of apropos that they blow your argument out of th
Re: (Score:2)
Aaah, I see your mistake. You conveniently didn't seperate out NEW CO2 from CO2 that was already part of the cycle. The page you linked actually TELLS you why your argument is bullshit. The numbers you give are a complete lie - but like any good lie - it's based on taking something true and lying about what it means.
Of the carbon that is added on TOP of what's in the existing cycle, the carbon that's actually a problem, we make almost all of it.
Just look at what you're doing - your argument is listend on th
Re: (Score:2)
I've read one estimate where the global, yearly CO2 generation is 800Gt (Giga tons). Human actions account to 30Gt (~4 % )
You've read incorrectly. Before human actions, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were stable.
Re: (Score:3)
You're giving yourself heart palpitations for no reasons. There are other, well-founded reasons, to be opposed to Trump. This is f00king retarded.
#NeverTrump,
#NeverHillary.
Vote Third Party in 2016 and beyond.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you really think that Republicans want dirty water and pollution choked skies?
It's not what anyone thinks; it's perfectly bleeding obvious. Exhibit A: Pat "the Rat" McCrory and his corrupt mollycoddling of Duke Energy.
Vote Third Party in 2016 and beyond.
Thanks for putting the Flim Flam Führer in office. But at least you kept your purity.
Re: (Score:2)
So? This is okay.
If this trip leads to a long-term reduction of CO2 emissions greater than 16.5 T then it's worth it. In effect, not taking the trip would cause more emissions.