Blast From Tonga Volcano In January Could Eat Away At Ozone Layer, Warm Earth (science.org) 85
Nathaniel Scharping writes via Science Magazine: On 15 January, Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted under the sea, rocking the South Pacific nation and sending tsunamis racing around the world. The eruption was the most powerful ever recorded, causing an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe four times, and sending a plume of debris more than 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. But it didn't stop there. The ash and gasses punching into the sky also shot billions of kilograms of water into the atmosphere, a new study concludes. That water will likely remain there for years, where it could eat away at the ozone layer and perhaps even warm Earth.
In all, the plume shot approximately 146 billion kilograms of water into Earth's stratosphere, an arid layer of the atmosphere that begins several miles above sea level, the authors report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That's equivalent to about 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, or about 10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere, [study co-author and JPL atmospheric scientist Luis Millan] says. Other volcanoes have added measurable amounts of water vapor to Earth's atmosphere, he says, but the scale this time was unprecedented. That's likely because of the eruption's magnitude and underwater location, he says. The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more, he says.
Big volcanic eruptions often cool the climate, because the sulfur dioxide they release forms compounds that reflect incoming sunlight. But with so much water vapor flung aloft, the Tonga eruption could have a different impact. Water absorbs incoming energy from the Sun, making it a potent greenhouse gas. And the sulfur dioxide will dissipate in just a few years whereas the water will likely stick around for at least 5 years -- and potentially longer Millan thinks. That could make Earth warmer for years and accelerate the warming from greenhouse gasses, [says Matthew Toohey, a physicist who focuses on climate modeling and the effects of volcanic eruptions at the University of Saskatchewan and was not involved with the work]. "We'll kind of just jump forward by a few years." But the actual effects on climate will likely take time to understand [...]. High above Earth, the water will likely react with other chemicals, potentially degrading the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light, and even changing the circulation of air currents that govern weather patterns.
In all, the plume shot approximately 146 billion kilograms of water into Earth's stratosphere, an arid layer of the atmosphere that begins several miles above sea level, the authors report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That's equivalent to about 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, or about 10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere, [study co-author and JPL atmospheric scientist Luis Millan] says. Other volcanoes have added measurable amounts of water vapor to Earth's atmosphere, he says, but the scale this time was unprecedented. That's likely because of the eruption's magnitude and underwater location, he says. The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more, he says.
Big volcanic eruptions often cool the climate, because the sulfur dioxide they release forms compounds that reflect incoming sunlight. But with so much water vapor flung aloft, the Tonga eruption could have a different impact. Water absorbs incoming energy from the Sun, making it a potent greenhouse gas. And the sulfur dioxide will dissipate in just a few years whereas the water will likely stick around for at least 5 years -- and potentially longer Millan thinks. That could make Earth warmer for years and accelerate the warming from greenhouse gasses, [says Matthew Toohey, a physicist who focuses on climate modeling and the effects of volcanic eruptions at the University of Saskatchewan and was not involved with the work]. "We'll kind of just jump forward by a few years." But the actual effects on climate will likely take time to understand [...]. High above Earth, the water will likely react with other chemicals, potentially degrading the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light, and even changing the circulation of air currents that govern weather patterns.
Exploded vs Evaporated (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious if water vapor lofted into the atmosphere from a volcanic explosion behaves any differently than water vapor absorbed by evaporation. Does the salt content cause it to condense differently than evaporated moisture? Is there enough salt content to make a difference? I'm sure some water was superheated and recondenced to water vapor, but for 146 billion liters to sent skyward, some of it might not have gone through the vapor/condense cycle.
I guess we'll have to see over the next few years how this water vapor affects precipitation cycles.
Re:Exploded vs Evaporated (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about the salt. Chlorine that makes it up to the stratosphere is the catalyst that causes the breakdown of ozone. Chlorine is what is generated when CFCs break down from UV light, so it is well studied.
Normal evaporation is mostly clean water, with no salts. The volcanic blast was probably not mostly evaporated - it was aerosolized and ejected with its salt intact.
Re:Exploded vs Evaporated (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you know the salt content of the water from the volcanic gases? No, Nor do I. But there's no reason to believe that water vapour from a volcano is any "fresher" than water evaporated from the surface of the sea. Specifically, this is a volcano above a subduction zone, and quite a lot of the water in it's magma(s) was de-gassed from the descending slab of seabed, and it is unlikely that the water in the ascending magma was in any sense "fresh". There is an awful lot of experience with fluid inclusions in mineral grains from metal ore veins, and in large non-metal mineral crystals in lavas, where you frequently (a few % of the time) find both bubbles of exsolved gas and crystallised salts in the cavity with the pore fluid enclosed by the growing crystal.
The water ejected from this volcano probably had a similar salt content to sea water, possibly somewhat higher (the interaction of seawater with mantle minerals tends to consume water, increasing the salt concentration in the remaining water phase ; it'll be supercritical at this point, most likely).
You're also seeming to think that the water condenses in some way with it's salt. It doesn't. When "moist" lava is fragmented and ejected into the air, the water from any droplets will go into vapour leaving non-volatile components in solution (or coated onto) in droplets of molten lava. That'll be your salts. When the temperature-pressure conditions in the rising plume become suitable, the water vapour will condense into droplets of pure water (literally, distilled). (The droplets will rapidly absorb carbon dioxide and possibly ammonia vapour from the air, making it less pure ; this is why when we prepared high-purity water for preparing analytic-grade hydrogen for the gas chromatographs, we'd buy in "distilled water" from the car maintenance shop, then pass it through two ion-exchange resins to substitute H+ for the positive ions, and OH- for the negative ions (H+ + OH- <=> H2O) ; there's a difference in purity between "distilled" and "de-ionised" water. Boring "war story".)
When a droplet of seawater is ejected into the air, and blown upwards by the winds, it loses water vapour (as pure as "distilled") into the air and a more concentrated "ex-seawater" in the droplet. That process continues until the salt(s) crystallise from the seawater.
These grains of salt are found in the air, and are a often found to be nucleation sites for condensing water vapour from the air to form rain drops. That's part of the logic behind various forms of "cloud seeding", as occasionally reported here.
I suspect that the settling rate of these salt grains is sufficiently fast that they'd struggle to get past the tropopause [wikipedia.org] (a low wind-speed region about 10-15 km up, IIRC) and into the stratosphere, let alone the middle stratosphere where the ozone layer is. If you remember, the destruction processes that cause the "ozone hole" are strongly catalysed by halogen (chlorine, bromine, iodine, primarily) ions - hence the problem of halogenated gases getting into the stratosphere. (There's also a strong temperature effect - hence the polar association.)
The distinction between water vapour from seawater evaporation and that from volcanic plumes is primarily that the plumes forcibly inject water vapour, grains of salts, grains of ash and also sulphur compounds directly into the stratosphere, while the materials from seawater have to diffuse up through the tropopause over a period of months.
Not a lot. There's no real evidence for the rate of volcanic eruptions which in
Will likely take time to understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Will likely take time to understand (Score:2)
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Neither: https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
Re: Will likely take time to understand (Score:2)
Re: Will likely take time to understand (Score:3)
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. I read studies that claim that Tonga eruption "will not affect the climate", "will have cooling effect" and now "will have warming effect".
That's just deniers grasping at straws.
Re: Will likely take time to understand (Score:2)
Looks like you have found a new religion - by faith alone you believe those whose predictions have never come true
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That and 12 of the last 15 years being hottest on record.
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How many journal editors (let alone "news outlet" editors) would publish a report that concludes "the effects of X will be too small to measure with any confidence"?
The answer could probably be counted on the fingers of one foot.
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I don't believe you read any reasonable number of peer-reviewed studies by actual experts, or understood those that you did read. For a start, no ACTUAL study will claim that such-and-such "will" have any effect. Studies will state that "if" such-and-such such holds true, given such-and-such was observed, models indicate a certain probability of such-and-such an effect. Anyone who reads certainty into a paper hasn't read the paper.
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IMO we should have geoengineering schemes ready both for global cooling and warming.
We're already doing the former, so that one is solved. We can deploy that one in about 8000 years if required. Warming is the current challenge we are facing, having done the former when the prior reduction in temperatures after the 8.4kya event has been quite gradual, i.e., prematurely.
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Not the most powerful (Score:5, Interesting)
This eruption was a VEI 5. The Pinatubo eruption of 1991 was a VEI 6, i.e. about 10 times the explosive force. The Tambora eruption of 1815 was a VEI 7, i.e. 100 times the explosive force.
The Tonga eruption did have some unusually large effects due to the local geography (a volcano under a thin layer of water).
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That's the magnitude of the eruption. The summary definitely gets it wrong by saying that the eruption is the most powerful - it's the size of the explosive force that exceeded other records. But the explosive force wasn't just from the eruption, it was because of the giant steam explosion above it - which isn't really part of the VEI ranking.
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The ejecta volume component in the "VEI" is logarithmic - and it's important, because you can estimate it fairly well (within a factor of 10-ish) a million years after the event, when the explosivity, plume height etc have dissipated. But the other components are part of the calculation too.
Re:Not the most powerful (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but it was by far the best measured eruption with regard to atmospheric effects (the best instrumented for terrestrial measurements would still be Mt. St. Helens).
Through some of these measurements of the Tonga eruption, we discovered, for example, that the tsunami was propagating far faster than our previous understanding would have explained. The current hypothesis is that the Tonga tsunami was primarily wind-driven by the shockwave, rather than by the up-down motion of the crust at the eruption point which would have generated a slower, traditional oceanic wave.
Also fascinating for the data analysis geek is that the 5 times around the world shockwaves in the upper atmosphere were measured by the second derivative of brightness in one particular wavelength band that corresponds to reflectivity of ice crystals. Not the absolute brightness, nor the first time derivative, but the *second*. https://www.reddit.com/r/datai... [reddit.com]
Additional mapping of the seabed in and around the caldera by an intrepid geologist in a fishing boat (nope, not kidding, he's an associate of mine) showed that a very large fraction (was it 80%?) of the eruptive volume remained sub-surface. His measurements have contributed to raising the current estimates for VEI of Tonga to from 5 to 6.
Finally, there are just buckets-full of observations for Tonga from all of the currently flying satellites. We have crazy amounts of data for this explosion at unprecedented resolution in both space and time.
Re:Seasons... (Score:1)
EVs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: EVs (Score:2)
Re: EVs (Score:2)
Re: EVs (Score:2)
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There is just not enough Lithium and metals for producing the quantity needed to make a dent.
Citation required.
They should be offering $7500 for small ICE cars to encourage people out of their trucks and SUVs.
It can be both, and I'd support both. Note, that ICE cars also use metal.
And residual heat is great in cold climates where electric cars lose like 40% capacity from cold batteries and heating.
Citation required for 40% loss of range (it's not capacity - capacity is the amount of energy in the battery).
Re: EVs (Score:2)
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Yes, the loss of capacity reduces the range, as does pumping a bunch of energy into the passenger compartment in the form of heat.
It does, but the issue is the claim of 40%.
Re: EVs (Score:4, Informative)
That would be this article [apnews.com], which says:
A gasoline car also experiences reduced range in cold weather because it takes longer for the engine to warm up and because engine oil is thicker at cold temperatures [holtsauto.com].
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That would be this article [apnews.com], which says:
A gasoline car also experiences reduced range in cold weather because it takes longer for the engine to warm up and because engine oil is thicker at cold temperatures [holtsauto.com].
Thank you, that's a decent citation.
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BEVs create double the carbon footprint during manufacture and seldom recover that loss due to the short lifespan.
Multiple studies say otherwise. Do you want to cite yours and I will cite a number that show your assertion is incorrect. With battery management systems the latest generation of batteries will outlast components such as suspension, bodywork, etc. and still have 80% or more capacity and can be used in the secondary market.
due to the short lifespan.
They don't have a short lifespan.
ICE has the advantage that it is far easier to switch to better fuel sources like plant based ethanol or rubbish based biodiesel as they do in Germany etc.
Pure ethanol requires engine changes.
I do find it strange that in the countries that do it, biofuels do not take up much land but in the US where there is more land, biofuels will take up too much land.
No Western nation is sourcing more than a tiny fraction of their fuel as biofuel from domestic sources. In the UK, for
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While OP was being snide, it should be noted, for the ignorant among us, that your average nuclear power plant does NOT produce fissionables, but rather consumes them. A nuclear power plant is pretty much useless for making nuclear weapons...
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Tritium is not a fissionable.
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What? I think you're missing a rather large amount of by products that get generated from that fission that are very very interesting for the nuclear weapons manufacturers...
They need more processing, for sure, and there are ways to create them more efficiently, for sure, but on levels of scale, 'commercial' nuclear reactors create an awful lot of them.
Fixing the myths and inacuraties (Score:2)
it will stop these volcanoes from emitting carbon dioxide into our atmostphere.
Even the summary mentions that the greenhouse effect of undersea volcanoes comes from water vapour.
Also, if volconoes are putting a bit of greenhouse in the atmosphere (eq. of 5 year of extra human CO2 emissions), the idea is that we shouldn't make the problem worse by pouring a shit ton of greenhouses too (nearly a century of CO2).
They do in reality cause as much of a carbon footprint as an ICE car due to battery production
If you thow away your EV in a dumpster every 2 years: Yes, that would be the case. But nobody does that.
Turn out, you know, ICE also need to be produced and those don't grow on (
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Thank you for an interesting reply :) EV manufacture has twice the carbon footprint of ICE manufacture thanks to the battery
Citation required.
Said battery does have a limitted lifespan but if it dies after 4 years
Which people are driving 250,000 miles per year?
So EVs are considered to have a lifespan of 8 years
Recent ones? No, new ones with decent battery management have a practical lifetime that is likely to be the same as ICEVs as the batteries should last a very long time. If you have information that they do not then you should publish your findings in the scientific literature.
In general, if you do less than 15,000 miles a year you will have a lower carbon footprint driving an ICE car although you still have the ICE car for the next 8 years or more and do not need to increase your carbon footprint by building another one.
Nonsense.
Public transport should use EVs,
Some already do (trains, and an increasing number of buses), but I wholeheartedly agree with this, not least because it also reduces NOx and particulate polluti
Re: Fixing the myths and inacuraties (Score:1)
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Citation needed in new battery lifetime predictions.
Nissan, Tesla, BMW, and Volkswagen will replace batteries falling under 70% capacity within the first 8 years or a number of miles (typically around 150,000), as of 2022. Note that not that many companies warrant other components for as long, although on some premium German cars ther
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I agree with the thrust of your comment but
Biofuels are the best we have today.
They absolutely cannot scale. I suggest you look at yields and requirements.
They absolutely can scale. We have more than enough desert land on the planet near enough to coasts that we can pump seawater inland with solar thermal heat pipes and produce enough algae to replace 100% of our transportation fuel needs.
and
Relatively few locations in Germany sell E85 as your car has to be extensively modified for it.
No, it does not. Running E85 requires just three hardware conditions: relatively high compression, a higher-volume fuel pump (and maybe fuel injectors) than for gasoline, and the inclusion of a fuel quality sensor. Only one of th
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They absolutely can scale. We have more than enough desert land on the planet near enough to coasts that we can pump seawater inland with solar thermal heat pipes and produce enough algae to replace 100% of our transportation fuel needs.
and
I refer to my previous comments. Algae is an unproven technology in any commercial scenario, and so the scenario above is unproven. It also involves, in your scenario, destroying ecosystems.
No, it does not. Running E85 requires just three hardware conditions: relatively high compression, a higher-volume fuel pump (and maybe fuel injectors) than for gasoline, and the inclusion of a fuel quality sensor.
Significant modifications for many engines. You can't just go and pump E85 into your car without doing this.
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Algae is an unproven technology in any commercial scenario
At these oil prices, even the tech proven at Sandia labs in the 80s should be profitable.
and so the scenario above is unproven. It also involves, in your scenario, destroying ecosystems.
Fuck 'em. Seen what's happening to the ecosystems we actually care about on this planet? You really think desert ecosystems are going to remain viable with global warming anyway? Desert is what happens when things go to shit, so we'll have more desert than we can live in soon enough if we don't get serious.
Significant modifications for many engines. You can't just go and pump E85 into your car without doing this.
You can't just make your argument make sense by ignoring the rest of my comment. I really don't know why that's eve
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Algae is an unproven technology in any commercial scenario
At these oil prices, even the tech proven at Sandia labs in the 80s should be profitable.
We don't know if it works at scale, which doesn't have anything to do with price.
and so the scenario above is unproven. It also involves, in your scenario, destroying ecosystems.
Fuck 'em. Seen what's happening to the ecosystems we actually care about on this planet?
Then why not just continue to burn coal and drill for oil if ecosystems don't matter?
Significant modifications for many engines. You can't just go and pump E85 into your car without doing this.
You can't just make your argument make sense by ignoring the rest of my comment.
I didn't ignore it, I just don't agree with you.
I really don't know why that's even a conversation since ethanol fuel is shit.
That we can agree on.
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We don't know if it works at scale, which doesn't have anything to do with price.
What? That's exactly what it has to do with. Welcome to capitalism. That's literally how it works.
Then why not just continue to burn coal and drill for oil if ecosystems don't matter?
Some matter more than others. Pretending otherwise is just that.
You can't just make your argument make sense by ignoring the rest of my comment.
I didn't ignore it, I just don't agree with you.
It's very, very rare for any modern vehicle to not be capable of running on E85 with very, very minor changes — and if they are made at the time of manufacture, they add very little cost to a vehicle. These statements are facts, and I'm not sure why they're supposed to be controversial. Even if you buy a flex fuel sensor aftermarket from a hi
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We don't know if it works at scale, which doesn't have anything to do with price.
What? That's exactly what it has to do with. Welcome to capitalism. That's literally how it works.
I think you misunderstood me. Something that appears to work on paper may turn out to be unworkable in practice at all, or with capitalism unable to change this for any price anyone is prepared to pay, i.e. relative to alternative options. Just because capitalism exist doesn't make something not possible or practical possible to do. So far, algae experiments have been limited in scale and quite inconclusive as to whether it is sustainable outside small scales or for long periods of time (decades) that would
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I think you would find great resistance to eliminating deserts by flooding them with sea water.
No doubt, but then, there is great resistance to all the things we should be doing in order to not destroy ourselves. Start with the ones which are going to be inundated by sea level rise soon anyway first...
Part1 (Score:2)
Said battery does have a limitted lifespan but if it dies after 4 years it is still economically viable to replace the battery but after 8 years you would throw the car away. So EVs are considered to have a lifespan of 8 years
The "8 years or 200'000miles" was a warranty that Tesla gave to its cars. Nowadays some of the earlier car have reached and exceeded this ages. The batteries didn't suddenly stopped working "en mass". The only thing you can observe is a reduced capacity of the battery. You can merely extract only 85~80% of the initial capacity (though in practice not all old cars have gone so low).
The cars and their batteries remain otherwise usable.
The only battery swap I've witnessed personally is the local car sharing co
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Part2 (Score:2)
Yup indeed I need to split in two.
The problem with nuclear is that it still takes time to change output. {...} Gas can respond fastest to changes in demand just like turning the dial on the cooker.
It depends on the exact definition of "time".
On the scale of daily use and such variation: it's more or less predictible and very heavily nuke oriented countries like France manage fine (as long as the output temperature of the cooling water doesn't exceed some very stringent ecological thresholds. Otherwise the maximum they are allowed to be throttle up to will be limited (it's happening along some rivers in France currently), or special exceptions to relax the stringency
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France being a good example of an insanely low CO2 country
Somewhere out there a Greenpeace member's head is exploding.
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Lots of words. Most of which are even in the dictionary. But none of it makes the remotest sense. Nobody is telling you to buy EVs, for a start. And even if they were, volcanoes are utterly insignificant in terms of the environmental impact compared to humans. If you're going to troll, AT LEAST learn enough to produce a coherent post. Oh, but you can't. Because as soon as you know enough to produce a coherent post, you realise that environmental concerns are serious.
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Forcing everone to drive EVs will do nothing to help the environment. The battery production takes a ton of carbon and the the electrical grid will need huge upgrades to support the extra load of charging all these vehicles. Like most "climate saving" mandates, when you look at the actual data they do little more than make smug eco nuts feel better.
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Forcing everone to drive EVs will do nothing to help the environment
Even when charged from coal, an EV has lower cradle to grave emissions than an ICEV, so that is a lie.
The battery production takes a ton of carbon
So does producing fossil fuels, so that is irrelevant. Also, not all battery production in fact involves a lot of carbon emissions, so that is only partially true.
and the the electrical grid will need huge upgrades to support the extra load of charging all these vehicles.
No, it doesn't, because there is lots of capacity available at night, and more than 80% of EV charging occurs then. So that was also a lie.
In summary, your comment was based around two outright lies and one half-truth. Conclusion, you are a liar.
Billions of kgs (Score:3)
Re: Billions of kgs (Score:2)
Re: Billions of kgs (Score:2)
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The meter and gram are a bit weird in that SI prefixes aren't used consistently. Nobody refers to 1000 km as 1 Mm. The Mg isn't used either, we switch to tonne and apply SI prefixes to that.
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Billions of kgs... Isn't that the same as millions of tonnes? Why not trillions of gs? I guess there's no requirement for science reporters to understand weights & measures.
Apparently they understand better than you that since the different ways of expressing the value are exactly equivalent, it doesn't matter which one they choose to use.
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If you can identify one iota of difference between "one million tons" and "one billion kg", I'm all ears.
Tax the volcanoes (Score:1)
The only way to save the planet from volcanic made climate change is to tax the volcanoes.
I am sure if we implemented a sort of "volcanic carbon credits system" of some sort (details tbd) we would save the planet and prevent all life being destroyed in the next 12 years. I am going to write my rep, AOC, to ask why we don't already have a VCC system in place. Must be those anti-science Republicans working for the volcano industry and against democracy.
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Well, I suppose they've got practice.
So much for predictions (Score:3)
I've been saving this [9cache.com] for just such an occasion and well, not even close. The only thing they got right was a large volcanic eruption, and not even on the correct date.
Obviously another John Titor [wikipedia.org] wannabe.
Queen Salote will eat it all (Score:2)
Only old people will understand the joke in the title.
Well then (Score:2)
And the sulfur dioxide will dissipate in just a few years whereas the water will likely stick around for at least 5 years -- and potentially longer Millan thinks.
Then I guess we'd better get hot (badum ching!) and start spraying some more sulfur dioxide up there.
Whatever the difficulties, that has to be more practical than trying to get other people (it's always other people) to stop using energy and plastics ...
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When is the government going to do something? (Score:3)
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Your sarcasm IS appreciated HERE.
Volcanoes often cool the climate. Or not. (Score:1)
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Stop climate change (Score:2)
Stop climate change -- ban volcanoes!
So, let me get this straight... (Score:1)