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Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

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Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#111

Post by tolien »

mohaine wrote: post #106
tolien wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R-134A has a global warming potential of 1550 over 100 years [1], i.e. about 45 times more effective than methane, so while it's not eating the ozone layer you probably shouldn't be spraying it around by the tonne either. Edit: and CO2 has a GWP of 1 (as the reference point for GWP), so R-134A is way more effective than that. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...

In a perfect world, requiring reclamation would help. In the real world it just pushes this off to gray market recycler. They will come by and pick up your broken fridge for free for the recycle value but most will just vent the refrigerant no mater what. They just claim it was zero pressure when they found it. Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant disposal would take all the profit out of t…

Agreed down thread that after the fact enforcement action doesn’t seem like a sensible way to do this but political reality is what it is and I expect most of these regulations were intended to encourage people to use non-ozone depleting refrigerants with their global warming potential a problem for another day.

> Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant disposal would take all the profit out of this service.

Fixing this (Make it cheaper to reclaim? Make the refrigerant more valuable? Some combination of the two?) seems like the way to go rather than just removing all the regulations and hoping for the best.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#112

Post by ams6110 »

robbick wrote: post #99
mrfusion wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cows just confuse the issue though since they’re mostly producing methane which although a ghg doesn’t stick around too long.

I hadn't heard that methane didn't last too long in the atmosphere before. What happens to it?

The UV part of sunlight breaks it down into CO2 and water. And before you get too worried about the CO2, that's from "current" carbon in the environment (the grass that the cows ate) not fossilized carbon. So it's not a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#113

Post by yock »

mohaine wrote: post #106
tolien wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

R-134A has a global warming potential of 1550 over 100 years [1], i.e. about 45 times more effective than methane, so while it's not eating the ozone layer you probably shouldn't be spraying it around by the tonne either. Edit: and CO2 has a GWP of 1 (as the reference point for GWP), so R-134A is way more effective than that. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...

In a perfect world, requiring reclamation would help. In the real world it just pushes this off to gray market recycler. They will come by and pick up your broken fridge for free for the recycle value but most will just vent the refrigerant no mater what. They just claim it was zero pressure when they found it. Hooking up a reclamation machine and paying for the refrigerant disposal would take all the profit out of t…

> Perfectly fixable items are going in the trash

Which results in the refrigerant being released anyway once the item deteriorates enough.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#114

Post by halbritt »

School-Cotton wrote: post #70
obpacheco wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I would call that a good alternative. How many places on the Earth can you no longer go due to radiation? Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island and the list will go on. Also it seams very short sided in terms of planning for out of control cosmic events such as asteroids or coronal mass ejections which could wipe out our grid, leading to nuclear leaks worldwide. If we were to get something like the…

Better a hundred Chernobyls than what will happen to the earth if we continue using fossil fuels at the current rate.

Death toll from Chernobyl is presently at 31 with an estimated number of 4000 premature deaths.

So, yeah.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#115

Post by picsao »

bzbarsky wrote: post #72
obpacheco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit a little bit of that is pessimism from what happened at Fukushima from when the plant lost power to run the cooling pumps. from Scientific American > Pushing water past the core means pumps that are generally run by electricity. What happens when a reactor gets disconnected from the grid? There are emergency diesel generators. You also have a battery system to keep instruments running, but that can also provi…

Right, at Fukushima it wasn't just loss of power that was the problem, it was the loss of all the backup power sources too, _combined_ with a design that required power to operate the cooling system. I agree that this is something we should be keeping in mind as we build new reactors. And people have in fact kept it in mind. Modern reactor designs use passive cooling systems that don't need power to operate properly.…

Even those passive cooling systems need a intact medium cycle or rely again on pumps for replacing the medium. You need a thorium salt reactor for real passive safety.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#117

Post by mattygh »

ThomPete wrote: post #98
awestroke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way to prove the effects? That's a controversial statement, considering the 99%+ scientific consensus that we are headed towards a global catastrophe.

1) There isnt a 97% consensus on what you think 2) Science does not work by consensus but falisifaction 3) climate debate is not scientific but political in its core.

Are you being facetious and saying you can’t prove climate change in the same way you can’t prove gravity exists? Or are you for real? Scientific proof has a different general meaning than what the general population calls proof, but the claim that more CO2 in the atmosphere leads to a warmer planet, and we can quite accurately project that correlation, is not remotely controversial. After a life of following this closely both in and out of academics I’m curious what makes you think differently to everyone that has looked into this closely, including unlikely people like oil companies and Jim Breidenstein. Read Merchants of Doubt if you’re interested in how it got so politicized.

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#118

Post by Vinnl »

barry-cotter wrote: post #103
Vinnl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a good alternative if it is much more expensive?

France’s energy prices are lower than Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain. https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/

Does that include government subsidies?

What I'm getting at, is: will governments be supporting nuclear, even if it's considered safe enough? As far as I know the Dutch government has cleared the way for a new nuclear power plant, but no company is willing to build it because they can't recoup the investments. If governments have to subsidise it more than they subsidise wind and solar energy, will they do it?

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#119

Post by justinator »

ralfd wrote: post #91
justinator wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are citations to my numbers (since I seem to be downvoted): * Transportation: 28% https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-... * Livestock is 14.5% of all GHG emissions, cows are 65% of that: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ * Stories on how the US Military is the world' biggest polluters: https://www.newsweek.com/2014/07/25/us-department-defence-on... https://www.foreignpol…

Slight correction: https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi... > All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. > To its credit, the FAO immediately owned up to its error. Unfortunately, the agency’s initial claim that livestock was responsible for the lion’…

Thanks, I didn't know of that error. I wish they'd fix the original report!

Re: Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

#120

Post by mindslight »

tolien wrote: post #93
mindslight wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by the duster cans I have here [0] it looks like they've switched to HFC-152a which has GWP but does not deplete the ozone layer. But the point is that they're the same exact substances, given different designators depending on the use. HFC-134a is perfectly legal to vent into the atmosphere, yet if it's in a refrigeration system (and thus called R-134a) it is not. R-290 is just the refrigeration name for pla…

> HFC-134a is perfectly legal to vent into the atmosphere The argument, I guess, is “it shouldn’t be”, but it’s better than R-12 (for the ozone layer anyway; R-12 has a GWP of 2400) so turning a blind eye to relatively small-scale use is better for the ozone layer. Propane’s GWP is 3.3, so it’s a bit worse than CO_2 but much better than -134a or methane. A fine does seem odd for venting it although as long as it’s ch…

The laws were made in the context of ozone depletion, rather than global warming. In that context 134a is inert, which is why it was then purposely sold in spray duster cans - while venting 134a from a refrigeration system remained illegal for no good reason.

The modern analog with respect to GWP is propane ("R-290"). With a GWP of 3.3, it looks like venting raw propane is basically equivalent to the CO2 created by burning that same propane.

In isolation, putting more propane into the atmosphere is worse than not. But on the whole, we'd much rather see propane used for refrigeration than R-152a or whatever other new proprietary (hydrofluoric acid combustion product !) refrigerant system Dow (et al) come up with. And not requiring the purchase of expensive "reclamation equipment" for propane-used-as-refrigerant would go a long way to encouraging that.

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