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New ice age? Don't count on it

newscientist.com

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Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#61

Post by yters »

dodo53 wrote: post #29
david927 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

climate change and green energy are so complicated and political There isn't much complicated about it climate change: the full consensus is that it's happening because we're burning too much oil. The politics? Less than 10 years ago, the world's largest industry was oil when the price was roughly stable at around $20 a barrel. Today a barrel costs $100. For something the world consumes at a thousand barrels a second…

I think the greenhouse effect is totally uncontroversial. To what extent the climate will change due to that is slighlty more scientifically controversial, but as uninformed lay person I'd say is fairly broad consensus. Which green energy choices are economically feasible is much more controversial - there's counterintuitive things like - is it better to subsidize solar/wind while not really feasible to subsidize tec…

For some reason the global warming crowd doesn't talk about the fact that the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor. CO2 only makes up something like 10%, and the human caused part only about 4% of that, which is 0.4% overall.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#62

Post by matwood »

varjag wrote: post #28
ars wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except your gut is wrong. Recycling is not really clean. For some things maybe but not for everything (it uses far too much water). Solar? Not clean at all. (For photovoltaic which is what most people mean. Solar thermal is good though.) And just because they are made from plastic means nothing. Plastic is cleaner than wood you know (i.e. uses less energy to make and use). There is a fact that no one wants to acknowl…

Fusion. The ultimate, clean energy generation potential. Also, don't discount wind that fast. The typical "it will have to whole country with these 1-2 MW turbines" line of argument is old. Modern offshore turbine designs are 6MW, getting to 10MW by 2012 and 20MW designs are in the works now. Advances in the field have been massive just in under a decade, with higher output efficiency (gearless designs) and less over…

I would love to see some offshore wind turbines, but as soon as that's brought up the rich people from both the left and right decide they don't want to ruin the views from their beach houses.

It seems like so many people want everyone else to be clean while being dirty themselves.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#63

Post by DougWebb »

arethuza wrote: post #44
Typhon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By focusing public attention on something else. It's not as if we had a shortage of problems. Then, the matter of climate change could be settled in a scientific manner, as opposed to a religious debate involving legions of people who don't know what they're talking about. Obviously, i'm being unrealistic. Once it's become politicized, it's already too late.

Deciding whether or not there is climate change and what is causing it is a scientific question. What do to about it is a political decision.

No, deciding what to do about it is an engineering decision.

Deciding to actually do what the engineers say is the best way to deal with the problem, based on the science, is the only political decision.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#64

Post by sethg »

yters wrote: post #61
dodo53 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the greenhouse effect is totally uncontroversial. To what extent the climate will change due to that is slighlty more scientifically controversial, but as uninformed lay person I'd say is fairly broad consensus. Which green energy choices are economically feasible is much more controversial - there's counterintuitive things like - is it better to subsidize solar/wind while not really feasible to subsidize tec…

For some reason the global warming crowd doesn't talk about the fact that the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor. CO2 only makes up something like 10%, and the human caused part only about 4% of that, which is 0.4% overall.

At least according to the Wikipedia “Greenhouse gas” article, it’s hard to measure exactly how much each gas contributes to the greenhouse effect, because different gases absorb and emit radiation at different frequencies.

Regardless of how you work out the proportions, there used to be a homeostasis, where the biological and physical processes that put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere balanced the processes that took them out. The additional CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O from human activity is upsetting that homeostasis.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#65

Post by sethg »

matwood wrote: post #62
varjag wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion. The ultimate, clean energy generation potential. Also, don't discount wind that fast. The typical "it will have to whole country with these 1-2 MW turbines" line of argument is old. Modern offshore turbine designs are 6MW, getting to 10MW by 2012 and 20MW designs are in the works now. Advances in the field have been massive just in under a decade, with higher output efficiency (gearless designs) and less over…

I would love to see some offshore wind turbines, but as soon as that's brought up the rich people from both the left and right decide they don't want to ruin the views from their beach houses. It seems like so many people want everyone else to be clean while being dirty themselves.

The “Cape Wind” project saw massive opposition from residents of Nantucket... but they failed to block its approval.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#66

Post by sethg »

ars wrote: post #37
varjag wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion. The ultimate, clean energy generation potential. Also, don't discount wind that fast. The typical "it will have to whole country with these 1-2 MW turbines" line of argument is old. Modern offshore turbine designs are 6MW, getting to 10MW by 2012 and 20MW designs are in the works now. Advances in the field have been massive just in under a decade, with higher output efficiency (gearless designs) and less over…

The trouble with wind is the variability. And even if you assume that there is always good wind somewhere, the energy grid just can't handle shifting power back and forth so quickly. It takes time for the other generators to change output levels, so during high speed wind turbines tend to get disconnect from the grid because of the harmful effects they have on it. The net result is that they don't produce out as much…

I forget the name of the company, but some guy is working on electric cars with swappable batteries: the idea is that instead of plugging your car in overnight to “refuel” it, you would take it to a service station and change the discharged batteries for charged ones.

Now imagine that the outlets for charging those batteries were connected to a wind-powered grid, where the power company charged a lower rate in exchange for less reliable availability. That kind of service would suck for running, say, an Internet data center, but it would be adequate to make sure that all the batteries that came in by 6:00 pm were fully charged by 6:00 am.

Voilà! Two problems solving each other.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#67

Post by Tichy »

Typhon wrote: post #58
Tichy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there is a lot of chatter doesn't mean that there aren't also scientists working on it at the same time.

Yes, but they're usually not the ones making a fuss in the media about it, and they're not the ones who will ultimately make or not make political decisions.

"The media" has their own agenda. If they wanted to, they could make a fuss about scientific findings.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#68

Post by dagw »

sethg wrote: post #66
ars wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with wind is the variability. And even if you assume that there is always good wind somewhere, the energy grid just can't handle shifting power back and forth so quickly. It takes time for the other generators to change output levels, so during high speed wind turbines tend to get disconnect from the grid because of the harmful effects they have on it. The net result is that they don't produce out as much…

I forget the name of the company, but some guy is working on electric cars with swappable batteries: the idea is that instead of plugging your car in overnight to “refuel” it, you would take it to a service station and change the discharged batteries for charged ones. Now imagine that the outlets for charging those batteries were connected to a wind-powered grid, where the power company charged a lower rate in exchan…

Most of the big car companies are experimenting with some sort of battery swapping concept. The problem is that they all have to get together and agree on some sort of standard interface, power ratings and dimensions. If a service station has to stock dozens of different models of batteries then the idea has basically failed before it even gets started.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#69

Post by Shenglong »

My friend writes: Also, the 10-12 year cycle of sunspots does not have a significant effect on climate. In fact, the climate scientists desperately trying to find other causes of global warming investigated them thoroughly, studies show that the change in solar insolation to be roughly one and a half orders of magnitude smaller than needed to be comparable to the current temperature changes. The temperature decrease from even the little ice age was less than a third of the temperature increase we've already experienced, and you know we're in for another three times that best case scenario. A little ice age now would be a wonderful coincidence, but would hardly change the dire outlook as the heating well surpasses it. That fortuitous event would only effect the price we put on carbon by ~1/31/3.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#70

Post by nl »

muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

I've found http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php quite useful.

It lists all the skeptic questions, and investigates the science that relates to each one in some depth - at either "Basic" or "Intermediate" levels.

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