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Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

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Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#171
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And will you be happy if iPhones and Walmart toys cost, let's say 30% more, because of China mandating CO2 emissions compensation? (Although such a compensation is mostly mythical). Or that the shelves of Walmart are bare ("Sorry we can only produce 10% of what we're able to, emission caps"), and prices are sky-high because of the law of supply and demand? I bet you'll be moaning then too.

I'd be quite happy if both the iPhone and all of the cheap plastic toys at Walmart no longer existed, unironically.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short of China and India voluntarily holding themselves to the same standards as Western Europe and the US for free, we are not going to avoid catastrophic global warming. The good news is, while we may not be able to prevent climate change, we are not powerless against it. The Dutch know how to win the fight against sea level rise. Middle Eastern architecture knows how to keep people cool even with >50°C air tempera…

> Countless human lives can be saved if we're willing to work together. The major problem is equatorial heat. After a certain point of wet bulb temperature, you either die or migrate a billion people away from the equator into Europe. Billions can't afford air conditioning. An air conditioning unit is equal to their entire annual income. You don't even have an airtight room within which you can install the AC unit. L…

>Billions can't afford air conditioning. An air conditioning unit is equal to their entire annual income.

Air conditioning can get radically cheaper to meet market demand, and they can start making radically more money.

Other products have gone from expensive to cheap (think TVs over the last 40 years), other people have gone from poor to prosperous (think China).

Do you have a good reason why these outcomes are possible TVs and for Chinese people, but not for ACs and equatorial people?

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#173
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when you adjust for trade: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...

Does adjusted for trade mean that sneakers produced in China but worn in the west, count for the west?

Yes.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome. Maybe it's time to put a billion or two into testing all these untested techs then.

That's what I find so baffling. Why aren't we putting serious resources into geoengineering, adaptation and mitigation? It's so underfunded in comparison to what we're spending in a futile attempt at emission reduction.

Because there's no economic incentive. We can only create one with proper policies, but politics have been bootlegged by industry who only looks at short-term gains.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#175
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality Isn't both ends of a pipe metered? Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home). How har…

Measurement error in gas networks can be 15% of volume, so not precise enough for this work.

omg this is real?

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data is good for cognitive behavioral therapy and not much else. In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentne…

> But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. Committed? We will have extra energy for carbon capture on the next decade. This is a problem we can solve. Not before it gets worse, but we can stop it from being permanent.

What extra energy? Energy consumption around the world is rising every year and will rise even higher because of climate change. And carbon capture is not a viable solution to climate change.

"According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth."

"Even today, some projects already operating around the world have not been as successful as planned. In Australia, the CCS project run by Chevron has not yet made its Gorgon project meet its target of 80% carbon dioxide capture.

A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) on two Norwegian projects that store carbon dioxide under the seabed called into question the long-term viability of CCS."

"There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions."

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-c...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/01/is-carbo...

https://archive.is/e0y4W

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#177
post #2

Ouch! They’re estimating 131 kt of methane! That’s equivalent to approx 3.93 Megatons of CO2 (in terms of its global warming impact over a century) or roughly equivalent to that of a small country like Iceland or Malta annually.

How much ∘C of change in global temperature does this translate to?

On the order of 0.

From what I read, we can expect a 1 degree increase if we release somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion tons of CO2. Using those figures, 3.93 megatons is 0.0000393 degrees.

As a point of comparison, humans release roughly 40 gigatons of CO2 per year; 3.93 megatons is 0.0098% of that.

As another point of comparison, around 550 gigatons of CO2 is released (and absorbed) by the planet "naturally". 3.93 megatons is 0.0007% of that.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Countless human lives can be saved if we're willing to work together. The major problem is equatorial heat. After a certain point of wet bulb temperature, you either die or migrate a billion people away from the equator into Europe. Billions can't afford air conditioning. An air conditioning unit is equal to their entire annual income. You don't even have an airtight room within which you can install the AC unit. L…

>Billions can't afford air conditioning. An air conditioning unit is equal to their entire annual income. Air conditioning can get radically cheaper to meet market demand, and they can start making radically more money. Other products have gone from expensive to cheap (think TVs over the last 40 years), other people have gone from poor to prosperous (think China). Do you have a good reason why these outcomes are poss…

What about countries with political strife like Myanmar? We can't hope that 100% of countries all experience significant growth, fast enough to outstrip the impact of rising temperatures. There will be laggards stuck on low GDP. Also, a lot of these economies rely on outdoor work, widespread AC can't help with that.

If we get to the 3-4C warming scenarios, these countries will be terrible to live in, regardless of AC, and I won't blame them when they all try to escape to colder Europe.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#179
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was written in 2019 before a number of extraordinarily significant events with major climate policy impacts: - a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas - China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically It seems…

This data is good for cognitive behavioral therapy and not much else. In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentne…

I agree with your comment, not because I don't think there is any hope, but because I see a situation were valid and viable hope is buried in the noise of feel-good-show hope and subsidy-ogling hope.

I am not saying it will be easy to build it, or cheap, or without any drawbacks, but...

It is physically possible to generate energy by cooling the planet.

Its cold in space, its cold up there. To run a heat engine you need 2 temperature baths at different temperatures.

Lets take for the higher temperature our surface temperature, and for the lower temperature the temperature at or slightly above the tropopause (say 11 km above surface, somewhere between polar and equatorial regions).

At that height temperatures might be say -50 deg C.

Now consider the following engineering challenge: a buoyant vessel holds taut ~12 km "atmosphere elevator", made of SCG (single crystal graphene). Along such cables could be suspended chimneys made of light fabric, or perhaps pipes conveying coolant up and down, ...

As a thought exercise: suppose the hook floating in the tropopause/bottom of stratosphere is used to heave up and down buckets of water (the same number of buckes going up and down, so apart from friction this transport costs no energy (think of a pulley).

as the water travels up it freezes, giving off heat at a higher layer, closer to dark cold space where it would end up anyway eventually, as the ice is lowered it absorbs heat from the lower layers. If the water/ice buckets were insulated, and only brought in thermal contact at the top or bottom of the structure, then it would dump the heat at the top only, above the CO2 and water blanket where it can more easily escape to space, and it would absorb heat only at the bottom. This means we could run a heat engine at the surface generating energy, without proliferation concerns (because when we do it its for energy, but when others do it it must be for weapons, or for gaining experience requisite for weapons)...

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#180
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was written in 2019 before a number of extraordinarily significant events with major climate policy impacts: - a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns - Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas - China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically It seems…

And yet, do you know when the hottest month on record was? It's easy to answer: last month. It's been "last month" for the last 12 months at least. Basically, we've hit the J curve. The "extraordinarily significant events" you cite amount to little more than a guy who jumped off a bridge thinking: "you know, I think I've changed my mind". (And yet, we just bought $700 of seedlings and I spent my birthday, and many ot…

And yet, this is baked into climate change models if you’ve been paying attention.

Unfortunately, yes, even after we hit a plateau of emissions, we’re going to see effects.

The important bit is that, yes, we are seeing changes, and yes, we are seeing dreadful environment effects, we’re making progress to slow this down.

We’re fortunate that the last few years gave us excuses to shift policy that otherwise would’ve had us keep going down this path for another decade+.

I would certainly hope those pushing the “doomerism” takes in this thread do not work for any AI companies, cloud computing, NVIDIA, or other organization responsible for insane datacenter power growth this past year.

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