Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

ckrapu.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 178 posts

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#131

Post by jacknews »

ckrapu wrote: post #45
jacknews wrote: post #5

Or just burn the huge piles to charcoal (pyrolysis), then you're only storing carbon, and it certainly won't decay. Even use it as a soil enhancer.

Let's say that we have a hollowed-out zone in the middle of the biomass pile where we tolerate limited oxidization so we can run a fire. If the rest of it is wet, maybe the heat from that combustion could pyrolyze a large radius of surrounding material since O2 flow into the system should be small.

Indeed if you insulate the pile as the OP suggests, the entire pile should reach pyrolisis temperatures.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#132

Post by indymike »

Y-bar wrote: post #122
avidiax wrote: post #93

Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to…

You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it. I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving…

What I like about the author's idea is it is a technical solution to a technical problem. Taxes, incentives, or for that matter anything that requires large-scale public behavior change is:

a) not likely to work

b) equally unlikely to cause a change on the scale needed.

c) will likely come with unpredictable and unwanted side effects caused by trying to force society to change (which is most often requires threats of violence and the loss of civil rights)

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#133

Post by tomxor »

Y-bar wrote: post #122
avidiax wrote: post #93

Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to…

You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it. I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving…

> The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.

That's an assumption.

I'm usually in favour of fixing the original problem, as so much of what is wrong with society would be simpler to fix by focusing on the source, but we prefer technological solutions rather than be confronted with changing our behaviour.

The problem with global warming is the source of the issue is extremely large, complex to reverse, and extremely difficult behaviour to change because it underpins economy. It is also one that is guided by economy on a global scale of supply and demand, making a single country green tends to just displace emmission to a poorer country (see what happened with coal).

For GHG I think the human forces at play are way too strong. This one needs a solution that will unfortunately allow for GHG, because the weaning off on a global scale is way longer than you think, and reversing it is going to takel even longer.

It's too late, we need climate engineering, i.e controlling the temperate with other mechanisms.

We saw this in action during the transition to cleaner shipping fuels a couple of years ago. I'm not suggesting we polute more, but controlling temperate with particulates clearly works.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#134

Post by naasking »

realusername wrote: post #114
AstralStorm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct CO2 capture is thermodynamically unviable, and literally every plan and attempt involving it was highly expensive in energy.

What does thermodynamically unviable means? There's no thermodynamic laws specifically on carbon.

I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but CO2 air capture is incredibly inefficient, and it consumes energy which itself releases heat. So if the amount of CO2 you capture reduces heat by X degrees but you release Y degrees in energy consumption to achieve that where Y > X, that would be one interpretation of "thermodynamically unviable". It seems implausible to me but not impossible.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#135

Post by Krssst »

yodsanklai wrote: post #110
tialaramex wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, look at that chart. According to that chart, we'll burn coal forever. Now, consult reality for a moment, or take a look around. Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century. So your "always" is at best temporarily true, and thus worthless, it can't actually have predictive power. Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're ei…

> Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely. I mean that new energy sources came in addition to existing ones. We consume as much wood as we ever did. Coal didn't reduce wood usage. Oil didn't reduce coal and so on...

Nuclear did remove almost completely fossil fuels from the French electricity grid. Only example I know of of a grid that succeeded in getting rid of almost all fossil fuels. (transport and heating keep using a lot of fossils however)

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#136

Post by naasking »

hedora wrote: post #95
jaggederest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interconnect is going to be old news once batteries and balance-of-system costs get low enough. Local microgrids at the substation level are going to be the way to go, with only a minority of current traveling long distances (except for certain natural features, i.e. hydroelectric)

Our car can run our all-electric house for days. We have more than one car. It’s not clear to me how much the power grid will matter in ten years. I can imagine cities using substations to route N solar installations to M bidirectional EV chargers, I guess. For places as or less dense than suburbs, it’s not obvious that it makes sense to bother.

The power grid will always be absolutely essential. I have no idea why you'd think otherwise.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#137

Post by naasking »

carapace wrote: post #56
hcurtiss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He very early assumes/disregards we remain confined to earth. In the face of exponentially growing energy resources, this is a terrible assumption.

Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same. See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8

> Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun?

The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight:

* https://www.sri.com/fcd_technology/self-cooling-paint-a-pass...

* https://cera.cool/

* https://hackaday.com/2023/07/03/cooling-paint-you-can-actual...

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#138

Post by carapace »

naasking wrote: post #137
carapace wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same. See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8

> Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight: * https://www.sri.com/fcd_techno…

Yes, and those are really cool and I want some.

We might be able to somehow collect heat (with superconductors? I don't know) and beam it into space, but that still doesn't solve the problem.

Please watch the Bartlett lecture, please?

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#139

Post by carapace »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102
carapace wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic? In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar sy…

> It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic? Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local ene…

At this point we're just trading sci-fi story ideas. If we can learn to manage our population growth and/or energy consumption growth, then that's awesome!

Watch the Bartlett lecture.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#140

Post by Self-Perfection »

Y-bar wrote: post #122
avidiax wrote: post #93

Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to…

You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it. I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving…

The only thing we need to implement from your list is the carbon tax. But it has to be sufficiently high.

The rest will happen without extra nudging just because doing it "the wrong way" will be too expensive.

By feeding carbon tax money into carbon extraction we can eventually start reducing amount of carbon in atmosphere.

Post reply on HN