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Europe's fires are just the start

economist.com

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Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#261

Post by wolvoleo »

AlexandrB wrote: post #89
OKRainbowKid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Meanwhile power from nuclear plants are very expensive, comparatively. So why should we invest in nuclear energy? I have the impression a lot of the debate about nuclea…

> They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing. Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear. [1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

France's nuclear is long paid off, and there were big government investments into building the industry around it because France is a nuclear power. It's not exactly the same tech obviously but when you build nuclear weapons yourself you need a workforce and industry capable of working with the materials. Some of those costs will have found their way under defense headings instead of energy ones.

Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#262

Post by wolvoleo »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #256
palata wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory is that it can reach a point where it won't be able to survive, and therefore it will die. We are around that limit. It may well be that it has already passed it and therefore it will die. I didn't mean "it is not there anymore", I meant "we won't be able to preserve it, it may already be too late for that".

How is the Amazon going to die? Don't plants kinda like co2? Do you think it'll just become a desert somehow or something?

Deforestation causes more extreme weather like floods and landslides which also remove fertile soil, and trees don't regenerate quickly enough to prevent that from happening. And global warming also increases weather instability at a rate nature can't adapt to.

So even the existing forests will have a harder time.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#263

Post by wolvoleo »

danw1979 wrote: post #119
oliwarner wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as we emit CO2 And aside the greenhouse effect, we're also using more power than we've ever used before, building 10Msqft boxes that ultimately turn electricity into heat. We could go all-solar and we'd still be warming our environment.

The amount of heat generated directly by all of the energy use by humans - from fossil, nuclear or renewables - is a tiny, miniscule rounding error compared to the excess heat absorbed by the atmosphere and oceans due to CO2 and the greenhouse effect. The heat output of every single data centre on earth isn’t even worth thinking about on the scale of the global climate system.

Absolutely, the heat itself is not the problem. I read that every day the earth receives more heat energy from the sun than was ever stored in all the fossil fuels on the planet.

What's more the problem is that we could have spent that energy on much more useful things. Even if these datacenters run on green energy that means that something else isn't. And don't forget that no energy is truly green. Generation requirement, electricity transport and metal extraction for it, maintenance, nuclear fuel extraction and refinement, all these things aren't green. We can make them green as much as possible but increasing demands on energy massively is making the point of reaching carbon neutrality much harder.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#264

Post by wolvoleo »

ifwinterco wrote: post #56

I was getting a bit worried so it's good to see an economist headline saying this will happen - now I can relax

I get your sarcasm but it's good that a paper very strongly focused on economic activity is on board with the need to tackle climate change. A couple decades ago all the capitalist neoliberal institutions were still trying too pooh-pooh it all under the rug. That is truly over, with the current US administration as the only significant exception.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#265

Post by chmod775 »

throwayay4929 wrote: post #161
chmod775 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe What... you know you could've looked this up pretty easily before posting? https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/styles/...

I did: https://aqicn.org/map/europe/

That's a real time map that will change by the hour. What I see now is probably not what you saw when you opened it.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#266

Post by chmod775 »

throwayay4929 wrote: post #164
chmod775 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe What... you know you could've looked this up pretty easily before posting? https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/styles/...

Both Berlin and Munich rank higher in terms of dirty air than the first polish city, Wroclaw: https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-ranking

That's LIVE data that will change hour to hour. When I opened it the list looked very different.

I provided you a map showing historical data collected over a year.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#268

Post by downrightmike »

toasty228 wrote: post #222
downrightmike wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to the earth before, the earth will change, Northern Atlantic will freeze over, stopping the currents of the ocean, and raise water levels at least several meters, enough to flood most cities on the East Coast.

It never happened this fast, by a fat margin

yup. we are probably burning 10k years of fossilized plant matter every year. The biosphere can't handle that.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#269

Post by adrianN »

palata wrote: post #217
adrianN wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is a high-capex source of electricity. It doesn’t do well economically in a grid where power if essentially free on sunny or windy days but you need a lot of backup power for a few hundred hours per year.

> It doesn’t do well economically Well, economy is fossil fuels. In the world after fossil fuels, we may have to redefine what "economy" means.

That seems to have very low chances of success.

Re: Europe's fires are just the start

#270

Post by BurningFrog »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #254
palata wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale [...] The unsolved problem is extracting You answered it yourself: it's not possible to get rid of the excess CO2. Think about conservation of energy: we extracted energy by burning stuff and producing CO2. We cannot revert that with less energy than we extracted from doing it in the first place. > It sounds scary, but is actually safe Famous last word…

It is possible to get rid of excess CO2. Yes it goes against entropy, isn't very efficient and requires a ton of energy but we do have sources of tbe energy required in the form of the sun, nuclear, geothermal etc. But that doesn't matter while we're still emitting.

Surely it matters even more while we're still emitting?
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