291–300 of 365 posts
Counter argument from Matt Ridley: Why the flames of Britain's wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article-16017973/Britains-w...
I guess disasters might be his area of expertise since he once crashed a bank and led the official pro-Brexit campaign, but the other stuff seems like a conflict of interest.
Counter argument from Matt Ridley: Why the flames of Britain's wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article-16017973/Britains-w...
Gotta get all the both sides of climate change deniers.
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I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned. We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels e…
So to cover double the energy consumption of fossil fuels with solar we need to cover 0.2% of the surface in solar. Compare to around 10% covered in farmland.
Again, very back of the envelope math, but in my opinion this does not seem impossible.
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Stratospheric aerosol injection hasn't been tested at any kind of scale, so we do not know whether it would be harmful (e.g. acid rain) or not. It would also be very expensive, so it's not really a practical solution at the moment. It may pan out, but stating "actually safe" is not yet known.
The Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991 actually did inject huge amounts of SO₂ to the stratosphere, and it disappeared over the next few years. While it remained, northern hemisphere temperatures lowered by ~0.5°C. USGS report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/ Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid…
> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming
Possibly, but acid rain can devastate marine ecosystems and cause issues with soil quality, so I'm not convinced that we can just hand-wave it away.
I can foresee greedy capitalists rubbing their hands together over being paid to seed SO2 into the stratosphere and then being paid to clean it up too. There's probably a lot of money to be made selling clean air if we can pollute the atmosphere enough to cause health problems for people.
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> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned. We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels e…
Very napkin math shows that annual energy consumption from fossil fuels is 500 exajoules. Every day the earth receives 15,000 exajoules in solar energy. So to cover double the energy consumption of fossil fuels with solar we need to cover 0.2% of the surface in solar. Compare to around 10% covered in farmland. Again, very back of the envelope math, but in my opinion this does not seem impossible.
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One not very well known fact is that even if we stop emissions today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for many centuries. They way I think/hope we can fix this is two parts: 1. The only way I think you can get rid of the excess CO₂ at scale is to permanently sequester it underground. The oil/gas industry can cheaply deposit huge amounts of gas there. The unsolved problem is extracting enough CO₂ from the atmosphe…
Best would be to capture CO2, and then solidify the carbon to a compact stable stable state by taking away the oxygen. Then we have a highly concentrated pure carbon form that we can just bury underground. Or add some hydrogen and get this liquid state that we can pump back into those empty underground reservoirs. But maybe we should stop taking it out in the first place...
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>They must be regularly cleaned People keep reiterating this probably because Trump keeps reiterating but it just sounds ridiculous. How do you clean forests? The debris is part of the forest, not all areas of a forest are easily accessible or feasible to transport debis out of there. A dead tree is actually an ecosystem of fungi and insects. Cleaning it may make it more fire prone as broken sticks and leaves shield…
Yeah, it is a bit dumb to talk about "cleaning" forests. Or at least I've never heard anyone who spouted that line who I thought had any understanding of the situation. Mostly they are just salty that the forests aren't actually profitable for logging, but they can't say it like that. Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something…
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The Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991 actually did inject huge amounts of SO₂ to the stratosphere, and it disappeared over the next few years. While it remained, northern hemisphere temperatures lowered by ~0.5°C. USGS report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/ Since the stratosphere is far above the rain cycle, it's very hard to imagine a mechanism whereby this could produce acid rain, and even if it did, acid…
> acid rain is a much smaller problem than global warming. In fact it used to be a common occurence during the heavy industrial pollution in the 20th century. So much that after the pollution stopped, farmers had to start applying sulphur to their fields as nutrients for some crops (I learned about this after unsuccessfully trying to grow tomatoes in alkaline soil).