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Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

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Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#161

Post by charlieyu1 »

atonse wrote: post #149
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people." Well, there was Chernobyl. Then Fukushima. I'm all for Nuclear. But I think humans have shown repeatedly they can't really handle it. So think the trepidation is justified. But, I am hoping with all the technology advances in last 50 years, maybe Nuclear can be made safe. If we do learn from past.

As far as I know though, Chernobyl and Fukushima had completely different reasons and don't really clump together apart from "both were meltdowns" Chernobyl was entirely a product of design compromises due to cost savings, combined by a totalitarian system suppressing the known impact of those design decisions. It was also a much older design. Fukushima also seemed like a design mistake (I remember reading it that th…

So 2 mistakes in the last 50 years, each wiping out a radius of 25km from being habitable for 1000 years. I won’t trust people for not making more mistakes.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#162

Post by ben_w »

Throw494955 wrote: post #111
ben_w wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible.""" https:…

[flagged]

> Most climatologist from 1950 till 1980ties predicted new ice age.

Not the scale of "by 2024" they didn't, and you're just flat out wrong to assert any of them thought any city, let alone all, would be under a mile of ice by now even the ones who ignored anthropogenic effects.

"A mile" requires continuous light to moderate precipitation for all 74 years from 1950. It should be obvious no scientist would have ever made such a claim.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#163

Post by timeon »

drexlspivey wrote: post #80
dougmwne wrote: post #52

I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip…

You can’t just shut down the fossil fuel industry before you have alternative green energy infrastructure in place, this is a multi decade project. Otherwise the price of oil shoots up and you get inflation which affects most people’s ability to get by. “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills.

> this is a multi decade project

Yes as Exxon report suggested:

"Thus, even if solar or nuclear technologies were to be considered viable alternatives, they would not really displace fossil fuel energy for next 40 to 50 years, and CO2 growth would have to be estimated based on realistic market displacement of the fossil fuel technologies."

This was 42 years ago. Maybe it is time for “Non-Populist anger” now.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#164

Post by ta1243 »

beretguy wrote: post #137
ta1243 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports…

> Why not solar, wind and storage? Because it’s nowhere near effective enough. ———- I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+

Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#165

Post by ben_w »

edward28 wrote: post #63
ben_w wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible.""" https:…

That phenomenona accurately describes the hackernews experience.

Also LLMs.

IMO this is why newspapers are so afraid of LLMs, they're competing on the sense of authoritativeness.

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#166

Post by cesarb »

rout39574 wrote: post #156
bko wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if solar is cheaper, why isn't it the dominant energy source today? Seems like a win win, people get cheaper energy all without force. Generally the market chooses the best product, which is why we replaced horses crapping all over our cities with cars. It wasn't legislation or some global consortium of governments that phased out the horse, it was a better product. What am I m…

Momentum, installed base, established interests, changing uses. Foolishly reductionistic model: at the instant that solar becomes defacto cheaper, if everyone immediately changed, you'd need at least [total world power consumption / solar panel production rate] years to change over. 2022 world electricity consumption was about 25000 TWH. That envelope-backs to about 2800 GW if the sun is always directly overhead ever…

> if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere [...] Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power

A simple but useful back-of-the-envelope estimate would be 25%. Half of the day, there's no sun, so you have 50%; the other half, it increases gradually until the middle of the day, then decreases gradually until the sun sets. Simplifying this to a linear increase and decrease, if you plot it into a graph you'd have a pair of isosceles right triangles, which cover half of the area, so you have another 50% over that first 50%, and the end result is 25%.

(IIRC, the real result for the single-axis trackers you'd find on grid-scale power plants is something like 30%, showing how good that simple back-of-the-envelope estimate is.)

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#167

Post by charlieyu1 »

breakyerself wrote: post #148
richrichie wrote: post #18

[flagged]

The planet is warming more than 20X the rate of warming seen through natural processes. There is a unplanned, uncontrolled, planetary scale experiment underway with the chemical and thermal properties of the atmosphere and oceans of the only planet available to us for our survival. The burden of proof is on anyone who wants to continue that experiment to demonstrate that it's safe.

Dinasours were flourishing in an era where atmospheric CO2 was 3x or more compared to current levels

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#168

Post by [deleted] »

maxrecursion wrote: post #77
dougmwne wrote: post #52

I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip…

Our governments are so dysfunctional and corrupt our only hope is that AI will actually be benevolent and can help guide us and solve problems. Because, as the comic, and thousands of other examples show, our governments aren't actually capable of leading and solving problems, even when the problems are blatant. Same when the solution is easy, but it will cause the wealthy to lose money, see US health care and taxati…

[deleted]

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#169

Post by cesarb »

CM30 wrote: post #67
rcbdev wrote: post #3

Mere ~30 years after discovering the Greenhouse Effect we managed to split the atom, harnessing heretofore unimaginable amounts of energy. Yet almost 100 years later, here we are - Oil and gas dependent, boasting an energy and climate crisis, all the while fooling regulators with worthless climate certificates, unaccountable off-shore factories and just plain rampant fraud when it comes to CO2 emissions.

Unfortunately, nuclear seems to get a bad rep from a lot of people. I suspect this is because of a mixture of things: 1. The rare instances of it going wrong look catastrophic, while the many times it does better than coal/oil/gas go ignored. Kinda like how people fear plane travel more than driving, despite the former being far safer than the latter. 2. It's more expensive to setup, so there's an economic incentive…

You didn't mention what I believe is the true reason nuclear power got its bad reputation: nuclear weapons.

(Tough you could argue that it's your item 3, since nuclear weapons and their open-air testing would be the reason the left/environmental/peace movement started to hate the concept.)

Re: Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect

#170

Post by timeon »

Winse wrote: post #135

As with most large scale changes...there are winners and losers. New species and extinctions. High CO2 is great for plants in my greenhouse...I suppose that's why it is called a greenhouse gas. Anyone longing for lower CO2 levels in our entire atmosphere is basically an anti-Canadian Agriculture bigot. Seriously though sometimes the cure is much worse than just handling the issues one at a time as we transition to a…

> Historically the planet has gone through all sorts of things before.

Since this is thread under XKCD post: https://xkcd.com/1732/

Isn't it bit naive to exclude rate of change in this argument?

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