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536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

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Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#221

Post by ClumsyPilot »

CameronNemo wrote: post #72
chrisco255 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forecasting volcanoes is a lot like forecasting earthquakes, it's really difficult to do and often there's very little warning, maybe a couple of days at most, but sometimes comes with no warning at all. The White Island volcano killed several people last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Whakaari_/_White_Island_e... This place was a famous tourist destination. One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic er…

How would green/grow houses help in such a situation?

Growhouses handle the situation perfectly well, but there are very few of them as conpared to open fields.

The only country i know of that has enough glasshouses to feed a significant chunk of its population is the netherlands.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#222

Post by sigstoat »

Someone wrote: post #162
yummypaint wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a good reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground and not just extract them as quickly as possible wherever we find them. It seems conceivable that we could eventually find ourselves thermodynamically unable to recover after a catastrophy like a big solar flare. Unfortunately there is no way for anyone to make money by being responsible in this way. We are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund a…

I would think the combination of windmills and wood supplies should almost always provide a (ssllooww) recovery path. There will plenty of metals on the surface. Use the wood to melt iron. Use iron to make saws. Use saws to cut trees into beams and planks. Use beams and planks to build windmills. Use windmills to generate power and electricity. Etc. Using coal and oil we went through the part from using mills for pow…

> There will plenty of metals on the surface.

we've even brought a lot of them closer to the surface, refined them, and alloyed them!

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#223

Post by aksss »

pfdietz wrote: post #208
aksss wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply this: our DAILY growing (not declining, not stable) demand for hydrocarbons is so profoundly huge, that the improvements in renewables (even if taken at generous face value) do not dent it today nor will they in the future even with the most generous assumptions about efficiency and storage improvements. This is just data you can look up to see the trends for daily barrel of oil demand, and the improvemen…

You seem to be saying that renewables require improvement just due to the scale of the problem. But once renewables are sufficiently cheap, or once CO2 taxes cause fossil fuels to reflect their true cost, all that's required is just building more of them. This is a matter of scaling up, not improving the product, although improvement will almost certainly also occur, due to experience effects if nothing else. That re…

> seem to be saying that renewables require improvement due to the scale of the problem.

Certainly they must be competitive in terms of energy density otherwise how can they substantially displace another energy source? Today renewable tech is not energy dense enough.

> Once renewables are sufficiently cheap

..cheap in total lifecycle cost (not end user cost of panel), carbon negative and sufficiently energy dense (transportable at light weight/low volume relative to stored energy)

> it's just building more of them.

For all of this, please remember we're talking global scale for electricity generation (Straight cost - you mention taxes and regulation. This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We nearly deforested the US east coast and almost killed off a whale species until coal came along and saved both (true story). Now we couldn't go back if we wanted to because civilization assumes a certain amount of energy input. Reducing it would have huge humanitarian impacts. Stabilizing it would be good, but this unfairly puts a huge burden on developing regions who would likely not tolerate it anyway.

Technology improvement - Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery. That's the gap it needs to make up at 5% efficiency gain per year (many orders of magnitude). It's beyond optimistic to say that would be covered any time soon barring a miracle (the track record shows that Moore's law doesn't apply to solar cells and batteries).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...

Even if you doubled the rate of efficiency improvements to 10% annualized, it's still an unrealistically wide gap to make up in my lifetime at least.

Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology. And/or you have to assume some global-scale rational decision making (or force) to reduce consumption voluntarily (or involuntarily :/), in contrast with the whole of historic human behavior regarding energy consumption. Seems like there's a lot of hope involved there.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#224

Post by aksss »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #217
aksss wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kidding me? We're all getting the coke. Just because you're not Scarface doesn't avoid the fact that all of us are awash in plastics, silicone, rare earth metals, concrete, steel, precious metals, alloys, goods from far flung lands, industrial agriculture and many assumptions about available services that rely on the same and ravenous upstream fossil fuel consumption. We (as human consumers) never had it so good,…

This is a xomolete misinterpretation of today's economic and resource situation. The real tragedy is that all this is a conpletely unneccesary wanton destruction. Thrre is no coke, it serves no purpose. Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materi…

There is no spoon?

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#225

Post by koheripbal »

rabidrat wrote: post #218
koheripbal wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Personally, I think the steady proliferation of nuclear weapons is going to snap at some point with some nut using them. God help us all. Humans are stupid. We think that because we survived the Cold War, that it won't happen. ...but if you read the history - it very nearly did happen a couple of times. ...it's only a matter of time.

OTOH nuclear weapons decay and we're rapidly losing the tacit knowledge required to make new ones (at least here in the US). If the Test Ban stays in place and is enforced, it may only be a few more decades until we as a species would have to do another Manhattan Project to rebuild them. This takes about 4 years of concerted effort within military and industry, and the only shortcut is the tacit knowledge that nuclea…

I'm not sure if you've been reading up on the latest news - but both Russia and the US have been developing and deploying hypersonic nuclear armed missiles. ...capable of circumventing any ABM platforms and delivering precision low-yield nuclear weapons without early warning detection anywhere in the world.

They're totally removing the need for ballistic missiles. These are armageddon weapons because they can be launched without detection, delivered across the world in tens of minutes, and target enemy nuclear silos before they can even launch.

It reminds me of the Hunt For Red October. They're made to start a war.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#226

Post by incompatible »

ativzzz wrote: post #97
lgl wrote: post #62

The 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull [0] was a small sample of the perturbations that a volcanic event can have on day to day lives. And it was a relatively small eruption. Anything much larger than that will most likely have devastating effects on modern society on pretty much all levels and it's not really a matter of "if" but "when". Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on…

> To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments. If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them i…

It would be very hard and very expensive to build a space colony that was self-sufficient, instead of requiring constant supplies from Earth. In fact, it would be very hard and very expensive to build a self-sufficient society on Earth which was up-to-date with modern technology. The range of products and materials required is vast, and the manufacturing of certain state-of-the-art products, such as the most advanced integrated circuits, has been centralized in only a few locations.

It would probably also require a change of culture, away from treating information as property and/or trade secrets in favour of open-hardware with shared designs. Designs would be shared and manufacturing decentralised, to improve robustness.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#227

Post by koheripbal »

ghaff wrote: post #117
subsubzero wrote: post #58

How many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.

I'd just point out that keeping a year's worth of food for a rapid and unexpected event is nuclear bunker level prep. It also requires spending a lot of money and storage space on something that's going to have to be rotated out every few years. And while some things can last pretty much indefinitely, other things have shelf lifes and you're probably not going to use all those canned goods during normal times. So the…

It doesn't need to be expensive at all. Perboiled rice is cheap and lasts literally 15 years. Canned food can last years. ...and if you're eating food, you can naturally rotate out what you have in the basement.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#228

Post by koheripbal »

ghaff wrote: post #164
grumple wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to buy things that you'll eat anyway - like canned beans, etc, and use them and replace them regularly.

I do not eat canned beans (other than baked beans) or canned vegetables generally. Most of the things I would buy for "prepping" would be just thrown out in a few years.

Canned foods can last a decade. It's not like you're throwing out the entire store every year. Perboiled rice lasts 15-20 YEARS if kept dry.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#229

Post by quickthrower2 »

subsubzero wrote: post #58

How many people reading this have a years worth of food? Could any of us survive something similar to this eruption? I think covid really opened alot of peoples eyes to extreme worldwide disasters (volcanos, large earthquakes, pandemics) and how most are not prepared for it at all and yes these things do and will continue to keep happening.

Forgetting macro/micro and focusing on calories, using a cheap food source, I'd need 0.75 metric tonnes of oats to do this, for 4 people. Probably doable for $750 say, I am guessing at a bulk price. Most years I'd need to chuck it.

Probably could slim down and live off half that. Or 500 cal/day for adults with more for the kids. It is survival situation after all.

Re: 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)

#230

Post by koheripbal »

walleeee wrote: post #151
Symmetry wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people have proposed putting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. It looks relatively easy and could potentially be within the means of even poorer countries like Bangladesh which have a lot to loose from rising sea levels. But we can't predict exactly how it would turn out and it would certainly make ocean acidifcation worse so it's very much a desperation play.

Yes. Marine cloud brightening has also been proposed. IMO we'll almost certainly see either that or stratospheric aerosols as nations begin to feel the increasing effects of climate change and grow more desperate. Whether it might be uni- or multilateral is also interesting, given the possibly serious effects on e.g. agriculture in "downstream" geographic regions. It's not much of a stretch to imagine it kicking off…

Seems more likely that populations will just move to new stable areas.
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