FYI: There are some NSFW images/links at the bottom of this article.
There Is Gas Under the Tundra
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and maybe we need to be radical rather than practical. I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destru…
Flow batteries, where charged electrolyte can be stockpiled, are under heavy development. These would allow us to finally make the grid 100% fossil fuel free. Also, I firmly believe that we can figure out how to make things like methane and oil from biological processes; it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think we're quickly getting to a point where this is a poli…
Making methane and oil from known biological processes is quite inefficient, even if a lot of energy input comes just from exposure to sunlight.
We have to either bio-engineer organisms to make them better producers (as we do for producing medicines, etc), or use any of the non-biologic processes for fuel synthesis, like Fischer-Tropsch.
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#43FYI: There are some NSFW images/links at the bottom of this article.
Clarification: there are two risqué thumbnails to other articles. One of them is a breastfeeding mother and the other is a nudist male seen roughly from the side.
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#44FYI: There are some NSFW images/links at the bottom of this article.
Clarification: there are two risqué thumbnails to other articles. One of them is a breastfeeding mother and the other is a nudist male seen roughly from the side.
Exactly. This may or may not be NSFW depending where you are...better safe than sorry though!
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
As things stand right now nuclear power is a single point of failure because (as the OP rightly points out) it has been used and is still being used by different military organizations in order to build nuclear bombs, which nuclear bombs can literally wipe us all at this very moment, not in 10 years’ time, not in 20 years’ time, now. Yeah, I know the whole talk about how nuclear bombs have stopped a possible WWIII in…
I can make a truck bomb from commercial fertilizers, or I can grow a whole bunch of wheat and corn. Just because you can fuck things up with a particular technology isn't a great reason for disallowing the positive usages of it.
> I can make a truck bomb from commercial fertilizers
.. which is why in many countries they're either a semi-controlled substance, or deliberately adulterated with substances to fizzle the explosion.
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and maybe we need to be radical rather than practical. I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destru…
I'm old too and I truly believe that we will continue to be here 10-20 years from now with roughly the same world we've always had.
Same world in most of the non-coastal parts of the West? Probably. Same world in a lot of low-lying or heat-sensitive third world countries? Probably not.
It has been argued that Yemen is the first resource exhaustion war - the country has extremely limited water supplies.
The West is going to have to look at the possibility of a lot of refugees in the future, with the option of taking them in or watching them die.
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#47... and it better stays there. Building up more capacity to extract fossil fuels is not what we should be doing right now.
You've got it wrong if you are worried about the greenhouse effect.
If humans don't extract and burn the gas, the gas will be released as-is into the atmosphere by beavers thawing out the permafrost.[1] Natural gas is actually a stronger greenhouse gas than its combustion products.[2]
[1] https://www.alaskapublic.org/2018/07/11/beavers-are-moving-i...
[2] "Natural gas is thus a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide due to the greater global-warming potential of methane" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas#Natural_gas
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and maybe we need to be radical rather than practical. I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destru…
I'm old too and I truly believe that we will continue to be here 10-20 years from now with roughly the same world we've always had.
> I'm old too
That doesn't mean you get to mess it up for the rest of us.
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and maybe we need to be radical rather than practical. I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destru…
Why is it destruction and not just it will be more costly to adapt? Why suppose that we can't figure out a way to scrub C02 from the atmosphere, or offset it some other way? Why can't humanity, who managed to survive an ice age with stone aged tools, figure out a way to survive a warmer planet with modern tech?
Thermodynamics comes into play. Because the entropy of a pure gas increases rapidly as it diffuses into a mixture, it will always require massively more energy to scrub CO2 from the air than you get from burning the carbon in the first place.
Scrubbing would only become possible if we either:
- develop unlimited free energy (fusion, or incredibly cheap solar)
- let plants do the work for us, harvesting the Earth's tremendous isolation.
Either of these solutions almost implies that the climate battle is already won. In the first case, if clean energy is cheap enough to scrub carbon, then it is cheap enough to displace all other power sources. In the latter case, the slow pace of photosynthesis means we'd have to stop burning carbon (and stop burning forests) for a long time until CO2 concentrations stabilize, which is exactly what the Kyoto protocol was all about.
Re: There Is Gas Under the Tundra
#50There are some beautiful photos in this article! Love the guy taking a rest in the snow.
I guess so. But all I can see are extremely fuzzy images.[0] Anyone know why I might be seeing that? 0) https://keybase.pub/mirimir/flare.png
As others have suggested, I suspect it is because javascript is disabled (I see the same images and I disable javascript).
Websites that "need" javascript to display a 26 year old image format and/or text(!!!) can go pound sand.