Climate: Il fait VRAIMENT CHAUD (fka un petit)

[LongRider]

23 hours ago, Larry of the Lake said:

A glimmer of sanity from an unexpected source:

Evangelical group releases climate change report, urges a biblical mandate for action (msn.com)

Hate to busy your bubble, but fundies and others have tried this before and it hasn't amounted to much.

Much more satisfying to destroy the planet and hate on women and LBGTA+ crowd.  

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, LongRider said:

Hate to busy your bubble, but fundies and others have tried this before and it hasn't amounted to much.

Much more satisfying to destroy the planet and hate on women and LBGTA+ crowd.  

Nope. No bubble. Hence, 'glimmer.'

That said, quite a few of the conservatives on my old route were at least willing to acknowledge that climate change was real.

[The Anti-Targ]

16 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Nope. No bubble. Hence, 'glimmer.'

That said, quite a few of the conservatives on my old route were at least willing to acknowledge that climate change was real.

Is that real in the olde conservative talking point that the climate is always changing, or is there an acceptance that human action is the major cause of what';s going on right now?

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Is that real in the olde conservative talking point that the climate is always changing, or is there an acceptance that human action is the major cause of what's going on right now?

Most of them were snowbirds - summer here in Alaska, winter someplace warmer. They were acknowledging/complaining about prolonged heat waves and increased storms/flooding near the summer properties.  Some of them did privately concede there might be a human element. 

[The Anti-Targ]

28 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Quote

what's going on right now?

 

I see what you did there. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 8/30/2022 at 4:39 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Is that real in the olde conservative talking point that the climate is always changing, or is there an acceptance that human action is the major cause of what';s going on right now?

I'm assuming that conservatives are starting to come around--lots of rural farmers are conservative, and they're facing historic issues. I could see some republicans starting to vote in favor of stopping climate change as more and more people are affected. Of course, it's too late to cling to the hope "we can still save things." 

[The Anti-Targ]

14 hours ago, Centrist Simon Steele said:

I'm assuming that conservatives are starting to come around--lots of rural farmers are conservative, and they're facing historic issues. I could see some republicans starting to vote in favor of stopping climate change as more and more people are affected. Of course, it's too late to cling to the hope "we can still save things." 

On that note, I just saw a campaign ad for a person standing for local council here which is full on clime denial, CO₂ is a nutrient, no need for managed retreat from areas prone to increased flooding and coastal erosion etc. Wild! I think there might be enough people who agree with some of these candidates less batshit standard conservative positions - low taxes, small govt, less regulation, freedom etc that they will still attract the votes to be successful. Unless there are "blue-greens"* standing the conservative vote pretty much has nowhere to go aside from the climate change deniers, since they can never bring themselves to vote for anyone with the least whiff of leftness about them.

 

*I think in most countries other than the USA the colour normally associated with conservatism is blue and the colour associated with the left is red. And of course environmentalism everywhere is green. Hence "blue-greens" are conservatives who at least acknowledge anthropogenic climate change and some other environment issues, while attempting to apply conservative and free market policies as the solution to these problems. IMO their solutions tend to reflect the kind of intellect that at a level of the only other thing I think of when using the term "blue-green": Algae.

[Rippounet]

You can't make this shit up.

Quote

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/01/carbon-capture-is-not-a-solution-to-net-zero-emissions-plans-report-says

Researchers for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found underperforming carbon capture projects considerably outnumbered successful ones by large margins.

Of the 13 projects examined for the study – accounting for about 55% of the world’s current operational capacity – seven underperformed, two failed and one was mothballed, the report found.

“Many international bodies and national government are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to net zero, and it simply won’t work,” Bruce Robertson, the author of the IEEFA report, said.

[...]

IEEFA’s report said that although carbon capture and storage is a 50-year-old technology, its results have been varied. Most CCS projects have since reused captured gas by pumping it into dwindling oil fields to help squeeze out the last drops, it pointed out.

This “enhanced oil recovery” (EOS) accounts for about 73% of the CO2 captured globally each year, in recent years, according to the report. Roughly 28m tonnes out of the 39m tonnes captured globally, according to its estimates, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.

“EOR itself leads to CO2 emissions both directly and indirectly,” the report said. “The direct impact is the emissions from the fuel used to compress and pump CO2 deep into the ground. The indirect impact is the emissions from burning the hydrocarbons that could now have come out without EOR.”

 

So much for all the hope put in CCS projects...

 

[Altherion]

39 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

You can't make this shit up.

So much for all the hope put in CCS projects...

You need plentiful clean energy before carbon capture becomes realistic.

On the bright side, better late than never:

Quote

 

Resistance to nuclear power is starting to ebb around the world with support from a surprising group: environmentalists.

This change of heart spans the globe, and is being prompted by climate change, unreliable electrical grids and fears about national security in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

...

Last week, Japan's prime minister said the country is restarting idled nuclear plants and considering building new ones. This is a sharp reversal for the country that largely abandoned nuclear after the tsunami-led disaster at the Fukushima plant in 2011.

Germany pulled the plug on nuclear after Fukushima, too. But this summer there's been an intense debate in Germany over whether to restart three plants in response to the country's severe energy crisis prompted by the Russia-Ukraine war.

 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Not forgiven, the environmentalists who spent the last 20 years knowing that fossil fuel use needed to end yet ideologically opposed nuclear at every opportunity refusing to consider the possibility that it can play a role in ending fossil fuel use. 20 years wasted where nuclear infrastructure could have been developed in the full knowledge that climate change was going to cause us grief, and at least 40 years of opposition simply for ideological reasons.

Coming around now is so late that it's debatable whether it's better than never.

[ThinkerX]

The nuclear power supporters I encounter elsewhere on the internet are almost always politically far right or libertarian. They also don't seem to grasp the limited supply of fissionable materials verses the need, nor do they care to discuss the spent fuel issue.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Is the spent fuel issue a bigger problem than trying to figure out a way to drastically cut fossil fuel use and increase energy production without any new nuclear generation?

Limited supply of fissionable material. Is that an absolute, or a reflection of the level of investment and activity in mining of said material?

[Impmk2]

25 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Is the spent fuel issue a bigger problem than trying to figure out a way to drastically cut fossil fuel use and increase energy production without any new nuclear generation?

The issue at this point as far as my limited understanding, is that new nuclear takes an average of approx 20 years to bring online. If we were going to go that way we needed to in the 90s. Ship has well and truely sailed.

At this point massively overbuilding renewable capacity, while investing in storage technologies (be that pumped hydro, gravity, pumped gas, hydrogen, battery etc etc) seems to be the way the market is heading. Any of those should be much faster to bring online than nuclear capacity.

[The Anti-Targ]

4 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

The issue at this point as far as my limited understanding, is that new nuclear takes an average of approx 20 years to bring online. If we were going to go that way we needed to in the 90s. Ship has well and truely sailed.

At this point massively overbuilding renewable capacity, while investing in storage technologies (be that pumped hydro, gravity, pumped gas, hydrogen, battery etc etc) seems to be the way the market is heading. Any of those should be much faster to bring online than nuclear capacity.

Hence my original post. Is it too late to even be better late than never? But the time to bring a nuclear plant online is 5 years, Google tells me. Perhaps the 20 years is time to profitability or time to carbon neutrality. I think building several new plants now, that will be online before 2030 is worth looking at.

Also wanted to say that one of our power companies has announced the building of a new geothermal station that is projected to be able to serve 60,000 homes and will come online in about 3 years. 60,000 doesn't sound like a lot for big countries, but New Zealand has about 2 million houses, so that's one power station serving 3% of our houses. That is a big boost and it will move our non-emitting electricity generation capacity even higher. I don't know if it will allow any coal or gas plants to be closed, but it will probably mean we need to rely on those plants less as surge generation.

[Impmk2]

10 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Is it too late to even be better late than never?

That's the question - again from my understanding there's an absolutely massive ramp up in investment in grid scale (non-chemical) energy storage going on right now. We think lithium batteries when we think renewable storage, but pumped hydro accounts for 94% of current grid scale energy storage, and that kind of technology (not just hydro, but compressed gas, heat storage - ie molten salt, hydrogen electrolysis etc etc etc) can be brought online far, far faster, at potentially far lower cost. That makes new investment into nuclear an extremely risky venture at this juncture, as it's a massive investment for something that'll potentially end up as a stranded asset.

[The Anti-Targ]

12 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

That's the question - again from my understanding there's an absolutely massive ramp up in investment in grid scale (non-chemical) energy storage going on right now. We think lithium batteries when we think renewable storage, but pumped hydro accounts for 94% of current grid scale energy storage, and that kind of technology (not just hydro, but compressed gas, heat storage - ie molten salt, hydrogen electrolysis etc etc etc) can be brought online far, far faster, at potentially far lower cost. That makes new investment into nuclear an extremely risky venture at this juncture, as it's a massive investment for something that'll potentially end up as a stranded asset.

See the recent Sabine Hossenfelder YouTube on storage options. They are good, but not as much of a solution as some people think they will be. Spoiler, she thinks nuclear is a good option to include in the mix.

Speaking of hydrogen this is potentially exciting https://www.sciencealert.com/clean-fuel-breakthrough-turns-water-into-hydrogen-at-room-temperature

Quote

A new study provides us with another promising step in that direction, provided you can make use of existing supplies of post-consumer aluminum and gallium.

In the new research, scientists describe a relatively simple method involving aluminum nanoparticles that are able to strip the oxygen from water molecules and leave hydrogen gas.

The process yields large amounts of hydrogen, and it all works at room temperature.

That removes one of the big barriers to hydrogen fuel production: the large amounts of power required to produce it using existing methods.

I was a bit dubious about this. But I checked in with my Chemistry PhD student son to ask if it seemed legit. He said it's been done with gold/platinum nano-particles in the past, so the principle is sound, and of course Al will bind very strongly with oxygen if you can keep stripping off the Al₂O₃ layer to keep exposing pure Al to the water. So whereas Au/Pt has a bit of an expense issue Al/Ga not so much. Though the availability of Ga is a limiting factor. But the good thing is the Ga is not consumed in the process. Al₂O₃ is the waste product from the reaction, which is a complete bastard to do anything useful with except to use shit loads of electricity to turn it back into Al. Still easier to store Al₂O₃ than radioactive waste.

Here's hoping it can be upscaled to industrial production.

[Impmk2]

53 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

See the recent Sabine Hossenfelder YouTube on storage options. They are good, but not as much of a solution as some people think they will be. Spoiler, she thinks nuclear is a good option to include in the mix.

In larger countries / continents like the US / Europe / China etc that may well be the case. For smaller or much more sparsely populated countries like Australia and NZ I'm not sure. I know here in Australia we've had several reports and inquiries into the viability of a domestic nuclear industry by both government and scientific bodies and they've basically all concluded that nuclear energy is too slow, too costly, and still doesn't make much sense in our energy mix here.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Impmk2 said:

In larger countries / continents like the US / Europe / China etc that may well be the case. For smaller or much more sparsely populated countries like Australia and NZ I'm not sure. I know here in Australia we've had several reports and inquiries into the viability of a domestic nuclear industry by both government and scientific bodies and they've basically all concluded that nuclear energy is too slow, too costly, and still doesn't make much sense in our energy mix here.

Possibly, but are the analysis really just says that for Aus being on the bleeding and leading edge of modern nuclear power development is not worth the investment. But if SMRs can be made cost effective in the larger countries then they may become a viable part of Australia's energy future.

For New Zealand, I'm not sure how we're going to fully de-carbonise our grid without some new technology, unless we can significantly reduce power consumption per-capita / transition to industrial sectors that use less electricity. We are running out of rivers to dam for hydro generation, and for the most part environmentalists are strongly opposing new hydro dams. We for sure have more geothermal we can build. We are a bit too cloudy for large scale cost effective solar, aside from people installing it on their roof, in the sunnier parts of the country. We have plenty of wind, but eventually that will bump up against the NIMBY effect. I don't know how underutilised our current wind farms are, so storage may help a bit. But I feel like all that will just allow us to keep pace with growth rather than allow for the decommissioning of our remaining dirty sources. I think we need to at least stop dismissing out of hand the nuclear option, and base decisions about nuclear solely on practical grounds not ideological grounds.

[Impmk2]

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Possibly, but are the analysis really just says that for Aus being on the bleeding and leading edge of modern nuclear power development is not worth the investment. But if SMRs can be made cost effective in the larger countries then they may become a viable part of Australia's energy future.

Sure, but that's waaaay along the timescale into where we'll need along the path for decarbonisation, being around a decade out. Basically the lets see how this technology pans out approach, which we could say for a range of things right now.

It's worth mentioning the previous reports (pre-2016) looked at traditional large scale nuclear rather than SMR and that wasn't found to be a viable way for Australia to rapidly lower emissions while keeping power prices sane either - but those reactors just aren't what's being proposed for here anymore.

ETA: and I don't think these are ideological. The South Australian government who commissioned the other report I linked were very pro nuclear and were basically looking for an excuse to invest. Came to exactly the same conclusion.

[ThinkerX]

Calling for a 'triple dip' La-Nina. The level of conservative climate change denial in the comments is impressive. As predicted at least some conservatives are claiming that liberals are manipulating the weather to impose a socialist/communist agenda.

What is a 'triple dip' La Niña? Meteorologists predict one is coming (msn.com)

 

A "triple-dip" La Niña is a multiyear cooling of the surface temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which can cause droughts, fierce winds and heavy rainfall.

 

According to WMO, the current La Niña is projected to span three consecutive northern hemisphere winters. It began in September 2020.

If it continues for the next six months, it will be the first "triple-dip" La Niña event of the 21st century, WMO says.

"It is exceptional to have three consecutive years with a la Niña event. Its cooling influence is temporarily slowing the rise in global temperatures – but it will not halt or reverse the long-term warming trend," Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of WMO, said in a recent report.

La Niñas are usually preceded by El Niño, a weather pattern that warms the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean; however, an El Niño event did not occur before the current La Niña, according to Michelle L'Heureux, a climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).