Climate: Il fait VRAIMENT CHAUD (fka un petit)

[Altherion]

On 9/7/2022 at 8:41 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

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

My comment was based on keeping old reactors around and bringing the ones in Germany back online. This does not take 20 years or even 5 years -- everything is already built and paid for; it's just that a combination of Fukushima and certain gas interests combined to take the nuclear plants offline a decade ago and replacing them with Russian gas. There will be some cost to extended maintenance and to bring them back online, but it should be relatively small.

On 9/7/2022 at 8:56 PM, 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.

There is and it is necessary, but it's unlikely to be sufficient worldwide. There are countries which can probably use this to become fully carbon neutral (the most likely example being Iceland), but if you look at the energy usage of China and the US, storing the necessary fraction of it in any form is going to be very difficult.

[DireWolfSpirit]

GM is going to be offering a basic model electric Equinox for only $30,000.

Thats a pretty competitive price.

[Impmk2]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

There is and it is necessary, but it's unlikely to be sufficient worldwide. There are countries which can probably use this to become fully carbon neutral (the most likely example being Iceland), but if you look at the energy usage of China and the US, storing the necessary fraction of it in any form is going to be very difficult.

Yeah my comments were largely limited to my home country (Australia) which has no existing nuclear infrastructure, a comparatively small population and large renewable resources, rather than say, China.

[The Anti-Targ]

Indeed, if Australia can't make use of solar who the bloody hell can?

[DireWolfSpirit]

Regards ancient climate change-

To look at Egypts Giza Complex of pyramids today, one realizes the incredible changes the topography had to endure to reach its present day desert scape.

An article this week in "Live Science" on a study that confirms my long held hypothesis that the large construction materials needed to build these Pyramids had to have been floated very close to the site.

Vanished arm of Nile helped ancient Egyptians transport pyramid materials

"When the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza around 4,500 years ago, the Nile River had an arm — one that has long since vanished — with high water levels that helped laborers ship materials to their construction site, a new study finds."

Slightly boggles the mind with wonder of how regions will transform into places completely unrecognizable from what they are currently.

Lake Superior may be my great/great grandchildrens Florida?

[mcbigski]

On 9/10/2022 at 12:34 PM, Altherion said:

My comment was based on keeping old reactors around and bringing the ones in Germany back online. This does not take 20 years or even 5 years -- everything is already built and paid for; it's just that a combination of Fukushima and certain gas interests combined to take the nuclear plants offline a decade ago and replacing them with Russian gas. There will be some cost to extended maintenance and to bring them back online, but it should be relatively small.

There is and it is necessary, but it's unlikely to be sufficient worldwide. There are countries which can probably use this to become fully carbon neutral (the most likely example being Iceland), but if you look at the energy usage of China and the US, storing the necessary fraction of it in any form is going to be very difficult.

Well if you want a 6 to 15 billion or so population that is prosperous then fission is the way to go.  Anyone anti fission is anti people in the aggregate.

On 9/17/2022 at 8:35 PM, DireWolfSpirit said:

Regards ancient climate change-

To look at Egypts Giza Complex of pyramids today, one realizes the incredible changes the topography had to endure to reach its present day desert scape.

An article this week in "Live Science" on a study that confirms my long held hypothesis that the large construction materials needed to build these Pyramids had to have been floated very close to the site.

Vanished arm of Nile helped ancient Egyptians transport pyramid materials

"When the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza around 4,500 years ago, the Nile River had an arm — one that has long since vanished — with high water levels that helped laborers ship materials to their construction site, a new study finds."

Slightly boggles the mind with wonder of how regions will transform into places completely unrecognizable from what they are currently.

Lake Superior may be my great/great grandchildrens Florida?

The Nile still exists.  If 5000 years ago give or take the Nile found a lower outlet, what does that have to do with climate change now?  

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Well if you want a 6 to 15 billion or so population that is prosperous then fission is the way to go.  Anyone anti fission is anti people in the aggregate.

The Nile still exists.  If 5000 years ago give or take the Nile found a lower outlet, what does that have to do with climate change now?  

I mean right at the top of my post I put-

"Regards ancient climate change-"

Why would i put that there if i wasnt, you know, regarding something to do with ancient fucking climate change?

[Kalbear]

12 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I mean right at the top of my post I put-

"Regards ancient climate change-"

Why would i put that there if i wasnt, you know, regarding something to do with ancient fucking climate change?

Heh. To that point - there are things that we are relying on currently that are just...gonna not be there. Things like the actual flow of the Colorado and being able to generate hydropower reliably, or rivers in France being able to be used to cool nuke plants. Heat patterns that allow for actual growth of certain crops. Rivers that can be used for transportation. Coastal regions that can be reliably used for living, fishing, transportation. Hell, whole actual islands.

It's a good illustration of the scale of things that can change, that feel like they should be constants but aren't remotely that way. 

[Zorral]

Even the Nile's annual inundations have fallen far off now due to climate change, for quite a few years.  Do you all not read reports?

[LongRider]

Once one knows where and how to look, the damage done to the environment becomes more visible.  Having lived in the high deserts of Nevada for many years recognizing this became easier. 
What helped with that was the region’s history of mining.  It didn’t just strip silver and minerals from the ground, but the trees cut down to support the mining in the Comstock Lode days created erosion of soils in some areas that can still be seen today. 
While Northern Nevada forests are naturally thin , stripping them out completely in some areas makes me wonder, what is the long term damage?

Mining has left it’s history all over No. Nevada, just look.

[karaddin]

Honestly the thing that most blew my mind about seeing the land change from things I didn't expect was the reintroduction of wolves changing the flow of a river(s?) due to vegetation changes caused by changed behaviour in the animals the wolves were eating.

[Kalbear]

26 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Honestly the thing that most blew my mind about seeing the land change from things I didn't expect was the reintroduction of wolves changing the flow of a river(s?) due to vegetation changes caused by changed behaviour in the animals the wolves were eating.

That unfortunately is actually bullshit and did not happen. I so wanted jt to, but it did not.

[karaddin]

Just now, KalVsWade said:

That unfortunately is actually bullshit and did not happen. I so wanted jt to, but it did not.

For fucks sake I hate the internet sometimes. I even did a quick google first expecting one of the top matches to be a debunking article if it had been debunked. Argh, ignore that and carry on.

[Kalbear]

It's an interesting read anyway and worth it. Basically everything is way more complex than anyone thinks, so simple stuff like that video where it's just this basic chain of things is almost always false.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debunk-myth-that-yellowstone-wolves-changed-entire-ecosystem-flow-of-rivers/349988

[ThinkerX]

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

For fucks sake I hate the internet sometimes. I even did a quick google first expecting one of the top matches to be a debunking article if it had been debunked. Argh, ignore that and carry on.

something vaguely similar here, except its partly people.  This area is basically a sort of marshy plateau covered with trees a hundred feet or so above sea level. Sixty some years ago, it was opened up for homesteading. So, a bunch of people spread out over the landscape, built houses, and put in wells. No great problem, the homesteads were 160 acres each. Then the original homesteaders got old and began subdividing these places. So, the number of houses increased dramatically - and so did the water wells. So many new wells were drilled it dropped the water table in places by something like twenty feet, drying up much of the marsh. Folks accelerated this process by killing beavers, whose dams turned some of that marsh into lakes. So, some lakes went away, and more marsh turned dry. Now...the thing is, that damp dirt was kind of sort of holding the top part of the plateau together, and that plateau is basically sand, gravel, and clay leftover from the last ice age. The bluff - where the plateau dropped into Cook Inlet - already had an erosion issue; this activity intensified it.

'Beaver Story' that directly affected my folk's homestead: The back side of the homestead includes a small lake, part of a string of four - call them A, B, C, D (only A has a proper name). A stream connects D with C, a second creek connects C with B, and so on, with a final stream between A and Cook Inlet. For a long, long time, only 'A' had anybody living on it, but as the area got more built-up other people moved beside the other lakes, especially 'D.'

 

Right as that was happening, a drunken moron killed the beavers that had built a dam at the mouth of Lake 'A.' Without the beavers to maintain it, the dam failed - and one fine spring day 90% of Lake 'A' - most of a square mile of water twenty feet deep - went into the inlet. Ticked off the people who used to have lakeside homes. Eventually, enough logs and debris floated over to the outlet to partly recreate the dam - but it took twenty years for Lake 'A' to properly refill.  Call that the first beaver story.

The second beaver story involves Lake 'D,' whose shore got built up again about the time lake 'A' recovered. Anyhow, one of these new settlers finished his adobe right before winter. That winter was kind of light on snow, and he got tired of looking at the butt-ugly pile of logs and brush on his end of Lake D. As it turned out, there was a backhoe left over from the lot clearing still on his property, so he fired it up and knocked down that eyesore - which was, you guessed it - a beaver dam...and the major reason Lake D existed in the first place. Even though it was winter with ice two feet thick, most of Lake D went downstream into Lake C pretty much all at once, tearing an impressive gouge in the landscape. That in turn prompted the downstream lakes to overflow, my brother who lives beside Lake B (the one on the family homestead) woke up to see five feet of water on top of the ice. Most of that water went downstream into Lake A (more or less replenishing it and washing out a couple of roads), but enough remained to increase B's size by about 30%. (I don't believe Lake D ever really came back)

[Kalbear]

Yeah, amusingly to me beavers (or their lack) feature more heavily into Yellowstone changes than wolves do. Which makes sense given how much of a physical change dams can have on micro ecologies. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Talk about being counterproductive: 

 

[Which Tyler]

Worth noting, the painting is behind glass, and at no risk of being damaged

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

Worth noting, the painting is behind glass, and at no risk of being damaged

No shit, doesn't change the fact this is only drawing negative attention. 

[karaddin]

I really wish people could look at that act and ponder the desperation of young people doing this rather than decrying the optics. I think they're accepting the attention is going to be negative and are doing whatever they can to try draw attention. And yeah, sometimes it's going to be dumb because kids do plenty of dumb shit.