https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea9RlFpugdo

The crew offshore in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch achieved our largest ocean plastic catch to date in a single extraction with System 002 on September 22nd 2021. This load amounts to 3.8 tons and concludes the last short test of the campaign.

all that habitat lost…

;-)

JudgeMental said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea9RlFpugdo

The crew offshore in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch achieved our largest ocean plastic catch to date in a single extraction with System 002 on September 22nd 2021. This load amounts to 3.8 tons and concludes the last short test of the campaign.

all that habitat lost…

;-)

3.8 tons catched, 3.8 thousand million tonnes to going

That plastic had not been in the sea long, far too clean, no algae, barnacles etc. Am very sceptical.

Seems to have been a coup at the BCA

Business Council of Australia calls for ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target

The nation’s business community is urging the government to adopt a far more ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target, if the nation is to have any chance of reaching net zero by 2050.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-09/business-council-australia-new-ambitious-carbon-emissions-target/100526742

dv said:

Seems to have been a coup at the BCA

Business Council of Australia calls for ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target

The nation’s business community is urging the government to adopt a far more ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target, if the nation is to have any chance of reaching net zero by 2050.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-09/business-council-australia-new-ambitious-carbon-emissions-target/100526742

Who carries more weight, Rupert or the nation’s business community?

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Seems to have been a coup at the BCA

Business Council of Australia calls for ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target

The nation’s business community is urging the government to adopt a far more ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target, if the nation is to have any chance of reaching net zero by 2050.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-09/business-council-australia-new-ambitious-carbon-emissions-target/100526742

Who carries more weight, Rupert or the nation’s business community?

The IPA

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Seems to have been a coup at the BCA

Business Council of Australia calls for ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target

The nation’s business community is urging the government to adopt a far more ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target, if the nation is to have any chance of reaching net zero by 2050.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-09/business-council-australia-new-ambitious-carbon-emissions-target/100526742

Who carries more weight, Rupert or the nation’s business community?

The IPA

Do the IPA actually have any money or electoral clout?

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

Who carries more weight, Rupert or the nation’s business community?

The IPA

Do the IPA actually have any money or electoral clout?

(shrugs) For reasons I don’t understand they have the Liberal party by the nuts

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

The IPA

Do the IPA actually have any money or electoral clout?

(shrugs) For reasons I don’t understand they have the Liberal party by the nuts

Maybe they have dirt on people.

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Seems to have been a coup at the BCA

Business Council of Australia calls for ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target

The nation’s business community is urging the government to adopt a far more ambitious short-term carbon emissions reduction target, if the nation is to have any chance of reaching net zero by 2050.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-09/business-council-australia-new-ambitious-carbon-emissions-target/100526742

Who carries more weight, Rupert or the nation’s business community?

The IPA

so it’s actually a reverse psychology trick and what they’re saying is, if you want to be too late to get to zero, so that you can insist on ForeverWarming™ for The Economy Must Grow, then this is what you shouldn’t do at all, don’t do it for fascism’s sake

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

Do the IPA actually have any money or electoral clout?

(shrugs) For reasons I don’t understand they have the Liberal party by the nuts

Maybe they have dirt on people.

yeah maybe they mean the insane nuts not the gonad nuts since Corruption Coalition seem not to have any of the latter, nor equivalently, guts

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a36300986/compressed-air-grid-energy-storage-system/

JudgeMental said:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a36300986/compressed-air-grid-energy-storage-system/

Checking the sources, the biggest plant they’ve built so far is 1 MW.

dv said:

JudgeMental said:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a36300986/compressed-air-grid-energy-storage-system/

Checking the sources, the biggest plant they’ve built so far is 1 MW.

What energy storage capacity?

dv said:

JudgeMental said:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a36300986/compressed-air-grid-energy-storage-system/

Checking the sources, the biggest plant they’ve built so far is 1 MW.

yeah, this just came up in my feed from one of my follows. Thought it interesting though maybe need some really big “tanks”.

sibeen said:

dv said:

JudgeMental said:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a36300986/compressed-air-grid-energy-storage-system/

Checking the sources, the biggest plant they’ve built so far is 1 MW.

What energy storage capacity?

IDK but it says 12+ hours, so presumably not much more than 12 hours, ie 12 MW.

I think this popularmechanics piece saying “Two new compressed air storage plants will soon rival the world’s largest non-hydroelectric facilities and hold up to 10 gigawatt hours of energy” is a bit optimistic. At this point they are looking for funding to expand.

dv said:

sibeen said:

dv said:

Checking the sources, the biggest plant they’ve built so far is 1 MW.

What energy storage capacity?

IDK but it says 12+ hours, so presumably not much more than 12 hours, ie 12 MW.

I think this popularmechanics piece saying “Two new compressed air storage plants will soon rival the world’s largest non-hydroelectric facilities and hold up to 10 gigawatt hours of energy” is a bit optimistic. At this point they are looking for funding to expand.

Yeah, I may be sceptical but there are so many chancers entering the renewable energy game.

A few people tried to drag me and my partner into helping a SA company, 1414 degrees, last year. We had a few teams meetings with them and then told the others “not a chance” Heard during the week that they are basically kaput.

sibeen said:

dv said:

sibeen said:

What energy storage capacity?

IDK but it says 12+ hours, so presumably not much more than 12 hours, ie 12 MW.

I think this popularmechanics piece saying “Two new compressed air storage plants will soon rival the world’s largest non-hydroelectric facilities and hold up to 10 gigawatt hours of energy” is a bit optimistic. At this point they are looking for funding to expand.

Yeah, I may be sceptical but there are so many chancers entering the renewable energy game.

A few people tried to drag me and my partner into helping a SA company, 1414 degrees, last year. We had a few teams meetings with them and then told the others “not a chance” Heard during the week that they are basically kaput.

That company is well hyped on the web.

Peak Warming Man said:

sibeen said:

dv said:

IDK but it says 12+ hours, so presumably not much more than 12 hours, ie 12 MW.

I think this popularmechanics piece saying “Two new compressed air storage plants will soon rival the world’s largest non-hydroelectric facilities and hold up to 10 gigawatt hours of energy” is a bit optimistic. At this point they are looking for funding to expand.

Yeah, I may be sceptical but there are so many chancers entering the renewable energy game.

A few people tried to drag me and my partner into helping a SA company, 1414 degrees, last year. We had a few teams meetings with them and then told the others “not a chance” Heard during the week that they are basically kaput.

That company is well hyped on the web.

They wanted an interim solution before they could get the molten salt up and running. They just didn’t want to pay for an interim solution design :)

JudgeMental said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea9RlFpugdo

The crew offshore in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch achieved our largest ocean plastic catch to date in a single extraction with System 002 on September 22nd 2021. This load amounts to 3.8 tons and concludes the last short test of the campaign.

all that habitat lost…

;-)

By putting a net around Pacific Island nations they could probably catch most of it before it gets into the open sea.

Many Pacific Island nations rely on bottled water and do not have good landfill burial sites or plastic recycling facilities.

I sgree with the habitat thing. There’s less natural vegetation washing into the oceans these days.

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce

Aaaarrrrgggggghhhh, the units, it burns.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

I’m sure they could buy a few batteries, if they so chose.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

I’m sure they could buy a few batteries, if they so chose.

Does recycling it take the same amount of power

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

No. They run 24/7, with the molten aluminium tapped off from time to time. Turning off the power would be a disaster. I think individual pots get turned off for maintenance from time to time, but each smelter would have hundreds of individual pots going.

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

No. They run 24/7, with the molten aluminium tapped off from time to time. Turning off the power would be a disaster. I think individual pots get turned off for maintenance from time to time, but each smelter would have hundreds of individual pots going.

Thanks.

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

No. They run 24/7, with the molten aluminium tapped off from time to time. Turning off the power would be a disaster. I think individual pots get turned off for maintenance from time to time, but each smelter would have hundreds of individual pots going.

Yeah, they fear a power failure as it can ruin the refinery.

sibeen said:

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Aluminum jumped to its highest price since 2008 as a deepening power crisis squeezes supplies of the energy-intensive metal that’s used in everything from beer cans to iPhones. Each ton of aluminum takes about 14 megawatt hours of power to produce, enough to run an average U.K. home for more than three years. If the 65 million ton-a-year aluminum industry was a country, it would rank as the fifth-largest power consumer in the world.

Bloomberg Newsletter

…

I wonder if aluminium smelters can be fired up and down based on the vagaries of solar/wind power.

No. They run 24/7, with the molten aluminium tapped off from time to time. Turning off the power would be a disaster. I think individual pots get turned off for maintenance from time to time, but each smelter would have hundreds of individual pots going.

Yeah, they fear a power failure as it can ruin the refinery.

Semi solidifies ?

Cymek said:

sibeen said:

party_pants said:

No. They run 24/7, with the molten aluminium tapped off from time to time. Turning off the power would be a disaster. I think individual pots get turned off for maintenance from time to time, but each smelter would have hundreds of individual pots going.

Yeah, they fear a power failure as it can ruin the refinery.

Semi solidifies ?

Yep, the aluminium solidifying would be a disaster.

OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s supreme court stripped two wind farms of their operating licences on Monday in a case that could boost the legal rights of the country’s indigenous Sami people.
Reindeer herders in Norway argue the sight and sound of wind turbines frighten animals grazing nearby and thus jeopardise age-old traditions, and that land should not be expropriated for such projects.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/us/two-norway-wind-farms-lose-licence-in-landmark-ruling-over-indigenous-rights/ar-AAPntWF?ocid=msedgntp

Peak Warming Man said:

OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s supreme court stripped two wind farms of their operating licences on Monday in a case that could boost the legal rights of the country’s indigenous Sami people.
Reindeer herders in Norway argue the sight and sound of wind turbines frighten animals grazing nearby and thus jeopardise age-old traditions, and that land should not be expropriated for such projects.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/us/two-norway-wind-farms-lose-licence-in-landmark-ruling-over-indigenous-rights/ar-AAPntWF?ocid=msedgntp

I nearly lost my license for excessive noise once.

Peak Warming Man said:

OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s supreme court stripped two wind farms of their operating licences on Monday in a case that could boost the legal rights of the country’s indigenous Sami people.
Reindeer herders in Norway argue the sight and sound of wind turbines frighten animals grazing nearby and thus jeopardise age-old traditions, and that land should not be expropriated for such projects.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/us/two-norway-wind-farms-lose-licence-in-landmark-ruling-over-indigenous-rights/ar-AAPntWF?ocid=msedgntp

do they use electricity to support any age old traditions

Peak Warming Man said:

OSLO (Reuters) – Norway’s supreme court stripped two wind farms of their operating licences on Monday in a case that could boost the legal rights of the country’s indigenous Sami people.
Reindeer herders in Norway argue the sight and sound of wind turbines frighten animals grazing nearby and thus jeopardise age-old traditions, and that land should not be expropriated for such projects.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/us/two-norway-wind-farms-lose-licence-in-landmark-ruling-over-indigenous-rights/ar-AAPntWF?ocid=msedgntp

They don’t seem to worry the cows and sheep around here. They happily graze around the high voltage lines to the Portland smelter and underneath the various wind turbines in the district. Perhaps reindeer are sensitive souls.

Thank Liberal

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-11/qld-hydrogen-capacity-explainer-hydrogen-green-twiggy/100528046

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-10-11/wa-nationals-back-net-zero-carbon-emissions-target/100530072

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2021-10-12/land-clearing-redress-rejected-by-influential-campaigner/100529384

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-14/nationals-climate-deal-net-zero-puzzling-lack-of-clarity/100535458

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-14/nationals-climate-deal-net-zero-puzzling-lack-of-clarity/100535458

They don’t want us to know? How surprising. not.

Rio Tinto trials biomass to combat steel sector’s carbon problem

By Nick Toscano
October 14, 2021 — 12.00am

Mining giant Rio Tinto is investigating the use of biomass to substitute coal in the emissions-intensive steel-making process, as pressure builds for Australia’s largest miners to tackle the huge carbon footprint of their customers.

https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/rio-tinto-trials-biomass-to-combat-steel-sector-s-carbon-problem-20211013-p58zlh.html

Witty Rejoinder said:

Rio Tinto trials biomass to combat steel sector’s carbon problem

By Nick Toscano
October 14, 2021 — 12.00am

Mining giant Rio Tinto is investigating the use of biomass to substitute coal in the emissions-intensive steel-making process, as pressure builds for Australia’s largest miners to tackle the huge carbon footprint of their customers.

https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/rio-tinto-trials-biomass-to-combat-steel-sector-s-carbon-problem-20211013-p58zlh.html

Burning biomass is just burning wood and doesn’t do a great deal in reducing emissions.

Spiny Norman said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Rio Tinto trials biomass to combat steel sector’s carbon problem

By Nick Toscano
October 14, 2021 — 12.00am

Mining giant Rio Tinto is investigating the use of biomass to substitute coal in the emissions-intensive steel-making process, as pressure builds for Australia’s largest miners to tackle the huge carbon footprint of their customers.

https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/rio-tinto-trials-biomass-to-combat-steel-sector-s-carbon-problem-20211013-p58zlh.html

Burning biomass is just burning wood and doesn’t do a great deal in reducing emissions.

It is carbon neutral over the life of the plant. Plants grow by taking CO2 out of the air and turning it into sugars and cellulose and that sort of stuff, in order to grow. Chop the tree down and burn it you turn that plant matter back into CO2. It is a cycle of a couple of decades, but at least it is not adding fossil carbon into the atmosphere. I think it is perfectly valid to add to the mix for becoming carbon neutral.

party_pants said:

Spiny Norman said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Rio Tinto trials biomass to combat steel sector’s carbon problem

By Nick Toscano
October 14, 2021 — 12.00am

Mining giant Rio Tinto is investigating the use of biomass to substitute coal in the emissions-intensive steel-making process, as pressure builds for Australia’s largest miners to tackle the huge carbon footprint of their customers.

https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/rio-tinto-trials-biomass-to-combat-steel-sector-s-carbon-problem-20211013-p58zlh.html

Burning biomass is just burning wood and doesn’t do a great deal in reducing emissions.

It is carbon neutral over the life of the plant. Plants grow by taking CO2 out of the air and turning it into sugars and cellulose and that sort of stuff, in order to grow. Chop the tree down and burn it you turn that plant matter back into CO2. It is a cycle of a couple of decades, but at least it is not adding fossil carbon into the atmosphere. I think it is perfectly valid to add to the mix for becoming carbon neutral.

IIRC, plants do take some (possibly near-permanently sequestered) carbon from the soil, too, making them not quite carbon-neutral.

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

Spiny Norman said:

Burning biomass is just burning wood and doesn’t do a great deal in reducing emissions.

It is carbon neutral over the life of the plant. Plants grow by taking CO2 out of the air and turning it into sugars and cellulose and that sort of stuff, in order to grow. Chop the tree down and burn it you turn that plant matter back into CO2. It is a cycle of a couple of decades, but at least it is not adding fossil carbon into the atmosphere. I think it is perfectly valid to add to the mix for becoming carbon neutral.

IIRC, plants do take some (possibly near-permanently sequestered) carbon from the soil, too, making them not quite carbon-neutral.

They lose leaves and branches over the seasons too, which fall to the ground and decompose into soil carbon.

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

It is carbon neutral over the life of the plant. Plants grow by taking CO2 out of the air and turning it into sugars and cellulose and that sort of stuff, in order to grow. Chop the tree down and burn it you turn that plant matter back into CO2. It is a cycle of a couple of decades, but at least it is not adding fossil carbon into the atmosphere. I think it is perfectly valid to add to the mix for becoming carbon neutral.

IIRC, plants do take some (possibly near-permanently sequestered) carbon from the soil, too, making them not quite carbon-neutral.

They lose leaves and branches over the seasons too, which fall to the ground and decompose into soil carbon.

Fair call.

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

IIRC, plants do take some (possibly near-permanently sequestered) carbon from the soil, too, making them not quite carbon-neutral.

They lose leaves and branches over the seasons too, which fall to the ground and decompose into soil carbon.

Fair call.

It is not perfect, but I think it is a vast improvement over digging up coal and burning it.

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

party_pants said:

They lose leaves and branches over the seasons too, which fall to the ground and decompose into soil carbon.

Fair call.

It is not perfect, but I think it is a vast improvement over digging up coal and burning it.

Coal is also carbon neutral, if you wait long enough.
The point is that burning wood is nothing like carbon neutral at the rate it needs to be.

Spiny Norman said:

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

Fair call.

It is not perfect, but I think it is a vast improvement over digging up coal and burning it.

Coal is also carbon neutral, if you wait long enough.
The point is that burning wood is nothing like carbon neutral at the rate it needs to be.

I agree that wood is too slow.

Spiny Norman said:

party_pants said:

Michael V said:

Fair call.

It is not perfect, but I think it is a vast improvement over digging up coal and burning it.

Coal is also carbon neutral, if you wait long enough.
The point is that burning wood is nothing like carbon neutral at the rate it needs to be.

Are witches carbon neutral if you burn them?

Trevtaowillgetyounowhere said:

Spiny Norman said:

party_pants said:

It is not perfect, but I think it is a vast improvement over digging up coal and burning it.

Coal is also carbon neutral, if you wait long enough.
The point is that burning wood is nothing like carbon neutral at the rate it needs to be.

Are witches carbon neutral if you burn them?

we mean what’s the difference between 100 and 100000000 years right, all the same, no worries

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

They’re not economists.

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Why not both….. Either way we’ll be rooned.

Witty Rejoinder said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

They’re not economists.

No, it would be silly to demand that degree of accuracy from them.

Trevtaowillgetyounowhere said:

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Why not both….. Either way we’ll be rooned.

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Looks to be a La Nina summer.

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

Wasn’t last year a La Nina year too?

buffy said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

Wasn’t last year a La Nina year too?

Dunno. I don’t hold a hose, mate.

buffy said:

captain_spalding said:

party_pants said:

Is that good or bad?

Floods or bushfires?

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

Wasn’t last year a La Nina year too?

No, last La Niña year was 2015-2016.

poikilotherm said:

buffy said:

captain_spalding said:

Forget it.

The reality will turn out to bear little resemblance to their predictions, whatever they may be.

Wasn’t last year a La Nina year too?

No, last La Niña year was 2015-2016.

Wrong 2010-2012

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/enso/

poikilotherm said:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/enso/

Might not have been updated? Because:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/wet-and-wild-summer-2020-2021/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97690-w

buffy said:

poikilotherm said:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/enso/

Might not have been updated? Because:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/wet-and-wild-summer-2020-2021/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97690-w

Bom says La Niña alert, but not a La Niña event. Bom still disagrees I think, hard to read on the phone.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/outlook/#tabs=ENSO-Outlook-history

poikilotherm said:

buffy said:

poikilotherm said:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/history/enso/

Might not have been updated? Because:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/wet-and-wild-summer-2020-2021/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97690-w

Bom says La Niña alert, but not a La Niña event. Bom still disagrees I think, hard to read on the phone.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/outlook/#tabs=ENSO-Outlook-history

Ah found it, so it was end of 2020 start of 2021z

poikilotherm said:

poikilotherm said:

buffy said:

Might not have been updated? Because:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/wet-and-wild-summer-2020-2021/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97690-w

Bom says La Niña alert, but not a La Niña event. Bom still disagrees I think, hard to read on the phone.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/outlook/#tabs=ENSO-Outlook-history

Ah found it, so it was end of 2020 start of 2021z

Have a look here:

“The most significant natural climate driver during 2020 however was La Niña. The Pacific Ocean began cooling over autumn, with early indicators of a developing La Niña emerging from around June. The event matured over winter and was declared in September. “

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/2020/#tabs=Influences

(We had a cool Summer last year. I don’t think we had any 40 degree days, or maybe just one. That is probably why I took notice that it was La Nina)

Bring Back Donald The Environmentalist

Despite years of promises and pledges to return coal to its former glory, Mr Trump presided over a 36 per cent decline in coal-fired electricity generation.

Plug-in cars are the future. The grid isn’t ready.

By 2035, the chief automakers will have turned away from the internal combustion engine. It’ll be up to the grid to fuel all those new cars, trucks and buses.

By Will Englund
October 13, 2021|Updated yesterday at 4:06 p.m. EDT

COPENHAGEN, N.Y. — On a good day, a fair wind blows off Lake Ontario, the long-distance transmission lines of New York state are not clogged up and yet another heat wave hasn’t pushed the urban utilities to their limits. On such a day, power from the two big wind turbines in Vaughn Moser’s hayfield in this little village join the great flow of electricity from upstate as it courses through the bottleneck west of Albany and then heads south, where some portion of it feeds what is currently the country’s largest electric vehicle charging station, on the edge of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

There, at an installation opened earlier this year by a car-sharing company called Revel, on the site of the old Pfizer pharmaceutical headquarters, this carbon-free power can help juice up a whole fleet of sleek vehicles that aim to leave the internal combustion engine behind.

But that’s on a good day. Even now — before this state and the country’s grand ambitions for an electric future are fully in motion — there are too many bad ones.

Seventy-four times last year, the wind across Upstate New York dropped so low that for stretches of eight hours or more barely any electricity was produced. Nearly half the year, the main transmission line feeding the metropolitan area was at full capacity, so that no more power could be fed into it. Congestion struck other, smaller lines, too, and when that happened some of the wind turbine blades upstate fell still.

And in New York City this summer, the utility Con Edison appealed to customers to cut back on their electricity usage during the strain of five separate heat waves, while Tropical Storms Elsa, Henri and Ida cut power to thousands.

Converting the nation’s fleet of automobiles and trucks to electric power is a critical piece of the battle against climate change. The Biden administration wants to see them account for half of all sales by 2030, and New York state has enacted a ban on the sale of internal combustion cars and trucks starting in 2035.

But making America’s cars go electric is no longer primarily a story about building the cars. Against this ambitious backdrop, America’s electric grid will be sorely challenged by the need to deliver clean power to those cars. Today, though, it barely functions in times of ordinary stress, and fails altogether too often for comfort, as widespread blackouts in California, Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere have shown.

“We got to talk about the grid,” said Gil Quiniones, head of a state agency called the New York Power Authority. “Otherwise we’ll be caught flat-footed.”

By 2030, according to one study, the nation will need to invest as much as $125 billion in the grid to allow it to handle electric vehicles. The current infrastructure bill before Congress puts about $5 billion toward transmission line construction and upgrades.

Even in this progressive, wealthy state, where policymakers are spending billions on climate change initiatives and the governor has announced plans for two big new transmission lines feeding the New York metropolitan area, the challenge is enormous.

By 2050, the state projects, electric cars, trucks and buses will use 14 percent of New York’s total output. That’s equivalent to half of all the electricity used in New York City in 2019 — so it’s like powering a new city of four million people. Overall demand could grow by as much as 50 percent.

Three places, hundreds of miles apart, tell the story of the grid in New York, and by extension in the country as a whole:

In the hard-hit dairy country of upstate Lewis County, wind power has been an economic lifeline, but its room for expansion is severely limited. Other renewables face similar limits.

In a control room in East Greenbush, outside Albany, the agency that oversees New York’s grid must manage the flow of electricity through transmission lines that without significant rebuilding will be totally inadequate in connecting upstate to the big metropolitan area.

And in New York City, stressed utility equipment will need expensive upgrades — and perhaps a totally new model of energy production — if they are to handle an eventual 2 million electric vehicles.

All in all, it shows how the country’s 20th-century point-to-point grid, delivering energy over long distances, will not be adequate to serve this century’s needs.

“The grid of the future isn’t going to be a grid at all,” said Shuli Goodman, executive director of a Linux Foundation project called LF Energy. “It will be more like the Internet,” she said, with power generation happening all over the place.

“Something,” she said, “like a forest.”

It’s been 20 years since the first wind farm was built in Lewis County, and since then more have followed, bringing a steady income stream to the small dairy farmers whose land hosts the towering white turbines. Theirs has been a life of struggle, squeezed on price by their larger competitors, selling milk through a co-op to the big yellow Kraft Heinz factory in Lowville that goes through a reported 20 million pounds a month to make string cheese and cream cheese.

Vaughn Moser’s parents were able to retire from farming when the turbines came. With four kids, ages 3 to 11, he keeps plenty busy making ends meet: tending about 250 head of cattle (beef and dairy), running 10,000 taps on maple trees to make syrup, operating a lumber mill and making furniture in his spare time.

In a year when the dairy co-op is dumping milk because there’s too much for the market to use, he’s glad to see the turbine blades churning, grabbing electricity from the wind and sending it away down the wires. “It’s going where it’s needed, and that’s okay,” he said. “Everything gets bigger and needs more power.”

Government officials speak with similar confidence about the role of wind power and its renewable cousin, solar, in powering a low-emissions electric grid that could undergird an electric vehicle future. Without a renewable source of electricity, electric vehicles will still contribute to climate change — where fossil fuels are burned at power plants rather than in tailpipe emissions.

New York has adopted what it calls the 70-30 goal: 70 percent carbon-free power by 2030. The Biden administration has spelled out similar, longer-term goals for the nation as a whole. But a White House proposal to encourage the expansion of clean energy in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is facing intense opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and is likely to be scaled back.

Officials have been depending on wind to be a big part of their clean energy plan. Earlier this year, then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) boasted, “We are proposing the largest wind programs in the nation and advancing our green manufacturing capacity and the jobs that go with it.”

In August, the Energy Department reported that 2020 had seen record-high levels of new land-based wind farm installations nationwide. “These reports contain such terrific news,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said. “They underscore both the progress made and the capacity for much more affordable wind power to come.”

But in New York and nationally, wind will have trouble meeting the expectations.

Lewis County and adjoining Jefferson County encompass the Tug Hill Plateau, a high forested region west of the Adirondacks. It’s the best location for onshore wind farms in the entire state. Turbines stretch out along the eastern escarpment of the plateau, just where the winds off Lake Ontario pick up speed as they flow down into the fertile Black River Valley.

This fall, the Roaring Brook wind farm, with the latest in European turbine blades mounted to each of 20 250-foot-tall towers, goes into operation. It strides across 5,000 mostly forested acres on the eastern escarpment of the plateau.

All that power doesn’t amount to much. Wind contributes about 3 percent of the output in New York.

Two proposed wind farms for Tug Hill could still get through the planning process and become operational.

“And that’s probably about it for this region,” said Jason Du Terroil, director of East Coast development for Avangrid, which will operate Roaring Brook. “The rest of New York, the topography doesn’t really lend itself to wind. Up and down the East Coast, it’s more difficult to site wind farms.”

Nationally, wind accounts for about 8.4 percent of power production, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects some growth of onshore wind in the years ahead, especially in the Midwest.

Additional growth will occur offshore, at least for the East Coast. Stronger, steadier winds and more powerful turbines in the waters from Martha’s Vineyard to Virginia could reach a capacity of 20 to 30 gigawatts by 2030, according to an American Wind Energy Association report.

New York’s share of that, probably nine gigawatts, would not be sufficient to replace all its fossil-fuel-powered generation plants, which in 2020 had a capacity of 26 gigawatts.

Solar energy is growing nationally, especially in the South and Southwest, but a combination of terrain and weather will limit its impact in the Northeast. It takes up too much room, for one thing.

Moser points out that he can plant his crops right up to the bases of the wind turbines standing in his fields. “To see good farmland covered with solar, it’s disappointing,” he said.

But wind farms aren’t welcome everywhere. Wind has meant money for Lewis County, though it still has the second-lowest median household income of New York’s 62 counties after the Bronx. Elsewhere — up near the Thousand Islands along the St. Lawrence River, for instance — wealthy part-time residents have had the means to fight off proposed wind farms.

And even in Lewis County, Roaring Brook met opposition. The Tug Hill Land Trust, a private nonprofit, objected to its placement on forest land, instead of farmers’ fields, said Linda Garrett, the executive director of the group. She cited concerns about water pollution and the loss of a wilderness feeling in the state’s third-largest forest. Avangrid has cut more than 10 miles of roads through the tract to connect the turbines.

“If you’re cutting down trees to put up windmills to fight climate change, it doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “It would be a lot easier to swallow if it was a community project, with community benefits.”

Currently, 57 proposed wind projects in New York — on land and at sea — are awaiting a green light. Approval depends on there being enough transmission capacity to handle their output. Some have been in the queue since 2012.

If every project eventually won approval, and moved toward operation over the next decade, the capacity would be about 30 gigawatts, enough in theory to replace the fossil fuel plants.

But every project won’t win approval. A new study of selected U.S. regions by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that fewer than a quarter of all proposed projects actually make it to commercial operation.

Nuclear power is expected to decline from 20 percent of national output in 2019 to 12 percent in 2050, according to a projection by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. There are no nuclear proposals in New York’s plans. Earlier this year, the state shut down an old nuclear plant at Indian Point, on the Hudson. Its capacity was picked up by two new gas-fired plants.

“Getting to 70 percent in nine years is going to be a big push,” said Cullen Howe, a grid specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s going to be a heavy lift. There’s no question about it. Is it technically feasible? Yeah, I think it is.”

But generating all that power will be one thing. Even assuming the goal can be met, that clean power still has to make its way to where the electric cars will be.

The electricity generated in Moser’s hayfield heads about nine miles to the northwest, where it joins the New York grid at a substation in East Watertown. There it falls under the control of the state’s Independent System Operator and enters a transmission line that shows up as a thin yellow connector on a dauntingly complicated and huge schematic screen that dominates the ISO control room in a tightly secured building in East Greenbush, just across the Hudson from Albany. The line interconnects with other lines in magenta, blue, red, green and orange, each representing a different level of voltage.

The ISO operators like to talk about what they call the state’s Tale of Two Grids: on one side, the rural north and Rust Belt west, and on the other, the Hudson Valley, New York City metropolitan area and Long Island. Both produce nearly the same amount of electricity — about 65,000 gigawatt-hours in 2020 — but one has plenty of renewable power and the other does not. One has vast rural stretches; the other does not. They operate like two nearly separate systems.

“When the system’s running well, there’s not a lot to do,” said Richard Dewey, president of the New York ISO. “It’s, like, 95 percent boredom and 5 percent hysteria.”

One main transmission line connects the two grids, carrying power from the north and west to where it’s needed downstate, which uses about two-thirds of the state’s overall energy. Running roughly between Utica and Albany, that line is called the Central East Constraint, and it is congested about half the year, meaning no more power can flow along it.

And at least 11 pockets within the two regions have their own local constraints: high-tension lines that don’t have enough capacity even today.

It is not a problem specific to New York state. Similar constraints exist in Texas, California, Maryland, Illinois and elsewhere. Across the country, long-distance transmission lines can only carry so much electricity, just the way a pipe can only carry so much water. When they’re at full capacity, they can’t carry any more, even if a downstream customer — a local utility, for instance — is trying to obtain some.

The limits of these constraints will become even more significant as the nation moves to send more clean energy across long distances. It’s much easier to cut back on wind and solar generation in what are called curtailments than it is to dial down a traditional power plant or hydroelectric dam, and easier to bring them back on again, so renewables always take the brunt of curtailment orders.

By 2030, a study suggests, the potential output of renewables in some of the smaller pockets in New York could face curtailments of as much as 63 percent without improvements in transmission. This would make it virtually impossible for the state to meet the 2030 goal.

Keeping energy flowing from upstate to downstate is critical to the state’s goals. Last year, 90 percent of the electricity produced upstate was zero-emission, a little bit of it from the Moser farm but the bulk from nuclear plants and the Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station. Downstate, by contrast, 77 percent of the electricity was from fossil fuels.

To meet its needs, New York state is planning to spend $1.2 billion on upgrades, and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced on Sept. 20 a plan to spend $11 billion on a new transmission line skirting the Catskills, as well as another line that would bring hydropower straight down from Quebec. At the national level, the federal infrastructure bill includes $5 billion to address congestion.

Even with the improvements, Dewey said, meeting the state’s emissions target by getting cleaner power downstate “is going to be a stretch.”

In New York and across the country, engineers also expect to enhance lines on existing rights of way. A technology called dynamic line rating, which uses sensors to provide much greater visibility into conditions on transmission lines, could allow them to carry significantly more power, without new construction.

A different workaround to the transmission problem involves numerous new small but local power generators. Hochul announced a plan in September to build vast numbers of rooftop installations.

The panels would be installed where the demand is — predominantly in and around New York City.

The main transmission line from upstate to New York City comes right down the Hudson Valley, with secondary lines providing some backup. Electricity imported from Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey can also feed the metropolitan area.

At substations around the region, the voltage is stepped down and the power is distributed on local lines — strung on familiar poles in parts of the outer boroughs and Westchester County, but underground in Manhattan.

Moshe Cohen, the CEO of a start-up called Gravity, hoped this year that at the end of one of these lines would be what he needed to get his electric taxi vehicle company up and running — quickly, and at scale.

He approached major parking garage operators about setting up 50 fast chargers, which can replenish a car in as little as 20 minutes but gulp huge amounts of electricity.

Building out the equipment for such a site would be possible. “This is what we do for a living,” said Patrick McHugh, vice president of engineering and planning for Con Edison. “It’s nothing that we haven’t done.”

But it would take years. If you plugged in 50 cars at once to 50 chargers, it would draw as much electricity as a high-rise office building for as long as the cars were being refueled.

“We face some very tight constraints,” Cohen said.

The plan didn’t work out. Instead Gravity is going with reduced, scattered charging sites around the city.

But that was a plan for only 50 cars. As the country turns toward electric vehicles, New York City is expected to have 2 million of them on the streets by 2040, according to the New York Power Authority.

Con Ed does not intend to be the obstacle to the electric vehicle future. “This is coming,” McHugh said. “We’re working to be ahead of that.”

But Gil Quiniones, head of the New York Power Authority, has a less optimistic view. He lives in the West Village of Manhattan, and there’s a big UPS depot just around the corner on Greenwich Street.

“What if Amazon and FedEx and UPS say, ‘We’re going to go electric,’ ” he said. “Con Ed is going to be scrambling.”

As CEO of the Power Authority — a state agency established by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1931 — Quiniones has had an up-close look at what ails the power grid.

The heat is a big headache for Con Ed and the utilities nationwide that distribute electricity up and down every street. Block by block, transformers and substations can overheat, from both the air temperature and the heavy burdens placed upon them by the demand from air conditioning. Heat pushes the system on a grand scale to its limits, but also neighborhood by neighborhood, even house by house.

In June, July, August and September, Con Ed urged customers to conserve power so the system wouldn’t crash.

As recently as the summer of 2019, Con Ed had to sever power to 50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens to keep its system from crashing in the face of 100-degree heat.

A crucial component as electric vehicles become more prevalent will be the ability to spread demand over 24 hours.

“You don’t want everybody charging when it’s 96 degrees at 2 p.m. That’ll crash the system,” Quiniones said.

McHugh said that Con Ed expects the move to electric cars to be gradual, much the way the adoption of home air conditioners was in the 1970s and 1980s. “It will slowly build up,” he said, “and we’ll monitor that accordingly.”

To power a city’s worth of electric vehicles, New York by the 2030s will have to call on a wide array of resources. New or enhanced transmission lines, for instance, will carry more juice from the renewable producers of western New York down to the metropolis — likely even some from Moser’s hayfield, unless it’s needed closer to home.

But at the same time, a dramatic transformation of the grid will be necessary, experts say. Rooftop solar panels will need to be sprouting everywhere. Enthusiasts believe that microgrids could one day be powered by long-elusive hydrogen fuel, or small, next-generation nuclear reactors. All these sources would be local but deeply interconnected, supporting each other.

“We have the technology to do it,” Howe said. “The question is, do we have the will?”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/13/electric-vehicles-grid-upgrade/?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-19/nationals-liberals-coalition-climate-policy-joyce-morrison/100547458

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/19/australias-trash-tide-researchers-studied-20m-pieces-of-beach-rubbish-and-found-a-lot-of-plastic

Laugh Out Loud

SCIENCE said:

Laugh Out Loud

They don’t match at the very least

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Laugh Out Loud

They don’t match at the very least

Imagine how bad it would be if they didn’t have those targets.

Dark Orange said:

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Laugh Out Loud

They don’t match at the very least

Imagine how bad it would be if they didn’t have those targets.

Indeed

Cymek said:

SCIENCE said:

Laugh Out Loud

They don’t match at the very least

There’s good alignment on the left hand side.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-20/plains-wanderers-gifted-13000ha-of-habitat/100552434
More than 13,000 hectares of prime plains-wanderer habitat in south-west New South Wales has been conserved with the help of rural landholders.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-02/prescribed-burn-decimates-numbat-habitat-wa/100110960

be interested in a survey now to determine for sure if numbers have been affected.

Boris said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-02/prescribed-burn-decimates-numbat-habitat-wa/100110960

be interested in a survey now to determine for sure if numbers have been affected.

Serious deep thought about the frequency and intensity of burns is required.

Nationals accept net zero target by 2050
By David Crowe and Katina Curtis
Updated October 24, 2021 — 6.55pm

Australia will make a formal pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 after Nationals MPs backed the goal in a tense meeting on Sunday that cleared the way for policies within days to adopt cleaner fuels, electric vehicles, and more renewable energy.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will ask federal cabinet on Monday to endorse the target and a policy package. The deal will be revealed before he flies on Thursday to a United Nations climate summit in Glasgow where he will be asked to commit to net zero.

Read More:

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/nationals-accept-net-zero-target-by-2050-20211024-p592pa.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhlE13EqjJk

Aussie birds and their calls – new, revised version

Brian Ward

This is my ‘latest and greatest’ version of Aussie birds and their calls. It includes a number of different birds that weren’t in the previous two versions. It also includes two photos that I didn’t take, both of which I have credited to the photographers involved – and I thank them for their generosity.
My apologies for the poor quality of several of the photos but they were the only ones I have of those particular birds.
The audio is still good quality, though!

I hope you enjoy it.

Bird List:
0:09 Laughing Kookaburra
0:19 Australian Magpie
0:29 Bell Miner aka Bellbird
0:44 New Holland Honeyeater
0:56 Spotted Pardalote
1:07 Fan-tailed Cuckoo
1:18 Galahs
1:29 Common Blackbird
1:44 Dollarbird
1:54 Eastern Whipbird (mostly male bird but the last three, quick calls are from the female)
2:11 Pied Currawong
2:29 Wonga Pigeon
2:37 Yellow-faced Honeyeater
2:45 Masked Lapwing aka Spur-winged Plover
2:55 Willie Wagtail
3:09 Superb Fairy-wren
3:20 Red Wattlebird (named after the red appendage on its throat)
3:32 Tawny Frogmouth
3:44 Golden Whistler
3:57 Pied Butcherbird
4:16 Australian King Parrot
4:27 Eastern Koel (two birds calling, male and female)
4:42 Grey Butcherbird
4:57 Grey Shrike-thrush (my favourite)
5:15 Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo
5:35 Eastern Yellow Robin
5:45 Superb Lyrebird (some imitate machinery, such as chainsaws, etc.)
6:04 Sulphur-crested Cockatoo – very loud.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

Cymek said:

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

roughbarked said:

ABC Rural
Soils can’t hold enough carbon to offset Australian emissions, experts say.

I thought they going to store it in wood?

Takes thousands of years.

Could you fill disused mines with it, bit of a trek though.
The way economics works may need a serious rethink, money/cost isn’t the main determination in why something does or doesn’t get done.

“Soils can’t hold enough carbon to offset Australian emissions, experts say.” sounds like a crock though, where did that carbon come from, did they dig it up oh wait.

OK with that if you are going to turn it back into coal and inject it back where you took it from.

Tha’ts what Cymek is suggesting right, don’t worry about thousands of years, make it millions, let it never be said that the Corruption Coalition aren’t the best at making long term plans, they’re better than everyone, they think long long term, none of that pesky “what will we do in the next 30 years” shit.

Tau.Neutrino said:

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about a genetically engineered tree that grows fast, stores carbon faster than other trees?

Still take thousands of years.

https://www.worldtree.eco/empress-tree/
The Empress Splendor (botanical name Paulownia) is the one of the fastest-growing trees in the world. A hardwood, it can grow 10-20 feet in its first year and reaches maturity within 10 years.

The Fastest Fast Growing Trees
https://arbordayblog.org/landscapedesign/the-fastest-fast-growing-trees/

well we do need a new set of furniture or twenty

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

How much could they carry up in one launch?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

How much could they carry up in one launch?

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

How much could they carry up in one launch?

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Once it’s in solid form, it can just be buried.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

How much could they carry up in one launch?

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Quite a lot of them is carbon fibre.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

How much could they carry up in one launch?

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Doesn’t make much sense if some of them are going to come down again I suppose.

Dark Orange said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

How much could they carry up in one launch?

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Once it’s in solid form, it can just be buried.

Maybe some carbon could be stored as a material in moon and mars bases?

Tamb said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

How much could they carry up in one launch?

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Quite a lot of them is carbon fibre.

Maybe new electric cars could store the carbon that way as well.

How many electric cars would you need to do it?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Dark Orange said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Once it’s in solid form, it can just be buried.

Maybe some carbon could be stored as a material in moon and mars bases?

You could if a space elevator existed just release it out the top end, would depend on its length though

Tau.Neutrino said:

Dark Orange said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What if they mixed carbon into the materials of satellites?

How much could the entire satellite constellation hold?

Once it’s in solid form, it can just be buried.

Maybe some carbon could be stored as a material in moon and mars bases?

This idea seems to be becoming more and more fanciful as it takes on a life of its own.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

How much could they carry up in one launch?

I’d guess less than 1% of the CO2 emissions required to get it there.

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

Come on man

dv said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

Come on man

Carbon fibre rocket casings?

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

What about sending carbon up into space ^

On all those space tourists rockets?

Come on man

Carbon fibre rocket casings?

You seem to be forgetting that CO2 is the issue, not carbon itself.

Dark Orange said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

dv said:

Come on man

Carbon fibre rocket casings?

You seem to be forgetting that CO2 is the issue, not carbon itself.

I am forgetful.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Dark Orange said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Carbon fibre rocket casings?

You seem to be forgetting that CO2 is the issue, not carbon itself.

I am forgetful.

ok, I will bookmark this and learn it.

C vs CO2

https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/C_vs_CO2

Why the world needs negative emissions
If negative emissions are to play a role in policy much more needs to be done to make them practically achievable

Oct 30th 2021

Thirty kilometres down the road from Reykjavik, the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant sits amid black boulders draped in phosphorescent green moss. Behind its plumes of rising steam, steep mountains sweep up from the rocky plain. Boulders and mountains alike are made of basalt, as is some 90% of the rest of Iceland. It is a 300trn tonne sawn-off tree stump of basalt sitting on the floor of the Atlantic—which is itself just more basalt. There is no commoner rock in Earth’s crust.

The cylinder of basalt that Kári Helgason is holding out, though, is different. Young basalt is riddled with tiny holes, but in this case most cavities are filled with flecks of white crystal. “This,” he says, pointing to the white flecks, “is mostly calcite.” Calcite, a form of calcium carbonate, is not a rare mineral on the island—it is commonly known as Iceland spar—or elsewhere. But this basalt-bound calcite is exceptional. It is the physical manifestation of CO2 emissions being turned to stone.

Small amounts of CO2 are part-and-parcel of the hot fluids piped up from the underlying crust at geothermal power stations like Hellisheiði. Since the early 2000s, Carbfix, the Icelandic company where Mr Helgason works, has been capturing CO2 and pumping it back into the porous bedrock in the form of carbonated water. Once there it reacts with calcium in the basalt. Tracer studies have shown that 95% of the gas injected by Carbfix is mineralised within two years.

Carbfix says Iceland’s basalt could store a century of CO2 emissions, even at today’s rate. By 2030 it hopes to have a “mineral storage terminal” west of Reykjavik that can petrify 3m tonnes of CO2 a year, most or all of it captured at industrial facilities in Europe. In early 2021 it signed a deal with Dan-Unity CO2, a Danish shipping company, for custom-made low-emission tankers to bring it CO2 earmarked for disposal.

Carbon capture and storage (ccs) along these lines has been a disappointment. There are ways to take CO2 out of the exhaust gases of power plants and steelworks, and injection into basalt is just one of various possible places to store it—others include gasfields and saline aquifers. The idea of putting these technologies together has been around for decades. The unfccc asked the ipcc to produce a report on the technology 20 years ago. Yet there is still not a single large gas- or coal-fired power station that is capturing and storing its emissions.

One problem is that fossil-fuel industries and governments that value them have an interest in saying they are pursuing ccs, because it seems to provide a future for some fossil fuels, but no pressing reason to make it an implemented reality. The technology makes plants more expensive and less efficient, and in the absence of a high carbon price that is a penalty nobody wants to pay. What is more, many people—sometimes termed “numbies”, for “not under my backyard”—dislike the idea of industrial waste being squirted into aquifers and gasfields anywhere near their homes. Hence the attraction of shipping it to Iceland where it can be turned into solid rock.

Given all this, it is a problem that the technologies on which ccs relies are now central to climate action, thanks to the spread of net-zero pledges. It is not just that these require decarbonising cement-making (for which ccs looks crucial), or that they have a role for hydrogen (which, if made from fossil fuels, needs ccs to be clean). It is that at some point they need CO2 to be drawn down from the thin but thickening air and stored away.

Take back what hurt you
Next to Carbfix’s operation at Hellisheiði is Orca, a facility built in partnership with Climeworks, a Swiss company. Fed with air from a bank of 96 industrial fans, Climeworks’s technology filters out atmospheric CO2 so it can be fed into the geothermal plant’s wastewater for disposal at depth. Orca, which opened in September, is the world’s largest “direct-air capture” (dac) facility. Its 11 tonnes of carbon captured each day are the forerunner of an enterprise which, if models are right and pledges are adhered to, will grow a millionfold in the next half-century.

The negative emissions dac is held to offer play two roles in climate stabilisation. One might be seen as balancing the current carbon account. Although most emissions can theoretically be eliminated using technologies that exist now, aviation, shipping and some industrial processes remain hard to decarbonise.Some agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions look as if they will prove recalcitrant. As long as emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases persist, stabilisation will require negative emissions.

The other role for dac is getting rid of historical excess. As we have seen, the cumulative CO2-emissions budget consistent with a 50-50 chance of meeting the 2°C goal is 3.7trn tonnes. The budget for 1.5°C is just 2.9trn tonnes. With 2.4trn tonnes already emitted, that leaves a decade of emissions at today’s rates for 1.5°C, maybe 25 years for 2°C.

Those constraints could be eased if some of what has already been “spent” were repaid—that is, if CO2 were pulled out of the atmosphere faster than it were being put in, producing net-negative emissions. Removing a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2050 is not quite the same as not having emitted it in 1950, but it is close. And this remains true even if the removal comes after the budget has been broken. Carbon budgets can be overshot, at least for a while.

This offers rich countries that benefited disproportionately from 20th-century emissions a way to create room in the budget for poor ones which were left out. But to do this on an appreciable scale they need to draw down huge amounts of carbon. Some scenarios have negative emissions of well over 10gt a year—a global fossil-fuel industry running in reverse. Done through dac that would require huge capital investment and use up a great deal of clean, renewable but still not free energy in the process.

This would not have to be done entirely through dac. Nature takes half the carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere back out, through either photosynthesis or geochemistry. Both processes could be ramped up.

For photosynthesis, more trees are the obvious option. They can be grown in plantations, including commercial ones where new trees replace each year’s harvest; or they can be encouraged in regenerated forests. The second option is much better. A study in 2019 found that over 80 years restoring natural forests stores an average of 40 times more carbon per hectare than new plantations. Restoration also scores better in preserving biodiversity. But plantations make money in an easily understood way. The same study found that 45% of commitments made under the Bonn Challenge, a voluntary ngo-led initiative to boost forests, involved planting poor-quality commercial plantations.

Another option is to raise the amount of carbon stored in agricultural land and forests that are already commercially exploited. So-called “nature-based solutions” along these lines are staples of the market for voluntary carbon offsets, where vendors promise to do things like growing trees, or stopping them being cut down, to absolve clients’ sins of emission.

Offsetting schemes seem able to deliver negative emissions at a reasonable price. When Microsoft and Stripe, a fintech company, sought carbon-removal projects to meet their net-zero pledges, they found that nature-based projects were priced at $5-50 per tonne. But there are three problems. One is that not all offsetting schemes are well run or well supervised. In Chile government subsidies helped establish 1.3m hectares of tree plantations since 1986—but a rule requiring that this expansion should not happen at the expense of native forests was not enforced. As a result the programme actually reduced the amount of stored carbon by some 50,000 tonnes.

A second is that offsetting is unlikely to solve deeper issues. The airline industry has strong economic incentives to use fuel efficiently, but they have not made the wrenching technological shifts required to stop buying kerosene. If the industry buys offsets to make its planes “carbon-neutral”, as it plans through a scheme called corsia, the efficiency incentives will increase further. But that will not of itself make a post-kerosene world more likely. That is one reason why the Science Based Targets Initiative, a standard-setting coalition, does not accept offsetting as a path to emission reduction.

The third drawback is limited capacity. This feels surprising, since in principle the scope for nature-based solutions could be very large. A team of researchers led by Cécile Girardin of Oxford University estimates that a radical commitment to the idea could see the amount of CO2 from human emissions absorbed by the biosphere more or less doubled by 2025, from 10gt a year to 20gt a year, making a real difference. Even more would be possible. Add the measures described by the researchers to a trajectory which would otherwise lead to 2°C of warming and you get 1.8°C; a 3°C trajectory comes down to 2.7°C.

Such massive effects cannot be achieved through expansion of current offsetting schemes. The Oxford plan would entail agricultural transformation around the world, an end to deforestation and the restoration of natural ecosystems across roughly 7m km{+2}of Earth’s surface—twice the area of India. It also requires forests and other ecosystems to stay healthy. Unfortunately climate change is making this much harder by increasing the risk of fire and other nasties, such as insect infestations. If nature-based solutions were to go ahead without a simultaneous effort to curb emissions, leaving the world to go on warming regardless, carbon stored in wood and soil could find its way back to the atmosphere.

Another process that could be co-opted is mineral weathering—reactions with rocks that use up CO2 dissolved in water. What is going on in the basalt under Hellisheiði is a form of weathering which produces calcium and carbonate ions that go on to precipitate out as calcite. Rock weathering already soaks up a billion tonnes of CO2 a year. Increase the area available for it by grinding suitable rocks into dust and you will get more. David Beerling, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, and his colleagues have calculated that spreading 3.5bn tonnes of finely ground basalt over 700,000 km{+2} of farmland every year—that’s 50 tonnes per hectare over an area roughly as big as Texas—could double the weathering rate, drawing down another billion tonnes.

Find a way
For weathering to work on a really large scale, though, turn to the oceans, where geochemical manipulation could in principle store trillions of tonnes of CO2. Increase the alkalinity of seawater—eg, by adding lime, an oxide of calcium used in cement—and the amount of carbon dissolved in it as carbonate atoms increases. That shift provides room for more CO2 to be absorbed. Unfortunately it takes some 700m tonnes of lime for 1gt of CO2—and to make the lime requires putting a lot of energy into heating limestone in kilns which have to be fitted with ccs, since the process itself gives off CO2. The sheer scale of the carbon drawdown that ocean alkalinisation offers makes such schemes worth considering. But they are at best a long-term possibility. Their costs would be enormous, their effects on ocean ecosystems would need careful monitoring and they would require international laws governing marine pollution to be renegotiated from the bottom up.

A more plausible near-term approach to sucking down CO2 industrially is to fit ccs to power stations which burn recently cropped plants. Because the carbon in those photosynthesising plants was recently CO2 in the air, putting what is released by burning them underground is in effect a transfer from atmosphere to crust. And because biomass energy with ccs (beccs) provides electricity as well as negative emissions it can be used to displace fossil fuels, further reducing emissions.

When the climate-and-economics models used to analyse emission pathways first began to be applied to negative emissions, it was by adding beccs to them. This gave the technology a first-mover advantage in subsequent discussion in the ipcc, at the Paris summit and elsewhere. That it has been more discussed than other approaches, though, does not make beccs better. Its large-scale deployment requires vast amounts of land be turned over to growing energy crops; in some estimates an area equivalent to up to 80% of that now used for food crops would be needed.

This is what gives purely technological dac schemes like Orca their appeal. The installation is designed to tuck away 48,000 tonnes of CO2 over its 12-year life. A tree plantation in a temperate climate capable of soaking up that much would have to cover about 400 hectares. Orca is just a small hangar and four pairs of shipping-container-sized collector units on stilts; a plant the size of a small school doing the work of a forest as big as a fair-sized town. And not only does dac require less land than beccs. It can also use land that agriculture can’t: witness Hellisheiði’s barren boulders and moss. Sunny deserts far from anywhere where the process can be powered by cheap solar panels would do fine.

The problem is cost. Climeworks says it costs between $600 and $800 to separate a tonne of CO2 from the Icelandic air and store it away, though it may do better in larger plants. It sells customers the assurance that a tonne of CO2 has been turned to stone at their behest for over $1,100. Because Orca is exciting and its capacity small, these offsets have more or less sold out. But when non-novelty offsets sell for a hundredth of the price it doesn’t look like a very scalable business. One serious rival, a Canadian firm called Carbon Engineering, says it can offer offsets at $300 a tonne when it gets its 1m-tonne-a-year plant operating in Texas by 2025. That fits with an analysis in an academic journal by the company’s founder, David Keith, that puts the costs of the technology it is using in the $90-240/tonne range.

Neither company focuses on offsetting as a core business. Carbon Engineering, which is partnered with Occidental Petroleum, an oil firm, plans to pump the CO2 it isolates in Texas into oilfields to squeeze out oil that is otherwise reluctant to flow. Because the CO2 stays underground, the oil will count as a low-carbon fuel which can be sold at a premium, thanks to regulations in California. It is also looking at combining the CO2 it captures with hydrogen to make synthetic fuels—a business Climeworks is keen on. A startup called Prometheus Fuels claims to be able to do this profitably with a cheaper form of dac, but has yet to provide details.

Such fuels may help with decarbonisation in some of the places electricity cannot reach, such as aircraft flying over oceans. But the greatest potential for dac lies in changing the overall carbon budget. If applied on a scale close to that of today’s natural-gas industry it could in principle create space in the atmosphere for hundreds of billions of tonnes of further emissions as the world weans itself off fossil fuels and in the decades after it does so.

Such an idea seems utterly fantastical. So do a huge alkalinisation of the oceans and nature-based solutions or beccs plantations on scales approaching those of a small continent. But if they remain so, in all likelihood so will a world where the temperature rise stays “well below 2°C”, in the words of the Paris agreement.

And, unfortunately, fantasies that do not become realities can still have real effects. The “net” in net zero functions as a notional safety net: it lets the world imagine that, if somewhere along the tightrope of emissions reduction it trips or tumbles, negative emissions will break its fall. But this is only true if the capacity for stonking great negative emissions is realised. If it remains a fantasy, such a fall could hurt a lot.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2021/10/30/why-the-world-needs-negative-emissions?

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why the world needs negative emissions
If negative emissions are to play a role in policy much more needs to be done to make them practically achievable

Oct 30th 2021

Thirty kilometres down the road from Reykjavik, the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant sits amid black boulders draped in phosphorescent green moss. Behind its plumes of rising steam, steep mountains sweep up from the rocky plain. Boulders and mountains alike are made of basalt, as is some 90% of the rest of Iceland. It is a 300trn tonne sawn-off tree stump of basalt sitting on the floor of the Atlantic—which is itself just more basalt. There is no commoner rock in Earth’s crust.

The cylinder of basalt that Kári Helgason is holding out, though, is different. Young basalt is riddled with tiny holes, but in this case most cavities are filled with flecks of white crystal. “This,” he says, pointing to the white flecks, “is mostly calcite.” Calcite, a form of calcium carbonate, is not a rare mineral on the island—it is commonly known as Iceland spar—or elsewhere. But this basalt-bound calcite is exceptional. It is the physical manifestation of CO2 emissions being turned to stone.

Small amounts of CO2 are part-and-parcel of the hot fluids piped up from the underlying crust at geothermal power stations like Hellisheiði. Since the early 2000s, Carbfix, the Icelandic company where Mr Helgason works, has been capturing CO2 and pumping it back into the porous bedrock in the form of carbonated water. Once there it reacts with calcium in the basalt. Tracer studies have shown that 95% of the gas injected by Carbfix is mineralised within two years.

Carbfix says Iceland’s basalt could store a century of CO2 emissions, even at today’s rate. By 2030 it hopes to have a “mineral storage terminal” west of Reykjavik that can petrify 3m tonnes of CO2 a year, most or all of it captured at industrial facilities in Europe. In early 2021 it signed a deal with Dan-Unity CO2, a Danish shipping company, for custom-made low-emission tankers to bring it CO2 earmarked for disposal.

Carbon capture and storage (ccs) along these lines has been a disappointment. There are ways to take CO2 out of the exhaust gases of power plants and steelworks, and injection into basalt is just one of various possible places to store it—others include gasfields and saline aquifers. The idea of putting these technologies together has been around for decades. The unfccc asked the ipcc to produce a report on the technology 20 years ago. Yet there is still not a single large gas- or coal-fired power station that is capturing and storing its emissions.

One problem is that fossil-fuel industries and governments that value them have an interest in saying they are pursuing ccs, because it seems to provide a future for some fossil fuels, but no pressing reason to make it an implemented reality. The technology makes plants more expensive and less efficient, and in the absence of a high carbon price that is a penalty nobody wants to pay. What is more, many people—sometimes termed “numbies”, for “not under my backyard”—dislike the idea of industrial waste being squirted into aquifers and gasfields anywhere near their homes. Hence the attraction of shipping it to Iceland where it can be turned into solid rock.

Given all this, it is a problem that the technologies on which ccs relies are now central to climate action, thanks to the spread of net-zero pledges. It is not just that these require decarbonising cement-making (for which ccs looks crucial), or that they have a role for hydrogen (which, if made from fossil fuels, needs ccs to be clean). It is that at some point they need CO2 to be drawn down from the thin but thickening air and stored away.

Take back what hurt you
Next to Carbfix’s operation at Hellisheiði is Orca, a facility built in partnership with Climeworks, a Swiss company. Fed with air from a bank of 96 industrial fans, Climeworks’s technology filters out atmospheric CO2 so it can be fed into the geothermal plant’s wastewater for disposal at depth. Orca, which opened in September, is the world’s largest “direct-air capture” (dac) facility. Its 11 tonnes of carbon captured each day are the forerunner of an enterprise which, if models are right and pledges are adhered to, will grow a millionfold in the next half-century.

The negative emissions dac is held to offer play two roles in climate stabilisation. One might be seen as balancing the current carbon account. Although most emissions can theoretically be eliminated using technologies that exist now, aviation, shipping and some industrial processes remain hard to decarbonise.Some agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions look as if they will prove recalcitrant. As long as emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases persist, stabilisation will require negative emissions.

The other role for dac is getting rid of historical excess. As we have seen, the cumulative CO2-emissions budget consistent with a 50-50 chance of meeting the 2°C goal is 3.7trn tonnes. The budget for 1.5°C is just 2.9trn tonnes. With 2.4trn tonnes already emitted, that leaves a decade of emissions at today’s rates for 1.5°C, maybe 25 years for 2°C.

Those constraints could be eased if some of what has already been “spent” were repaid—that is, if CO2 were pulled out of the atmosphere faster than it were being put in, producing net-negative emissions. Removing a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2050 is not quite the same as not having emitted it in 1950, but it is close. And this remains true even if the removal comes after the budget has been broken. Carbon budgets can be overshot, at least for a while.

This offers rich countries that benefited disproportionately from 20th-century emissions a way to create room in the budget for poor ones which were left out. But to do this on an appreciable scale they need to draw down huge amounts of carbon. Some scenarios have negative emissions of well over 10gt a year—a global fossil-fuel industry running in reverse. Done through dac that would require huge capital investment and use up a great deal of clean, renewable but still not free energy in the process.

This would not have to be done entirely through dac. Nature takes half the carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere back out, through either photosynthesis or geochemistry. Both processes could be ramped up.

For photosynthesis, more trees are the obvious option. They can be grown in plantations, including commercial ones where new trees replace each year’s harvest; or they can be encouraged in regenerated forests. The second option is much better. A study in 2019 found that over 80 years restoring natural forests stores an average of 40 times more carbon per hectare than new plantations. Restoration also scores better in preserving biodiversity. But plantations make money in an easily understood way. The same study found that 45% of commitments made under the Bonn Challenge, a voluntary ngo-led initiative to boost forests, involved planting poor-quality commercial plantations.

Another option is to raise the amount of carbon stored in agricultural land and forests that are already commercially exploited. So-called “nature-based solutions” along these lines are staples of the market for voluntary carbon offsets, where vendors promise to do things like growing trees, or stopping them being cut down, to absolve clients’ sins of emission.

Offsetting schemes seem able to deliver negative emissions at a reasonable price. When Microsoft and Stripe, a fintech company, sought carbon-removal projects to meet their net-zero pledges, they found that nature-based projects were priced at $5-50 per tonne. But there are three problems. One is that not all offsetting schemes are well run or well supervised. In Chile government subsidies helped establish 1.3m hectares of tree plantations since 1986—but a rule requiring that this expansion should not happen at the expense of native forests was not enforced. As a result the programme actually reduced the amount of stored carbon by some 50,000 tonnes.

A second is that offsetting is unlikely to solve deeper issues. The airline industry has strong economic incentives to use fuel efficiently, but they have not made the wrenching technological shifts required to stop buying kerosene. If the industry buys offsets to make its planes “carbon-neutral”, as it plans through a scheme called corsia, the efficiency incentives will increase further. But that will not of itself make a post-kerosene world more likely. That is one reason why the Science Based Targets Initiative, a standard-setting coalition, does not accept offsetting as a path to emission reduction.

The third drawback is limited capacity. This feels surprising, since in principle the scope for nature-based solutions could be very large. A team of researchers led by Cécile Girardin of Oxford University estimates that a radical commitment to the idea could see the amount of CO2 from human emissions absorbed by the biosphere more or less doubled by 2025, from 10gt a year to 20gt a year, making a real difference. Even more would be possible. Add the measures described by the researchers to a trajectory which would otherwise lead to 2°C of warming and you get 1.8°C; a 3°C trajectory comes down to 2.7°C.

Such massive effects cannot be achieved through expansion of current offsetting schemes. The Oxford plan would entail agricultural transformation around the world, an end to deforestation and the restoration of natural ecosystems across roughly 7m km{+2}of Earth’s surface—twice the area of India. It also requires forests and other ecosystems to stay healthy. Unfortunately climate change is making this much harder by increasing the risk of fire and other nasties, such as insect infestations. If nature-based solutions were to go ahead without a simultaneous effort to curb emissions, leaving the world to go on warming regardless, carbon stored in wood and soil could find its way back to the atmosphere.

Another process that could be co-opted is mineral weathering—reactions with rocks that use up CO2 dissolved in water. What is going on in the basalt under Hellisheiði is a form of weathering which produces calcium and carbonate ions that go on to precipitate out as calcite. Rock weathering already soaks up a billion tonnes of CO2 a year. Increase the area available for it by grinding suitable rocks into dust and you will get more. David Beerling, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, and his colleagues have calculated that spreading 3.5bn tonnes of finely ground basalt over 700,000 km{+2} of farmland every year—that’s 50 tonnes per hectare over an area roughly as big as Texas—could double the weathering rate, drawing down another billion tonnes.

Find a way
For weathering to work on a really large scale, though, turn to the oceans, where geochemical manipulation could in principle store trillions of tonnes of CO2. Increase the alkalinity of seawater—eg, by adding lime, an oxide of calcium used in cement—and the amount of carbon dissolved in it as carbonate atoms increases. That shift provides room for more CO2 to be absorbed. Unfortunately it takes some 700m tonnes of lime for 1gt of CO2—and to make the lime requires putting a lot of energy into heating limestone in kilns which have to be fitted with ccs, since the process itself gives off CO2. The sheer scale of the carbon drawdown that ocean alkalinisation offers makes such schemes worth considering. But they are at best a long-term possibility. Their costs would be enormous, their effects on ocean ecosystems would need careful monitoring and they would require international laws governing marine pollution to be renegotiated from the bottom up.

A more plausible near-term approach to sucking down CO2 industrially is to fit ccs to power stations which burn recently cropped plants. Because the carbon in those photosynthesising plants was recently CO2 in the air, putting what is released by burning them underground is in effect a transfer from atmosphere to crust. And because biomass energy with ccs (beccs) provides electricity as well as negative emissions it can be used to displace fossil fuels, further reducing emissions.

When the climate-and-economics models used to analyse emission pathways first began to be applied to negative emissions, it was by adding beccs to them. This gave the technology a first-mover advantage in subsequent discussion in the ipcc, at the Paris summit and elsewhere. That it has been more discussed than other approaches, though, does not make beccs better. Its large-scale deployment requires vast amounts of land be turned over to growing energy crops; in some estimates an area equivalent to up to 80% of that now used for food crops would be needed.

This is what gives purely technological dac schemes like Orca their appeal. The installation is designed to tuck away 48,000 tonnes of CO2 over its 12-year life. A tree plantation in a temperate climate capable of soaking up that much would have to cover about 400 hectares. Orca is just a small hangar and four pairs of shipping-container-sized collector units on stilts; a plant the size of a small school doing the work of a forest as big as a fair-sized town. And not only does dac require less land than beccs. It can also use land that agriculture can’t: witness Hellisheiði’s barren boulders and moss. Sunny deserts far from anywhere where the process can be powered by cheap solar panels would do fine.

The problem is cost. Climeworks says it costs between $600 and $800 to separate a tonne of CO2 from the Icelandic air and store it away, though it may do better in larger plants. It sells customers the assurance that a tonne of CO2 has been turned to stone at their behest for over $1,100. Because Orca is exciting and its capacity small, these offsets have more or less sold out. But when non-novelty offsets sell for a hundredth of the price it doesn’t look like a very scalable business. One serious rival, a Canadian firm called Carbon Engineering, says it can offer offsets at $300 a tonne when it gets its 1m-tonne-a-year plant operating in Texas by 2025. That fits with an analysis in an academic journal by the company’s founder, David Keith, that puts the costs of the technology it is using in the $90-240/tonne range.

Neither company focuses on offsetting as a core business. Carbon Engineering, which is partnered with Occidental Petroleum, an oil firm, plans to pump the CO2 it isolates in Texas into oilfields to squeeze out oil that is otherwise reluctant to flow. Because the CO2 stays underground, the oil will count as a low-carbon fuel which can be sold at a premium, thanks to regulations in California. It is also looking at combining the CO2 it captures with hydrogen to make synthetic fuels—a business Climeworks is keen on. A startup called Prometheus Fuels claims to be able to do this profitably with a cheaper form of dac, but has yet to provide details.

Such fuels may help with decarbonisation in some of the places electricity cannot reach, such as aircraft flying over oceans. But the greatest potential for dac lies in changing the overall carbon budget. If applied on a scale close to that of today’s natural-gas industry it could in principle create space in the atmosphere for hundreds of billions of tonnes of further emissions as the world weans itself off fossil fuels and in the decades after it does so.

Such an idea seems utterly fantastical. So do a huge alkalinisation of the oceans and nature-based solutions or beccs plantations on scales approaching those of a small continent. But if they remain so, in all likelihood so will a world where the temperature rise stays “well below 2°C”, in the words of the Paris agreement.

And, unfortunately, fantasies that do not become realities can still have real effects. The “net” in net zero functions as a notional safety net: it lets the world imagine that, if somewhere along the tightrope of emissions reduction it trips or tumbles, negative emissions will break its fall. But this is only true if the capacity for stonking great negative emissions is realised. If it remains a fantasy, such a fall could hurt a lot.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2021/10/30/why-the-world-needs-negative-emissions?

That article strikes me as being reasonable and well written.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

Why the world needs negative emissions
If negative emissions are to play a role in policy much more needs to be done to make them practically achievable

Oct 30th 2021

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2021/10/30/why-the-world-needs-negative-emissions?

That article strikes me as being reasonable and well written.

and future-focused¡ Oct 30th 2021 see

and anyway, seeing as there’s finally some kind of consensus to get shit together by 100 years after the alarm was raised, there’s still hope for COVID-19 disaster yet, just give it another 98 years

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/29/angus-taylor-to-promote-fossil-fuel-at-glasgow-cop26-climate-summit

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/28/former-finance-minister-who-helped-sink-carbon-price-now-urging-australia-to-adopt-one

Boris said:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/28/former-finance-minister-who-helped-sink-carbon-price-now-urging-australia-to-adopt-one

We can but hope this acceptance of traditional liberal economic principles proves to be highly infectious, and that Scomo has a good long mask-free chat with Mathias.

Boris said:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/29/angus-taylor-to-promote-fossil-fuel-at-glasgow-cop26-climate-summit

Good luck with that, Angus.

Boris said:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/28/former-finance-minister-who-helped-sink-carbon-price-now-urging-australia-to-adopt-one

Gormless.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/10/29/michael-pascoe-scott-morrison-net-zero-trust-integrity/

Zero effort
Australia’s climate policy is all talk and no trousers
It relies too much on future technology and not enough on present action

Oct 30th 2021

There is a “uniquely Australian” way to tackle rising temperatures, believes Scott Morrison, the country’s prime minister. After weeks of being hassled to beef up his climate commitments, his conservative coalition government on October 26th at last pledged to reduce its emissions to “net zero” by 2050—but without addressing the tricky matter of fossil fuels. The country can both deliver “action on climate change” and “protect the Australian way of life”, the prime minister argues.

Australia has long danced around climate change. It is the world’s biggest exporter of coal by both energy and value. Mining of all sorts accounts for 11% of gdp and supports some 270,000 jobs. Over the past 11 years, three of Mr Morrison’s predecessors have lost their jobs for trying to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

That Mr Morrison still leads the country, even while uttering words like “net zero”, is progress of a sort. Yet his government had to concede something to its international allies before the un’s climate talks start in Glasgow on October 31st. Alas, its plan has “all the strength of a wet paper bag”, as Joe Fontaine, an ecologist, put it.

Mr Morrison’s government will not pass a law to enforce any cuts. Nor will it put a price on carbon, as a Labor government did between 2012 and 2014, before the scheme was ripped up by the conservatives. Instead, Mr Morrison’s vision rests on five principles, which boil down to hoping and praying. Apart from “technology not taxes” and “drive down the cost” of technology, the principles include keeping energy cheap, not insisting anybody do anything, and promising to be accountable for its progress.

There is “no new money, no new policy and no credible plan”, says Tim Baxter of the Climate Council, an ngo. His organisation calculates that Australia is doing less to cut emissions than any other rich country. The government’s proposal, dating from Paris in 2015, aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 26-28% by 2030 from 2005 levels, compared with the 50-52% that America promises. No matter, says Mr Morrison. Australia will surpass its goal, with reductions of about 30-35%. Yet for it to do its part to keep global temperatures below 2°C as it promised in Paris, it too would have to raise its target to at least 50%, according to the Climate Targets Panel, a group of scientists. Hitting 1.5°C would involve cutting by 74%.

Australia’s intransigence matters for the rest of the world. Coal is still the source of most of the country’s electricity, accounting for a big chunk of its domestic emissions (see chart). Factoring in the vast quantities it exports, the country of just 25m people rises from the world’s 15th-biggest emitter of CO{-2} to its fifth. It is lobbying alongside other energy giants such as Saudi Arabia to weaken the un’s recommendations for phasing out fossil fuels.

Neither of Australia’s major parties has any plans to do so. Its coal exports are booming, and the federal and various state governments are waving through new mines as prices rise. Mr Morrison’s has approved the expansion of three in the past two months. It also wants to open five new natural-gas fields as part of a “gas-fired recovery” from the pandemic. Mr Morrison plans to limit the damage by pumping A$20bn ($15bn) into “low-emissions” technologies. Green pressure groups complain that it is prioritising projects in nascent fields such as carbon capture and storage, which give it an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels.

Still, Mr Morrison may calculate that he has done enough to placate voters in a coming election. More than 60% of Australians think that climate change is a “serious and pressing problem”, compared with 36% in 2012, according to the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney. Yet fewer want to make changes that would lighten their wallets. Less than half of people surveyed in another poll want coal-fired power to be phased out within a decade, and 44% would prefer to keep exporting the stuff until overseas demand dries up.

The lack of alarm is all the stranger given that the continent feels the effects of climate change more acutely than many rich countries. It suffers crippling droughts and increasingly ferocious bushfires. Half its most prized natural treasure, the Great Barrier Reef, has been killed by warming waters. Islands in the Torres Strait, off its northern coast, are slipping into the sea. “Time is ticking,” says Yessie Mosby, a Torres Strait Islander who is part of a group trying to force the government into more urgent action by lodging a human-rights claim with un. Three decades, he says, is too long for Australia to wait to cut emissions. By then, his people “will be refugees in our own country”.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/10/30/australias-climate-policy-is-all-talk-and-no-trousers

As energy prices spike, governments reach for the dirtiest tool in the box
A new IMF study shows that fossil-fuel subsidies are a climate nightmare

Oct 30th 2021
NEW YORK

“This reform will increase our energy security…and it will help us combat the threat posed by climate change.” Those hopeful words were uttered by Barack Obama, then America’s president, at the end of a meeting of the g20 group of countries in Pittsburgh in 2009. The gathered leaders had agreed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, which, by encouraging the use of polluting fuels, tilt the playing field against cleaner alternatives. Twelve years later, however, fossil-fuel subsidies are still hanging on. And as a severe energy-supply crunch leads to soaring prices around the world, they are making something of a comeback.

Ministers from the European Union held an emergency meeting this week to discuss how to respond to the price spikes, but failed to agree on a plan. National politicians, however, are turning to subsidies and price caps. Italy is considering spending more than €5bn ($5.8bn, or 0.3% of gdp) this year and next to reduce the price of natural gas and power for consumers. France will extend its cap on household-gas prices until the end of next year.

Most people would agree that fossil-fuel subsidies should, in principle, be ditched. But no politician wants to expose voters to pain at home or at the petrol pump. Even before the energy crisis, the politics of subsidies were veering off track. Bloombergnef, a research outfit, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, a charity, calculate that g20 countries offered direct subsidies on coal, oil, gas and fossil-fuel-fired power worth more than $3.3trn between 2015 and 2019. Tim Gould of the International Energy Agency, an official body, notes that periods of lower energy prices offer governments a chance to reduce subsidies. The fact that they did not use the pandemic-induced drop in energy demand and prices last year to roll back subsidies, he says, was “a missed opportunity”. In July g20 ministers could not even agree on a date by which fossil-fuel subsidies would be phased out.

A new study from the imf powerfully sets out both the scale of the subsidies and their impact. It estimates the effects of two types of support. Explicit subsidies, which include production-tax breaks for oil firms, create a wedge between the cost of supplying fuel and the price consumers pay at the pump. Yet governments are underpricing energy not only relative to supply costs, but also compared with social costs (such as the damage to health and the environment caused by fossil fuels). The researchers call this an implicit subsidy.

They estimate that explicit subsidies will amount to just under $600bn this year (or 0.6% of global gdp) but that implicit subsidies could be ten times that (see chart 1). Even if the value of explicit support remains constant as a share of global output, the boffins reckon that the damage from fossil fuels, especially coal, will worsen, and that the value of implicit subsidies will continue to rise (see chart 2).

If governments were to eliminate both explicit and implicit subsidies by 2025—admittedly, a huge if—then global emissions of carbon dioxide would fall by 36%, and global tax revenues would be higher by 3.8% of world gdp, compared with a scenario with no subsidy reform. Rather than a miserable world in which warming is 3°C above pre-industrial levels, the temperature rise would be kept “well below” 2°C and perhaps even on track towards 1.5°C, as the un’s Paris climate accords intend. As the world’s leaders prepare to assemble in Glasgow for a climate summit, the hope is that these findings re-energise their efforts to tackle subsidy reform.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/10/30/as-energy-prices-spike-governments-reach-for-the-dirtiest-tool-in-the-box

We’ve Found The Solution

Throw Money At This Problem And It Will Go Away

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/01/morrison-government-climate-plan-will-fail-if-solely-reliant-on-technology-thinktank-reports

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/31/climate-change-has-driven-farmers-to-despair-and-all-we-get-is-callous-disregard

SCIENCE said:

We’ve Found The Solution

Throw Money At This Problem And It Will Go Away

Isn’t that the place where the heads of ‘Ndrangheta meet?

https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-attends-pivotal-global-climate-talks-today-bringing-a-weak-plan-that-leaves-australia-exposed-170842

https://theconversation.com/glasgow-cop26-climate-finance-pledges-from-rich-nations-are-inadequate-and-time-is-running-out-169686

it’s like Tau.Neutrino all over again

SCIENCE said:

it’s like Tau.Neutrino all over again

https://theconversation.com/the-hunt-for-sterile-neutrinos-a-new-experiment-has-dashed-hopes-of-an-undiscovered-particle-170369

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-10-30/snakes-venomous-how-to-survive-a-bite/100406488

SCIENCE said:

We’ve Found The Solution

Throw Money At This Problem And It Will Go Away

They’re all going on a summer’s holiday.

Boris said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-10-30/snakes-venomous-how-to-survive-a-bite/100406488

Read that one, they say there that you’ve got 6 to 10 hours after being bitten to get treatment if you’ve had a suitable compression bandage properly applied, that’s comforting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6SO0xkr_uI

SCIENCE said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6SO0xkr_uI

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6SO0xkr_uI

He’s bored.

The Economy Must Grow

Mr Bourne is a former BP engineer, and said while CCS could play a role in helping reduce emissions from industries such as cement production and steel making, saying the technology could save the gas and coal industry was a “false hope”. “It’s enormously costly … the moment you actually then have to capture the CO2 and put it underground with no offsetting sales process, you’re basically asking either for a subsidy or a tax break,” he said. “When you do the numbers … you find very, very quickly that it’s just impossible to decarbonise the fossil fuel industry in any way, shape, or form.” Mr Bourne said the federal government should instead be focusing on natural advantages such as solar and wind.

Energy finance analyst Bruce Robertson, from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), said using CCS on a coal plant was “horrendously expensive.” “If we’re talking a coal fired power station: According to the CSIRO, a coal-fired power station in 2030 should cost around $102 a megawatt-hour,” he said. “If you add carbon captured and storage it goes up to $186 a megawatt-hour. “That is three times — three times — the cost of wind, solar and storage with associated integration costs.”

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull went further, recently describing CCS as ‘a con’ and a ‘proven failure’ at an energy conference. “It is being used by the fossil fuel sector as a distraction to delay the end of burning coal and gas,” Mr Turnbull said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-02/queensland-carbon-capture-and-storage-trial/100570436

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/03/cop26-fossil-fuels

Was reading an article over at the Gran by George Monbiot when this sentence caught my eye.

For just $161bn – a fraction of the money governments spend on supporting fossil fuels – they could buy out and shut down every coal plant on Earth.

I can’t for the life of me see how that makes any sense at all. Coal exports per annum come in at about $80bn and internal usage must be at least that. The total value of every coalmine has to be an order of magnitude higher than the quoted figure, surely. What am I missing?

sibeen said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/03/cop26-fossil-fuels

Was reading an article over at the Gran by George Monbiot when this sentence caught my eye.

For just $161bn – a fraction of the money governments spend on supporting fossil fuels – they could buy out and shut down every coal plant on Earth.

I can’t for the life of me see how that makes any sense at all. Coal exports per annum come in at about $80bn and internal usage must be at least that. The total value of every coalmine has to be an order of magnitude higher than the quoted figure, surely. What am I missing?

maybe he just means the power stations.

Bogsnorkler said:

sibeen said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/03/cop26-fossil-fuels

Was reading an article over at the Gran by George Monbiot when this sentence caught my eye.

For just $161bn – a fraction of the money governments spend on supporting fossil fuels – they could buy out and shut down every coal plant on Earth.

I can’t for the life of me see how that makes any sense at all. Coal exports per annum come in at about $80bn and internal usage must be at least that. The total value of every coalmine has to be an order of magnitude higher than the quoted figure, surely. What am I missing?

maybe he just means the power stations.

As about 40% of the world’s electricity is produced by coal is expect that figure would be just as bad.

sibeen said:

Bogsnorkler said:

sibeen said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/03/cop26-fossil-fuels

Was reading an article over at the Gran by George Monbiot when this sentence caught my eye.

For just $161bn – a fraction of the money governments spend on supporting fossil fuels – they could buy out and shut down every coal plant on Earth.

I can’t for the life of me see how that makes any sense at all. Coal exports per annum come in at about $80bn and internal usage must be at least that. The total value of every coalmine has to be an order of magnitude higher than the quoted figure, surely. What am I missing?

maybe he just means the power stations.

As about 40% of the world’s electricity is produced by coal is expect that figure would be just as bad.

there is a link to a report that I presume explains the costing.

sibeen said:

Bogsnorkler said:

sibeen said:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/03/cop26-fossil-fuels

Was reading an article over at the Gran by George Monbiot when this sentence caught my eye.

For just $161bn – a fraction of the money governments spend on supporting fossil fuels – they could buy out and shut down every coal plant on Earth.

I can’t for the life of me see how that makes any sense at all. Coal exports per annum come in at about $80bn and internal usage must be at least that. The total value of every coalmine has to be an order of magnitude higher than the quoted figure, surely. What am I missing?

maybe he just means the power stations.

As about 40% of the world’s electricity is produced by coal is expect that figure would be just as bad.

A quick BOTE. World production of electricity is about 550 exajoules = 152 × 10⁹ MWh. At a sale price of $20/MWh that’s about $1.2T dollars in sales for 40% production.

Bogsnorkler said:

sibeen said:

Bogsnorkler said:

maybe he just means the power stations.

As about 40% of the world’s electricity is produced by coal is expect that figure would be just as bad.

there is a link to a report that I presume explains the costing.

Yeah, I did open that up. The heading was “How To Retire Early”. I quickly closed it.

sibeen said:

Bogsnorkler said:

sibeen said:

As about 40% of the world’s electricity is produced by coal is expect that figure would be just as bad.

there is a link to a report that I presume explains the costing.

Yeah, I did open that up. The heading was “How To Retire Early”. I quickly closed it.

Focusing on fossil fuel production doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s the use of fossil fuels that has to be reduced.

The Rev Dodgson said:

sibeen said:

Bogsnorkler said:

there is a link to a report that I presume explains the costing.

Yeah, I did open that up. The heading was “How To Retire Early”. I quickly closed it.

Focusing on fossil fuel production doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s the use of fossil fuels that has to be reduced.

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

sibeen said:

Yeah, I did open that up. The heading was “How To Retire Early”. I quickly closed it.

Focusing on fossil fuel production doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s the use of fossil fuels that has to be reduced.

Is It Possible That Even As We Recognise That Demand Drives Supply, There Is Such A Phenomenon As Supply Driving Demand ¿
there’s a word for it too, “induced demand” or something similar, who would know

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Focusing on fossil fuel production doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s the use of fossil fuels that has to be reduced.

Is It Possible That Even As We Recognise That Demand Drives Supply, There Is Such A Phenomenon As Supply Driving Demand ¿
there’s a word for it too, “induced demand” or something similar, who would know

To the extent that excess supply reduces prices, but that is easily fixed by putting a price on ghg emissions.

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

sibeen said:

Yeah, I did open that up. The heading was “How To Retire Early”. I quickly closed it.

Focusing on fossil fuel production doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s the use of fossil fuels that has to be reduced.

Interesting graph, but what does it have to do with the production vs use question?

Also why do people rarely mention steel production when it is responsible for a similar level of emissions as cement production?

The Rev Dodgson said:

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Focusing on fossil fuel production doesn’t make any sense anyway. It’s the use of fossil fuels that has to be reduced.

Interesting graph, but what does it have to do with the production vs use question?

Also why do people rarely mention steel production when it is responsible for a similar level of emissions as cement production?

The only reason I included it was to show just how much fossil fuels need to be reduced by.
I assume that steel production is part of the fossil fuels.

There’s Your ABC for you, selling the good sell.

Or keep reading to find out how capitalism will help drive Australia to 500 per cent renewables and beyond. It involves two billionaires, a tiny molecule and a giant extension cord.

Set in green concrete
How cement may yet help slow global warming
It is a big source of emissions, but might one day be the reverse

Nov 4th 2021

The romans perfected concrete, and their legacy still stands in the form of the magnificent roof of the Pantheon, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Since it was completed in around 125ad by the Emperor Hadrian, an awful lot more concrete has been poured—some 30bn tonnes every year, at the moment, to put up buildings, roads, bridges, dams and other structures. The grey stuff has become the most widely used construction material on the planet, and demand is growing.

This is bad news for global warming. The problem is that concrete’s crucial ingredient, cement, which is mixed with sand, gravel and water to make the stuff, is responsible for a huge amount of greenhouse-gas emissions. Taking in its various stages of production, the 5bn tonnes of cement produced each year account for 8% of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions. If the cement industry were a country it would be the third-largest emitter in the world, after China and America.

So far, concrete has few practical alternatives. The development of cross-laminated, “engineered”, timber—which, being produced from wood, can be a renewable resource—is gaining interest, even for some high-rise buildings. But compared with concrete, engineered timber remains, for now, a novelty. Concrete’s biggest users, especially China, which makes more than half of the world’s cement, are not about to stop employing it. Hence cleaning up the industry might seem a hopeless task. But it isn’t, for technologies are being developed to make concrete greener. Green enough, perhaps, for it to go from adding CO2 to the atmosphere, to subtracting it.

The place to start is where emissions are greatest. Cement production begins with the quarrying of limestone, the main component of which is calcium carbonate (CaCO3). This is mixed with clay and passed through a rotating kiln at more than 1,400ºC in a process called calcination. The heat drives off the carbon and part of the oxygen, which combine to form CO2. The remaining lumps, called clinker, are made of molecular complexes of calcium oxide and silica, known collectively as calcium silicates. The clinker is then cooled and milled into cement. More than half the emissions involved in cement-making are a consequence of calcination, and most of the rest result from burning coal and other fossil fuels to power the process (see chart). All told, nearly one tonne of CO2 is released for every tonne of fresh cement.

Hot stuff
The inevitability of calcination’s creation of CO2 makes capturing the gas before it can enter the atmosphere, and storing it away, the most effective approach to decarbonise the cement industry, according to a study by Paul Fennell of Imperial College, London, and his colleagues, published earlier this year in Joule. The captured CO2 could be held underground or used by other industries—for instance to make synthetic fuel (see box overleaf). But it might also be injected back into concrete at the point when it is being mixed with water to cure it. Water promotes chemical reactions that cause cement to harden. CO2 has a similar effect and, in the process, gets locked up as calcium carbonate.

In fact, reversing calcination in this way makes concrete stronger than if water alone is used. So, not only is some of the original emission thus dealt with, less cement is needed for a given job, lowering overall emissions still further. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons reverse calcination could, at present, sequester up to 5% of cement’s emissions. As the technology improves it expects that might rise to 30%.

Several companies are starting down this route. CarbonCure, a Canadian firm, has fitted equipment which injects CO2 into ready-mixed concrete to more than 400 plants around the world. Its system has been used to construct buildings that include a new campus in Arlington, Virginia, for Amazon, an online retailer (and also a shareholder in CarbonCure), and an assembly plant for electric vehicles, for General Motors, in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

At present the CO2 used by CarbonCure has been captured by industrial-gas companies. But firms are developing equipment intended to collect the gas directly from cement kilns. And Calix, based in Sydney, Australia, is working on an electrically powered system which heats the limestone indirectly, from the outside of the kiln rather than the inside. That enables pure CO2 to be captured without having to clean up combustion gases from fuel burnt inside the kiln—so, if the electricity itself came from green sources, the resulting cement would be completely green.

A pilot plant using this technology has run successfully as part of a European Union research project on a site in Belgium operated by Heidelberg Cement, a German firm that is one of world’s biggest cement-makers. A larger demonstration plant is due to open in 2023, in Hanover, to help scale up the technology.

Energising rubbish
Another approach—less green, but still better than using fossil fuels—is to substitute some of the coal burnt in kilns with municipal and industrial waste. Several firms are already doing this. Cemex, a Mexican building-materials giant, for example, makes a kiln fuel called Climafuel out of municipal waste that has been denuded of its recyclable substances. This is rich, in the form of plant material (“biomass”), in carbon that has recently been in the atmosphere, and is simply returning there, rather than having been dug up as fossil fuel. Up to 60% of the coal used by some of Cemex’s British cement plants has been replaced with Climafuel.

Companies are also looking at ways to substitute some of the cement in concrete with other materials. Many add fly ash, a by-product of coal-fired power plants, or crushed slag from the blast furnaces used to make iron. But neither of these approaches is sustainable in the long run. As Peter Harrop, boss of idTechEx, a firm of analysts in Cambridge, England, and the co-author of a new report on the future of concrete and cement, observes, coal use is dwindling and steel production aspires to move to newer, cleaner technologies.

For Dr Harrop, an important part of the answer is to “tech-up” concrete in ways which mean that less of it will be needed to do particular jobs. This means adding things like synthetic and natural fibres—or even graphene, a substance stronger than steel that consists of single-layer sheets of carbon atoms. Only small amounts are needed to produce beneficial results.

Graphene and other reinforcement will lead to new, ultra-high-performance concretes, which Dr Harrop thinks will be particularly suitable for 3d printing. This builds up precise layers of material under robotic control, and greatly reduces waste. “Using much less cement is a very important part of the answer,” he adds, especially as cement production looks otherwise set to double over the next 20 years.

Additives can also make concrete last longer and reduce the need for maintenance. At the University of Michigan, Victor Li and his colleagues use synthetic and natural fibres, along with CO2 injection, to produce a bendable concrete they call Engineered Cementitious Composite (ecc). The internal structure of this material was inspired by nacre, a flexible material commonly called “mother of pearl” that coats the insides of the shells of molluscs such as abalone and oysters.

Adding such flexibility to concrete lets bridges and roads cope more easily with heavy traffic, and improves the earthquake resistance of tall buildings. ecc develops only tiny surface cracks when it ages. Dr Li says it is thus better at keeping water out and preventing corrosion of reinforcing steel bars inside. Such corrosion can cause reinforced-concrete structures to crumble within a few years of their construction—sometimes resulting in their collapse.

To zero and beyond
Substitution of materials could go still further. Solidia, a firm in New Jersey, makes cement containing calcium silicates with a higher ratio of silica to calcium oxide than the standard “Portland” variety. This has two consequences. One is that Solidia’s process requires less heat (and therefore less fossil fuel) than conventional calcination, and so releases less CO2 in the first place. The other is that, when mixed into concrete, Solidia’s silica-rich silicates can be cured more rapidly than regular cement by using captured CO2 instead of water. Solidia is working on applications for its cement with one of its investors, LafargeHolcim, a Swiss building-supplies giant.

Taking all these developments into account, how green could concrete get? Dr Fennell says it would be reasonably easy to reduce the industry’s CO2 emissions to around 80% of present levels per tonne of concrete produced by better energy use and the modification of materials. But companies could really pull the stops out if they moved to kilns largely or entirely powered by biomass, such as wood. The carbon in this would, until recently, have been CO2 in the air. If, after being turned back into that gas by being burned in the kiln, it was stored away and not released, the consequence, as new trees grew to replace those consumed, would be a net flow of carbon out of the atmosphere.

This sort of system, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (beccs), is one way climate modellers imagine providing the “negative emissions” needed for net-zero or net-negative emissions targets. beccs-based electricity generation is often talked of, but beccs might actually be better suited to cement-making—because in a carbon-conscious world the CO2 capturing equipment will already be there, dealing with results of calcination. And if that happened, one of the pariahs of global warming might thus redeem itself by helping alleviate the damage being done to the planet, and so leave behind a legacy as impressive in its way as that of the Romans.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/how-cement-may-yet-help-slow-global-warming/21806083?

For “green” concrete also see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolymer_cement

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

So why is it a stupid idea?

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

Besides, four seasons in one day.

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

So why is it a stupid idea?

No support .

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

Don’t know if I read it correctly but part of the scheme seemed to be replacing windows with solar panels. Wouldn’t that make the interior dark & need to have the lights on.

NSW budget estimates hears average of four Aboriginal heritage sites per week green-lit for destruction.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-10/fears-for-aboriginal-heritage-sites-amid-barton-highway-upgrade/100605732

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

Here’s two buildings, which are back to back, that I was asked to do a design to put solar on about 5 or 6 years ago. The top building actually looks like it might have some free space – believe me it hasn’t.

I could have put a few panels on here and there but it would have been a complete waste of time, energy and money.

Tamb said:

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

Don’t know if I read it correctly but part of the scheme seemed to be replacing windows with solar panels. Wouldn’t that make the interior dark & need to have the lights on.

And the fact that buildings right next to you may, just may, cause a shading issue.

sibeen said:

Tamb said:

sibeen said:

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

Don’t know if I read it correctly but part of the scheme seemed to be replacing windows with solar panels. Wouldn’t that make the interior dark & need to have the lights on.

And the fact that buildings right next to you may, just may, cause a shading issue.

That too.

Tamb said:

sibeen said:

Tamb said:

Don’t know if I read it correctly but part of the scheme seemed to be replacing windows with solar panels. Wouldn’t that make the interior dark & need to have the lights on.

And the fact that buildings right next to you may, just may, cause a shading issue.

That too.

so what are everyone’s thoughts about building concrete jungles on land that historically was selected for growing food owing to the favourable properties of said land

Tamb said:

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

Don’t know if I read it correctly but part of the scheme seemed to be replacing windows with solar panels. Wouldn’t that make the interior dark & need to have the lights on.

Ah, but there’s the glory of it.

You cover the windows with solar panels that generate the electricity to run the lights that replace the sunlight.

And you can bill the owners/occupants of the building for the electricity!

Market forces at work.

sibeen said:

Tamb said:

sibeen said:

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

Don’t know if I read it correctly but part of the scheme seemed to be replacing windows with solar panels. Wouldn’t that make the interior dark & need to have the lights on.

And the fact that buildings right next to you may, just may, cause a shading issue.

I would hope that the people involved look at that before going ahead. Plus any future buildings that might impact the insolation of the array.

Bogsnorkler said:

I would hope that the people involved look at that before going ahead. Plus any future buildings that might impact the insolation of the array.

Shouldn’t be a problem. Developers are famous for looking ahead and considering future consequences.

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-11-10/rooftop-solar-mcg-could-help-melbourne-reach-net-zero/100602676

Whilst I haven’t read the paper from the article it would have to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve seen. I’m not sure the authors have ever been on the roof of a large building.

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

The MCG too?

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

The MCG too?

probably not but then are those rooves designed to carry a shedload of panels?

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

The MCG too?

Fairly hard to get at though, I should think.

Surely the prime candidates for more urban solar should be suburban parking lots, warehouse buildings, and shopping malls.

Michael V said:

sibeen said:

Michael V said:

So why is it a stupid idea?

Have you ever been on the top of a large building?

There is no room. It’s covered in cooling towers and water towers and associated pumps and fans and other shit.

The MCG too?

No.

This is more to our style, a valley covered in solar panels.

SCIENCE said:

This is more to our style, a valley covered in solar panels.

Even has transmission lines to deliver the energy to your home.

Coal prices face stark forecasts to 2024: KPMG

https://www.australianmining.com.au/news/coal-prices-face-stark-forecasts-to-2024-kpmg/

The report took a current average price for hard coking coal in the mid-$US180s per tonne.

It showed this average price to remain steady in 2022 before diving to $150 in 2023 and into the mid-$140s by 2024.

According to the report, 2025 showed a slight rebound to about $150, however, fewer contributors hazarded a guess at these longer-term forecasts.

They must have a different definition of ‘stark’ then I do. Up until about May this year coal hadn’t reached a price of $75 for about forever. “Diving to $150” must have the miners sleeping very bloody well.

Documents show NT government secretly negotiated change in NT water rules to allow huge farm to go ahead

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-11/foi-documents-reveal-secret-nt-water-licence-rules/100608364

FUCK CHINA

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/10/china-and-the-us-announce-plan-to-work-together-on-cutting-emissions

China and the US announced a surprise plan to work together on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the crucial next decade, in a strong boost to the Cop26 summit, as negotiators wrangled over a draft outcome.

The world’s two biggest emitters had been trading insults for the first week of the conference, but on Wednesday evening unveiled a joint declaration that would see the world’s two biggest economies cooperate closely on the emissions cuts scientists say are needed in the next 10 years to stay within 1.5C.

sorry we meant

What The Fuck, CHINA¿

The NSW parliament has passed a bill banning single-use plastic items, a move that will see them phased out from mid-next year.

Lightweight plastic bags will be banned across the state from next June and other plastic items such as straws, cutlery and cotton buds will be prohibited from next November.

Parliamentary secretary for the environment Felicity Wilson said businesses would be supported to transition to alternative products before the change came into effect.

“We’ve had a lot of businesses that have actually been really proactive phasing out whole ranges of problematic single-use plastics, but we’re going to be working to help transition a lot of the smaller businesses to alternative products and investing in some innovation to develop more products.”

Last Saturday in South Australia, renewables accounted for a staggering 135 per cent of total demand, breaking the world record for the proportion of solar and wind supplied to a large grid.

As a result of all this excess generation, the spot price of power fell to minus $35.95 per megawatt hour.

Anyway, what with all your doom and gloom in them other threads here’s some good news, summer is here at last¡

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/03/15/north-pole-melting-arctic-climate/

A record-breaking “bomb cyclone” that began its development over the U.S. East Coast on Friday is bringing an exceptional insurgence of mild air to the Arctic. Temperatures around 50 degrees (28 Celsius) above normal could visit the North Pole on Wednesday, climbing to near the freezing mark.

Temperatures in the Arctic will fall to some extent by Thursday, but they look to remain unusually mild still over the next week.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34

Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said. At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

ahahahahahaha

SCIENCE said:

Anyway, what with all your doom and gloom in them other threads here’s some good news, summer is here at last¡

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/03/15/north-pole-melting-arctic-climate/

A record-breaking “bomb cyclone” that began its development over the U.S. East Coast on Friday is bringing an exceptional insurgence of mild air to the Arctic. Temperatures around 50 degrees (28 Celsius) above normal could visit the North Pole on Wednesday, climbing to near the freezing mark.

Temperatures in the Arctic will fall to some extent by Thursday, but they look to remain unusually mild still over the next week.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34

Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said. At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

ahahahahahaha

Arctic Permafrost Thaw Plays Greater Role In Climate Change Than Previously Estimated

Abrupt thawing of permafrost will double previous estimates of potential carbon emissions from permafrost thaw in the Arctic, and is already rapidly changing the landscape and ecology of the circumpolar north, a new CU Boulder-led study finds.

Permafrost, a perpetually frozen layer under the seasonally thawed surface layer of the ground, affects 18 million square kilometers at high latitudes or one quarter of all the exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere. Current estimates predict permafrost contains an estimated 1,500 petagrams of carbon, which is equivalent to 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon.

The new study distinguishes between gradual permafrost thaw, which affects permafrost and its carbon stores slowly, versus more abrupt types of permafrost thaw. Some 20% of the Arctic region has conditions conducive to abrupt thaw due to its ice-rich permafrost layer. Permafrost that abruptly thaws is a large emitter of carbon, including the release of carbon dioxide as well as methane, which is more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. That means that even though at any given time less than 5% of the Arctic permafrost region is likely to be experiencing abrupt thaw, their emissions will equal those of areas experiencing gradual thaw.

This abrupt thawing is “fast and dramatic, affecting landscapes in unprecedented ways,” said Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at CU Boulder and lead author of the study published today in Nature Geoscience. “Forests can become lakes in the course of a month, landslides occur with no warning, and invisible methane seep holes can swallow snowmobiles whole.”

“The impacts from abrupt thaw are not represented in any existing global model and our findings indicate that this could amplify the permafrost climate-carbon feedback by up to a factor of two, thereby exacerbating the problem of permissible emissions to stay below specific climate change targets,” said David Lawrence, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and a coauthor of the study.

The findings bring new urgency to including permafrost in all types of climate models, along with implementing strong climate policy and mitigation, Turetsky added.

https://scienceblog.com/513915/arctic-permafrost-thaw-plays-greater-role-in-climate-change-than-previously-estimated/

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

Anyway, what with all your doom and gloom in them other threads here’s some good news, summer is here at last¡

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/03/15/north-pole-melting-arctic-climate/

A record-breaking “bomb cyclone” that began its development over the U.S. East Coast on Friday is bringing an exceptional insurgence of mild air to the Arctic. Temperatures around 50 degrees (28 Celsius) above normal could visit the North Pole on Wednesday, climbing to near the freezing mark.

Temperatures in the Arctic will fall to some extent by Thursday, but they look to remain unusually mild still over the next week.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-colorado-arctic-antarctica-eda9ea8704108bdab2480fa2cd4b6e34

Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said. At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

ahahahahahaha

Arctic Permafrost Thaw Plays Greater Role In Climate Change Than Previously Estimated

https://scienceblog.com/513915/arctic-permafrost-thaw-plays-greater-role-in-climate-change-than-previously-estimated/

mild

Privileged Rich Man Shows Masses How Fossil Fuel Weaning Is Done

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/26/amory-lovins-energy-efficiency-interview-cheapest-safest-cleanest-crisis

SCIENCE said:

Privileged Rich Man Shows Masses How Fossil Fuel Weaning Is Done

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/26/amory-lovins-energy-efficiency-interview-cheapest-safest-cleanest-crisis

Amory Lovins, he must be getting on a bit I thought.

But no, he’s only 74, a mere lad.

He was a big name in the alternative energy field way back in the mid-70’s (when he really was a mere lad).

SCIENCE said:

dv said:

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/environment/watch-gb-news-host-tells-meteorologist-to-be-happy-about-heatwave-dont-look-up-329626/

Well this gives the GB News vid anyway

well who needs to invite targeting by Russian artillery when you can get everyone killed and destroy your infrastructure without it

Record temperatures across Europe have claimed the lives of at least 1,500 people, with train tracks buckling and fires raging across the continent.

SCIENCE said:

Today, the ozone hole still exists, forming every year over Antarctica in the spring. It closes up again over the summer as stratospheric air from lower latitudes is mixed in, patching it up until the following spring when the cycle begins again. But there’s evidence it’s starting to disappear – and recover more or less as expected, says Solomon. Based on scientific assessments, the ozone layer is expected to return to pre-1980 levels around the middle of the century. Healing is slow because of the long lifespan of ozone-depleting molecules. Some persist in the atmosphere for 50 to 150 years before decaying.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220321-what-happened-to-the-worlds-ozone-hole

they always talk about tipping points but don’t you need water to be able to tip it

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/22/china-drought-causes-yangtze-river-to-dry-up-sparking-shortage-of-hydropower

SCIENCE said:

they always talk about tipping points but don’t you need water to be able to tip it

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/22/china-drought-causes-yangtze-river-to-dry-up-sparking-shortage-of-hydropower

If you ask me, it has already tipped.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

they always talk about tipping points but don’t you need water to be able to tip it

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/22/china-drought-causes-yangtze-river-to-dry-up-sparking-shortage-of-hydropower

If you ask me, it has already tipped.

ah that explains the emptiness where water should have been

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

they always talk about tipping points but don’t you need water to be able to tip it

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/22/china-drought-causes-yangtze-river-to-dry-up-sparking-shortage-of-hydropower

If you ask me, it has already tipped.

ah that explains the emptiness where water should have been

This.

here have the good news they say

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/vulnerable-marsupial-red-tailed-phascogale-in-wildlife-sanctuary/101361374

SCIENCE said:

here have the good news they say

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/vulnerable-marsupial-red-tailed-phascogale-in-wildlife-sanctuary/101361374

It’s an advertisement for the fund.

Michael V said:

SCIENCE said:

here have the good news they say

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/vulnerable-marsupial-red-tailed-phascogale-in-wildlife-sanctuary/101361374

It’s an advertisement for the fund.

damn privatised ABC these days

bloody interventionalist governments

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/giant-panda-gives-birth-twin-cubs-china/101369354
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-24/dugongs-functionally-extinct-in-chinese-waters/101368208

SCIENCE said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

SCIENCE said:

The 1% hoarding most of the world’s wealth are an ever bigger risk to civilization.

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

What the world needs is more people.

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

What the world needs is more people.

Yeah, that graph looks more unrealistic every day.

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

You’re just antcy you’ll be spending your twilight years laying in your own urine because there’s not enough desperately unemployed young people. It’s not all about you!

Witty Rejoinder said:

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

You’re just antcy you’ll be spending your twilight years laying in your own urine because there’s not enough desperately unemployed young people. It’s not all about you!

It’s spelt ‘antsy’ you young whippersnapper; and get off my fucking lawn!

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

What the world needs is more people.

Yeah, that graph looks more unrealistic every day.

LOL

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

What the world needs is more people.

Yeah, that graph looks more unrealistic every day.

LOL

^shrgug*

It does.

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

Yeah, that graph looks more unrealistic every day.

LOL

^shrgug*

It does.

Don’t worry about it sibeen, it is just the result of scientific investigation.

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

LOL

^shrgug*

It does.

Don’t worry about it sibeen, it is just the result of scientific investigation.

Hahaha, No it’s not. It’s a UN projection. The last time the UN got anything right is lost in the mists of time.

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

^shrgug*

It does.

Don’t worry about it sibeen, it is just the result of scientific investigation.

Hahaha, No it’s not. It’s a UN projection. The last time the UN got anything right is lost in the mists of time.

It might be a projection of population growth beyond the year 2022, but the 8 billion just recently reached and the staggeringly steep increases are based on factual information. Sorry to disappoint.

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

Don’t worry about it sibeen, it is just the result of scientific investigation.

Hahaha, No it’s not. It’s a UN projection. The last time the UN got anything right is lost in the mists of time.

It might be a projection of population growth beyond the year 2022, but the 8 billion just recently reached and the staggeringly steep increases are based on factual information. Sorry to disappoint.

When you say the staggeringly steep increases you really do lose all credibility. Outside of Africa there are very few countries that are at replacement rates.

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

Hahaha, No it’s not. It’s a UN projection. The last time the UN got anything right is lost in the mists of time.

It might be a projection of population growth beyond the year 2022, but the 8 billion just recently reached and the staggeringly steep increases are based on factual information. Sorry to disappoint.

When you say the staggeringly steep increases you really do lose all credibility. Outside of Africa there are very few countries that are at replacement rates.

Where have you been living these past few decades? Are you trying to tell me that the graph I presented is incorrect, because these are well known and commonly recorded facts. Do I have to produce more graphs by other scientific bodies to satisfy your misconceptions.

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

It might be a projection of population growth beyond the year 2022, but the 8 billion just recently reached and the staggeringly steep increases are based on factual information. Sorry to disappoint.

When you say the staggeringly steep increases you really do lose all credibility. Outside of Africa there are very few countries that are at replacement rates.

Where have you been living these past few decades? Are you trying to tell me that the graph I presented is incorrect, because these are well known and commonly recorded facts. Do I have to produce more graphs by other scientific bodies to satisfy your misconceptions.

Well, no, but from your sentence it seemed you were claiming staggeringly steep increases from the 8 billion. That’s not going to happen. The human population may reach 9 billion, or even a bit above, but I suspect that’ll be the peak. After that there’s a reasonably sharp decline.

sibeen said:

PermeateFree said:

sibeen said:

When you say the staggeringly steep increases you really do lose all credibility. Outside of Africa there are very few countries that are at replacement rates.

Where have you been living these past few decades? Are you trying to tell me that the graph I presented is incorrect, because these are well known and commonly recorded facts. Do I have to produce more graphs by other scientific bodies to satisfy your misconceptions.

Well, no, but from your sentence it seemed you were claiming staggeringly steep increases from the 8 billion. That’s not going to happen. The human population may reach 9 billion, or even a bit above, but I suspect that’ll be the peak. After that there’s a reasonably sharp decline.

Humans have a long life and it takes many years for population numbers to reduce and they certainly don’t do so quickly. You have around another 80 years for it to reach its peak, then at least a similar period of time for numbers to drop to the level we have today. So if the predictions are correct your have around 160 years of world population on a planet that is currently bursting at the seams and with an environmental footprint that is already unsustainable. I am afraid I do not share you optimism.

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

Very few times that I agree with Musk.

Same here.

And yet another great example here of Musk crap to be disagreed with.

kind of true but just like the child labour thing, maybe we’re twisted abnormals but pretty sure in our day we used to multiple-use those plastic bags

some might say that wars start over this kind of thing

not sure we’d be eating cotton though

The World Has a $1 Trillion La Nina Problem
It’s all but guaranteed the world will see another year of weather disasters that destroy homes, ruin crops, disrupt shipping and threaten lives.

By Brian K. Sullivan and Sybilla Gross Green
16 September 2022

Deadly floods in Pakistan. Scorching heat and wildfires in the US West. Torrential rains in Australia and Indonesia. A megadrought in Brazil and Argentina.

As climate change pushes weather disasters to new extremes, it’s La Nina, an atmospheric phenomenon, that has been the driver behind the chaos since mid-2020. And now the planet stands on the cusp of something that’s only happened twice since 1950 – three years of La Nina.

Another year of La Nina means the world is hurtling toward $1 trillion in weather-disaster damages by the time 2023 wraps up. The floods, droughts, storms and fires will destroy more homes, ruin more crops, further disrupt shipping, hobble energy supplies and, ultimately, end lives.

It’s hard to imagine that all this destruction comes down to just a slight drop in temperatures way out in the gleaming blue waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

On a patch of ocean frequented by seals and fishing crews, less than a degree of cooling can bring on La Nina and upend the world’s weather. While the warm-cool ocean cycles have been happening for centuries, La Nina now means something more intense than ever before because of the way that climate change magnifies its calamities.

The weather cycles that come from La Nina “just exacerbate all the problems that already exist in the big picture, like the war in Ukraine and rising commodity prices,” said Michael Pento, president and founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies. “When you add in the extreme weather, it just creates a scenario for higher energy prices, higher food prices and more inflation. It’s negative for the global economy, and it’s working against the Federal Reserve.”

Odds that the cooling of the equatorial Pacific will linger through October have risen to 97%, according to a new forecast by the US Climate Prediction Center. The chances of La Nina sticking around through January are 80%.

The last string of three La Ninas was 1998-2001, and before that 1973-1976, according to Michelle L’Heureux, a forecaster and scientist specializing in the phenomenon for the US Climate Prediction Center.

But the current cycle has the potential for much more devastation because it’s happening when climate change is making the extremes more frequent and more intense.

Costs from drought, winter storms and hurricanes spurred on by La Nina can race into the tens of billions, but are so widespread they’re also hard to calculate. The best measure is through losses tabulated by insurance firms.

Weather catastrophes cost the world $268 billion in 2020, and another $329 billion in 2021, according to Aon, a data and research firm.

If the coming period looks anything like the chaos La Nina brought in 2020 and 2021, the total during the three-string run will likely come close to, or possibly even top, $1 trillion by the end of 2023. While some of that total isn’t tied directly to La Nina, the phenomenon, along with climate change, is what’s setting the terms.

“La Nina is like the conductor of a weather symphony,” L’Heureux said.

That weather bill, which mostly tallies property loss and crop damage, doesn’t fully capture all of La Nina’s knock-on effects. The price of everything from a cup of coffee to the coal used in steelmaking is impacted by the weather. When those costs rise, it fuels inflation. Outside of a major war, La Nina is the one event that has its thumb on the scales of global markets, industries and economies.

The cycle that brings on La Nina was first noticed by Peruvian fishermen in the 1600s, but it wasn’t fully understood until the 1960s.

Scientists are investigating whether climate change is responsible for increasing the odds for a La Nina. Richard Seager, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said he and his colleagues theorize the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is making extended, strong La Ninas more likely. Still, more research is needed to fully understand the patterns.

Here’s a look at La Nina’s recent impact across the globe

North America
Drought has spread across western parts of Canada and the US, leaving reservoirs nearly empty and causing widespread shortages of water for irrigation and hydroelectric power production

In Texas, parched conditions brought huge losses for the cotton crop, sending prices to their highest in more than a decade earlier this year.

The combination of little rain and hot weather means “2022 very well could be the next benchmark as the toughest crop-production year for the state in recent records,” said Kody Bessent, chief executive officer for Plains Cotton Growers Inc., which oversees farms across 42 counties in West Texas. “Growers will abandon more than half of this year’s crop.”

Atlantic Hurricanes
While La Nina is a phenomenon of the Pacific, it also impacts hurricanes in the Atlantic during August, September and October, the heart of storm season. The changing weather patterns cut off a lot of wind shear in the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere across the basin, allowing more Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms to form and grow stronger.

In 2020, a record 30 storms formed. In 2021, there were 21, and this year forecasters are expecting well above the 14 systems that mark an average season.

Australia
Torrential rains have inundated large parts of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. The deluges have killed more than 20 people and damaged more than 15,000 homes, with insurance claims topping $3 billion.

Heavy showers led to quality downgrades in last season’s grain crop, and this year’s downpours have already delayed wheat and barley planting. Overflowing waters can also engulf metallurgical coal mines in New South Wales and Queensland, the world’s biggest exporter of the steelmaking ingredient.

Warm water pushed eastward by La Nina has led to the death of hundreds of small penguins that have washed up on the beaches of New Zealand.

South America
Intensely dry weather has hurt coffee, sugar and orange groves in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of the three crops. The parched conditions are still a concern as the new coffee season gets underway, said Marco Antonio dos Santos, a meteorologist at Rural Clima. And extreme weather has also disrupted operations for the country’s iron-ore miners including Usiminas, Gerdau SA and Vale SA, the world’s second-largest producer.

In Argentina, dryness has hurt soybean and corn crops that are key to the cash-strapped nation’s trade balance. The years-long drought has also dried out the Parana River, a key shipping route. Agricultural traders and farmers have had to grapple with the extra logistics and expense of sending more exports out of alternative ports.

South Asia
Flooding has devastated Pakistan, killing almost 1,500 people and causing at least $10 billion in damage. Deluges have also ripped across Bangladesh affecting an estimated 7.2 million people, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Torrential rains in India have damaged about 300,000 homes.

The weather patterns can be directly tied to La Nina, said Fahad Saeed, the regional lead for South Asia and the Middle East for Climate Analytics. “The monster flooding in Pakistan and elsewhere didn’t happen by chance.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-la-nina-weather-risk-global-economies/?

The shit had to hit the fan sometime.

Store excess renewable energy in closed loop hydro. Excess daytime power is ALL captured to pump conditioned water into water tanks at elevation. Of a night / peak periods a that water gets released into lower tanks. Doesn’t suffer from droughts and dirt/ mechanical damage. Simple, non toxic, low maintenance, fast start up to Max output.

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

Arable farmland should be used for crops. Food independence is important.

Solar power is important, too. But, Australia has vast spaces that are not viable farmland. Put the solar ‘farms’ there. Build the transmission infrastructure that’s necessary.

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

I suspect that 14 GWh figure is wildly optimistic.

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

I just did a quick addition (the numbers are pretty elastic) and came up with a CO2 saving of a couple of orders of magnitude larger than his quoted figures, but I may be way out.

But it’s not just about CO2, solar will also save literally tons of lead and other particulates escaping into the atmosphere and besides – solar farms don’t generally get put where viable existing wheat farms are.

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

I suspect that 14 GWh figure is wildly optimistic.

Probably closer to half that.

Dark Orange said:

sibeen said:

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

I suspect that 14 GWh figure is wildly optimistic.

Probably closer to half that.

If you have panels without any spacing, a capacity factor of 30% (at the the extreme upper level) and a lifetime of 25 years without any degradation over the 25 years, I get just above 13 GWh.

Put the solar cells up on warehouse roofs.

Close to the load using the power ( less transmission loss)

Provides shading to the roof

Easy to maintain – cities are full of people who install them

Warehouses need to be designed to allow easy installation and maintenance

Make solar cells mandatory for all new houses

You use excess daytime power to pump conditioned water 500m upwards.

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

Arable farmland should be used for crops. Food independence is important.

Solar power is important, too. But, Australia has vast spaces that are not viable farmland. Put the solar ‘farms’ there. Build the transmission infrastructure that’s necessary.

stop talking sense

party_pants said:

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

Arable farmland should be used for crops. Food independence is important.

Solar power is important, too. But, Australia has vast spaces that are not viable farmland. Put the solar ‘farms’ there. Build the transmission infrastructure that’s necessary.

stop talking sense

yes, just clear more useless bush and put the panels there.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-large-extinct-australian-cockroach-has-reappeared-after-more-than-80-years

Good news everyone

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

Arable farmland should be used for crops. Food independence is important.

Solar power is important, too. But, Australia has vast spaces that are not viable farmland. Put the solar ‘farms’ there. Build the transmission infrastructure that’s necessary.

Such a shame that Australia has no arid or semiarid areas

On the other hand…

The amount of land you’d need to completely power Australia using PV is pretty small compared to the amount of farmland. This feels like concern-trolling.

But just to put some numbers on it…

1/
Australia is of course a net exporter of food. We export about 70% of the food we produce. It doesn’t make sense to link import emissions with photovoltaics.

2/
Making modest assumptions:
(6 kWh/sqm per day effective solar radiation, 20% pv efficiency, 15% transmission and storage losses, 5% wasted space)

a hectare would generate about 3 GWh per annum. What’s the expected life of the farm? I mean the PVs should probably last 25 years but I suppose the farm could be there forever: ship of Theseus and all that. But at 25 years the output per hectare should be around 75 GWh.

3/

Australia uses about 250000 GWh per year. So the amount of land needed to cover all of our power needs would be something like 833 sq km, like the purple square in the map below. It’s not possible that it would ever significantly degrade our ability to produce our own food.

dv said:

, like the purple square in the map below.

puts on glasses

the one between Melbourne & Canberra?

party_pants said:

dv said:

, like the purple square in the map below.

puts on glasses

the one between Melbourne & Canberra?

that’s him

dv said:

But just to put some numbers on it…

1/
Australia is of course a net exporter of food. We export about 70% of the food we produce. It doesn’t make sense to link import emissions with photovoltaics.

2/
Making modest assumptions:
(6 kWh/sqm per day effective solar radiation, 20% pv efficiency, 15% transmission and storage losses, 5% wasted space)

a hectare would generate about 3 GWh per annum. What’s the expected life of the farm? I mean the PVs should probably last 25 years but I suppose the farm could be there forever: ship of Theseus and all that. But at 25 years the output per hectare should be around 75 GWh.

3/

Australia uses about 250000 GWh per year. So the amount of land needed to cover all of our power needs would be something like 833 sq km, like the purple square in the map below. It’s not possible that it would ever significantly degrade our ability to produce our own food.

Kingy said:

dv said:

But just to put some numbers on it…

1/
Australia is of course a net exporter of food. We export about 70% of the food we produce. It doesn’t make sense to link import emissions with photovoltaics.

2/
Making modest assumptions:
(6 kWh/sqm per day effective solar radiation, 20% pv efficiency, 15% transmission and storage losses, 5% wasted space)

a hectare would generate about 3 GWh per annum. What’s the expected life of the farm? I mean the PVs should probably last 25 years but I suppose the farm could be there forever: ship of Theseus and all that. But at 25 years the output per hectare should be around 75 GWh.

3/

Australia uses about 250000 GWh per year. So the amount of land needed to cover all of our power needs would be something like 833 sq km, like the purple square in the map below. It’s not possible that it would ever significantly degrade our ability to produce our own food.

Nice ref

dv said:

captain_spalding said:

SCIENCE said:

any of yous know how true this checks out to be

Arable farmland should be used for crops. Food independence is important.

Solar power is important, too. But, Australia has vast spaces that are not viable farmland. Put the solar ‘farms’ there. Build the transmission infrastructure that’s necessary.

Such a shame that Australia has no arid or semiarid areas

or muddy fields.

dv said:

But just to put some numbers on it…

1/
Australia is of course a net exporter of food. We export about 70% of the food we produce. It doesn’t make sense to link import emissions with photovoltaics.

2/
Making modest assumptions:
(6 kWh/sqm per day effective solar radiation, 20% pv efficiency, 15% transmission and storage losses, 5% wasted space)

a hectare would generate about 3 GWh per annum. What’s the expected life of the farm? I mean the PVs should probably last 25 years but I suppose the farm could be there forever: ship of Theseus and all that. But at 25 years the output per hectare should be around 75 GWh.

3/

Australia uses about 250000 GWh per year. So the amount of land needed to cover all of our power needs would be something like 833 sq km, like the purple square in the map below. It’s not possible that it would ever significantly degrade our ability to produce our own food.

Golly gee, That’s almost as big as Switzerland.

Privileged Bastard Consumes Resources Gratis But Still Suffers Buyer’s Remorse

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/

The abyss

SCIENCE said:

Privileged Bastard Consumes Resources Gratis But Still Suffers Buyer’s Remorse

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/

A shame more people don’t feel like that.

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

Privileged Bastard Consumes Resources Gratis But Still Suffers Buyer’s Remorse

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/

A shame more people don’t feel like that.

feel like taking a casual space flight ¿ seems a bit wasteful

https://www.andrewweavermla.ca/2023/01/01/privilege-agency-climate-scientists-role-public-global-warming-debate/

Link

https://theconversation.com/australian-humpback-whales-are-singing-less-and-fighting-more-should-we-be-worried-200062

Link

India’s deadly heatwaves are getting even hotter
The consequences of climate change will be horrific for the Indo-Gangetic Plain

Apr 2nd 2023 | DELHI AND JACOBABAD

In the opening scenes of “The Ministry for the Future”, the American novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what happens to a small Indian town hit by a heatwave. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week.

Mr Robinson has said he wrote his bestseller, published in 2020, as a warning. The Indo-Gangetic Plain, which extends from the spine of Pakistan through northern India to the deltas of Bangladesh, is home to 700m people and exceptionally vulnerable to the heat pulses that climate change is making more frequent. It is one of the hottest, poorest and most populous places on Earth (see map). Between 2000 and 2019, South Asia saw over 110,000 heat-related excess deaths a year, according to a study in Lancet Planetary Health, a journal. Last year’s pre-monsoon hot season, which runs from March until early June, was one of the most extreme and economically disruptive on record. This year’s could rival it.

India has just experienced its hottest December and February since 1901. Last month the India Meteorological Department (imd) and its counterpart in Pakistan (pmd) warned of above-average temperatures and heatwaves until the end of May. On March 6th Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, chaired a review on hot-season preparedness. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority kicked off a countrywide simulation to test emergency responses to the flooding that can follow extreme heat. Despite a relatively cool March, the coming weeks could be perilously hot. On April 1st Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, imd’s chief, raised the alarm again.

Scientists record heat stress as a combination of temperature and humidity, known as a “wet-bulb” measurement. As this combined level approaches body temperature, 37°C, it becomes hard for mammals to shed heat through perspiration. At a wet-bulb temperature of around 31°C, dangerously little sweat can evaporate into the soup-like air. Brain damage and heart and kidney failure become increasingly likely. Sustained exposure to a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, the level Mr Robinson imagines in his book, is considered fatal. The Indo-Gangetic Plain is one of the few places where such wet-bulb temperatures have been recorded, including on several occasions in the scorched Pakistani town of Jacobabad. A report by the World Bank in November warned that India could become one of the first places where wet-bulb temperatures routinely exceed the 35°C survivability threshold.

In Jacobabad, the air temperature last year peaked at 51°C. Half the town’s population of 200,000 had by then fled in search of more bearable weather elsewhere. Even after the heatwave began to ease, in June, it was hard to resume regular activity. Ali Bahar, a daily-wage labourer in Jacobabad, recalls trying and failing to work in its surrounding fields in June. While driving a tractor in 42°C heat, he felt feverish and dizzy, then tumbled from the machine, injuring his head. Co-workers carried him to a local clinic, which dished out the standard treatment of a packet of orange-flavoured rehydration salts. He was unable to work for a week.

The temperature record provides a horrifying account of the changes afoot. According to the definition of a heatwave used by India’s weather agency, India saw, on average, 23.5 heatwaves every year in the two decades to 2019, more than twice the annual average of 9.9 between 1980 and 1999. Between 2010 and 2019, the incidence of heatwaves in India grew by a quarter compared with the previous decade, with a corresponding increase in heat-related mortality of 27%. During last year’s hot season, India experienced twice as many heatwave days as in the same period in 2012, the previous record year.

Climate change made last year’s heatwave 30 times likelier than it would otherwise have been, according to World Weather Attribution, a research collaboration. That is both because it has raised India’s average annual temperature—by around 0.7°C between 1900 and 2018—and because it has made heatwaves bigger and more frequent. The magnifying effect of the built urban environment, which can be 2°C hotter than nearby rural areas, is often pronounced in India’s concrete jungles. Those living in slum housing, which offers little air circulation and often uses heat-sucking materials such as tin, suffer the worst of it.

Hot mess
If the climate warms by 2°C compared with pre-industrial levels, as appears unavoidable, such events would be more likely by an additional factor of 2-20. Even if the world makes more headway towards curbing greenhouse-gas emissions than looks likely, “vast regions of South Asia are projected to experience episodes exceeding 31°C, which is considered extremely dangerous for most humans,” according to a paper by Elfatih Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues.

The costs of the heat are already vast. Even working in the shade on an average summer day in Delhi results in labour losses of 15-20 minutes per hour at the hottest times, reckons Luke Parsons of Duke University, North Carolina. Mr Parsons and colleagues have estimated that India loses 101bn man-hours per year to heat, and Pakistan 13bn. During last year’s hot season, the wheat harvest was down by around 15% in both countries. Livestock perished. The normal agricultural day became impossible. Electricity outages shut down industry and, worse, air-conditioning. Even India’s capital, Delhi, faced blackouts.

A study in 2020 by McKinsey Global Institute (mgi), a corporate think-tank, estimates that the loss of outdoor daylight working-hours to extreme heat in India has risen from 10% of the maximum total before 1980 to 15% today. Models suggest that the proportion will double by 2050 in some parts of India.

The effect is hugely exacerbated by how labour-intensive India and other hot and poor places are (see chart). In 2017 heat-exposed work accounted for 50% of India’s gdp and employed 75% of the labour force, or some 380m people. By 2030, reckons mgi, such work will still make up 40% of gdp, and the rising number of lost working hours could put at risk 2.5-4.5% of gdp, or $150bn-250bn. Pakistan could lose 6.5-9% of gdp due to climate change, the World Bank warned last year, “as increased floods and heatwaves reduce agriculture and livestock yields, destroy infrastructure, sap labour productivity and undermine health”.

What, short of reversing global warming, can be done? Ahmedabad, a city in India’s western state of Gujarat, offers a guide. In 2010 it suffered a heatwave that killed 800 people in a week. “This was a shocking figure,” says Dileep Mavalankar. As director of the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital, he helped Ahmedabad design India’s first heat action plan (hap). It recommended several simple but effective measures: warn people of extreme temperatures, advise them to stay indoors and drink lots of water, and put emergency services on alert.

Today there are estimated to be more than 100 such plans in India’s cities, districts and states. Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, developed a similar plan after a heatwave in the city in 2015 killed 1,300 people. These steps probably contributed to a surprisingly low death toll during last year’s extended heatwave. Early estimates identified only 90 deaths in India attributable to it, though the true number was probably much greater. The fact that last year’s heatwave was not particularly humid was probably the main reason for the low death toll. It is also the case that places used to intense heat are better at adapting to it than ill-accustomed ones.

Some haps are better than others. A new study by the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi, found that many oversimplified heat hazards by ignoring the role of humidity, failed to target vulnerable groups and lacked adequate financing. Provisions for forecasting heatwaves are also variable. India’s imd issues a sophisticated daily heat bulletin with colour-coded five-day forecasts. Pakistan is much further behind. “The pmd is creaky in technology,” says Sherry Rehman, the country’s climate change minister. “To be better prepared, we will need better forecasting abilities.” The two countries would do better by co-operating, says the un.

They will both increasingly be called on to take much costlier measures, such as designing “cold shelters”, rethinking urban planning and building materials, and bailing out those unable to work in the heat. “We are going to have to learn to live in a warmer world,” says Gabriel Vecchi, a scientist at Princeton University, New Jersey. The question is how orderly, costly or calamitous that learning process will be.

It is hard to find much comfort in the underlying facts. Year by year, parts of the poor and crowded Indo-Gangetic Plain will become increasingly difficult to live in for days or weeks on end. Even the most capable government would struggle to prevent that leading to catastrophe. And India’s, much less Pakistan’s, is not the most capable.

This is in fact where Mr Robinson’s dystopian novel goes off the rails. He imagines the heatwave he describes spurring transformative climate action around the world. That was “ludicrously unrealistic”, concluded Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist. Yet without such action, it is hard to see what will stop one of the most dire threats of global warming becoming a horrifying reality.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/02/global-warming-is-killing-indians-and-pakistanis?

Witty Rejoinder said:

India’s deadly heatwaves are getting even hotter
The consequences of climate change will be horrific for the Indo-Gangetic Plain

Apr 2nd 2023 | DELHI AND JACOBABAD

In the opening scenes of “The Ministry for the Future”, the American novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what happens to a small Indian town hit by a heatwave. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week.

Mr Robinson has said he wrote his bestseller, published in 2020, as a warning. The Indo-Gangetic Plain, which extends from the spine of Pakistan through northern India to the deltas of Bangladesh, is home to 700m people and exceptionally vulnerable to the heat pulses that climate change is making more frequent. It is one of the hottest, poorest and most populous places on Earth (see map). Between 2000 and 2019, South Asia saw over 110,000 heat-related excess deaths a year, according to a study in Lancet Planetary Health, a journal. Last year’s pre-monsoon hot season, which runs from March until early June, was one of the most extreme and economically disruptive on record. This year’s could rival it.

India has just experienced its hottest December and February since 1901. Last month the India Meteorological Department (imd) and its counterpart in Pakistan (pmd) warned of above-average temperatures and heatwaves until the end of May. On March 6th Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, chaired a review on hot-season preparedness. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority kicked off a countrywide simulation to test emergency responses to the flooding that can follow extreme heat. Despite a relatively cool March, the coming weeks could be perilously hot. On April 1st Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, imd’s chief, raised the alarm again.

Scientists record heat stress as a combination of temperature and humidity, known as a “wet-bulb” measurement. As this combined level approaches body temperature, 37°C, it becomes hard for mammals to shed heat through perspiration. At a wet-bulb temperature of around 31°C, dangerously little sweat can evaporate into the soup-like air. Brain damage and heart and kidney failure become increasingly likely. Sustained exposure to a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, the level Mr Robinson imagines in his book, is considered fatal. The Indo-Gangetic Plain is one of the few places where such wet-bulb temperatures have been recorded, including on several occasions in the scorched Pakistani town of Jacobabad. A report by the World Bank in November warned that India could become one of the first places where wet-bulb temperatures routinely exceed the 35°C survivability threshold.

In Jacobabad, the air temperature last year peaked at 51°C. Half the town’s population of 200,000 had by then fled in search of more bearable weather elsewhere. Even after the heatwave began to ease, in June, it was hard to resume regular activity. Ali Bahar, a daily-wage labourer in Jacobabad, recalls trying and failing to work in its surrounding fields in June. While driving a tractor in 42°C heat, he felt feverish and dizzy, then tumbled from the machine, injuring his head. Co-workers carried him to a local clinic, which dished out the standard treatment of a packet of orange-flavoured rehydration salts. He was unable to work for a week.

The temperature record provides a horrifying account of the changes afoot. According to the definition of a heatwave used by India’s weather agency, India saw, on average, 23.5 heatwaves every year in the two decades to 2019, more than twice the annual average of 9.9 between 1980 and 1999. Between 2010 and 2019, the incidence of heatwaves in India grew by a quarter compared with the previous decade, with a corresponding increase in heat-related mortality of 27%. During last year’s hot season, India experienced twice as many heatwave days as in the same period in 2012, the previous record year.

Climate change made last year’s heatwave 30 times likelier than it would otherwise have been, according to World Weather Attribution, a research collaboration. That is both because it has raised India’s average annual temperature—by around 0.7°C between 1900 and 2018—and because it has made heatwaves bigger and more frequent. The magnifying effect of the built urban environment, which can be 2°C hotter than nearby rural areas, is often pronounced in India’s concrete jungles. Those living in slum housing, which offers little air circulation and often uses heat-sucking materials such as tin, suffer the worst of it.

Hot mess
If the climate warms by 2°C compared with pre-industrial levels, as appears unavoidable, such events would be more likely by an additional factor of 2-20. Even if the world makes more headway towards curbing greenhouse-gas emissions than looks likely, “vast regions of South Asia are projected to experience episodes exceeding 31°C, which is considered extremely dangerous for most humans,” according to a paper by Elfatih Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues.

The costs of the heat are already vast. Even working in the shade on an average summer day in Delhi results in labour losses of 15-20 minutes per hour at the hottest times, reckons Luke Parsons of Duke University, North Carolina. Mr Parsons and colleagues have estimated that India loses 101bn man-hours per year to heat, and Pakistan 13bn. During last year’s hot season, the wheat harvest was down by around 15% in both countries. Livestock perished. The normal agricultural day became impossible. Electricity outages shut down industry and, worse, air-conditioning. Even India’s capital, Delhi, faced blackouts.

A study in 2020 by McKinsey Global Institute (mgi), a corporate think-tank, estimates that the loss of outdoor daylight working-hours to extreme heat in India has risen from 10% of the maximum total before 1980 to 15% today. Models suggest that the proportion will double by 2050 in some parts of India.

The effect is hugely exacerbated by how labour-intensive India and other hot and poor places are (see chart). In 2017 heat-exposed work accounted for 50% of India’s gdp and employed 75% of the labour force, or some 380m people. By 2030, reckons mgi, such work will still make up 40% of gdp, and the rising number of lost working hours could put at risk 2.5-4.5% of gdp, or $150bn-250bn. Pakistan could lose 6.5-9% of gdp due to climate change, the World Bank warned last year, “as increased floods and heatwaves reduce agriculture and livestock yields, destroy infrastructure, sap labour productivity and undermine health”.

What, short of reversing global warming, can be done? Ahmedabad, a city in India’s western state of Gujarat, offers a guide. In 2010 it suffered a heatwave that killed 800 people in a week. “This was a shocking figure,” says Dileep Mavalankar. As director of the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital, he helped Ahmedabad design India’s first heat action plan (hap). It recommended several simple but effective measures: warn people of extreme temperatures, advise them to stay indoors and drink lots of water, and put emergency services on alert.

Today there are estimated to be more than 100 such plans in India’s cities, districts and states. Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, developed a similar plan after a heatwave in the city in 2015 killed 1,300 people. These steps probably contributed to a surprisingly low death toll during last year’s extended heatwave. Early estimates identified only 90 deaths in India attributable to it, though the true number was probably much greater. The fact that last year’s heatwave was not particularly humid was probably the main reason for the low death toll. It is also the case that places used to intense heat are better at adapting to it than ill-accustomed ones.

Some haps are better than others. A new study by the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi, found that many oversimplified heat hazards by ignoring the role of humidity, failed to target vulnerable groups and lacked adequate financing. Provisions for forecasting heatwaves are also variable. India’s imd issues a sophisticated daily heat bulletin with colour-coded five-day forecasts. Pakistan is much further behind. “The pmd is creaky in technology,” says Sherry Rehman, the country’s climate change minister. “To be better prepared, we will need better forecasting abilities.” The two countries would do better by co-operating, says the un.

They will both increasingly be called on to take much costlier measures, such as designing “cold shelters”, rethinking urban planning and building materials, and bailing out those unable to work in the heat. “We are going to have to learn to live in a warmer world,” says Gabriel Vecchi, a scientist at Princeton University, New Jersey. The question is how orderly, costly or calamitous that learning process will be.

It is hard to find much comfort in the underlying facts. Year by year, parts of the poor and crowded Indo-Gangetic Plain will become increasingly difficult to live in for days or weeks on end. Even the most capable government would struggle to prevent that leading to catastrophe. And India’s, much less Pakistan’s, is not the most capable.

This is in fact where Mr Robinson’s dystopian novel goes off the rails. He imagines the heatwave he describes spurring transformative climate action around the world. That was “ludicrously unrealistic”, concluded Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist. Yet without such action, it is hard to see what will stop one of the most dire threats of global warming becoming a horrifying reality.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/02/global-warming-is-killing-indians-and-pakistanis?

Many parts of the world will become unlivable as Global Warming increases, this will mean hundreds of millions of people will move to hopefully cooler places. Europe will get enormous numbers that will necessitate forceful action in an attempt to stop them. Countries in our part of the world will see Australia as a destination, despite parts also being unlivable. The future for humanity because of our high population levels and global warming will through necessity, create a question of survival that today we cannot imagine.

PermeateFree said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

India’s deadly heatwaves are getting even hotter
The consequences of climate change will be horrific for the Indo-Gangetic Plain

Apr 2nd 2023 | DELHI AND JACOBABAD

In the opening scenes of “The Ministry for the Future”, the American novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what happens to a small Indian town hit by a heatwave. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week.

Mr Robinson has said he wrote his bestseller, published in 2020, as a warning. The Indo-Gangetic Plain, which extends from the spine of Pakistan through northern India to the deltas of Bangladesh, is home to 700m people and exceptionally vulnerable to the heat pulses that climate change is making more frequent. It is one of the hottest, poorest and most populous places on Earth (see map). Between 2000 and 2019, South Asia saw over 110,000 heat-related excess deaths a year, according to a study in Lancet Planetary Health, a journal. Last year’s pre-monsoon hot season, which runs from March until early June, was one of the most extreme and economically disruptive on record. This year’s could rival it.

India has just experienced its hottest December and February since 1901. Last month the India Meteorological Department (imd) and its counterpart in Pakistan (pmd) warned of above-average temperatures and heatwaves until the end of May. On March 6th Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, chaired a review on hot-season preparedness. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority kicked off a countrywide simulation to test emergency responses to the flooding that can follow extreme heat. Despite a relatively cool March, the coming weeks could be perilously hot. On April 1st Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, imd’s chief, raised the alarm again.

Scientists record heat stress as a combination of temperature and humidity, known as a “wet-bulb” measurement. As this combined level approaches body temperature, 37°C, it becomes hard for mammals to shed heat through perspiration. At a wet-bulb temperature of around 31°C, dangerously little sweat can evaporate into the soup-like air. Brain damage and heart and kidney failure become increasingly likely. Sustained exposure to a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, the level Mr Robinson imagines in his book, is considered fatal. The Indo-Gangetic Plain is one of the few places where such wet-bulb temperatures have been recorded, including on several occasions in the scorched Pakistani town of Jacobabad. A report by the World Bank in November warned that India could become one of the first places where wet-bulb temperatures routinely exceed the 35°C survivability threshold.

In Jacobabad, the air temperature last year peaked at 51°C. Half the town’s population of 200,000 had by then fled in search of more bearable weather elsewhere. Even after the heatwave began to ease, in June, it was hard to resume regular activity. Ali Bahar, a daily-wage labourer in Jacobabad, recalls trying and failing to work in its surrounding fields in June. While driving a tractor in 42°C heat, he felt feverish and dizzy, then tumbled from the machine, injuring his head. Co-workers carried him to a local clinic, which dished out the standard treatment of a packet of orange-flavoured rehydration salts. He was unable to work for a week.

The temperature record provides a horrifying account of the changes afoot. According to the definition of a heatwave used by India’s weather agency, India saw, on average, 23.5 heatwaves every year in the two decades to 2019, more than twice the annual average of 9.9 between 1980 and 1999. Between 2010 and 2019, the incidence of heatwaves in India grew by a quarter compared with the previous decade, with a corresponding increase in heat-related mortality of 27%. During last year’s hot season, India experienced twice as many heatwave days as in the same period in 2012, the previous record year.

Climate change made last year’s heatwave 30 times likelier than it would otherwise have been, according to World Weather Attribution, a research collaboration. That is both because it has raised India’s average annual temperature—by around 0.7°C between 1900 and 2018—and because it has made heatwaves bigger and more frequent. The magnifying effect of the built urban environment, which can be 2°C hotter than nearby rural areas, is often pronounced in India’s concrete jungles. Those living in slum housing, which offers little air circulation and often uses heat-sucking materials such as tin, suffer the worst of it.

Hot mess
If the climate warms by 2°C compared with pre-industrial levels, as appears unavoidable, such events would be more likely by an additional factor of 2-20. Even if the world makes more headway towards curbing greenhouse-gas emissions than looks likely, “vast regions of South Asia are projected to experience episodes exceeding 31°C, which is considered extremely dangerous for most humans,” according to a paper by Elfatih Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues.

The costs of the heat are already vast. Even working in the shade on an average summer day in Delhi results in labour losses of 15-20 minutes per hour at the hottest times, reckons Luke Parsons of Duke University, North Carolina. Mr Parsons and colleagues have estimated that India loses 101bn man-hours per year to heat, and Pakistan 13bn. During last year’s hot season, the wheat harvest was down by around 15% in both countries. Livestock perished. The normal agricultural day became impossible. Electricity outages shut down industry and, worse, air-conditioning. Even India’s capital, Delhi, faced blackouts.

A study in 2020 by McKinsey Global Institute (mgi), a corporate think-tank, estimates that the loss of outdoor daylight working-hours to extreme heat in India has risen from 10% of the maximum total before 1980 to 15% today. Models suggest that the proportion will double by 2050 in some parts of India.

The effect is hugely exacerbated by how labour-intensive India and other hot and poor places are (see chart). In 2017 heat-exposed work accounted for 50% of India’s gdp and employed 75% of the labour force, or some 380m people. By 2030, reckons mgi, such work will still make up 40% of gdp, and the rising number of lost working hours could put at risk 2.5-4.5% of gdp, or $150bn-250bn. Pakistan could lose 6.5-9% of gdp due to climate change, the World Bank warned last year, “as increased floods and heatwaves reduce agriculture and livestock yields, destroy infrastructure, sap labour productivity and undermine health”.

What, short of reversing global warming, can be done? Ahmedabad, a city in India’s western state of Gujarat, offers a guide. In 2010 it suffered a heatwave that killed 800 people in a week. “This was a shocking figure,” says Dileep Mavalankar. As director of the Indian Institute of Public Health in Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital, he helped Ahmedabad design India’s first heat action plan (hap). It recommended several simple but effective measures: warn people of extreme temperatures, advise them to stay indoors and drink lots of water, and put emergency services on alert.

Today there are estimated to be more than 100 such plans in India’s cities, districts and states. Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, developed a similar plan after a heatwave in the city in 2015 killed 1,300 people. These steps probably contributed to a surprisingly low death toll during last year’s extended heatwave. Early estimates identified only 90 deaths in India attributable to it, though the true number was probably much greater. The fact that last year’s heatwave was not particularly humid was probably the main reason for the low death toll. It is also the case that places used to intense heat are better at adapting to it than ill-accustomed ones.

Some haps are better than others. A new study by the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi, found that many oversimplified heat hazards by ignoring the role of humidity, failed to target vulnerable groups and lacked adequate financing. Provisions for forecasting heatwaves are also variable. India’s imd issues a sophisticated daily heat bulletin with colour-coded five-day forecasts. Pakistan is much further behind. “The pmd is creaky in technology,” says Sherry Rehman, the country’s climate change minister. “To be better prepared, we will need better forecasting abilities.” The two countries would do better by co-operating, says the un.

They will both increasingly be called on to take much costlier measures, such as designing “cold shelters”, rethinking urban planning and building materials, and bailing out those unable to work in the heat. “We are going to have to learn to live in a warmer world,” says Gabriel Vecchi, a scientist at Princeton University, New Jersey. The question is how orderly, costly or calamitous that learning process will be.

It is hard to find much comfort in the underlying facts. Year by year, parts of the poor and crowded Indo-Gangetic Plain will become increasingly difficult to live in for days or weeks on end. Even the most capable government would struggle to prevent that leading to catastrophe. And India’s, much less Pakistan’s, is not the most capable.

This is in fact where Mr Robinson’s dystopian novel goes off the rails. He imagines the heatwave he describes spurring transformative climate action around the world. That was “ludicrously unrealistic”, concluded Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist. Yet without such action, it is hard to see what will stop one of the most dire threats of global warming becoming a horrifying reality.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/02/global-warming-is-killing-indians-and-pakistanis?

Many parts of the world will become unlivable as Global Warming increases, this will mean hundreds of millions of people will move to hopefully cooler places. Europe will get enormous numbers that will necessitate forceful action in an attempt to stop them. Countries in our part of the world will see Australia as a destination, despite parts also being unlivable. The future for humanity because of our high population levels and global warming will through necessity, create a question of survival that today we cannot imagine.

It has been happening now for quite some time. It can only get worse for many millions.

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

India’s deadly heatwaves are getting even hotter
The consequences of climate change will be horrific for the Indo-Gangetic Plain

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/02/global-warming-is-killing-indians-and-pakistanis??

Many parts of the world will become unlivable as Global Warming increases, this will mean hundreds of millions of people will move to hopefully cooler places. Europe will get enormous numbers that will necessitate forceful action in an attempt to stop them. Countries in our part of the world will see Australia as a destination, despite parts also being unlivable. The future for humanity because of our high population levels and global warming will through necessity, create a question of survival that today we cannot imagine.

It has been happening now for quite some time. It can only get worse for many millions.

Excellent, another chance to profit further, The Economy Must Grow¡

Don’t know if it’s legit’ but

seems like quite an excursion.

SCIENCE said:

Don’t know if it’s legit’ but

seems like quite an excursion.

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

Why Kenya could take the lead in carbon removal
Geothermal energy and cheap talent offer comparative advantage

Jun 15th 2023 | NAIROBI

East africa’s Rift Valley, which runs for thousands of kilometres from the Red Sea to Mozambique, provides a unique window into the evolutionary history of humanity. The shifting of tectonic plates that formed its deep lakes and sheltered canyons created conditions that first nurtured the ancestors of modern humans and then preserved their bones. Those geological forces may also push open a door to the future by making it possible to capture and store global-warming carbon dioxide cheaply from the air.

That, at least, is the hope of James Irungu Mwangi, a Kenyan environmentalist and development expert, who talks of the opportunity that could be afforded by what he calls “the Great Carbon Valley”. The rift, he argues, has the key attributes that make it attractive for “direct air capture” (dac) stations to suck carbon dioxide from the air: renewable-energy potential and the right geology for storing carbon.

dac plants need huge amounts of energy. Some of this is in the form of electricity, which is used to run fans blowing air through or over chemicals that absorb carbon dioxide. Much more energy is then needed in the form of heat to make these chemicals belch the gas, which is then compressed for use or storage.

Because the earth’s crust is thinner than usual along the rift, it has vast geothermal potential. The American government reckons Kenya alone could generate 10,000mw of geothermal power, more than ten times the amount it currently produces. A by-product of such power stations is plenty of waste steam, which can then be used to heat dac machines. Moreover, since close to 90% of Kenya’s power is renewable, the electricity these machines consume does not contribute to more global warming.

Capturing carbon dioxide is just part of the process. Next it has to be safely locked away. The rift’s geology is particularly good for this, too. It has bands of porous basalt (a volcanic rock) that stretch across thousands of square kilometres. This makes the region “ideal” for carbon capture and storage, according to a paper published in 2021 by George Otieno Okoko and Lydia Olaka, both of the University of Nairobi. After carbon dioxide has been sucked from the air it is dissolved in water (in the same way one would make sparkling water). This slightly acidic and bubbly liquid is then injected into the rock. There it reacts with the basalt to form carbon-rich minerals—in essence, rocks—which means the gas will not leak back into the atmosphere.

A similar combination of geothermal energy and volcanic rock has already attracted companies elsewhere. Climeworks, a Swiss firm, opened the world’s biggest dac plant in Iceland in 2021. It can remove some 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere at a cost of $600-800 a tonne.

Martin Freimüller, the founder of Octavia Carbon, a Kenyan startup, is working to build the world’s second-biggest dac plant in the Rift Valley. He hopes it will be able to sequester carbon dioxide far more cheaply than Climeworks can, in part thanks to cheap renewable electricity and geothermal steam, and in part because hiring skilled engineers and chemists costs less in Kenya than in the rich world.

Octavia’s pilot plant, scheduled for completion next year, is forecast to have costs of well below $500 a tonne. Mr Freimüller aims to cut this to below $100 within five years. That is far cheaper than industry-wide forecasts of $300-400 by bcg, a consulting firm. As this new market matures, nascent firms and technologies will have to evolve quickly, or die out.

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/06/15/why-kenya-could-take-the-lead-in-carbon-removal?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/10/the-big-idea-why-climate-tribalism-only-helps-the-deniers

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTRlSGKddJE&t=631s

Link

If ocean levels are rising, why can’t we see it?

potholer54

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTRlSGKddJE&t=631s

Link

If ocean levels are rising, why can’t we see it?

potholer54

:)

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/10/the-big-idea-why-climate-tribalism-only-helps-the-deniers

Link

I approve of that.

So much so, I’ll leave the statement about nook power being 1000’s of time safer unchallenged.

As she says, also applies to many other things, especially “The Voice”.

The Rev Dodgson said:

ChrispenEvan said:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/10/the-big-idea-why-climate-tribalism-only-helps-the-deniers

Link

I approve of that.

So much so, I’ll leave the statement about nook power being 1000’s of time safer unchallenged.

As she says, also applies to many other things, especially “The Voice”.

+1

North Korea launches latest missile test, warning of nuclear crisis beyond the Cold War era
The latest test sparks a United Nations Security Council meeting and condemnation from world leaders.

roughbarked said:

North Korea launches latest missile test, warning of nuclear crisis beyond the Cold War era
The latest test sparks a United Nations Security Council meeting and condemnation from world leaders.

So, I wonder whether Putin will attend or attempt to veto?

roughbarked said:

roughbarked said:

North Korea launches latest missile test, warning of nuclear crisis beyond the Cold War era
The latest test sparks a United Nations Security Council meeting and condemnation from world leaders.

So, I wonder whether Putin will attend or attempt to veto?

China also veto, we stand with fellow “commies” nuclear annihilation be damned

LOL

It’s Plateaued ¡

At that point, the technology would theoretically become competitive with other options, such as planting trees, where a price was put on carbon.

But whereas trees burn in bushfires or can be cut down – releasing much of the stored CO2 – carbon buried underground through DAC could be kept there.

Good point, nobody has ever observed underground carbon fuelled fires or dug up carbon from underground and released much of the stored CO2¡

Imagine if you could just water plants / plant trees to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

As a crazy idea

Maybe compressed air energy storage would do better in a domestic rather than large scale situation

You dig a deep hole and using fibre glass and concrete create a pressure vessel. You install a bleed valve on the bottom of the tank.

You use solar to compress air and store it in the tank. You release the compressed air into a motor of a night that drives a generator. No need to mine , process , recycle millions of tonnes of lithium destroying the environment.

wookiemeister said:

Imagine if you could just water plants / plant trees to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

What, me personally?

I can’t do that much digging without getting a sore back after a while. The planet will have to manage on its own.

party_pants said:

wookiemeister said:

Imagine if you could just water plants / plant trees to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

What, me personally?

I can’t do that much digging without getting a sore back after a while. The planet will have to manage on its own.

Planting white daisies is an option

You could cool down artesian well water and judicially water tracts of land

LOL

SCIENCE said:

LOL

Mr Squiggle has been having fun.

Excellent¡ We’ve hit the target early¡

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-08/temperatures-1-5c-above-pre-industrial-era-average-for-12-months/104054910

Time to party, crack out the fireworks, work out the firecrackers, go for a bunch of nice drives and cruises and flights to celebrate¡

Like Magic, Industrial Revolution Turns 11 Years Into 300 Years ¡

SCIENCE said:

Like Magic, Industrial Revolution Turns 11 Years Into 300 Years ¡

I’m not at all impressed with the slow speed at which loading standards for building and construction are updating things like design rainfall and maximum wind speeds.

The Rev Dodgson said:

SCIENCE said:

Like Magic, Industrial Revolution Turns 11 Years Into 300 Years ¡

I’m not at all impressed with the slow speed at which loading standards for building and construction are updating things like design rainfall and maximum wind speeds.

Don’t worry at least Corruption are promising that this historical pattern will be completely different where simple atom smashing electrical generation is concerned¡

Big If Legit’

Just a mild hot.

Sunday, July 21, was the hottest day ever recorded, according to preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which has tracked such global weather patterns since 1940. The global average surface air temperature on Sunday reached 17.09 degrees Celsius — slightly higher than the previous record of 17.08C set last July — as heatwaves scorched large swathes of the United States, Europe and Russia.

FkCHINA¡

Five wealthy countries accounted for 56% of oil and gas licences since 2000

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/24/new-oil-gas-emission-data-us-uk

that smoke isn’t from wildfires it’s from the gas

LOLOLOLOLOL

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/23/australia-weather-forecast-august-heat-records-bom-adelaide-brisbane-sydney-melbourne

Record high winter temperatures could be set in Victoria, where Mildura’s Sunday forecast of 29C will nudge the current 29.9C maximum, and in Queensland, where Birdville’s 37C forecast will sit just under the state record of 38.5C.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-23/revegetating-land-by-protecting-paddock-trees/104135760

Selling and buying native stingless bee honey is now legal.
Hopefully that will bring the price down..?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2024-08-23/native-stingless-bee-honey-food-standards-approved/104249950

roughbarked said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-23/revegetating-land-by-protecting-paddock-trees/104135760

but what about those beautiful bright yellow rapeseed fields then, things like trees and renewable electrical generators sticking out of them spoil the view, birds will die, we want otherwise barren bright yellow fields

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-23/revegetating-land-by-protecting-paddock-trees/104135760

but what about those beautiful bright yellow rapeseed fields then, things like trees and renewable electrical generators sticking out of them spoil the view, birds will die, we want otherwise barren bright yellow fields

Do you eat canola oil or would you rather olive and almond, walnut and hemp oils?

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-23/revegetating-land-by-protecting-paddock-trees/104135760

but what about those beautiful bright yellow rapeseed fields then, things like trees and renewable electrical generators sticking out of them spoil the view, birds will die, we want otherwise barren bright yellow fields

Do you eat canola oil or would you rather olive and almond, walnut and hemp oils?

animal fats

Bubblecar said:

transition said:

transition said:

whatever immune system kicked up a storm and dealt with it, got sore head and lot of tiredness, grumpy as hell

it didn’t progress to anything more

reading
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/battle-seasons-australia-record-winter-warm-polar-blast/104264218

- Oodnadatta with 38.5C, breaking its former record of 36.5C in 1946
- Coober Pedy with 36.4C, breaking its former record 35.0C in 1970
- Roxby Downs with 36.0C, breaking its former record of 34.6C in 2017
- Woomera with 34.1C, breaking its former record 32.6C from 1995

from^ favorite broadcaster there, your ABC, wonderful service, tune in anytime you need, get the latest news and weather

That’s really quite disturbing. Still proper winter down here and I’m glad it is.

fuck

SCIENCE said:

Bubblecar said:

transition said:

reading
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/battle-seasons-australia-record-winter-warm-polar-blast/104264218

- Oodnadatta with 38.5C, breaking its former record of 36.5C in 1946
- Coober Pedy with 36.4C, breaking its former record 35.0C in 1970
- Roxby Downs with 36.0C, breaking its former record of 34.6C in 2017
- Woomera with 34.1C, breaking its former record 32.6C from 1995

from^ favorite broadcaster there, your ABC, wonderful service, tune in anytime you need, get the latest news and weather

That’s really quite disturbing. Still proper winter down here and I’m glad it is.

fuck

ahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/great-barrier-reef-continued-deterioration-climate-change/104265330

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

Bubblecar said:

That’s really quite disturbing. Still proper winter down here and I’m glad it is.

fuck

ahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/great-barrier-reef-continued-deterioration-climate-change/104265330

LOL

here listen to a shrill alarmist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA

andor read their blabber

https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-approaching-a-tipping-point

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

fuck

ahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/great-barrier-reef-continued-deterioration-climate-change/104265330

LOL

here listen to a shrill alarmist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA

andor read their blabber

https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-approaching-a-tipping-point

Dire.

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

fuck

ahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/great-barrier-reef-continued-deterioration-climate-change/104265330

LOL

here listen to a shrill alarmist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA

andor read their blabber

https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-approaching-a-tipping-point

In 1751, the captain of an English slave-​trading ship made a historic discovery. While sailing at 25°N in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean, Captain Henry Ellis lowered a “bucket sea-gauge,” devised and provided to him by the British clergyman Reverend Stephen Hales, through the warm surface waters into the deep. By means of a long rope and a system of valves, water from various depths could be brought up to the deck where its temperature was read from a built-in thermometer.

—

Near enough for a bass line I spose.

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

fuck

ahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/great-barrier-reef-continued-deterioration-climate-change/104265330

LOL

here listen to a shrill alarmist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA

andor read their blabber

https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-approaching-a-tipping-point

Stefan Rahmstorf (born 22 February 1960) is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Wiki

Hardly a shrill alarmist or one that blabbers. Ignore him at your peril.

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

SCIENCE said:

ahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-24/great-barrier-reef-continued-deterioration-climate-change/104265330

LOL

here listen to a shrill alarmist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA

andor read their blabber

https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-approaching-a-tipping-point

Stefan Rahmstorf (born 22 February 1960) is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Wiki

Hardly a shrill alarmist or one that blabbers. Ignore him at your peril.

Glad to see you are still with us PF. :)

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

LOL

here listen to a shrill alarmist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA

andor read their blabber

https://tos.org/oceanography/article/is-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-approaching-a-tipping-point

Stefan Rahmstorf (born 22 February 1960) is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Wiki

Hardly a shrill alarmist or one that blabbers. Ignore him at your peril.

Glad to see you are still with us PF. :)

ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/warm-weather-forecast-after-winter-records-broken/104267642
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/winter-weather-40-degrees-in-august/104271368
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/unseasonal-heat-breaks-australias-winter-temperature-record/104271990

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

PermeateFree said:

Stefan Rahmstorf (born 22 February 1960) is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Wiki

Hardly a shrill alarmist or one that blabbers. Ignore him at your peril.

Glad to see you are still with us PF. :)

ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/warm-weather-forecast-after-winter-records-broken/104267642
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/winter-weather-40-degrees-in-august/104271368
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/unseasonal-heat-breaks-australias-winter-temperature-record/104271990

You obviously don’t read the links you post as you would realise the first two links to which I replied have little to no relevance to the three you just posted. I pop in here occasionally and only read a selected number of posters of which you are not normally included, however as you posted in a topic that was of interest, I clicked on your post only to be met with your normal drivel of which I felt obliged to correct.

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Glad to see you are still with us PF. :)

ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/warm-weather-forecast-after-winter-records-broken/104267642
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/winter-weather-40-degrees-in-august/104271368
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/unseasonal-heat-breaks-australias-winter-temperature-record/104271990

You obviously don’t read the links you post as you would realise the first two links to which I replied have little to no relevance to the three you just posted. I pop in here occasionally and only read a selected number of posters of which you are not normally included, however as you posted in a topic that was of interest, I clicked on your post only to be met with your normal drivel of which I felt obliged to correct.

LOL please summarise the articles

SCIENCE said:

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/warm-weather-forecast-after-winter-records-broken/104267642
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/winter-weather-40-degrees-in-august/104271368
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/unseasonal-heat-breaks-australias-winter-temperature-record/104271990

You obviously don’t read the links you post as you would realise the first two links to which I replied have little to no relevance to the three you just posted. I pop in here occasionally and only read a selected number of posters of which you are not normally included, however as you posted in a topic that was of interest, I clicked on your post only to be met with your normal drivel of which I felt obliged to correct.

LOL please summarise the articles

Stupid boy!

PermeateFree said:

SCIENCE said:

PermeateFree said:

You obviously don’t read the links you post as you would realise the first two links to which I replied have little to no relevance to the three you just posted. I pop in here occasionally and only read a selected number of posters of which you are not normally included, however as you posted in a topic that was of interest, I clicked on your post only to be met with your normal drivel of which I felt obliged to correct.

LOL please summarise the articles

Stupid boy!

you

Imagine the energy savings if all 24 × 7 hot water tanks were replaced by hot water on demand systems.

Number of residential properties in Australia 11,176,100
Number of businesses in Australia 2,589,873

It would be a substantial figure.

Not just energy savings in dollars, it would be a win for the environment.

Imagine the total number of minutes on hot water on demand vs the total of 24 hours a day over 7 days a week of continuous hot water across all of Australia.

We would not have not have to generate so much energy, as most of that 24 × 7 water heating gets wasted.

On a hot water on demand system I would use around 30 minutes of hot water.
vs 10080 minutes on 24hr, 7day system.

Add that up over a year.

Makes sense.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Imagine the energy savings if all 24 × 7 hot water tanks were replaced by hot water on demand systems.

Number of residential properties in Australia 11,176,100
Number of businesses in Australia 2,589,873

It would be a substantial figure.

Not just energy savings in dollars, it would be a win for the environment.

Imagine the total number of minutes on hot water on demand vs the total of 24 hours a day over 7 days a week of continuous hot water across all of Australia.

We would not have not have to generate so much energy, as most of that 24 × 7 water heating gets wasted.

On a hot water on demand system I would use around 30 minutes of hot water.
vs 10080 minutes on 24hr, 7day system.

Add that up over a year.

Makes sense.

No more energy problem.

Gone.

Number of people in Australia 26.01 million (2022)

The average person has a shower duration of 7 minutes. Shower timer duration is 4 minutes; saving 3 minutes shower time or 45 litres (QLD Government 2008).

https://www.burnside.sa.gov.au/Environment-Sustainability/Water/Shower-Timer-Campaign

USA Study

The average shower lasts about eight minutes. Since the average showerhead has a water flow of 2.1 gallons per minute, each shower uses more than 16 gallons of water!

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2017-02/documents/ws-ourwater-shower-better-learning-resource_0.pdf

Tau.Neutrino said:

Number of people in Australia 26.01 million (2022)

The average person has a shower duration of 7 minutes. Shower timer duration is 4 minutes; saving 3 minutes shower time or 45 litres (QLD Government 2008).

https://www.burnside.sa.gov.au/Environment-Sustainability/Water/Shower-Timer-Campaign

USA Study

The average shower lasts about eight minutes. Since the average showerhead has a water flow of 2.1 gallons per minute, each shower uses more than 16 gallons of water!

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2017-02/documents/ws-ourwater-shower-better-learning-resource_0.pdf

16 gallons of water = 60.567 litres

It would be interesting to see the figure for energy production reduction by rolling out hot water on demand for all property dwellings across all of Australia.

Australia uses 273 TWh per annum

List of countries by electricity production
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production

Tau.Neutrino said:

It would be interesting to see the figure for energy production reduction by rolling out hot water on demand for all property dwellings across all of Australia.

Australia uses 273 TWh per annum

List of countries by electricity production
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production

If you work it out globally then the energy savings would be immense and it would be a win for the environment.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

It would be interesting to see the figure for energy production reduction by rolling out hot water on demand for all property dwellings across all of Australia.

Australia uses 273 TWh per annum

List of countries by electricity production
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production

If you work it out globally then the energy savings would be immense and it would be a win for the environment.

It would be interesting to see the figures for producing the total energy used by hot water services.

And the total figures for hot water systems wasting energy thats not used.

The energy production industry needs to find energy savings, switching from 24hr ×7 day hot water to hot water on demand would do that, remember on an individual basis – 10080 minutes down to 30 minutes is very significant.

Tau.Neutrino said:

The energy production industry needs to find energy savings, switching from 24hr ×7 day hot water to hot water on demand would do that, remember on an individual basis – 10080 minutes down to 30 minutes is very significant.

I use 30 minutes of water heating time a week.

1 week = 10080 minutes.

So on a 24×7 hot water system I would be wasting 10050 minutes of water heating time.

24hr 7day a week hot water systems are not environmentally friendly and help to push up our emissions. Phasing them out will help reduce our emissions, so there is an incentive for the government.

All homes need double glazed windows, 1 to help reduce emissions, 2 to help reduce energy costs.
3 to help people sleep better.

Tau.Neutrino said:

All homes need double glazed windows, 1 to help reduce emissions, 2 to help reduce energy costs.
3 to help people sleep better.

This is where recycling glass will help.

dude calm down all you need is to keep globally warning until the ambient temperatures are averaging around 300 K and nobody will need any additionally heated water ever again

SCIENCE said:

dude calm down all you need is to keep globally warning until the ambient temperatures are averaging around 300 K and nobody will need any additionally heated water ever again

fuck Sydney and Perth the bastards

Lies, Everyone

Knows That Only Causing Winter To Become Summer Will Increase Food Production Adequately to Provide For Capitalist Consumption

So uh if every daily maximum this week is above the long term average daily maximum for summer months here does that mean we’re fucked¿

SCIENCE said:

So uh if every daily maximum this week is above the long term average daily maximum for summer months here does that mean we’re fucked¿

Nah. I’ll have frosts next week.

This is just the foreplay.

SCIENCE said:

Wot Dat?

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

Wot Dat?

not gravel

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-31/greece-extreme-weather-causes-mass-fish-die-off/104294834

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

Wot Dat?

not gravel

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-31/greece-extreme-weather-causes-mass-fish-die-off/104294834

So the rest of the world is feeling it as well.

roughbarked said:

SCIENCE said:

roughbarked said:

Wot Dat?

not gravel

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-31/greece-extreme-weather-causes-mass-fish-die-off/104294834

So the rest of the world is feeling it as well.

LOL

all lies

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/summer-2024-is-the-hottest-on-record/104321626