Why the water isn’t killing the fire?
Could be anything from sodium to calcium carbide to fluorine. :) Sodium makes hydrogen with water, carbide makes acetylene with water, and flouride just oxidizes water by grabbing hydrogen away from oxygen.
If the character’s plan is to try fascism next, I think they’re into fairly agressive substances. :P
While the article takes no solid position about the benefits and harms of alleviating global warming with solar geoengineering, it does correctly point out that discussion and governance of the subject is lacking.
Some hypothetical examples:
Case A:
Case B:
Case C:
Myself, I perceive this as a last resort. If reasonable measures don’t save the day, this is one of the less reasonable measures that could buy time. I would like people to research this, so that capability would exist. But I would not be easily convinced of the necessity of taking action, as long as alternatives remain.
Summary:
I keep wondering why he seems to have any chance at all. Guesses:
Obviously, society is not well. A healthy society should be able to recognize a confidence artist trying to con them.
Back to farming kale, then. :)
So it’s mainly asthma that people develop due to exposure to nitrogen oxide - and treating all the patients puts a considerable burden on society.
Unrelatedly, as a side note, I got curious about Portuguese cooking - for some reason the graphs show that cooking food in Portugal requires a three times higher percentage (30% as opposed to 10%) of overall energy consumption, implying either lower energy use for everything else, or higher energy use for cooking.
I wonder if there’s some secret sauce that is only made in Portugal and which is extremely energy-intensive? Or just a case of broken statistics…
I mean sure, if you’re at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications.
Currently, solar still makes economic sense, but from April to October. Lots of it was built rather fast, now the adoption is slowing since the grid can’t accept it everywhere.
Consequently, summer is when oil shale miners rest and prepare for the next season.
Since the goal is to get rid of mining oil shale, big plans exist to install a lot of wind power. Sadly, this has gone embarrassingly slow, and it cannot cover winter consumption, and there is not enough storage.
As a result, some companies and building out storage, but only enough to last a few hours.
…and in the next country southwards, there is a huge gas reservoir that could accept methane, enough to last the whole winter, but nobody has a good enough handle on methanation to renewably produce a considerable quantity and store it there. :o
With regard to reactors, it seems likely that getting one would take 10 years and the local country here doesn’t even have legislation built out for nuclear power. They’re drafting it. Starting from zero is quite slow.
That’s a pretty big gap to cover with spamming more panels. I would venture to guess: this approach would work up to latitude 45 or so.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-solar-radiation-d_1213.html
Where I live, in midwinter, the day is 6 hours long. Over here, wind turns more heads than solar. But yes, solar is riduculously quick to install.
Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.
Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.
Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week… that’s about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.
To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren’t fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There’s electrolysis and methanation, there’s iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there’s seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)…
…but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.
It is my personal opinion that a crossing is better emphasized with light from above. Snow cannot cover light.
As for bumps… there are bumps that work right (harm the suspension at speeds above the limit), and then there are bumps that harm the suspension at any speed. Road builders over here cannot seem to get them consistently right.
Also relevant: “Always shoot the messenger first.” :)
If news unsettles a person, and there’s a cognitive dissonance upon processing their world model (“everything OK with climate”) and sensory input (“another big freaking hurricane”) then if the person isn’t a model of rational thought and already has a fad for conspiracies…
…one might find it easier to add another conspiracy theory to one’s collection, as opposed to harder steps like refreshing one’s model of how the world functions. :o
Guy seems to be a walking disaster.
No matter whether he intends what he says or not, that’s definitely not how a presidential candidate should behave. If one wants to govern a country (as opposed to running it into ground), at the minimum one should not be ridiculous.
Last time, I recall, it took him a fairly long weaseling to use the border guard a bit, here and there. I don’t think the US military is eager to do his bidding, or cheerful about being drawn into his campaign.
Over here, in a different country on a whole different continent, the previous (now retired) commander of the defense forces had a habit of providing fact corrections when politicians lied, spinned or bluffed about defense. For a reason which didn’t need a detective to figure out, only conservative populists ended up on his shit list. :)
One of the conservative populists took being corrected so personally that he got into a social media confrontation with the general right before elections. Politologists later estimated that it was not beneficial at all to the politician involved. :)
Seems like a useful monitoring and accountability tool. :) Especially if its quantity estimates can be made accurate.
I think the study analyzed the footprint of the person, not the vehicle:
In this new study, the research team investigated whether consumers who purchase and drive such vehicles have a smaller carbon footprint than other consumers
The merits of electric vehicles are irrelevant to their study - and their study is irrelevant to the merits of electric vehicles.
So maybe they’re not lying (or maybe they are, if they made a direct claim about the power mix of the Finnish grid), but they’re definitely far from barking under the correct tree. They’re barking in a different forest, not of transport economy, but of wealth and consumption. :)
The proliferation of a new technology typically doesn’t start from poor people.
It starts from fanatics first. I built my first EV. It was crap, I cut it apart and sold the metal (environmental footprint: awful). Then I built my second EV. It drove around 10 000 km, but had to be retired due to metal fatigue (enviromental footprint: neutral at best, lesson learned: big).
I bought my third EV on a crashed vehicle auction. New front axle, stretching the frame back to correct dimensions… I drive it every day, but it’s a crap car that I’d not recommend to my worst enemy. :) Environmental footprint: positive, I can produce fuel for myself from April to October. But if the same vehicle would be used by someone who doesn’t produce (or buy) renewable power, the footprint would be less positive.
Anticipating the demise of my factory-made electric microcar, I am however building another EV. Again the footprint is negative, but I need information about how to easily manufacture one, and obtaining information has a cost in resources. :(
Meanwhile, of course, truly rich folks buy fancy and electronics-laden self-driving EVs which some then proceed to crash or mishandle due to lack of clue. People are like that and it will stick out in statistics.
IMHO: if they hadn’t bought an EV, they’d have bought another kind of status symbol and would have used it even more wastefully. What matters more is what the average person can and will do. And how do we influence the auto makers to produce less resource-intensive vehicles?
I have a solar panel that died. A piece or plywood flung by a storm went right through it, leaving a 30 cm “wound”.
Well, to be honest, it’s alive, just weaker - the panel remains suitable for pumping water on the field during muddy season. I wouldn’t take a good panel to such a bad place, but this panel, I have no worries about.
As for what happens when they really, really die - they get disassembled. The aluminum frame gets taken off and goes into metal recycling. Junction boxes go to where plastic goes - not a nice place. The glass and doped silicon go into a crushing mill, after which they get separated. The glass is easy to recycle, but the doped silicon is difficult to refine again to such a purity, so it likely won’t become a solar panel. But it’s a very small fraction of the panel’s mass.
Thank you. :)
Regarding c/offgrid - I would be willing to moderate it, since it’s a topic “close to home” for me (I’m off grid too).
But at the current moment, I’m not terribly active on Lemmy, I only log in once per day. It seems like a low-volume community, so I imagine that a moderator checking things once per day might be OK…
On individual scale, precisely that - a split type AC with one half indoors (or in a water tank) and the other half in an outdoor environement (air, water or ground).
If you’re extracting heat from the environment, the machine lets the working fluid evaporate into the outdoor heat exchanger and compresses it back into the indoor heat exchanger. If you’re cooling your premises - reverse that.
However, on a city scale, it’s like “you’ve got a lot of sewage at 30 C” -> “your heat pump is a large building” -> “your sewage outflow is now at 10 C, but your underground heat reservoir gets charged to 140 C (stays liquid because of water column pressure), and you spend much less energy pumping the heat than you would spend heating the water directly”.
This one didn’t have rocket boosters, but was also nice: :)
( it traveled 180 km on one charge, back in 2009 :D )
Very very impressive. :)