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TLP
climber
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Mar 27, 2019 - 08:05pm PT
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^+100. You are so right about this issue. It's the same basic issue as climate: widespread smaller contributions of pollutants that cumulatively are seriously bad.
And it has already reached the oceans: see Gulf of Mexico, huge dead zone from the agricultural pollution of the Mississippi. Also the case in Asia where large areas of reefs which are the nurseries for the fish they depend on have been destroyed by nutrient pollution. I've seen that first hand: miles of dead coral draped with green glop.
It's hard to be optimistic about anything being done about fertilizer pollution until some rich people (that is, owners of the political system) find that beautiful green paint on their vacation home doorsteps. Like in Florida for instance.
Spot on post. Great images.
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TradMike
Trad climber
Cincinnati, Ohio
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Mar 29, 2019 - 07:25am PT
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^
Now we just need the following to charge those planes. The only feasible solution that has a chance to get to the level of energy needed is a fusion reactor.
We currently have the technology and ability to prevent nitrate runoff from farms and sewage. It will take a lot of money to retrofit all the sewer systems and a lot of land to fix the nitrate runoff problem.
I wonder which of these two races to prevent our apocalypse we will win? And to be fair, I have not seen either side of the political spectrum bring the nitrate problem to attention. CO2 is the red herring in this match. Nitrates will kill us quicker. The UN even misleads people by using the 20 or 100 year decay scale to make methane look less of a problem and blame CO2 mostly when methane is probably worse. Well that is all I hear in the media, evil CO2. Yes CO2 is bad but watch out for the left hook (Nitrates and Methane), knockout.
The "Save The World New Deal" must address: Nitrates, Methane and CO2 or we are all doomed.
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Mar 29, 2019 - 11:38am PT
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Trad,
Fusion reactors have been 30 years away for nearly 50 years. I don't see that changing.
Not sure where you are getting your ideas and how much is sincere versus trying to stir things up.
I agree that overpopulation is a problem as are nitrates and many other forms of pollution. Humans aren't going to have to worry about not enough oxygen in the air. By the time there were enough changes that oxygen levels dropped that far, I"m pretty sure all the humans would already be gone.
Solar and wind are proven technologies that can be rolled out now and are scalable.
Fusion is the sort of thing that you spend $30 billion over 20 years and still don't have anything producing more power than it consumes.
I'm not knee-jerk opposed to the current nuclear energy, but developed countries don't seem to have the political will to build them in a cost effective and timely manner. The places like China that can build them in a cost effective manner probably shouldn't. Wouldn't surprise me to see China have a Chernobyl style accident. Even the Japanese can't run their nuclear industry in a safe manner.
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TradMike
Trad climber
Cincinnati, Ohio
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Mar 29, 2019 - 03:42pm PT
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I am not trying to stir up anything. I see most of the right blind to our problems and I see the left proposing things that won't solve the problems while pushing an agenda and bandaids while the other major killers go unchecked. I am grasping for anything that will work for this population size. The nitrate timebomb is just starting since those are slow to leach out of the soil so even if we fix today they will continue to accelerate. I'd like to know the math on how much solar and wind power we would need for this population. It just doesn't seem like it is feasible at the surface. We'd need 652 Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Projects which is 500 square miles in size in prime wind zone by itself to power the US. I can't seem to find a decent solar calculation but they say only the desert southwest is feasible. I guess I am hoping on a Hail Mary in the fusion reactor. MIT says they can have a functioning 100 megawatt reactor by 2025. It may only be 1/50 of a nuke plant but scalable and would be 100 times better than wind power.
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EdwardT
Trad climber
Retired
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A judge has ruled in favor of environmental groups in their effort to block the Trump administration’s push to re-open large portions of Arctic waters to oil drilling.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason, in an opinion released late Friday, said President Donald Trump exceeded his authority by issuing an executive order in 2017 that reopened large parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas to offshore oil leasing. Former President Barack Obama had protected those areas from development in his second term.
The decision once again puts the vast majority of the Arctic Ocean and parts of the Atlantic off-limits to oil development.
https://www.alaskapublic.org/2019/03/29/judge-blocks-trump-administration-move-to-undo-obama-ban-on-arctic-oil-leasing/
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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I'd like to know the math on how much solar and wind power we would need for this population. It just doesn't seem like it is feasible at the surface. We'd need 652 Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Projects which is 500 square miles in size in prime wind zone by itself to power the US. I can't seem to find a decent solar calculation but they say only the desert southwest is feasible. I guess I am hoping on a Hail Mary in the fusion reactor. MIT says they can have a functioning 100 megawatt reactor by 2025. It may only be 1/50 of a nuke plant but scalable and would be 100 times better than wind power.
And I would be happy to bet my life savings that a 100 megawatt reactor isn't going to be built by 2025.
The wealthy world can't even build conventional nuclear power plants and that is using proven technology.
Check out the mess that is Hinkley Point C in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station
The US has cancelled almost all the new nuclear that was going to happen under the alleged 'nuclear renaissance'.
Fusion is not even a proven technology. A limited research budget is fine but a Hail Mary? No.
There is a tremendous amount of 'land' that solar could be built on if you look at rooftops and parking lots.
Wind generation has a lot of untapped potential offshore. There is still a lot of wind power that could be developed in the great plains states (start in Austin and go north to the Dakotas).
To take advantage of this, the country should invest in some large scale, long distance power lines. The politics of land ownership make this difficult, but I believe it is far more doable than fusion power.
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clifff
Mountain climber
golden, rollin hills of California
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On March 31, 2019, 12:00 UTC, the Arctic was 7.7°C or 13.86°F warmer than 1979-2000, as above image shows, while in parts of Alaska the anomaly was at the top end of the scale, i.e. 30°C or 54°F above 1979-2000, as discussed in an earlier post.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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"If the president and his crew of climate deniers have their way and a fossil-fuelized version of energy “dominance” comes to rule our American world, while the path to alternative energy growth is crippled,..."
Hasn't this already been happening for 30+ years? Is trump different than shrub?
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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The Helms Project at Courtwright Reservoir is California's best example of which I have heard of pumped hydro.
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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The Helms Project at Courtwright Reservoir is California's best example of which I have heard of pumped hydro.
This was built to basically be the battery for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. While the plant runs all night but there is minimal drain to the community, that extra power was sent to Courtright to pump water from Wishon back up to Courtright so that it could be drained again during the following day to make more power. Pretty clever.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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LADWP wants a pumped hydro project on the Colorado river.
(just about what I suggested in this forum in 2012).
Details are few. It looks like it would run between Hoover Dam and the upper part of Lake Mohave (the next reservoir 20 miles downstream from Lake Mead). A pump station at the upper part of Lake Mohave would pump the water into an underground pipeline for the uphill return trip.
this article has some info and some speculation.
http://euanmearns.com/the-hoover-dam-pumped-hydro-proposal/ I suspect it is incorrect (as others post in the comments) to think LA is planning to pump more uphill than would go through the turbines going downhill. Maybe they will add more turbines. Or maybe the details are still farfetched.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-glaciers-melting-20190408-story.html
Earth's glaciers are melting much faster than scientists thought. A new study shows they are losing 369 billion tons of snow and ice each year, more than half of that in North America.
The most comprehensive measurement of glaciers worldwide found that thousands of inland masses of snow compressed into ice are shrinking 18% faster than an international panel of scientists calculated in 2013.
The world's glaciers are shrinking five times faster now than they were in the 1960s. Their melt is accelerating because of global warming, and adding more water to already rising seas, the study found.
"Over 30 years suddenly almost all regions started losing mass at the same time," said lead author Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich. "That's clearly climate change if you look at the global picture."
The glaciers shrinking fastest are in central Europe, the Caucasus region, western Canada, the U.S. Lower 48 states, New Zealand and near the tropics. Glaciers in these places on average are losing more than 1% of their mass each year, according to a study in Monday's journal Nature.
"In these regions, at the current glacier loss rate, the glaciers will not survive the century," Zemp said.
Zemp's team used ground and satellite measurements to look at 19,000 glaciers, far more than previous studies. They determined that southwestern Asia is the only region of 19 where glaciers are not shrinking, which Zemp said is due to local climate conditions.
Since 1961, the world has lost 10.6 trillion tons of ice and snow, the study found. That's enough to cover the Lower 48 states in about 4 feet of ice.
Scientists have known for a long time that global warming caused by human activities like burning coal, gasoline and diesel for electricity and transportation is making Earth lose its ice. They have been especially concerned with the large ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica.
This study "is telling us there's much more to the story," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., who wasn't part of the study. "The influence of glaciers on sea level is bigger than we thought."
A number of factors are making sea levels rise. The biggest cause is that oceans are getting warmer, which makes water expand. The new figures show glacier melt is a bigger contributor than thought, responsible for about 25% to 30% of the yearly rise in oceans, Zemp said.
Rising seas threaten coastal cities around the world and put more people at risk of flooding during storms.
Glaciers grow in winter and shrink in summer, but as the Earth has warmed, they are growing less and shrinking more. Zemp said warmer summer temperatures are the main reason glaciers are shrinking faster.
While people think of glaciers as polar issues, shrinking mountain glaciers closer to the equator can cause serious problems for people who depend on them, said Twila Moon, a snow and ice data center scientist who also wasn't part of the study. She said people in the Andes, for example, rely on the glaciers for drinking and irrigation water each summer.
A separate study Monday in Environmental Research Letters confirmed faster melting and other changes in the Arctic. It found that in winter, the Arctic is warming 2.8 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. Overall, the region is getting more humid, cloudier and wetter.
"It's on steroids, it's hyperactive," said lead author Jason Box, a scientist for the Danish Meteorological Institute.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 13, 2019 - 07:30am PT
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Soooo boring here.
Just tons of copy paste
I miss Ron Anderson and the "Cheif" etal lol.
They made it wild, lol.
Now just basically one guy typing boring sterile dry copy paste all day every day.
You gross materialists ultimately sterilize everything until there's no life itself left .....
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