Global Warming
 

I have quite a simple question really - do you believe that this is a Real Thing, and that we have to get off of our fat asses and do something about it Right Now; or do you believe that it is just so much scaremongering by scientists and that so called global warming is nothing more than a naturally occuring process that would be happening if we were here or not?

Real Thing. In any case, it can't be a bad idea to do something...

Indeed. Even ignoring every other reason and making it a purely economic argument, the cost of global warming even in the relatively short term (the next few decades, say) vastly vastly outweighs the cost of taking steps to retard its progress.

Indeedo-wap.

And how do you "retard its progress," exactly? I can't figure out how. Even if you could somehow stop all fossil fuel consumption right now, it'd still take decades for the atmosphere to recover, right?

I'm still a little annoyed that the vast majority of alternative fuel sources and more efficient car designs have been shot in the cradle by the oil industry and their squadrons of lobbyists and lawyers. Oil makes them rich NOW, so they want to keep making money NOW, because the consequences will happen LATER. It's absolutely insane.

On a side note, am I misinformed by my impression that nuclear power has gotten a lot safer lately, but the politicians still won't embrace it as much as Europe does because they're afraid of public opinion. All we need them to say is, "Nuclear power is so safe that if we were to convert over and only use gas for cars, the price would drop to a buck a gallon and our energy bills would be cut in half," and we'd have the masses swarming every state capital BEGGING for nuclear power, right?

I think it's must be something real. I can't believe all the stuff we do to the Earth won't have some bad effects. I think it might be a little overstated. I mean, I've read about the 'mini iceage' in the 17th-18th century, when the river Thames froze over for a number of years each winter. I guess sometimes things can be weird on their own. Evertime we have a hot summer in England some people says it's because of 'Global Warming' - couldn't it just be a hot summer?
But on the other hand there is all the evidence about the ice in Greenland melting much quicker...So something must be up!

Not just the atmosphere, but the entire global climate. And it's not about recovery, as such, but more about equillibrium. It's not possible to reduce our impact on the environment to nothing, but it is possible to drastically reduce it. If it takes decades, or longer, for things to stabilize, then so be it - just because it might take a long time is no reason not to do something about it. Some people seem to think that it is though, and unfortunatley a lot of those who are in a position to actually do something think that way (including it seems the current occupant of the White House). There isn't much chance that the public as a whole is going to suddenly wake up one day and thing "Hey, we need to do something about this" simply because the effects of wuch action would impact on what has really become an unsustainable way of life. No more disposable consumer culture, no more cheap flights abroad, no more three-car households - it's hard to see beyond that now to it's inevitable consequence.

You're absolutely right about the oil business. Our global civilisation is based on the consumption of crude oil products. The oil companies know this, and even though some of them are now making small moves in the direction of renewables, the sort of serious persuit that's really needed right now just isn't happening. The oil business won't do anything, so governments must, and fortunately some are (notably Germany and China).

Nuclear is a tricky option at best - France is probably the only country in the EU to actively embrace it - but despite public opinion being mostly firmly against it, it is unforunately something that we're going to have to rely more on anyway. The kicker is and always has been waste. It's got to go somewhere, but nobody wants it next to them. It's the lesser of two evils though, and that's only ever the logical choice to make.

There is such a thing as natural climate change, of course, but the long and the short of it is that human activity is short circuiting in just a few hundred years shifts that usually take place in tens of thousands of years, and no-one with even the tiniest grasp of reason could think that that's a good thing.

Greenland is worrying though. I read in New Scientist not so long ago that it's only in the last five or six years that the rate at which the ice sheet is melting has started to surpass its ability to reform - the critial point at which it becomes an unstoppable process could be as little as a century from now. Scary stuff, really.

I think global warming is very real, and while the world won't fall apart tomorrow, we definately need to do something about it now. As for nuclear power, I'm fully in favor. Recent developments in reactor technology can reduce waste dramatically, and I know some German scientists are working on artificially shortening the half-life of radioactive material so it "bleeds" off faster and doesn't need to be stored so long.

I really wish public opinion wasn't so dead-set against nuclear power. Most of the alternatives are actually far more dangerous to the environment. Everybody keeps talking Chernobyl, but the reactor design sucked, many safeguards were intentionally disabled, and on top of that we have good old humans mucking everything up. A modern reactor design is fail-safe and among the best-researched and understood machines we can possibly build.

But we also have to remember that we can't do everything with nuclear power - it's great for base load, but can't quickly be switched on, off or regulated for the peaks. Improved water and solar power should be able to cover a lot of this, though, especially since ultracapacitators are slowly becoming more practical - maybe we'll be able to eventually run the whole world of what's effectively a giant UPS...

Gatac

Nuclear power is also expensive to build, and while it may be clean for the most part, It creates a lot of water vapour which it releases into he atmosphere via cooling towers, and it also creates waste which at the moment we haven't the faintest idea what to do with.

I read recently that tidal power could provide up to 15% of the UK's energy requirements, it's regular, and it doesn't seem to have any adverse effects.

And what about biomass?

Biomass is a red herring as a fuel source (I'm counting biofuels in that). We'd literally need to cultivate every single acre of arable land on the globe, and even then we'd produce less than a tenth of our energy requirements. It sounds good for oil companies to say that they're researching it though.

That's one of the big counts against nuclear power - a huge chunk of the energy you've tapped is lost straight into the atmosphere as hot air. It does depend on the type of reactor, though the most predominant type is the pressurised water reactor which wastes something like 40% (though I could just be making that figure up). One of the plusses of nuclear reactor technology though is that not all waste is bad waste. The current state of reprocessing technology means that spent fuels can be turned into reprocessed uranium or MOX (mixed oxide fuel) with relatively little waste. Of course, that still needs to be disposed of, so it only really alleviates the problem rather than solves it.

Tidal power has great potential, as does wave power. There are a limited number of sites (in the UK at least) where it would be feasable to build tidal power facilities, and much like hydro the environmental impact has to be considered very carefully. Wave power, by contrast, doesn't have that restriction, but at the moment there are two big problems to overcome - firstly, it is a new technology, and most of the designs that have actually been built and tested have a tendency to fall to bits after a while. Secondly there's the matter of actually bringing the power ashore, which of course is also an issue with offshore windpower. It's all solvable stuff though, and certainly an avenue that must be explored further.

I do hate wind farms. They produce bugger all energy and look ugly. And the amount they produce differs from day to day.I don't see it as viable.

re: biomass - what about large hydroponic space stations? Then we could just have haulage between Earth and the stations...assuming we could find a green method of space travel...

One of the biggest problems with wind farms is that the best places to put them are in the Highlands, and a lot of that is covered by peat bog. That peat represents the biggest carbon store in the UK (certainly more than all our woodlands and forests), and if in the process of constructing turbines you have to displace serveral thousand tonnes of peat you've at a stroke negated the point of building them in the first place. There's also some controversy on how much impact they have on bird species, so that's another factor you've got to consider when siting them. That's not to say that wind power is totally without merit, of course - they're by far and away the most developed form of renewable energy we have available to us right now, (solar panels are terribly innefficient, and we just don't have the climate for them anyway). And of course, small scale wind turbines that you can stick on your roof have a lot of potential. You won't be self-sufficient, but your electricty bills will drop for certain (provided you live somewhere suitable, naturally).

We'd need a space elevator, pretty much, or else the sort of anti-gravity drive that Harry Harrison conjured up in his book The Daleth Effect.

Err...slingshot effect, maybe? Could you use that to escape Earth's gravity?

No, that's more something you'd use in passing, on your way from somewhere to somewhere else.

Or if you're trying to travel back in time to steal some whales.

You're worried about steam? At least it's not more carbon monoxide, right?

It's silly, really. If we were conservative about the CO2 we were creating now, using biomass as a sourse really wouldn't be that bad.

As for nuclear power being unsuitable for the irregular power consumption habits that we have, the answer is BATTERIES, or having a connected network of power plants shunting most of the energy to the nighttime half o the planet.

I have you have a misconception or two about power generation, Infinite Improbility. Battery storage on the scale you're talking about is not even remotely feasable - the closest thing we have to it are hydro-electric schemes where excess power is used to pump water up to high resevoirs, so that at peak demand you've essentially got an extra hydro plant to plug into the grid. We cannot store electricty directly, only indirectly on a very small scale using chemicals, which is why it must be generated.

As for "shunting" energy (or more accurately, shunting excess capacity), while that may be doable on a national scale, on a global scale it would be difficult to the point of impossibility. The <i>only</i> way that I can think of in which it could become possible would be if tomorrow somebody in a lab somewhere discovered a very cheap, easy to manufacture room-temperature superconductor (a material with zero electrical resistance, in other words), and the likelyhood of that happening is slim to none. How far you can "send" power over a grid is entirely governed by how much is lost in its' transmission - beyond a certain distance, it just becomes unfeasable. Add to that the cost of setting up a global grid system and not to mention getting everyone to agree to such a scheme in the first place, and we're pretty much talking about something that could only happen in science fiction.

Power Storage: Yeah, big-ass water reservoirs are the best we can do now. In the future, you'd probably do well to use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, though, especially if we go for hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Power Transfer: Few power networks today are truly independant, and technically speaking, stuff like the European power system is as close to a single linked entity as feasible today, but it's still massively inefficient, and depends on a few high capacity links between countries rather than having a "mesh" over Europe. Of course, that'd be totally impractical, too.

For really long range, I read a long time ago that a focussed microwave beam would be your best bet to transfer energy long-range through an atmosphere, but that's basically require taking a deathbeam and bouncing it off a geostationary satellite to be really long range. (Or use a massive solar satellite and beam down the power from there...)

Solar Power: For a typical household, solar power is not nearly efficient enough, but there are people who do live "off the grid", literally - several custom-made mobile homes can be run almost entirely from solar for their electrical power, and there's also a large share of biodiesel enthusiasts in that crowd.

On the other end of the scale, there are plans to build massive solar towers - basically, very big vertical turbines surrounded by a couple square miles of sealed solar panels. The power would come from both the photovoltaic panels and the wind generated by the heated air under the panels travelling towards the tower in the center and streaming upwards through the turbine. Cost estimates place that at about 250 million dollars initial investment, but the big draw is that would be easy and cheap to maintain.

Gatac

So what's wrong with death beams to satellites? We miss, no one's hurt. It works, we can shoot it back down.

There are other forms of energy storage than simple acid batteries. I'm all for water fuel cells.

Do we need to pick just one? I'm pretty split on the issue. On the one hand, the arguments that global warming is happening are obviously pretty strong, or they wouldn't have so many top scientists convinced. I think the counterarguments are too often written off, but in a way it doesn't matter. What's at issue is how much harm is being done -- no one claims that pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is a good thing or that working to lessen the damage isn't a worthy goal.

On the other hand, there are very good reasons to think that measures like the Kyoto Accord are both unrealistic and unlikely to make a difference. That makes it hard to justify the economic cost. It isn't a black-and-white issue. And I don't like the scare tactics -- no matter who's right about this, and no matter what's done, we're not all going to drown the day after tomorrow.