Environmental Collapse: when and how bad?

[noel emits]

Finally, can we drop the cold fusion/zero-point stuff?

Who do you work for?

Obviously if I was serious about those things I would have mentioned them first. But still, it is not at all unlikely that large energy suppliers with enormous vested interests in exploiting fossil fuels would attempt to stall the introduction of alternative sources of power.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm a physicist. That means I have a better idea of the scientific feasibility of these concepts than most people on here. I'm not politically naive either, I'm sure loads of great ideas have been squashed by vested interests - more efficient engines, electric cars and so on - but given that I actually know a little bit about these 'free energy' concepts, the most likely reason we're not all using them is that they don't work.

 

[nomadologist]

regardless of the science of co2 emissions and their ability to effect rapid change (or even bring on an ice age like some are claiming), i think we need to do a LOT MORE than the republicans will do. please don't let them fool you into thinking they care because they're acknowledging an obvious fact about a climate change that's occurring. they care about having control of the cash/energy flow when the current system falls apart.

"An Inconvenient Truth" might be great, but I have a hard time believing there is not "one" paper that has an alternate theory on the climate change. Especially because a quick google search tells you that's not true.

Mr. Tea what do physicists think about ethanol fuel for cars? Haven't talked to a scientist about taht, except my dad briefly. He tells me it's not as easy as it sounds, but I didn't get the full story...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Dunno about ethanol-fuelled cars, that's not really my area - it sounds like a great idea though.
Not that ZPE or cold fusion really *are* my areas, but I say they can't be used for free energy because I think the science itself is unsound. With an ethanol car you're still just burning a hydrocarbon in some kind of internal combustion engine (I assume), so whether it works or not is going to be down to nitty-gritty engineering details. ZPE, in our current understanding, is a non-starter *on principle* - it doesn't even get off the blackboard.

Hydrogen fuel cells could be very big though, as long as the storage technology is efficient and safe enough. That's about the only way electric cars are going to be worthwhile. Still, you have to get the electricity from somewhere, so whether it's a 'green' technology or not depends entirely on your power source.

 

[nomadologist]

my dad was an inorganic chemist for a long time who worked for the Zinc Corporation of America. he used to get fuming mad at people who would get self-righteous about recycling and cite Al Gore on energy. in the mining industries, it's well-known that the Gore family's money comes from centuries worth of mining for coal and other less environmentally friendly matter. when Clinton flooded the global zinc market with something crazy (like 300 tons) of zinc at less than half the going rate, zinc mines in the Americas were forced to shut down. the initiatives the Gores proposed to restrict mining and make it cleaner didn't extend to their own corner of the industry, funnily enough.

 

[gek-opel]

Mr Tea, you referred earlier in a delightful sleight of hand to the problems of nuclear fuel waste storage as being relatively easy to solve perhaps by means of nanotechnology!!!! I was under the understanding (perhaps false, you're the physicist) that nanotech was nowhere near developed enough yet to handle this... enlighten me please!

 

[nomadologist]

"Heat Mining"

http://www.slate.com/id/2158314/

 

[turtles]

"An Inconvenient Truth" might be great, but I have a hard time believing there is not "one" paper that has an alternate theory on the climate change. Especially because a quick google search tells you that's not true.

Yeah, I did a google scholar search out of interest and found the same thing, but who knows, maybe they had higher standards on what journals they considered.

Still, I did find this paper though that seems to pretty much sum up the arguments I was giving. I didn't actually read through the whole thing, but I did find this graph, which shows what I was talking about with CO2 emmisions. Off the chart indeed!

 

[Mr. Tea]

OK, to be quite honest I know vanishingly little about either nuclear waste disposal or nanotechnology. BUT nanotch is a real, honest-to-God science - a huge, multi-million pound London Centre for Nanotechnology was built last year about twenty yards from where I'm sitting, with my university as the main partner. There's no London Centre for Cold Fusion and there sure as hell isn't a London Centre for Zero-Point Energy. You see what I'm saying? People know nanomaterials have amazing properties, it's only a matter of time before their manufacture becomes cheap enough for them to be widely used in all sorts of civil engineering applications. So a comparison with ZPE (Edit: OK, so you didn't make a direct comparison - but I am...) is a bit like comparing a manned Mars mission to human settlement of the Andromeda galaxy.

 

[nomadologist]

heating mining, people! it's the wave of the future

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/23/us_study_urges_use_of_geothermal_energy/

http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think most of Iceland runs on that.
Great for countries that have that as a natural resource.

 

[nomadologist]

sounds like with a little digging, a lot of countries could starting moving in that direction...

 

[nomadologist]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

 

[zhao]

interesting wiki entry a friend alerted me to. haven't yet thoroughly absorbed it, but seems very much relevent here:

Shutdown of thermohaline circulation

seems maybe europe may not be completely frozen by mid century after all!

 

[DigitalDjigit]

Ethanol is absolutely terrible as a car fuel. It's very inefficient to produce (for each 1 unit of energy you put in to produce it from corn you get out something like 1.5 at best...figures vary on this).

The other big problem is that there's just nowhere to grow all this extra biomass. I did a calculation for fun once which I didn't save and don't feel like doing at the moment. Basically I took Brazil's vehicle fleet numbers (Brazil runs most of their vehicle fleet on ethanol) and how much land is devoted to growing ethanol producing crops and how much ethanol they use. Then I took the US vehicle fleet numbers and oil consumption figures and calculated how much land it would require to substitute for that with ethanol. The result was something on the order of 30%-60% of all US arable land. Since we have to eat there's just no way to devote that much land to these new crops.

There are many other reasons why ethanol sucks: driving up food prices, environmental destruction from farming.

Nuclear doesn't solve the transporation problem.

What is needed is a complete restructuring of society: less sprawl, less energy use.

And energy/global warming is only part of the picture. What about the forests being destroyed for chopsticks. The acidification of the oceans. The stupendous amount of plastic in the oceans (see Harper's magazine from December I think for a great essay about this...it's the one with yellow ducks on the cover). The pollution of streams/land by heavy metals from all the electronics that are being discarded all the time. Habitat destruction to build roads/settlements. The drawdown of underground reservoirs due to using so much water in agriculture and because the glaciers are melting due to global warming leading to a world-wide water shortage soon (if not already).

 

[Mr. Tea]

All very good points, but we have to start somewhere. Global warming/climate change is undoubtably the biggest problem, in that it's potentially the most irreversible/longest-term problem (with the exception of species extinction, which is of course totally irreversible) and also because it affects all of us: if a certain country's streams are polluted, it affects that country and perhaps countries bordering it, but climate change is affecting the entire planet.

You're right, of course, but with a limited amount of political will I think carbon emmissions are the thing to try and tackle in the short term.

 

[DigitalDjigit]

Oh, yeah, no doubt it needs to be tackled. I am just saying that we are fucked anyway.

Isn't that heroism? Fighting even though you are doomed?

 

[zhao]

there are still way too many factors involved to acurately predict exactly how bad we, and our children, will have it. for instance the thermohaline circulation article demonstrates a probability previously not considered -- but as a friend said yesterday: we must prepare for the worst and hope that it doesn't come to pass. I guess.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Oh, yeah, no doubt it needs to be tackled. I am just saying that we are fucked anyway.

Isn't that heroism? Fighting even though you are doomed?

This attitude is exactly what I talked about earlier when I mentioned the dangers of hopelessness. Someone who's convinced we've irreversibly fucked up the planet already is no more use to the discussion than someone burying their head in the sand and denying climate change is anything to do with us.

 

[DigitalDjigit]

I am not hopeless. I just realise the odds are stacked against us. It's like those guys who are besieged but still fight to the last man. I am not saying we should give up at all. I am just trying to point out the tragic dimension here.