The Environmental thread + Conventional (HI-FI) wisdom is almost always invariably wrong

[esldude]

7 hours ago, charlesphoto said:

 

Give me/us a break with the 'fake news' meme. Electing a real estate mob family to the WH with a corrupt Senate (two words: Merrick Garland) is a recipe for disaster - and as near this country has or will come to dictatorship (a wanna be one at the least) - so of course the NYT etc is going to report it like it is, not like the Trumpers believe it should be. 

That would be fine if the NYT reported it like it is.  Instead they report it like the leftist politicians are wanting it to be. 

[semente]

Just now, esldude said:

Unfortunately quality investigative journalism doesn't describe the NYT of recent years.  It is more of a mouthpiece of biased propaganda for one political side.  Unfortunately so is Fox news for the other side.  

 

I chose the NYT because it was the first US paper to come up on google, don't read any American newspapers or watch American news channels (did watch Jon Stewart's show).

 

I could have linked The Independent, The Guardian, The BBC...

[Paul R]

49 minutes ago, semente said:

 

We could move nuclear waste to the Moon. I've read it's going to set itself free from the Earth at some point...

 

 

The easiest way to get rid of nuisance nuclear waste is to encase it in glass and drop it in a subduction zone. But there are other ways. Shipping costs to the moon would be frightful! 

 

The real answer though is to start finding other power sources. Maybe it is time to revive the idea of space based power stations, and work really hard on nuclear fusion. Both clean, high-density energy sources. 

[Paul R]

3 hours ago, semente said:

 

We're four at home and I'm on a part-time job at the moment and my wife's been finishing her DPhil so I have to do a bit of juggling around with supermarket discounts. My children never had candy or soft-drinks or junk food and they seem happy without all of it. They also only get gifts for birthdays, Christmas and as rewards for their school performance. The youngest inherits most of his brother's clothes.

 

As I've said, people eat much larger portions than they need or should healthwise. If you size the meals adequately there'll be little or no waste. And the city council picks up the organic leftovers for composting. We've just been granted an allotment but that will take a while and some investment before it starts to bear fruit. A hail storm last week was not exactly helpful...

 

If you choose to live that way, it's great. But would you want someone to force you to live that way? 

 

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, Paul R said:

 

And I advise far more objectivity and research for you, snd with a wider scope. 

 

Paul - you should stick to something you have a t least a modicum of expertise in -- your comments on this topic merely show your ignorance.

[Paul R]

56 minutes ago, esldude said:

Scrutiny and honest reporting yes.  That doesn't describe the NYT since Trump has been president.  Scrutiny and honest reporting wouldn't include deciding to oppose the presidents policy and control narratives in order to do that.  

 

I'm sure any president  wants to control the media at times.  Because they think it is hampering efforts they believe in.  I'm not for that.  But scrutiny and honest journalistic reporting is what should happen.  Any news organization of course has to decide what to report on.  

 

I believe that people said the same thing about the Post when Carl and Bob let loose on the Watergate story? 

 

Time will tell. I certainly think there is some editorial bias there, but their reporting on Trump is not significantly different from any other major news source. Save of course, for Fox. (IMHO, YMMV, etc.) 

 

 

[semente]

This was appropriately playing on Radio 4 just now:

 

A Saga of Trying (and Failing) to Save the Planet

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005mpm

 

We have known about climate change for a very long time. Prof Alice Roberts digs deep in the radio archives to find out what we could, should and still can do to save our planet.

 

As a palaeontologist, Professor Alice Roberts knows a lot about mass extinctions. As part of Radio 4's 'Costing the Earth’ team, she’s also heard a lot about the many potential solutions to our current planetary predicament. Some are already proven: we know what we have to do to de-carbonise so why are we still rushing towards the environmental apocalypse faster than Elon Musk’s low carbon Hyperloop transporter AKA the ‘barf ride’? To find out how best we get to zero carbon nirvana, Alice looks back at which great green plans have worked and which remain in the lab. What has really changed in the 40 years since 'climate change' began to be discussed by world leaders, and can the environmental archive tell us what we need to do about it?

Alongside some of the serious and real achievements such as fewer plastic bags, incredible advances in renewable energy and electric cars which work, Alice explores some of the more radical ideas in the archive. Why, in the future, might we stop having pets or multiple children? For the answer we can delve back to 'Costing the Earth' in 2010. To keep emissions below 2 degrees we might be eating insects, riding around in airships or holidaying on cruise ships propelled by kite. Or we might have finally figured out how to make carbon capture and storage economical, cracked the fusion power conundrum and found a way to make our waste work for us.

By looking back at campaigns and ideas which have really worked, Alice hopes to find some suggestions for how we should proceed before it's too late.

[semente]

8 minutes ago, Paul R said:

 

If you choose to live that way, it's great. But would you want someone to force you to live that way? 

 

 

It's not like I am starving. I just don't stuff myself to a diabetic high blood pressure chronic kidney and liver overweight snoring stroke.

[Paul R]

4 minutes ago, semente said:

This was appropriately playing on Radio 4 just now:

 

A Saga of Trying (and Failing) to Save the Planet

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005mpm

 

We have known about climate change for a very long time. Prof Alice Roberts digs deep in the radio archives to find out what we could, should and still can do to save our planet.

 

As a palaeontologist, Professor Alice Roberts knows a lot about mass extinctions. As part of Radio 4's 'Costing the Earth’ team, she’s also heard a lot about the many potential solutions to our current planetary predicament. Some are already proven: we know what we have to do to de-carbonise so why are we still rushing towards the environmental apocalypse faster than Elon Musk’s low carbon Hyperloop transporter AKA the ‘barf ride’? To find out how best we get to zero carbon nirvana, Alice looks back at which great green plans have worked and which remain in the lab. What has really changed in the 40 years since 'climate change' began to be discussed by world leaders, and can the environmental archive tell us what we need to do about it?

Alongside some of the serious and real achievements such as fewer plastic bags, incredible advances in renewable energy and electric cars which work, Alice explores some of the more radical ideas in the archive. Why, in the future, might we stop having pets or multiple children? For the answer we can delve back to 'Costing the Earth' in 2010. To keep emissions below 2 degrees we might be eating insects, riding around in airships or holidaying on cruise ships propelled by kite. Or we might have finally figured out how to make carbon capture and storage economical, cracked the fusion power conundrum and found a way to make our waste work for us.

By looking back at campaigns and ideas which have really worked, Alice hopes to find some suggestions for how we should proceed before it's too late.

5

 

I know it sounds stupid, but is there a transcript of this available? I had a bit of trouble with the thick accent.  

 

-Paul 

 

[Paul R]

5 minutes ago, semente said:

 

It's not like I am starving. I just don't stuff myself to a diabetic chronic overweight snoring stroke.

 

Which is good. But would you like it if someone told you it was the law you could only live as you live today? If you want to make changes, say adding a dog to the mix, you cannot do that and there is no option for you do so - even if you were to move to the country? 

 

By the way, most Americans do not eat themselves into a diabetic chronic overweight snoring stroke. We stress ourselves into that with overwork and worrying about paying taxes and medical bills. We then over exercise to make up for the smoking and drinking we do to relieve the stress and avoid over eating.  

 

 

[semente]

13 minutes ago, Paul R said:

 

I know it sounds stupid, but is there a transcript of this available? I had a bit of trouble with the thick accent.  

 

-Paul 

 

 

There was an article not long ago about foreign people living in the UK understanding themselves when communicating in English amongst themselves but not the locals. 😂

When I first started working here I had trouble understanding most of my colleagues...

[Ralf11]

31 minutes ago, Paul R said:

 

Well, we both agree neither one of us wants to listen to an idiot. I certainly do not care to listen to you.

 

Please crawl back under whatever rock you came out from under with your arrogant attitude and inane personal attacks on me. Far better if you leave the civilized folks to discuss things with intelligent reason instead of - whatever it is you are showing. 

 

 

 

You would be well advised to post on something you know about and stop with your childish name-calling of scientists working in an area you do not understand.

 

You are hardly an exemplar of intelligent reason.

[esldude]

47 minutes ago, semente said:

This was appropriately playing on Radio 4 just now:

 

A Saga of Trying (and Failing) to Save the Planet

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005mpm

 

We have known about climate change for a very long time. Prof Alice Roberts digs deep in the radio archives to find out what we could, should and still can do to save our planet.

 

As a palaeontologist, Professor Alice Roberts knows a lot about mass extinctions. As part of Radio 4's 'Costing the Earth’ team, she’s also heard a lot about the many potential solutions to our current planetary predicament. Some are already proven: we know what we have to do to de-carbonise so why are we still rushing towards the environmental apocalypse faster than Elon Musk’s low carbon Hyperloop transporter AKA the ‘barf ride’? To find out how best we get to zero carbon nirvana, Alice looks back at which great green plans have worked and which remain in the lab. What has really changed in the 40 years since 'climate change' began to be discussed by world leaders, and can the environmental archive tell us what we need to do about it?

Alongside some of the serious and real achievements such as fewer plastic bags, incredible advances in renewable energy and electric cars which work, Alice explores some of the more radical ideas in the archive. Why, in the future, might we stop having pets or multiple children? For the answer we can delve back to 'Costing the Earth' in 2010. To keep emissions below 2 degrees we might be eating insects, riding around in airships or holidaying on cruise ships propelled by kite. Or we might have finally figured out how to make carbon capture and storage economical, cracked the fusion power conundrum and found a way to make our waste work for us.

By looking back at campaigns and ideas which have really worked, Alice hopes to find some suggestions for how we should proceed before it's too late.

I can add a few possibilities too.  But you stop at the point where it gets interesting.  What worked, what is a solution going forward?  Not a total solution, but what things are workable and in need of doing? Maybe the 1hr long podcast goes into that.  I didn't listen to it yet.  A transcript would be nicer. 

 

We know we have to de-carbonize which hasn't been news for about 30 years at least.  Now what to do?  And you have to get people on board.  Do we have more people and no pets or do we have pets and fewer people?  In the USA there have been fairly incredible advances in the efficiency and power of IC engines for cars and trucks.  But what has happened?  They use that efficiency to build larger and larger vehicles that are about as consuming of gasoline as the old ones.  And those are the vehicles that have sold.  Easy to say we should have fuel economy standards (we should) etc. etc., but that hasn't worked politically or in the marketplace.  I was pissed off with the unfairness of the Cash for Clunkers deal.  For those not in the USA, the gov't gave a nice big  several thousand dollar discount if you turned in an old gas guzzler and purchased something new getting at least 20% better mileage.  Of course there were limits, if your current car had a mileage rating above a certain number you didn't qualify.  So at the time I had a 17 year old car that was in need of replacement, but it had an EPA rating too high to qualify.  So there were people getting thousands of dollars to turn in a vehicle buy an even larger one that was just slightly better than the old one and that got about half the mileage of the car I had.  I felt like they had rewarded wasteful people and punishing those who had been frugal with fuel like myself.  I understood why, and yet it didn't sit well with me.  It was probably a good program.  Oil consumption has somewhat been reigned in compared to past growth in the US and that was an important piece that started to turn the corner.  It is unclear if it was overall a benefit economically.  

 

 

[lucretius]

21 minutes ago, esldude said:

I felt like they had rewarded wasteful people and punishing those who had been frugal with fuel like myself.

 

Communism, I tell ya!

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

I can add a few possibilities too.  But you stop at the point where it gets interesting.  What worked, what is a solution going forward?  Not a total solution, but what things are workable and in need of doing? Maybe the 1hr long podcast goes into that.  I didn't listen to it yet.  A transcript would be nicer. 

 

We know we have to de-carbonize which hasn't been news for about 30 years at least.  Now what to do?  And you have to get people on board.  Do we have more people and no pets or do we have pets and fewer people?  In the USA there have been fairly incredible advances in the efficiency and power of IC engines for cars and trucks.  But what has happened?  They use that efficiency to build larger and larger vehicles that are about as consuming of gasoline as the old ones.  And those are the vehicles that have sold.  Easy to say we should have fuel economy standards (we should) etc. etc., but that hasn't worked politically or in the marketplace.  I was pissed off with the unfairness of the Cash for Clunkers deal.  For those not in the USA, the gov't gave a nice big  several thousand dollar discount if you turned in an old gas guzzler and purchased something new getting at least 20% better mileage.  Of course there were limits, if your current car had a mileage rating above a certain number you didn't qualify.  So at the time I had a 17 year old car that was in need of replacement, but it had an EPA rating too high to qualify.  So there were people getting thousands of dollars to turn in a vehicle buy an even larger one that was just slightly better than the old one and that got about half the mileage of the car I had.  I felt like they had rewarded wasteful people and punishing those who had been frugal with fuel like myself.  I understood why, and yet it didn't sit well with me.  It was probably a good program.  Oil consumption has somewhat been reigned in compared to past growth in the US and that was an important piece that started to turn the corner.  It is unclear if it was overall a benefit economically.  

 

 

 

it's not too hard to put PV panels on every rooftop; EVs are not too much more difficult

 

then there are things like deforestation, termite proliferation, etc. which are harder

 

emissions from cattle are controllable as most US herds are in CAFOs, so you can put a roof over the ones w/o roofs, then collect the methane for use (instead of venting into the atmosphere)

 

these are all ways to reduce the effects, but as I noted before you cannot get around the 35-40 yr lag time w/o removing CO2 )and lots of it) from the atmosphere, something that is not currently feasible

 

we are left with retreating from coastal areas (or building differently a la Venice) in places rich enough to do so - Miami and S. Manhattan (for example, the big Wall St. firms have already moved HVAC and other critical systems from the basements to the rooftops - after Sandy)

 

we will need to shift food resources (no more oysters, but plenty of crabs); forests will convert to grassland and desert - a process already underway

 

humans displaced by climate disruption will migrate north (from Africa to Europe, from S/C Amer. to the US) if they can

 

other animals will migrate north too - disease vectors, parasites, etc.

 

societies in the hardest hit areas will be increasingly vulnerable and conflicts, including war will increase - DoD has some very fun reading on this

 

[sandyk]

28 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

emissions from cattle are controllable as most US herds are in CAFOs, so you can put a roof over the ones w/o roofs, then collect the methane for use (instead of venting into the atmosphere)

 

 If the level of Methane is high enough to be collected, then surely it must also adversely affect the cattle ? 

[esldude]

2 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

it's not too hard to put PV panels on every rooftop; EVs are not too much more difficult

 

then there are things like deforestation, termite proliferation, etc. which are harder

 

emissions from cattle are controllable as most US herds are in CAFOs, so you can put a roof over the ones w/o roofs, then collect the methane for use (instead of venting into the atmosphere)

 

these are all ways to reduce the effects, but as I noted before you cannot get around the 35-40 yr lag time w/o removing CO2 )and lots of it) from the atmosphere, something that is not currently feasible

 

we are left with retreating from coastal areas (or building differently a la Venice) in places rich enough to do so - Miami and S. Manhattan (for example, the big Wall St. firms have already moved HVAC and other critical systems from the basements to the rooftops - after Sandy)

 

we will need to shift food resources (no more oysters, but plenty of crabs); forests will convert to grassland and desert - a process already underway

 

humans displaced by climate disruption will migrate north (from Africa to Europe, from S/C Amer. to the US) if they can

 

other animals will migrate north too - disease vectors, parasites, etc.

 

societies in the hardest hit areas will be increasingly vulnerable and conflicts, including war will increase - DoD has some very fun reading on this

 

Yes, I've read a few of the bits of DoD literature.  Always funny to have a Republican administration denying global warming is a thing while its military is planning for exactly that. 

[fas42]

1 hour ago, Paul R said:

Here's one I learned a long time ago, if you can not calculate it, you do not understand it. We certainly can model some climate change, but last I looked, the models cannot accurately model history. That really means the models are probably not going to have accurate predictions of the future either. They are not junk science, but they are not well done enough to bet the entire future on either. And when you expand that to ecological and economic effects - the models are the purest fantasy at the moment. Useful in politics though. 

 

 

On just that one point, it is trivially easy to find material online as to which direction the models are "going wrong" ... https://phys.org/news/2018-07-global-climate.html

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

Yes, I've read a few of the bits of DoD literature.  Always funny to have a Republican administration denying global warming is a thing while its military is planning for exactly that. 

 

 

Luckily, the "deep state" is too deep for the shallow to affect.

[STC]

And not to forget about how certain countries keep the environment safe and clean. 

 

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/malaysia-ship-tonnes-plastic-waste-foreign-nations-190528053903376.html

[PeterSt]

OK. So since our waste is separated (like for plastic) this now allows for easily collecting all this plastic, put it in containers and send ships with it out to e.g. Malaysia ?

Speaking about side effects ...

 

 

PS: In Bangladesh they now have Tidal too ? 

 

 

[Paul R]

53 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

chill muffy

 

you would not recognize real science if it bit you in the  butt

 

Perhaps not. I have no trouble at all recognizing bullshit though. 

 

 

[esldude]

Don't waste that manure.  Here is the answer.  Roofs not needed.  24 hrs runs a car or fridge it says.  Of course the energy use of a car and fridge are dramatically different.  So probably just dramatic info. From Argentina btw.

 

[Ralf11]

maybe you can ship the collected gas to Pompous Paul

[sandyk]

18 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

maybe you can ship the collected gas to Pompous Paul

 

That was a serious question, and as is so often the case you come back with a smart arse answer attacking another member,and appear to get away with it !