Climate Change(d)?

[Shadowy Man]

Three Mile Island put the kibosh on nuclear power. That plus antibody wanted to have a nuclear waste storage site in their state.

they’d much rather have fossil fuel waste spread across every state and nation on the earth.

There are the images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plus all the movies about apocalyptic scenarios and radiation beginning in the 40s 50s. Mutant zombies.

Exactly. Much better to be poisoned imperceptibly slowly rather than all at once. Human nature to not notice subtleties.

 

[bilby]

It's not just the fossil fuels, but pretty much all the easily mined anything will be gone.

No, it won't. It's all still here, and we have concentrated it in our cities. The next civilisation will have a bonanza of metals and resources wherever we had big cities, in deposits far richer, and far more accessible, than the natural ore bodies we mined it from.

Only the fossil fuels are gone.

 

[bilby]

That's always been an Achilles heel for nuclear, the need for external power to avoid a Fukushima.

If by "nuclear" you mean Generation I nuclear, like Fukushima Daichi.

Fukushima Daini, a Gen II facility literally next door, had no problems.

So by "always" you mean "up until the 1970s, but not since then".

 

[TSwizzle]

Three Mile Island put the kibosh on nuclear power. That plus antibody wanted to have a nuclear waste storage site in their state.

they’d much rather have fossil fuel waste spread across every state and nation on the earth.

Who is “they”?

 

[Swammerdami]

For a 1 degree C rise in temperature of the volume of water in the Gulf Of Mexico the increase in energy is approximately 9.7 gigaajoules. If all the energy was converted to work in 1 second it would be 9.7 gigawatts. Watts = Joules/second.

We did this three years ago, though using "Hiroshima" as the unit of energy rather than "gigajoule." I thought my post was hilarious, so will waste a pico-Hiroshima and post it again.

Let's Go Brandon!

Is this the crap headline I saw last year where it's like 50million Hiroshima bombs going off every hour or something? Absolute tosh.

I find it fun and relaxing to work with big numbers. I took this as a challenge.

• First off, the headline was 5 Hiroshima's per second which is a mere 18,000 Hiroshimas per hour. Was Mr. Swizzle inflating the figure to justify his "tosh" pronouncement? Nah, that would imply he dusted off his slide-rule to figure how many seconds there are in an hour. I think he just obfuscated to make it harder for any of us to double-check his "work."
• What does "tosh" mean anyway? Google shows me that it's either the comedian Daniel Dwight Tosh or
  tosh. / (tɒʃ) / noun. slang, mainly British nonsense; rubbish
  I *think* that means Mr. Swizzle thinks the 5-Hiroshima claim is false. Yayyy! We've finally gotten the inscrutable Mr. Swizzle to actually volunteer an (alleged) FACT! Yayyy!!
• Let's see. The Earth's oceans comprise 321,003,271 cubic miles. That's a lot of water! We'll have to drop quite a few A-bombs to warm it up. (Why aren't we using H-bombs for this chore?) One sig-fig is good enough for us; the oceans are 1.3 sextillion liters. (Those are American sextillions; the oceans have just 1300 trillion liters with old French numbering.
  Now what do we do? Multiply by Avogadro's number or something?
• Google also shows us that there is a gram of gold in every 100 million tonnes of sea water! Does that work out to 30 million atoms per gram of swallowed seawater? Should we be panning our shit for gold after visiting the beach?
  Anyway, this is all a red herring. We'd have to integrate over sea depth since temperature rise diminishes with depth.
• Ten parts per trillion isn't much, but that's still about 20 million tons of gold altogether. A fellow could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with that much gold. Though I guess I'd need a fleet of 100,000 jumbo-jets or so to haul it all in.
• Ah, shucks! See how I get side-tracked? Let's just Google-get https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content and see that NOAA shows 240 ZettaJoules — that's about a quarter of a septillion Joules for you metric prefix-phobes — as total heat increase for the oceans over the period 1995-2020.
• I apologize!! This was going to be a quick exercise but is taking more time than anticipated. Still, it's worth it. Mr. Swizzle has FINALLY deigned to give us the benefit of his expertise. It isn't often we get one of the world's top climatologists to tell us the "5 Hiroshima bombs per second" is "tosh." We should help him celebrate his triumph!
• I actually double-checked and triple-checked these numbers, even resorting to multiplication and divisions. I was reluctant to go with NOAA's nice summary since they work for Brandon and are therefore probably lying their asses off. But the smartest NOAA people are working on Islamo-Jewish space lasers to take down MTG, LB, Vladimir Putin and other fine patriots. So we can hope that the webpage I linked to was produced by moles working for Alex Jones and others who are interested only in TRUTH.
• Are you still here? We can divide the 240 ZettaJoules by 25 (years), then by 365 (days), 24 (hours) and 3600 (seconds) to get 304 TeraJoules. Ah! Is it comfortable to be working with small units again? The yield of the Hiroshima device is shown as 60 or 63 teraJoules. One final division yields 5.1 or 4.8 Hiroshima bombs per second.
• Good thing I wasn't stupid enough to think that the 1-degree rise in surface temperature implied that rise throughout the entire ocean. Make that error and the calculation would have finished with 100+ Hiroshimas, an absurdly high figure

DONE! Over 25 years the ocean heating has been equivalent to 4.8 or 5.1 Hiroshima bombs per second depending on which Hiroshima estimate we use. Let's split the difference and call it 4.95 bombs.

Conclusion. The headline Mr. Swizzle calls out states "5 Hiroshima bombs per second," and he calls it "tosh" (nonsense or rubbish). Careful calculation implies that 4.95 is indeed a fairer estimate, a full percentage point below the toshy estimate,

Kudos to Mr. Swizzle! Well done.

 

[bilby]

I think Sandia developed a manufacturable model.

Chk this:

Home

The world's largest and leading commercial fusion energy company

cfs.energy

More immediately, see what OKLO is doing.

Fusion is a pipedream. It will never be cheaper, safer, cleaner, or more practical than fission power; The only thing that makes it popular is that it doesn't exist, which is exactly the kind of alternative power source that both the fossil fuel lobby and the hippies can really get behind.

Why do you say it will never exist?

Inertial confinement "works" now, it's just a matter of efficiency. It might not be possible to make viable, but I can't see that we know enough to say it's impossible.

It doesn't need to be impossible; It just needs to be more expensive than fission.

Which seems like a no-brainer, given that in seven decades we have never managed to get more energy out of fusion than we need to put in to make it happen.

For fusion to beat out fission, it must either be cheaper, or have other features that are worth the difference in cost.

What other features might it have, and how much might they be worth?

 

[bilby]

The military doesn't use existing power reactors for fuel production, why would replacing the existing power reactors be a problem for them?

Because they care about other countries developing weapons.

You may have heard that recently there's been some concerns about this. If Iran wants to switch from oil to fission, they had better be building reactors that inherently cannot be made to produce weapons-grade fissionables in a useable form.

 

[bilby]

Three Mile Island put the kibosh on nuclear power. That plus antibody wanted to have a nuclear waste storage site in their state.

There are intrinsically safe reactor designs that can never have an uncontrolled runaway state.

An intrinsically safe system is one where any failure can not lead to fire, explosion, or hazard to life.

'Fail Safe'.

An intrinsically safe nuclear reactor is designed so that safety is inherent in its physics and design, meaning it doesn't rely on active safety systems or human intervention to prevent accidents. These reactors utilize features that naturally limit power output and prevent meltdowns, even in extreme situations. Several designs exist that leverage principles like negative temperature coefficients and passive cooling systems to achieve this.

Passive nuclear safety - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Passive nuclear safety is a design approach for safety features, implemented in a nuclear reactor, that does not require any active intervention on the part of the operator or electrical/electronic feedback in order to bring the reactor to a safe shutdown state, in the event of a particular type of emergency (usually overheating resulting from a loss of coolant or loss of coolant flow). Such design features tend to rely on the engineering of components such that their predicted behaviour would slow down, rather than accelerate the deterioration of the reactor state; they typically take advantage of natural forces or phenomena such as gravity, buoyancy, pressure differences, conduction or natural heat convection to accomplish safety functions without requiring an active power source.[1] Many older common reactor designs use passive safety systems to a limited extent, rather, relying on active safety systems such as diesel-powered motors. Some newer reactor designs feature more passive systems; the motivation being that they are highly reliable and reduce the cost associated with the installation and maintenance of systems that would otherwise require multiple trains of equipment and redundant safety class power supplies in order to achieve the same level of reliability. However, weak driving forces that power many passive safety features can pose significant challenges to effectiveness of a passive system, particularly in the short term following an accident.

Molten salt reactors, in which the fuel salt is also the primary coolant, are very obviously the way to go. But there's not been much interest from the military, who want reactors that can be adapted to make weapons-grade fissionables, and/or can be operated by their expensively trained sailors with PWR experience. And only the military has wanted to fund fission R&D at all, because politicians have so far seen nuclear power as a vote loser.

 

[DBT]

It's not that these things never happened before, but that climate change predicts more frequent and more severe weather events, wildfires, storms....

Using unrealistic models, the propaganda predicts climate catastrophe. And none of the predictions have materialized. The climate has been remarkably stable.

The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed. The signs in the Montana park were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen told CNN. In 2017, the park was told by the agency that the complete melting off of the glaciers was no longer expected to take place so quickly due to changes in the forecast model, Kurzmen said.

CNN

That example doesn't negate currant climate models and their predictions.

There are plenty others, just skim through Teh Grauniad “climate crisis” section.

You need to consider the big picture.

Different regions of the world are not effected in the same way.

You can point to one spot and say it's cooling, but that doesn't represent what is happening to the planet.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I love how the people who claim climate change is "alarmism" tend to also be alarmist about things like trans people in bathrooms. Or, say, the crime rate, when crime has been decreasing. Or, say, voter fraud.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

It's not that these things never happened before, but that climate change predicts more frequent and more severe weather events, wildfires, storms....

Using unrealistic models, the propaganda predicts climate catastrophe. And none of the predictions have materialized. The climate has been remarkably stable.

The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed. The signs in the Montana park were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen told CNN. In 2017, the park was told by the agency that the complete melting off of the glaciers was no longer expected to take place so quickly due to changes in the forecast model, Kurzmen said.

CNN

That example doesn't negate currant climate models and their predictions.

There are plenty others, just skim through Teh Grauniad “climate crisis” section.

You need to consider the big picture.

Different regions of the world are not effected in the same way.

You can point to one spot and say it's cooling, but that doesn't represent what is happening to the planet.

I'll trust the scientists over some guy who believes having blue hair is a problem.

 

[steve_bank]

When fusion cones up my response is it has been 20 years away since 1980. Back in the 80s fusion was though to be in the not so far future. Some thought we'd have a hydrogen economy.

Every once in awhile there has been hyped news reports of f an implied breakthrough, but nothing emerges. I once heard one report of the same thing years apart in the news. The second report was hyped as a new breakthrough.

Doesn't men research should stop, there is always a chance somebody might find a solution.

Serendipity has al;ways been a part of science.

When it comes down to it a nuclear reactor is pretty simple. It substitutes a hot pile of radioactive material for coal or natural gas.

 

[pood]

FWIW: China’s fusion breakthrough (note — by 2027.)

Wondering how anyone has a “breakthrough” that is two years away.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

FWIW: China’s fusion breakthrough (note — by 2027.)

Wondering how anyone has a “breakthrough” that is two years away.

To be honest I don't trust authoritarian regimes not to make false claims about their research, simply in order to propagandize. And yes, I believe the U.S. is an authoritarian regime, to anyone who wants to make a dumbass whataboutism. It's already happening here.

 

[TSwizzle]

You can point to one spot and say it's cooling, but that doesn't represent what is happening to the planet.

I have never done that.

 

[steve_bank]

For years FOX News pushed fake news and conspiracy theories along with strong anti climate change denials.

FOX ended up paying money for damages in a law suit.

Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and others at FOX acknowledged they knowingly pushed fake news for ratings and support from the conservative network base.

The Guardians has multiple lawsuits.

Repeating climate denial claims makes them seem more credible, Australian-led study finds

Even those who are concerned about climate crisis were influenced by false claims, showing how ‘insidious’ repetition is, researcher says

www.theguardian.com

Repeating climate denial claims makes them seem more credible, Australian-led study finds
Repeating false and sceptical claims about climate science makes them seem more credible – including to people who accept the science and are alarmed by the climate crisis – new research has found.

The study’s lead author, Mary Jiang, from the Australian National University, said: “The findings show how powerful and insidious repetition is and how it can influence people’s assessment of truth.”

Published in the academic journal Plos One, the study said people were more likely to judge a statement as probably true if they had encountered it before, a behaviour psychologists called the “illusory truth effect”.

Adding after a longer look the Guardian does appear to present both sides. The Gordian pushes no censorship and freedom of expression.

The blog of George Mo9ntblot on the Guardian.

George Monbiot's blog + Climate science scepticism and denial | The Guardian

The Guardian's George Monbiot blogs on the environment, social justice, and other things that make him angry

www.theguardian.com

George Monbiot - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

George Joshua Richard Monbiot (/ˈmɒnbioʊ/ MON-bee-oh; born 27 January 1963) is an English journalist, author, and environmental and political activist. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and has written several books.

Monbiot grew up in Oxfordshire and studied zoology at the University of Oxford. He then began a career in investigative journalism, publishing his first book Poisoned Arrows in 1989 about human rights issues in West Papua. In later years, he has been involved in activism and advocacy related to various issues, such as climate change, British politics and loneliness. In Feral (2013), he discussed and endorsed expansion of rewilding. He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.[2] Monbiot was awarded the Global 500 in 1995 and the Orwell Prize in 2022.

I do not see where the Guardian takes an official editorial position against. climate science.

 

[TSwizzle]

lol.

An example of a science-based claim was that “climate change models can make accurate predictions”, Jiang said.

The models can’t predict next week’s weather never mind what is supposed to happen in ten years time.

 

[bilby]

The models can’t predict next week’s weather never mind what is supposed to happen in ten years time.

Climate is not weather.

Weather is unpredictable - will it rain here next wednesday?

Climate is predictable - will it be colder here in January than it is in July?

Seasons ARE a (simple) climate model, and that model has successfully predicted that summer will be warmer than winter thousands of years in advance.

Predicting next week's weather is hard. Predicting the climate ten years from now is far easier.

 

[steve_bank]

lol.

An example of a science-based claim was that “climate change models can make accurate predictions”, Jiang said.

The models can’t predict next week’s weather never mind what is supposed to happen in ten years time.

You are not bringing in the context.

One can be critical of accuracy of long term predictions while not denying that the current changes are human caused.

Actually models used to forecast local weather are pretty good around here. Hurricane models are very good. Climate models do not predict local temperatures years from now, but predicts general climate conditions. As time passes and more data is taken the model improves.

Local weather forecasts here run out 7-10 days. On Monday if the forecast says Friday there will be light rain in the afternoon it usually happens.

Stating the obvious, long term predictions are one thing. However we are dealing with climate change problems right now now today.

 

[DBT]

You can point to one spot and say it's cooling, but that doesn't represent what is happening to the planet.

I have never done that.

It's implied in your remarks, the weather in your city, etc.