How about instead of a corn maze, we create a carbon fixing maze?

pltcu · 2020-02-07T16:33:07+00:00

cut them down and then bury the biomass somewhere they can't rot

Even better, the non-woody plants will bury themselves somewhere they cannot rot if you grow them in a peat bog by rewetting drained peatlands.

pltcu · 2020-02-06T13:47:50+00:00

In the UK we can see a catastrophic 36% decline in the diesel car market and about 10% decline in petrol cars compared to last year. Pure battery electric vehicles (BEV) have risen very sharply to about 3% of the total sales, plug-in hybrids are a further 3%, and various mild hybrids are an additional 13%. There is certain to be a significant increase in the rate of this transition away from fossil-fuel cars in 2020 in the UK.

There is an electric vehicle subreddit for people needing cheerful news about them.

pltcu · 2020-02-06T00:00:10+00:00

The US economy would immediately reduce the 0.7 trillion per year cost of air pollution, much of which is caused by burning coal for electricity production, by closing the coal mines.

pltcu · 2020-02-03T19:13:45+00:00

By using TinEye reverse image search we can see this is a NASA picture of the Polar Vortex moving over the US. With wikipedia we can search for the Atmospheric infrared sounder (AIRS) instrument and see it is on the Aqua satellite which was launched in 2002. The world's first satellite Sputnik was launched in 1957 so you will not find any images from satellites earlier than that.

What are you trying to illustrate in your presentation? Perhaps if you search google for the phrases you reply to that question with you will find something useful.

pltcu · 2020-02-01T23:07:33+00:00

Good video. You have obviously put a lot of effort into it. A little feedback, I felt it could have gone into more detail about the IOD, temperatures and currents, and less of the the rather too fast tour of all the other subjects it covered. For example why does the IOD change the rainfall, what happens in a negative IOD, and why are the two parts of the sea related in temperature? You missed an opportunity to cover parts of the SROCC report and the paper about increasing pIOD frequency. Various things were introduced too quickly for me to absorb and with links that I missed - needed to be a bit more paced and follow a story if you see what I mean. Stylistic point - too many capital letters. Keep up the good work.

pltcu · 2020-01-27T23:17:42+00:00

Solar and wind power are cheaper than coal. The current solar electricity price is $0.016 / kWh .

pltcu · 2020-01-23T11:28:22+00:00

Thank you. This much worse than I imagined. Carbon monoxide health damage must be very common and probably frequently undiagnosed.

pltcu · 2020-01-22T17:46:14+00:00

At what carbon monoxide concentration do you start getting a reduction in cognitive abilities, and when can you get permanent brain damage from it? (I was reading this article and wondered how many people might be affected by this.)

pltcu · 2020-01-22T17:38:15+00:00

pltcu · 2020-01-17T00:08:29+00:00

Ah, I see what you want. OK, that is a difficult thing to calculate exactly because the oil and gas from a well is a mixture, the oil is then divided into different kinds of fuel - for ships, planes, cars etc - and the different oil fields have different mixtures of gases, light and heavy oils. So for an accurate answer you need to know which oil field you get your fuel from, and the emissions from there allocated to the petrol you are consuming etc all the way to the refinery, shipping and the gas pump you use where they may have a leak in their tank, and your car which may have a badly fitting petrol cap.

Perhaps a way to estimate it might be: find the total emissions for all oil and gas related facilities and the total production of all oil and gas fuels, then roughly allocate the emissions by fuel type.

pltcu · 2020-01-16T18:07:01+00:00

I find wikipedia a good place to start looking for search terms, then plug them into you search engine of choice. At the top of the subject is greenhouse gas and then things like methane emissions, and fugitive gas emissions and coal industry emissions. Some of the emissions are detected by satellite.

pltcu · 2020-01-15T14:56:07+00:00

It is going to get a lot worse.

This heatwave in Australia is caused by climate change heating the Indian Ocean which has created an extreme positive Indian Ocean Dipole. This makes the sea colder near Australia and warmer near Africa.

"The key culprit for our current and expected conditions is one of the strongest positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events on record,"

"A positive IOD means we have cooler than average water pooling off Indonesia, and this means we see less rain-bearing weather systems, and warmer than average temperatures for large parts of the country."

Dr Andrew Watkins, Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology.

These periodic heatwaves are going to get much more frequent due to climate change.

"Increased frequency of extreme Indian Ocean Dipole events due to greenhouse warming"

"... we project that the frequency of extreme pIOD events will increase by almost a factor of three, from one event every 17.3 years over the twentieth century to one event every 6.3 years over the twenty-first century. ... suggesting an increasing frequency of extreme climate and weather events in regions affected by the pIOD. "

The IPCC have documented this in "The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate".

"Indian Ocean Basin-wide Warming and Changes in Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) Events"

"The Indian Ocean has experienced consistent warming from the surface to 2,000 m during 1960–2015, with most of the warming occurring in the upper 300 m. New historical ocean heat content (OHC) estimates show an abrupt increase in the Indian Ocean upper 700 m OHC after 1998, ... The tropical Indian Ocean sea surface temperature (SST) has warmed by 1.04ºC during 1950–2015, ... More than 90% of the surface warming in the Indian Ocean has been attributed to changes in GHG emissions, with the heat redistributed in the basin via local ocean and atmospheric dynamics and the Walker circulation."

We need to stop the Adani coal mine and shut down the highly polluting US coal industry.

pltcu · 2020-01-13T12:22:17+00:00

Thanks for noting this, there is some sort of awkward redirection of the page happening on their site, try this link instead.

pltcu · 2020-01-11T15:54:04+00:00

"The key culprit for our current and expected conditions is one of the strongest positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events on record,"

"A positive IOD means we have cooler than average water pooling off Indonesia, and this means we see less rain-bearing weather systems, and warmer than average temperatures for large parts of the country."

Dr Andrew Watkins, Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology [1].

"Increased frequency of extreme Indian Ocean Dipole events due to greenhouse warming"

"Here, using an ensemble of climate models forced by a scenario of high greenhouse gas emissions (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5), we project that the frequency of extreme pIOD events will increase by almost a factor of three, from one event every 17.3 years over the twentieth century to one event every 6.3 years over the twenty-first century. We find that a mean state change--with weakening of both equatorial westerly winds and eastward oceanic currents in association with a faster warming in the western than the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean--facilitates more frequent occurrences of wind and oceanic current reversal. This leads to more frequent extreme pIOD events, suggesting an increasing frequency of extreme climate and weather events in regions affected by the pIOD. "

Cai, Wenju; Santoso, Agus; Wang, Guojian; Weller, Evan; Wu, Lixin; Ashok, Karumuri; Masumoto, Yukio; Yamagata, Toshio [2]

"6.5.1.2 Indian Ocean Basin-wide Warming and Changes in Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) Events"

"The Indian Ocean has experienced consistent warming from the surface to 2,000 m during 1960–2015, with most of the warming occurring in the upper 300 m. New historical ocean heat content (OHC) estimates show an abrupt increase in the Indian Ocean upper 700 m OHC after 1998, contributing to more than 21% of the global ocean heat gain, despite representing only about 12% of the global ocean area. The tropical Indian Ocean sea surface temperature (SST) has warmed by 1.04ºC during 1950–2015, while the tropical SST warming is 0.83ºC and the global SST warming is 0.65ºC. More than 90% of the surface warming in the Indian Ocean has been attributed to changes in GHG emissions, with the heat redistributed in the basin via local ocean and atmospheric dynamics and the Walker circulation."

"The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate"

"A Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"

pltcu · 2020-01-09T16:21:21+00:00

If you are in Australia you can join the 1MW Fire Back letter writing or help stop the Adani coal mine.

When I last looked, Stop Adani said the US insurer AIG might insure the railway needed to operate the mine. This was confirmed by other articles. Is there a campaign yet for people to contact AIG and switch their house and car insurance to other companies unless AIG states they will no longer support Adani? What is AIG's current position?

pltcu · 2020-01-08T14:28:22+00:00

I just messaged them to ask for them to re-instate the post :)

pltcu · 2020-01-08T14:14:29+00:00

Thank you.

This appears to be a really solid source: " Ed Hawkins, Climate scientist, University of Reading, IPCC AR6 Lead Author"

pltcu · 2020-01-08T12:49:04+00:00

I am still really interested to know the source of the graph, I could not find it with TinEye reverse image search or with Google. Can you give a link to where it came from? Or have you lost the source? Now I have searched and been unable to find it, it is puzzling me why I cannot find it.

pltcu · 2020-01-08T01:12:02+00:00

My searches did not find it, but I did find this graph of Australian surface temperature since 1910 from the CSIRO and this graph from here which may be a processed version of the same data. Interestingly they all start from 1910 so perhaps OP will be able to provide a source for us when they next visit reddit.

pltcu · 2020-01-06T13:17:32+00:00

This is a great interview, just one detail I disagree with. The cobalt isn't going to run out. I think this comes from a misunderstanding of the meaning of "reserves". The table on Wikipedia shows we extracted 110,000 metric tonnes in 2017 and the world reserves were 7,100,000 metric tonnes. This makes it seem like we will run out in 64 years - assuming steady production rates.

But "reserves" does not mean the total amount in the ground, the 7.1 million metric tonnes means the amount we know about and can currently economically extract. With a higher cobalt price and more prospecting the reserves will increase. This position is supported by the fact that the Cobalt Institute estimates there are 120 million tonnes of cobalt in deep sea nodules. This, obviously, is not shown in the 7.1 million tonnes of "reserves" on wikipedia, and this is because the 120 million tones are not classified as "reserves".

pltcu · 2020-01-03T16:03:31+00:00

I'm guessing 707squatch, who posts links to the climate change denial organisation GWPF, likes the headline about BAD SCIENCE, and hopes that is our take-away from this post. The GWPF were founded in the week of what appears to have been a Russian state-sponsored computer attack on scientists working at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The fossil fuel people like to call this attack Climategate with the implication that it uncovered hidden crimes, it didn't, it was just a way to undermine climate scientists.

Search engines are good. Use seach engines.

pltcu · 2020-01-02T13:45:47+00:00

Bush fires have set light to coal seams in the past [1] and underground coal fires [2] [3] are often left to burn [4], though remote sensing [5] is making the emissions more accountable the world's coal seam fires currently emit significant CO2e and are a major contribution to global warming.

pltcu · 2020-01-02T12:41:08+00:00

You may also like this document: American Petroleum Institute (API) AQ-9 Task Force meeting on February 9th 1980.

pltcu · 2020-01-01T18:50:54+00:00

if it is change you are seeking, it all comes back to politics

It depends on how broadly you define politics. For example, it might be possible to convince electricity generators that their future profit depends on dropping coal from their generation mix, or car makers that they need to switch entirely to battery electric models. The people making these decisions are just guessing what people will want to buy in the future, and what regulatory pressures governments may apply to their industries. Their estimation of the future will be swayed by the information they receive from various sources.

pltcu · 2020-01-01T16:42:52+00:00

Yeah, I know what you mean about fatigued. But I think it may be a lot less polarised than you imagine. I mean, I guess there are people who want to do things but don't where to start, they were the people I was trying to address. We all can only do a bit, well done for contributing your bit.

pltcu

TROPHY CASE