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Cont: Global warming discussion V

Roger Ramjets said:
Imagine if we had no cars, no trains, no airplanes, no electricity, no factories. It's not hard to imagine. 200 years ago we had none of that. Yet 200 years ago we had advanced civilizations with thriving economies.
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You think the expertise exists today to go back to the type of economy that was in place 200 years ago?
 
Australia nearing record amount of solar panel uptake to beat rising power prices, analysts say

Exclusive: The ongoing strength of rooftop solar installations contrasts with the sharp slowdown in new large-scale solar farms



Australia nearing record amount of solar panel uptake to beat rising power prices, analysts say
Exclusive: The ongoing strength of rooftop solar installations contrasts with the sharp slowdown in new large-scale solar farms

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Peter Hannam
Wed 12 Jul 2023 11.00 AEST
Rooftop solar is on track for another near-record annual installation tally as households seek to beat rising power prices with new or bigger photovoltaic systems.

In the first six months of 2023, households and businesses added about 1.46 gigawatts of new solar capacity in small-scale systems, about a fifth higher than a year earlier, according to Green Energy Markets. For June alone, almost 250 megawatts of new capacity went on to rooftops, 13.2% more than for the same month in 2022.

Higher electricity prices in the past year have stoked demand for solar panels, the director of analysis and advisory at Green Energy Markets, Tristan Edis, said. With a further increase of as much as 25% being imposed from this month, 2021’s record for new capacity of about 3.2GW set in 2021 may come close to being broken.

...

Australia has the world’s highest per-capita solar energy penetration, with almost one in three homes hosting PV panels. Even in winter, more than a quarter of the electricity used in the eastern states is being generated on rooftops during the peak of sunny days such as Tuesday, according to the OpenNEM website.
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An interesting example of the intersection between austerity and climate change.

UK's train system is getting steadily worse. More delays, worse service, just suckier in pretty much every way. Practically pushing anyone who can afford it into a private car rather than rely on public transit, even in areas where historically have been served pretty well mass transit schemes rather than car-first infrastructure.

If anything societies should be looking at ways to increase transit efficiency (which means mass transit) as a means of reducing carbon footprint, but that requires a level of economic efficiency and centralization simply not acceptable to our increasingly austere and neoliberal world.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Note that this is capacity, not actual power generated. The average utilization rate of Chinese coal power plants in 2022 was only 52%. Much of the increased capacity is being installed to provide a backup in case hydro lakes run dry and other renewables can't supply enough.

According to the IEA, China is expected to add 207GW of wind and solar capacity in 2023, and 224GW in 2024. If this trend continues coal power plants will be running at even lower utilization rates.

But why build new coal plants when existing ones are not being fully utilized? One reason is that China is a big country and its power grid is not well integrated. They are working on that though, with UHVDC transmission lines of up to 3,300 km.

Another factor is factories and homes burning coal or oil for local power generation and heating. A large central power station is a lot more efficient, so new coal plants are actually expected to reduce pollution when users switch to grid electricity. Then as renewables ramp up emissions will automatically reduce even more.
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I've often wondered about China being on one time zone. If everyone wasn't waking up at pretty much the same time, would China need as much ramp-up capacity.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
An interesting example of the intersection between austerity and climate change.

UK's train system is getting steadily worse. More delays, worse service, just suckier in pretty much every way. Practically pushing anyone who can afford it into a private car...

If anything societies should be looking at ways to increase transit efficiency (which means mass transit) as a means of reducing carbon footprint, but that requires a level of economic efficiency and centralization simply not acceptable to our increasingly austere and neoliberal world.
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I understand that the UK has exceptionally good passenger train services compared to many other countries, but how much of it is carbon neutral? I have no idea what proportion is electric vs diesel powered.

OTOH I do know that in Dec 2022 33% of new car registrations in the UK were electric.

If you think UK rail is sucky then consider that where I live there is no train service to the next city, because the bridge was destroyed by cyclone Gabriel in February and still hasn't been replaced (they're working on it). All goods going to/from the port now have to be transported by road, and the only passenger transport options are diesel bus or private motor car. Many people here live in one city and work in the other - which might seem crazy but you have to take work where you can get it.

But that's the way it goes. First we cause global warming, then it causes us to create more global warming. The buses here should be electric but nobody seems to be interested in the investment required, while council rates are going up to pay for the cyclone damage that was caused by global warming!
 
Roger Ramjets said:
I understand that the UK has exceptionally good passenger train services compared to many other countries, but how much of it is carbon neutral? I have no idea what proportion is electric vs diesel powered.

OTOH I do know that in Dec 2022 33% of new car registrations in the UK were electric.

If you think UK rail is sucky then consider that where I live there is no train service to the next city, because the bridge was destroyed by cyclone Gabriel in February and still hasn't been replaced (they're working on it). All goods going to/from the port now have to be transported by road, and the only passenger transport options are diesel bus or private motor car. Many people here live in one city and work in the other - which might seem crazy but you have to take work where you can get it.

But that's the way it goes. First we cause global warming, then it causes us to create more global warming. The buses here should be electric but nobody seems to be interested in the investment required, while council rates are going up to pay for the cyclone damage that was caused by global warming!
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Power generation is only a small slice of the issue. A car-first infrastructure inevitably leads to inefficient sprawl. If you have everyone driving you need huge amounts of paved surfaces for parking. Compact, efficient city centers just don't work if you need everyone to abandon a car somewhere for 9 hrs a day while at work.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
Power generation is only a small slice of the issue. A car-first infrastructure inevitably leads to inefficient sprawl. If you have everyone driving you need huge amounts of paved surfaces for parking. Compact, efficient city centers just don't work if you need everyone to abandon a car somewhere for 9 hrs a day while at work.
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Trains also need right-of-way, and they don't work so well in many areas either. In my small city the train line goes right though the center of town, but people need to travel significant distances from there to where they live and work. It 'only' takes 90 minutes for me to walk from my house to the supermarket across town and back, which I sometimes do when the weather is good. But I am semi-retired so I have that time. Most people don't. I also bike to work when I can too (a 13km round trip), but not in the winter. Biking is OK for those of us who are fit enough and don't have to be fresh when they arrive at work.

One of my hobbies is flying radio control model aircraft. The flying site is a 33km round trip, and I can't carry the planes and stuff on my bike. So I absolutely need a car. Won't be doing that any time soon though, since the whole area got destroyed by unprecedented flooding. In fact the way things are going 'weather'-wise I might have to give up that hobby.

I have lived in big cities without a car for months at a time. I did a lot of walking. But on the job I needed a vehicle because it wasn't just homes that were sprawled. Many people work in factories and industrial sites that obviously can't be jammed into the city center close to a railway station.

You can talk about changing infrastructure, but it's often not that easy. You can't just run railway tracks everywhere and expect them to take all the traffic. And people shouldn't have to give up the freedom to drive where they want when they want. We have the technology to allow that freedom sustainably, so why not allow it?

Covid also showed us what I already knew, that far too many people travel to the city to work on a computer in an office when they could do the same thing at home. A friend of mine does work all over the country without leaving her home, 25km from town. They have an electric car and solar panels feeding electricity into grid.

In Australia 30% of homes have rooftop PV, and that number is increasing. When businesses also offer charging at work their employees will always have enough electricity to keep their cars topped up. Sure they are driving on 'infrastructure' but with more working from home we won't need any more of it. The existing roads in most cities would be more than enough if we just changed how people work.
 
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Pixel42 said:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factche...es-say-about-past-and-present-climate-change/
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Site says avg temps today are higher than at any time over the last 2,000 years.

But graph shows that just beyond 2,000 years ago, avg temps were indeed higher. Several times.

It looks like basically starting around 3,800 years ago, avg temps were on a downward slope. Then started going up again in the 1980s.

Thoughts?


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this and 3 other posts moved here from "But Global Warming is a Hoax thread
Posted By: jimbob
 
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dann said:
Does this work for you?!






It is being explained better to the average guy - and to everybody else. Whenever a Republican in Congress finds and brings a snowball or comes up with a similar stunt, it is explained. Why do you think it isn't?!

Maybe your deniers should read this about the Greenland GISP2 Ice Core graph. It includes graphs of "Greenland temperatures over the last 12,000 years" and of "Greenland temperatures over the last 2,000 years". And there is a third graph:
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Accurate and reliable data from Greenland show average Earth temps higher than today, MANY times before 0 AD. Seems things were generally warmer than today and started a downward trend around 3,800 years ago. Then started up say in 1950?

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Hercules56 said:
Accurate and reliable data from Greenland show average Earth temps higher than today, MANY times before 0 AD. Seems things were generally warmer than today and started a downward trend around 3,800 years ago. Then started up say in 1950?

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1446&pictureid=13627[/qimg]
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The current Milankovich cycle (interglacial) peaked about 6000 years ago, since then there has been a natural underlying cooling trend of about 0.2C every thousand years. That has been turned into an underlying warming trend of about 0.2C every 15 years by the burning of fossil fuel.
 
Hercules56 said:
Accurate and reliable data from Greenland show average Earth temps higher than today, MANY times before 0 AD. Seems things were generally warmer than today and started a downward trend around 3,800 years ago. Then started up say in 1950?

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1446&pictureid=13627[/qimg]
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Read the article:
The figure below shows a 20-year LOWESS smoothed average of the models from 2000 through to 2100 added on to the end of the observational temperature data. Temperatures clearly exceed any experienced in Greenland during the Holocene by 2050 and are much warmer by 2100.
Factcheck: What Greenland ice cores say about past and present climate change (CarbonBrief, Mar 5, 2019)
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Hercules56 said:
Accurate and reliable data from Greenland show average Earth temps higher than today, MANY times before 0 AD. Seems things were generally warmer than today and started a downward trend around 3,800 years ago. Then started up say in 1950?

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1446&pictureid=13627[/qimg]
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Notice what happened when "average Earth temps" (and Arctic temperatures in particular) were higher than today:

A recently discovered ice core taken from beneath Greenland’s ice sheet decades ago has revealed that a large part of the country was ice-free around 400,000 years ago, when temperatures were similar to those the world is approaching now, according to a new report – an alarming finding that could have disastrous implications for sea level rise.
(...)
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are 1.5 times higher now than they were 400,000 years ago, and global temperatures keep climbing.
If Greenland’s ice sheet saw rapid melting during a period of moderate warming, it “may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than previously understood – and will be vulnerable to irreversible, rapid melting in coming centuries,” the study authors said in a statement.
Long-lost Greenland ice core suggests potential for disastrous sea level rise (CNN, July 20, 2023)
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(It wasn't really lost but just forgotten in a Danish freezer. Sorry!)

Where do you think all that H2O goes when it no longer covers Greenland?

Grønland smeltede og skabte havstigninger på 1,5 meter for få hundredetusinde år siden i et klima, der ligner vores (Videnskab.dk, July 20, 2023)
A few hundred thousand years ago in a climate similar to ours, Greenland melted and caused a rising sea level of 1.5 meters
Editor’s summary
Measurements made on subglacial sediment from the Camp Century ice core in northwestern Greenland show that the location was ice free during the interglacial that occurred around 400,000 years ago. Christ et al. used luminescence dating and cosmogenic nuclide data to show that the sediment was deposited under ice-free conditions after having been exposed at the surface to sunlight fewer than 16,000 years earlier. The absence of ice at that location means that the Greenland Ice Sheet must have contributed more than 1.4 meters of sea-level equivalent to the high sea-level stand, when the average global air temperature was similar to what we will soon experience because of human-caused climate warming. —H. Jesse Smith
Deglaciation of northwestern Greenland during Marine Isotope Stage 11 (Science, July 20, 2023)
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And more bad news for the 'hydrogen economy'...

Fuel cell bus in California destroyed as hydrogen tanks explode during refuelling
A $1.1m hydrogen fuel cell bus in the city of Bakersfield in California was destroyed as its hydrogen tanks exploded during refuelling in the early hours of yesterday morning...

Golden Empire Transit, the company operating the fuel cell buses, noted in a statement that the primary tanks of the fueling station did not ignite due to unspecified safety measures installed within the refuelling station.
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Well that's a relief. At least the entire station didn't explode, unlike this one in Norway in 2019, or this one in San Francisco Bay Area.

Then there was the pick-up truck towing hydrogen cylinders that exploded in Ohio in February.

Three injured after truck towing 420kg of hydrogen crashes and explodes in Ohio

It was the second road accident involving the transportation of H2 in the US in the space of two days...

About 30 seconds after the crash, a wave of explosions began as 420kg of hydrogen, carried in six large cylinders, started to burn... “Everything went up in flames. There were balls of flames going up into the air and loud whistling noise,” he told local media.

“Explosion after explosion after explosion and it just didn’t stop.”
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If only we had evidence of how hydrogen is really dangerous in large quantities from some time in the past.
 
Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

Abstract
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.
Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Nature Communications, July 25, 2023)
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From the Danish version:
Nordatlantiske havstrømme som blandt andre Golfstrømmen er med til at forme klimaet i Danmark. Et kollaps kan i værste fald ske så tidligt som i 2025. Uanset årstal bør vi handle nu, mener forskere.
Danske forskere med vild udmelding: Afgørende havstrømme kollapser omkring 2057 (Videnskab.dk, July 25, 2023)
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North Atlantic ocean currents like the Gulf Stream help shape the climate in Denmark. At worst, a collapse may happen as early as 2025. Regardless of the year, we should act now, say researchers.
Danish scientists with wild announcement: Decisive ocean currents collapse around 2057
 
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