..... Suddenly found out the wind and solar aren't reliable for baseload. ........
Pete
Distributed wind can and does provide baseload. As for renewables just look at Iceland on best practice. 99.8% renewable.
Coal power stations break down from time to time and, as a result, can be out of action for weeks...as has often been the case in Australia.
I have no problem with Gen 4 or Thorium based nuclear. The French have
been safely operating Nuclear for decades....and export their surplus energy to much of Europe.
BTW I note 9 coal miners lost their lives yesterday due gas suffocation. Hardly a whimper in the news cycle on this, but had 9 French nuclear power workers suffered the same fate....it would have been a global headline.
I have been dong a bit of research on how bad could the planet get if nothing is done to mitigate human induced CO2, methane, etc. emissions (which is the current reality) so it's business as usual until 2100....in terms of election cycles, who cares, but as I have two grandchildren, they will very likely see what our sad legacy has been.
2 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world, will have to endure of 45 days per year of 60°C. The human body cannot be outside for longer than about six hours because it loses the ability to cool itself down at these temperatures. The same applies to flora an fauna.
Moving toward the poles will be required for the survival of any species. Equatorial regions of the planet will likely be uninhabitable except for hardy succulent plants and insects.
The oceans will have acidified by 125%. All coral reefs will be dead. Fish stocks will have collapsed. Thermal expansion of the oceans alone will account for a 1 metre sea-level rise. Major coastal cities such as Jakarta, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro and Miami will be abandoned.
All mountain glaciers will have melted. Flows of the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Yamuna rivers which over 600 million people rely on for water, will have all but dried up.
Then there are the storms, bushfires, massive rain events & flooding, species extinctions (which are already going great-guns), loss of arable land, loss of fresh water......
Frankly I found it too depressing to delve into the details any further.
Its all bad.
The undeniable recent events in Australia so far...
-Massive repeated bleaching on the Great Barrier reef
-186,000 square kilometres destroyed by the megafire of 2020, along thousands of homes and 3 Billion animals.
-" Hundred year" floods in Lismore for the last two years in a row
-Hottest recorded temperatures ever
-Highest recorded rainfall ever
As I write The NSW Government has just given Whitehaven the tick of approval to construct a new coal mine at Narrabri...which will result in another half billion tonnes of CO2.
I've found when you are in a deep hole, the best course of action is to stop digging.
High time we took the shovels off these lunatics.
All true unfortunately, but how to get rid of our system of government that adds to the troubles and just wait until things are too late, as long as there’s no mud and sewerage running through their homes they won’t care and can always blame the opposition which is the point of our system of democracy: to be able to say we tried but the opposition are to blame. Unless australians are willing to see the problems and try to hold the politicians legally to their promises but of course most methods of achieving that have been put into law. Notice the recent trend towards making protests illegal and even criminal and the lack of appropriate Legislative Change cycle during covid to get anything put into legislation without public consultation or review processes. To find out for yourself try reading the definitions of words in the legislation and compare that to the public understanding of the words or phrases, its how the system works and why we’re seeing increasing numbers of “support” systems driving taxpayers into poverty and homelessness. I bet what everyone one of you thinks of as “renewables” is different from the definition in legislation. I bet theres room for the government to classify Coal and natural gas as renewable because there is no timeframe in the definitions and so in 50M years the coal will renew. I’ve seen that sort of crap used. Even if we go fully american with the one bullet one vote policy the legislation remains in place for the next people to abuse.
I’m not sure about the timeframe for destruction but it might be within our lifetimes not our grandchildrens. As the balance tipping keeps swinging it’ll accelerate and we’ll see more harm and death as a result but the extremes will be shortlived, but long enough for death of anyone unprepared but in our grandchildrens time the extreme predictions will be the average. Bring it on I’m ready to go now, No matter if you put your super mansion on a mountain top of underground, you wont have livestock to live off for long or crops either and it’ll happen faster than evolution can adapt but thats fine, if humans get wiped out the world and life will go on and ,yes, find a way.
Iceland isn't the best example due to low population an low h-intensity electricity using production system. I guess we will see when they shut down the coal fired stations here.
Pete
Iceland isn't the best example due to low population an low h-intensity electricity using production system. I guess we will see when they shut down the coal fired stations here.
Pete
Is the fact it actually works for the Icelanders...who BTW have free thermal solar heating....the reason it's not "the best example" ?
Oz has sniffed at thermal generation from Hot Dry Rocks and Thermal Solar
(the latter team from UNSW had a proposal that could have powered 90% of the entire eastern seaboard for a 1/10th of the cost of the NBN) was flipped off by Bob Carr and unsurprisingly went offshore to China.
Thermal solar via superheating large quantities of saline solution (think Olympic swimming pool tank size) with sunshine, then running a steam turbine 24/7 courtesy its thermal inertia is an easy solution to baseload.
""......governments and companies had lied to people about their commitments to reducing emissions, and that though the world needed to see a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by the end of the decade the world was on track for a 14 per cent increase"
A complete re-do of our political system. The people in government are beholden to big polluting businesses. That's not a conspiracy, that's just fact. Crony capitalism kills any plan for meaningful change; the system is designed to ensure entities with money keep that money, whatever the cost, and make it harder for disruption to occur.
Make no mistake about it, we need complete and utter disruption of our economic system to achieve our climate goals. But it won't happen.
I read that it will take at least 100000 years for CO2 levels to go back to pre industrial levels and 10000 for a third of it to go. So in the scale of things (geological timeline) we're just a fart on the radar. No real impact. We tend to think so highly of ourselves.
so all our trees, grasses etc will convert what gas to oxygen? still in 100000 years the problem will have been solved as the human race will most likely have blown itself to bits and the planet can resume normal programming.
Pete
I read that it will take at least 100000 years for CO2 levels to go back to pre industrial levels and 10000 for a third of it to go. So in the scale of things (geological timeline) we're just a fart on the radar. No real impact. We tend to think so highly of ourselves.
No real impact would be to deny the fact that climate change, environment encroachment and pollution are not playing a part in the current mass extinction event taking place.
And whether we have 300pmm or 475pmm will not make a lick of difference to our survival chances. If you look at the past four eco censuses you'll see a a near 30% decline in recorded bio-mass every cycle. We really don't have to worry about sea levels at the end of the century...
We have had a very real impact, but the planet was once nearly entirely covered by a single species of fungus, so its all cogs and wheels...
No real impact would be to deny the fact that climate change, environment encroachment and pollution are not playing a part in the current mass extinction event taking place.
And whether we have 300pmm or 475pmm will not make a lick of difference to our survival chances. If you look at the past four eco censuses you'll see a a near 30% decline in recorded bio-mass every cycle. We really don't have to worry about sea levels at the end of the century...
We have had a very real impact, but the planet was once nearly entirely covered by a single species of fungus, so its all cogs and wheels...
Oh we did have an impact short term. Definitely. We ransacked the joint and caused a mass extinction both in fauna and flora. What I'm saying is that in the grand scheme of things it happens really quickly and will fix itself relatively quickly as well. So no real impact. Things always bounce back. We might not be here to see it or maybe a much cut down version of humanity. If anyone's left.
The planets bio-diversity has the ability to adapt to consume an excess resource and the ability to survive in general.
The plastic eating bacteria starting to evolve within the plastic floating island is a great example. Less than 100 years and we have something starting to adapt to a newly available resource. Nature adapts a lot quicker than she is given credit for me thinks.
Birds are a good example of survival from the last extinction event.
But what level of bio-mass and bio-diversity will be around in 2100 is anyone's guess. I think it getting pretty close to not being able to eat food without mirco-plastics present now, both in land and sea based protein.
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