Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.

Settings

Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).

Term Lookup

Settings

All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Home Arguments Software Resources Comments The Consensus Project Translations About Support

Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Mastodon MeWe

Twitter YouTube RSS Posts RSS Comments Email Subscribe


Climate's changed before
It's the sun
It's not bad
There is no consensus
It's cooling
Models are unreliable
Temp record is unreliable
Animals and plants can adapt
It hasn't warmed since 1998
Antarctica is gaining ice
View All Arguments...



Username
Password
New? Register here
Forgot your password?

Latest Posts

Archives

Recent Comments

Prev  2050  2051  2052  2053  2054  2055  2056  2057  2058  2059  2060  2061  2062  2063  2064  2065  Next

Comments 102851 to 102900:

  1. Climategate: Impeding Information Requests?
    dhogaza @74 Agreed. It would appear that UEA information compliance staff have been dealing with requests for information held by CRU from early 2007. The record for the request log starts from 2005 and the first entry is dated 25/1/07. I daresay there will be further discussion when the Information Commissioner publishes their Decision Notices relating to appeals.
  2. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    It seems that Robert & Camburn are a bit like ships passing in the night. The papers I've read give the EAIS barely detectable losses (or even not detectable losses), whilst WAIS loss is detected with good confidence. Which is what Camburn is saying. Overall, Antarctica is losing mass and most of this is from the WAIS. Most papers agree that overall there is net ice loss (e.g. Camburn's Allison et al) and it is a small portion of total loss. Which is what Robert is saying and Camburn isn't disagreeing with. The worry is that many models don't capture ice sheet breakup and in some increased precipitation outweighs it. Now it looks like ice sheet breakup is faster than models expect and as Robert pointed out, a 1% loss of Antarctic land ice would approximately double the IPCC sea level rise projections whilst Greenland is also falling apart more quickly than models expected. This supports the results of Vermeer & Rahmstorf etc and suggests the upper bound of sea level rise is probably 3-4 times larger than IPCC, 2007. Of course, maybe it's natural noise and that's what we should pray for.
  3. Renewable Baseload Energy
    dana1981 #115 "This is a rebuttal of the 'skeptic' argument "Renewables can't provide baseload power". The gist of which is basically says it doesnt cut it. At least that's the overall impression you give. And with words like an "ideal world", it doesnt take much imagination to assume what real solutions involve. You cannot separate these two issues, as they intimately related. All designs, whehter buildings, cars, buses, planes, whatever, imply a finite number of people to board, occupy etc. As to what other posters have said, and no lack of sincerity, it is precisely the great energy associated with fossil fuels that led to the population explosion in the first place. So any plans about moving to alternate energy supplies without including some mention in consideration for stemming population are incomplete or at least appear very distorted.
  4. Renewable Baseload Energy
    actually thoughtfull @145
    (so rounding out sailrick's comments - the French built 29GW nuclear in 10 years, USA built 18GW solar in two years - blow it out and we see that we could build 90GW in the time it took the French to build 29GW - and not have any nuclear waste to deal with). [wind may have some problems scaling, but hasn't shown any yet (run out of "good" wind, transmission lines, intermittent supply]
    Let's deconstruct this: 1. You are comparing the US economy now to France thirty years ago. Just what would the ratio of the two GDPs be? Well, lets have a look here GDP France 1985: $543 million GDP US 2005: $12,600 million The US economy in 2005 was over 23 times the size of the French economy during the nuclear build out! 2. Lets compare apples to apples. What exactly does 90 GW of solar mean? As the type of solar is not specified, lets just call the capacity factor 20%, which is pretty generous for PV and lets call the capacity factor for nuclear 85%. So we "normalize" the capacity of the actual French 29 MWe nuclear to a notional value of 24.6 MW continuous and the US 90 GW solar to 18GW continuous. In other words, per unit of GDP, France built nuclear power (24.6 / 18) * (12,600 / 543) = (1.36 * 23) = 31 times faster per unit of GDP than the US is deploying solar. If anything this comparison flatters solar as it is not truly baseload. Your quote does not show what you think it does.
  5. Renewable Baseload Energy
    Bibliovermis #114 "Anthropogenic waste heat contributes 1% of the warming" OK, so instead of changes within 100 years it will take 1000. The problem remains.... no to mention all that spent nuclear fuel. The only thing that does make sense is the implied assumption that by then people will not continue to be fooled by all this tommy rot.
  6. Renewable Baseload Energy
    @147 actually thoughtfull at 17:28 PM on 29 November, 2010 >> me: "However I maintain that nuclear is not only the cheaper option than the presented alternatives (nuclear electricity in the US is actually the cheapest one, cheaper than coal right now), but that is the only one which can get the job done at the scale necessary to replace coal/gas (and eventually oil with electric cars)." > I provided facts a few pages ago that refute the claim that nuclear is cheaper than coal, gas or wind. I said: "Nuclear electricity in the US is actually the cheapest one, cheaper than coal right now." See the plot which demonstrates this: http://newenergyandfuel.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/US-Electricity-Production-Costs-1995-2008.png Obviously, this is due to the fact that most of these nuclear plants were build decades ago, and are largely amortized by now. The hotly debated subject is the cost of the new plants in the US, for which we only have various estimates, not real life data. (I should add that the single plant in construction in the US is indeed on schedule and on budged, so far.) > While some of your points are valid - fixating on nuclear at the exclusion of renewables simply doesn't make sense. Having nuclear in the mix makes sense. Having nuclear as the only option does NOT make sense. I agree. In particular I don't want to get rid of existing hydro (~8% of US electricity), and I think there are places for wind, solar, geothermal etc., but I do not think they will ever constitute more than few percent each in the overall mix. Maybe I'm wrong but I haven't seen anything persuasive yet, or at the horizon :)
  7. Renewable Baseload Energy
    @122 Nick Palmer at 10:53 AM on 29 November, 2010 > Oh dear. Perhaps Quokka does not comprehend what the word "directly" implies? Perhaps Q can tell us what will prevent an unscrupulous regime (see below) from using ordinary chemical separation methods to separate and purify the mixed actinides? I do not think it would be great idea to export solid fueled fast breeders (FBRs) to "unscrupulous regimes", I actually suggested DMSR for such purposes, where all the elements (U and Pu in particular) are kept at weapons-useless levels at all times, so chemical separation would not do a thing. (LEU; Pu with a large part of 238, 240, and 242 isotopes, so that a weapon physically cannot be constructed out of it in any way). However, there is a larger issue than that: this is not up to us (or US) to decide anymore. India is building their indigenous FBRs, China is building FBRs using the Russian design, Japan restarted their own FBR prototype this year, South Korea is developing an FBR for export. Us (or US) had already lost its technological leadership in this area, and consequently lost the control over who buys this technology. There is a small chance that US could develop something so much better than FBRs, such as the molten salt reactors - LFTR and DMSR-like, that other countries (in particular the "unscrupulous regime" ones) would voluntarily decided to avoid FBRs, and used proliferation and tamper proof US designs, but as it stands now this is not much likely. In particular as far as the "unscrupulous regimes" are concerned. *** Please do understand this very clearly: nuclear weapons are over 60 years old technology, physics and chemistry of which is well known and documented in textbooks and other public sources, including detailed blueprints of tested working designs. This may sound disagreeable and scary, but it has been a fact of life for some time by now. Any country which decides to pay the material and political price to develop them - will, if it has nuclear power reactors of any kind or not. Even the isolated and starving North Korea did exactly that! (NK has zero power reactors). If the US or Europe builds PWRs, FBRs, or any other reactors, it does not change the above any bit in any way. Claiming otherwise is maintaining dangerously mistaken and even somewhat arrogant attitude, which has already been decisively demonstrated as FALSE by the example of the starving and isolated North Korea. *** # >> "However most people live in places which already have nuclear weapons, so even if the "plutonium economy" was a reality, this does not add to weapons proliferation in any way." > Really? You just haven't thought about the way the world works enough. Oh thank you! Did you notice that large majority of the poeple you talked about live (and will live) in China and India, both of which already have nuclear weapons? For countries where one is worried about possible weapons proliferation, there is DMSR. This would not stop any determined rogue nation (as the easiest way to produce nuclear weapons does not involve any power reactors, but small and special low flux reactors which do not produce any electricity), but it would set our hearts free that we don't provide them with any conceivable avenue for proliferation. Despite what I wrote above, this seems to be a political necessity nowadays, and it is well feasible technologically, so not a big deal. > You're assuming that all these newly developing nations will choose the tech that you have faith in, rather than a tech that can be used to siphon off fissile material. Why do pro-nuke shills have such a childlike, but dangerous, faith in the innate goodness and morals of megalomaniac dictators? 1) Please keep your ad-hominem attacks to minimum, it is not that funny. 2) Megalomaniac dictators or any other rulers do not need any nuclear power reactors to produce their weapon-grade plutonium, as neither USA nor USSR nor India nor even starving North Korea needed any to begin with. Perhaps you forgot that nuclear weapons predate nuclear power reactors. Suggesting that commercial nuclear power plants aid proliferation of nuclear weapons in any way is incorrect, at odds with facts of recent history, and perhaps even dangerously delusional: In an energy starved world the probability for a regime to turn unscrupulous, and put together some graphite and uranium slugs, is much higher than in a world with plentiful, on-demand, scalable, economic, and clean power. [There are efficient ways of limiting proliferation of weapons, but this is beyond the scope of this discussion.] # > France has 60 million people and 60 nukes. A back of the envelope calculation speculation shows that if we were to power the world in 2050 with the universal European living standards needed to stabilise population - with the same size plant as France currently has - we would have to have around 9,000 nukes spread out in every one of the 200 countries in the world. Better pray that they are all run by selfless saints... I very much agree with you concerning stabilizing of the world population. 9000 GWe of nuclear capacity sounds about right. Thanks for bringing up the example of France. Most of their reactors were built within about two decades, demonstrating we can actually switch over to non-fossil sources in this rather short time frame using nuclear power. The similar experiment was done by other countries deploying wind/solar sources (Denmark, Austria, Germany, Spain), in some cases for about he same time of two decades. A brief look at where the electricity comes from in these countries, along with the respective gCO2/kWh (which I already posted earlier), clearly demonstrates which of these two approaches actually achieves the stated goals of eliminating CO2-intensive electricity generation, and reduces the emissions. BTW: Since when exactly is France being run by selfless saints? Or India, China, South Korea, Japan, US, Switzerland, Sweden, UK, ...?
  8. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Camburn's statement about the trashing of Steig (2009) is incorrect. It was attacked, unsuccessfully, by Steve McIntyre. There's a decent review, including a post by Steig, from the period - here:- http://www.masterresource.org/2009/01/the-buzz-about-antarctica/
  9. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    In my opinion it's not the March and September ice distributions that are important. For energy balance, it's the amount and distribution of ice at the height of summer that we should focus on, rather than the extent or area at the end of the melt season. So what's happening to Antarctic ice in December? Also, Tamino recently had a post about sea ice in which he mentioned Antarctic sea ice, although recently increasing, was previously much less. I haven't seen this mentioned on any of the other blogs I follow. I'm looking forward to his follow up on that. Congrats on the progress you've made on the basic versions. Cheers.
  10. 2nd law of thermodynamics contradicts greenhouse theory
    Again I am getting accused of denying the existence of back-radiation, saying CO2 is no green house gas and for my incorrect understanding of physics as well as refusing to accept science. I thought of having gained some patience during 60 years, but now it is wearing really thin. So far I have taken on any concrete counter argument and refuted it with evidence. So far I did not recognize that someone offered evidence for his counter arguments which makes the whole event somewhat lopsided. Nevertheless I tried and hopefully managed to keep calm and polite. But having to deal any other reply with, as it meanwhile seems, wilfully misreadings or misinterpretations of what I wrote is getting at my nerves. Then there are explanations like that of yocta, really helpful. It is as if you go to your car mechanic and ask him why the cylinder-head of your vehicle broke and he answers with a detailed description on the metallurgic composition of the cylinder-head. I'm too old for this crap. Good bye.
  11. actually thoughtful at 17:28 PM on 29 November 2010
    Renewable Baseload Energy
    "However I maintain that nuclear is not only the cheaper option than the presented alternatives (nuclear electricity in the US is actually the cheapest one, cheaper than coal right now), but that is the only one which can get the job done at the scale necessary to replace coal/gas (and eventually oil with electric cars)." I provided facts a few pages ago that refute the claim that nuclear is cheaper than coal, gas or wind. While some of your points are valid - fixating on nuclear at the exclusion of renewables simply doesn't make sense. Having nuclear in the mix makes sense. Having nuclear as the only option does NOT make sense. Indeed, given the well known, discussed here already negatives of nuclear - it makes more sense to work renewables until you hit a stopping point (at least a decade away unless we suddenly get serious about it). If we can push the envelope of renewables and not add any more nuclear - the world will be a better (and cheaper!) place to be. That said, in the US at least, we should start a few nuclear plants now - it takes over a decade to get one going (being charitable - I am in AZ - the home of mesa verde - check it out - what a disaster) and we may need a few in the 2020s. Also, read my post just above yours - US is building wind at the rate of 90GW per decade. That crosses out your argument that only nuclear can scale fast enough.
  12. Renewable Baseload Energy
    @120 MattJ at 10:39 AM on 29 November, 2010 > The flimsiest is your claim that all these technologies were abandoned because they were too expensive. No this was not the crux of my argument. It was that these technologies do not scale due to fundamental limitations which I discussed, the price being just one of them. I was complaining that natgas burners with compressed air storage (CAES) are incorrectly presented as a renewable, without even mentioning the necessity of burning the gas. I was complaining that the environmental impacts, which already did kill several projects of the kind mentioned, were not considered. I was complaining that EV battery storage is not feasible due to battery technology we have. I was complaining that the largest, the most efficient (at the scale of hundreds of MWs), and so far the cheapest electricity storage technology at this scale - pumped hydro - was not even mentioned in the article. > You must have been living in a cave all these years. The whole POINT of the switch to low-carbon, renewable sources is that once the TRUE cost of carbon emission is taken into account, no, they are NOT too expensive. On the contrary: it is sticking with carbon that is far, far too expensive. I agree, and I would add that it is not only the cost of carbon (dioxide) emissions which should be factored in, but the cost of other externalities/emissions as well. Coal in particular produces quantifiable externalities of about $8/MWh according to EU study ExternE - http://www.externe.info/ This is about the price of the coal electricity itself! However I maintain that nuclear is not only the cheaper option than the presented alternatives (nuclear electricity in the US is actually the cheapest one, cheaper than coal right now), but that is the only one which can get the job done at the scale necessary to replace coal/gas (and eventually oil with electric cars). @121 MattJ at 10:43 AM on 29 November, 2010 I agree that the Indian way with solid fueled fast breeders is not optional, and there is a much better, safer way, the molten salt reactors, actually developed in the US. This talk is a brief primer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk Gore details here: http://energyfromthorium.com/ Concerning thorium - to power the whole civilization on thorium one would need to fission about 7 000 tonnes per year in a LFTR-type of reactor. Thorium is chemically similar to rare earth elements (REE), so it is often collocated with REE. As of now, there is no economic value in thorium, actually it presents an obnoxious waste which REE extraction has to deal with, therefore many places where the is a lot of thorium admixture are avoided. I asked a friend of mine who is in REE business, and he said that if there was any positive value of thorium, nearly all of the needed 7000 t/y (to power the whole planet), would be extracted as byproducts from existing scale of REE mining... The point here is that thorium is not an Indian specific thing. Actually the reason is the opposite: every large enough country has plenty of thorium, but India had very little uranium, and due to its opposition to NNPT used to be (until very recently) considered as a bad boy country which nobody could sell uranium (or other nuclear tech) into.
  13. actually thoughtful at 17:10 PM on 29 November 2010
    Renewable Baseload Energy
    I started out wondering the average size of a nuclear plant (1GW). I found this article - a great rundown on wind, solar and nuclear output (we ALREADY have wind output in the USthat equals US + France total nuclear output!) http://www.ases.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1178&Itemid=204 The power of using technology we have now! (so rounding out sailrick's comments - the French built 29GW nuclear in 10 years, USA built 18GW solar in two years - blow it out and we see that we could build 90GW in the time it took the French to build 29GW - and not have any nuclear waste to deal with). [wind may have some problems scaling, but hasn't shown any yet (run out of "good" wind, transmission lines, intermittent supply]
  14. actually thoughtful at 16:50 PM on 29 November 2010
    Renewable Baseload Energy
    Quokka - how can you be in favor of nuclear but against a beefed up grid? It just doesn't compute. I am not arguing for starting an electron's flow in the Keys of FL and sending it to Anchorage, AK, then back to the Keys. But any non-stone age future for mankind will rely more heavily on electricity. You want to rule out local use (ie solar PV on rooftops, backyard wind). So we will have, in your world, larger plants. In the absence of a beefed up grid - how will you pull that off? In the presence of a beefed up grid - why can't renewables benefit? I am not sure if you have created a straw man (renewables don't need a better grid) or a logical fallacy (nuclear doesn't need a better grid). It is hard to envision any future that doesn't include a much more reliable, smarter, more robust electrical grid. In fact, the only way to avoid that is to go whole hog on backyard wind and solar - and be willing to forgo lights, heat, internet, etc from time to time when no one locally is adding any power to the grid. Now, once you have backyard solar/wind, and you throw in some CSP, utility wind and some of these grid storage concepts (some are proof of concept, some are done already, some are possible now due to materials sciences advances not available when the grid was first developed, some are clever ideas no one thought of before (and many more ideas will come into being once we put a rational price on carbon)) - THEN you could potentially make do with smaller grid interconnects. But you will have them anyways because in between those two times you have a period when you need to be able to move electricity around long distances. And when you factor in that wind rules the heartland, and solar the southwest, and many loads are in the NE and West - you can see that a stronger grid is a MUST - no matter which vision of the future comes into being. PS - I was thinking perhaps you meant that King Island is not a city, rather than disputing its location. The 2007 population was 1,723 according to Wikipedia. So providing power for 50% of that through grid storage is pretty cool. Maybe we should be thinking in units of 2,000 people. I am somewhat tongue in cheek here, but also quite serious that it will take new approaches in thinking to bring about a successful carbon free future. It isn't just replace coal with nuclear, next problem please. Renewables are different, and the more local they are, the more power you have over your energy destiny - which I think is a notable improvement over greedily sucking on the electric utility teat.
  15. Renewable Baseload Energy
    Regarding nuclear, while it may be a necessary part of the overall solution, I think Nick Palmer @ 122 has some good points. What I always question, is not so much the technology, but human nature. Human error, whether of the willful sort, as in terrorism, or unwitting sort. We've all seen plenty of examples of the latter, in the fossil fuel industry and to a lesser extent with nuclear. And there has been some of the former, like Saddam Hussein setting fire to the oil wells in Kuwait, and stolen nuclear materials from the former USSR. KajL "In France they built 29 nuclear power plants in just 10 years." In the U.S. over 18 GW of wind energy were built in two years. 2008-2009 And the French don't know what to do with the waste any more than we do.
  16. Renewable Baseload Energy
    @124 Marcus at 11:18 AM on 29 November, 2010 > What we see, though, is that China's "cheap" nuclear power stations are the exception, not the rule. Actually the same cheap nuclear plants have been built recently in countries as different as Japan, India, South Korea, and even the Czech Republic. This shows that there is nothing expensive with nuclear fission energy as such, but the problem is in the way nuclear plants are "built by lawyers" in the US. There is clearly an effect of economy of "mass" production, that is after several few plants are build many issues get ironed out, everyone knows what to do etc., which lacks in most places in the West right now after the decades of no new nuclear builds. Even that is hard to justify the difference, in particular considering the costs such as the completely new nuclear plants in UAE build by Koreans. See here for some relevant info, pages 74-77: http://www.asmeconferences.org/ICONE16/pdfs/NewPlantsBeBuilt.pdf
  17. Renewable Baseload Energy
    "grand plans for renewables require very significantly expanded grids with large deployment of new HVDC transmission lines. Precisely to avail themselves of spacial smoothing" One of my points was that renewables can also enable spatial smoothing, by contributing to the grid, particularly large scale solar thermal following the load. If you don't have to fire up a peaker gas plant because you have some saved up energy from wind or solar, isn't that contributing to the grid and reducing emissions? Or do you think it all just flows toward backing up the renewable sources? Solar mostly provides power when you need it most.
  18. Renewable Baseload Energy
    Camburn #127 - "A lot of posts on this topic show that co2 is not an immenent threat to climate at all." Funny, I haven't seen a single example of this. Perhaps you're seeing what you want to see. "There are leakage losses with long line transmission no matter what current tech is used." High voltage direct current lines only lose about 3% per 1,000 km. "PV on a roof sounds noble, but in reality is expensive per kwh. The rich folks can do this and feel good." I'm not rich by any means, but I've leased PV for my roof. Over the 10 year lease, it roughly breaks even with what I would have paid otherwise to my electric utility, despite the fact that my house has very low energy consumption. And PV prices continue to drop. "There has to be baseload generating stations." That's what the article is about.
  19. Renewable Baseload Energy
    johnd Thanks for the response. I get what you are saying. I don't think there's any one size fits all solution utilizing CSP. Each power company would decide how best to use it to suit their needs. One company may just want CSP for peak demand, without the heat storage, while another may have a different situation that calls for heat storage. Another power company may choose to couple CSP with natural gas, if it better suits their needs. Storing heat is far more efficient and cheaper than storing power in batteries. In the areas most likely to have CSP built, it is a good match, since the biggest nearby demands are in summer for air conditioning. And it is possible to build enough heat storage into a CSP plant to run all night, if that is what you need. It should also be possible to add heat storage to an existing parabolic trough CSP plant at a later date, if deemed worthwhile, or needed. Long story short, I don't think its an either or question of CSP with heat storage verses storing hydro power, or other alternatives. We'll likely need all this and more. Same goes for the PV verses centralized CSP argument that I hear sometimes. We need them both IMO, distributed as well as utility scale solar. All in all, I still think CSP is a very versatile and useful technology. But thanks for showing me the utility of using hydro as storage, particularly over long periods of time. The nine NREL pilot plants in the Mojave Desert were orignally built with heat storage. I believe oil was used, maybe water. They were able to provide power to SoCal cities in the evening, when demand is still pretty high. Of course, molten salt is a much more efficient storage medium. They were later converted to co-firing with gas, not because the heat storage wasn't working, but because they wanted to experiment with co-firing gas, and couldn't do both. If permitting and such goes well, there are 15 GW of solar thermal ready to be built in the southwest, which is not a bad start. There is about 6 GW already undederway if my memory serves. That at least partially answers quokka's question about solar replacing coal. I'm not saying it has resulted in coal plants being shut down, but 15GW is equivalent to about 23 coal plants at avg. nameplate generating capacity. (650 MW coal plants) or roughly - 6.46 coal plants @28% capacity factor for solar thermal, 11.5 coal plants @50% cpacity factor for solar thermal with heat storage. Lets call it 7 and 12, since I didn't adjust for coal's less than 100% capacity factor. :-) CSP plants can be up and running in three years, or less, from inception. It's biggest drawback is that it's captial intensive up front.
  20. actually thoughtful at 16:24 PM on 29 November 2010
    Renewable Baseload Energy
    Actually thoughtful: "I do agree with the poster who points out renewables tend to favor a national grid (actually - everyone benefits, even coal - more open market)." Quokka:"Why do we have to have this absurd conversation. It widely acknowledged, indeed advocated by the best renewables experts that HVDC must be substantially upgraded for renewables to be able to run a viable grid." Perhaps because you can't even be bothered to read my posts? To think beyond your ax of the evening - nuclear everywhere? Quokka: "King Island is, remarkably, an island with a small population and NOT a city in Tasmania. " My source for that is: "A 200 kW, 800 kW·h (2.9 GJ) output leveler in use at the Huxley Hill Wind Farm on King Island, Tasmania." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery Look I am not a citizen of Australia - I have been to Tasmania, but did not visit King Island (I guess because it is not there...). If both the original poster of this information and Wikipedia are incorrect - I certainly apologize for continuing the misinformation. Where is King Island? As for the mythical nuclear so cheap we won't even meter it! (yep, I can use a straw man too). Well, again, read my posts - where I find (using well, er, US DOE/EIA estimates!) that nuclear is ~$60/unit and wind, coal and gas are ~$53-55/unit (and to be fair solar PV weighs in at $100/unit (minimum) - but historically PV goes down by 20% for each doubling of installed base). And all of this relies on an overnight cost of nuclear at ~2k/KWHe - which is, as you so colorfully put it "tosh." (in the United States) So we are having this conversation because you don't read my posts, nor my sources, which back up my posts and you are frustrated that all of us enlightened folks don't bow to the alter of nuclear. Nuclear in the US is destined to be a partial solution as it is in China (China leads in nuclear. China leads in coal. China leads in renewables. China is big. Really big.) As to whether the DOE is accurate in pricing renewables - probably not. They are still not admitting there is such a thing as peak oil. They are relatively neutral, but if they have any bias, it is pro-fossil, pro-nuclear, and in NO way pro-renewable. Here is some background on a national electric grid (US) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398 (not saying you need background - the conversation about "the grid" is amorphous for more posters than just myself) Look there is a lot going on - I now have an electric meter that I can't read, that the electric company calls a "smart" meter. We already have a national grid - I am honestly asking you what you mean when you talk about improvements to the grid. I mean better interconnections between regional grids, replacement of aging infrastructure, better ways to control and price flows between regional grids, connections from remote sources (utility size wind, solar, and nuclear are all going to be sited far from current loads due to NIMBY). All of these things benefit current utilities. That it will benefit renewables is obviously true. That a wind plant in BFE will need a connection to the grid is obviously true - as will nuclear.
  21. Twice as much Canada, same warming climate
    Re: gallopingcamel (71) I think the Christidis et al paper is of tremendous value, as it documents a unique (thus far) way to determine the attribution of climate change's effects on both CRM and HRM. That is what it set out to do and the authors accomplished that mission. But the making of any inferences above and beyond what the study was designed to do is simply wrong. What CO2Science is doing, using the Christidis et al paper to support its contention that warming (not that it's happening, mind you, just if it hypothetically is) is good for people because it lengthens lifespans (which is clearly different from lowering mortality) is flat out deceptive and wrong. That is what all on both sides of intelligent discourse should be challenging and decrying, deception and manipulations of sources to say things that they simply don't do. But it has been a pleasure, GC. Hope your mission to NOAA was enlightening. Which center did you visit? The Yooper
  22. Renewable Baseload Energy
    actually thoughtfull @136 Why do we have to have this absurd conversation. It widely acknowledged, indeed advocated by the best renewables experts that HVDC must be substantially upgraded for renewables to be able to run a viable grid. There is no question about this. How do you think this electricity generated by desert CSP is going to be moved to where it's needed? Quantum entanglement? Why are people always banging on that if the wind is not blowing somewhere, it is blowing somewhere else and electricity will be moved over an enhanced grid? This is so fundamentally basic to intermittent renewables, that to deny it is expose complete ignorance. King Island is, remarkably, an island with a small population and NOT a city in Tasmania. What is economic on an island with a small population where the alternative is most likely diesel generation may very well not be at all relevant to national grids. Is this so astonishingly difficult to grasp?
    Which is why nuclear is having such trouble in this thread - in the real world it is wickedly expensive.
    I have already provided on this thread references to both the IEA and US DOE/EIA 2010 estimates of the costs of electricity generation which show nuclear to be competitive with fossil fuels given a carbon price and broadly cheaper than wind and far cheaper than solar, but apparently you for some reason, yet to be explained, know better. I should think that IEA and DOE have a far more substantial connection to the real world than some of the tosh being peddled here.
  23. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Er, don't mean to butt in to a robust discussion, but I also looked at the abstracts for the articles that Robert referenced. Camburn, you're right, the error margins are huge. But that error cuts both ways. It could be that EAIS is losing 100Gtpa or more. That's a phenomenal amount of mass loss for an area that, until recently, was thought to be *gaining* mass... So, we have best estimates (with a lot of uncertainty) showing WAIS losing about ~130 Gtpa, and the EAIS either stable, or losing ~50Gtpa. That's a whole lot of ice. Either way, Antarctica as a whole is losing ice. Sure, it may be a small percentage of the total ice sheet down there, but when you start talking about tens (or hundreds) of cubic kilometres of ice falling off that continent into the Southern Ocean, you don't think that's cause for concern?
  24. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Actually Wu et al. 2010 (the skeptics favorite) show that ice losses are occurring in the EAIS outside of the error bars. I believe Chen et al. 2009 show it outside the error bars also (slightly) -57 plusminus 52Gtyr. I think you have to remember that Error bars go both ways but yeah EAIS is probably stable for the most part. WAIS is VERY unstable as my presentation will even attest to. It is not "negligible" because it represents a small portion of its mass. That's a ridiculous statement to make. If Antarctica loses 1% of its mass over the next 50 to 100 years we're in deep trouble (0.5m SLR) but according to you that is "negligible".
  25. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Robert: I don't have a nature sub anymore, but from the abstract of the papers you posted, it confirms what I stated. WAIS is loosing ice. EAIS is stable. Look at the error bars in the abstracts please. Thank you. And once again, the loss of ice in Antarctica on a whole is neglibable as a percentage of mass.
  26. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    You conflate subglacial meltwater with surface meltwater that percolates down. The two are not required to exist co-dependently you realize? Subglacial "meltwater" in Antarctica is generally caused by the warmth underneath thick ice sheets providing insulation enough that free-flowing water can exist. This is NOT the same thing as melt ponds on the surface percolating down and creating the "Zwally-effect". See no trend in melting on the surface of Antarctica tells us nothing about what is going on for ice losses in Antarctica of which 90% originates through calving. Mostly driven by the mechanisms I described from the paper by Bell 2008. If you want we can get more in depth about this? Meltwater percolation likely plays very little part in the accelerations of ice streams in the WAIS because these ice streams are already fastmoving ice streams which have reached their basal saturation rate as has been seen on Jacobshavn by Pelto. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/10/what-links-the-retreat... Thus if you introduce more meltwater through the so called zwally effect (NOT THAT YOU COULD IN WAIS) then you wouldn't see the accelerations that have been found to be occurring due to ocean warming. For anyone of who might be interested here is a presentation I did on Antarctic ice changes (in 2009) Camburn, it might be of use to read it. http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Antarctic_Presentation.pdf
    Moderator Response: Please don't use all caps. Use italics, or, if you must, bold.
  27. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Sorry. I meant this paper. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6215004
  28. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Ok....I am done. Read this paper. Thank you. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/igsoc/jog/2003/00000049/00000164/art00013
  29. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Robert: I am not talking about "melting glacier sheets". I am talking about melt ponds, just as the auther of the paper I cited did. Melt water DOES play a role in the WAIS. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/igsoc/jog/2003/00000049/00000164/art00013
  30. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Camburn, Steig et al (2009) has not been "put in the trash bin" the methods were fine. Just because Hu and them over at CA found that they forgot to correct for autocorrelation doesn't mean it was trash. They submitted their correction and the correction was published without any noticeable difference. "Back to ice loss" Yeah you are going way back. All the way to 2006. How about we stick with more recent studies shall we? http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n12/full/ngeo694.html http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n2/abs/ngeo102.html http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n12/full/ngeo694.html No trend discernible? What are you saying? You do realize that paper you cited was about MELT not ICE LOSS. The two ARE NOT the same. That is the whole reason I had to do the rebuttal to Goddard in the first place. Antarctica as a whole is not neglible. If you see the post I mentioned earlier (response to goddard) you would see that almost ALL estimates show a significant total ice loss from land ice. Finally, Melt plays 10% of the role, calving plays 90% of the role. Sorry but melting just isn't terribly important in Antarctic Ice Mass trends. End of story.
  31. Twice as much Canada, same warming climate
    Daniel Bailey (#69), If we have a disagreement it appears to be in semantics. We seem to draw slightly different inferences from the Christidis et al paper. If you are saying that the paper is of limited value owing to covering just one country, I agree with you. In fact I would go further and say that such studies of countries in high latitudes are bound to show what they found. To put it in layman's terms, temperature increases in high latitudes make countries more livable by lengthening the summers (when "the living is easy" according to at least one song writer) and shortening the winters. The adaptation issue is a complex one. Mankind has been wearing clothes and heating dwellings for many thousands of years, so we have had plenty of experience at adapting to cold conditions. On the other hand, when it comes to high temperatures, the ability to adapt through air conditioning and drinking Gatorade is relatively new. Like you, I enjoy the "pleasant dialog" and must congratulate John Cook and the good people who post on this blog for making it possible.
  32. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Robert: Yes, the warmer water that has infiltrated under the WAIS is accelerating the loss. Melt aslo plays a part further inland on that sheet. I checked my archive and foolishly didn't save that paper. The observers were quit astounded with their find.
  33. actually thoughtful at 15:00 PM on 29 November 2010
    Renewable Baseload Energy
    Quokka - the counter to your claims about "ridiculous and unfounded claims" is reality. This is why I posted earlier about my customers who have cut their winter heating bills (in a cold climate) by 75% - this is the type of thing people like you claim can't be done. Likewise, if a city in Tasmania is running 50% off of wind by using a vanadium flow battery - this is a real-world proof of concept. Will it roll out to the world? Perhaps, perhaps not. But lessons learned there will be useful in other renewable base load projects. Likewise, my local utility with their 25% power at one substation - again proving the concept. Nothing beats real world to establish a claim. Which is why nuclear is having such trouble in this thread - in the real world it is wickedly expensive. I agree we should start now to put some nuclear in place - that means we should see it on line around 2020-2025 - by which time I HOPE we have correctly priced carbon and many of these "impossible things" you keep railing against will be part of our everyday reality. The single most important thing any/all of us can do is take action now. Just as we can't get government to turn on a dime - none of us can build a nuclear plant. But all of us can install solar or wind on our homes, or work with the landlord to get it installed on their property. Bring it up at work and see if you can't make something happen. I know when we put solar in at businesses the employees are all quite pleased (obviously the owner is or we wouldn't have the job). Given the failure of governments worldwide to deal with this crisis - we are going to have to act as individuals to create the momentum (and yes - economies of scale) to bring these technologies into the mainstream.
  34. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Steig et al has been put in the trash bin. The mythology of that paper was pure junk. Back to ice loss: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5768/1754 The WAIS has credibily lost ice. The EAIS not so credibly. NO trend discernable. The loss on the whole of Antarctica is still neglible as a percentage.
  35. Renewable Baseload Energy
    sailrick @132 I made no claim about water used in CSP, you are mistaking me for somebody else. But I will make one comment on the Brightsource project. Has it been built and operated and if so what was the cost and has it met the design claims? I'm not saying that it won't. I'm just saying that it pays to maintain a skeptical - in the good sense - attitude to first of a kind large scale civil engineering projects with brand new designs and technologies. Oh, and last time I looked "homes" were not a SI unit for energy or power. Would authors of pieces on renewable generation please drop the deplorable habit of specifying generation capacity in "homes". And your point about HVDC is what? I was replying to nonsense about renewables not needing expanded grids because of local generation and grid storage. I did not say this was good or bad - just trying to drag the discussion back to some connection with reality.
  36. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Camburn, If you understand the "physics" of glaciers quite well then you will know that the mechanism through which antarctic glaciers have accelerated is not the same as those in many areas of greenland where the zwally effect (the melt water lubricating the base) is key. In Antarctic the key important factor is the removal of longitudinal compression forces. Warming ocean waters cause grounding line retreat which removes the compression forces and let the glaciers flow quicker. This is also well-understood "physics". If you really read the article's that I posted, you would see the following phrase "In terms of a grounding line retreat, an inland shift of the grounding line causes less backpressure through increased calving and basal melting. This process results in increased glacier velocities and subsequent inland thinning as more ice is being pulled from the accumulation zone (Bell 2008)." Finally, You seem to indicate that East Antarctica has cooled whereas Steig et al. (2009) refute your impression.
  37. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Re: Camburn (8) Not having access to the full study you reference, if (as Robert points out) that the focus of the study is melt trends, then I'd have to say that using the paper to invalidate the documented losses of Antarctic ice (through observed calving and retreat of grounding lines) is an apples-to-oranges comparison. We can visually observe how the Antarctic is losing ice and we can document by how much. Melt as yet is a non-factor. The WAIS and the EAIS are both losing mass, in the multi-gigaton range yearly. The Yooper
  38. actually thoughtful at 14:45 PM on 29 November 2010
    Renewable Baseload Energy
    adelady - I wish you would disagree with me more often! This is exactly what I am talking about - you yourself with the real world experience of 20 years of solar hot water (systems now do a lot more to tell you what is happening - less of a black box (at least the ones I design...)). And then your mother! My goodness 190 households full of matriarchs and patriarchs telling their offspring and bridge/golf buddies - solar works! This is what we need to change the world! (Yes - it should be a government/industry led thing - but in the US at least - the political body is already owned by the corporations that stand to lose - so we MUST find effective means of change that work outside of our institutions - thus the call for INDIVIDUAL and IMMEDIATE action - if you understand climate change - how can you not act at the home/business level?) Please! Argue louder with me! ;-) My neighbor - a red neck, right wing, anti-environmental gun-totin' smoking radical - just signed up to have the local power company install solar PV in exchange for a fixed electricity payment for the next 20 years. I really am in awe - he doesn't give a fig about global warming - but he does want a fixed cost for electricity. This is APS - Arizona utility monopoly. I have to admit they are the most enlightened utility I know of (after fighting PV for a few decades...). They are proving false the idea that back feeding the grid causes problems. They are going to have 25% plus of the power that goes through our local sub-station come from decentralized PV. I thought I would throw out some unrelenting good news to break up all the denier class BS we all deal with everyday!
  39. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Robert: I understand the dynamics of glaciers quit well. Melt plays an important role in the advancement of the glacier as the melt water lubricates the base. And contrary to Mr. Goodard, there are melt pools on Antartica. The ice sheet in Antarctica seems to respond more to pressure than surface temperature. Western Antarctica has warmed. Yes, it is still very cold but that is not an issue in this dynamic. Eastern Antarctica has cooled, with a net over the continent of even temperature with regional variations.
  40. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    no reason not to "believe" Monaghan. Its just that the paper doesnt say what you think it does. ie land ice loss != melt. See sealevel curve. What's worrying about antarctic ice loss is that models didnt predict any, though in fairness most of EAIS is behaving as expected thankfully. Getting seawater under the WAIS is the concern.
  41. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    #10: "10 years is not" Long enough to deflate your 'lack of GPS' objection. How long has GRACE been up? "I believe the NCAR fellow" That's good science, picking the study that fits your preconceived ideas? Hey Yooper, cherry-picking season came early this year!
  42. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    muon@6: 10 years is not a very long time. I believe the NCAR fellow. And actually, the paper about drift etc confirms the NCAR fellow in Geo.
  43. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Camburn, Maybe I should have shown you this post: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Antarctica-absolute-temperatures-too-cold-ice-loss.htm If you read it carefully you would realize that melting on Antarctica is virtually irrelevant because ice losses primarily occur through glacier accelerations. So your paper on Antarctic melt trends is irrelevant to this debate.
  44. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Yooper: The abstract on this paper was quit good. If you don't have access to the whole paper, if you live near a college, you can get access to it. The Geo paper is peer reviewed and shows that overall there has not been a trend established as far as land ice loss. One of the main reasons is the sheer mass of the ice field.
  45. Renewable Baseload Energy
    @dana1981
    As a general comment, this article really has nothing to do with nuclear power, and it's kind of aggravating that the comments have been hijacked into a nuclear argument. It's hard to resist, because people are making incorrect statements about nuclear power, and then moving the goalposts so that the argument keeps going. But this really isn't the place to be arguing about nuclear power. Please stick to the topic on hand, which is the ability of renewable energy to provide baseload power, and whether it's even necessary.
    If I might make a constructive criticism. Your article is essentially a shopping list of technologies - many of which are at best very immature. This leads to commentors here making ridiculous and unfounded claims such as "renewables don't require a much beefed up grid" not because it is true, but they think that repeating nonsense reinforces their position which is political and not based in science, engineering and economics. Just pick some whizz bang thing like vanadium flow batteries and shout loudly that it "proves" that grid level storage is viable and HVDC expansion is not needed. I think a much better and more fruitful approach would be to take some of the "grand plans" for energy, dissect and criticize them. The fact that none of these plans that I have seen have a significant element of grid storage should tell us something about grid storage - especially when the plans are prepared by the some of the most fervent and knowledgeable of renewables advocates. One such plan might be for Australia, ZCA2020, there are analogous plans for Europe and possibly the US. For a plan with a large slice of nuclear, Ontario’s Long-Term Energy Plan might be interesting to look at. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of cost. Being forced to deal with a complete plan, rather than just a bunch of hand waving about the next big thing, means that the overall system cost must be addressed. For example LCOE does not fully price wind power as there is a system and emissions cost in backup generation. Existing grids act as a kind of slush fund for wind, but that game is only good up to some level of wind penetration, maybe of the order of 20% or so. As far as I can see, system wide analysis where the system components must be costed on the most authoritative basis available is the only way to productively address questions such as "Can renewables do baseload?"
  46. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Re: Camburn (4, 5) So, please tell me how your linked study materially differs from the information contained in Robert's post? The Yooper
  47. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    #1: "The lack of GPS stations affect the corrections." Really? See Geodesy in Antarctica 10 years of Continuous GPS measurements for geodetic tying of Antarctica and India Then there is GLONASS; even the Argentinians are in the act:
  48. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Yooper: Unless you want to tell me that NCAR is not a reliable source of information.
  49. A basic overview of Antarctic ice
    Yooper: I read his post. I will stand by my post. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010EO010001.shtml
  50. Renewable Baseload Energy
    quokka "CPS uses more water per mwh than any other source of power" Not so. It can be water cooled, air cooled, or closed loop cooled as in a Heller system. This last one uses very little water. Brightsource says their 410 MW Ivanpah site uses less than 100 acre feet annualy. Enough power for 140,000 homes while using 300 homes worth of water. "The secret to low water ue, high efficiency CSP" http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/29/csp-concentrating-solar-power-heller-water-use/ quokka "grand plans for renewables require very significantly expanded grids with large deployment of new HVDC transmission lines. Precisely to avail themselves of spacial smoothing" How about significantly improved grids? And much of the need for HVDC is because of the remote areas where CSP or Wind might be built. Giving CSP the ability to add power to the long distance grid via HVDC thereby enabling "spatial smoothing" not just "availing" itself of the HVDC. Like I posted earlier, there is over 300 GW potential for CSP near existing power lines.

Prev  2050  2051  2052  2053  2054  2055  2056  2057  2058  2059  2060  2061  2062  2063  2064  2065  Next


The Consensus Project Website

THE ESCALATOR

(free to republish)


© Copyright 2024 John Cook
Home | Translations | About Us | Privacy | Contact Us