"July was one of the hottest - if not the hottest - month on modern record, and the world’s hottest day was registered – yet another unwelcome indication of the extent that greenhouse gases from human activities are changing our climate."
- World Meteorological Organization
https://wmo.int/media/news/july-sets-new-temperature-records
@WDEFAustenOnek
8.1+^ BILLION human beings, all running cars, power plants, air conditioners & tons of other heat generating devices 24/7. The earth may seem big from our POV, but it is a closed system. Of course humans are a significant cause of climate change, to deny that is really stupid.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek They'll finally grasp what we've been saying
Once we are knee deep side by side
Destruction is looming above us
As we're drowning, our hands still tied
Their tears all pouring down as life is scorched by the sun
The ending that we knew would come has finally begun
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Although in truth I have more hope than that.
It'd require an immense amount of effort, but I believe it should still be viable to apply a reversible geoengineering solution to buy time - like, for example, a giant semi-adjustable thin-film space mirror array.
If we were to redirect enough sunlight to halt or reverse the existing warming while also cutting our carbon emissions down to net zero, the biosphere might still be able to correct the issue. Maybe.
@IrelandTorin @WDEFAustenOnek
The easiest way for us to fix our world is to stop having children. Completely. All our problems are caused by us & the sheer size of our population (8.1+ BILLION people& climbing). If we were gone, the world would fix itself. So reducing our population is a simple way to scale back the size of our problems. But until then we still have to fix the current causes
Replace fossil fuel cars with electric vehicles & build the infrastructure for powering them.
1
@IrelandTorin @WDEFAustenOnek
Replace all fossil fuel burning power plants with solar plants & wind farms.
A lot of this is already underway, but is slowed by conservative foot-dragging.
Bandaid fixes like space mirrors, even if they manage to help, will only worsen our situation if we aren't dealing with our core problems.
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@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek You'd be far better off to opt with nuclear plants.
They can produce a stable baseload power supply, can be operated in a load-following mode to keep the grid stable, have turbines with big-ass flywheels that absorb small transient fluctuations (this is a big problem with solar as the AC-to-DC inverters it uses don't do this at all, and wind turbines aren't great at it) and don't require battery storage to work.
They're also zero-carbon in operation.
@IrelandTorin @WDEFAustenOnek
The problem (& it's a big one) with nuclear power plants is they build up nuclear waste, which is deadly, never dies & must be stored somewhere. If all of our power plants were nuclear, eventually the whole planet would be radioactive.
At least the drawbacks to solar & wind power are not deadly. That's the whole point behind eliminating fossil fuel-burning power plants, the deadly side effects.
What is the point of only choosing between deadly options?
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek We have millennia worth of nuclear fuel, especially if we make use of (existing) reprocessing technologies and use heavy-water reactors like the CANDU (which is capable of utilizing thorium).
Eliminating fossil fuels by replacing them with nuclear would be a HUGE step forward.
The PM2.5 pollution *alone* from fossil fuels kills more people every few hours (5 to 12, depending on your data source) than every nuclear accident in history has *combined*.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek As a final word - my advice to you is: before you reject nuclear out of hand based on rumour, sensationalization, and scaremongering... review data from reliable sources (UNSCEAR, IAEA, US EPA, etc - you know, reputable organizations with the expertise and the data to speak authoritatively) on the subject.
You may, as I did, find that all is not as the tabloids have made it out to be.
I wonder how much the fossil fuel industry paid them to print some of that drivel.
@IrelandTorin @WDEFAustenOnek
It's pointless to compare the benefits/dangers of fossil fuel power plants over nuclear plants, how many have died from one thing or the other. Here on Closed-System Earth, both are bad, with consequences that are deadly. Solar power & wind power have never killed anyone, nor have they any negative side effects that build up over time.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Everything just said is wrong. Also, you clearly didn't absorb the responses I spent time writing before replying.
- Comparisons between fossil fuels & nuclear matter: solar/wind don't provide reliable baseload, & the resources we'd need to fix that globally with current energy storage technologies don't exist.
- That's a false equivalence: oil power (most commonly used) is 614X deadlier than nuclear.
- Solar and wind DO kill, & DO have side effects. [continued]
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Wind has a casualty rate of 0.04 deaths per terawatt-hour; solar has a casualty rate of 0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour.
AFAIK that's mostly maintenance & manufacturing accidents - eg, deaths from falling off wind turbines (or impact w/ side while on harness) are common.
You want to know what nuclear's casualty rate is?
0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour, same as solar.
FYI making solar panels yields A LOT of toxic semiconductor chem waste, & panels don't last forever.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Listen, I used to think renewables were the perfect solution too.
I *wish* they were - that'd be so much simpler.
Unfortunately, when I actually looked into the subject, I found out that the obstacles to a global renewable-only grid are *enormous*. If we're lucky we *might* be able to do it within 100 years, but by that point it'd be far too late.
For that very reason, fossil fuel companies have spent vast sums encouraging renewables & spreading anti-nuclear FUD.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek It's not like I think renewables don't have a place (they do!) but they aren't ready to be our sole source, especially not baseload.
With a nuclear+renewable mix, we could take full advantage of renewables energy when it's available, while maintaining the stable grid we need 24/7/365.
No other energy source can even come close to nuclear's capacity factor (simplified, you can think of it as % reliability) - nuclear's is 92%, vs solar's 23% & wind's 34%.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek No, that's not how nuclear waste works.
Firstly, nuclear waste DOES decay away; depending on how it's dealt with, most of the danger could be gone in a couple centuries.
Secondly, it doesn't necessarily have to be stored (well, most of it): reprocessing technology that has existed since the '70s can extract the ~99%ish of unreacted uranium for use in new fuel rods, leaving only the 1% of fission products for disposal, & a lot of produced isotopes have value/uses.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Thirdly, the amount of high-level nuclear waste produced is miniscule, even without reprocessing reducing it by a factor of 100.
For perspective, the total volume of high-level waste *ever produced* is equivalent to a cube with a side-length of 21 meters - such a small amount it could feasibly all be stored in a single facility so deep underground that the only fate it could ever experience is being subducted down into the mantle & harmlessly sinking to the core.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Fourthly, the drawbacks to solar and wind power ARE deadly.
On a per-unit-energy basis, wind energy kills more people than nuclear energy - turns out maintaining wind turbines is a really, REALLY dangerous job. Hydro is even worse.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
As for solar, the production of PV panels is a highly polluting and toxic process - to say nothing of the batteries also needed - and FYI unreliable power also causes significant excess mortality.
@jjGravitas @WDEFAustenOnek Finally, to address your claim "eventually the whole planet would be radioactive":
Well, there's a lot to unpack.
First: the whole planet's always been radioactive - in fact, the decay of naturally occurring unstable isotopes is partly what keeps Earth's mantle & core hot! We're also constantly bathed in background radiation from space.
Second: Nuclear plants don't emit any notable amount of radiation into the environment. Doing that gets you shut down right away.
@IrelandTorin @WDEFAustenOnek
... As if that wasn't bad enough, there is one more drawback to nuclear fuel such as uranium, which is finite and must be mined. Eliminating fossil fuels by replacing them with radioactive fuels is replacing bad with worse. Considering what fossil fuels have done to our world, what do you think radioactive fuels would do to our world? It wouldn't fix the existing carbon problem, but would add radioactivity to the deadly mix.