The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Climate Change or: How I Stopped Worrying and Love Rising Sea Levels
That_Guy
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
While I should have been working, I was instead reading several articles today about just how bad Global Climate Change is getting and just how out of touch the general public and lawmakers are. There doesn't seem to be a recent thread on this topic already, so here we go.
Even with a production ready 100mw fusion reactor in 10 years, I am worried we have just done far too much damage to the environment for it to matter. The west will become a barren desert while the eastern seaboard will be underwater. Florida will probably be the worst hit with up to half the state underwater. Assuming the worst, what is your plan? Run, fight, give up?
Even with a production ready 100mw fusion reactor in 10 years, I am worried we have just done far too much damage to the environment for it to matter. The west will become a barren desert while the eastern seaboard will be underwater. Florida will probably be the worst hit with up to half the state underwater. Assuming the worst, what is your plan? Run, fight, give up?
https://www.youtube.com/hesthatguy | https://www.patreon.com/hesthatguy | https://steamcommunity.com/id/ThatGuy3141/
0
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
But the American West is already going to become a barren desert because Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and farmers are sucking up all the water. Las Vegas in particular, with a whopping 219 gallons of water per day per person, is planning on putting a pipe at the very bottom of Lake Mead and sucking it dry.
I'm not worried about the water rise right here since I'm on the side of a mountain in Vermont. Plenty of water, and we can weather a couple degree increase in temperature. But I'm sure worried about the food situation up here since we don't have tons of stable cropland thanks to those same mountains. And I'm sure we'll run into problems with people wanting the water from the northeast along the same lines as Lake Mead.
We're a rich nation, we'll be able to get through this with damage, but minimal loss of life. I'm far more worried about poor nations that are already losing their lands.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
That's a good point. I could see the scientists and engineers of America coming together to create artificial habitats in the western wastelands fed by underground water pumps from the east. We could repurpose all the oil pipelines when everything is powered electrically via fusion.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
We already have the pumps and the pipelines. I don't see how it could get much cheaper. In the desert, water is more valuable than oil.
Well, the boning will. The humanity banding together won't.
Half this country has their fingers in their ears, hates the other half, and actively sabotages any attempts to avoid this train wreck.
We'll be good and proper fucked, and it's scary to realize that we already missed the chance to avoid it.
Edit: I wish I had the funds to grab a dozen or so acres some place up north. Oh well though!
Hell, at this point we'll be lucky if the oceans can sustain life by this time next century.
But one hopes that in a thousand years places like Vegas are remembered with the deepest scorn. Perhaps we all should bury time capsules containing just a piece of paper that reads 'I fucking told you!'
You could always, like, tone it down instead of outright halting, too.
This area is turning more humid but it's going to be quite messy as it turns back to what this area once was 40k years ago
I do find it sad we have had our annual rain fall for the year already and they still in the paper and on tv say we are still in a draught.
I really find it beyond stupid the power company in a failed lawsuit over their coal plants [they were really messy even for a coal power plant} lost and is trying to stick the cost to the people instead of looking forward.
With the amount of easy to access geothermal areas here and the amount of sun they boast about they could solve both their power and water problems with those
But again it costs money and a silly company going down in flames is not going to build it or let others build it.
I do find it scary how fast Florida is dissolving. And why.
I want to see Belgium and the Netherlands now, before they either cease to exist or build newer, bigger seawalls all around the country.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
wooo
The exact timeline depends on who you ask, but they're definitely not a sure thing. There has been a lot more investment and interest recently, and Lockheed isn't usually a company to brag about black projects unless they're far more than onto something. The bigger point is if one group figures out how to build them, they'll almost instantly be proliferated as fast as they can be churned out for the purposes of national interest and environmental reasons. There's no reason to mine hydrocarbons if you have enough of them (so long Middle East, and thanks for all the fish), and there's no reason to have a fission power plant once fusion exists other than to produce nukes or certain industrial isotopes.
I hate how just by existing in a first-world country, I contribute far more than my fair share to climate change, and there's not much I can do about it.
Nobody's going to rebuild a civilization based on cooperation. As long as there's resource scarcity, we will form tribes and fight each other.
For example, our community garden is on its second year and demand is strong. We get free wood chips from the local tree board and everyone chips in on a community plot which largely goes to the homeless as well as local charities.
It's my understanding that beyond really radical stuff like chaining yourself to a tree to thwart clear cutting, the best thing to do is simply consume less. Take your bike or the bus when possible, eat local, grow your own food, etc.
I'd rather see us convert to a desalination / hydroponics / nuclear fission economy while we wait for that ever elusive fusion technology to become available.
How do I do this? Cause I feel terrible about eating all those animals but hamburgers.
I think its finally sinking in the scale of the problem. If the entirety of human civilization were to make global climate change their first priority - as in the same priority that Germany and U.S. gave WWII during the conflict - it still would not be enough to do more than minimize the effects. The scale we are discussing is just too immense for local and individual solutions. Any change has to be international and focus on the behaviors not just of individuals, but also government and industry.
As it is, I think we've hit peak free market capitalism at the absolute worst time to deal with this issue. As little as a half century ago, if they had had the data, the world would have been in decent shape to move together to fix these issues. In fact, the global community, with the full cooperation of the United States, was pretty good at dealing with things like pollution and environmental degradation as late as the 1990s.
But you can't fix collective action problems in a system where the government is frozen by deadlock and beholden to political ideas that put wealth and private property rights above all other concerns.
Nah there's lots of useful stuff you can get out hydrocarbon deposits that would be insanely cheaper than doing it otherwise (plastics, sulphur, other compounds). Burning it for energy would be right out for sure though.
Aside from the ocean acidification worries, global fisheries are being depleted rapidly. The move to fish is crashing the populations of wild stock. Aquaculture has grown, but it is also proving to be much more resource intensive and polluting than anyone expected.
Chicken remains cheap, and there's definitely an argument that more people should keep chickens in their backyard, but the poultry industry is an environmental nightmare. Pollution from the waste runoff of the mega-farms is fucking up entire regions of the American Southeast, and the concentrations of that many animals together is creating disease incubators for animals and humans alike.
And, thanks to the industrial nature of mass production farming, there are even issues with switching to an all vegetable diet. With its reliance on monoculture crops and chemical farming (pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers), the farming sector is very vulnerable both to both climate shocks and resource scarcity.
While I and everyone hopes for solutions through scientific breakthroughs, I think the quiet realization is that the human project cannot maintain seven billion and growing people indefinitely through existing methods. And since no one in power wants to address how to back down from that precipice, it looks like the next century or so is going to be a wild ride where nature takes care of the problem for us in the most brutal way possible.
And they shall pay tribute to our majesty.
This is my go to post on the subject, because people i think just don't really get the scale of the issue. Power plants get stuck out in the middle of no where. So people see the one outside of the city and think that is what powers the entire county.
Huge image
So the last time I posted this is was the 2011 Chart. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/energy.html
Here are the changes from 2011
Total 97.3 ->97.4
Solar 0.158->0.320
Nuclear 8.26->8.27
Hydro 3.17->2.56 (YAY DROUGHTS!)
Wind 1.17->1.60
Geothermal 0.226->0.201
NG 24.9->26.6
Coal 19.7->18.0
Biomass 4.41-> 4.49
Petro 35.3(25.1 transport) ->35.1(24.9 Transport)
Want to replace coal plants, okay. We just need to increase the number of windmills, solar installs, and geo-thermal projects, by 900%. And keep energy growth flat. Electric cars, will require another 1200% increase...
This isn't meant to advocate disengagement from national politics and such - if your lifeboat isn't finished yet, you have to keep bailing, if only to give yourself more time. But expecting national and international solutions to the crisis, or any worldwide solution, is only slightly more realistic than hoping Jesus returns in time to save us. As you and others have said, limiting consumption and attempting to shift from reliance upon global capitalism to more local and sustainable forms of production are our best prospects for survival.
The downside to this approach is that some areas will be totally fucked. As someone who lives in semi-rural Maine, post-crisis survival, while daunting, does not seem completely impossible - we already produce a lot of our own food, and have the capacity to do much more. Much of my state is also very sparsely populated (north/west areas especially), which seems like it would reduce pressure on the environment. But someone living in Santa Fe, New Mexico or Riyadh, Saudi Arabia might not be so "lucky." My position might sound like it boils down to "fuck you, got mine," but it's more "I can't save everyone everywhere, but maybe I can save myself and the people I care about most."
I also agree that the shift in public opinion on the severity of this crisis has been interesting to watch, and that arguments which many perceived as alarmist doomsaying a few years ago have gradually become more mainstream.
There is no local lifeboat in a global ecological meltdown. There are just the places where the refugees are coming from, and the place where the refugees are going. Some societies might get away with mass murdering refugees trying to cross their borders, but the internal politics of such places are going to pretty damn nasty even without the refugee influx.
Semi-rural Maine is only remote because there are other places where people want to live more. If it becomes a desirable location, then it becomes the Great Maine Refugee Camp.
Incrementally! It's important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good - especially with dietary choices for some reason, I tend to see people say "Welp I'm over my daily calorie allotment my 5% so fuggit let's go to DQ and get a blizzard!"
'Meatless Mondays' work for some people as a way to experiment without upending their entire routine. If you find dishes and habits and routines that work for you and want to expand them, awesome! If it's really challenging for whatever reason (maybe you share the grocery shopping with non-participating roommates or your only grocery access is the local convenience store) and you want to hold steady or go to every other Monday, then you're still better than you were before you tried it.
If you like I can dig up some guides but I'm not familiar with any off the top of my head. I will say that concerns about protein are largely fiction if you eat vegetables. Going meatless and subsisting on poptarts and cheeze-its not only defeats the purpose from an environmental perspective, it's not going to be healthier or cheaper. Meat substitutes are okay - generally expensive and anything fancier than a black bean burger is quite processed, but if it helps ease the transition then go nuts. Just be wary that if you go in expecting a hamburger you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. Homemade should be your goal.
Look at Vogtle 3 & 4.
3 years just to get the 'clear trees and shit' permit, another 3 to get the permit to start actual construction, lose 6 months directly, probably more like a year, to an junk lawsuit from the tree huggers.
Finally get the first concrete pour 6 years and 10 months after they applied for the permit. And the application probably took over a year to do if not more.
this is a pretty fair article on the whole shabang.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/business/energy-environment/nuclear-powers-future-may-hinge-on-georgia-project.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
here's a more pessimistic, but probably accurate view.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-18/the-u-dot-s-dot-nuclear-power-industrys-dim-future
Updated:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2015/02/09/southern-companys-discomfort-what-kemper-and-vogtle-plants-say-about-competitive-power-markets/
Current projection for the project in 2019/2020 for V3 & V4 3 years behind schedule. Say they streamline things in the future, and can get building a plant down to say a 7 year timeline, and get the cost down down to the proposal cost for Vogtle $7b per.
To replace just the US's coal fleet capacity of 317,640 MW, you'd need to build 320 new plants and will it cost roughly 2.3 trillion dollars.
To get that done in the next 50 years is maybe doable, the next 20 is impossible. In 2010 we built 8 plants over 500MW(half the size of a AP1000 unit), in 2011 we built 5. Only 7 were anywhere near the size of an AP1000 unit. We put in ~20,000MW a year in 2010 & 2011, if we pretend that was all coal replacement(And I know all 7 of the 800MW+ plants were coal fired so thats atleast 6kMW that wasn't), we'd need to do that for the next 16 years with no demand growth just to get rid of the coal plants.
There aren't that many EPCs who can manage building a nuke plant. There are none that can manage building dozens at once. In order to build the 320 units in 27 years(commissioning 16/year starting in 2022) years at 7 years a pop, overall construction would peak at 112 plants in various stages of construction at once. And would stay there for 13 years.
From an engineering-talent side(and staffing the finished plants) the only comparison I can think of for this would be promotions in a major war. You'd have 22 year old junior engineers reporting to 26 year old senior engineers, reporting to 30 year old engineering managers. This is probably equally true of tradesmen for the construction. Hell even the materials side of things would be a crunch. We had a concrete shortage in the US this year. And nuke plants use almost inconceivable amounts of concrete. Let alone all the weird alloys you need to make the reactor vessels and other containment stuff.
Most of that applies to fusion too. Sure the regulatory hurtles might prove easier, but at this moment ASME doesn't have standards for building the key parts of fusion plants. ITER is super behind schedule, and its schedule was very long to begin with. If fusion tech was ready today, we'd be hard pressed to build it fast enough, and it is not anywhere near close.