Trump and coal mines

[Woodbutcher]

14000 years ago we were having an ice age. Sea levels were much lower, thus the village was on dry land at the time. 700 million years ago the earth was completely covered in ice. What is your point?

[Hermit]

Sea levels rise, sea levels fall...

Since we started keeping records of tides sea levels kept rising. Fact.

Anthropocentric bilge. Evidence of Indian villages have been found 300 feet underwater in the Puget Sound region.

Had you read up about Puget Sound even just a little, you would have learnt that the area is subject to subduction, or underthrusting of the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate beneath the continent, currently at a rate of about 36 mm/yr. Yes, coastlines do rise and drop for reasons other than global warming. Last week part of Kaikoura was raised by two metres in a matter of a minute. Believe it or not, scientists can tell the difference between sea level changes and changes brought about by the movement of tectonic plates. Kiribati is subject to the latter. Kaikoura and your Indian village are not.

But there is an important fact you have failed to consider: There is an absolute limit to how high sea levels will go, and that elevation is both calculable and has been calculated many times. Once all the ice melts the seas can't go any higher than that, period. According to scientists the maximum sea level rise possible is about 70 meters, or 230 feet.

80, actually. No matter. That'll leave one metre of Kiribati's highest mountain above water - until the tide comes in.

I give you 9/10 for strawmanning anyway. Once again, I never said a word about anthropocentrism. I just report on what I can make of the data that are available to you, me and anyone who cares to look at them. So far I have not made a single comment concerning anthropocentrism in this thread. Where the fuck do you keep seeing this shit, or by what flight of fancy do you manage to imply it?

[JimC]

Increasingly it is possible to buy battery banks (often made by Tesla) to capture excess solar energy during the day, and seamlessly use it at night. This can be done either for single households, or on a larger scale for solar farms. When costs come down due to economies of scale, it could be a real game changer...

[Seth]

Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.

And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.

Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is dropping,

Not really. The short-term cost of panels has dropped because the Chinese are dumping solar panels onto the world market but that won't last. While solar is far less intrusive than wind farms it suffers from the same failure that wind does: it's cyclical and the energy cannot be stored for use when demand is high. Oil and gas, by the way, are nothing more than stored solar energy, or had that fact escaped you?

More like that fact has escaped you, as you don't seem to realise that it is stored as captured carbon. When the energy is extracted, the carbon is released, leading to global warming.

So what? It's a closed-loop system. All the carbon that exists has always existed and will always exist. It just changes from time to time, like the climate. More CO2 is better than less CO2 because a) it increases plant growth, which converts CO2 to plant matter, which produces oxygen and sequesters carbon, is buried and turns to...wait for it...coal and natural gas; b) it keeps the planet from turning into a lifeless iceball; and c) we can get along just fine with global tropical temperatures. The same can't be said of global glaciation.

And it's perfectly possible to store renewable energies in molten salt, batteries and/or gravitational potential energy.

Possible, but not efficient or cost-effective.

And don't blather on about cost, you ignoramus, as you don't seem to understand the extent to which the fossil fuels industry is subsided and environmental costs externalised.

You don't get to tell me what I can and cannot comment upon. Nobody's developed commercial-grade "molten salt" installations, batteries that have even a tiny fraction of the required terawatts of storage needed and there's only so much water you can pump to an uphill reservoir for "gravitational potential energy."

All of your suggestions may have future potential, but it's going to be the FAR future before they can replace coal or gas. Besides, where are you going to get the gigatons of molten salt you need, because heat-storage is incredibly inefficient.

[Seth]

14000 years ago we were having an ice age. Sea levels were much lower, thus the village was on dry land at the time. 700 million years ago the earth was completely covered in ice. What is your point?

What's whose point?

[pErvinalia]

Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.

And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.

Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is dropping,

Not really. The short-term cost of panels has dropped because the Chinese are dumping solar panels onto the world market but that won't last. While solar is far less intrusive than wind farms it suffers from the same failure that wind does: it's cyclical and the energy cannot be stored for use when demand is high. Oil and gas, by the way, are nothing more than stored solar energy, or had that fact escaped you?

More like that fact has escaped you, as you don't seem to realise that it is stored as captured carbon. When the energy is extracted, the carbon is released, leading to global warming.

So what?

Shall I write it in crayon for you? Burning fossil fuels leads to global warming. A phenomenon which threatens environmental services, sovereignty and security (see Pentagon report), and will cost economies many trillion dollars.

[Seth]

Increasingly it is possible to buy battery banks (often made by Tesla) to capture excess solar energy during the day, and seamlessly use it at night. This can be done either for single households, or on a larger scale for solar farms. When costs come down due to economies of scale, it could be a real game changer...

And if they are anything like Samsung batteries they will keep you warm at night...very, very warm...very, very suddenly.

Batteries, in case you missed it, have a very limited life and a finite ability to accept recharges. Tesla's product is a whiz-bang but it's unproven in the long term and doesn't meet all the needs of a household anyway, not without supplemental grid power.

And they are fucking expensive as hell and use materials that are expensive as hell and it's doubtful that they will come down in price so as to be able to compete on a kWh basis with coal/gas grid power for a long, long time.

You see, we've already sunk the costs of the grid and coal/gas plants, and the investment in these new technologies, while they may show theoretical promise, is enormous and out of reach of most people.

However, when and if Tesla batteries, molten salt energy storage, solar panels or anything else reaches a level of technological superiority and economic viability that beats out coal and gas fired plants, then we can discuss decommissioning those plants, but not before then. Reliable, cheap electricity is what makes our world economy run. If we pander to the greenies and compromise our ability to provide reliable, cheap electricity we'll never make the technological leaps needed to make real solutions like fusion power viable.

It's like an economy, you have to spend money to make money. Likewise you have to have electricity to make electricity, and people can't afford econut gestures of solidarity, they need and want power, and they want it right fucking now in whatever amounts they need right fucking now and they don't want anything to interfere with that power delivery on demand. And that's what they are going to get.

Until your ideas are economically, socially, politically and environmentally viable as a complete replacement for coal and gas generated electricity, and they have been DEPLOYED in a way that the switchover is seamless and doesn't leave anyone compromised either by demand or economics, it's all still just a pipe dream and a political football.

Which is not to say that research into such technologies should be stifled, merely privatized and denied public funding. If such research can't stand on its own and attract enough venture capital to pay for it without public assistance then it ain't ready for prime time.

[Seth]

Shall I write it in crayon for you? Burning fossil fuels leads to global warming.

No proof of that so far and who cares anyway? Global warming is good. Far better than the global cooling we're overdue for and are factually seeing in the last decade or so worth of actual, unmanipulated data.

A phenomenon which threatens environmental services,

Sucks to be an environmentalist I guess. The rest of us will get along just fine because we will adapt.

sovereignty and security (see Pentagon report),

Nobody said species survival was easy.

and will cost economies many trillion dollars.

...spent over hundreds of years. Big deal. Who cares? Beats spending hundreds of trillions of dollars destroying our economy right away just so some ignorant fucks in South America and Australia can go right on letting their termites fart all over the place while they do nothing but take money from the US. The US has done all it needs to do for a long, long time. Now's the time for everybody else to catch up. Adapt or die.

[Woodbutcher]

14000 years ago we were having an ice age. Sea levels were much lower, thus the village was on dry land at the time. 700 million years ago the earth was completely covered in ice. What is your point?

What's whose point?

Precisely. You don't have one.

[Seth]

14000 years ago we were having an ice age. Sea levels were much lower, thus the village was on dry land at the time. 700 million years ago the earth was completely covered in ice. What is your point?

What's whose point?

Precisely. You don't have one.

Perhaps I should have said "Which who's point?"

[pErvinalia]

Shall I write it in crayon for you? Burning fossil fuels leads to global warming.

No proof of that so far

Not under your rock, anyway.

and who cares anyway? Global warming is good.

A phenomenon which threatens environmental services,

Sucks to be an environmentalist I guess. The rest of us will get along just fine because we will adapt.

you don't even know what environmental services are. You're not even qualified to bleat empty rhetoric on this subject let alone anything more than that.

sovereignty and security (see Pentagon report),

Nobody said species survival was easy.

Apparently only self masochist "libertarians" want to make life difficult for themselves.

and will cost economies many trillion dollars.

...spent over hundreds of years.

Bzzzt, wrong! Back to the kid's table for you.

[Hermit]

Something Seth sidestepped. Mhhh

Sea levels rise, sea levels fall...

Since we started keeping records of tides sea levels kept rising. Fact.

Anthropocentric bilge. Evidence of Indian villages have been found 300 feet underwater in the Puget Sound region.

Had you read up about Puget Sound even just a little, you would have learnt that the area is subject to subduction, or underthrusting of the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate beneath the continent, currently at a rate of about 36 mm/yr. Yes, coastlines do rise and drop for reasons other than global warming. Last week part of Kaikoura was raised by two metres in a matter of a minute. Believe it or not, scientists can tell the difference between sea level changes and changes brought about by the movement of tectonic plates. Kiribati is subject to the latter. Kaikoura and your Indian village are not.

But there is an important fact you have failed to consider: There is an absolute limit to how high sea levels will go, and that elevation is both calculable and has been calculated many times. Once all the ice melts the seas can't go any higher than that, period. According to scientists the maximum sea level rise possible is about 70 meters, or 230 feet.

80, actually. No matter. That'll leave one metre of Kiribati's highest mountain above water - until the tide comes in.

I give you 9/10 for strawmanning anyway. Once again, I never said a word about anthropocentrism. I just report on what I can make of the data that are available to you, me and anyone who cares to look at them. So far I have not made a single comment concerning anthropocentrism in this thread. Where the fuck do you keep seeing this shit, or by what flight of fancy do you manage to imply it?

[L'Emmerdeur]

Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.

And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.

Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is dropping,

Not really. The short-term cost of panels has dropped because the Chinese are dumping solar panels onto the world market but that won't last. While solar is far less intrusive than wind farms it suffers from the same failure that wind does: it's cyclical and the energy cannot be stored for use when demand is high. Oil and gas, by the way, are nothing more than stored solar energy, or had that fact escaped you?

and looks to continue to do so.

Not once the Chinese wipe out panel production elsewhere and then it either jacks the prices or simply stops exporting panels in order to wage economic warfare, something it has a long, long history of doing.

By the way, you misread this citation, which says that the PRICE of solar energy, which is to say the price that is paid to the individual who owns the solar system, is in decline, not the COST of building and maintaining a system:

The continued decline comes even as the price of photovoltaic modules – commonly known as solar panels – which represent one of the highest single equipment costs in solar energy systems, have remained relatively steady since 2012.

Your dishonest approach to debate is pathetic and amusing. Unlike you, I read the articles rather than just skimming for nuggets that appeared to support my position.

In the second article, where you got your quote, it clearly states what is being described: "price drops for solar energy systems." It also states that there are studies showing that the price is likely to continue to drop. This gives the lie to your attempt to obfuscate by selective quotation. In addition it describes the primary reasons for the decrease in price, which do not include "the Chinese are dumping solar panels." It seems you failed to notice that the section you quoted shows that the supposed "Chinese dumping" has had no appreciable effect on the price of solar panels since 2012.

Your mendacious yammering is tiresome; apparently other members of this site enjoy indulging you but I don't see a point to dealing with any more of it on this topic.

[rainbow]

14000 years ago we were having an ice age. Sea levels were much lower, thus the village was on dry land at the time. 700 million years ago the earth was completely covered in ice. What is your point?

What's whose point?

Precisely. You don't have one.

El confuso está confundido

[Scot Dutchy]

Seth wrote:

...and how do we know it's not subsidence of the island, not sea level rise...

Yet more breathtaking ignorance. Both sea levels and the altitudes of any area of land can be measured extremely precisely via satellite technology. Sea level rises are a general phenomenon, one that is happening more rapidly now than in previous eras of sea level change.

Hence our dykes have been raised 3 metres the whole length of the North Sea coast.