Prices of the electricity we use to charge

soundwave

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i vote for unicron ;)
 

Woosh

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no point trump will win or they will nick it again or try to :p
Trump said at his MSG rally that he and Mike Johnson have a little secret that he will reveal after the election. Presumably the same scheme they used in 2020.
 

Woosh

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That shows Trump quite a lot in the lead - 56% Trump vs 40% Kama Chamelion. Civil war is imminent.
10% more women than men have voted. That's rather better for Harris than Trump.
 

lenny

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"The average poll in the state shows Trump up by half a percentage point, so this aligns with the narrow lead the GOP nominee has currently and with historical performance; the former president won it in 2016 by 0.73% and lost it 4 years later by 1.17%."

 
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Woosh

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There are a lot of polls that are skewed one way or the other through their choice of weighting because someone pays them to do the poll. Polls paid for by large newspapers are a lot more consistent. I much prefer looking for rise and fall of demographic groups that we know how the majority of them will vote. I think Harris is winning.
 
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lenny

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Woosh

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Amazing story: Tesla made more than $10 billions selling carbox credits to legacy automakers in the USA.
 
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MikelBikel

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Half a pound of this powder can remove as much CO₂ from the air as a tree, scientists say
Stories like this make me think "sceancetists" are on "half a pound of *another* powder that can remove as much sense from their heads as..".
More Co2 means more veggies, means food, feeds animals, means more food. Hands up who doesn't want to eat? Oh, you're too tired to raise your hand?!:D
 

Woosh

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Stories like this make me think "sceancetists" are on "half a pound of *another* powder that can remove as much sense from their heads as..".
More Co2 means more veggies, means food, feeds animals, means more food. Hands up who doesn't want to eat? Oh, you're too tired to raise your hand?!:D
There is much to congratulate the two scientists who work on those amines. Think of them as batteries. The air is forced through the amines which selectively retain CO2, a couple of weeks later, the amines is heated to about 80 degrees C. At that temperature, the CO2 molecules detach themselves from the amines and is then stored or made into other products. All you need to run the process is a pump and some heat. The number of useable cycles can run into tens of thousands. Think of gas fired power stations. The process can give them zero carbon footprint.
 
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MikelBikel

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There is much to congratulate the two scientists who work on those amines. Think of them as batteries. The air is forced through the amines which selectively retain CO2, a couple of weeks later, the amines is heated to about 80 degrees C. At that temperature, the CO2 molecules detach themselves from the amines and is then stored or made into other products. All you need to run the process is a pump and some heat. The number of useable cycles can run into tens of thousands. Think of gas fired power stations. The process makes them zero carbon footprint.
Co2 is the gas of life. It has risen from a near extinction level to its present usable amount. It could double with only beneficial effects. Innumerable natural vents are releasing it all the time.

I've also quoted details of numerous man-made emissions from coal mine & waste dump fires around the world. And the reply was "oh its too difficult to put out". E.g. the landfill in Rainham that's been burning for 10yrs, really, too difficult?
Pleeaase, a solution looking for a problem that doesnt exist! o_O
 
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soundwave

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lenny

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Loss of oxygen in bodies of water identified as new tipping point
Oxygen concentrations in our planet's waters are decreasing rapidly and dramatically—from ponds to the ocean. The progressive loss of oxygen threatens not only ecosystems, but also the livelihoods of large sectors of society and the entire planet



 

Woosh

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Co2 is the gas of life. It has risen from a near extinction level to its present usable amount. It could double with only beneficial effects. Innumerable natural vents are releasing it all the time.

I've also quoted details of numerous man-made emissions from coal mine & waste dump fires around the world. And the reply was "oh its too difficult to put out". E.g. the landfill in Rainham that's been burning for 10yrs, really, too difficult?
Pleeaase, a solution looking for a problem that doesnt exist! o_O
in the past, levels of CO2 took millions of years to change even a couple of percents. In the last 20 years, CO2 level has gone up 11%. It's not natural.
 
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Ghost1951

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Is the rise in co2 a serious problem?

There are points on both sides of the argument that need to be taken seriously.

The level of co2 in the atmosphere has almost doubled since the mid 19th Century. It used to be 240 parts per million. It is now 419 parts per million. I think we can be pretty sure it will be at that double point in the next few years.

The big question is though; is this a disaster?

Well we know from physics that more co2 causes more greenhouse heating. So what? The mean global temperature of the planet is sub 15 degrees C. This is pretty low by the standards of the last half billion years.

60447

You can see where we are now at the right hand end of the graph. We are in an inter-glacial period. Earth has mostly been very much hotter than now for the entire period when complex life existed, so we are not talking about global loss of life events if the planet warms up (which it is doing). The mean global temperature is about one degree c warmer than it was in the mid 19th century.

As Mickel keeps saying, CO2 is the foundational cornerstone of all our living organisms on the planet. Carbon is the molecule which makes life possible. It is the scaffolding of all life and it comes directly from the co2 in the atmosphere. Plants absorb co2 and make complex sugars, which are the fuel of all animal life. The chemical formula of sugar is C12H22O11. Note the 12 carbon atoms. All plants and animals are carbon based and can not exist without it. We eat the plants directly, and we eat them indirectly in the form of meat and fish, which ate the plants for us, before we ate them.

Mickel is also right that the optimum co2 level for growing food plants is about double the current level of atmospheric co2. Greenhouse growers artificially boost the atmosphere inside their poly tunnels to that sort of level. They do it because the plants grow faster and produce much more food.

He is also correct that the periods of minimum co2 levels just below 200 parts per million which happened about 300 million years ago and again about 2 million years ago were not that far above the point where plants could have gone extinct.

On the other hand, the temperature of the planet is not the same everywhere. That moderate average temperature of 15C varies hugely as you move about the earth. Human populations exist all over the planet, struggling in the more extreme areas, both hot and cold. Rising temperature may well improve life for some, but it will make other places uninhabitable and dangerous. There are plenty of places where the summer day time temperatures approach and even exceed the temperature at which humans and some other animals will die. You will be very uncomfortable and unable to exert yourself at 40c. If your core body temperature gets over 43 - 44 c you will die, so warming - which is certainly happening and will continue, will make parts of the planet uninhabitable. But of course, large areas of the planet are pretty much uninhabitable anyway. 2/3 of it is covered in oceans. You won't last long dumped in an ocean without a pretty good life support system called a ship. We can barely live in desert areas, or in the very cold polar and semi polar regions. People will die in very large numbers and they will move in very large numbers. They already are doing. Some areas which are now cold will be more comfortable and productive. Change is on the way for sure.

Land use and farming will have to change. Crops grown in some areas will not be able to continue as staple products. Others will need to be found. They exist. We can do that. Some animals will need to change their normal range and many will die out. Others will take advantage of the new environment vacated by the less hardy. It is ridiculous to pretend that warming (which is already inevitable) won't cause problems. That said, living on the planet has ALWAYS given us and the animals around us plenty of problems. The changes will be faster than in the previous changes, because the release of fossilised carbon is at a very high rate. In general the only past prehistoric releases of carbon on this scale have occurred during strange geological events which created widespread volcanism and flood basalt flows like the Siberian Trapps and the Deccan Trapps. These upheavals caused extinction events and millions of years of climactic upheaval. None of them are recent.

One unpredictable outcome will likely be the release to the atmosphere of frozen methane deposits from the soil in tundra areas, and from methane clathrates under the presently cool arctic seas. Methane has per volume, twenty times the warming potential of co2. Water vapour too is a warming gas and warmer oceans will mean more evaporation. These issues may form a positive feedback loop which could and likely would accelerate warming. On the other hand, more water vapour clouds may reflect more sunlight straight back to space. The picture is multi-dimensional and complex.

Co2 levels are now double what they were during the entire lifetime of our species. There will be very large upheavals of our agricultural systems, and settlement patterns. Melting ice caps and sea level rise, including the submergence of many coastal regions and cities will mean migration and loss of infrastructure which will need to be replaced. We won't be going extinct though, but in some parts there will be famine, war, mass migration and upheavals.

Whether you believe this or not, it is happening and will continue to happen because we have already put a lot of that fossil carbon back into the atmosphere. That is where it came from originally during the hot periods of earth's past. The coal we have been burning and the Chinese can't seem to get enough of right now, formed in hot swamp forests millions of years ago during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Trees pulled carbon out of the atmosphere, died and rotted under the swamps forming coal. Oil formed from the remains of carbon based plants and animals.

60448

People rightly point to Milancovitch Cycles in explaining periods of warming and cooling in the geological record, but co2 cycles were also very strong drivers of the rising and falling temperatures. Temperature is a mater of heat input from the sun AND heat retention by the atmosphere and the gasses in it. Climate is a complex system with more than one input.

Whatever we think as a country and as individuals, we are going to have a hard time getting agreement on what to do about our inputs to climate change. Energy is such a liberating gift that many big emitters of co2 will not easily give up the advantages they get right now - whatever impact it may later have on their future. Politicians generally think on very short time scales. They won't risk severe unpopularity by advocating policies which make people's lives worse right now, even if the actions of today make things much worse in the future. If they do, people in democracies will get rid of them for short term gains.

The best hope for ending our release of fossilised carbon, is probably new technological development, but it will take some pretty spectacular discoveries to make fossil fuels redundant. I wonder what they might be?
 
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