82 replies to this topic

[skisox34]

I think the most important thing of the whole idea is to make your footprint as small as possible. No matter what happens it just makes sense that if you use resources and put stuff into the air that is not nature made that there is going to be some effect! I traded in my '89 Lincoln for a '95 saturn 4 cylinder in part to help the environment but also part to save money.

[k2skier]

skisox34, on Apr 12 2008, 09:28 AM, said:

I think the most important thing of the whole idea is to make your footprint as small as possible. No matter what happens it just makes sense that if you use resources and put stuff into the air that is not nature made that there is going to be some effect! I traded in my '89 Lincoln for a '95 saturn 4 cylinder in part to help the environment but also part to save money.

A perfect example of what I meant when I said "no harm". One person can make a difference, if we all do something it will make a significant difference.

[RibStaThiok]

Yeah but in the end, there will be the earthquakes and volcanos and other natural disasters which will do more harm then what we are doing by using regular light bulbs instead of CFLs and by driving regular gas burning cars instead of electric and people will say "Why did we even bother to try."

Life happens, death happens. Just the way it goes.

I'm done ranting.

[jeffe]

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventur...antarctica.html

It was early in the tourist season, and a particularly cold austral winter had resulted in even more sea ice than usual.

GAP Adventures bought the historic ship—the first purpose-built to carry tourists to Antarctica in 1969—in 2004. In the past it had been sending 12 cruises a year into the Antarctic.

[WBSKI]

I agree with you on that. But the problem is - we have 200 years worth of coal in the ground, and plenty of oil as well. Unless governments provide incentives for people to conserve fossil fuels, people will continue to consume.

Skier, on Apr 11 2008, 03:50 PM, said:

Let's remember that the earth is 6 billion years old, and no temperature changes have ever happened as quickly as those in the past 100 years. The global warming concept makes sense to me, however I really don't think it matters because people really aren't going to stop using fossil fuels until they run out anyways.

[cjb]

WBSKI, on Apr 15 2008, 07:07 PM, said:

I agree with you on that. But the problem is - we have 200 years worth of coal in the ground, and plenty of oil as well. Unless governments provide incentives for people to conserve fossil fuels, people will continue to consume.

As the recent oil find in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana demonstrates. No one knows how much oil or coal is in the ground, we may have more than that. But how can having all of that oil and coal in the ground be a problem? Jimmy Carter said we'd be running out of oil in the 1990's, with prices at $100 per GALLON; showed what he knew. The best thing the government can do is get the hell out of the way of the free markets. Look what their 'ethanol incentive' is doing. Helping to raise food prices world wide, contributing to global inflation of food prices. I think that the next 10-20 years will see the 'ultra refinement' of internal combustion engines to much higher efficiencies than seen today and by then some other technology will be ready to take over in their place. As for power production, this country is so ignorant to the advantages and safety of nuclear power it is ridiculous. Thanks to the environmentalists of the 70's the public and government won't let them be built based on exaggerations and doomsday scenarios. The same tactics used today to prevent driling in ANWAR and off of either coasts.

[Peter]

I agree with you on nuclear power, it can produce huge amounts of electricity with no greenhouse emissions. I am confident that the waste can be stored safely.

As for ANWR, there isn't even enough oil there to sustain us for a year, so why destroy it for such a temporary fix?

[SkiBachelor]

I also agree that nuclear is a great source of power. I think the reason why so many Americans are paranoid about it is because of how the U.S. Energy Department always went with the lowest bidder for building these plants. This caused huge problems because several of the plants weren't built correctly and leaked, like the one here in Oregon. There was also the 3 Mile Island incident which almost made Philadelphia the next Chernobyl.

France relies heavily on Nuclear power and it actually cleans its nuclear rods by putting them into big pools of water for about 12 years.

[k2skier]

If we invested the billions of dollars into solar research, instead of how we are going to store radioactive waste for 8,000-12,000 years, we'd already have cost effective solar power. Why are we trying to reinvent the sun when it's already there for the using? And without a deadly by-product to boot. There are far more eco-friendly, (and cheaper kWh ways when factoring in storage costs) than nuclear fission.

SkiBachelor, on Apr 15 2008, 10:54 PM, said:

France relies heavily on Nuclear power and it actually cleans its nuclear rods by putting them into big pools of water for about 12 years.

HUH??!! How can 12 years in water speed up the radioactive decay???
http://www.ieer.org/...et/uranium.html

[SkiBachelor]

You can read about it here:
http://www.ocrwm.doe...oeymp0411.shtml
http://www.wtopnews....220&sid=1329639

[k2skier]

SkiBachelor, on Apr 16 2008, 08:47 AM, said:

You can read about it here:
http://www.ocrwm.doe...oeymp0411.shtml
http://www.wtopnews....220&sid=1329639

Read 'em. Only metions reprocessing, nothing about what 12 years in water does.

[Peter]

It's recycling, and it is what France does. It takes the spent nuclear fuel rods, and converts them into a smaller amount of waste and some fuel that can be reused. The problem is it creates weapons-grade plutonium as waste and it still requires a long time to decay.

Solar power is a joke, you could cover the whole US with solar panels and it still wouldn't be enough. They are made in China too and the factories produce horrible pollution themselves.

The answer does not lie in any one of these technologies. I believe the solution will be a mix of solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and an increase in efficiency so we don't need as much energy in the first place.

[Emax]

"Solar power is a joke, you could cover the whole US with solar panels and it still wouldn't be enough."

10-4. I am recently acquainted with a very large, well-engineered, well-funded solar installation that is totally "off-the-grid". Mr. Kunczynski's most recent calculations show that he has paid nearly $.085 per kilowatt-hour - more than ten times what most of us on the grid pay. The needed Watt-density just isn't there.

Another downside is that the production of photovoltaic arrays has a huge "carbon footprint" - unlikely to be negated by clean solar output. Then there is the small matter of large battery banks that must be maintained... and replaced every three years (private installations only).

This planet IS a solar collector - always has been. It's also been very good at storing solar energy - in the form of all sorts of living things, ocean currents and air currents. Even the solar energy absorbed by living things that die is kept - we burn it as oil, gas and coal. The "earth collector" is still working as well as it ever did - we're just over overwhelming the planet's "batteries".

Too much demand... by WAY too many of us.

[k2skier]

Are they using concentrating solar power technologies?
http://www.reia-nm.o...l_electric.html

Add;Manufacturing Costs
Concentrating solar power is the least expensive solar electricity for large-scale power generation, and has the potential to make solar power available at a very competitive rate. As a result, government, industry, and utilities have formed partnerships with the goal of reducing the manufacturing cost of concentrating solar power technologies

This post has been edited by k2skier: 16 April 2008 - 04:07 PM

[Emax]

"Are they using concentrating solar power technologies?"

Interesting that you ask - I have been told that this is Jan's next move. The use of molten salt as a heat storage medium is an effective way to even out the the sometimes unpredictable solar input. Makes me wonder if we'll someday be driving electric vehicles that use molten salt "batteries".

[LiftTech]

Sounds like it’s going to be hard to make them safe for cars with operating temperatures of 400 to 700°C

[k2skier]

Bush speaks out on Global Warming.


easier link http://www.youtube.c...h?v=8ZyW2-vSqV8

Here's the original skit, Will Ferrell on SNL http://www.youtube.c...h?v=Q5r6TqpOQGc

Attached File(s)

•  This_Kid_Deserves_an_Oscar.wmv (1.82MB)
  Number of downloads: 1

This post has been edited by k2skier: 02 May 2008 - 01:37 PM

[Callao]

Surely we can drop the population explosion thing by now. Consider that news people have to have something to report about, and the topics have changed over the course of the decades. Through the 1970's, the world was concerned about the population explosion. In the 1980's we were all concerned about the disappearing ozone, and the disappearing rain forests in the 1990's. Each time, people charted graphs, and then made huge extrapolation errors simply because of the lack of data. Now that we have more data, we aren't so concerned--so lets get concerned about a new problem.

Awe, Enter global warming. This is a trend! I've seen the data (not by personal observation, which is a stupid way to track change, but by looking at the hard numbers) for a few local sites, and I see warming. And I can also see why there is dispute about what is going on. Thousands of data points (ie daily temperature observations) over decades and decades--and not just at one site, but at thousands more. True, we've seen warming at many sites here in Utah, after a cooling period during the 1960's and 70's. Let's blame it on something.

Don't you see? This is the latest fad! We extrapolate and extrapolate--and then extrapolate some more for interesting news. At the rate of warming that occurred this morning between 9:00 and 11:00, we will hit a million degrees by 2009, and all the polar bears will have drowned in the Arctic Ocean. "Green" is the newest purr-word. If you are not green by now, you are ignorant--or so they say. Sure, why don't you just save my farm from me, its steward? Sure, tell me what I can and cannot do. Who do you think you are? If you want to be green, then go ahead and do it. Stop pushing your religion on me.

 WorldPop.JPG (92.3K)
Number of downloads: 11
Figure 1. Long-term world population growth, 1750-2050. (Source: United Nations Population Division, ''The World at Six Billion'')

[Allan]

Here's some actual data provided by our weather stations... I don't notice much of a change in the seven years I've been doing the seasonal records... We have our low snow years and some warmer and some colder months... I could chart back 20 years and it would look similar. The spikes in the top 05-06 data on the snow chart are due to there being too much snow for the station (read buried) so it freaks out and reads whatever.

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•  Averages0708.pdf (7.81K)
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•  Snow_Chart.pdf (16.33K)
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[Peter]

Well I hope no one is denying that the Earth is warming. The 8 hottest years in this century were in the past decade, even if some places are actually getting cooler.

The bigger questions are whether humans are causing it and whether it is more extreme than any natural variation. I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do know that we are altering the planet in ways I think we shouldn't. So I choose to believe the scientists who are warning us about this. Even if it turns out that the Earth can somehow absorb the excess carbon that we are creating without getting warmer, I would rather our government acted now and turned out to be wrong than to ignore the problem until it is impossible to fix.

As far as ozone and rainforests, those problems didn't simply go away on their own. The ozone problem is fixed because the world powers got together and banned CFC's. And since when is rainforest deforestation a problem that we are no longer concerned about? It is unfair to link these completely unrelated world problems to global warming.

As for environmentalism being a religion, sustainability is something I wish we would all think about without government intervention. However, as with the ozone example you mentioned yourself, it took government regulation to fix the problem. The Clean Air Act and the Clean WaterAct are other examples.