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As other already pointed out, Earth isn't a closed system! That fundamental misunderstanding of you invalidates your whole reasoning. About 173,000 TW of energ

by Ma8ee 5y ago

As other already pointed out, Earth isn't a closed system! That fundamental misunderstanding of you invalidates your whole reasoning. About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. The only thing that is lacking is political will. This is our great tragedy.

robomartin 5y ago
> About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever. To start, read this: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... And then, this: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggressive-co2-removal-will-take-more-700-years-1513897 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr... And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space. BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second... How is petroleum made? Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil? n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros> How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration? Well, we burned oil. Why was that so effective? Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds. In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287 From the article: ""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change."" So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that). Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year? Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/ https://www.worldometers.info/oil/ BILLION, not million. Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it. What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans. Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper. About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible. Apparently I have to teach you that power is energy per unit of time, that is we have 173,000 TJ/s. And then we can do some simple calculation from energy equivalence of 35 billion barrels of oil (213,000,000 TJ) and find that corresponds to about 20 minutes of sunlight hitting Earth. Or calculating from power instead, we burn 6.75 GW of oil, or about 3e-11 of the incoming sun power. There's plenty of energy available, and nowadays sun energy is cheaper than coal. You don't even need high school math for this. So, as you see, the "not closed system", is kind of relevant. What is irrelevant is how much plant matter that is required to produce said oil. No one, absolutely no one, has suggested that we should make new oil by burying plant matter for a long time.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    Nice bit of high school math after a google search. Good job. Pointless though. You are pointing at solar energy coming into the planet as if it were some magical juju bean that can solve all of our problems. Well, it isn't. Had you actually read the report from which you got some of this information you would know just how wrong you are in trying to reduce the entirety of reality into a single variable: Solar energy. The whole idea is preposterous. In your attempt to look smart and convert power to energy using a google search you fail to understand the key difference between power and energy in real life. Using a simple example: The solar array I built in the back of my house can produce a theoretical maximum of 14,000 W any given instant (power). Assuming that is true (not even close), this means I could collect a theoretical 104 kW hours of energy over eight hours (also not true). Talking about energy is pointless because we do not use energy, we use power, we use the instantaneous version of, in this case, using electrons to do some work. If you add-up the energy production capacity of all the power plants in the US (multiply their power output by 24 hours and add them all up) you can easily believe we have enough to charge 300 million electric cars. And that would be wrong. We do not have enough POWER generating capacity to support such a fleet. The energy calculation isn't correct because you can't use it to deliver power beyond the instantaneous power delivery capacity we have. The only way this would be true is if our future electric cars sat there for 24 hours to charge. And then there's the reality that converting solar energy to anything useful is a horribly inefficient process. My 13 kW array covers about 80 square meters. That is a theoretical 80 kW (round numbers) of solar energy. At best, with all conditions being perfect, I have generated 11 kW. My average peak over several years in operation is about 8 kW. So 10% of the energy that hits it, at the PEAK moment in the day, much worse on either side of that curve. Counting energy, when what you need is power is a fantasy. Oher solar energy conversion processes are even worse, as an example, geothermal is about 2% efficient, at best. Do not reduce reality to a single variable. It isn't. It is a complex multivariate problem. > About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper. You probably didn't even read it. Did you? The paper has NOTHING to do with cost. It has everything to do with "can we achieve zero emissions with renewables". And that means all renewables, not just solar. The answer is a solid "no". > About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible. No idea what you are saying. You probably didn't read that either.

by Ma8ee 5y ago

robomartin 5y ago

> About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever. To start, read this: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... And then, this: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggressive-co2-removal-will-take-more-700-years-1513897 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr... And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space. BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second... How is petroleum made? Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil? n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros> How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration? Well, we burned oil. Why was that so effective? Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds. In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287 From the article: ""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change."" So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that). Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year? Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/ https://www.worldometers.info/oil/ BILLION, not million. Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it. What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans. Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.

Ma8ee 5y ago
About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper. About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible. Apparently I have to teach you that power is energy per unit of time, that is we have 173,000 TJ/s. And then we can do some simple calculation from energy equivalence of 35 billion barrels of oil (213,000,000 TJ) and find that corresponds to about 20 minutes of sunlight hitting Earth. Or calculating from power instead, we burn 6.75 GW of oil, or about 3e-11 of the incoming sun power. There's plenty of energy available, and nowadays sun energy is cheaper than coal. You don't even need high school math for this. So, as you see, the "not closed system", is kind of relevant. What is irrelevant is how much plant matter that is required to produce said oil. No one, absolutely no one, has suggested that we should make new oil by burying plant matter for a long time.
- robomartin 5y ago
  Nice bit of high school math after a google search. Good job. Pointless though. You are pointing at solar energy coming into the planet as if it were some magical juju bean that can solve all of our problems. Well, it isn't. Had you actually read the report from which you got some of this information you would know just how wrong you are in trying to reduce the entirety of reality into a single variable: Solar energy. The whole idea is preposterous. In your attempt to look smart and convert power to energy using a google search you fail to understand the key difference between power and energy in real life. Using a simple example: The solar array I built in the back of my house can produce a theoretical maximum of 14,000 W any given instant (power). Assuming that is true (not even close), this means I could collect a theoretical 104 kW hours of energy over eight hours (also not true). Talking about energy is pointless because we do not use energy, we use power, we use the instantaneous version of, in this case, using electrons to do some work. If you add-up the energy production capacity of all the power plants in the US (multiply their power output by 24 hours and add them all up) you can easily believe we have enough to charge 300 million electric cars. And that would be wrong. We do not have enough POWER generating capacity to support such a fleet. The energy calculation isn't correct because you can't use it to deliver power beyond the instantaneous power delivery capacity we have. The only way this would be true is if our future electric cars sat there for 24 hours to charge. And then there's the reality that converting solar energy to anything useful is a horribly inefficient process. My 13 kW array covers about 80 square meters. That is a theoretical 80 kW (round numbers) of solar energy. At best, with all conditions being perfect, I have generated 11 kW. My average peak over several years in operation is about 8 kW. So 10% of the energy that hits it, at the PEAK moment in the day, much worse on either side of that curve. Counting energy, when what you need is power is a fantasy. Oher solar energy conversion processes are even worse, as an example, geothermal is about 2% efficient, at best. Do not reduce reality to a single variable. It isn't. It is a complex multivariate problem. > About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper. You probably didn't even read it. Did you? The paper has NOTHING to do with cost. It has everything to do with "can we achieve zero emissions with renewables". And that means all renewables, not just solar. The answer is a solid "no". > About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible. No idea what you are saying. You probably didn't read that either.