Does steam and diesel have a future?

Without climate change there would be no fossils in any case. When I was at school We were told that dinosaurs died out when the temperature of the earth (Pressumably atmosphere) increased. Now We're told that the dinosaurs were killed out by an asteroid hitting the Earth, now give it some thought, an asteroid big enough to kill every living thing would destroy the Earth, unless every living thing was in the same place at the time of impact, which is nearly as likely as fossil fuels causing the problem. Trouble is preaching to the converted is amongst the most Quixotic activities imaginable and no other bugger will listen.

 

What are you on about? It I find it quite easy to imagine a meteor could wipe out quite a lot of life but not all of it. This is quite a nice little article about what survived and what didn't https://theconversation.com/curious...the-dinosaurs-have-on-plants-and-trees-132386

 

I vaguely remember reading once, somewhere, that someone designed a water powered engine, but it was squashed by oil companies.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-fuelled_car All you could possibly want to know about water fuelled cars!

 

The version I heard was that oil companies bought the patent. As this was long ago, and during which time the patent has long since elapsed, there now no reasons against anyone making use of it. Would someone please give details of this patent so that I can convert my car to run on water.

 

It’s interesting that that page mentions “fraud” three times more often than it mentions “thermodynamics!”

Tom

 

I think you will find that this is the true story behind the great extinction event



Colin

 

A chance worth taking in my books .... whatever mother nature chucks at us, we and we alone are responsible for the crap we and our ancestors have slung into the atmosphere. They knew no better. Theirs was a blissful ignorance we've no claim to share.

Even were there no climate related imperative to mend our ways, for some odd reason the notions of road vehicles not chucking noxious gases out under our noses and buildings that don't cost an arm and a leg to fail to heat appeals rather more than needlessly making billionaires and corporates even richer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have to turn the damned heating up again ......

 

I don't have a problem with getting rid of 'dark Satanic mills' - and London smog - but that has been ongoing for 70 years or so, now (and the cleaning accumulated atmospheric-deposited soot off London buildings has been going on since the 1960s). The thing is that humans living will necessarily have some effect on the world around them, and there's no way to get rid of that entirely - without getting rid of humans entirely. So we have to look at the cost/benefit balance of everything.

Better insulated buildings are good - but there are all sorts of complications there. E.g. there will be a scale of insulation quality, and 'better' will likely cost more - resources that then won't be available for something else that would be good. How good is 'good enough'? And windows are harder to insulate as well as walls, so do we make people sit in closed rooms, with no natural light, so we can maximise building insulation levels? And new construction is 'easy' to improve, but what about all those existing buildings (and repeat previous comment about how resources used improving them then won't be available for other worthy goals). Etc, etc, etc, etc.

CO2 is an infinitely more complex question, with a lot of the most important questions being mostly ignored in the public debate (the question of 'how stable is the climate anyway', alluded to above, being just one of them), but this isn't the place to explore it, and it'd take me a week to write something that even scratched the surface (things like 'the use of RCP 8.5 as a model input, as is so common, is incredibly misguided' keep whirling through my mind).

Noel

 

Only a week, Noel? I'm not seeking to rubbish a very sensible post, but would point out that there are those who seize on anything as evidence we're somehow being conned concerning the human contribution to climate. I've actually scribbled a fair bit across several threads touching on several aspects of the whole climate change and decarbonsisation issues, so I'll restrict my reply here to a few observations.

Saying 'the planetary atmosphere is complex' won't get any arguments from me ..... it most definitely is! Where I do have issues is over the weaponisation of fatuous arguments, in support of a discredited claim that, because atmospheric conditions change over time (which they certainly do), either anthropogenic climate change can or should be discounted as a factor, when simply because of it's scale it can't be discounted, or that nothing we do makes any difference. The jury came back on that one some time ago. To claim otherwise is part 'counsel of despair', part disingenuous 'business as usual' agenda by people with vested interests doing anything to advance a discredited agenda.

This isn't only a message from a few thousand unwashed students with superglue on the seat of their jeans, it's qualified scientists with decades of experience, including Nobel Laureates, independently gathering data, verifying it and cross checking findings. If you ask me whether I've more trust in decades of verifiable science, all of which points in the same direction, than I have in hack journalists, paid to do a last ditch hatchet job for those who stand to lose their right to pollute with impunity, I suspect you can guess my answer.

Whilst welcoming informed debate, I fear there are far too many who take any question to mean we need do nothing, when time is most definitely not on our side. By all means, let's have that debate, but let's do so once we've started properly down the road to mitigating the worst effects of millenia of careless human stewardship.

I'm not suggesting some unquestioning 'environmentalist creed'. There'll be more than a few seeking to do no more than opportunistically make a quick buck and it'd be downright daft to take anything novel at face value. Yes, we'll need to sort the wheat from the chaff. When's that ever been any different?

One thing I've come to realise, over the years I've been trying to get to grips with what is the single biggest upheaval since the industrial revolution (possibly since the agricultural revolution .... it really is that transformative) is that the decarbonisation process actually offers unprecedented scope for universal economic and health benefits (sez he, roll-up in hand!) than anything during the lifetimes of anyone now living. No wonder those who've done very nicely, thank you, from the status quo are ready to throw everything they've got into derailing it.

The evidence is we can all do much better by decarbonising and that not continuing to screw up the biosphere, to the point of endangering our very existence, is just one (very welcome) benefit.

[\END of diatribe]

 

??? Really? Only now?

My schooling was some considerable time ago and I'm scratching around to whether I ever imagined that fossils only exist because of climate change?

 

Anyone fancy another go at a perpetual motion machine?

 

If current ideas about time only coming into existence alongside space as a consequence of the Big Bang are correct, we're all living inside one.

 

That's not how science works - deciding based on people's credentials; those are supposed to be irrelevant. Who says something is not significant; it's what they say that's supposed to be important. (That's why a then-unknown level III assistant patent examiner turned all of physics upside down.) Science is supposed to start with empirical data - observations of the real world - and analyze it with logic - and who does any of that is not supposed to matter. The work is supposed to speak for itself. Yes, human nature being what it is, sometimes people fall from that level - like the way Barbara McClintock's work was ignored for decades. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be the goal.

I expect I'm wasting my time typing this, because your mind appears to be pretty set, but I can't leave your post sit in the records without some pushback on the inaccuracies. (Yes, yes, 'someone on the Internet is wrong'.)

I find the mention of "hack journalists" deeply ironic; I wonder how many of the journalists cheerfully broadcasting the latest scary predictions from various models (for whatever reason; either because they misguidedly think they are correct, or to get clicks for their employer, or some mix of several reasons) understand that a lot of those models (the issues with which I will pass by for the moment) are using, as one input, a prediction of future CO2 production (if one wants to predict the future, one has to have a prediction of how much CO2 will be produced - modelling the world's economy in enough detail to get a reliable analytic prediction of that production isn't feasible, so instead the modellers have set up a range of alternative predictions called 'Representative Concentration Pathways') which is intensely unlikely. It's the one called 'RCP 8.5', and although a lot of climate people describe it as 'business as usual', that cannot be accurate. RCP 8.5 has the highest CO2 levels if any of the RCP's - to the point where it has been calculated that to produce that much CO2, average overall coal usage around the globe would have to go up 700%. Do you really think that's credible? And how many of those 'non-hack journalists' who are busy (for whatever motives, either clicks or ideological agreement or just laziness or incompetence) scaring the life out of their readers understand that the predictions they're cheerfully trumpeting are based on a prediction that coal use will go up 700%? (I'm not sure there's that much coal in the world.) But one thing is for sure: people reading the average 'non-hack' news coverage of climate won't have gotten any idea of how widespread use of RCP 8.5 is in the modelling world.

These are many of the same 'non-hack journalists' who were happy to repeat and spread the meme that COVID had to be natural, not the result of a lab accident or anything (to the point that Facebook even banned mentioning the theory that it was not natural) - before everyone did a U-turn on that one.


This has already gotten too long; I think I'd better stop there (before I start talking about parameterization of water vapour behavior in global circulation models - and dozens of other points).

Noel

 

Unfortunately, much of what you write is also wrong. There is too much to deal with on this forum but you are oversimplifying all the issues you raise. If I focus on just one, you misstate the purpose of RCP 8.5 and fail to point out that it and the other RCPs are in any case obsolete and since the Paris meeting have been integrated with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. RCP 8.5 was chosen by the lobbyists seeking to reduce climate change mitigations as a weakness that could be used to attack the Paris Accord as it was the pathway leading to the worst outcomes. It has subsequently been used in the run up to Glasgow, despite its obsolescence, for a similar purpose but was dropped when it became apparent that the strategy of claiming RCP 8.5 as a ridiculous outlier that would never happen had failed. The reason for the strategy's failure was essentially that RCP 8.5's predictions were the best fit for what had actually happened since its development in 2012/13. After Paris there was optimism that if the commitments made then were kept, and most believed that they would be kept, global warming would be adequately controlled and the rise kept to 1.5 deg. Subsequently, it has become clear that the Paris commitments have not remotely been kept which led to the demands in Glasgow for much more onerous mitigations.

I regret Noel that you are just reiterating garbled versions of the arguments used by the fossil fuel industries for the continuance of business as usual.

Wikipedia has a simple summary of the IPCC Sixth Assessment prepared for the Glasgow conference.
Look at the table of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Follow the links.
For the details see the actual IPCC Report.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report#Findings

 

Probably best here just to point folks at the 2021 IPCC report, rather than home in on any one metric:

https://www.ipcc.ch/

I stand by my comments on media reporting (does anyone think we've been well informed?) and for the record, I never even mentioned covid in my post [#70, above].

 

The real problem is two-fold and np reality is that no-one really wants to of either of them. They are firstly that modern economic theory is predicated on growth, which obviously has to have a limit at some point, and secondly the planet can only support so much life, a limit that has probably already been reached, if not breached. Until we come to terms with and confront these fundamental issues I fear we are on a doomed pathway.

 

Everybody, on all sides, is oversimplifying.

Noel

 

Thomas Malthus, a philosopher, came up with a theory in 1798 that food supply and population growth were linked. He stated that the continuing growth of population would eventually outstrip food supply, which results in famine.

one thing I am in full agreement with the greens on is waste and use of resources, continual consumerism uses finite resources, yet any attempt to reduce this derails the consumer economy and is resisted by big business. For example, if cookers were made to last 80 years, no one would buy any new ones, profits would suffer.

 

With that statement, I'm in complete agreement. From where I'm standing, a degree of oversimplification with regard to the whole intertwined decarbonsisation/ climate issues is not only inevitable, but if governments (let alone us plebs) are to get our heads around so much as the basics, there's a strong case for saying it's actually not only desirable, but absolutely essential.