Well, you do seem to have a thing, about SUVs. I mean, how many times have you referred to them here? It is like an obsession. Could be a fetish, the way you won't stop brining them up.We could go back to your post that triggered this series and that proves your fantasy character.
No, I was not salivating.
General / Off-Topic Recycle or Die! (the elite environmental thread)
- Thread starter Zak Gordon
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1st: I am trying not to visualise this, in any way.
How that can be good for the environment, I dread to think.
Actually it's more like "going purple" but you get the picture. And it's better for the environment because no resources or energy was expended on my comfort.
What ever makes you happy.
Bit of a dog's breakfast apparently. Fuel tank over the front wheels meant it eventually ran light, and didn't steer and it had this nasty habit of spitting fuel out of the carbs, and catching fire.
Having said that, some hamsters quite liked it...
You mean like a world with indoor plumbing, no smallpox, abundant food, instant worldwide communication, increasing literacy and standard of living world-wide? Yeah it's awful.
You're so right. They should all stay home.
'Brazil wildfires: Blaze advances across Pantanal wetlands':
www.bbc.com
When 'wetlands' are dry enough to burn at this scale, we have a problem.
Brazil wildfires: Blaze advances across Pantanal wetlands
The area is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, and a popular tourist destination.
www.bbc.com
When 'wetlands' are dry enough to burn at this scale, we have a problem.
And in context, over a longer time period, 2019 is up 85% on 2018, but also down 50% on 2004.'Brazil wildfires: Blaze advances across Pantanal wetlands':
Brazil wildfires: Blaze advances across Pantanal wetlands
The area is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world, and a popular tourist destination.
When 'wetlands' are dry enough to burn at this scale, we have a problem.
Are you sure this isn't just the BBC spinning fresh click bait headlines to resell the same drama?
Source: Similar article, bit more detail but still no mention of photosynthesis or CO2 uses?
No it's not, which is why we shouldn't destroy it, as we currently do.
Remember to keep being skeptical. In the last 2000 years humanity has removed forrest to make room for agriculture. In that time we have halved the amount of biomass on the planet. The wast majority of the biomass is plants, those who convert CO2 into oxygen. That process has been exponentially growing together with the population. You can cherry pick as much as you like, but when the plants ability to create food, convert CO2 and all the rest of it drops below a certain level, then we run out of food.And in context, over a longer time period, 2019 is up 85% on 2018, but also down 50% on 2004.
Are you sure this isn't just the BBC spinning fresh click bait headlines to resell the same drama?
Source: Similar article, bit more detail but still no mention of photosynthesis or CO2 uses?
The forrest fires are mainly criticized because some suspect they have been started by humans. Brazil is a major manufacturer of biomass used to produce biofuels, so there are major economical interests at play. Some people want to remove more forrest so that they can do agriculture instead.
I'm not a skeptic. Knowing of the existence of a theory does not oblige one to be-LIE-ve it, and one can, and should hold many opposing perspectives on complex issues simultaneously, lest they be taken for a ride by unscrupulous parties. Ignorance of a thing forces one to rely on the motivated opinions of others.
This is a slightly older (2013) overview on how fossil fuels may be having a positive effect on greening...
Look, I understand why some of you are scared about the future like the rest of us, and why that leads you to seek out the "positives", but the way Matt Ridley juggles the numbers in that video is wrong. The total net primary production is decreasing globally exponentially. Read the article I linked to.
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One example: Ridley claims that the population has doubled since 1950. He claims it was 3.5 billion back then. It was 2.5 billion meaning that the population has tripled. He also states that in the same amount of time we have gone to using "65% less land to produce the same amount of food as we did in 1950". Since 1950 the area of agricultural land has increased slightly, but is now close to constant. We produce 3 times as much food, due to fertilizers, pesticides and fossil energy. All those are limiting factors. That means that without energy food production will drop, and the same goes for the fertilizer, which we're also running out of.
(From MIT, and you only have to read the first sentence)
He's juggling the numbers so much that it almost seems that he has a hidden agenda, if we should use your fondness about conspiracies.
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We don't really have the luxury of being scared, emotional reactions shut down the part of the brain that is needed for thinking and there are other, fairly pressing issues that need to be addressed. Climate always varies, there are periodic ice ages and quakes. Stuck on the surface of a planet is not a safe place.
Best thing the species can do is get some eggs into another basket and start mining the NEO database.
Wait, have you ever heard of a space flight simulator called Elite?
Yep, I play that game "occasionally".
As I wrote before, to get anything out of Earth's gravity you need a lot of energy, which we don't have. Also we're so much in a hurry, that we can't depend on technology that we don't have yet (if ever). Mining asteroids is great in ED, but in ED we can also travel faster than light, and we have mysterious power plants that break any law in physics that we know of.
I haven't seen the movie, but I was told that in Ad Astra they have space elevators. Those would potentially make asteroid mining more feasible, but we don't have them yet, and they are really hard to build. The cable in itself is very heavy, meaning that we have to use nano technology materials we don't have yet to make them. There are also problems like planes flying into them, tornados and hurricanes, but the main problem is the cable itself. We do know how to shoot down a passenger plane with a pilot coming too close
It might be that we get to a point were we can have them work, and even that we develop a FSD, but it is not something we will do in this century, simply because we still lack knowledge of how to do it. With the FSD physics shows us that it probably can't be done, but before the computer was invented, it was also pretty impossible to do many of the calculations we do today.
The point is that if we ever want to get there, we need to stay alive on the planet with what we've currently got. I love Sci Fi, and sometimes it even comes up with ideas that are turned into real life like VR did, but just because we can think the idea, does not mean it's realizable. We have to keep a balance between pessimism and optimism, and right there between those two you find being realistic.
Or, you need a low energy way to manipulate relative mass. There is plenty of energy all around us, the trick is tapping it with a reliable technology that can overcome the need to carry contemporary fuels. Its unlikely to be the 1884 steam turbine technology that's still used to generate electricity after 135 years.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and at some point the people making profits from the inefficient way we do things now are going to decide there's more profit or enough urgency in the change they've been resisting to fund a media blitzkreig that motivates the herd into demanding higher costs to underwrite it.
Nothing happens by accident on this planet. It all has to be paid for, including the current narrative trying to fan the flames of CO2 hysteria when it's a beneficial gas that's critical to plant life and the food chain while apparently ignoring more toxic carbon monoxide and failing to *predict climate change accurately.
Elevate your perspective, or wait. It's likely you'll discover the church of climate woke is being played.
*Climate modelling might be a complex task worthy of AI development, instead of a surveillance state.
Carbon monoxide is more dangerous to the climate when it reacts with oxygen in the air and turns into CO2. It is very toxic in even small concentrations but not at the levels you find in most of the atmosphere. Even CO2 is toxic but only at much higher levels than in the air we normally breathe. Air pollution in the cities is somewhat overlooked, potentially killing as many people as cigarettes, but that is mainly caused by micro particles and NOx.
If you look at invention of new technology it is roughly linear, whereas the general development of the planet is exponential. They don't follow along, and I know science and engineering well enough to see that we can't come up with new inventions fast enough today. The steam turbine as a good example. The efficiency of those have been improved, and they work pretty well, but it's old technology. Even with nuclear energy you use them, because physics basically tells us that they are a good way of converting heat into motion and motion into electricity.
All the energy surrounding us comes from or came from the Sun, or in the case of uranium from a supernova of another star. Pretty crazy the latter! That is all the energy we have (disregarding the heat inside the planet), and it arrives in the form of light, not something combustible, making the energy more difficult to extract. Wind turbines extract energy from the Sun, because the Sun heats the atmosphere and the oceans unevenly causing the air to move.
All of that is the among the many terms science has to work with, so it's not as easy as it mind sound.
If you look at invention of new technology it is roughly linear, whereas the general development of the planet is exponential. They don't follow along, and I know science and engineering well enough to see that we can't come up with new inventions fast enough today. The steam turbine as a good example. The efficiency of those have been improved, and they work pretty well, but it's old technology. Even with nuclear energy you use them, because physics basically tells us that they are a good way of converting heat into motion and motion into electricity.
All the energy surrounding us comes from or came from the Sun, or in the case of uranium from a supernova of another star. Pretty crazy the latter! That is all the energy we have (disregarding the heat inside the planet), and it arrives in the form of light, not something combustible, making the energy more difficult to extract. Wind turbines extract energy from the Sun, because the Sun heats the atmosphere and the oceans unevenly causing the air to move.
All of that is the among the many terms science has to work with, so it's not as easy as it mind sound.
Wait, so you think technology advances have been linear over what time period? Within some industries, like the hand held global tracking and surveillance devices we so willingly take everywhere with us have seen incredible changes in terms of processing speed, battery life, range, data storage and bandwidth.
Other industries not much, if any. Doesn't that seem a little, odd to you? Like they're hiding something?
[Edit: You may like to see if you can identify a bottle neck that's stopping new inventions getting to market.]
Other industries not much, if any. Doesn't that seem a little, odd to you? Like they're hiding something?
[Edit: You may like to see if you can identify a bottle neck that's stopping new inventions getting to market.]
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This is a valid observation.
The effect of Moore's Law on density of computing power is unsurpassed by any industry so far ( that's about to get eclipsed by genetics/proteonomics) and we have really been constrained by energy density of fossil fuels.
So phones, internet, communications all leaped ahead.
Harder science like propulsion, engines, rocketry, all seemed to stagnate since 1975. We're still fielding jet fighters designed then, the Mazda RX4 rotary engine is still the most advanced version of the ICE, and we never got the jetpacks or flying cars because we dont have super high energy density "atomic fuel".
To our discredit, we gave up aircraft like Concorde, the SR71 Blackbird, the Harrier Jump Jet, and the Space Shuttle- all with no replacement or improvement. Nobody developed the Fairey Autogyro.
At least one innovative aircraft got made : the tilt rotor Osprey is flying at last.
Stagnant, or sequestered into compartmentalised, need-to-know, unacknowledged black projects?
Any suitably functioning technology may be described as magic by one who cannot comprehend it.
[Edit: Add link and: There are a VAST number of alternative views on what does and does not exist.]
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