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The Analysis of Sea Levels.


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The glacial retreat issue is an interesting one - while potentially alarming if measured from 1850 levels - it should be recognized that was also the end of the Little Ice Age... so is that the best measuring stick? 

Every retreat is also revealing evidence of human activity in the passes and valleys these glaciers occupy.  At a minimum, it is a boone to archeology 

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/melting-mongolian-ice-reveals-fragile-artifacts-that-provide-clues-about-how-past-people-lived-164657

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/15/world/viking-mountain-pass-norway-scn/index.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/glaciers-retreat-they-give-mummies-and-artifacts-they-swallowed-180955399/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2000-artifacts-pulled-edge-norways-melting-glaciers-180967949/

... 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850

 

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14 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Also Jomolungma is going to loose its best known benchmarks like the green boots.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47638436

Quote

Nepal's army drained the Imja Lake near Mount Everest in 2016 after its water from rapid glacial-melt had reached dangerous levels.

How much TNT was involved?

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https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/weather/earth-dimming-climate/index.html

Likely relevant here - Earth's albedo has been decreasing the last 3 years. 

Retaining an extra 1/2 watt per square meter over baseline measurements for the last 20 years.  Due largely to changes in cloud cover over the Americas 

Edited by JoeSchmuckatelli
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5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/weather/earth-dimming-climate/index.html

Likely relevant here - Earth's albedo has been decreasing the last 3 years. 

Retaining an extra 1/2 watt per square meter over baseline measurements for the last 20 years.  Due largely to changes in cloud cover over the Americas 

One of many feedback loops.

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@sevenperforce pointed out a few pages back that while we are not seeing more storms (by number of storms) we should be seeing more larger storms...

Italy got a massive rainfall this week 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/06/weather/italy-flood-oman-climate-change/index.html

Oman got hit hard, too

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-58783992.amp

And last year massive storms hit North Africa and the Middle East 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Middle_East_storms

The projections that make sense call for an increase in the humidity of regions that are currently arid - like the Arabian peninsula and North Africa. While short duration heavy rain can be economically devastating - I wonder if the projections are true whether we might see a reversal of desertification in those regions. 

Paleo humans saw hippos in what is now the middle of the Sahara and Saudi Arabia used to have a lake district (although my reading suggests Earth's tilt was causal in that wet period) 

Interestingly - a wet Sahara might be a long term boon to people in NAfrica - but adversely affect the Amazon rainforests which rely on Saharan dust 

Edited by JoeSchmuckatelli
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I want to provide some accidental evidence I just ran into personally.

For the last week of weather, my sunny So-Cal weather went from:

- "cold" - yay fall is finally here

- hot - er nevermind, lets turn on the AC.

desert weather rain storm- multiple Lightning strikes, crazy wind, heavy isolated rains

- cold - again

I'm not an old person, but the sorta weather I ran into is more of a desert environment I've seen in Arizona and Nevada. The multiple lightning strikes are totally new for this area in my memory. And the fact it took basically 1 day to go back to "its cold enough for a jacket" So-Cal weather isn't "normal" from my memory.

 

Unfortunately, getting rain where I live doesn't really help the drought. With a few years we went from historical rainfall in the mountains, to historical drought. 

 

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1. There is a lot of artificial underground caves. Say, where they mine oil and replace it with water and methanol solution.

2. The carbon dioxide is highly solvable in water.

3. The carbon dioxide can be turned into methanol and ethanol.

4. So, the carbon dioxide can be turned into a carbonated alcohol beverage stored underground in a cave already equipped with pipes for bottling.

5. A champagne is a carbonated alcohol beverage with fruit flavours.
Of course, it's a special secret recipe, exact side of the hill, the year, and so on, but if remove the water and the ethanol, it will be a set of organic molecules without magic.

So, a solution.

All produced carbon dioxide should be collected, turned into ethanol and carbonated with the rest of the carbon dioxide.
Then it should be being pumped underground on the oil rigs, and replace the oil, like they do it now with methanol.
When the oil deposit is exhausted, and the cave is full of the carbonated alcohol beverage, they should pour the syntheti champagne extract...
... And voila! Where they were mining oil, there is an undergroud lake of champagne with pipes and cranes to fill the glassware when needed.

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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

1. There is a lot of artificial underground caves. Say, where they mine oil and replace it with water and methanol solution.

2. The carbon dioxide is highly solvable in water.

3. The carbon dioxide can be turned into methanol and ethanol.

4. So, the carbon dioxide can be turned into a carbonated alcohol beverage stored underground in a cave already equipped with pipes for bottling.

5. A champagne is a carbonated alcohol beverage with fruit flavours.
Of course, it's a special secret recipe, exact side of the hill, the year, and so on, but if remove the water and the ethanol, it will be a set of organic molecules without magic.

So, a solution.

All produced carbon dioxide should be collected, turned into ethanol and carbonated with the rest of the carbon dioxide.
Then it should be being pumped underground on the oil rigs, and replace the oil, like they do it now with methanol.
When the oil deposit is exhausted, and the cave is full of the carbonated alcohol beverage, they should pour the syntheti champagne extract...
... And voila! Where they were mining oil, there is an undergroud lake of champagne with pipes and cranes to fill the glassware when needed.

In case anyone remotely considers the above a serious suggestion- no. The long-chain hydrocarbons you're displacing contains far more carbon than the CO2 you are filling the same volume with, meaning that it's better to leave all the oil (and coal) in the ground than dig it up only to rebury it. We've already done enough damage, reversing millions of years of natural sequestration in only 200 years.

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6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

All produced carbon dioxide should be collected, turned into ethanol and carbonated with the rest of the carbon dioxide.
...
... And voila! Where they were mining oil, there is an undergroud lake of champagne with pipes and cranes to fill the glassware when needed.

...and you thought cow farts were bad 

4 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

We've already done enough damage, reversing millions of years of natural sequestration in only 200 years

I will point out that Out-of-Africa humans do well in hot and humid environments. 

Little Ice Age demonstrates that cold is more dangerous than hot. 

.. I will also point out that @kerbiloidlives in one of the places that are becoming more temperate and the region likes cheap booze, so his suggestions are a natural fit.

:D

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14 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I will point out that Out-of-Africa humans do well in hot and humid environments. 

Little Ice Age demonstrates that cold is more dangerous than hot.

There's hard limits there. Heat stroke is becoming an increasingly common  problem in the warmer regions of the world.

It's not cold that's the problem, it's UNEXPECTED cold. If you know it's coming, you just wear a sweater.

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1 hour ago, Rakaydos said:

There's hard limits there. Heat stroke is becoming an increasingly common  problem in the warmer regions of the world.

It's not cold that's the problem, it's UNEXPECTED cold. If you know it's coming, you just wear a sweater.

Well - once again, I bring up the difference between inconvenience (and economic cost) vs existential threat.  From a species perspective, high heat and humidity are an inconvenience.  Sure, the individual in an overcrowded city, reliant upon air-conditioning when the power goes out and the windows won't open is at risk... But as a species, we are adapted.

Plants love these conditions, btw.

Contrast this with reduced food production when it's too cold.  Hard to put a sweater on your crops.  

...

We've talked about feedback loops - and there's an interesting one that you touch on: people's adapting to heat-island cities.  We've done this by pumping in water and providing air-conditioning in modern buildings.  But lots of people in the world live in buildings that date back to before central air was part of the design.  Given the high cost and ugly appearance of retrofitting, many older buildings don't have such amenities.  Those are the places where the heat-stroke is happening.  In a hotter world, demand for such nice to haves will rise, with it the demand for more cheap power - and what's the cheapest source of power right now?

No-one wants grandma to cook (well, except at dinner time) - and she doesn't want to miss out on the happs in town; so because people demand to live in overcrowded conditions... the cost has to be paid in one form or another.

Edited by JoeSchmuckatelli
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1 hour ago, Rakaydos said:

There's hard limits there. Heat stroke is becoming an increasingly common  problem in the warmer regions of the world.

It's not cold that's the problem, it's UNEXPECTED cold. If you know it's coming, you just wear a sweater.

… until the ground is covered in 10 feet 3 meters of ice and nothing is growing. Time to break out the nuclear-powered hydroponics kit. 

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11 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Well - once again, I bring up the difference between inconvenience (and economic cost) vs existential threat.  From a species perspective, high heat and humidity are an inconvenience.  Sure, the individual in an overcrowded city, reliant upon air-conditioning when the power goes out and the windows won't open is at risk... But as a species, we are adapted.

Plants love these conditions, btw.

Contrast this with reduced food production when it's too cold.  Hard to put a sweater on your crops.  

...

We've talked about feedback loops - and there's an interesting one that you touch on: people's adapting to heat-island cities.  We've done this by pumping in water and providing air-conditioning in modern buildings.  But lots of people in the world live in buildings that date back to before central air was part of the design.  Given the high cost and ugly appearance of retrofitting, many older buildings don't have such amenities.  Those are the places where the heat-stroke is happening.  In a hotter world, demand for such nice to haves will rise, with it the demand for more cheap power - and what's the cheapest source of power right now?

No-one wants grandma to cook (well, except at dinner time) - and she doesn't want to miss out on the happs in town; so because people demand to live in overcrowded conditions... the cost has to be paid in one form or another.

I'm sure you love thanksgiving dinner, too, but eat like that every day and you arnt going to last a year. According to studies, plant growth rate is limited by available sunlight- while there is some minor benifit to a higher CO2, they arnt going to consume more with the same sunlight.

"Sweater on your crops"- it's called a greenhouse, by the way.

Cheapest source of power: Solar and Wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source)

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3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

In exact limited places and avoiding the utilization problems.

Currently EU is enjoying the green power.

That's the lie that the oil producers (including russia) have sold us, yes...

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2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Combustion, fission, and fusion are predictable and don't depend on time and place.

And when (after 2040) all cars become electric, this will harden the things even more.

Neither does SBSP.

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1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

From a species perspective, high heat and humidity are an inconvenience.

Sorry to do a drive-by comment, but I'm short on time:

https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/

From a species perspective, sure. On the scale of societies, countries, regions, individuals, maybe not. Adaptation takes time, money, and political will.

You and I have both lived and worked outside--Wet-bulb temperature MATTERS. While I find the usual "heat danger" charts a bit conservative, productivity definitely goes down significantly as that index climbs. Also, I've had heat stroke, it's not a joke.

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23 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

In exact limited places and avoiding the utilization problems.

Currently EU is enjoying the green power.

21 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

This year was not that sunny and windy.

Oh dear lord, you can't have picked a worse time. They've just made me look this stuff up for work, and I'm annoyed enough to regurgitate it on cue (go ahead and compare me to a penguin).

https://www.rbc.ru/business/22/09/2021/614b12e89a794762e94db190 (Russia's wind suddenly ended up cheapest in the world, to boot)

https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2021/Jun/IRENA_Power_Generation_Costs_2020.pdf

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Price-of-electricity-new-renewables-vs-n

Basically, we're passing the breakeven point with regards to costs. Solving the variance in load is a secondary problem, as are EU's goof-ups. That said, the we're going to see coal (and oil shale, hey there Estonia) get affected first.

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10 minutes ago, DDE said:

Basically, we're passing the breakeven point with regards to costs.

The awesome thing is that political will (meaning money) provided the impetus for the engineers to solve so many problems in just a decade.  10 years ago, the doom and gloom 'it's new and will never work' crowd actually had plausible arguments.  Factually, EU's goof's can be seen as iteration (road to someplace is paved with good intentions)... so people tried it, learned what worked, what didn't and some efficiencies - meaning that current adopters have some prepared ground to work from.

4 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

Cheapest source of power:

Proving to be an interesting read: thanks!

2 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

orry to do a drive-by comment,

Climate migration is real - its going to be a massive political and economic test (already is, frankly).  

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