The Analysis of Sea Levels.

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

For penguins! For Greta!

For the Stargate!  Maybe it's by looking for the oil that we stumble on the Stargate, at last

[mikegarrison]

Antarctica is covered under the Antarctic Treaty. I don't think resource extraction like mining or oil drilling is allowed, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Antarctica is covered under the Antarctic Treaty. I don't think resource extraction like mining or oil drilling is allowed, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

Treaties go, treaties get gone.

Antarctica just a resource and land deposit, conserved for the future brave new world under the wise Global Government rule.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Antarctica is covered under the Antarctic Treaty. I don't think resource extraction like mining or oil drilling is allowed, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

None of the signatories to the treaty that have resource claims have relinquished them so apparently they may think the treaty may be less than permanent.  Hedging perhaps

[DDE]

4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Antarctica is covered under the Antarctic Treaty. I don't think resource extraction like mining or oil drilling is allowed, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

Even proper surveys - with drills and stuff - aren't allowed. However, the political situation is starting to heat up.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/11/russia-uncovers-oil-and-gas-reserves-british-antarctic/

I'm pretty sure the Arctic supplies are good enough to keep Russia busy for the next few centuries, but apparently we're just so perniciously malevolent we're going after both poles. Somehow.

Edited June 9 by DDE

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

45 minutes ago, DDE said:

 apparently we're just so perniciously malevolent we're going after both poles

Surprise - people do what is cheap and easy and fait accompli (insert Urkel (did I do thaaaat?) okay, busted, but since we are here... might as well keep going).   To paraphrase: he who gets there fuhstest gets the mostest. 

Money, power, prestige and the game of empire.  

Nothing really new. 

... 

Except.  Something has changed. 

 40 years ago, news like this would have only been found in some obscure industry journal and known only to a few. 

Fait accompli was easier then. 

Now the Gretas of the world get a say. 

Will be interested to see if the people worried about the world 100 years from now win this - or if those who only care about short term profit and immediate reward do 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Somehow.

Mohole. But on the Earth.

The North (P/H)ole is connected to the South (P/H)ole with a tunnel.
Otherwise, how could it rotate about the axis? The axis is passing through the tunnel.
The oil is actually the machine oil, which the Earth is producing to oil the axis.
Just some of it reach the surface, and is used by the humans.

The Earth is a torus, after all.

Spoiler

Bublik aka torus.

 

P.S.
Interesting, what political system do the penguins have?
Do they do it right? Don't they need some help?

P.P.S.
Based on the Earth size, the gap between the axis and the tunnel wall should be enough great to let an atomic submarine dive at the North Pole and undive on the South Pole.
Captain Nemo was visiting the South Pole, after all. Why others shouldn't?

Edited June 9 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

(correct title: Thou shalt not build windmills)

https://pikabu-ru.translate.goog/story/tyi_ne_dolzhen_stroit_vetryaki_11499857?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Spoiler

 

Blackwhite - models, colored - reality

(The English source links are at the end of the article.

Ignore the comments.)

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

(correct title: Thou shalt not build windmills)

https://pikabu-ru.translate.goog/story/tyi_ne_dolzhen_stroit_vetryaki_11499857?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pto=wapp

  Hide contents

 

Blackwhite - models, colored - reality

(The English source links are at the end of the article.

Ignore the comments.)

Way too many US farmers have been leasing their fields to solar farming outfits.  The solar farmers show up with buckets of money they get from gov subsidies and it's hard for the farmers to say no when they can make way more leasing the land out than growing food on it. 

I bet many of them were told their land would do well to go fallow for awhile and would be even better farming after the lease was up decades from now.  I doubt many would have chosen to ruin their soil to any degree had this about moisture depletion and microbiome die-off been known

Edited June 11 by darthgently

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

his about moisture depletion and microbiome die-off been known

Or maybe a bit overblown. 

Some indication =/= catasstrophy. 

This looks like disinformation - remember: the best lie always contains a kernal of truth. 

Not really passing the sniff test for me (at least not yet) 

[StrandedonEarth]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

Way too many US farmers have been leasing their fields to solar farming outfits.  The solar farmers show up with buckets of money they get from gov subsidies and it's hard for the farmers to say no when they can make way more leasing the land out than growing food on it. 

I bet many of them were told their land would do well to go fallow for awhile and would be even better farming after the lease was up decades from now.  I doubt many would have chosen to ruin their soil to any degree had this about moisture depletion and microbiome die-off been known

Agrivoltaics is where it’s at. Many crops benefit from partial shade, and evaporation from the soil is reduced. 

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

This looks like disinformation

 

13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The English source links are at the end of the article.

 

[K^2]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The English source links are at the end of the article.

There's a very strong selection bias in these. Worth looking into, but without a metastudy, all you really have is that climate has changed in places that had wind turbines and solar panels built. It also changed in most places where it hasn't. We're kind of going through a major climate shift. That's the reason we're looking into alternative energy sources, remember? And there is absolutely nothing establishing a connection between the change and the infrastructure. You'd have to study hundreds of sites with and without infrastructure change to even pick up the connection when the averages have shifted so much over just a few years.

And yeah, the bias in the Russian article is obvious.

Quote

Как мы все знаем из курса школьной физики (если вы, конечно, не экоактивист), если где-то переизбыток чего-то, то в другом месте этого не хватает – закон сохранения материи суров, но это закон. Ветряные парки «выжимают» досуха проходящий через них воздух и задерживают влагу, из-за чего местность вокруг постепенно высыхает.

Yeah, huge "citation needed," on this one. Windmills can certainly cause the moisture to fall out as a rain. Any obstruction to the air does. Forests, famously. Except, it's deforestation that leads to desertification and not the other way around. The law of conservation of matter, that this paragraph refers to, precisely tells you that if the windmill made the air drier, that moisture ended up somewhere. It ended up as fog and clouds behind the windmill, resulting in rainfall on the terrain. That might have been rainfall that didn't happen somewhere else, but it certainly hasn't resulted in less moisture reaching the ground on the net. If anything, the dryer air will promote more evaporation over the bodies of water, resulting in even more rainfall. Again, see forests and differences in rainfall over plains vs mountainous/hilly terrain.

Rapid temperature increases we're seeing due to the CO2 emissions, in contrast, have been linked to a lot of areas getting drier weather. Also to some absolute monsoons in other areas, whether or not they installed wind farms.

And you want the real kicker? Take a look at CO2 concentrations over Europe, and compare them to the maps shown in the article. Heck, some of these are precisely mapping to the coal emissions from the Germany's increase in coal burn after the nuclear power plants were shut down. The author's just another pseudo-intellectual unwittingly picking up the lines from European coal industry. Unsurprising, really, given which news sources that industry backs in Europe, and the political climate in Russia. It's shockingly easy to lie to people with no media literacy using charts.

And yes, the author does talk about nuclear energy. And so do the German coal firms. In the key of, "Oh, yes, it would have been better to keep the NPPs running, but who knew? Now we have no choice but to mine more coal." Germany screwed up big time. But pinning the climate impact caused by resulting coal emissions increase on wind farms is not going to make things better.

10 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Not really passing the sniff test for me

Rightly so.

[Chemp]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

There's a very strong selection bias in these. Worth looking into, but without a metastudy, all you really have is that climate has changed in places that had wind turbines and solar panels built. It also changed in most places where it hasn't. We're kind of going through a major climate shift. That's the reason we're looking into alternative energy sources, remember? And there is absolutely nothing establishing a connection between the change and the infrastructure. You'd have to study hundreds of sites with and without infrastructure change to even pick up the connection when the averages have shifted so much over just a few years.

And yeah, the bias in the Russian article is obvious.

Yeah, huge "citation needed," on this one. Windmills can certainly cause the moisture to fall out as a rain. Any obstruction to the air does. Forests, famously. Except, it's deforestation that leads to desertification and not the other way around. The law of conservation of matter, that this paragraph refers to, precisely tells you that if the windmill made the air drier, that moisture ended up somewhere. It ended up as fog and clouds behind the windmill, resulting in rainfall on the terrain. That might have been rainfall that didn't happen somewhere else, but it certainly hasn't resulted in less moisture reaching the ground on the net. If anything, the dryer air will promote more evaporation over the bodies of water, resulting in even more rainfall. Again, see forests and differences in rainfall over plains vs mountainous/hilly terrain.

Rapid temperature increases we're seeing due to the CO2 emissions, in contrast, have been linked to a lot of areas getting drier weather. Also to some absolute monsoons in other areas, whether or not they installed wind farms.

And you want the real kicker? Take a look at CO2 concentrations over Europe, and compare them to the maps shown in the article. Heck, some of these are precisely mapping to the coal emissions from the Germany's increase in coal burn after the nuclear power plants were shut down. The author's just another pseudo-intellectual unwittingly picking up the lines from European coal industry. Unsurprising, really, given which news sources that industry backs in Europe, and the political climate in Russia. It's shockingly easy to lie to people with no media literacy using charts.

And yes, the author does talk about nuclear energy. And so do the German coal firms. In the key of, "Oh, yes, it would have been better to keep the NPPs running, but who knew? Now we have no choice but to mine more coal." Germany screwed up big time. But pinning the climate impact caused by resulting coal emissions increase on wind farms is not going to make things better.

Rightly so.

Exactly what I wanted to look for during my lunch break but you already did all the work for me. Thank you for your analysis!

[Deddly]

Fact Check: No, wind turbines do not cause global warming | ACP (cleanpower.org)

Quote

Here’s what their model does show: wind turbines do not add more heat to the atmosphere, but they may redistribute heat by mixing air. Certain models show that could temporarily and locally raise ground temperatures. Again, however, there is no contribution to rising global temperatures and their associated problems

Quote

“It is well known that this type of modeling assumption does a poor job of predicting the flow in real wind farms,” he told MIT Technology Review. However, in other simulations that were “more realistic,” Dabiri said there is “little temperature change near the surface.”

Quote

Meanwhile, besides reducing carbon pollution, we already know that wind power cuts air pollution that contributes to smog and asthma attacks, creating over $8 billion in public health benefits in 2017 alone. A 2017 study from Nature Energy also found that from 2007 to 2015, wind generated up to $108 billion in air quality and public health benefits and avoided up to 12,200 premature deaths.

Quote

Increased carbon emissions also create impacts like ocean acidification, loss of sea ice, sea level rise, more extreme weather, and many other effects. The local warming effect Keith and Miller’s model forecasts does not contribute to any of these phenomena.

Underlining mine.

One of the sources linked in @kerbiloid's article says 

Quote

A statistically significant signal is only found in winter, with changes within ±0.3 °C and within 0–5% for precipitation. It results from the combination of local wind farm effects and changes due to a weak, but robust, anticyclonic-induced circulation over Europe. However, the impacts remain much weaker than the natural climate interannual variability and changes expected from greenhouse gas emissions.

Another of the sources says:

Quote

operational wind turbines raised air temperature by 0.18 °C and absolute humidity (AH) by 0.03 g m-3 during the night, and increased the variability in air, surface and soil temperature throughout the diurnal cycle. Further, the microclimatic influence of turbines on air temperature and AH decreased logarithmically with distance from the nearest turbine. 

 

So, I mean, wind turbines are no silver bullet to cure the world's problems. They might possibly have a minor impact on ground temperature and humidity in the immediate vicinity. They do make some noise, which can disturb people living nearby. Electricity still needs to be transported via wires, and forests are sometimes cut down to make room for those wires.

On the other hand, they are certainly helping to improve air quality, and many other forms of electricity production are far more harmful and disturbing to both the local, regional and global environment.

If you're going to try and get something banned, there are far more damaging and problematic targets out there, the devastating effects of which have been studied in far more detail and in far more reliable studies than any of these.

[darthgently]

36 minutes ago, Deddly said:

Fact Check: No, wind turbines do not cause global warming | ACP (cleanpower.org)

Underlining mine.

One of the sources linked in @kerbiloid's article says 

Another of the sources says:

 

So, I mean, wind turbines are no silver bullet to cure the world's problems. They might possibly have a minor impact on ground temperature and humidity in the immediate vicinity. They do make some noise, which can disturb people living nearby. Electricity still needs to be transported via wires, and forests are sometimes cut down to make room for those wires.

On the other hand, they are certainly helping to improve air quality, and many other forms of electricity production are far more harmful and disturbing to both the local, regional and global environment.

If you're going to try and get something banned, there are far more damaging and problematic targets out there, the devastating effects of which have been studied in far more detail and in far more reliable studies than any of these.

The maintenance and cradle to grave costs of windmill blades alone are sobering.  That is a huge volume of resins (plastic) in gigantic disposable blades.  No one has found a viable way to recycle composites.  They just get buried.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grok

 

 

@grok

Petroleum, the black gold that fuels our cars and our dreams of becoming oil tycoons, is indeed a primary source for making composite resins. Like a superhero with a secret identity, petroleum can be refined into various chemicals, such as olefins and aromatics, which can then be used to synthesize resins like epoxy, polyester, and vinyl ester. These resins are the unsung heroes of the composite world, binding together fibers to create strong, lightweight, and durable materials.

 

So, to answer your question with a dash of humor and a sprinkle of wit: Yes, petroleum is still a primary source for making composite resins today. It's like the James Bond of the polymer world - suave, sophisticated, and always gets the job done.

[Deddly]

This is true. 

What happens to all the old wind turbines? (bbc.com)

There are ways of dealing with it, but it's a problem, yes.

Spoiler

 

On the other hand, the amount of fossil fuel used in producing these is miniscule in comparison to the amount of power they produce over their lifetime.

Making an issue out of this in defence of continuing to burn fossil fuels is like saying "Hey! That furniture is made of wood, so it's OK to burn down rain forests".

[darthgently]

I have a theory that the reason big oil is so prominently "green" is that they see future profits being much larger if the convert petroleum into plastics instead of fuel.  This only works if they can get governments to require the use of plastics, especially disposable plastics, across vast swaths of the global economy.  Like plastic gloves for food service workers that show little, or even negative, benefit compared normal hand washing (ppl treat the gloves like a talisman and they end up dirtier than their hands).  Plastic based masks with pores orders of magnitude larger than viruses mandated into use during pandemics, etc.   And giant plastic disposable windmill blades.  All mandated by gov fiat with little market forces involved

7 minutes ago, Deddly said:

This is true. 

What happens to all the old wind turbines? (bbc.com)

There are ways of dealing with it, but it's a problem, yes.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

On the other hand, the amount of fossil fuel used in producing these is miniscule in comparison to the amount of power they produce over their lifetime.

Making an issue out of this in defence of continuing to burn fossil fuels is like saying "Hey! That furniture is made of wood, so it's OK to burn down rain forests".

Straw man.  I didn't say burn rain forests and no amount of hyperbole will make this statement relevant

Edited June 14 by darthgently

[Deddly]

Well, let's not get into a political discussion over it.

[farmerben]

I recommend aluminum for windmills.  That would be 100% recyclable.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, farmerben said:

I recommend aluminum for windmills.  That would be 100% recyclable.

Lunar aluminum and titanium processed into usable alloys off planet using space based solar and nukes 

[DDE]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

Lunar aluminum and titanium processed into usable alloys off planet using space based solar and nukes 

"...In fact, forget the solar"

[Codraroll]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

Lunar aluminum and titanium processed into usable alloys off planet using space based solar and nukes 

And in the lower lunar gravity, windmill blades could be made even more slender while still bearing their own weight, further reducing material usage!

Uh, wait a second ...

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Uh, wait a second ...

Naw - I think you're on to something... All we need is Ozzy and a dog to 'Bark on the Moon' 

[kerbiloid]

The lunar seas can provide energy for the tidal powerplants.