NNadir
NNadir's JournalIn the period between 2024, and 2040, an additional 110 million people will die from antinukism, the mechanism being...
...air pollution. Between 2024 and 2040 an additional 70 million will die, by the same mechanism, from the idiotic paranoia sold to the general public by antinukism, in addition to the 90 million million who have already died since 2011 during which antinukes have been whining on computers about Fukushima, computers overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuel derived electricity.
These numbers do not include the deaths antinukes have brought, are bringing and will bring to us from climate change.
Let's make something clear, OK? I could no more prove to a member of the antinuke cults that nuclear power is "safe" than I could prove to a dumb shit Trumper antivaxxer that vaccines are "safe." Vaccines are not risk free, and neither is nuclear power, but vaccines save lives. Nuclear power need not be without risk to save lives any more than vaccines need to be risk free to save lives.
And nuclear power quantitatively saves lives, as described by one of the world's most prominent climate scientists:
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
It follows,that antinuke rhetoric kills people.
Predictably, antinukes when asked to show that as many people have died from radiation released at Fukushima as will die from air pollution in the next hour, 800 deaths, as a result of antinuke selective attention, they don't answer with numbers if they answer at all.
I gave something called a "reference" with numbers for the death toll killed every year in my previous post to one of the world's most prominent medical journals, Lancet to show the death toll associated with antinuke ignorance. Of course, apparently, antinukes can read no better than they can think.
Billions of dollars are being squandered to "clean up" Fukushima, but to what standard? Is the standard required to show to the satisfaction of antinuke paranoids who fail to understand even the lowest level standards of risk. There is no satisfying the members of this cult.
How many lives will be saved by these billions of dollars spent to "clean up" Fukushima? As many as if we ignored bourgeois assholes who think that the existence of radioactivity is a great tragedy, and did nothing to "clean up" Fukushima and instead spent the same number of billions of dollars to provide basic sanitation to the 1.5 billion people who lack access to even basic sanitation?
Six hundred thousand people, mostly children will die this year from fecal waste?
What is the mechanism by which this allegedly "molten" reactor core will kill anyone if nothing is done for to address it? Six hundred thousand per year, every year, as is the case from the water poverty about which antinukes couldn't give a shit?
Seven million per year every year, as is the case from air pollution?
As many as died in 2023 from extreme heat?
I once confronted an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke who whined stupidly that a tunnel collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and thus stupidly insisted nuclear energy is "too dangerous."
This led me, to my great amusement, to compose a rather long post filled with something called "references" to the primary scientific literature, to explore the mechanisms of radionuclide migration: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels.
Of course, antinukes can't read any more than they can think, so the exercise was for my amusement only, but happily, I learned a lot writing it.
I once heard here from someone, a dumb shit straight up antinuke as opposed to an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke, that he, she them or it was a "data scientist" and indicated that he, she, them or it was sure that her, his, their, or it's resume was better than mine, this while being unable to produce numbers for the death toll associated with radiation released from Fukushima. This person, doesn't know anything at all about me, and I am disinterested in anything about the person in question except for the position of a foil to call out the mentality.
A "data scientist" who cannot produce numbers to support an argument, admittedly a stupid argument, but one that a competent data scientist would not make without numbers, isn't worth shit as a "data scientist." No one should hire such a fool, and no one should work with such a fool, period.
I note that the same asshole didn't give a flying fuck about how many people are killed by tsunami's because they live in coastal cities by seawater. The number of antinukes calling for the phase out of coastal cities because of tsunamis have killed over a hundred of thousand people in them in this century, both in 2004 and again in 2011 (also destroying reactors) is zero, just like the number of antinukes calling for the phase out of fossil fuels is zero.
In fact, antinukes are engaged in making coastal cities even more unsafe than they are now. It's called "climate change."
What happens when I ask anyone here or elsewhere to show that radiation releases in the last 13 years from Fukushima have killed as many people as air pollution will kill in the next hour, 800 people, they change the subject. If I ask these same salespeople selling death and destruction to show that in the nearly 70 year history of commercial nuclear power it has killed as many people who die every damned day from air pollution, yesterday, today, tomorrow, next Thursday, December 25, 2024 and if things don't change on January 1st 2040, 19,000 deaths each day roughly, they also change the subject, slime away into their deadly little holes or simply disappear.
Antinukes are equivalent to antivaxxers, although antivaxxers have not come close to killing 19,000 people per day, every day, year after year, decade after decade.
Antinukes have no sense of decency, no intellectual integrity, no moral integrity, no serious knowledge, and not a single care about the future of humanity beyond their stupid paranoia that a few radioactives might tunnel into their rather useless brains.
People lie, to themselves and each other, but numbers don't lie. Anyone who is serious about any argument about safety should be able to produce numbers. If they can't do so, they, and their claims are worthless at best, deadly toxic at worst,
Have a wonderful Friday and enjoy the upcoming weekend.
"Win a heart" science contest. Explain the difference between Faradaic efficiency and Thermodynamic efficiency.
This could be a short thread since it should be easy to get one or more of four DU hearts I have to give away. Alternatively it could be a short thread because no one is interested in it.
Unlike the rules set by the trivia person over in the Lounge, you are free to use Google to tell us what the difference between Faradaic efficiency and thermodynamic efficiency is in electrolysis. The first correct answer gets a heart from me. Upon the award of the heart, that part is closed with two parts to remain.
In scientific papers discussing approaches to making electrolysis to produce hydrogen economically viable - which it isn't - so we can all pretend in spite of reality that hydrogen is "green," - people often speak of "Faradaic Efficiency." (The numbers often seem impressive.) Faradaic efficiency is different however from "Thermodynamic efficiency," the latter being what antinuke Guru Amory Lovins told us, in 1976, would save the world, except it didn't. (He was apparently confused when he opened a physics text and assumed that no one else on the planet knew physics so he could claim he did.)
The consequence of thermodynamics has resulted in this industrial reality, to which I often point:
The caption:
Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084]
You may also win a heart for producing here the equation that describes the thermodynamics of electrolysis.
You may win two hearts for showing, with a simple example, how this equation applies to the electrolysis of water to make hydrogen and oxygen, with brief satisfactory text on the implications, thus demonstrating why electrolysis, despite the efforts of fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots here and elsewhere to claim dishonestly otherwise, electrolysis is an economic nonstarter industrially and hydrogen production is dominated by fossil fuel dependence.
There will only be one award in each category.
Unfortunately, I am the judge of the contest as well as the person with hearts to give away, for what it's worth.
I disabused my son of a reason he gave for thinking Leonardo DiCaprio is a good actor.
My son is upstairs watching "The Wolf of Wall Street," a movie I've never seen and don't want to see, but it was on when I walked in the room. I have passing familiarity with the movie from osmosis, so I knew what movie it was.
My son is fond of the famous chart showing that Leonardo DiCaprio never dates women over the age of 25:
He said, referring to Margot Robbie that DiCaprio was a great actor because he was pretending to be interested in a woman over 25.
I regretted that I had to tell him that the movie was made in 2013, and Margot Robbie was 23 then.
Better luck next time, son, trying to prove that dubious point...
Functional traits--not nativeness--shape the effects of large mammalian herbivores on plant communities
The paper I'll briefly discuss in this post is this one: Lundgren, Erick J.; Bergman, Juraj; Trepel, Jonas; le Roux, Elizabeth; Monsarrat, Sophie; Kristensen, Jeppe Aagaard; Pedersen, Rasmus Østergaard; Pereyra, Patricio; Tietje, Melanie; Svenning, Jens-Christian, Functional traits—not nativeness—shape the effects of large mammalian herbivores on plant communities. Science 383, 531-537 (2024).
The paper concerns the effect of large herbivores on plant diversity and on the effect on introduced plant species, vs the effect of native herbivores on this diversity. We have a number of large herbivores that have been introduced where they have not existed before, for instance, horses in North America as well as feral pigs (boar), while other major species have been rendered extinct or nearly so. Most of North American megafauna disappeared with the arrival of human beings on this continent; whether it was the result of hunting or climate change is not, so far as I know, resolved.
The paper is introduced in the current issue of Science as of this writing with a "perspective," which is for general consumption.
From the perspective, When function, not origin, matters Science
1 Feb 2024 Vol 383, Issue 6682 pp. 478-479 by YVONNE M. BUCKLEY AND ANDREW TORSNEY
Large mammalian herbivores that range in size from red kangaroos (Osphranter rufus) and goats (Capra hircus) to African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) have profound effects on ecosystems through their functions as consumers and modifiers of plant biomass (3), dispersers of seeds (4), and, when dead, concentrated resources for scavengers and decomposers (5). The largest adult megaherbivores (>1000 kg; e.g., Rhinoceros spp., Hippopotamus amphibius, and elephants) are relatively resistant to predation pressure, which has important consequences for the flow of energy through ecosystems and landscape heterogeneity (6). However, large animals are also vulnerable to local and global extinctions (7). This is attributed to a mixture of intrinsic traits, such as low reproductive output, and extrinsic exposure to human impacts. Although large mammalian herbivores have been lost in many habitats, some ecosystems have gained them through human-mediated introductions to areas where they did not previously occur.
Feral goats, buffalo, and horses (wild populations of formerly domesticated species) are high-impact invasive species, particularly in regions where humans have caused the decline and extinction of other large herbivores or where large herbivores with traits similar to the introduced species never occurred. Indeed, goat (C. hircus), fallow deer (Dama dama), and wild boar (Sus scrofa) are included in the list of 100 of the world’s worst invasive species (8). Goats that were introduced to islands have proven to be particularly problematic as a driver of local species extinctions (9), and their eradication from islands is a conservation success story (10)...
From the full article:
However, introduced megafauna can also reduce native plant abundance and diversity and promote introduced plants (9). These effects are generally interpreted as evidence that the impacts of introduced megafauna are distinct from those of native megafauna (10). Accordingly, conservation policy has prioritized the eradication and culling of introduced megafauna, even though 50% of these species are threatened or extinct in their native ranges (11).
The notion that native and introduced species have distinct effects is most often justified by the functional postulate that long-term community-wide coevolutionary history shapes ecological interactions (12–14). Coevolution has been inferred at broad macroevolutionary scales [e.g., the evolution of grasses and grazers throughout the Cenozoic, or the evolution of plant defenses (15, 16)] and plays a role in specialized interactions, as evidenced by the consequences of introduced pathogens (17). However, these observations have been extended to justify a broader biological reality to nativeness in which coevolution also shapes diffuse, generalist interactions with high taxonomic precision, such as between individual plant and megafauna species. Nativeness has thus become central to conservation policy (18); widespread notions of ecological “health” (19); and basic biodiversity data, which only count populations thought to be native (20).
However, critics have argued that coevolution is unlikely to shape generalist interactions in the same way it does specialized ones and that long-term community-wide coevolution is unmeasurable (21, 22). Instead, critics have suggested that ecological factors, such as predation, the environment, and functional traits, may sufficiently explain the effects of both introduced and native organisms (23, 24). If so, and if it were impossible to determine the nativeness of an organism from their actual effects, then nativeness would remain a description of dispersal history but would not be a meaningful way to understand ecological interactions (23).
We employed a meta-analytic dataset of 3995 responses from 221 studies to evaluate whether nativeness and/or ecological factors (Table 1) could explain the effects of wild herbivorous megafauna (?45 kg) on plant abundance (N = 3221 responses) and plant diversity (N = 774) (25, 26)...
A graphic from the paper:
The caption:
(A) There was strong evidence that megafauna communities dominated by bulk-feeding generalists increased local plant diversity. Dietary generalism was estimated with muzzle width of each megafauna community (maximum, weighted by relative biomass per species; see fig. S3 for mean muzzle width). Letters in the plot indicate the taxa highlighted in (C) to (F). [Icons: Gabriela Palomo-Munoz, Jan A. Venter, Herbert H. T. Prins, David A. Balfour, and Rob Slotow (vectorized by T. Michael Keesey)] (B) Effect sizes for select groups of representative taxa from communities where these species constitute >50% of total megafauna biomass. Deer include all Cervidae, and wild pigs include all Suidae (primarily introduced wild boar, Sus scrofa). Equids include all Equidae but primarily feral horses (Equus ferus caballus). Large, broad-muzzled bovids include the genera Bison, Bos, and Syncerus. (C) Native and introduced deer can reduce plant diversity by selectively browsing preferred plants (49, 50). [Photo: Murray Foubister] (D) Pigs are distinct for belowground foraging and are dietary generalists, despite their relatively narrow muzzles (51). Feral pigs often increase plant diversity, at times doubling native plant diversity by suppressing competitive dominants (52). [Photo: Valentin Panzirsch] (E) Feral horses (E. ferus caballus) appear to have mixed effects on local plant diversity. (F) Bulk-grazers, like cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer) and bison (Bison bison), tend to increase plant diversity (53). Our results suggest that this is driven by their inability to selectively feed, forcing them to consume the most abundant (i.e., competitively dominant) plants. [Photo: Stig Nygaard]
The authors conclude that megafauna have similar effects on plant diversity and growth whether they represent introduced species or native species, and thus question whether efforts to exterminate introduced herbivores is justified, noting that in some cases, the species are threatened in their native domain.
An example not mentioned in the paper are the hippopotami introduced by the drug lord Pablo Escobar into Columbia. He imported four for his private zoo, and after his death, they bred and are now considered an introduced species there.
Interesting I think.
Which is a better sign that you have too much money?
Cocaine addiction or having in your personal library the Handbook of Mummy Studies?
The latter, I think, is probably cheaper. It can be yours for only $379.99 plus the US VAT.
You would then be rich enough to read this wonderful article:
Life and Diseases of the Neolithic Glacier Mummy “Ötzi
I'm neither a cocaine junkie nor the owner of the Handbook of Mummy Studies.
Can copper be "green?"
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: Regulation Mechanism for Designing Decarbonization Pathways in the Copper Industry Toward Carbon Neutrality Yifan Gu, Hongyang Yang, Yufeng Wu, Mingxuan Tuo, Ming Xu, Guangwen Hu, and Tieyong Zuo Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (3), 1518-1530
One doesn't need to be a chemist to recognize that in its most common oxidized state, Cu+2, copper is generally green. Statues, copper roofing, plumbing show as much. (Complexed with ammonia, though, Cu+2 is brilliant blue.) In this sense nothing has to be done to make copper "green" other than to oxidize the, um, copper colored familiar metal.
Originally the word "green" referred to a color of course, but in a modern sense the word as become, often in abuse as opposed to legitimate use, by appeal to the color of chlorophyl, for something that is environmentally sustainable. For example, the gas with the third lowest critical temperature, the property that it is incompatible with many metals, and which must be manufactured by the use of vast environmentalist and unsustainable exergy destruction, hydrogen, is often described as "green hydrogen," often by fossil fuel sales people and salesbots, here and elsewhere, trying to rebrand their products, dangerous fossil fuels, as "green." Of course, not even chlorophyl is necessarily "green" in this sense. There are very real and very frightening questions about the sustainability of agriculture, for example, and even forestation and afforestation, as I noted in a recent post, has dire limitations, particularly in connection with land use, as I noted in a recent post in this space.
The issue as to what is and is not "sustainable" is admittedly complex, and is the subject of an ongoing debate and refinement. I have drawn my own conclusions from studying this debate, one of which is that we are not going to mine our way out climate change, nor are we going to address it by industrializing every square inch of the planet because ecosystems are expendable because they're not put to energy use. One example now familiar is the riverine ecosystem - major free rivers are in the 21st century almost unknown. Another is the benthic ecosystem - Norway's decision to allow mining at sea is the first shot across the bow in what is sure to be a disastrous pattern - and those people wanting to industrialize the continental shelf seabed with wind industrial parks disgust me as do offshore oil and platforms, one having done vast damage to the entire Gulf of Mexico.
I note that the "green" critic of nuclear energy, Benjamin Sovacool, an appalling badly educated myopic fool in my opinion, seems to be fine with deep sea mining for "green" so called "renewable energy:" Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future Sovacool et al, Science 3 Jan 2020 Vol 367, Issue 6473 pp. 30-33
This spake Sovacool:
This statement is very, very, very dangerous tripe.
That boy has a very poor understanding of what the word "sustainable" might mean.
There are 90 naturally occurring elements in the periodic table including those that are radioactive, including the one subject to fission, spontaneous or induced. There is more to the environment than carbon, kiddie, and tearing the shit out of the ocean floor to get at some of them because of a failed approach to addressing one of them, carbon, represents a huge indifference to sustainability.
Here's a clue for you Benji boy, about what so called "renewable energy," has done for us in the 21st century with respect to carbon, nothing at all:
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 419.72 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 398.08 ppm
Last updated: February 04, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa. The number week of January 28, 2024, last week, is 53.04 ppm higher than it was in the week beginning January 30, 2000, around the time people started throwing serious money at the reactionary "renewable energy will save us" cults.. Things are getting worse, faster. Little Benji seems to have a problem with something called "data" and apparently can't define what "low carbon" even means.
Perhaps one of the most important elements in the periodic table with respect to energy is copper, because of its remarkable electrical conductivity, exceeded only to the rarer elements silver and gold. It is generally conceded to be an available element, and it has been so through most of human history, but centuries of mining and refining it have raised the question of whether this will remain so for even a few generations. It is worthy of note that the more dilute an ore (or recycling source) is, the more energy that will be required to obtain it.
The authors of the paper under discussion are based in China, but the issues they discuss apply to the entire world; it takes energy to obtain copper, and overwhelmingly that energy is supplied by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels.
From the introduction:
Copper resources are highly valued for their thermal and electrical conductivity, plasticity, and ductility and are expected to play a crucial role in the transformation of the global power structure. It is estimated that the global demand for refined copper resources will increase to about 62.0 Mt by 2050, which is a 1.6-fold increase compared to 2020. (3) The exploitation of copper resources is complex and involves several links, such as mining, refining, and processing, all of which are energy-demanding and produce GHG emissions. The energy consumption of mining and refining is approximately 0.50 and 0.31 tce/t product, respectively. (4) In recent years, technologies such as oxygen-enriched bottom-blowing copper matte continuous converting and the cosmelting of primary and secondary copper resources have been developed to improve the energy efficiency of the copper industry. For example, in the process of continuous converting using three consecutive furnaces, the comprehensive energy consumption of crude copper is less than 0.10 tce/t product, while the recovery from refined copper to electrolytic copper can reach 99%. (5) However, technology evolution can only reduce GHG emissions intensity. To achieve the goal of carbon neutrality in the copper industry, a collaborative approach integrating international trade, circular economy, technology evolution, and the environmental market is required.
Note the use of the conditional word "would." The idea that "electrification of energy will be "green," to use the abused word, is dependent on whence the electricity comes. Right now, it is overwhelmingly generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, and most often using Rankine cycle devices - although Brayton cycles are used in some dangerous natural gas "combined cycle" plants - but hardly all dangerous natural gas powered plants. Rankine devices generally have an energy efficiency of around 33% depending on ambient temperatures - slightly higher in cold weather, slightly lower in hot weather.
Electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy.
Anyway, the "electrify everything" objective is soothsaying and does not correspond to reality and if it did, it would be a bad idea, just like storing electricity is a bad idea, both as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics which cannot, and will not be repealed no matter how much wishful thinking rhetoric is applied to reality.
As for the soothsaying "percent talk," 45-50% "by 2050" may not involve the use of less fossil fuels to burn to make electricity, since one may be using more than 100% more electricity in 2050 as opposed to 2024, especially in "electrify everything" scenarios.
Anyway, the authors lay out a proposal for making copper "green," in the abused sense of the word.
Some graphics from the text:
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Since the use and abuse of language is a subtext of this post, it behooves me to comment on that word "scenario." A better word, in my view, and the one I use often is "soothsaying." The optimistic scenarios/soothsaying is an argument that future generations will do what we have not done ourselves, this with all of the best ores already mined and often toxic tailings left behind, with a destroyed atmosphere and vast stretches of once virgin wilderness transformed into the rotting hulks of "renewable energy" industrial plants, a destroyed atmosphere, extended deserts, the burned remains of forests and dried up rivers.
Reality...
Here is table 1 from the paper, referring to all the wonderful stuff that is supposed to happen to make copper "green:"
One of the more amusing bits in these scenarios that are supposed to all fall together that is supposed to translate into the grand "renewable energy" nirvana implied for the "energy transition" unicorn that is often alleged to exist now although it's hard to see any effect on climate change, is the reference to biomass, a reference also found in the text.
This scenario/soothsaying may involve strip mining forests, assuming they haven't all burned spontaneously in extreme heat and drought, or it may involve condemning lots of people to starvation to grow biofuels, but both are dependent on access and availability of an already strained resource other than energy, water.
In the popular press there's an account of the inability to mine copper because of a lack of access to just that, water:
Aridity Could Dry Up Southwestern Mine Proposals
Subtitle:
There’s that mythical “energy transition” again dubiously utilized with the word “clean,” this in reference to the ability to tear the shit out the Earth with mining to be “green.”
The use of language is atrocious in these times, and again, perhaps it's not “use” at all but rather abuse.
A few years back, power lines in California sparked during an extreme unquestionably climate driven drought and huge fines were directed at PSE&G for their irresponsibility for having, um, power lines. Of course, the reason that California has so many power lines is because it has built so many unreliable energy plants, given the fetish there for solar and wind energy. When the wind isn't blowing, or the sun isn't shining, all those wires containing all that copper is a stranded asset. It takes a lot of wires to connect all that unreliable and unpredictable shit.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, on a foot print of less than 12 acres including the parking lots, has far less copper in its two generators than the wind turbines scattered over more than 1500 square miles of industrialized wilderness in that state.
In 2022, the last year for which the California Energy Commission has posted data, the Diablo Canyon plant generated more electricity than all the wind turbines in California, 17,627 GWh (63.5 Petajoules) for the Diablo Canyon plant, 13,938 GWh (50.2 Petajoules) for wind. In the "percent talk" that antinukes use to obscure the miserable failure of so called "renewable energy" this is 79.1% as much as was produced on 12 acres and vastly less copper.
California 2022 Total System Electric Generation
If there's any "energy transition" going on, it's a transition from bad to worse.
I trust you'll have a pleasant Sunday evening.
From a Science Editorial...Earning Respect and Trust.
R. Holden Thorpe, editor of one of the world's most prestigious journals, is pissed off, um, by arrogance:
Earning respect and trust
He remarks on the declining trust in Science in polls, and refers to recent scandals among high level scientists at the highest levels of academia, up to the rank of University Presidency, that have been in the news:
...When I was a university administrator, I was frequently visited by graduate students who were in distress after they had informed their adviser that they did not intend to pursue an academic research career. Suddenly, their adviser became less interested in them. I was dismayed by faculty who had apparently forgotten that they worked at a school, where helping students achieve success in the life that they choose is the goal. Academic researchers should be excited for students who want to contribute to scientific publishing, education, policy, and other endeavors where science needs much more help than it does in producing more grants and papers.
Nowhere is this elitism more apparent than in the behavior I sometimes see from academics toward the staff at Science’s journals. Many seem to think that having highly cited work and membership in exclusive academies gives them license to be dismissive of others. This is pure arrogance and ignorance. Professional editors are scientists who are highly capable and trained to handle papers. Too often, an editor’s decisions are attacked as thoughtless output from an underling rather than insightful determinations from a true colleague. I have worked with both excellent academic departments and with outstanding professional editors, and talking science in both environments is equally stimulating and challenging. Furthermore, the people who handle the visual, communication, and technical details do important things that no researcher can. As it turns out, these individuals are not just among the most capable people in scientific publishing, they’re among the most capable people in the enterprise of science...
Recently my son told me that when he finishes his Ph.D. he would like to become an academic researcher. I just smiled with the knowledge that this is how graduate students are trained to think. I do think he could do better, but it's not my call to rain on the parade of a young man. Most graduate students don't make it into academia, and to my mind, this is a good thing. Academia plays an important role, but the course of the world is largely driven by industrial science.
Trust in science has become essential for human survival as we enter into environmentally tragic times. Even if it is true that industry has brought us here, it may fall to honorable science in industry to lead us back, with scientists trained in and exposed to ethical considerations. To the extent that academics look out into the world beyond their labs, it is a good thing.
Arrogance is not limited to scientists of course, but we owe to it to the future of the world to police ourselves, and I welcome Dr. Thorpe's remarks.
One sees these things; it's regrettable.
Sustainability limits needed for CO2 removal: Science Policy Forum.
The paper to which I'll refer is in the current issue of the journal Science: Sustainability limits needed for CO2 removal, Deprez Deprez, Leadley Leadley, Dooley Dooley, Williamson Williamson, Cramer Cramer, Gattuso Gattuso, Rankovic Rankovic, Carlson Carlson, Creutzig Creutzig Science 383 6682 2024.
The article, which regrettably requires a subscription, is from the Policy section of the journal, specifically the Climate Policy section.
It contains some refreshingly blunt assessments of some the wishful thinking one hears almost continuously these days, particularly with respect to land use and poverty.
Since the article is not open sourced, I'll excerpt some interesting statements. All bolding will be mine.
Some excerpts, beginning with the introductory paragraph:
Achieving the Paris Agreement climate goals primarily depends on deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in GHG emissions, including steep reduction in fossil fuel production and use (3, 7). Yet some CDR will also be needed in coming decades to reach “net zero” (by counterbalancing hard-to-abate residual GHG emissions), and then “net negative” emissions (to help reverse any temperature overshoot above 1.5°C)...
... The latest IPCC Working Group III (WGIII) report estimates the upper “technical mitigation potential” of BECCS and A/R at 11.3 and 10 gigatonnes of CO2 per year (GtCO2/year), respectively (3). Together, this could require converting up to 29 million km2 of land—over three times the area of the United States—to bioenergy crops or trees, and potentially push over 300 million people into food insecurity [see supplementary materials (SM)]. The upper end of the IPCC’s BECCS technical potential does not take into account socioeconomic barriers or the transgression of planetary boundaries, but the A/R potential takes into consideration food security and environmental impacts. The IPCC report does not provide details or quantitative evaluation of how sustainability risks vary with increasing levels of A/R or BECCS deployment (3).
We compare IPCC mitigation potentials with recent studies that give greater attention to the ecological, biological, and societal impacts of land-based CDR (see SM), to provide quantified sustainability limits...
"A/R" here refers to afforestration/reforestration.
What's the starvation of 300 million people and the rendering three times the area of the United States into farms for biofuels between friends?
Hopefully all those new forests won't do what forests have a habit of doing in these wonderful days of climate change: Burn.
Anyway...
It's not like we should compare the "low risk" here, whatever it might be, to the much hyped risk in this space and elsewhere among functional idiots that someday somewhere someone might die from radiation exposure at Fukushima. (Thus far, radiation deaths from the event have not been unambiguously observed.) The rhetoric behind this detestable morally void calculation is that nuclear energy is "too dangerous" but climate change isn't "too dangerous." This also reflects on the similar calculation made by ethically challenged people that nuclear energy is "too expensive" - this because the benefits will accrue to the future generations about whom we couldn't give a fuck - and leaving the planet in flames for those generations is not "too expensive."
Although I have had much happiness in my life, I won't feel too bad about getting kicked out of being in a world, biting the bullet, shuffling off this mortal coil. going off to the great beyond, what have you, on a planet where calculus of this type prevails, where it is not regarded with extreme disgust. It's unbelievably clueless.
As for the "low risk" rates of removal for "nature based" CDR, carbon dioxide removal, 2.6 gigatons per year and as for "medium risk," 5.1 gigatons per year should be compared with the emissions chiefly from fossil fuels, which is currently on the order of 35-40 gigatons per year as of this year.
Don't worry; be happy:
If any of this troubles you, well why don't you buy a happy book by a "political science" doctoral student with wind turbines on the cover. Then, I'm sure, you'll be happy, especially if you ignore the land use and material costs of building zillions of wind turbines and replacing them every 25 years.
Or else you can head over to Cleantechnia and read all kinds of wonderful news about Apartheid Elon's wonderful electric cars.
I'm sure you'll feel better.
As for me, if I sound outraged, it may be connected with the fact that I am so.
Have a great weekend.
2023's Average CO2 Concentrations Released at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory. The correct descriptive word is "ugly."
As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep a spreadsheet of the data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.
Facts matter.
When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.
A recent post of this nature is here: At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory, 2024 Starts With a Fairly Disgusting Bang.
As I've been reporting over the years in various contexts, the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide which is killing the planet fluctuate sinusoidally over the year, with the rough sine wave superimposed on a quadratic axis:
Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
The Observatory posts on its data pages curated and reviewed averages for daily, weekly, monthly, and annual data. I maintain spreadsheets for the latter three to use in calculations.
The annual figure for 2023 has now been added to the annual data page which covers 65 years of data, going back to 1959 when the average reading for that year was 315.98 ppm. For 2023 that average was 421.08 ppm. If one has not joined Greenpeace and thus can do simple math, this is an increase 105.10 ppm over 1959.
Of the ten highest year to year increases, eight have occurred in this century. Of the two that occurred in the 20th century, one occurred in 1998 when the rain forests in S.E. Asia caught fire after slash and burn fires set to make palm oil plantations for "renewable biodiesel" for Germany's "Renewable Energy Portfolio" went out of control. This was the 2nd highest increase ever observed, 2.96 ppm over 1997.
Of the ten highest year to year increases, five have occurred in the last ten years, including 2023, the year just passed, where the average concentration was the first to exceed 420 ppm, 421.08 ppm, the increase over 2022 was 2.52 ppm, when the average concentrations was 418.56 ppm. This is the 6th worst ever annual increase out of 65.
The first year to exceed 400 ppm was 2015, when the average was 401.01 ppm.
No one now living will ever see a reading below 400 ppm again, not in daily data, not in weekly data, not in monthly data, nor in annual data.
To remove all of the added CO2 since 2015, one would need to produce all of the energy that put it there, plus energy to recover the entropy of mixing, and do so with energy that is free of CO2 releases. This is the consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, which we sweep under the rug and ignore at our peril.
In 2004, when the average CO2 concentration in the planetary atmosphere was 377.70 ppm, two scientists, Pacala and Socolow, at Princeton University, a local university in my case where I sometimes attend lectures and where the faculty hypes so called "renewable energy" endlessly, wrote the famous "wedgies" paper, which contended that we had all the technology we needed to address climate change. They did a passable job, for Princeton Climate Scientists at least, to not vomit uncontrollably when they mentioned nuclear energy. (Princeton Scientists like to pretend that other than a fusion fantasy, nuclear energy doesn't exist and is extremely dangerous and will definitely result in a nuclear war; at least that's my impression of the attitude there, an impression that makes me want to throw up.)
One of the "wedges" they proposed was substituting dangerous natural gas for coal, which has more or less happened in the provincial United States, although worldwide, according to the 2023 World Energy Outlook the world burned more coal than ever before. The result of the partial US switch to gas is that things are worse than ever and getting worse faster than ever.
Don't worry, be happy:
A swell way to address the climate crisis is to have the climate scientific community at Princeton University and other places in academia and beyond is to chant the same thing over and over and over and over: Uncertain Futures. How to Overcome the Climate Impasse.
I am unshaken in my view, based not on wishful thinking but on observed data, that if one sees a book on climate change featuring wind turbines on the cover, one is reading the work of someone engaged in tiresome chanting and nothing else. Within 25 years, practically every wind turbine now operating on this planet will need to be replaced, using fossil fuels to engineer the replacement.
We need to stop kidding ourselves. The wild eyed expensive enthusiasm for so called "renewable energy" that has run through the 21st century has been useless. It was not conceived to address climate change, and never really was about climate change. The climate rhetoric attached to it was an afterthought. This reactionary program of returning our energy supplies to dependence on the weather at a time we have destabilized the weather was conceived to attack nuclear energy and stopping nuclear energy's necessary growth. Slowing the growth of nuclear energy, which has played brilliantly into the hands of the dangerous fossil fuel industry, which is allowed to kill at will, is the only success of the "renewable energy" scam. Otherwise it has been useless, worse than useless actually.
After many decades of considerations of nuclear energy and advocating for it, I am seeing a cultural change in the traditional rote hostility to it, the safest and cleanest form of energy ever invented. It is not risk free, but it doesn't have to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. The decline in hostility is not enough, and even if it was "enough" whatever "enough" might be, it is too little too late.
We have viciously left all future generations with an intractable mess, converted the entire planet into a waste dump.
The best time to have gone whole hog for nuclear energy was thirty years ago. The second best time is now.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Have a nice day and enjoy the upcoming weekend.
IAEA Report on Tritiated Water Releases at Fukushima.
The report is here: IAEA Review of Safety Related Aspects of Handling ALPS-Treated Water at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
It speaks for itself.
"ALPS" stands for "Advanced Liquid Processing System." Presumably these are ion exchange resins.
I have argued - and will not be dissuaded from this opinion - that more people have been killed by air pollution generated at fossil fuel power plants to provide electricity to computers used to carry on mindlessly about Fukushima than have been killed by the radiation releases connected with the natural disaster there. (About 20,000 people were killed in the tsunami and quake, but they were killed by seawater largely, which is apparently not sexy enough to generate an ounce of concern. You will grow old waiting for an antinuke in a selective attention festival to call for banning coastal cities because of the tsunami(s). )
I have understood - and will likewise not being dissuaded from this opinion - that fossil fuel interests love to throw gasoline (both literally and figuratively) on otherwise inane and nonsensical rhetoric thrown around by antinukes. I contend that the only path to the phase out dangerous fossil fuels - now required on an emergency basis - goes through nuclear energy.
I note that the fossil fuel promotional interests here - a promotion based on rebranding fossil fuels as "hydrogen" at a cost in exergy destruction - have very little interest in any other topic other than hydrogen except for carrying on about the water releases at Fukushima. To me, that's telling. They're sure selling coal in Germany these days.
To match the death toll from climate change and air pollution, as I often point out, nuclear energy would need to result in more than 7 million deaths per year, or 19,000 per day, roughly. I often challenge antinukes to produce a reputable report showing that the nearly 70 year history of nuclear energy - including the bogeymen Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mile Island - has led to as many deaths as will result in the next eight hours from air pollution. (A reputable report would be one from the primary scientific literature including references, methods and data, not some nut job conspiracy theories.) The antinukes so challenged either sulk away, change the subject, or otherwise fail to address the challenge put forth.
The tritium being released at Fukushima isn't harming anyone at a measurable level. All the bullshit in the world will not change that fact.
Facts matter.
Have a nice afternoon and evening.
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