Climate Change

[stylofone]

Gotta love George Monbiot

Strongly agree... yet his columns don't seem to make the front page of the Australian edition.

IIRC soil credits are a huge part of Australia's bogus net zero calculations.

Another one is not clearing land, which is like giving yourself a bravery medal for not murdering someone and claiming you saved their life.

Methane emissions from mining are calculated with figures provided by the fossil fuel miners. Satellite detection reveals what a load of crap their figures are.

Even evidence like that doesn't seem to shift the dial. My summation is that only the disaster itself will prompt action to prevent the disaster. It's already here now, but what I'm thinking of is a really big bad year or two year period where we get to cross off a large number of major events on a bingo card: food inflation due to worldwide shortages; multiple cat 5 hurricanes hitting southern US; famines worse than the usual ones caused by war and chaos; tens of thousands of deaths from extreme heat in places like Phoenix and Mecca; large portions of one or more major coastal cities becoming uninhabitable due to erosion/sea level rise; mass death events of animals and plants in multiple sensitive environments; a global financial crisis triggered by all of the above as well as the collapse of various insurance companies and related investment entities.

I really don't know when all that will happen, maybe it will be all spread out, maybe it will be later rather than sooner. But I'm assuming it will be in my lifetime and I'm thinking about how I'll handle it.

[pipbarber]

I'm not sure anything will shift the dial. A pyrocumulonimbus could land on a capital system and turn it into ashes and Andrew Bolt would blame it on African youths. As long as there are people like Murdoch, billionaires and social media, i'm skeptical anyone in power will ever face reality. They'll just govern the ashes, probably turn them into a tradable commodity.

[pipbarber]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-projects

We're just not doing anything really, are we.

[stylofone]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... s-projects

We're just not doing anything really, are we.

We ARE doing something, we're doing lots. We are INCREASING CO2 emissions and getting excited about reaching a "plateau". Supposedly emissions will start falling after that. A small amount of gas for "firming" is part of the plan for electricity. It looks like governments and fossil fuel criminal cartels have instead taken this to mean that they should massively expand gas production.

It reminds me of the Chinese edict that no coal-fired power stations would be built after, umm, I forget the exact year, 2032? Local authorities chasing productivity targets thought they had better build MORE coal fired generators before the deadline, another example of efforts to reduce emissions resulting in an immediate increase in emissions.

Add to that, the only way to make all the renewables is with coal and gas powered factories. Green steel and other processes are still decades away. Recent emissions figures from China showed that 5% of the increase was caused by the production of renewables.

Now we have Trump who is going to sabotage even the bullshit climate measures. Truly we are fucked.

[pipbarber]

Yep, best to not look up and get on with the xmas shopping, think of the retailers.

[DanDare2050]

It looks like governments and fossil fuel criminal cartels have instead taken this to mean that they should massively expand gas production.

Did you see all the promotion of gas on the front pages of all the Newscorp rags, pretending to be news but actually just paid advertising?

[stevebrooks]

I suppose every little bit helps;

However, China’s dependence on Aussie exports is under threat because of a revolutionary ironmaking method that is faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly.

Chinese researchers at the prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering unveiled the new technique — that dramatically reduces processing time from hours to mere seconds — in a new research paper this week.

By injecting finely ground iron ore into an ultra-hot furnace using a stick known as a “vortex lance”, a rapid “explosive chemical reaction” occurs, producing high-purity liquid iron droplets that can be used directly in steelmaking.

Of course reports are that it will devastate Australia's "dig it up and ship it" economy, but then people have been warning about that for decades, we can't just rely on digging shit up and sending it overseas to power the economy forever, why haven't we been investing in other areas with all that income? What you say? Blame the politicians? Blame the mining lobby? Blame the resource billionaires? Ok, will do!

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy ... 9665faa057

[stylofone]

There's not much new in this bit of reporting from AFP, but I thought it was an interesting summation from a mainstream outlet.

“The record global warmth of the past two years has sent the planet well into uncharted territory,” Richard Allan, a climate scientist from the UK’s University of Reading, told AFP.

What occurred was “at the limit of what we would expect based on existing climate models”, Sonia Seneviratne, a climatologist from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, told AFP.

My understanding is that it won't take much and the consensus will have to shift, that the existing models no longer reflect reality, policies and targets will need to change radically, the factual basis of the climate response will collapse. Whether the policies actually change is another question... what's more likely is that the levels of denial will increase to accommodate the new evidence, and it will be business pretty much as usual.

The other possibility is that warming slows down a bit and we can cling to hope that the old models still work, we can still fix this. This seems less likely to me.

https://www.msn.com/en-ph/news/national ... r-AA1vXz5Q

[stevebrooks]

Scientists have developed a magnetocaloric heat pump that matches conventional systems in cost, weight, and performance, eliminating harmful refrigerants. By optimizing materials and design, the pump achieves comparable power density, offering a greener and efficient alternative for heating and cooling.

https://scitechdaily.com/goodbye-refrig ... heat-pump/

[stevebrooks]

Don't know how accurate these graphs are but it shows solar power generation since the 1980's, of course it only goes to 2023 and apparently 2024 has been big in China for solar power, but it's interesting nonetheless, it does show how much most western countries dropped the ball in the early 2000's probably due to the oil lobby!