Imaginos1892 wrote:But WHY do they insist on playing their eternal one-song opera called Global Warming? (Or whatever is their latest name for it) There are so many other, better reasons to reduce our consumption of coal, oil and natural gas that don’t depend on convincing everybody that The End Is Near when they don’t see the world looking much different. I remember hearing climate gloom-and-doom back in the early 1970’s and the world hasn’t ended yet. Then, it was an impending Ice Age; now it's Global Warming. Most people just groan, and say ‘shut up, Chicken Little’.
I think people are missing the fact that the warming doesn't have an immediate effect right now, but it is going to get more and more pronounced in the future.
Imaginos1892 wrote:There is only so much coal, oil and natural gas in the ground and we’re using it up. It’s taking more and more energy to get the same amounts of coal, oil and gas. When it takes as much energy to produce a barrel of oil as you get from it, you can’t run your economy on oil any more. You can’t even run an oil company on it.
I don't think we have reached the tipping point for production costs vs what the market can bear.
Joat42 wrote:According to data from Bloomberg production costs among the G20-countries for renewable energy (water, wind & sun) are on average lower than fossil fueled energy production.
Imaginos1892 wrote:Norway has already found out that if you try to run a major power grid on unreliable sources like wind and solar, it gets unstable at about 40% ‘renewable’ energy. You can’t just turn up the wind, or the sun, when more power is needed. Load matching is a very tricky business. Brownouts are bad enough, but overvoltage is much worse.
The energy production in Norway is 98-99% hydroelectric and as far as I know they haven't had problems with brownouts - especially considering that their energy grid has very good interconnections with the other Scandinavian countries and the European continent. They are currently ramping up energy production from other renewable sources as wind and solar though in an attempt to diversify .
Joat42 wrote:The production of bio fuels and their impact on rainforest deforestation and food prices in Africa is a problem, but that problem has it roots in a conservative car industry that have been wedded to the oil industry and refused to look at alternatives to the ICE - and it didn't help when car manufactures discovered that they could sell more cars by tweaking them a bit and slapping a eco-friendly sticker on them.
Imaginos1892 wrote:You’re right, piston engines are 15% efficient at best in converting chemical energy into mechanical energy. Gas turbine engines can be over 40% efficient, but would require cars to be completely redesigned. With current technology, it would be possible to build gas-turbine-electric cars that would get 80 to 100 miles per gallon, AND would run on nearly any liquid fuel. Their batteries could also be charged from other sources, using no fuel at all.
Why don’t we have them today? Development would cost $100 million or more, and they would completely disrupt the markets. The entrenched companies don’t see any need to take a chance on new designs when they can just go on selling the same old cars in the same old way. The oil companies wouldn’t want oil consumption to decrease by 30%.
There has been some prototype hybrid cars with turbine electric propulsion but AFAIK they never went anywhere. And then we have the now dead idea of using hydrogen to power cars that was touted as a viable alternative to fossil fueled cars. They really never thought that idea through, did they?!
Joat42 wrote:So you are saying with 100% certainty that there will be no rapid climate change?
Imaginos1892 wrote:Yes, the climate could change. Yes, it could be bad. But with no precedent, nobody can tell with any certainty what’s going to happen. Fifteen years ago there were widespread predictions that the results would be catastrophically bad ‘by 2020’, and it looks like those predictions have failed. Those making the predictions now look like clueless alarmists. ‘But wait! It really will happen this time!’ just sounds like more of the same.
Lighten up on the Global Warming. If it takes ten minutes to explain to people why you think there’s a problem, most of them will tune you out eight minutes before you’re done.
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I'm not just sitting on my ass. I spent almost $20,000 putting solar panels on my house. They consistently produce more power than I use.
All trends point to that we are experiencing a global warming and that it's accelerating. Many of the alarmist reports that say a catastrophe is just around the corner is the fault of news organisations that can't help themselves pushing the most pessimistic estimates because they try to inflate the amount of viewers/readers.