doogles » January 31st, 2021, 5:14 am wrote:I'm not sure if your last Bitfender COMMENT is aimed at me,
Serpent, but my Bitfender blocks me most times I enter this site. I've been ignoring the warnings, maybe stupidly, but I find I'm willing to take a risk to keep in touch with my morning dose of SPCF and you blokes.
The warning was aimed at anyone who was also on the site at that time, because I wasn't planning to stick around a second longer than necessary. I do take them seriously, because I have lost a fairly new and not very cheap computer to a virus I picked up from the internet.
I have no idea about the origin of that poster. Given that it could be a back-up, then the message inherent in the poster is that the current alternatives need back-up generation.
Funny. "Seriously, You just couldn't make this shit up!"... only we don't exactly know which shit we're mocking.... Ya, that'll fly.
Would anyone argue with that? We've had electricity 'blackouts' where I live for up to 3 days after floods or storms. I have a small petrol-driven back-up generator as a back-up for such circumstances.
We live in the country, where repairs after a storm are low priority,
(Hydro linemen have to be lifted by ice-encrusted cherry-pickers - lucky, because their fathers had to climb icy poles - to re-string dangerous electric cables, along mile upon of of highway. Plus, millions of poles have to be replaced with newly-cut trees every ten years or so. The grid is not merely inefficient, unreliable, vulnerable to error and sabotage, hideously expensive and unsightly - it's a killer. Have you cottoned on yet that I dislike the grid?)
and, since the well pump is electric, we may have no water for days. We used to have a backup generator - loud, stinky thing that needed the garage door open lest it choke the operator. Now, we have solar panels and batteries, so the only way we know there is a power outage is if the toaster doesn't work. (High-draw, short-use appliances are plugged into the grid outlets.)
Can anyone look at the graph below and show me any evidence at all that carbon dioxide emission reduction methods are working?
What reduction? Greenhouse gases are still
rising, in spite of a little dip (you might have not have noticed the cleaner air, but it was sure evident over the industrial cities
https://www.insider.com/before-after-photos-show-less-air-pollution-during-pandemic-lockdown#after-once-traffic-dropped-during-lockdown-so-did-air-pollution-in-response-milan-is-thinking-about-introducing-a-plan-to-reduce-car-use-after-the-pandemic-to-avoid-a-rebound-according-to-the-guardian-2) during the first Covid 19 lockdown. Nowhere near enough to matter, especially when you factor in the forests that have burned and cut down in the last 40 years, plus the permafrost spewing ancient methane into the atmosphere. It's very probable that we're doing too little too late. I guess some of us are just romantics, who want to have tried to do something positive, rather than hasten the mass extinction.
There must be an invisible suit somewhere, but I can't see it. We need to investigate alternatives.
By all means, do!
I'd be happy to see some serious attempts to tackle population growth and cloud engineering.
A big definite YES and a shaking-in-my-boots
no, respectively.
Getting back to the subject, I would support the construction of the 235 new gas-fired generating plants.
You'll have to engineer
a lot of clouds to make up for that.
During the 11 years I spent in manufacturing, after I retired from the University, I realised how much the world depends on road freight to keep functioning. Fossil fuels can be converted to electrical energy 24 hours a day every day. The two main alternatives, wind and solar, are heavily weather-dependent at the moment. If a significant number of vehicles becomes reliant on electricity, and the main source of that electricity is wind or solar, I can envisage all sorts of problems.
What, like 20,000 plastic toys won't get to the McHappy meals in time for the little children to scatter under their grandparents' unsuspecting bare feet? Not to mention killing the rest of the world...
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/The way the world has been functioning for the last century is insane - and not terribly functional. The whole system needs a major overhaul.