DemocracyFTW
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Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
@1 the part of the salt being an essential ingredient did escape me so thanks for pointing it out. It does make the whole thing more believable because then maybe (if it works) you can have more clouds for a fraction of mass moved.
@2 yeah I'm all for zeppelins (and trains). It's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of zeppelins (or trains) for this project but maybe they could be used to collect solar power (but do they have enough buoyancy for large solar panels?)
@3 I'm not against sending experimental vessels to the sea and spray water all over the place in order to find out what happens. I'm all for doing some boundary sanity checks beforehand and during such undertakings to see whether basic physics checks out, and this is what motivated my post. I live in Germany, a country with roughly the size of the Great Barrier Reef, and I'm not sure I have a good handle at the size of this country—it is too big. I'd be happy to hear from someone else an estimate for the size, number and horsepower of vessels required to pull this off. If it's a thousand cargo ships, that sounds like an upper bound for being reasonable. If it's a thousand aircraft carriers, then forget about it. If its hundreds of thousands of mid-sized vessels, good luck with acquiring or building, outfitting, maintaining, manning, catering, harboring, and fueling them. Maybe modified oil drilling platforms are better suited for a task like this.
Comment · 4 years ago
It's good to hear from an Australian that environmental policies like fire management and cloud seeding have made ecological disasters a thing of the past in your part of the world /s
Comment · 4 years ago
Maybe my comment in this thread can encourage him to take the calculation further, like trying to find out how many Wh are needed based on physics alone to accelerate the requisite mass of water needed on a daily basis, which gives you a lower bound of how much electricity / fossil fuel / m³ of hydrogen / percentage of nuclear power plant output is needed for that.
I think my unfinished back-of-the-envelope calculation strongly hints at this plan being not practical. Another factor to consider is the large scale impacts and assessment of the sheer predictability of outcomes for the ecosphere and for society alike. To me it looks a lot like some people just don't get that messing with the environment on a global scale is qualitatively different from, say, watering your 300m² garden or turning that knob on the radio.
Comment · 4 years ago
Under the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, the government has yet to strengthen its climate pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement, as many nations have done in the past year. Morrison has personally ruled out committing to net-zero emissions. Pushing for a technological fix to global warming without moving to aggressively curb greenhouse gases is “sheer lunacy”, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison):
The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia in last place for its climate policies and was the only country to score 0 for the same metric in 2021.
During the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, Morrison dismissed suggestions of a link between Australia's emissions or policies and the intensity of the bushfires and initially downplayed the influence of climate change on the fires, but later admitted that climate change may have contributed.
Morrison declined to set net-zero emissions or other climate change targets, unlike other world leaders. Morrison allegedly requested climate change policy targets be removed from a proposed 2021 Australia–United Kingdom trade deal and initially suggested he would not attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but later confirmed that he would.
Morrison's government pledged that Australia would aim to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, but did not introduce this into national law; Morrison said he believed market forces and not government regulation can address climate change.
His government's climate action plan has been criticised as "lightweight", "meaningless", and a "mockery" that contains "no policy or strategy whatsoever".
Market forces, sure.
How much CO2 is emitted by those boats with their high-powered water pumps? How much noise is injected into the water body when these vessels operate in numbers day in, day out? How many vessels and hours of operation will be needed to have a cooling effect? Where do the clouds, where does the water go once it is vaporized and left drifting?
Come to think of it one could imagine to suck huge quantities of marine water to vaporize it and let it drift as clouds over land; thinking in the abstract, that could contribute to more shade, lower temperatures and more precipitation over hot and arid areas, thereby improving conditions for plants, animals, and humans. But, and this is a big one: how much energy will this need? How is that energy produced? How much water would one have to evaporate? What are the consequences for marine life? What are the consequences when the next government decides to cut funding? And what about the salt content of the aerosol, for certainly it will be utterly uneconomic to desalinate the water prior to spraying it?
My hunch is that those figures won't work out and that artificial clouds over the Great Barrier Reef also won't work out. The reef is called great because it covers an area of ~344,400km², roughly the area of countries like Finland, Congo, Germany, or Japan. According to the USGS[1], the water in a cloud with a volume of 1km³ weighs about 500,000kg. A 1m thick cloud layer over said area has a volume of 344.400km³ if I'm not mistaken, so weighs around 172,200,000kg. So in order to work one would think it to be requisite to spray in the order of a hundred million kg of water like almost daily into the air from seagoing vessels. There's an almost constant wind over most of the oceans so low-faring clouds will disperse in a matter of minutes or hours; the clouds however would be most desperately needed around noon each day which complicates things. Perhaps one could move the ships to upwind locations each day so clouds generated in the afternoon and the night get a chance to drift over the reef.
But imagine to do that for a country-size area: You'd need a fleet of tens or hundreds of thousands of not-so-small vessels. I cannot imagine photovoltaics to be a sufficient source of energy (for one, space is very limited on any vessel, and ironically, the vessel's reason for being there is to reduce impact of solar power). You'd need nuclear or hydrogen because otherwise you'd have to burn through untold tons of fossil fuels.
At any rate, the waters will not be calm anymore. The noise of the evaporators and the propellers will be deafening in the air and in the sea.
All told, a badly thought-out publicity stunt.
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...
Comment · 4 years ago
That doesn't read like an endorsement of planned geoengineering.
Comment · 4 years ago
No we're not engineers because we find it OK when the poll results get displayed before you even vote. Engineers would study a problem including user experience and user expectations, hence only tell results after the poll has finished or at least until after the user has voted (in low-stake polls like this one).
Yes we are engineers because we find it OK when the poll results get displayed before you even vote—shows how little we know and care about the rest of the world.
Comment · 4 years ago
That's not "opposition to the science", that's a sane response to a madman's proposal to intentionally f*k with the biosphere at the grandest scale.
Comment · 4 years ago
> solar radiation management first [...] Marine cloud brightening
you mean, like, throwing a spanner into a machinery we hardly understand and see whether "it sticks"? Give me a hundred planets and start the trials!
Comment · 4 years ago
> Generally this is not seriously discussed by experts as a solution to global warming not because it is not feasible, but because it would diminish the sense of urgency
Let us say it is not being discussed because it is not feasible. Unless of course we build massive nuclear power plants in Antarctica with all what that entails. We are not any time soon in a position where we can produce any nontrivial amount of solar or wind energy in the hostile environment of that continent, plus it's dark night down there for half a year each year. Meaning the only remaining option would be to ship coal or oil down there to burn it so we can cool air to –140°C, obviously a non-starter if there ever was one.
> and discourage the much more prudent and affordable approach of simply reducing emissions.
This. The entire plan is madness: you'd burn two tons of oil and coal to get rid of part of what burning one ton of oil and coal leave behind in the atmosphere. It is not clear to me at this point if it is at all feasible to use fossil fuel to get more CO2 out of the atmosphere than burning it puts into the atmosphere in the first place. Because in this household we obey the laws of thermodynamic. And if it's possible at all it's not easy to see why continuing to burn oil and coal and capturing the CO2 at other sites should be better than not burning part of those fuels and capturing the CO2 right at their point of emission should be the better option. It is a hare-brained plan.
Comment · 4 years ago
> surplus renewable energy
is where you lost me. Hell coal is projected to get burned by the megaton for another half century or so because China and India have those resources and that demand. Mankind does not currently have surplus renewable energy.
Comment · 4 years ago
Your assessment of the properties of the display specifically seem to go counter what I perceived as a convincing argument by the OLPC guy brought up in a TED talk at the time, namely, that the two biggest cost factors of a new laptop are marketing and the display unit. He then argued that the project can largely just do away with marketing altogether (plausible) and went on to say that even displays that come out of production with a single pixel error have a massively reduced price tag. From that I concluded that the project could reasonably build cheap hardware if only they went with no advertising and run-of-the-mill display units that narrowly failed quality checks.
Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead.
I feel being lied to.
Comment · 4 years ago
It would perhaps be a good thing if one could write SQL clauses in their logical ordering; as [1] explains:
* The FROM clause: First, all data sources are defined and joined
* The WHERE clause: Then, data is filtered as early as possible
* The CONNECT BY clause: Then, data is traversed iteratively or recursively, to produce new tuples
* The GROUP BY clause: Then, data is reduced to groups, possibly producing new tuples if grouping functions like ROLLUP(), CUBE(), GROUPING SETS() are used
* The HAVING clause: Then, data is filtered again
* The SELECT clause: Only now, the projection is evaluated. In case of a SELECT DISTINCT statement, data is further reduced to remove duplicates
* The UNION clause: Optionally, the above is repeated for several UNION-connected subqueries. Unless this is a UNION ALL clause, data is further reduced to remove duplicates
* The ORDER BY clause: Now, all remaining tuples are ordered
* The LIMIT clause: Then, a paginating view is created for the ordered tuples
* The FOR clause: Transformation to XML or JSON
* The FOR UPDATE clause: Finally, pessimistic locking is applied
[1] https://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/sql-building/sql-stat...
Comment · 4 years ago
[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners?
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
Comment · 4 years ago
Also worth to understand and remember, from the linked thread: "digitisation does not = preservation. All they’ve done is replace a long term, resource-light asset with a short term and resource-heavy one that doesn’t work in the way the creator intended."
which obviously is not true, right?