Earth matters

[Montegriffo]

Pah, a black man walked out of Africa a few thousand years ago and with his partner became Adam and Eve to everyone on the planet.Well I assume they were Black we all have big dicks in England anyway.

[TheReal_ND]

Evolution stopped right there according to academia. Obviously living in civilization for some hundreds of years has no effect on the gene pool.

[Montegriffo]

Gene pool? More like gene ocean these days. In a few centuries more we will all be coffee coloured, 6'2' and well built.

[TheReal_ND]

No we won't. Outbreeding remains the outlier of breeding habits because we are racially different. It's no small wonder that certain entities are pushing the Mudsill Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory

[Montegriffo]

Never heard of it. What's the theory? Never mind I'll follow your link. See you in 10 mins.

[pettertb]

I have read the thread. It will be a couple of long posts, with quotes. Spam-bombing away!

Green power.

I had a course on this in uni. Listing the different sources, their advantages and disadvantages. Man are they complicated, based around a local, limited resource, polluting in some way or the other, dependent upon wind or sun, ugly or smelly. NIMBY all the way. Covering our current energy use with these energy sources will be a greater pain than people like to think. It is just so much more convenient to blow our fossil inheritance.

I like this blog: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math about these issues.

That's why you need a wide range of clean sources. The wind can help out in the winter when there is no sun etc. If energy is relatively non producing you can just over produce it. On the farm there is a big wind generator so if it is windy and cold farmer paul heats his house with electric heaters. If it is calm he chucks another log on the fire.
Photo voltaic is pretty crap anyway. Have you seen that new plant in Morocco which heats up oil to 400c with mirrors and then powers steam turbines? They even store heat in big containers of salt so they can produce energy for a few hours after the sun goes down.

True, and it's why I want a European perspective on the electrical grid, no matter how much I despise the EU. But you still need those kinds that can increase and decrease on demand. Like water, gas, coal and nuclear. Can't remove one of them, without increasing another.

And not all countries can have dams. Hard to build one in Denmark. Then they really have no other option than gas, coal and nuclear, at least for managing the grid. And exporting electricity turns inefficient over long distances, so there's limits to an European electrical grid.

Norway and Iceland got lucky with the geography, and can be totally renewable energy reliant. But most countries aren't that lucky.

Ugh, the cheap electricity of Norway comes from our decision to sacrifice our rivers for power. It is a trade advantage and a national treasure.

And now we're building power lines to the continent, at the expense of Ola Nordmann, so that the power plant owners can export it at a higher price? And in the process raise our power bills, while they are at it? It makes me so mad.

I soo want labour to go: Want to export the Norwegian dam juice? Pay for the cable yourself, and watch your profits siphoned off in special taxes. If ya wanna complain, you can dig up the dam, put it in a back pack, and get the heck out of the country. Want to export the power? Export it as aluminium products, or GTFO.

Oh, and I read (saw? Today I found out on Youtube? Learned about somewhere) about that salt-solar-power-plant. Cheap chinese solar panels have owned it on price if I remember correctly.

The Green movement flip flops back and forwards on nuclear power as I have myself. When you take into account the speed at which CO2 emissions are set to rise with the populations of developing countries demanding more energy and the developed countries dragging their feet on renewable sources I currently think it is the only way forward.However there is a huge but, bigger than JLO's butt, when it comes to safety. Building power stations near the coast in earthquake zones is about as dumb as it gets. Sticking nuclear waste in capsules under the ground till we work out how to deal with them is dumb. Plus you have the fact that Uranium is running out and at current consumption it could be all gone in 60 years.Once that runs out you might have to use Plutonium which is even more dangerous. So it's not too surprising that Greenpeace are against it and that I can't really make up my mind.

Uranium was dug up from the ground, we can dig it back down after using it. We just have to dig deep, and pick a good location. Like really deep. So deep people will make movies about it. An entire new genre of horror fiction deep. And then place the stuff right next to the Balrog.

But, as you've said, we're running out of Uranium. Uranium reactors are not the future, but they're necessary to keep the educational infrastructure and economical incentives to manage to develop Thorium reactors. A drop in nuclear reactors will lead to a drop in nuclear scientists, and those guys are necessary to make Thorium work. Maybe they'll figure out how to make fusion reactors work too.

Also, India has the largest amount of Thorium, and those are the people that will need it the most in the future.

Someone once said to me we should fire nuclear waste out into space. I said "trouble with standing at the bottom of a well throwing up hand grenades is sooner or later you are going to fuck up and one will fall right back towards you".

I like nuclear. Nuclear is cheap and green, and the fear of radiation is overhyped.

Besides, what would our grandchildren prefer: A mine with radioactive materials in it, confined to certain areas and materials. Or CO2, as dispersed as disperse can be, spread across the globe, harming it?

[pettertb]

Someday, I'll tell my grandkids about the good old days, when we ate seafood...

My Grandpa has a nice story of this, coming from his Grandpa.

In the fjord he grew up in they fished herring, lots of herring. They could scoop them up by the bucket.

Great great gramps, told grandpa "if you want to show your grandchildren a herring, you better go and make one out of wood*"

He was almost right. Luckily, they banned all fishing of it before it was too late, I believe partly due to lessened profits from the fisheries. There are herring in the fjord today, but no where near what it was like in the hey day. Still, the fish is slowly returning, and is already at fishable levels.

.. And in my generation they are trying to kill the ocean floor once again with fish farming.

[Montegriffo]

This is the most promising thing I've seen yet.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... the-sahara

Simple technology, on land which has very little use for anything else and none of the rare earth materials used in PV solar plus you can keep producing energy after sunset. When I see banks of PV over here on good farming land it makes me cringe and people say dumb shit like I thought you were green.

[pettertb]

I was about to quote a wall of text, but if you wanna see the (whale) meat discussion, just go back and read it

I agree with Otern on whaling. Harvesting sustainable fish stocks should not be an issue. Not all whales are endangered. Use that outrage for something useful instead.

Disagree on the whale meat tastes bad - thing. As long as it doesn't taste too much like fish oil (sign that it could have been frozen earlier) it tastes great! I like a whale steak, or in a stew. We are so used to cheap, so well raised it is bland, meat these days that the tang of game is a good thing again Same goes for the game meat with less fat on it, didn't use to be the first choice. What used to be a nice fatty pig, is suddenly less sought after.

Sure, a post-energycrisis diet would include some meat. It would surely include way less meat than we currently eat, but at least some meat. I think of it more in terms of the eating of our poorer ancestors, meat is a treat and expensive and is treated as such.

The "stahp eating meat, think of global change" is obviously a stand-in argument from the PETA "animals have feelings too"-crowd. I always get a bad taste in my mouth when the people that want to ban the keeping of livestock for ethical reasons push the climate in front of them. First I think the metric isn't CO2 per kg, calorie or m2. Its CO2 per dollar. After all, you'll spend that dollar on something else, right? And that something else probably pollutes. But once you start going excessively after meat, because the climate wasn't what you care about after all, then a solid "fuck you" is warranted

[Montegriffo]

I was about to quote a wall of text, but if you wanna see the (whale) meat discussion, just go back and read it

I agree with Otern on whaling. Harvesting sustainable fish stocks should not be an issue. Not all whales are endangered. Use that outrage for something useful instead.

Disagree on the whale meat tastes bad - thing. As long as it doesn't taste too much like fish oil (sign that it could have been frozen earlier) it tastes great! I like a whale steak, or in a stew. We are so used to cheap, so well raised it is bland, meat these days that the tang of game is a good thing again Same goes for the game meat with less fat on it, didn't use to be the first choice. What used to be a nice fatty pig, is suddenly less sought after.

Sure, a post-energycrisis diet would include some meat. It would surely include way less meat than we currently eat, but at least some meat. I think of it more in terms of the eating of our poorer ancestors, meat is a treat and expensive and is treated as such.

The "stahp eating meat, think of global change" is obviously a stand-in argument from the PETA "animals have feelings too"-crowd. I always get a bad taste in my mouth when the people that want to ban the keeping of livestock for ethical reasons push the climate in front of them. First I think the metric isn't CO2 per kg, calorie or m2. Its CO2 per dollar. After all, you'll spend that dollar on something else, right? And that something else probably pollutes. But once you start going excessively after meat, because the climate wasn't what you care about after all, then a solid "fuck you" is warranted

To be fair I agree with Otern now on whales. My arguments were 30 years out of date. I still hate the Japanese for their dolphin massacres but maybe that has stopped now. As for fishing I would still like to see heavier restrictions to leave a few left for the future.