strainer

Cows don't "already eat parts of cows" except in that most tenuous sense you made out of self reabsorbtion of placenta, which is common to mammals.

Do I "eat parts of people" if I chew on my nails? In the same tenuous sense I do "eat parts of people", but really we both know - its just a stretched caveat to the rule that we dont really eat people, and cows dont really eat cows.

And what kind of "small animals" do cows hunt ? Slugs, beetles perhaps... never mind.

Renewables meet the traditional concept of base load while generation is sufficient. This can be the situation often, or just occasionally depending on how many wind and solar facilities are present.

Renewable oversupply can already be economically stored for daily cycle purposes with 4 to 8 hour battery banks. If longer term storage is not developed, biomatter and synthetic fuels can run thermo-electric generators on the occasions that renewable supply falls short of demand.

Sooner or later it is likely that microbes which can digest plastics but are currently extremely rare, will multiply, become common and evolve since we are making plastic pollution increasingly common throughout soils and seas.

What will be the timescale and effect of a new category of microbes on earthly micro-flora? In soils, in foodchains and within our own guts ? This uncertainty presents an unpredictable biohazard. An intelligent population having noticed its accidental emissions would try to limit and reduce them in scale for its own and future generations biological security.

Apologies for being pedantic but the link contains no mention of magnetic field information and Neptune's discovery would not have taken this into account either.

Im fairly sure this has been done so far by analysing orbits in different ways, but Ive never heard of perturbations in solar system wide electro-magnetism (within solar wind) taken into account, or if that could be possible and effective to model in detail.

But junk is perjorative word which suggests that it is entirely disposable even desirable to remove. That may turn out to be true but the experiment required to prove that thesis would require closely observing a biological systems evolution and disease evolution for some length of time, with "junk" DNA somehow removed and repressed. It may turn out to be a sort of filler with certain characteristics that work out to have repercussions for longer term genetic dynamics, and it may not. Since we cant tell yet, the name for it is very presumptive.

The systemic solution is to continue and increase development and build of wind and solar which will continue almost without limit onto the oceans, assisted by autonomous equipment.. and build fuel synthesis and electric storage. Energy will be abundant within a few decades.

And plant forests, ecologically improved agriculture and use wood and sustainable biophilic materials where possible (all large wind turbine blades are currently almost entirely made of balsawood)

Also, a global alliance against military aggression, space industry for asteroid mining, lagrange point sun shielding if necessary. Promotion of therapeutic professions, reduction in accounting labor and financial wizardy to be replaced by modern informational and analytic technologies. Promotion of aspirations other than car driving and land ownership. Secure living spaces for everyone who seeks them and commits to respecting them. Quality of life guided by things which are actually known to improve quality of life, like education, recreation, arts, community spaces, rather than the psychologically marketed consumables which currently divert economies and fantasies ...

A bright future is very complicated and challenging to envisage, but no moreso really than any particular gloomy one :)

Drawdown seems very interesting overall, but their ranked list is confusing with the top 'solution' being about refrigerants, which amount to no more than a couple of percent gross CO2e emissions. Thats not what most people would expect from a top ranked solution, and potentially detracts from IPCCs seriously worked out advice - that we need to deal most with CO2.

Here is the IPCCs detail of ghg gas emissions [1]

The gross global warming effect of pollutants that you are mentioning is low compared to CO2. Methane emissions amount to around 16% of CO2(e) emissions, and NOx emissions amount to around half of methanes. Refrigerants and others about 2% so far, though they could get worse if not better controlled (which seems to be drawdowns case).

The IPCC highlights CO2 because it is the main problem which has to be dealt with.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/SPM.02_rev1-...

They are ranked a bit confusingly by the metric of 'potential future impact' divided by 'cost'. Refrigerants could have a huge impact if they are not controlled and/or improved, but they need not be very costly to control and improve. They don't yet present the scale of problem that carbon emissions present. The IPCC after decades of studying and advising on the matter is pretty well clear on that.

This is not only javascripts behavior, it is the IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic which most modern hardware and software strictly adheres to.

The UK has been alarmed by the "New Zealand flatworm" threatening its earthworm population - some places have lost all of their worms, though it seems to be under control. On the other hand at a push, it may be possible to deliberately seed forests with them.

I think this article is quite hyperbolic though. It talks about a researchers "horror" at theoretical possibilities, but the latest literature review cited is 6 years old and it did not resolve any definite effect.

>Our results suggest that although earthworms are largely beneficial to soil fertility, they increase net soil greenhouse-gas emissions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1692

If you believe the calculation to be incorrect you owe it to yourself to identify the error. It should take much less time for you to do that than it took me to compile and reference the calculation for _you_.

The IPCC has compiled known options for getting CO2 down, including aforestation. Its not revealing to focus on the relative rate of change - we increased CO2 at an unprecedented rate, if you would read the IPCC reports or articles concerning the subject with a basic level of regard, you could learn it is in fact possible to also decrease at an unprecedented rate.

I think we may find such schemes happen as we miss our CO2 targets and may need to urgently limit global temperature rise. A controllable sun shade in space would be my preference over consigning regions of earth to heat dumping grounds. But such geohacks will not be able to target the ecological disruption of local heat pollution or make water resources abundant where they are scarce, they will just perhaps be able to ameliorate a global emergency.

That sounds cool (sorry couldn't resist) but very much a long shot as the wikipedia article itself notes :

"None of these efforts has yet tested its device with hydrogen–boron fuel, so the anticipated performance is based on extrapolating from theory, experimental results with other fuels and from simulations."

Also, even with good proportion of energy contained in such particles to somehow tap efficiently in practice, the reactor itself is still going to need a great deal of cooling, just to stop it melting.

Also the article we are commenting on, does not seem to concern such a reactor.

Wind and solar do not require cooling or have problematic thermal emissions. It is possible for solar to have a slightly lower (or higher) albedo than ground it is situated, and possible for wind to cause some local heating from air mixing (with corresponding distance cooling) but these effects are much less intense than thermoelectric plants essential need to release Gigawatts of heat in order to produce gigawatts of electricity (in addition to the heat which the produced electricity ultimately results as).

> Heat pollution is a very minor concern.

WOHA was a cursory and self acknowledged "back of the envelope" style reference, it is also now outdated.

Heat pollution is often not a minor concern locally, see introductions such as "Thermal pollution: an overview"[1]. Even globally heat pollution may have a significant contribution to climate, see studies such as "Global anthropogenic heat emissions from energy consumption" [2]

>Although the mean Antropogenic Heat Flux is small compared to the forcing of GHGs, it may exert quite distinctive effects on the climate and the environment because of the surface-based emissions and uneven geographical distribution.[2]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-017-2092-z

Afaik the arizona plant doesnt use sewage but grey water, from drains and canals and such. Large amounts of it, and it gets straight up evaporated. Grey water should ideally be remediated and used for irrigation, not just evaporated - not in desert regions at least.

We will need to use water resources better! There are options for doing that, but no way to make thermoelectric power plant use insignificant.

The "near limitless energy" claim of articles like these is very deceptive. The true destination is perpetual heat generation, which is low grade energy and a potential pollutant on this planet.

The only thing we can do with such amounts of heat to produce the kind of energy we need and consume is build thermo-electric power plants to generate electricity. Here is the crunch:

> Thermoelectric power use has a significant impact on water resources and the power sector is highly dependent on these water resources; the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated on a national level that 41% of all freshwater withdrawals in the United States in 2005 were for thermoelectric power operations, primarily for cooling needs.[1]

[1] Operational water consumption and withdrawal factors for electricity generating technologies - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045...

Its actually very complicated matter to count [1]. But if you look into winds "carbon footprint" you should find it is widely regarded as having one of the lowest overall emissions, about 1-2% of natural gas generations footprint.

[1] https://www.climatexchange.org.uk/media/1461/main_report_-_l...

To establish that the organism would have to be observed for some time to rule out exceptional responses/relationships to other microbial communities, and materials. Life is problematically complicated and confounding over time, it doesn't lend itself to neat proofs.

Sure shipping diesel is bad, but have you made that calculation? Where does the idea come from? You believe the IPCC ignore/hide transportation and other factors from the EROI calculcations to the degree they are essentially fictitious?

Here[1] someone answers a question says their container ship, the "M V Dubai Crown" consumed 45 metric tonnes of fuel a day sailing:

It can carry about 50 thousand tonnes of cargo (thats its "deadweight tonnage" figure [2]).

Container ship travel time from Huagzu to New york: 30 days [3]

So, 45 * 30 = 1350 metric tonnes of oil - for the shipping of say 30,000 tonnes of solar panels from China to US.

Thats 30k/1.35k = 22 tonnes of panels per tonne of oil.

Or 22 kilos of panels per kilo of oil.

A spend of _1 kilo_ of oil, at legacy shipping efficiency (see also [4]) to ship _22 kilos_ of panels.

So... a residential solar panel weights about 40 pounds - say 20 kilos [5]

That's about 1 kilo of shipping oil per PANEL.

_You_ are professing the argument of cult - something sounds wise so say it, no workings, no references. _You_ are led a merry dance on a wisecrack. But its even not merry, its nihilistic - you've got your panels anyway right, ready for the inevitable doom. Pull your socks up brother.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-a-medium-sized-bulk...

[2] https://www.gjenvick.com/OceanTravel/ShipTonnage/1932-06-28-...

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-a-cargo-ship...

[4] https://www.oilandgaspeople.com/news/18194/maersk-takes-tang...

[5] https://news.energysage.com/average-solar-panel-size-weight/

That's internal passive cooling which they mention briefly in their faq (transferal of heat from their reactor to their output loop). These units take in water and output steam, and they need attached to thermo-electric plant to produce electricity. They are water boilers.

> building renewable generation will produce more GHG's than you are going to "stop producing". Manufacturing isn't a clean process

Production of renewables certainly does not produce more GHGs than are saved. You must be following poor articles and sources of advice on the matter if you believe this. The matter is well studied and documented. If you wish to get really emphatically critical about these matters in general, you need to respect or at least deal with the IPCCs research and policy advice. It is folly to write passionately about renewable energy tech otherwise.

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

Build renewable generation to stop releasing GHGs - this technology is affordable, ready and is likely in the medium term to be alot cheaper than running the old plants. Its no where near necessary to "cover this planet with solar panels and wind farms" that is "decade+ old" mis-information.

Large scale aforestation can take a great deal of CO2 out of atmosphere and simultaneously help endangered and degraded wildlife, and help people visit and work within biophilic surroundings. Large scale afforestation is advised by the IPCC.

Geoengineering may well be necessary, we will see as things turn out but strong technological knowledge exists for this also. Ocean seeding, atmospheric aerosols, - langrange point "sun shade" construction... these possibilities should be researched and may need to be implemented at scale, but as IPCC advises they are secondary to reducing emissions - which we DO have the technology ready and improving still.

I dont regard that 2014 article you linked as representing reality well, its a five year old editorialisation - a magazine conversation piece not a sober or reviewed analysis. Since 2014 cost of wind and solar have dropped, almost in half.

SMRs likewise require generators and cooling plant, 2 or 3 times as much cooling as electricity produced, perhaps even more if its to be done most economically. So if CHP is justification for such release of heat into cool environments - they should be categorized as mainly a source of heating, not high value electrical energy. An ability to make continuous heat on this planet is not a futuristic energy supply in its own right, it falls well short of the "game changer" goal.

Waste heat cant simply be used for this and that, or else we would see all existing thermo-electric powerplants already doing so. Efforts to make thermo-electric plant more efficient and use waste heat are ongoing, but full use of waste heat would be a more game changing development than practical fission reactors !

Its rather rhetorical for us to quibble with my statement "about 3 times.." But in my readings on the matter 33-37% is the theoretic optimal running efficiency of most existing nuclear plants (depends on the kind and expense of turbine cycle and cooling system employed).

Sounds like they are trying to keep their investment alive until there is the policy of strong promotion of renewable energy which half the planet has been crying out for, for years already.

Nuclear fusion and fission are both exceptionally complicated ways to boil water, and even if given an ideal water boiler, turbine and cooling plants still need to be built for them and situated somewhere that about 3 times as much heat energy can be released into the local environment. This is known as thermal pollution:

"ultimately, when heat waves are extreme enough, power plants will need to draw down their power output."[1]

Here [2] is a study which shows anthropogenic heat emissions from energy consumption are a pressure on global climate. If we put out another 200%+ of whatever energy we consume, in the form of thermoelectric cooling (heat) then quite surely that will amount to a bigger problem.

Also, "Thermoelectric power use has a significant impact on water resources and the power sector is highly dependent on these water resources; the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated on a national level that 41% OF ALL FRESHWATER WITHDRAWALS in the United States in 2005 were for thermoelectric power operations, primarily for cooling needs (Kenny et al 2009)."[3]

I believe the real game changers are plainly solar and wind. These have shown the most rapid improvements from investment. On similar timescale to developing fission or secure nuclear, floating oceanic wind and solar combined with hydrogen generation rigs (and even ocean plastic filtering) are possible...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-017-2092-z

[3] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045...

This kind of chart should have its workings and data readily available. It appears the only deaths included for nuclear are from some cancer estimate which is not readily accessible. It is not clear what the others death count includes.

Here is the entire data download that is actually included for this chart:

  Entity,Code,Year, (deaths per TWh)
  Biomass,,2014,4.63
  Brown coal,,2014,32.72
  Coal,,2014,24.62
  Gas,,2014,2.821
  Nuclear,,2014,0.074
  Oil,,2014,18.43

With it lacking any discussion of what these quite mysterious counts mean - this is often taken as proof of safety. Yet Nuclears exceptional score could be transformed by the kind of catastrophic accident which nuclear is capable of and which by great expense and some luck has avoided to date.

For example if weather during Fukushimas accident had blown fallout over Tokyo, or if a reactor anywhere releases similar or greater amounts of fallout anywhere in the world where a large population center is downwind, many thousands of cancers are possible, with children disproportionately affected by radiation exposure. Large areas of land can be made uninhabitable to civilization for decades or more, and depending on future civilizations standards.

Besides the biological safety issues in mass producing animal flesh detached from an evolved and plenty mysterious natural immune system... Meat gets flavor from animals diet and digestion and overall systematic health.

The magic cloned meat fairy should and may well never amount to more than a strange and precarious confusion, about our potential and desirable relationship to food and its environment in crisis.