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Sad Truth about Environmental Movement - they’re making the greenhouse gas problem WORSE!


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2021 Jun 6, 8:39am   1,239 views  33 comments

by Shaman   ➕follow (4)   💰tip   ignore  

Great article in Quillette by a long time environmental activist who has seen the light (finally) and realized that all her hard work has been pushing things in the utterly wrong direction. She’s now calling for safe clear nuclear power as a top priority in the fight against global warming. Without that, we have no hope of reigning in emissions or the acidification of the oceans.

https://quillette.com/2021/05/31/the-sad-truth-about-traditional-environmentalism/

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1   richwicks   2021 Jun 6, 10:30am  

Shaman says
we have no hope of reigning in emissions or the acidification of the oceans.


"Acidification of the oceans" is a myth. In 1990, it was supposed to destroy all ocean life, by 2010.

It's just another goddamned lie. Another fucking scare.

We are not significantly increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, or the ocean, by burning fossil fuels. This is just a complete lie. Eventually we're going to run out of these fuels, but market conditions will force us to gravitate to other energy sources because return on energy investment will go down.
2   Shaman   2021 Jun 6, 10:53am  

richwicks says
We are not significantly increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, or the ocean, by burning fossil fuels


Actually that is wrong. The increase in atmospheric and ocean-dissolved CO2 has been carefully tracked. What is NOT known is how much effect this will have on climate. Personally I think the warming effect is minimal. The oceans give me the most concern, as dissolved CO2 makes them more acidic leading to less conducive atmosphere for life. Since phytoplankton are the primary way carbon dioxide is removed from the oceans, any change that leads to less hospitable environmental for those organisms may lead to a death spiral. We should absolutely move away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear for the world’s energy needs.
3   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 6, 11:51am  

My understanding, from listening the the older generation of scientists (the ones who came up with climate change predictions in the first place and weren't alarmist about it) is that there is not enough sources of carbon on the planet to ever turn the ocean acid, i.e., < pH=7.

It does lower the pH though like it does when I hang out in my living room next to my marine tank.



That's a tight pH range but only because I haven't stocked this well yet or turned the lights on. Soon I'll be using a CO2 scrubber to bump that up ~0.2 and adding some corals. 7.5 or less would be bad, for corals, not my fish, other invertebrates or copepods and phytoplankton that I also grow.

If you look at the bottom plot you can see far left pH has relatively high and stable. I was out of town that week and it dropped when I came back last Monday night.
4   Booger   2021 Jun 6, 12:02pm  

So no peeing in the ocean, and were good, right?
I'm at the beach right now... getting ready to pee in the ocean..
5   HeadSet   2021 Jun 6, 12:14pm  

Booger says
So no peeing in the ocean, and were good, right?
I'm at the beach right now... getting ready to pee in the ocean..


Be glad this fish ain't in Atlantic City:

The candiru, sometimes known as the “penis fish,” is a small Amazonian catfish. It’s reported to lodge itself in the urethra of people who may be urinating in the water.
6   Patrick   2021 Jun 6, 2:33pm  

Shaman says
What is NOT known is how much effect this will have on climate. Personally I think the warming effect is minimal. The oceans give me the most concern, as dissolved CO2 makes them more acidic leading to less conducive atmosphere for life. Since phytoplankton are the primary way carbon dioxide is removed from the oceans, any change that leads to less hospitable environmental for those organisms may lead to a death spiral. We should absolutely move away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear for the world’s energy needs.



Here's a pretty good counter-argument:

https://lt3000.blogspot.com/2019/11/contrarianism-esg-investing-coal-and.html

I hope that guy is right. If he is, the CO2 released by human activity is a net benefit for the planet.
7   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 6, 3:14pm  

Patrick says
I hope that guy is right. If he is, the CO2 released by human activity is a net benefit for the planet.


It's greening the earth. Our food production is increasing. Plants are becoming more drought tolerant (when they open stomates to such in a molecule of CO2 they lose one H2O instead of three for example - yes I made those numbers up)

Some scientists predicted if we hadn't come along in about 150K years there wouldn't be enough CO2 to support plant life and they'd all be dead. As it was 100 years ago plants were sort of gasping for 'air' so to speak.

Yes, it's not all bad...
8   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 6, 3:16pm  

Okay, just skimmed that article. Their numbers are a bit different than what I posted (from what I've read) but it makes the same point.
9   clambo   2021 Jun 7, 7:01am  

The reason for this global warming hoax is that real pollution and the threat of nuclear mega deaths from the Soviets was reduced.

Bored hand wringing leftists had to come up with some other threat.

Lately they are talking about “racism” again.

The Wuhan virus was great for them, now they can pull some bullshit every year.

Shaman, the oceans are 1. Buffers 2. Basic

Ocean phytoplankton like CO2. Actually, when we grew dense cultures in the lab we bubbled CO2 into the tanks to make the culture grow better.
10   Bd6r   2021 Jun 7, 8:48am  

richwicks says
"Acidification of the oceans" is a myth. In 1990, it was supposed to destroy all ocean life, by 2010.

nope, acidification is very real. As opposed to most climate-change scares, ocean acidity and its changes can be measured: pH of ocean surface was 8.24 in pre-industrial era, about 8.14 now
11   Bd6r   2021 Jun 7, 8:49am  

just_passing_through says
My understanding, from listening the the older generation of scientists (the ones who came up with climate change predictions in the first place and weren't alarmist about it) is that there is not enough sources of carbon on the planet to ever turn the ocean acid, i.e., < pH=7.

it does not need to go acidic to interfere with ability to form shells - these are equilibrium processes
12   Bd6r   2021 Jun 7, 8:52am  

just_passing_through says
Some scientists predicted if we hadn't come along in about 150K years there wouldn't be enough CO2 to support plant life and they'd all be dead. As it was 100 years ago plants were sort of gasping for 'air' so to speak.

Yes, it's not all bad...

I think it is about 150 ppm CO2 below which plants start dying off, and that level was (almost) reached at some recent point in history
13   Karloff   2021 Jun 7, 9:26am  

New, "progressive" tech is worse than what it replaced? Color me shocked, yet again..

This happens time and time again. We're back to paper bags at grocery stores now, compact fluorescent lighting was worse for the environment than incandescent, we'll probably find out that car battery tech is worse than fossil fuels for the environment...
14   Bd6r   2021 Jun 7, 10:15am  

Karloff says
car battery tech is worse than fossil fuels

yes: A separate study from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that, depending on the type of plug-in being built, manufacturing a battery-powered car generates anywhere from 15% to 68% more CO2 emissions than a conventional gas-powered car. The reason is that producing the batteries is incredibly energy intensive.

Over the lifetime of a car, then, a plug-in could, depending on where one lives, contribute more to global warming than those nasty gasoline powered cars.

Whatever the case, it's clear that labeling electric cars as "zero emission" is one of the biggest consumer scams going.

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/electric-cars-co2-emissions-global-warming/
15   HeadSet   2021 Jun 7, 7:15pm  

Hippies from the 70s who called their 10-speeds an "eco-cycle" would be aghast at the pic above. Having a motor of any sort on a bike would be wrong, just pedal, you polluter.
16   Patrick   2021 Jun 7, 7:17pm  

Maybe humans output more CO2 per mile than some kinds of motors.
17   HeadSet   2021 Jun 7, 7:44pm  

Patrick says
Maybe humans output more CO2 per mile than some kinds of motors.

I know you are joking, but if that were true people would lose noticeable weight by breathing heavy.
18   Patrick   2021 Jun 7, 9:21pm  

Not joking. People burn sugar to run themselves and exhale water and CO2, very much like engines that burn gasoline.

If you do a lot of exercise, you burn more, get hotter, give off more CO2.

How efficient is human metabolism compare to an internal combustion engine?

Maybe @Rb6d has an opinion.
19   RWSGFY   2021 Jun 8, 5:46am  

Patrick says
If you do a lot of exercise, you burn more, get hotter, give off more CO2.


Non-essential physical exertion should be discouraged (if not outright banned) then.
20   HeadSet   2021 Jun 8, 9:26am  

Patrick says
If you do a lot of exercise, you burn more, get hotter, give off more CO2.

How efficient is human metabolism compare to an internal combustion engine?

Hey Patrick, put on your engineering pants. No, not the striped coveralls used when playing with the HO train set.
Hopefully I do not bore you guys with this, but I think Patnetters are intellectually curious and statements like that need to be examined.

Since you are talking "sugar." lets presume the cyclist uses 1,000 calories for a 20 mile bike ride and gets those calories just from sugar (He loves the Mountain Dew Throwback). And let's assume that all that sugar is metabolized and not turned to belly fat. That is, all the carbon in that 1,000 calories is expelled as CO2. Sugar is a hydrocarbon (C12 H22 011) and if you do the math with the atomic weight bit (144/342), it is only about 42% carbon. Sugar energy is 4 kiloCalories/gram, the 1,000 calories of sugar would be 250 grams. Metabolizing 250 grams of sugar would produce about 917 grams of carbon dioxide, that is 250gm/(Molecular weight of CO2/Atomic weight of carbon).

It takes 2.5 hours to charge an e-bike to go 20 miles. A suitable gasoline generator uses about 3/4 gallon per hour. Gasoline is another hydrocarbon, with about 87% carbon by weight. That means that a 6 pound gallon of gasoline is about 5.5 pounds of carbon. So burning perfectly a gallon of gas puts 19.6 pounds of CO2 in the air (includes the 2 molecules of oxygen taken from the air per carbon atom) or about 8.9 kg of CO2.

Therefore, a human pedaling a bike 20 miles uses 1,000 calories and exhales less than a kilogram of CO2.
An electric bike, if it only took an gallon to charge for a 20 mile run, puts out almost 10 times more CO2 to produce the electricity than the human pedaler would.

Agreed, using a generator is inefficient, so let's use plugin power. It takes about a kilowatt hour to charge a e-bike for 20 miles. The US Department of energy says producing 1 kilowatt of electricity creates about .92 kg of CO2. So in that case, human and ebike CO2 emissions are about the same.
21   NuttBoxer   2021 Jun 8, 4:32pm  

Been reading Tesla's autobiography. Seems he developed a way to transmit energy wirelessly to any point on the globe with almost no loss of energy.
22   Onvacation   2021 Jun 8, 5:40pm  

NuttBoxer says
Seems he developed a way to transmit energy wirelessly to any point on the globe with almost no loss of energy.

He thought he developed a system. Just couldn't get the funding to provide free energy for everyone; no profit.

Brilliant man, great book.

Tesla developed a really cool backflow valve, no moving parts. It was brilliant, but didn't really work as well as other Backflow valves already available. Turns out it might make a pump that runs on machinery vibration.



https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277794-century-old-water-valve-invented-by-nikola-tesla-could-have-modern-use/?utm_campaign=patrick.net&utm_source=patrick.net&utm_medium=patrick.net&utm_content=news
23   HeadSet   2021 Jun 8, 6:38pm  

NuttBoxer says
Been reading Tesla's autobiography. Seems he developed a way to transmit energy wirelessly to any point on the globe with almost no loss of energy.

I remember in High School a demo of a Tesla device to wirelessly light up a florescent bulb several feet away. That was not lossless. Inverse square law alone makes "lossless" transmission of radiated energy impossible, unless going point to point with something like a laser. And I am glad a Tesla device did not catch on, the radiation is worse than standing under high voltage transmission lines.
24   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 8, 6:44pm  

HeadSet says
I know you are joking, but if that were true people would lose noticeable weight by breathing heavy.
80% of weight loss is breathed out CO2. So if you lose a pound 0.8lbs of that weight loss you breathed out as CO2.
25   Shaman   2021 Jun 8, 6:45pm  

just_passing_through says
80% of weight loss is breathed out CO2.


My wife (who has two masters and is a dietician) agrees with this statement.
26   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 8, 6:49pm  

It's kind of weird to think about... I'd imagine triglyceride math is different than sugar math though.
27   HeadSet   2021 Jun 8, 7:17pm  

Shaman says
just_passing_through says
80% of weight loss is breathed out CO2.


My wife (who has two masters and is a dietician) agrees with this statement.

True, which is the whole point of good old aerobics with it emphasis on oxygen use (creating CO2). But the body is very efficient. CO2 exhaled from a normal 24 hours of breathing can be replaced by a small amount of even healthy food. And I presume the 80% weight loss figure refers to marginal loss, as in total terms a person loses more weight peeing, perspiring, and pooping than from exhaled CO2. Let me add also that only the carbon of the CO2 is what you lose. The Oxygen part you are extracting from the air. So for each kg of CO2 exhales, only 6/22 or .27 kg is the carbon from your body.
28   Patrick   2021 Jun 8, 7:18pm  

HeadSet says
Agreed, using a generator is inefficient, so let's use plugin power. It takes about a kilowatt hour to charge a e-bike for 20 miles. The US Department of energy says producing 1 kilowatt of electricity creates about .92 kg of CO2. So in that case, human and ebike CO2 emissions are about the same.



Thanks for the calculations @HeadSet

OK, people are pretty efficient.

I've read that reptiles are more energy-efficient than mammals, but have the weakness that it's harder for them to get warmed up and moving when they are cold.
29   HeadSet   2021 Jun 8, 7:38pm  

Patrick says
I've read that reptiles are more energy-efficient than mammals,

Yes, it takes lots of oxygen to maintain a warm blooded metabolism. This is why I cringe when I hear a marine biologist pontificate how it is a evolutionary quirk that whales did not re-develop gills as an adaptation to life in water. Gills big enough to support even a dolphin sized animal would be the size of a parachute and would quickly deplete the surrounding water of oxygen. Warm blooded animals must be air breathers with lungs that take advantage of the 20% atmospheric oxygen.
30   HeadSet   2021 Jun 8, 7:49pm  

just_passing_through says
It's kind of weird to think about... I'd imagine triglyceride math is different than sugar math though.

Yes, but triglycerides are more complex chemically than the sugar hydrocarbon example and the math is more cumbersome. But triglycerides have that fatty component which is way less calorie efficient than sugar, so the CO2 output would balance to about the same (more triglycerides used, but less CO2 per unit).
31   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 9, 8:22am  

HeadSet says
Gills big enough to support even a dolphin sized animal would be the size of a parachute and would quickly deplete the surrounding water of oxygen. Warm blooded animals must be air breathers with lungs that take advantage of the 20% atmospheric oxygen.


Some sharks are warm blooded. It's 25 years ago but when I was a pre-med we were told that the definition of warm blooded simply meant that oxygenated blood didn't mix with de-oxygenated blood in the heart. Blood with a higher oxygen content allows for a hotter burn in cells, warming the animal.

After a quick read: Sharks heat up using their muscles so I suspect we were told a half truth with respect to heart anatomy.
32   HeadSet   2021 Jun 9, 11:45am  

just_passing_through says
Some sharks are warm blooded. It's 25 years ago but when I was a pre-med we were told that the definition of warm blooded simply meant that oxygenated blood didn't mix with de-oxygenated blood in the heart. Blood with a higher oxygen content allows for a hotter burn in cells, warming the animal.

Well, I am not a doctor, but I am pretty sure that any animal with gills has a two chambered heart, sharks included. No separate chambers to exchange with gill oxygen blood, like a warm blooded mammal has for lung oxygen blood. I also saw on the news about a discovery in a deep sea fish that bridges "warm blooded" because of muscle activity. That is a far cry from a regulated body temperature that requires lots of oxygen to maintain.
33   just_passing_through   2021 Jun 9, 10:22pm  

@HeadSet, I think we're both on the right track. Some sharks 2 chambered hearts shunt blood to the gills and push it beyond. This is the same effect - no mixing of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood is pushed out by the heart.

http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/white_shark/rete.htm#:~:text=One%20striking%20feature%20of%20these,gills%20are%20at%20environmental%20temperatures.&text=As%20in%20humans%2C%20sharks%20have,and%20veins%20toward%20the%20heart

" This is called 'endothermy' or 'warm-bloodedness'."

"These sharks are unique in their ability to elevate and maintain body temperatures above the ambient water temperature. They are endothermic. One striking feature of these warm-bodied sharks is that their flanks and viscera are warm, while the heart and gills are at environmental temperatures. This is because they differ substantially from all other sharks in the pattern of blood supply to the viscera and swimming muscles.

"As in humans, sharks have a closed circulatory system in which arteries carry blood away from the heart and veins toward the heart. After blood leaves a shark's heart, it is pumped forward and upward to the gills. At the gills' secondary lamellae, carbon dioxide is dumped from the blood and oxygen is picked up, losing about 45% of its initial pressure as it passes through these delicate gas-exchange filaments (which may explain why many otherwise healthy sharks appear to 'go limp' when turned upside-down: shark systemic blood pressure is so low that, when inverted, the weak force of gravity changes blood distribution so that the brain and swimming muscles become starved for oxygen). From there, the freshly oxygenated blood is pumped fore to the head and aft to the rest of the body"

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