Katoomba Monthly Temp average set to be SMASHED!!! AGAIN!!!

[GraemeCook]

.....
However, outside electricity generation and heating, road transport is still the big one to solve.

Transport is responsible for nearly 30% of the EU’s total CO2 emissions, of which 72% comes from road transportation. Quote from CO2 emissions from cars: facts and figures (infographics)

....

How times change. One hundred years ago when the T-model Ford was replacing horses, people lauded the new fangled horseless carriages as being so much less polluting than poor old Dobbin.

According to ABS, there were 14.5 million passenger vehicles in Australia on 31 January 2019. Let us consider a scenario where each car is replaced by one horse - 14,500,000 horses and most of them in the cities because that is where we live. Sure would generate a lot of manure. Happy times for gardeners!

[Bohdan]

Of what point is hauling an extra 200 tons of fuel to the destination? Surely it would be best to land literally on vapours

And when you arrive at your intended destination you are informed that the runway is closed and you have to divert to another one.

[FenceFurniture]

Very good article from NASA sent to me overnight.

Why Milankovitch Cycles Can't Explain Earth's Current Warming – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

Key points:

• Milankovitch cycles operate on long time scales, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years
  
• Earth’s current warming has taken place over time scales of decades to centuries
  
• NASA satellite observations show that over the last 40 years, solar radiation has actually decreased somewhat
  
• Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has increased 48 percent
  
• In just the past 20 years alone, carbon dioxide is up 11 percent
  
• the warming effects of carbon dioxide on our planet are 34 times higher than any warming due to the Sun
  
• Earth is currently in an interglacial period - the Milankovitch cycles predict our planet should be cooling, not warming, continuing a long-term cooling trend that began 6,000 years ago

So that all backs up the argument that CC has always been happening, and always will.

The unfortunate part of relying on that argument for anthropogenic CC denial is that the current natural CC would actually be cooling the planet, not warming it at unprecedented rates.

[woodPixel]

Potassium metal battery emerges as a rival to lithium-ion technology

Nice

[woodPixel]

Some of the science being done right now is super good.

Capillary-driven desalination in a synthetic mangrove | Science Advances

[RossM]

Paper That Blames The Sun For Climate Change Was Just Retracted From Major Journal

But begs the question - why on earth did they publish it to begin with?? Seems like a failure of the peer review process.

[FenceFurniture]

Paper That Blames The Sun For Climate Change Was Just Retracted From Major Journal

Bloody hell, that seems like a fundamentally stupid mistake!

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

According to ABS, there were 14.5 million passenger vehicles in Australia on 31 January 2019. Let us consider a scenario where each car is replaced by one horse - 14,500,000 horses and most of them in the cities because that is where we live. Sure would generate a lot of manure. Happy times for gardeners!

I'd like to see the numbers crunched on that. How would the extra methane (another greenhouse gas) produced by that many horses compare to the exhaust gases of as many cars?

I know it's an unfair comparison, but still...

If the numbers were even remotely comparable, I suspect the world would've taken action long before now, even if only because having to continually scrape pooh off your boots is much more... personal.

[GraemeCook]

Potassium metal battery emerges as a rival to lithium-ion technology

Nice

Unfortunately, it is only in the early days of laboratory research.
Full Page Reload

Remember, less than 1% of university research ever gets to commercial projects.

[woodPixel]

How times change. One hundred years ago when the T-model Ford was replacing horses, people lauded the new fangled horseless carriages as being so much less polluting than poor old Dobbin.

According to ABS, there were 14.5 million passenger vehicles in Australia on 31 January 2019. Let us consider a scenario where each car is replaced by one horse - 14,500,000 horses and most of them in the cities because that is where we live. Sure would generate a lot of manure. Happy times for gardeners!

Reminds me of this Hypothetical: Great horse manure crisis of 1894 - Wikipedia

[Bushmiller]

Unfortunately, it is only in the early days of laboratory research.
Full Page Reload

Remember, less than 1% of university research ever gets to commercial projects.

Graeme

Yes indeed. From the last paragraph of that article:

“It will take time to figure out the exact combination of electrolyte, cathode, and anode,” Pol says. “It might take another 15 years from now to get to the market.”

Regards
Paul

[AlexS]

Paper That Blames The Sun For Climate Change Was Just Retracted From Major Journal

But begs the question - why on earth did they publish it to begin with?? Seems like a failure of the peer review process.

I guess it worked, just a bit slower than it should. Normally, gross errors and mistakes should be picked up by the magazine's reviewers, leaving readers to comment/dispute/confirm the conclusions without having to worry about mistakes.

[woodPixel]

Perhaps, rather than produce electricity for the purposes of inputting it into the grid - they could become a bitcoin mining operation.

Plonk down a massive solar grid in the middle of nowhere (cheap land!) and pop in a few coin miner machines (automated!) and a satellite uplink....

Minting money the modern way

Bloomberg - this-utility-heats-new-york-state-and-mines-its-own-bitcoin

[FenceFurniture]

Mine saffron. It's worth twice the price of gold....at Woollies anyway.

[NeilS]

Minting money the modern way

Bloomberg - this-utility-heats-new-york-state-and-mines-its-own-bitcoin

One of my offspring ran a cryptocurrency mining operation for a while. He lives in the world of high end graphic processing, so has the know how on the required technologies.

Three issues concerned him; you get paid in the cryptocurrency and that is a gamble, returns for miners halve periodically, and, most significantly for him, the energy they consume is profligate in a world challenged with reducing its emissions.

Yes, a solar farm in the desert will not be adding to emissions, but that renewable energy should be put to better use than enabling Darknet trading and unproductive investing.