The Money Mustache Community
Other => Off Topic => Topic started by: newgirl on January 15, 2018, 12:38:43 PM
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Something I've been mulling over for a while...
Are there any particular areas of the US that strike you as being better positioned than others to cope with nearer-term (like next 50-100 years) effects of climate change?
Obviously climate change will impact different areas of the country differently - from droughts/wildfires to hurricanes. We live in MN, and one of the reasons I've been reluctant to explore other places to live (that are more low-cost and have milder winters) is that, in the near term, I feel like MN is fairly well positioned to absorb some of the negative effects of climate change - we have access to a lot of water here, we are not fire prone, there is a decent variety of agriculture and things that can be grown, lots of public land to hunt and fish, you could probably get some decent mileage out of both solar and wind power, etc. Hell if anything short term climate change might actually make the winters livable.
It's sort of a back of my mind type of thought but when I think about where and how we are going to raise our kids over the next 20 years or so, this stuff weighs heavily in the calculations. Maybe more heavily than it should. I suppose that the best preparation for climate change is to get yourself in a position to be extremely mobile in the future (geographically and financially), but I have to be honest, that doesn't hold a lot of appeal to me. Unlike a lot of people on the boards I'm just not a traveler, and certainly I would prefer to raise my kids in one place.
Anyone else think about this stuff?
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Two potential sources you might find interesting;
1) insurance actuaries routinely put out risk assessments, often down to the county level and sometimes to individual properties. There are all sorts of maps showing your risks against a variety of natural disasters.
2) climate models (a-la the IPCC's AR5 and the National CLimate Assessment (https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/regions/midwest#intro-section-2)) can give you a lot of information on what changes a particular area will experience over the coming decades. Some regions will change far more than others.
Neither is going to be terribly useful for 100 year predictions, as there are so many assumptions 'baked in' that the degree of change becomes highly uncertain. Few climate models even attempt to predict past 2100 (82 years) - 100 years is asking a lot.
What's even harder to predict is the social-economic shifts which may happen. Will MN see an influx or outflux of people? Climate predictions have the midwest experiencing more heat waves and drought conditions, though an increase in the number of frost-free days (which could help big-Ag in the short term). What will the world economic-stage look like - will the three largest economies still be US/China/Japan (most models suggest India, Indonesia and Brazil will crack into the top 5)? What will war, disease of famine do? We're likely to see the number of global refugees increase dramatically - which countries take them in may influence their demographics for decades to come.
Finally, you said "I suppose that the best preparation for climate change is to get yourself in a position to be extremely mobile in the future " - flexibility is probably the best approach to very long-term planning.
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My inclination would be to look for:
- high ground (not flood prone)
- non-earthquake prone area
- not near a coast
- slightly cooler weather on average than you would like right now
I'd also be inclined to look for either:
- a remote area where people are more self-sufficient
- a highly populated area where there are too many people to ignore in the event of a crisis
If you have a lot of family, or very close friends in an area that would be a big benefit too . . . as you might depend upon support (or want to offer it) to others.
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My husband and I had this discussion a couple of years ago because we were faced with job options in Southern CA, the UK, and Ohio. I think Wales would have been awesome but was too far from family and we have children.
So we ended up in Ohio. We bought a house on the bluff side of a river and made sure it wasn't in any floodplains (though at some point, that data will go out the window, I think). We like that we are in area with trees, and water, and land, and because it was an old town, it was designed for walking.
Compared to SoCal - it is an area in which life can be easily sustained. I know it sounds silly, but it was important to me to be somewhere where water was easily accessible. The thought of taking water from someone else's river, or desalinating ocean water was just wacky to me. I think it is an amazing feat that humans can tame an environment and make a previously unlivable place, livable - but I don't necessarily thing we should do that if we can avoid it.
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My inclination would be to look for:
- high ground (not flood prone)
- non-earthquake prone area
- not near a coast
- slightly cooler weather on average than you would like right now
I'd also be inclined to look for either:
- a remote area where people are more self-sufficient
- a highly populated area where there are too many people to ignore in the event of a crisis
If you have a lot of family, or very close friends in an area that would be a big benefit too . . . as you might depend upon support (or want to offer it) to others.
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/01/natural_disaster_map_shows_why.html
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My inclination would be to look for:
- high ground (not flood prone)
- non-earthquake prone area
- not near a coast
- slightly cooler weather on average than you would like right now
I'd also be inclined to look for either:
- a remote area where people are more self-sufficient
- a highly populated area where there are too many people to ignore in the event of a crisis
If you have a lot of family, or very close friends in an area that would be a big benefit too . . . as you might depend upon support (or want to offer it) to others.
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/01/natural_disaster_map_shows_why.html
hah! Looks like my instinct to homestead in northern MN is a good one. I never really considered Michigan before, either. And Ohio doesn't look half bad either. Strictly for natural disasters, obviously.
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Natural disasters just look at Detroit and say "They've suffered enough."
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Natural disasters just look at Detroit and say "They've suffered enough."
Speaking of Detroit - it's a good example of how hard it is to predict what an area will look like in 50 years. 50 years ago Detroit was an economic powerhouse (5th largest US city) and San Jose, CA was barely large enough to call itself a city. Arizona's population quadrupeld, Florida's has tripled in size, California, Texas and Georgia have more than doubled... yet New York, Pennsylvania, Illionois and Michigan have barely grown at all.
What will various regions of the US look like in 50 years? Who knows.
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Natural disasters just look at Detroit and say "They've suffered enough."
Speaking of Detroit - it's a good example of how hard it is to predict what an area will look like in 50 years. 50 years ago Detroit was an economic powerhouse (5th largest US city) and San Jose, CA was barely large enough to call itself a city. Arizona's population quadrupeld, Florida's has tripled in size, California, Texas and Georgia have more than doubled... yet New York, Pennsylvania, Illionois and Michigan have barely grown at all.
What will various regions of the US look like in 50 years? Who knows.
It used to be that larger cities were located where they made sense geographically--near navigable waterways and resources, such as drinking water. The last decades took us away from that, thinking of places like Vegas and maybe Phoenix. Probably lots of cities in particularly the southwest that have been made more habitable via human intervention. However, the subject of this thread being climate change, that recent human intervention is likely to become more difficult and costly once again. How much are we willing to continue to relocate the basic necessities of living vs. moving nearer to them?
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Natural disasters just look at Detroit and say "They've suffered enough."
Speaking of Detroit - it's a good example of how hard it is to predict what an area will look like in 50 years. 50 years ago Detroit was an economic powerhouse (5th largest US city) and San Jose, CA was barely large enough to call itself a city. Arizona's population quadrupeld, Florida's has tripled in size, California, Texas and Georgia have more than doubled... yet New York, Pennsylvania, Illionois and Michigan have barely grown at all.
What will various regions of the US look like in 50 years? Who knows.
It used to be that larger cities were located where they made sense geographically--near navigable waterways and resources, such as drinking water. The last decades took us away from that, thinking of places like Vegas and maybe Phoenix. Probably lots of cities in particularly the southwest that have been made more habitable via human intervention. However, the subject of this thread being climate change, that recent human intervention is likely to become more difficult and costly once again. How much are we willing to continue to relocate the basic necessities of living vs. moving nearer to them?
I think the above statement needs a huge asterick attached. Namely - what 'necessities of living' are we talking about that one must transport in order to make a particular habitable? Water? Some form of heat? Access to shipping? Food?
Cities were located where it made sense at the time. Those that could provide lots of jobs grew. Most emerged along natural sheltered embayments because water transport was the only way of transporting most stuff. Others were built for their military importance (Quebec) or because a missionary was established their (often for random historical reasons). Madrid was specifically built to be inconveinent to get to. But take away their access to the sea and many of these older cities aren't any more "habitable" to ones that have sprung up in recent decades. Two cities you mentioned - Phoenix & Las Vegas, are ideal spots for solar energy. Is that less important today than some place like New England that relies heavily on importing fuel-oil for heating and electricity but has more water resources? One imports/recycles a crap-ton of water, the other a crap-ton of fossil fuels.
Industrial cities still need deep-water ports, but that's not as important for other cities. We built railroads (opening up most of the heartland of both the US and Canada) and then the interstate system. Some cities have flourished because of oil or tech or cattle or manufacturing. New England used to be filled with large cities and towns because of textile and lumber mills - then it became cheaper to import lumber from BC and textiles from Asia. Quebec controlled the ST. Lawrence seaway - the only way of getting goods and grain from the midwest - until NY built the Erie canal and there was a way to bypass the gulf (NYC boomed, Quebec crashed).
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And Ohio doesn't look half bad either. Strictly for natural disasters, obviously.
The thing I notice most regarding climate change, is we are now a growing Zone 6 - we have been a Zone 5 since I needed to know such things, about 50 yrs.
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Natural disasters just look at Detroit and say "They've suffered enough."
Speaking of Detroit - it's a good example of how hard it is to predict what an area will look like in 50 years. 50 years ago Detroit was an economic powerhouse (5th largest US city) and San Jose, CA was barely large enough to call itself a city. Arizona's population quadrupeld, Florida's has tripled in size, California, Texas and Georgia have more than doubled... yet New York, Pennsylvania, Illionois and Michigan have barely grown at all.
What will various regions of the US look like in 50 years? Who knows.
It used to be that larger cities were located where they made sense geographically--near navigable waterways and resources, such as drinking water. The last decades took us away from that, thinking of places like Vegas and maybe Phoenix. Probably lots of cities in particularly the southwest that have been made more habitable via human intervention. However, the subject of this thread being climate change, that recent human intervention is likely to become more difficult and costly once again. How much are we willing to continue to relocate the basic necessities of living vs. moving nearer to them?
I think the above statement needs a huge asterick attached. Namely - what 'necessities of living' are we talking about that one must transport in order to make a particular habitable? Water? Some form of heat? Access to shipping? Food?
Cities were located where it made sense at the time. Those that could provide lots of jobs grew. Most emerged along natural sheltered embayments because water transport was the only way of transporting most stuff. Others were built for their military importance (Quebec) or because a missionary was established their (often for random historical reasons). Madrid was specifically built to be inconveinent to get to. But take away their access to the sea and many of these older cities aren't any more "habitable" to ones that have sprung up in recent decades. Two cities you mentioned - Phoenix & Las Vegas, are ideal spots for solar energy. Is that less important today than some place like New England that relies heavily on importing fuel-oil for heating and electricity but has more water resources? One imports/recycles a crap-ton of water, the other a crap-ton of fossil fuels.
Industrial cities still need deep-water ports, but that's not as important for other cities. We built railroads (opening up most of the heartland of both the US and Canada) and then the interstate system. Some cities have flourished because of oil or tech or cattle or manufacturing. New England used to be filled with large cities and towns because of textile and lumber mills - then it became cheaper to import lumber from BC and textiles from Asia. Quebec controlled the ST. Lawrence seaway - the only way of getting goods and grain from the midwest - until NY built the Erie canal and there was a way to bypass the gulf (NYC boomed, Quebec crashed).
I'm not sure why there needs to be an asterisk, as my post wasn't a dissertation, but an idea, my idea being that climate change would result in a contraction of resources that have allowed for population growth in places where otherwise would not be feasible. With less plentiful resources, a focus on logistical efficiency might be renewed. And yes, the necessities of life are food, water, shelter. Electricity is nice and useful, too, but not a basic necessity of life.
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And Ohio doesn't look half bad either. Strictly for natural disasters, obviously.
The thing I notice most regarding climate change, is we are now a growing Zone 6 - we have been a Zone 5 since I needed to know such things, about 50 yrs.
I was surprised when I looked up my growing zone, it was more temperate than I expected for the Midwest. Though I'm still emphasizing drought tolerant, hardy plants that can take a beating from Mother Nature.
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Things are changing so much from year to year its hard to say. And being on high ground doesnt mean your safe from water. Can depend on the water table as well as flood rains. Down south they have more snow than the midwest. Its easier to say at least for me, I wouldn't live on the coast.
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Will there be more opportunities as the climate change? People gotta eat. Some places in the Northern Great Lakes region have a very short growing season. Will global warming allow, for example, vineyards where none could easily exist before? Perhaps a milder climate would allow multiple crops to be grown in a given year.
Will the lakes dry up or will there be more rain and they could expand?
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Will there be more opportunities as the climate change? People gotta eat. Some places in the Northern Great Lakes region have a very short growing season. Will global warming allow, for example, vineyards where none could easily exist before? Perhaps a milder climate would allow multiple crops to be grown in a given year.
Will the lakes dry up or will there be more rain and they could expand?
Sure, some cold areas may warm up a bit on average . . . some dry areas may get wetter, and some wet areas may get drier. The main issue that climate change brings is wider swings in weather though. You might get a couple extremely dry years, and then a couple years with lots of flooding.
Plants tend to like consistency. They have particular temperature ranges and watering requirements in order to survive, but to flourish these ranges are narrower. Climate change therefore is likely to make most land less productive.
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Plants tend to like consistency. They have particular temperature ranges and watering requirements in order to survive, but to flourish these ranges are narrower. Climate change therefore is likely to make most land less productive.
This is one reason I'm very interested in building some earth sheltered greenhouses on my property for high density production (probably aquaponics based).
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but MN is an area of concern for many environmental scientists. The entire region is suffering from extensive tree migration, much like most of the northern US and southern Canada. This is leaving deadwood, and coupled with decreasing rainfall and longer dry seasons, fires are expected to go up in areas that previously had few. Although MN historically has wildfires, they rarely are as intense as those in the west. MN has already experienced some of this. (The Boundary Waters fire a few years back is being used as a model of the effects of tree migration on fire seasons in university classrooms, for example.)
The problem with the natural disaster map linked is it is using historic data. Unfortunately, that is no longer a reliable method of predicting the future. It's also only addressing high profile disaster fears, and half of them are arguably not even climate related. It isn't showing wildfire danger. It isn't showing drought, extended heat, or more intense winters. It's not showing wind storms -- and a straight line wind burst at high enough speeds can be more damaging than any tornado. (Just ask the residents of central and eastern Washington, whom got hit with two such "freak" events in a single year in 2015.)
So is MN more resilient to climate change? No. Is it possible to weather climate change successfully and possibly thrive in MN? Possibly. Just be realistic about what dangers will increase or develop in the area, because no region will be untouched. My not too educated guess would be an increase in storm intensity off the lakes, drastic changes to growing season, and increased wildfires. There may also be, odd as it sounds, drought issues in portions of the region as the loss of the boreal forests changes local weather patterns.
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I think climate resilience is going to be less important than economic resilience. The two aren't entirely unrelated, but the explosive growth in places like Vegas highlights the difference. Lots of natural disasters (like earthquakes and volcanoes) are significant threats that basically ignore climate, so if you're worried about natural disasters more than gradual warming trends, I'd consider those too.
Here's my appeal to authority: I'm a natural resources scientist who deals with helping people plan for things like future climate scenarios, so part of my job is keeping up with the consensus projections for my part of the country (the west).
Average changes are pretty well understood. In general, California and the southwest are not going to get an better, but keep in mind that people still thrive in Mexico and the US could thrive under a similar (hotter, drier) climate. Western Canada is expected to get wetter, but they're used to rain and have low population density anyway. My home, here in the Pacific Northwest, is pretty well situated for future climate because we have abundant water resources, moderate temperatures, and a healthy agricultural industry that would probably benefit from some warming. Lots of the farmers I know would love to have California style sunshine.
The problem with future climate is not the averages, though. It's the tail cases. Consider a normal probability distribution curve like the one shown below. Each weather event is a dot that falls somewhere under the big curve (the climate), but it's only the few cases out at the tail ends that people care about, extreme events like a "bomb cyclone" or heat waves/droughts/floods.
(http://showmethevotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Normal-distribution-with-tails-graph.gif)
Those events happen at fixed values (of say temperature or rainfall amounts) represented by the vertical lines separating the light blue (happy weather) and dark blue (unhappy weather) regions. Climate change gradually shifts the entire curve over to the right, but those vertical lines stay in the same place. Because the distribution curve is taller in the middle than out at the ends, this shift means that the dark blue regions change in area pretty dramatically in response to small shifts of the curve.
In practice, this why extreme weather events like floods and heat waves happen so much more often in response to small changes in climate. The extreme tail cases are much more sensitive. No one even notices when a normal day is five degrees hotter than normal, but when the hottest day of the decade gets five degrees hotter people start to die.
Predicting these tail events is much harder than predicting the average shifts, because every weather event is just one dot somewhere under that big curve and some years none of those dots land in dark blue region, even if the region is statistically larger than it was last year.
We have to plan for the tail cases. The tail cases are things like major floods that wipe out infrastructure, or blizzards in April, or storm surges that flood the eastern seaboard.
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I think climate resilience is going to be less important than economic resilience.
Agree. In my view, my home city’s best protection against rising sea levels is its obscene concentration of nonportable wealth. Given the real estate values at stake in NYC, the powers that be will reengineer the earth before surrendering the city to the sea, so we may suffer less than many areas with comparable geographic vulnerability.
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Plants tend to like consistency. They have particular temperature ranges and watering requirements in order to survive, but to flourish these ranges are narrower. Climate change therefore is likely to make most land less productive.
This is one reason I'm very interested in building some earth sheltered greenhouses on my property for high density production (probably aquaponics based).
Plants are acclimated not just to temperature but to light. Northwards of the usual growing zone for a particular type of plant the amount of light available (eg the length of day over the growing season) changes. In order to thrive in a different range plants have to adjust not just to different temperatures and water availabilities but also to different light availabilities. It adds to the problem of plants flourishing in new ranges.
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@sol Thanks so much for taking the time to add your expertise to these threads. I learn so much when I read your posts!
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@sol Thanks so much for taking the time to add your expertise to these threads. I learn so much when I read your posts!
I like to write. Thanks for reading.
Given the real estate values at stake in NYC, the powers that be will reengineer the earth before surrendering the city to the sea, so we may suffer less than many areas with comparable geographic vulnerability.
Build that (sea)wall!
(http://waterfrontalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/AprilFools_TrumpAlt-copy-e1459523546283.jpg)
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I think a lot of the middle of the US has such a variable climate that climate change might be lost in the noise of crazy weather that never seems to follow any pattern anyway. That might even be a reason so many Americans are climate skeptics.
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"I think a lot of the middle of the US has such a variable climate that climate change might be lost in the noise of crazy weather that never seems to follow any pattern anyway. That might even be a reason so many Americans are climate skeptics."
I think there will be insects coming from the South with no native enemies that will thrive in the formerly cold climate of the American Midwest. I think there will be invasive plants that have heretofore been unseen. It's already been nasty to some species of trees.
Where I grew up, it was too cold for termites. That will change.
How far North will we see some of those nasty Southern snakes? Will there really be giant alligators or Crocs living in the sewers of New York? A few degrees of temperature difference may be all that it takes.
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"I think a lot of the middle of the US has such a variable climate that climate change might be lost in the noise of crazy weather that never seems to follow any pattern anyway. That might even be a reason so many Americans are climate skeptics."
I think there will be insects coming from the South with no native enemies that will thrive in the formerly cold climate of the American Midwest. I think there will be invasive plants that have heretofore been unseen. It's already been nasty to some species of trees.
Where I grew up, it was too cold for termites. That will change.
How far North will we see some of those nasty Southern snakes? Will there really be giant alligators or Crocs living in the sewers of New York? A few degrees of temperature difference may be all that it takes.
My husband is from PA, and he complains about it being more jungly down here, especially all the bugs. I don't think native southern species going north will be that much of a problem, though, given that their native enemies will naturally move north with them. The invasive non-native species here will be the problem. You'll get to experience fire ants and kudzu.
I guess I feel for you on snakes. It's kind of a phobia for me. I'm always really careful in the woods because copperheads and rattlesnakes are well camouflaged in leaves. You just have to be careful to watch the ground when you walk somewhere they might be.
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I'm bumping this thread to add a piece about winters lately not being cold enough in my part of the world (Oregon, specifically around Portland) so that the fucking yellow jacket queens don't die (enough of them anyway), which leads to lots and lots of huge colonies (they're ground nesters) and big problems. There are reports of Lowe's running out of pesticide, exterminators being booked out for weeks and weeks, ER visits skyrocketing for folks who have been swarmed...it's horrible. These are insects who have been here forever, but the climate conditions lately have allowed them to thrive (at our expense). #MyVersionOfHell
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This week 100% of the state of New South Wales was declared as officially in drought.
100%!
TV networks are interviewing farming kids 6-8 years old who have never seen rain in their lives.
It's already the case that most of Australia is uninhabitable.... we may be all squeezing ourselves into Victoria and Tasmania before the century is out.
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I'm bumping this thread to add a piece about winters lately not being cold enough in my part of the world (Oregon, specifically around Portland) so that the fucking yellow jacket queens don't die (enough of them anyway), which leads to lots and lots of huge colonies (they're ground nesters) and big problems. There are reports of Lowe's running out of pesticide, exterminators being booked out for weeks and weeks, ER visits skyrocketing for folks who have been swarmed...it's horrible. These are insects who have been here forever, but the climate conditions lately have allowed them to thrive (at our expense). #MyVersionOfHell
If Portland was similar to Washington, you just had your coldest winter in 20-somethingyears not too long ago... late 2016 early 2017
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If Portland was similar to Washington, you just had your coldest winter in 20-somethingyears not too long ago... late 2016 early 2017
Also our hottest summer ever! Isn't climate change a kick in the pants?
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Learning to reclaim and protect against desertification seems like a nobel cause.
I'm sure there are scientists working on it, but I haven't seen any news of it. If solar panels in the desert were to provide power and also cooling shade, the power could be used to desalinate and/or pump water for irrigation. I realize the scale is vast, but converting worthless desert wasteland into land that support life seems like a worthy goal. Each acre of sucess would support the next, like the domino effect, except in all directions.
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...but converting worthless desert wasteland into land that support life seems like a worthy goal.
But... the endangered desert tortoise habitat will be threatened! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Desert_tortoise)
(seriously, there is stuff living in "desert wasteland," but the "environmentalists" have really lost their ability to say much after being against nuclear, then against coal, then against solar, then against... etc - at least the "Hey, let's kill off a few billion people to solve the problem" types are honest)
Desert solar is useful, but you still have to build the transmission lines to get the power out of the desert and somewhere useful. A better national interconnect for power systems (high voltage DC is promising for that) would help a lot, because it can move power from places that have excess (if you've got negative power rates at night because it's windy in Texas, there are probably other places that can use that power for you) to places that are currently running thermal generation or turbines to generate power.
It's... a tricky set of technical problems, though.
I'm aiming towards a resilient homestead type approach, so ask me in 5 years how that's going. We're currently dealing with record heat, which the garden certainly likes... I'm a bit less useful in 105F and smokey conditions, though.
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It's interesting how some utilities are simultaneously saying "we can't support solar and wind because it's intermittent" yet also refuse to spend money on need infrastructure upgrades that have the side benefit of providing better ability to manage power distribution. By interesting, I mean stupid. Between them and the anti-solar, pro-desert crowd, it'll be hard to significantly expand utility-scale power. I do think it'll be more economical for most people to switch to rooftop solar in the near future, especially if it can be amortized over 30 years like housing itself.
Syonyk - have you looked into small desalination systems (~250-500 gallons a day capacitiy)? I've read into them but am unsure about their practicality vs. buying a giant tank and storing freshwater in it.
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Learning to reclaim and protect against desertification seems like a nobel cause.
I'm sure there are scientists working on it, but I haven't seen any news of it. If solar panels in the desert were to provide power and also cooling shade, the power could be used to desalinate and/or pump water for irrigation. I realize the scale is vast, but converting worthless desert wasteland into land that support life seems like a worthy goal. Each acre of sucess would support the next, like the domino effect, except in all directions.
Southern California has been doing this for decades, and it's a disaster. Leave the desert alone!
Out in the Mojave in the 90s, you could buy land for like $100/acre. You truck in a cat and scrape off the desert pavement to expose the finer grained dusty soil underneath. You sink a deep well to access the free-for-all of California water law, and then you center-pivot grow something stupid like alfalfa or almonds. After five or six years of this you've extracted a bunch of profitable crops, depleted the local aquifer and caused compaction and subsidence, and salinated your soil enough that it won't support life for thousands of years. But who cares? You just abandon the fields and buy another one. The Mojave is covered in the wreckage of abandoned short-term agriculture.
The removal of the pavement layer on top remobilizes the soil underneath as soon as the field is abandoned, which causes sandstorms and dunes that choke out the existing desert plants, and the desert expands to encroach on neighboring ecosystems. This sort of "bringing water to the desert" development is making desertification worse, not better. Not to mention all of the trucks that drive across the playas willy-nilly to bring in farm workers, or the unregulated waste dumps they leave behind. These are wild areas just like forests and mountains, and they probably deserve similar protections.
At least with solar you can keep the area productive, instead of using it up in a few years and then trashing it to move on to somewhere new. As others have pointed out, though, the problem with desert solar is distribution. One of solar's strongest selling points is distributed generation, near the point of consumption, which minimizes the need for long distance high voltage lines. It's not only cheaper to make, it's cheaper to distribute.
"environmentalists" have really lost their ability to say much after being against nuclear, then against coal, then against solar,
I don't think it's fair to group these people together. The folks who opposed nuclear were anti-cold war types from the 50s who were terrified of Chernobyl style disasters, which is a very different group than the climate scientists who oppose coal because it is causing droughts and wildfires or melting ice caps, who are not the same people who are trying to protect endangered species. It's like criticizing Ronald Reagan for Trump's ties to Russia, or Mitt Romney for the Bush Iraq wars. These people have very different goals in mind, and the fact that they all call themselves "conservatives" does not mean they are all equally responsible for each other's failings.
better national interconnect for power systems (high voltage DC is promising for that)
Aren't all long distance transmission lines already high voltage DC? That's why we have transformers and substations, to convert distant power to AC for local use. Are you suggesting we put in more transformers in more places, to minimize the distance AC has to go? I assure you that power utilities have already run the math on the most efficient way to solve this problem.
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I'd consider myself an environmentalist who is generally in favour of nuclear power. Nuclear power has legitimate problems (a big one being the storage of contaminated materials that remain contaminated for thousands of years, and another being the lack of fissionable materials to support current world power demands for long - both of which have partial but not fully satisfying solutions currently), but fears of a Chenobyl only come from people who don't understand the fundamental design difference between the reactors used in North America and the older, much less safe Russian design.
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but fears of a Chenobyl only come from people who don't understand the fundamental design difference between the reactors
Let's not forget that a big part of the anti-nuclear paranoia was funded by fossil fuel companies. Once you build a reactor, nuclear is cheap clean power for decades and decades. Basically every nuclear plant that gets built causes a coal plant to go out of business, and they hate that. They happily funded "environmental" groups to oppose new nuclear plants.
As to the design differences, I agree that modern plants cannot melt down like Chernobyl did, but they can still cause problems. Fukushima was a legit disaster and it wasn't a drop-out reactor, it just happened to built in a really bad place. Of course, the vast majority of nuclear contamination in the US came from weapons manufacturing, not power generation. We cranked a lot of plutonium in the 1980s, without any regard for the 40,000 year consequences of that decision.
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but fears of a Chenobyl only come from people who don't understand the fundamental design difference between the reactors
Let's not forget that a big part of the anti-nuclear paranoia was funded by fossil fuel companies. Once you build a reactor, nuclear is cheap clean power for decades and decades. Basically every nuclear plant that gets built causes a coal plant to go out of business, and they hate that. They happily funded "environmental" groups to oppose new nuclear plants.
As to the design differences, I agree that modern plants cannot melt down like Chernobyl did, but they can still cause problems. Fukushima was a legit disaster and it wasn't a drop-out reactor, it just happened to built in a really bad place. Of course, the vast majority of nuclear contamination in the US came from weapons manufacturing, not power generation. We cranked a lot of plutonium in the 1980s, without any regard for the 40,000 year consequences of that decision.
Agreed. Although the Fukushima thing wasn't a design problem, it was a location problem. It's hard to ever get on board with building reactors on unstable earthquake or tsunami zones (ie all of Japan). A gazillion tons of water or the ground jumping up and down a few meters is tough on any building.
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It's interesting how some utilities are simultaneously saying "we can't support solar and wind because it's intermittent" yet also refuse to spend money on need infrastructure upgrades that have the side benefit of providing better ability to manage power distribution. By interesting, I mean stupid.
Oh, good. You've got the ready-made solution for integrating solar/wind/etc and keeping a stable grid? Don't keep it to yourself, share that research! Everything I've read, including fairly recent stuff, is clear that the problem is still quite unsolved - unless the plan is to just starve the power companies out and let the grid collapse in 10-15 years, which quite a few people seem to want (or, at least, are perfectly OK with - the "The power company owes me retail rates for everything I generate, instead of their energy cost, and I should get paid to use their grid" folks).
Between them and the anti-solar, pro-desert crowd, it'll be hard to significantly expand utility-scale power.
Except for all those utility scale buildouts doing exactly that. Rooftop solar is a rogue generator that's hard to deal with, utility scale solar can do things like bid into the energy markets with accurate forecasts, and operate curtailed - if you can't maintain max output because of clouds, maintain 50 or 60% of rated output, so you can keep the slew rates low. A bit of energy storage can let the plant ride through dips in the clouds as well. But there's a huge, huge difference in how a utility solar plant is operated, and how rooftop inverters operate ("All the power they can produce at every point in time, with no external controls on them").
I do think it'll be more economical for most people to switch to rooftop solar in the near future, especially if it can be amortized over 30 years like housing itself.
Are you referring to off grid solar, or grid tied with no backup? Or what, in particular, variant of "solar" do you expect it will be economical for people to switch to?
If it's grid tied solar, you have to deal with the problem that less than half of a typical power rate for residential is for a kWh of energy - the rest is grid maintenance. It's woven into the grid costs since it makes for a simpler power bill, and the ramping tiers tend to approximate demand charge behavior (if you're using a ton of energy, the connection to your house/neighborhood has to be able to handle more than someone barely using anything).
If it's off grid solar, well... you run into the problem that it's comically impractical to do with a typical house, even if you handwave at expensive lithium batteries. If you're cool with blacking out entirely for a couple weeks a winter, you can do it, but to design a system that can run a typical house off grid for the winter, you've got an awful lot of extra expense involved, as well as a backup generator that is far, far less thermally efficient than a power plant (a typical small scale generator runs around 10-12% thermal efficiency, maybe 15% for a small diesel, but they're a royal pain to start in the winter when you need the power). I deal with the realities of off gird power in my office, and am designing a system that can run my house substantially off grid, but I intend to remain grid tied, and don't expect my system to "pay off" in financial terms just about ever. Even with me doing all the work myself (because nobody will do what I want, and I'm stubborn like that).
If you can get an off grid system to generate power at 4x the grid rate over the long term, you're doing well. Two years in, my cost per kWh delivered for my office power system is around $1.50/kWh. In 10 years, assuming similar loads, I'll be around $0.30/kWh - but then need battery replacement. In 30 years, I might be able to get my cost down to close to what the grid offers, but that's assuming zero other system failures, not counting generator fuel (which, admittedly, is a small amount), replacement panels, etc. And I'm a battery/energy geek who is willing to do all sorts of interesting things to maintain my system - I'm not a set it and forget it type, which is what most people want of their electricity. It would have been far, far cheaper to trench power, but, to me, far less interesting. I'm weird. I accept this.
Syonyk - have you looked into small desalination systems (~250-500 gallons a day capacitiy)? I've read into them but am unsure about their practicality vs. buying a giant tank and storing freshwater in it.
... no, it's not like I've got a ton of salt water to deal with. I live in high desert. We get 8-10" of precipitation a year, which I intend to substantially collect in a 10k gallon tank or so (I estimate 6-12k gallons/yr of collection, depending on efficiency of my collectors and what I can route where). That'll be for irrigation, firefighting, and backup house use, but intended for outdoor use.
Aren't all long distance transmission lines already high voltage DC? That's why we have transformers and substations, to convert distant power to AC for local use. Are you suggesting we put in more transformers in more places, to minimize the distance AC has to go? I assure you that power utilities have already run the math on the most efficient way to solve this problem.
No. It's almost entirely high voltage AC, which gets interesting over long distances. But we don't have anything resembling a national grid that can pump energy in and out of various places - there's no way for wind in Texas to... well, really power anything but Texas (ERCOT), and there's no way for western AZ solar to power the east coast as they're in their evening peak (western vs eastern interconnect, and a total lack of capacity across that distance). Doing something that's a national high voltage DC grid opens up a lot of options, without requiring any sort of frequency sync across the country. It's hard enough on the current grids we have, but HVDC drops out to the local waveform where you need it, and you can skip the inverters on solar farms - just have a DC-DC boost converter coming off the solar arrays. There's enough capacitance in the system that it's quite stable, and you can just have current sources and sinks, letting the voltage float over a fairly wide range.
Agreed. Although the Fukushima thing wasn't a design problem, it was a location problem. It's hard to ever get on board with building reactors on unstable earthquake or tsunami zones (ie all of Japan). A gazillion tons of water or the ground jumping up and down a few meters is tough on any building.
Fukushima held up to the tsunami and earthquake just fine. What it didn't hold up to, and what it wasn't designed for, was a total station blackout. The plant required power to maintain reactor safety, and the people managing it didn't listen to the recommendation to retrofit steam coolant pumps that would have allowed them to cool the reactors in the event of the total blackout that happened. It's a "Hey, this design was flawed, you should fix it this way..." situation, followed by a "Nah, we're not going to." And, as has been noted, newer designs are radically better designed in terms of walk away safety and such - they're literally designed to maintain themselves for some period of time without power or operators (typically 48 hours), and then to melt down in a designed path to a non-critical, stable, safe configuration.
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No. It's almost entirely high voltage AC, which gets interesting over long distances.
I know that we use high voltage DC transmission to send our regional hydropower surplus to California. I assumed this was standard practice for sending lots of power over long distances, but I guess that's not the case? Wikipedia suggests most utilities are just using locally generated power and have no need for long distance transmission, so they just deal with the AC losses as part of their overhead. That seems dumb, outside of major metro areas.
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I know that we use high voltage DC transmission to send our regional hydropower surplus to California. I assumed this was standard practice for sending lots of power over long distances, but I guess that's not the case? Wikipedia suggests most utilities are just using locally generated power and have no need for long distance transmission, so they just deal with the AC losses as part of their overhead. That seems dumb, outside of major metro areas.
In the US, HVDC lines are the exception, rather than the rule.
Partly because, as you note, there's not a huge amount of long distance transmission (which limits the amount of renewables you can make use of), but a large part of it is simply that high voltage DC didn't meaningfully exist as an option until fairly recently - and most of our power grid predates that as an option. It's easy to make high voltage AC - just use transformers. High voltage DC, at useful currents, is a relatively recent thing (early 80s, really, were the first practical projects).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
You have losses either with HVDC or AC transmission, but they differ in their nature. For undersea cables, capacitive losses are far higher, so HVDC has an advantage. For most of the grid system, the cost and complexity of a HVDC link exceeds the benefit they'd gain from it, so AC transformers work fine.
"Totally redoing the power grid" is a very, very high cost project, so quite a bit of the grid is just a more modern version of what was initially installed.
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Nuclear Power could be a major solution to global warming. It can produce electricity or do other stuff all day and all night for 365 days a year. Beer will stay cold.
It is ignored due to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) People have been all stirred up about the "waste." There is some waste but it is still stored at big power plants that have been running for 40 years or more. It takes surprisingly little space. What about nuclear proliferation? Well - The stuff at nuclear plants is pretty hard to turn into nuclear bombs. You could make a dirty bomb and just spread the stuff around, but you can do that with lots of chemicals too. I mean poison in my back yard would scare me just like nuclear waste.
There are new types of nuclear reactors that can use the old waste and produce less waste. Maybe, some are being built in China. There seems to be major resistance to trying any of these new reactors here in the United States. I think big energy may be shutting any progress on these down. Solar and Wind use a lot of natural gas when they aren't available. Who wants a competitor? It does seem very unusual that nuclear energy, such a promising energy source, hit a nearly total brick wall in terms of real progress.
One New Type:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor)
If people are really serious about fixing this climate change thing, don't you think it's time to at least try some of these new nukes? The reactors we have now were designed in the 1960s. Vacuum Tubes were still used in the 1960s. Lots of things have been improved since then.
How about the money? Well, wind and solar are given a lot of subsidy breaks. (This helps sell gas,) Maybe, we could fund a few new small nukes too.
If we honestly fixed this thing, the Polar Bears may thank us some day.
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I spent much of last year working as an analyst for the decommissioning of three nuclear plants in the US.
As pecunia said, public resistance to new reactors can be summed up by 'Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt', but it became apparent very early on that the overwhelming cost of a nuclear reactor was based on two factors: security and long-term storage of fuel.
Security was described to me by one of our clients as an 'inside-out supermax prison design" - instead of keeping the most dangerous people inside a secure building, every plant is designed to keep the most dangerous people out, and requires super-secure sectors protected from everything from aerial to cyber attacks (stuxnet anyone?). Plants have concentric rings of round-the-clock security where even most of the workers can't access the most sensitive portions of the plant. It's military-level security with a price tag to match.
Long-term storage can be an ever greater challenge, and it relates directly back to the security issue. We've utterly failed to establish any sort of nuclear repository (e.g. Yucca Mountain) so spent fuel sits in secure lots for several years as it cools before placed within encasement vessels and then (again) stored for decades, all under heavy security. By law all nuclear plants have a decomissioning fund to help pay for these expenses for a minimum of 50 years (not nearly long enough!). In other words, several decades after a plant has last pushed power into the grid (and the plant is no longer generating income) you've paying for 24/7 armed security to guard a few hundred vessels in a secure lot with a very wide perimeter.
Solving the storage problem is technically straightforward but has been a political non-starter. But as long as nuclear material is a source of catnip for very bad people I'm not sure how we move past the massive security costs.
FWIW, these two ongoing costs (security and storage) are the leading reason why small-to-medium plants around the country are closing. Very large plants can economically churn out power due to economies of scale. Instead of trying to build dozens of medium (~500MW) plants, we'd be better served building a few very large (>5,000MW) plants near large urban centers. But then you get cries of NIMBY! - going back to @pecunia's point of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
ETA: To be fair, beyond the nuclear material, nuclear power comes with its own environmental footprint. First, they take an enormous amount of concrete to build, and second they take massive amounts of water to cool. Just sayin' - no tech is without its downsides.
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(disclosure: I work for a public utility)
Nuclear is really hard to build. It's often built at a base-load scale, which is a huge chunk to lay out in one sitting, especially at a time when per-person demand for energy is not growing. Building a new gas turbine costs only $10's of millions, while a New nuclear plant--which generates more energy--costs perhaps $15,000 million, perhaps more. The Southeastern utilities are having trouble determining whether the economics are there and keep stopping and restarting their nukes.
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The obvious solution for the long term nuclear waste seems to be that the technology needs to evolve to the point that it doesn't produce harmful waste. As long as the waste contains harmful levels of radiation it still has energy that needs to be extracted. "Impossible" only means that we haven't figured out how to do it, yet.
If it was simple somebody would have figured it out already. It took thousands of years to invent the bicycle, and that seems pretty simple today.
After the brightest minds of the day finish designing ever fancier cell phones and other toys, maybe they'll get around to solving our energy needs. ;)
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We have been able to create and design truly incredible things in the past couple centuries. This often instills in people an overconfidence regarding what we have (or will have) the technical capability to actually do. It's as frightening to hear the faith in "science miracles" as if they said "well, angels love us and want to help . . . so if things get really bad they'll just fly down and fix our problems".
I'm not saying that you can't be optimistic about the future, I'm saying that you shouldn't expect miracles. Even from science.
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The obvious solution for the long term nuclear waste seems to be that the technology needs to evolve to the point that it doesn't produce harmful waste. As long as the waste contains harmful levels of radiation it still has energy that needs to be extracted. "Impossible" only means that we haven't figured out how to do it, yet.
If it was simple somebody would have figured it out already. It took thousands of years to invent the bicycle, and that seems pretty simple today.
After the brightest minds of the day finish designing ever fancier cell phones and other toys, maybe they'll get around to solving our energy needs. ;)
I think we’ve already got all the technology and knowledge we need to ‘solve’ our energy needs - all of our problems stem from us not wanting to pay for the kind of energy grid we want, and not being able to make the evaluated compromises needed to balance cost, efficiency, environmentalism and convenience.
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After the brightest minds of the day finish designing ever fancier cell phones and other toys, maybe they'll get around to solving our energy needs. ;)
We're working on it, I assure you. I know lots of smart people who are working on the nuclear fuel cycle and how to reprocess and minimize the worst end products. The problem seems to be that it isn't cost or energy effective to turn spent fuel into something you don't need to guard.
And new nuke plants aren't really our problem. The vast majority of high level waste we have is from making bombs decades ago, not making fuel rods for power plants today. These days we know better how to deal with the manufacturing, but back then we were just cranking out bombs as fast as we could without any regard for the waste stream.
And in the larger world of nonproliferation, secured US waste is about the lowest priority. Yes it is crazy expensive, but we're already paying those costs at existing facilities anyway so the marginal cost of waste storage each year isn't nearly as bad as it looks. There are lots of easier places for bad guys to get nuclear materials. The North Korea's didn't steal theirs from the US stockpile.
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We have been able to create and design truly incredible things in the past couple centuries. This often instills in people an overconfidence regarding what we have (or will have) the technical capability to actually do. It's as frightening to hear the faith in "science miracles" as if they said "well, angels love us and want to help . . . so if things get really bad they'll just fly down and fix our problems".
I'm not saying that you can't be optimistic about the future, I'm saying that you shouldn't expect miracles. Even from science.
I agree that many things we dream of being able to do are actually impossible. But, it's also true with most discoveries and inventions that there's is almost always a lot of room for improvement after an idea is proven possible.
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The US has been building a lot of gas plants. It has been building a lot of solar and wind. It has been shutting down coal and nuke plants. You'd think the big shift has been to wind. Well - it has. The taxpayer has paid for it and the rules are skewed in t's favor. How do things stack up today?
Where does your electricity come from?
32 percent natural gas
30 percent coal
20 percent Nuclear Power
17 percent - renewables including
6 percent wind
7 percent hydroelectric
2 percent biomass
1 percent solar
1 percent geothermal
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=electricity_in_the_united_states (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=electricity_in_the_united_states)
It was noted above that nuclear power plants presently have beau coup security forces. They didn't used to. There weren't major problems before the security forces were bloated. These people have to be paid by the proceeds of the power plant. Is a potential source of greenhouse gas energy being unnecessarily crippled from economic viability?
- SNIP -
"I'm not saying that you can't be optimistic about the future, I'm saying that you shouldn't expect miracles. Even from science."
I agree that many things we dream of being able to do are actually impossible. But, it's also true with most discoveries and inventions that there's is almost always a lot of room for improvement after an idea is proven possible.
You can't improve unless you try. Often improvements are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Nuclear power may be the most viable solution to global warming. It is a condensed source of power rather than a distributed form covering major portions of the landscape. It's location may be determined where men need the power rather than where nature has desired to produce it. It has a proven track record of reliability and safety. Like any technology, it can improve. This can only be done by "cut and try" of the designs. Everything is not done on paper. Problems are often found and fixed in the field.
What is actually possible and impossible may not be determined until the idea in question is attempted. Again, I think some of these new ideas should be attempted. The climate problem is dictating to mankind that new ideas need to be explored.
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The problem with future climate is not the averages, though. It's the tail cases. Consider a normal probability distribution curve like the one shown below. Each weather event is a dot that falls somewhere under the big curve (the climate), but it's only the few cases out at the tail ends that people care about, extreme events like a "bomb cyclone" or heat waves/droughts/floods.
(http://showmethevotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Normal-distribution-with-tails-graph.gif)
Those events happen at fixed values (of say temperature or rainfall amounts) represented by the vertical lines separating the light blue (happy weather) and dark blue (unhappy weather) regions. Climate change gradually shifts the entire curve over to the right, but those vertical lines stay in the same place. Because the distribution curve is taller in the middle than out at the ends, this shift means that the dark blue regions change in area pretty dramatically in response to small shifts of the curve.
In practice, this why extreme weather events like floods and heat waves happen so much more often in response to small changes in climate. The extreme tail cases are much more sensitive. No one even notices when a normal day is five degrees hotter than normal, but when the hottest day of the decade gets five degrees hotter people start to die.
Best explanation I've seen on the real dangers of climate change. Thanks Sol.
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The obvious solution for the long term nuclear waste seems to be that the technology needs to evolve to the point that it doesn't produce harmful waste. As long as the waste contains harmful levels of radiation it still has energy that needs to be extracted. "Impossible" only means that we haven't figured out how to do it, yet.
If it was simple somebody would have figured it out already. It took thousands of years to invent the bicycle, and that seems pretty simple today.
After the brightest minds of the day finish designing ever fancier cell phones and other toys, maybe they'll get around to solving our energy needs. ;)
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel.aspx
Actually, its already been figured out, its just not economical and not worth pursuing, there isn't likely ever to be significant money made in reprocessing. Spot Uranium is $26/lb right now, its the cheapest fuel in the world. Reprocessing costs a lot more, so people just buy fresh uranium. For perspective, that pound of uranium can supply 20,000 kwh of electricity. My house used 5,000 last year, an average house is probably 10,000 kwh. $26 in fuel for all the electricity needed for 1000 houses...fuel is cheap.
The uranium needed to power my house is worth $8-13 a year. For a reality check, how much did you spend on gasoline last year? A tesla is suppose to get 2.5-3 miles per kwh, so 10,000 miles would be 4000 wh or $5.20 in uranium. I bet that's less then most people spend on gasoline.
Perspective is everything. The problem isn't the fuel, its the reactors.
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The obvious solution for the long term nuclear waste seems to be that the technology needs to evolve to the point that it doesn't produce harmful waste. As long as the waste contains harmful levels of radiation it still has energy that needs to be extracted. "Impossible" only means that we haven't figured out how to do it, yet.
If it was simple somebody would have figured it out already. It took thousands of years to invent the bicycle, and that seems pretty simple today.
After the brightest minds of the day finish designing ever fancier cell phones and other toys, maybe they'll get around to solving our energy needs. ;)
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel.aspx
Actually, its already been figured out, its just not economical and not worth pursuing, there isn't likely ever to be significant money made in reprocessing. Spot Uranium is $26/lb right now, its the cheapest fuel in the world. Reprocessing costs a lot more, so people just buy fresh uranium. For perspective, that pound of uranium can supply 20,000 kwh of electricity. My house used 5,000 last year, an average house is probably 10,000 kwh. $26 in fuel for all the electricity needed for 1000 houses...fuel is cheap.
The uranium needed to power my house is worth $8-13 a year. For a reality check, how much did you spend on gasoline last year? A tesla is suppose to get 2.5-3 miles per kwh, so 10,000 miles would be 4000 wh or $5.20 in uranium. I bet that's less then most people spend on gasoline.
Perspective is everything. The problem isn't the fuel, its the reactors.
What is "spot" uranium. Do you mean nuclear waste product, depleted uranium? The ability to use this is fuel is theoretically possible and actively being pursued with significant private investment. Theoretically its cost should be more than viable. Here is at least on article. I think I first heard about this on Freakonomics.
https://www.bloomberg.com/technology (https://www.bloomberg.com/technology)
The barrier to developing this tech far enough to prove 100% that it works is simply that the US is not in desperate need of alternative power. We have plenty of natural gas and are firmly committed to renewable energy. So its hard to come by money for anything related to nuclear power research as their is a strong stigma against it do to past mistakes.
Their may be some further waste related downsides I am not aware of. But fiscal viability if the theoretical design works is not an issue. The current company head claims there is enough depleted uranium in the US to power the whole country for 100 years, or something crazy like that if their models are correct.
I have not connected with any of my physics buddies to see if this work is thought to be plausible or a joke among the scientific community. I want to say investors like Bill Gates means something positive, but I believe he has backed crazy ideas in the past.
Either way it seems the research is forging on, just not primarily in the US.
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Presumably the "spot price" of uranium metal.
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Didn't see that this was already posted. Thought there was a lot of information here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html
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San Francisco is silly.
New York will die when the subways rot from salt water.
Boise is full. Don't move here.
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San Francisco is silly.
New York will die when the subways rot from salt water.
Boise is full. Don't move here.
I agree with crossing off San Francisco and New York from the list, the others are worth considering. Generally the Great Lakes region is probably best to find places with mid to low cost of living and reasonable adaptability to climate change. Of course we could all move to Boise and get Syonyk to teach us how to build off-grid solar for energy independence.
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Eh, the house system is going to be grid tied, just with a lot of battery for sustained grid down running. It's not a good way to design something unless you really care about weird things that I care about.
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What is "spot" uranium. Do you mean nuclear waste product, depleted uranium? The ability to use this is fuel is theoretically possible and actively being pursued with significant private investment. Theoretically its cost should be more than viable. Here is at least on article. I think I first heard about this on Freakonomics.
https://www.bloomberg.com/technology (https://www.bloomberg.com/technology)
The barrier to developing this tech far enough to prove 100% that it works is simply that the US is not in desperate need of alternative power. We have plenty of natural gas and are firmly committed to renewable energy. So its hard to come by money for anything related to nuclear power research as their is a strong stigma against it do to past mistakes.
Their may be some further waste related downsides I am not aware of. But fiscal viability if the theoretical design works is not an issue. The current company head claims there is enough depleted uranium in the US to power the whole country for 100 years, or something crazy like that if their models are correct.
I have not connected with any of my physics buddies to see if this work is thought to be plausible or a joke among the scientific community. I want to say investors like Bill Gates means something positive, but I believe he has backed crazy ideas in the past.
Either way it seems the research is forging on, just not primarily in the US.
Spot Price is the cost of uranium, on the open market it sells for $26/lb. Prior to Fukushima it was over $60, in 2006 it spiked to $120. At the current price of fuel the USA has shuttered its mines. Canada, which supplies 30% of the world, has shuttered 2 of the 3 mills that mines send ore to. Canada has some of the best Uranium ore in the world, it was the source for the Manhattan project (Eldorado Mine) and still continues to supply the USA.
The work is entirely feasible, its also where plutonium comes from for Nukes, Russia, Europe Japan all have the capacity to do so and currently reprocess on a limited scale. Virgin Ore on the other hand isn't viable for nuclear weapons, it needs to be processed. In Canada its mined, milled and used in CANDU reactors. Its also shipped from Ontario Canada to the USA for enrichment, where it can be used in nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors. The Manhattan project used irradiated Uranium (fake nuclear waste) for the plutonium, its not a new tech at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_phosphate_process
In the news currently we have North Korea, Going back to 2008 they blew up the cooling tower at their reactor site, a significant step if you're trying to avoid nuclear weapons from reprocessed uranium.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/world/asia/28korea.html
The world has an oversupply of uranium and will continue to have an oversupply for the next decade or longer. Reusing uranium is pretty simple, it just costs more. As a consumer would you rather pay $26 a pound or $200 a pound (estimate, I'm not sure of the current price)? That's the choice faced by uranium purchasers. So far the market says to keep on mining and refining virgin ore, but the day will come in 40-50 years when all the "waste" is ready for reprocessing because the spot price is higher then the cost of reprocessing.
We're not disagreeing, I'm just letting you know that the work has already been accomplished to reprocess fuel. There are unintended consequences such as the ability to get Plutonium, such as that used in the third nuclear explosion in history over Nagasaki (Hiroshima was the second, it used Uranium, the first was the test).
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We're not disagreeing, I'm just letting you know that the work has already been accomplished to reprocess fuel. There are unintended consequences such as the ability to get Plutonium, such as that used in the third nuclear explosion in history over Nagasaki (Hiroshima was the second, it used Uranium, the first was the test).
The Gadget was a plutonium implosion type device as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)
We tested that because we weren't sure it would work. The simpler gun type weapon over Hiroshima had never been tested before actual use, but it was over-designed enough that the engineers were confident it would work.
The newer breeders can produce a bit more of a poisoned plutonium, though. You can target isotopes with a high enough spontaneous neutron generation rate that even an implosion type weapon is likely to fizzle, and separating out the stuff is really, really tricky (uranium is mostly dangerous as a heavy metal that likes to catch fire, plutonium has some genuinely nasty isotopes).
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From Prairie Stash:
The world has an oversupply of uranium and will continue to have an oversupply for the next decade or longer. Reusing uranium is pretty simple, it just costs more. As a consumer would you rather pay $26 a pound or $200 a pound (estimate, I'm not sure of the current price)? That's the choice faced by uranium purchasers. So far the market says to keep on mining and refining virgin ore, but the day will come in 40-50 years when all the "waste" is ready for reprocessing because the spot price is higher then the cost of reprocessing.
In 40 to 50 years, it is hoped that there will be new reactors that will use Thorium. Thorium has been used in reactors in the past. I read someplace we have about a 4,000 years worth of the stuff to power the US at current electrical usage. It is very common and occurs with rare earth elements which we certainly need. The reprocessing of spent fuel may never be market driven. Wise regulatory bodies may make the right kinds of rules to eliminate it. Of course neither the Thorium nor spent fuel reactors will emit greenhouse gases.
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So, is it cheaper to secure the storage of spent radioactive fuel indefinitely than it is to reprocess it?
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So, is it cheaper to secure the storage of spent radioactive fuel indefinitely than it is to reprocess it?
Tough to say.
The costs of maintaining storage of spent radioactive fuel are unknown as they are pushed to the future. Reprocessing it is a known (high) cost.
I don't know any businessman who will take immediate costly losses over something that might happen in the distant future. Short term gain always wins.
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From Prairie Stash:
The world has an oversupply of uranium and will continue to have an oversupply for the next decade or longer. Reusing uranium is pretty simple, it just costs more. As a consumer would you rather pay $26 a pound or $200 a pound (estimate, I'm not sure of the current price)? That's the choice faced by uranium purchasers. So far the market says to keep on mining and refining virgin ore, but the day will come in 40-50 years when all the "waste" is ready for reprocessing because the spot price is higher then the cost of reprocessing.
In 40 to 50 years, it is hoped that there will be new reactors that will use Thorium. Thorium has been used in reactors in the past. I read someplace we have about a 4,000 years worth of the stuff to power the US at current electrical usage. It is very common and occurs with rare earth elements which we certainly need. The reprocessing of spent fuel may never be market driven. Wise regulatory bodies may make the right kinds of rules to eliminate it. Of course neither the Thorium nor spent fuel reactors will emit greenhouse gases.
;) in the 80's it was predicted 40-50 years they would have fusion. 40-50 years is the scientific way of saying, we have no idea when this will happen.
I have absolutely no idea when reprocessing will be economical, no one does. I won't be around in 50 years, I'm not worried abot being called out for being wrong. I'm sorry to have misled anyone, it wasn't my intention to have the timeline taken seriosuly, I meant that its a long indeterminate time away before it happens.
FYI: Anytime there's a prediction of what will happen with technology in 30+ years, its safe to assume the author is speculating. Its very common in the nuclear industry, it allows people to save face since they're always retired before it comes to pass.
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So, is it cheaper to secure the storage of spent radioactive fuel indefinitely than it is to reprocess it?
therre are two types of waste; fuel waste and everything else. Fuel waste is special, its dense and can be reprocessed. That stuff is small in volume and amount, cheap to store. Here is a picture of what storage looks like, does that look expensive? In total, all of canada's spent nuclear waste fits into 8 hoockey rinks stacked to the boards (Canada, eh!)
https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Canadas-Plan/Canadas-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/How-Is-It-Stored-Today
Everything else is a much bigger problem. It includes the tyvek coveralls and gloves people wear every shift. It includes packaging used for shipping, the metal recyclers scan for material that comes from the uranium industry (a contaminated scrap load, which could be the lid from a transport barrel, can cost millions to clean up). Everything that came into contact during the handling and processing, thats nuclear waste. It doesn't even need to scan high in radioactivity, its a zero tolerance game.
http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/waste/low-and-intermediate-waste/index.cfm
Instead of uranium, imagine if somehing small in your house, like coffee grounds was toxic waste. Now imagine if everything that ever touched those grounds was considered contaminated waste. So every morning I make coffee and use 50grams of cofee, but alongside that I have to throw out the spoon I used, the gloves I wore, the container it came in, the cloth that I had handy in case of a spill (still clean but you still toss it) and then to be extra sure, my pyjamas in case it touched those. All of a sudden that small pile of coffee created a lot of waste. Obviously that will never be reprocessed, you aren't going to make coffee from my PJ's.
Its the ancillary waste that adds up. People generally lump the two together which creates all the confusion. Most waste can't be reprocessed.
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Didn't see that this was already posted. Thought there was a lot of information here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html
I think San Francisco and Boise, along with a lot of other places out west, will run out of water à la Cape Town.
I'm surprised it doesn't mention the inland South. A lot of the places mentioned wouldn't have any way to deal with the heat. If you added another 5 degrees to the temperature here we'd gripe a bit and then go on about our day. We're used to dealing with really hot weather. And terrible storms are already completely normal here. Also I think the South is the least likely part of the country to run out of water or experience large fires.
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Didn't see that this was already posted. Thought there was a lot of information here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html)
I think San Francisco and Boise, along with a lot of other places out west, will run out of water à la Cape Town.
I'm surprised it doesn't mention the inland South. A lot of the places mentioned wouldn't have any way to deal with the heat. If you added another 5 degrees to the temperature here we'd gripe a bit and then go on about our day. We're used to dealing with really hot weather. And terrible storms are already completely normal here. Also I think the South is the least likely part of the country to run out of water or experience large fires.
But can the plants live at those temps? How much drier will the air be? Will it continue to rain, or will AL become a desert? And remember the forest fires. It's hard for forests to recover from fires when there are droughts too.
Alabama could look like Arizona. Arizona might look like the Saraha.
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Didn't see that this was already posted. Thought there was a lot of information here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html)
I think San Francisco and Boise, along with a lot of other places out west, will run out of water à la Cape Town.
I'm surprised it doesn't mention the inland South. A lot of the places mentioned wouldn't have any way to deal with the heat. If you added another 5 degrees to the temperature here we'd gripe a bit and then go on about our day. We're used to dealing with really hot weather. And terrible storms are already completely normal here. Also I think the South is the least likely part of the country to run out of water or experience large fires.
But can the plants live at those temps? How much drier will the air be? Will it continue to rain, or will AL become a desert? And remember the forest fires. It's hard for forests to recover from fires when there are droughts too.
Alabama could look like Arizona. Arizona might look like the Saraha.
I grew up in North Carolina, and learned that there are large aquifers under the coastal plain extending from Virginia to Georgia that are slowly getting contaminated with brackish water as the freshwater is being pumped. Similar to the Great Plains' Oglalla Aquifer, except it's actually a worse situation as the salt in the brackish water is contaminating the remainder of the (otherwise usable) freshwater over time.
Dougules, why is it you think the Southeast US will have less issues with drought and fire than the Northeast?
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Didn't see that this was already posted. Thought there was a lot of information here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/science/9-cities-to-live-in-if-youre-worried-about-climate-change.html)
I think San Francisco and Boise, along with a lot of other places out west, will run out of water à la Cape Town.
I'm surprised it doesn't mention the inland South. A lot of the places mentioned wouldn't have any way to deal with the heat. If you added another 5 degrees to the temperature here we'd gripe a bit and then go on about our day. We're used to dealing with really hot weather. And terrible storms are already completely normal here. Also I think the South is the least likely part of the country to run out of water or experience large fires.
But can the plants live at those temps? How much drier will the air be? Will it continue to rain, or will AL become a desert? And remember the forest fires. It's hard for forests to recover from fires when there are droughts too.
Alabama could look like Arizona. Arizona might look like the Saraha.
I grew up in North Carolina, and learned that there are large aquifers under the coastal plain extending from Virginia to Georgia that are slowly getting contaminated with brackish water as the freshwater is being pumped. Similar to the Great Plains' Oglalla Aquifer, except it's actually a worse situation as the salt in the brackish water is contaminating the remainder of the (otherwise usable) freshwater over time.
Dougules, why is it you think the Southeast US will have less issues with drought and fire than the Northeast?
The Southeast is right by the Gulf of Mexico which is already the temperature of bath water. Alabama and Mississippi could possibly dry out, but I think with the Gulf just to our south, I think our chances of keeping well-watered are better than anywhere else in the US.
As for brackish water in the aquifer in NC, are you sure that's not more related to sea level rise? NC is also further from the Gulf, so that my guess may not apply to the Atlantic side of the Southeast.
I could also be wrong about the fires. There were large fires in the Blue Ridge mountains in 2016, and that's really abnormal given how damp the mountains generally stay.
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Ocean desalination costs between $2,000 and $2,500 an acre-foot, Mills noted. Brackish desalination can range from $1,000 to $2,000. An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, or roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/29/california-water-desalination-projects-move-forward-with-new-state-funding/
Pertinent to water scarcity is dealination in California. Unlike Cape Town I think California wil be able to afford this for their cities. For comparison water ranges from $400 to $1000 now.
"The largest, by far, is a $1 billion plant on the coast in Carlsbad, 35 miles north of San Diego, that opened in 2015. The largest desalination plant in the United States, it generates up to 56,000 acre-feet of water a year — roughly 8 percent of San Diego County’s water supply. But the cost is high, from $2,131 to $2,367 an acre-foot, depending on how much is produced, which is double the price that Metropolitan Water District of Southern California charges for the same amount of water from other sources such as local dams, the Colorado River or the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. By comparison, the Santa Clara Valley Water District in San Jose pays about $400 an acre foot for water from the Delta."
San Francisco is not running out of water.
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For comparison water ranges from $400 to $1000 now.
Haha um... no. Maybe you're talking about residential water rates? "Acre feet" is a unit used to measure agricultural water supplies only, because it is a ridiculously large amount of water. I pay about $2.10 per CCF for water at my house (approximately 4 gallons for one penny), which works out to a little over $900 per acre foot. The farmers I work with, by contrast, usually pay between $5 and $15 per acre foot for much larger quantities of water, and they bitch and moan about anything much higher than that. As a general rule, farmers pay less than 10% of what a municipal water customer will pay, in part because the federal government spent a few billion dollars back in the 1930s to build reservoirs and canals for them.
With those costs in mind, desalination really only makes the remotest kind of sense for supplying people's homes, not for growing crops. City water rates would approximately double or triple, but that's a cost most households can easily absorb because water is already so cheap. The only form of agriculture that can possibly operate at that market price for water is weed.
Which is fine! Everyone makes a big deal about supporting farmers "because everyone has to eat" but the simple truth is that we DO NOT have to grow food in the places where we currently grow food. No one farms in Manhattan, and yet Manhattan is still economically prosperous without a single farmer. You grow your food wherever it is cost effective to do so, and then you pay to ship it to wherever it is needed. We literally transport cargo ships full of grain across the Pacific Ocean and make a profit doing it, and I'm pretty sure we can truck your apples and cheese across state lines if we have to.
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Atlanta is having water problems already. They'd really like to tap into the Tennessee River but Tennessee won't let them. Guess they need to get far more serious about water conservation.
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For comparison water ranges from $400 to $1000 now.
Haha um... no. Maybe you're talking about residential water rates? "Acre feet" is a unit used to measure agricultural water supplies only, because it is a ridiculously large amount of water. I pay about $2.10 per CCF for water at my house (approximately 4 gallons for one penny), which works out to a little over $900 per acre foot. The farmers I work with, by contrast, usually pay between $5 and $15 per acre foot for much larger quantities of water, and they bitch and moan about anything much higher than that. As a general rule, farmers pay less than 10% of what a municipal water customer will pay, in part because the federal government spent a few billion dollars back in the 1930s to build reservoirs and canals for them.
With those costs in mind, desalination really only makes the remotest kind of sense for supplying people's homes, not for growing crops. City water rates would approximately double or triple, but that's a cost most households can easily absorb because water is already so cheap. The only form of agriculture that can possibly operate at that market price for water is weed.
Which is fine! Everyone makes a big deal about supporting farmers "because everyone has to eat" but the simple truth is that we DO NOT have to grow food in the places where we currently grow food. No one farms in Manhattan, and yet Manhattan is still economically prosperous without a single farmer. You grow your food wherever it is cost effective to do so, and then you pay to ship it to wherever it is needed. We literally transport cargo ships full of grain across the Pacific Ocean and make a profit doing it, and I'm pretty sure we can truck your apples and cheese across state lines if we have to.
An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, or roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. residential use is implied, family of fice is in the description.
I think it might have something to do with scale, when you start talking about 56,000 acre-feet, it gets ridiculous using gallons - 18,247,656,000, wtf is 18 trillion gallons! Instead, a more meaningful metric is employed for communication 1 acre-foot=1 house...56,000 acre-feet is 56,000 homes,
56,000 is the size of San Diego's plant in Carlsbad. It supplies 8% of the counties water and cost a billion dollars (from the link). San diego county has 3 million people, California has 39.4 million. It would take $164 billion, at that price, to build desalination water for all residential use.
Clearly thats an enormous sum, for comparison the debt of california is $1,140 billion, desalination for all will add on 14% to total debt (really rough math to put things in perspective), chances are you wouldn't replace 100% of all water.
I stand by my statement, the cities of California aren't going to disappear in a Mad Max scenario. I also disagree they will experience a Cape Town scenario. The farmers will be screwed, but hollywood will remain, no need to fret over the Kardashians.
In Canada theres a large unfounded fear that America will invade and steal our water. Given the cost of a miltary invasion (2 trillion for Iraq), I suspect y'all would just build desalination plants. I doubt you want to deal with rebuilding our igloos and log cabins.
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In Canada theres a large unfounded fear that America will invade and steal our water. Given the cost of a miltary invasion (2 trillion for Iraq), I suspect y'all would just build desalination plants. I doubt you want to deal with rebuilding our igloos and log cabins.
Now wait just a minute, yah cannokistani commie fascist pinko librul apologizer! Ain't no glory in infersruchsure buildin'. War? That's got glory! Guts! Courage! And y'all'd be prone to just apologize for being in our way, so it'll be a cakewalk!
:p
Seriously, though. You think the United States is sane enough to spend money on infrastructure when we can get some military action out of it instead? I'm struggling to imagine the logistics of invading Canada for water, though. That's an awful lot of prairie tankers to get the water back.
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In Canada theres a large unfounded fear that America will invade and steal our water.
We don't need to invade to steal your water. We're currently renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty.
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Betsy Devos is in charge of US education, so we don't have to worry for long. A few more years and Americans won't be able to find Canada on a map.
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Betsy Devos is in charge of US education, so we don't have to worry for long. A few more years and Americans won't be able to find Canada on a map.
When asked "what do Americans think of Canada" - the most honest common answer seems to be "we don't." Also, we're already spectacularly bad at geography, and I wouldn't be surprised if many can't already find Canada on a map. Not that this is a problem just south of the CanUSA border; in at least one study (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/lost-without-a-map-despite-a-globalized-society-university-students-cant-locate-the-atlantic-ocean), many Memorial University students (Canada) couldn't name the ocean east of Newfoundland, locate the continent of Africa or recognize Italy.
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Betsy Devos is in charge of US education, so we don't have to worry for long. A few more years and Americans won't be able to find Canada on a map.
When asked "what do Americans think of Canada" - the most honest common answer seems to be "we don't." Also, we're already spectacularly bad at geography, and I wouldn't be surprised if many can't already find Canada on a map. Not that this is a problem just south of the CanUSA border; in at least one study (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/lost-without-a-map-despite-a-globalized-society-university-students-cant-locate-the-atlantic-ocean), many Memorial University students (Canada) couldn't name the ocean east of Newfoundland, locate the continent of Africa or recognize Italy.
Their loss! I love the Maritimes. And Quebec City + environs is one of my favorite places for excellent food.
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This is an excellent thread. Can we keep it on-topic, please?
Thank you to everyone for their contributions, especially those with high-level specialized knowledge.
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It's worth stressing that climate change won't result in uniform changes across all of the US - i.e. with 2ºC increased global temperatures we won't see all parts of our country increase by 2ºC. More worrisome than the average increase is the increase in the extremes in some areas - whereas the hottest 5 days of the year might have been ~100ºF in some area, they may soon see 106º or even 110º for about as many days. Coastal areas will be buffered somewhat from these extremes due to the heat capacity of the ocean, whereas desert regions will see greater extremes.
The same goes with sea-level rise. While 'sea-level' might be constant (at least to a first degree of approximation) the land where we live isn't. Some areas, like most of New England, are rising (due to isobaric rebound) while much of the east coast from New Jersey to Florida are sinking.
Rainfall is hte trickiest to predict because it interfaces with temperature, ocean currents and wind patterns.
tl;dr - average changes across the US (or the globe) will not be uniform.
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Here's a website showing the predicted climate change with several models:
http://www.climatewizard.org/
Overall it appears the Great Plains is at highest risk of increasing temperature, while Texas and the Southwest extending into southern California are at highest risk of precipitation decline. There aren't huge differences between locations in the US, however. The other caveat is that these are average temperatures, not maximum temperatures.
This is a good website for more details at a state level:
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/ca
This website gives more granular data with good graphs. You may disappear for a few days looking through this!
https://toolkit.climate.gov/tools/climate-explorer
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tl;dr - average changes across the US (or the globe) will not be uniform.
I've spent much of my professional life dealing with various aspects of west coast climate change. The general consensus seems to be that California is going to get a little drier, and British Columbia is going to get a little wetter, but everywhere is going to get a little warmer. Along with the "warmer" part comes increased variability in rainfall, and increased water use by vegetation. That means that even in the parts that are going to get "wetter" due to slight (<10%) increases in precip, they will end up with less water available to rivers and aquifer due to the enhanced interception by thirsty plants.
It's really the temperature signal this is going to swamp everything else. It just has cascading effects on every other part of the climate system, like increased evaporation from lakes and streams, increased transpiration by plants, increased irrigation demand by farmers, increased rates of succession in forest ecosystems, increased glacier melt rates, increased storm and flood intensity, etc. There are very few parts of the climate in my corner of the world that are going to get any better due to future climate change.
Now if I lived in Canada, it might be a different story. One of my old friends started a "Canadians for Global Warming" club in college.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable, and unstoppable. Where I now live was, 10K years ago, 5 miles deep in ice. Same average insolation, just a slightly different orbit around the sun. In that era, the Sahara Desert was the Sahara Paradise. We don't know where will be dry or wet, warmer or cooler.
I wouldn't live right on the coast, since the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable... the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
You do see the irony here, right? First you claim "utterly unpredictable" and then you proceed to make predictions.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable, and unstoppable. Where I now live was, 10K years ago, 5 miles deep in ice. Same average insolation, just a slightly different orbit around the sun. In that era, the Sahara Desert was the Sahara Paradise. We don't know where will be dry or wet, warmer or cooler.
I wouldn't live right on the coast, since the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
I take a bit of offense to the statements above, and have to call out some parts that is just plain wrong. Like Sol, most of my professional career has been dealing with aspects of a changing climate, only my work focuses primarily in the N. Atlantic whereas Sol's out in the PNW.
To say that we have 'no idea' is basically refuting the work of tens of thousands of our best and brightest, as well as ignoring the substantial historical records we've painstakingly reconstructed, most in the last decade or so. The truth is that we have a very good idea of what changes our climate has undergone, and where and how things will change in the future. Nearly all the uncertainty of climate predictions comes down to what we do as humans - do we continue being dicks to the environment or do we drastically throttle back?
It's also patently false that the sea has been gradually rising for 10k years, and paints the global climate as some sort of ever-shifting target, always either slowly rising or slowly falling. That's wrong. Global climate exists in a series of steps, with numerous feedback mechanisms to keep things in one state for milennia until its knocked into a different regime. What really scares me as a climate scientist is looking back at previous climates and realizing that *none* of them have held stable at +2ºC of temperatures (baseline 1900). Instead every warming period has plateaued at a much higher level. In other words, 'holding' the planet to 2ºC may not be possible.
Then there's the old canard about the 'position of the sun' (Milancovitch cycles) and the suggestion that we should be warming because of it. no. If we hadn't monkeyed so much with the climate already we would be in a cooling phase. And of course there's the latest excuse - that it is 'unstoppable'. Hogwash. We (humans) are the root casue of the current shifts, ergo we can and have changed things. It's up to us whether we want to see +6ºC in 200 years or if we fight to revert back to this blissful sweetspot we've occupied for the last several thousands years. Speaking of which, it's no coincidence that our civilizations rose and population expanded and intelligence increased during a rather remarkable time when our climate was in this 'goldilocks zone'. Primates had been around through several climate changes but it was this latest one that gave rise to modern humans.
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The thing that seems to be the most difficult to predict, prevent, and endure will be the dying off of plant life caused by fires, prolonged droughts, and the difficulty for plants to recover.
Animals can relocate & migrate, but plants can't. Once the plants are gone from an area there's nothing for most of the animals to return to.
Humans & their agriculture will be competing more than ever with wildlife in the areas that they've both migrated to.
There are huge land masses in northern North America and also Aisa, which will be good for Canada & Russia.
I'm in the NC mountains and we've had 25 days of rain in the past month. This will probably be a comfortable place for quite a while, as long as fires don't become a problem.
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Green Eggs w/o ham:
"Animals can relocate & migrate, but plants can't. Once the plants are gone from an area there's nothing for most of the animals to return to. "
Animals can relocate?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/09/without-action-on-climate-change-say-goodbye-to-polar-bears/?utm_term=.42dba087adc4 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/09/without-action-on-climate-change-say-goodbye-to-polar-bears/?utm_term=.42dba087adc4)
Article says Polar Bears will be gone. I guess if there is no more cold arctic areas, they won't be around.
Now - I don't really like Polar Bears. They eat people. However, I hate to see them go. You can make really cool rugs from them.
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re: migration - people tend to have a really limited view of what an animal is. Ask the average lay-person to name as many animals as they can in 60 seconds and chances are they will be almost entirely mammals, maybe with a couple birds thrown in. That makes up just a fraction of the animal kingdom.
Some, like mussels, are sessile their entire adult life and can't migrate into new habitats. Others, like polar species, have no where to go in a warming climate. The Caribbean corals are especially vulnerable, as it may become too hot an acidic for their existing homes, but if you go slightly north into Georgia or South Carolina there's a distinct lack of hard substrate due to the geography, so they're screwed too. Then as pecunia hinted at, many species are either symbiotic or dependent on other flaura or fauna. Break one of those links and they die too, even if they could have survived the physical environment.
FWIW, I like Polar Bears, even though they (very occasionally) DO eat people. IMO they are one of the most impressive creatures on earth, capable of swimming 100 miles of open ice-clogged water and catching 500lbs seals with their bare paws.
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re: migration - people tend to have a really limited view of what an animal is. Ask the average lay-person to name as many animals as they can in 60 seconds and chances are they will be almost entirely mammals, maybe with a couple birds thrown in. That makes up just a fraction of the animal kingdom.
Some, like mussels, are sessile their entire adult life and can't migrate into new habitats. Others, like polar species, have no where to go in a warming climate. The Caribbean corals are especially vulnerable, as it may become too hot an acidic for their existing homes, but if you go slightly north into Georgia or South Carolina there's a distinct lack of hard substrate due to the geography, so they're screwed too. Then as pecunia hinted at, many species are either symbiotic or dependent on other flaura or fauna. Break one of those links and they die too, even if they could have survived the physical environment.
FWIW, I like Polar Bears, even though they (very occasionally) DO eat people. IMO they are one of the most impressive creatures on earth, capable of swimming 100 miles of open ice-clogged water and catching 500lbs seals with their bare paws.
A world where there are no predators badass enough to occasionally eat humans is a world not worth living in, IMO.
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My point was animals depend on plants.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable... the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
You do see the irony here, right? First you claim "utterly unpredictable" and then you proceed to make predictions.
Yes Sol, you are right. I was exaggerating for effect, and the word 'utterly' was unnecessarily extreme. Some things are predictable, like the sea continuing to rise (in most areas, but not all, since the land is rebounding from the weight of the glaciers in some areas, and land is rising for tectonic reasons in others).
But we really don't know a lot. For one example, in the last warm era, the Sahara was wet. If the climate warms will it be wet again? We know that the Southwestern US has had 'mega-droughts' periodically over the last few hundreds to thousands of years. Will it again, and when? Probably yes, but no one can predict when or exactly where, nor if Global Warming will exacerbate or ameliorate it. Will the low areas of Florida disappear under the sea as they have in the past?
For me, if not for others, global warming is too thin a reed to plan against on a personal scale. I wouldn't live in Seattle because of the risk of tsunamis and earthquakes, nor in LA. Likewise I wouldn't buy property in Galveston TX, knowing its history of flooding, but others have a higher tolerance for risk. There are plenty of at least somewhat predictable risks that we can plan against. Global warming isn't really one of them.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable, and unstoppable. Where I now live was, 10K years ago, 5 miles deep in ice. Same average insolation, just a slightly different orbit around the sun. In that era, the Sahara Desert was the Sahara Paradise. We don't know where will be dry or wet, warmer or cooler.
I wouldn't live right on the coast, since the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
I take a bit of offense to the statements above,
Then there's the old canard about the 'position of the sun' (Milancovitch cycles) and the suggestion that we should be warming because of it. no. If we hadn't monkeyed so much with the climate already we would be in a cooling phase. And of course there's the latest excuse - that it is 'unstoppable'. Hogwash. We (humans) are the root casue of the current shifts, ergo we can and have changed things. It's up to us whether we want to see +6ºC in 200 years or if we fight to revert back to this blissful sweetspot we've occupied for the last several thousands years.
Sorry to cause offense! In a 5-sentence blip of a post it is hard to be very detailed, and I do know that the seas have risen very rapidly at some points, receded a bit during cold periods and so on, but the general trend since the ice age has been a gradual rise, as seen from the current era.
I am interested in your whole post, but this particularly caught my attention. Somehow we can calibrate our actions to specifically hit a sweet spot of temperature, like that of 1900? Tricky.
I do believe climate change is unstoppable. There are too many factors beyond human control. We can cut CO2 emissions, smog, particulates, sulfur, all the filth of human industry. Good. I don't think we can affect ocean currents or precession. Climate will change.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable, and unstoppable. Where I now live was, 10K years ago, 5 miles deep in ice. Same average insolation, just a slightly different orbit around the sun. In that era, the Sahara Desert was the Sahara Paradise. We don't know where will be dry or wet, warmer or cooler.
I wouldn't live right on the coast, since the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
I take a bit of offense to the statements above,
Then there's the old canard about the 'position of the sun' (Milancovitch cycles) and the suggestion that we should be warming because of it. no. If we hadn't monkeyed so much with the climate already we would be in a cooling phase. And of course there's the latest excuse - that it is 'unstoppable'. Hogwash. We (humans) are the root casue of the current shifts, ergo we can and have changed things. It's up to us whether we want to see +6ºC in 200 years or if we fight to revert back to this blissful sweetspot we've occupied for the last several thousands years.
Sorry to cause offense! In a 5-sentence blip of a post it is hard to be very detailed, and I do know that the seas have risen very rapidly at some points, receded a bit during cold periods and so on, but the general trend since the ice age has been a gradual rise, as seen from the current era.
I am interested in your whole post, but this particularly caught my attention. Somehow we can calibrate our actions to specifically hit a sweet spot of temperature, like that of 1900? Tricky.
I do believe climate change is unstoppable. There are too many factors beyond human control. We can cut CO2 emissions, smog, particulates, sulfur, all the filth of human industry. Good. I don't think we can affect ocean currents or precession. Climate will change.
Technology has the potential to change all those things, it's really the only solution. Whether that will come too late, we will find out i guess.
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The thing about climate change is it is utterly unpredictable, and unstoppable. Where I now live was, 10K years ago, 5 miles deep in ice. Same average insolation, just a slightly different orbit around the sun. In that era, the Sahara Desert was the Sahara Paradise. We don't know where will be dry or wet, warmer or cooler.
I wouldn't live right on the coast, since the sea has been gradually rising for the last 10K years and will probably continue to do so until the next ice age. Also, all coastal areas are subject to occasional tsunamis, every few hundred years.
I take a bit of offense to the statements above,
Then there's the old canard about the 'position of the sun' (Milancovitch cycles) and the suggestion that we should be warming because of it. no. If we hadn't monkeyed so much with the climate already we would be in a cooling phase. And of course there's the latest excuse - that it is 'unstoppable'. Hogwash. We (humans) are the root casue of the current shifts, ergo we can and have changed things. It's up to us whether we want to see +6ºC in 200 years or if we fight to revert back to this blissful sweetspot we've occupied for the last several thousands years.
Sorry to cause offense! In a 5-sentence blip of a post it is hard to be very detailed, and I do know that the seas have risen very rapidly at some points, receded a bit during cold periods and so on, but the general trend since the ice age has been a gradual rise, as seen from the current era.
I am interested in your whole post, but this particularly caught my attention. Somehow we can calibrate our actions to specifically hit a sweet spot of temperature, like that of 1900? Tricky.
I do believe climate change is unstoppable. There are too many factors beyond human control. We can cut CO2 emissions, smog, particulates, sulfur, all the filth of human industry. Good. I don't think we can affect ocean currents or precession. Climate will change.
I'm glad we are continuing this dialog and that your post was not meant to offend. I'd just like to respond to your last point right now -
We have altered the climate. It's not that it is going to happen in the near future, but past tense. Ipso facto, climate change is not unstoppable; we've already shown that we can alter it and are continuing to do so.
Perhaps what you meant is that our future trend is unstoppable. Hogwash. We could certainly alter the climate and make it much, much warmer if we lifted all the enviornmental considerations and started belching unfiltered coal plants for all of our energy, so that's false to.
Maybe you meant we are incapable of reversing the damage we've already done (which parallels the talking point of 'it's just too expensive!'). That is also false, though I will say right now it would be harder (especially politically) to reverse the what we've done than push it even further along. We know how to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We even know how to pull it back in (hey, thankfully plants learned that trick over a billion years ago!). What we lack is the will to do it, and that's because people stand around making statements like we've seen here.
ETA: Wanted to come back to that '1900' comment. That date is simply parlance for the widespread use of the combustion engine. As I mentioned earlier the planet has existed in numerous different stable states before, with one of them lasting for about 10,000 years (up and until the early 20th century) It isn't that we would try to keep the climate at whatever it was on January 1st, 1990, but rather that we could have a climate that resembles what we've every civilization on earth has developed under, or we will will slide into something much, much warmer, one where we entirely lose places like Osaka and the entirety of Florida.
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re: migration - people tend to have a really limited view of what an animal is. Ask the average lay-person to name as many animals as they can in 60 seconds and chances are they will be almost entirely mammals, maybe with a couple birds thrown in. That makes up just a fraction of the animal kingdom.
Some, like mussels, are sessile their entire adult life and can't migrate into new habitats. Others, like polar species, have no where to go in a warming climate. The Caribbean corals are especially vulnerable, as it may become too hot an acidic for their existing homes, but if you go slightly north into Georgia or South Carolina there's a distinct lack of hard substrate due to the geography, so they're screwed too. Then as pecunia hinted at, many species are either symbiotic or dependent on other flaura or fauna. Break one of those links and they die too, even if they could have survived the physical environment.
FWIW, I like Polar Bears, even though they (very occasionally) DO eat people. IMO they are one of the most impressive creatures on earth, capable of swimming 100 miles of open ice-clogged water and catching 500lbs seals with their bare paws.
A world where there are no predators badass enough to occasionally eat humans is a world not worth living in, IMO.
A world where humans are the only surviving animals meets your criteria as a world worth living in. Just watch out for kuru, it's a bitch of a disease.
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Two words to watch out for: Sink holes. Sure, we've seen this forever in Florida and because Kentucky is built on top of caves that are eroding, it's heading down that path, but lots of places are seeing sink holes forming. I won't pretend to even know why. Florida and Kentucky are easy to figure out.
I guess I'm lucky. If I dig down 4 feet anywhere near my house, I hit solid granite. So not much of a risk where I am.
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Two words to watch out for: Sink holes. Sure, we've seen this forever in Florida and because Kentucky is built on top of caves that are eroding, it's heading down that path, but lots of places are seeing sink holes forming. I won't pretend to even know why. Florida and Kentucky are easy to figure out.
I guess I'm lucky. If I dig down 4 feet anywhere near my house, I hit solid granite. So not much of a risk where I am.
Fracking, maybe?
And to bring my Canada love more on topic, I have wondered if Canada will benefit from climate change, or at least, if southern Canada might be a desirable place to relocate to if possible (or northern Maine/Vermont/New Hampshire/New York state).
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Two words to watch out for: Sink holes. Sure, we've seen this forever in Florida and because Kentucky is built on top of caves that are eroding, it's heading down that path, but lots of places are seeing sink holes forming. I won't pretend to even know why. Florida and Kentucky are easy to figure out.
I guess I'm lucky. If I dig down 4 feet anywhere near my house, I hit solid granite. So not much of a risk where I am.
Fracking, maybe?
And to bring my Canada love more on topic, I have wondered if Canada will benefit from climate change, or at least, if southern Canada might be a desirable place to relocate to if possible (or northern Maine/Vermont/New Hampshire/New York state).
Canada, of course, is huge and so effects will be varied from region to region. Thankfully Canada has an abundance of fresh water and comparatively small population. Some cities like Halifax are actually sinking while most of New England is still rising.
If you want to really dig into the weeds about what different cities and regions in Canada are likely to experience, you can read about it here:
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/environment/resources/publications/impacts-adaptation/reports/assessments/2014/16309 (http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/environment/resources/publications/impacts-adaptation/reports/assessments/2014/16309)
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Two words to watch out for: Sink holes. Sure, we've seen this forever in Florida and because Kentucky is built on top of caves that are eroding, it's heading down that path, but lots of places are seeing sink holes forming. I won't pretend to even know why. Florida and Kentucky are easy to figure out.
I guess I'm lucky. If I dig down 4 feet anywhere near my house, I hit solid granite. So not much of a risk where I am.
Fracking, maybe?
Sinkholes are a geologic problem, not a climate problem. They are caused by living in places built on rocks that dissolve too easily in rain water, like limestones and dolomites.
They are not caused by fracking. Fracking injects water (and sand and some chemicals) deep underground to where oil and gas are stored, usually thousands of feet. Sinkholes are rarely more than a hundred feet deep, because a cave deeper than that has a roof strong enough not to collapse.
In cases where sinkholes are caused by humans instead of natural rainfall, it's usually badly leaking water pipes that are the culprit.
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Atlanta is having water problems already. They'd really like to tap into the Tennessee River but Tennessee won't let them. Guess they need to get far more serious about water conservation.
Atlanta was destined to have water problems from its inception. It was built on the Eastern Continental Divide because that's where it was the easiest to run a railroad without having to cross rivers. But a continental divide is also not a good place to get water even before factoring in climate change.
Even if Atlanta were allowed access to the Tennessee River, it would be a massive project to pipe the water >100 miles through rough terrain. Of course that's already been done to get water to L.A., but still a huge project.
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dougeles:
Atlanta, Georgia gets 51 inches of rain, on average, per year. The US average is 39 inches of rain per year. Atlanta averages 1 inches of snow per year. The US average is 26 inches of snow per year.
Seems like cisterns or something similar could go a long way to get water in Atlanta if legally permitted.
Bermuda does it:
https://www.enterbermuda.com/blog/how-bermuda-gets-its-water (https://www.enterbermuda.com/blog/how-bermuda-gets-its-water)
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Cisterns are a ridiculously expensive way to get water. Not recommended, unless you're stuck on an island with no other options.
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Michigan is pretty well protected from the worst effects of climate change. We don't get earthquakes, rarely get tornados, and don't have to worry about hurricanes.
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Michigan is pretty well protected from the worst effects of climate change. We don't get earthquakes, rarely get tornados, and don't have to worry about hurricanes.
Yes, but you are stuck with the tigers and lions. Maybe if climate change pushes them to other cities I'll reconsider :-P
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dougeles:
Atlanta, Georgia gets 51 inches of rain, on average, per year. The US average is 39 inches of rain per year. Atlanta averages 1 inches of snow per year. The US average is 26 inches of snow per year.
Seems like cisterns or something similar could go a long way to get water in Atlanta if legally permitted.
Bermuda does it:
https://www.enterbermuda.com/blog/how-bermuda-gets-its-water (https://www.enterbermuda.com/blog/how-bermuda-gets-its-water)
Cisterns are a ridiculously expensive way to get water. Not recommended, unless you're stuck on an island with no other options.
Very impractical where annual rainfall is concentrated in one season. I estimate it would cost about $10,000 to put in 10,000 gallon rainwater catchment. In an area with wet winters and dry summers, capacity only gets used once per year. If desalination costs $2000/acre foot and retail rates are twice that, it would take over 80 years to spend that much on the water that the rainwater system could provide.
Rainwater catchment works for Bermuda because they only need to store a week or two's worth of water at a time. But Atlanta also usually gets year round rainfall, so rainwater catchment might make sense there too.
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Michigan is pretty well protected from the worst effects of climate change. We don't get earthquakes, rarely get tornados, and don't have to worry about hurricanes.
Yes, but you are stuck with the tigers and lions. Maybe if climate change pushes them to other cities I'll reconsider :-P
And Detroit already looks like it's been leveled by a natural disaster . . . so there's really no place to go but up!
:P
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Detroit's is resurging in the downtown area.
But I prefer other parts of Michigan.
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Michigan is pretty well protected from the worst effects of climate change. We don't get earthquakes, rarely get tornados, and don't have to worry about hurricanes.
Yes, but you are stuck with the tigers and lions. Maybe if climate change pushes them to other cities I'll reconsider :-P
And Detroit already looks like it's been leveled by a natural disaster . . . so there's really no place to go but up!
:P
I think there will be resistance to having all those lower Michigan (LP) folks moving (UP). UP is the Upper Peninsula
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dougeles:
Atlanta, Georgia gets 51 inches of rain, on average, per year. The US average is 39 inches of rain per year. Atlanta averages 1 inches of snow per year. The US average is 26 inches of snow per year.
Seems like cisterns or something similar could go a long way to get water in Atlanta if legally permitted.
Bermuda does it:
https://www.enterbermuda.com/blog/how-bermuda-gets-its-water (https://www.enterbermuda.com/blog/how-bermuda-gets-its-water)
It's a good idea but I just don't see the people of Gwinnett County all installing cisterns. I think they'd go to war with Tennessee first.