happy New Year!

Yep. Who needs enemies when you can have "journalists" >:-} ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 

Yep. And who needs a Grinch when you have Jim Thompson?

Global warming helps you live longer!

Cheers

John Larkin Wrote in message:

All made possible by plentiful, relatively inexpensive oil. Soon that era will be over, and the era of scarce, expensive oil will be upon us. When that happens industrial civilization will come to an end, and most likely the human race along with it.

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No, the major contribution to worldwide well-being is engineers.

Soon

What, we'll run out of gas and then all of us will die one Tuesday afternoon?

We have hundreds of years supply of oil, gas, and especially coal, and we keep finding more. One of these days we may have viable solar power and fusion. Fission nukes work now. Things will probably keep getting better. Sorry.

Solar (and wind) takes one form of incident radiation and passes it thru a process that allows human to make stuff move before it passes to exactly the same heat sink. Net zero. Free lunch. If you don't count the energy cost of building the processes that capture/process that incident radiation for human consumption.

Fusion takes some mass that was cold and produces heat. That energy passes thru some process that allows humans to move stuff before it passes to exactly the same heat sink. Net Positive thermal energy dissipated into the atmosphere and to some extent the mass of the top layers of the earth's surface.

So, the question is, how much fusion energy can we generate before we start to worry about melting some ice?

years-in-history.html

At present renewable energy - wind and solar - costs about twice as much as energy generated by burning fossil carbon, but it's perfectly capable of s upplying 100% of our energy needs. Oil doesn't have to get particularly sca rce or expensive to make renewable energy the cheaper (and much more reliab le) option.

Installing the volume of generating gear needed to let us rely on renewable sources for most of our energy needs would probably - on its own - raise t he manufacturing volume by enough (roughly a factor of ten) to halve the ca pital cost per kilowatt of renewable energy anyway.

This doesn't sound like an end-of-civilisation scenario, or the precursor t o a population crash. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse"

eed

does suggest that the current community leaders, who are making a lot of mo ney out of digging up and selling fossil carbon, would keep on doing it rig ht up to and beyond the point where it threatens their personal survival - the Koch brother's investment in denialist propaganda is a fairly obvious e xhibition of this sort of behaviour. Happily, they haven't got an exclusive grip on the levers of power.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

John Larkin Wrote in message:

Nah, what will happen is that the energy required to extract a gallon of oil will become greater than the energy contained in a gallon of oil. At that point it doesn't matter how much is still left in the ground. Taking into account other costs associated with the petroleum industry besides extraction it will probably cease to be financially viable well before that point is reached. We won't all die then; extinctions don't work that way. The Neanderthals struggled on for millenia on the coasts of Spain after they were gone from Western Europe, but their time was essentially over once they had their own environmental catastrophe - Homo Sapiens arrived on the scene and started competing for resources/interbreeding with them.

Is that hundreds of years worth figured on _current_ usage levels, or the exponentially increasing usage that is actually happening? That kind of makes a big difference in the calculation. We can't use anywhere near all of it anyway, for reasons mentioned previously and that I don't want to live in a world where the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are gone and sea level is 15 meters higher than it is today, though if I remember some of your older posts I guess you don't believe in that stuff.

I'm pessimistic on solar. It's currently what, 0.3% of US production? I belive Google was too. It's fusion where your reactor is an AU away. The amount of land area youd have to cover with panels/mirrors/power towers to make up a significant proportion of the energy provided by fossils boggles the mind.

Is commercial fusion still 50 years away? Fission seems the most promising, though we still don't have a good solution to the waste problem. I'd be OK with new reactors being built; it's not all the fault of environmentalist NIMBYs that they aren't. Three Mile Island taught potential investors that a however many billion dollar asset could end up a however many billion dollar liability in about a half hour, and I don't think Fukushima has helped matters. Is the free market working for us here?

Whatever renewable sources we use in an attempt to supplement or replace fossils, I think it will become clear that our current consumer society is unsustainable when faced with the limits to growth that nature will impose.

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t-years-in-history.html

We've got viable solar power now. It costs about twice as much per kilowatt hour as the power currently generated by burning fossil carbon. If we buil t ten times as much solar plant - as we could - we'd probably halve the cap ital cost per kilowatt and be level-pegging with fossil carbon.

If you do, solar power costs roughly twice as much as energy produced by bu rning fossil carbon. If we built enough solar power plant to replace our fo ssil carbon-based generating plant the economies of scale solar power would be a cheap as fossil-carbon derived power (and wouldn't be contributing to global warming).

Quite a lot more than the total energy we use now. If we stopped dumping CO

2 into the atmosphere, and the CO2 level fell back to the normal inter-glac ial 270ppm (rather than the 400ppm we've got to now) we could radiate even more.

Sticking the fusion plant in space and using microwave links to beam down j ust the power we needed would let us do even better.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

There is no "energy contained in a gallon of oil". The energy becomes available after you mix the oil with oxygen and ignite the mixture.

10 metres higher. And that's probably a couple of centuries away - though the way ice sheets start sliding rapidly when they get warm enough, predicting exactly when is tricky. They don't melt in place.

Actually, it doesn't boggle those minds that have taken the trouble to work it out.

They figure on about 0.4% of the world's land area (mostly solar farms), with about another 0.6% lost to "spacing out" (mostly wind farms).

Wrong, at least as far as energy goes. Raw materials may be more problematic, but materials science is good at finding new materials to handle old jobs.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

On 30/12/14 01.51, mike wrote: ...

...

Hi Mike and others

We now have the possibility to make CO2-neutral "free energy" all night and (even heavily clouded) days - everywhere on earth. I will presumeably get some comments on this claim :-) I am two armed ! I know that the energy per square meter, will be much lower than 1000 W/m2:

Use a heat-IR selective surface (Stanford-like) with e.g. a Stirling Engine, an electric generator - and two heat pipes:

gyroscope.com: Precision Stirling Engine:

Quote: "... Ultra Low temperature difference Stirling Engine ...

engine will run. ..."

"Magic" heat-IR selective surface:

Stanford School of Engineering. (2014, November 26). High-tech mirror beams heat away from buildings into space. ScienceDaily:

Quote: "... "As a result of professor Fan's work, we can now [use radiative cooling], not only at night but counter-intuitively in the daytime as well." ... The first part of the coating's one-two punch radiates heat-bearing infrared light directly into space ... This multilayered coating also acts as a highly efficient mirror, preventing 97 percent of sunlight from striking the building and heating it up ... Together, the radiation and reflection make the photonic radiative

air during the day. The multilayered material is just 1.8 microns thick, thinner than the thinnest aluminum foil. It is made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver. These layers are not a uniform thickness, but are instead engineered to create a new material. Its internal structure is tuned to radiate infrared rays at a frequency that lets them pass into space without warming the air near the building. ..."

Glenn

PS: Happy new year

(Answer to sci.electronics.design )

On 30/12/14 01.51, mike wrote: ... > Solar (and wind) takes one form of incident radiation and passes it thru > a process > that allows human to make stuff move before it passes to exactly the > same heat sink. Net zero. Free lunch. If you don't count the energy > cost of building the processes that capture/process that > incident radiation for human consumption. ...

Hi Mike and others

We now have the possibility to make CO2-neutral "free energy" all night and (even heavily clouded) days - everywhere on earth. I will presumeably get some comments on this claim :-) I am two armed ! I know that the energy per square meter, will be much lower than 1000 W/m2:

Use a heat-IR selective surface (Stanford-like) with e.g. a Stirling Engine, an electric generator - and two heat pipes:

gyroscope.com: Precision Stirling Engine:

Quote: "... Ultra Low temperature difference Stirling Engine ...

engine will run. ..."

"Magic" heat-IR selective surface:

Stanford School of Engineering. (2014, November 26). High-tech mirror beams heat away from buildings into space. ScienceDaily:

Quote: "... "As a result of professor Fan's work, we can now [use radiative cooling], not only at night but counter-intuitively in the daytime as well." ... The first part of the coating's one-two punch radiates heat-bearing infrared light directly into space ... This multilayered coating also acts as a highly efficient mirror, preventing 97 percent of sunlight from striking the building and heating it up ... Together, the radiation and reflection make the photonic radiative

air during the day. The multilayered material is just 1.8 microns thick, thinner than the thinnest aluminum foil. It is made of seven layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver. These layers are not a uniform thickness, but are instead engineered to create a new material. Its internal structure is tuned to radiate infrared rays at a frequency that lets them pass into space without warming the air near the building. ..."

Glenn

PS: Happy new year

That delusional idiot has a history of writing about the best years in history theme. It's a waste of time to give that waste of oxygen the time of day.

Well, at least we now know that not everyone is happy.

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Did you think that everyone was, before? 

John Fields 

He takes the Daily Telegraph seriously enough to post their rubbish.

What he "thinks" isn't worth worrying about.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Yes, that will happen all at once.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

--
John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

Not to mention that we somehow managed to survive the 170k years of our history on the planet. Most of the time not exactly comfortable conditions, but far from dying out...

Best regards, Piotr