OT: The Power Grid Will Fail within 36 Months

Mike Terrell is an ignorant nitwit. It meant that they were in jobs "vital to the war effort" and couldn't go off and join the army, or - in my father's case - the air force, where his university friends had formed a "chemical warfare" unit (in fact for checking water supplies on air force bases for bacterial contamination and similar taks handled by industrial chemists). He was a bit peeved about it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Australia had conscription - they called it National Service - during WW2, but conscripts were only required to serve within Australia's national boundaries or in Australian territories. It was reintroduced in 1951 for Korean War, but no Australian conscripts served in Korea. It was stopped in 1959, six months before I would have been affected.

It was reintroduced again in 1964 for the Vietnam War by which I was too old to be affected. My youner brother was also too old - by six hours - to be affected. Since he had been born six weeks premature, there was some talk of thinking ahead at an early age.

My youngest brother did have to register for the Vietnam draft, but he was doing medicine, and the army wanted him to finish his course before they drafted him, and the Vietnam conscription happened to be terminated before that happened, so none of us were affected.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

For Korea - sort of. For Vietnam - definitely.

Australia never conscripted women for the armed forces. They could be "manpowered" into industries deemed vital to the war effort. As a chemistry graduate, my mother was "manpowered" into a job in the paper industry, thus freeing up a man to join the army.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Had a birthday recently?

My first conscious memory is of getting separated from my parents during the victory parade through Adelaide in 1946 so I don't remember anything from WW2. The phrase "reserved occupation" was the one my parents always used when talking about their experiences from that period.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

When my father volunteered for the Australian Army when war was first declared in 1939, he was told that his occupation was in an industry vital to the war effort - thus reserved - and he had to stay where he was.

My mother had been doing an M.Sc. on mastitis in cows at the time, which was deemed not vital to the war effort, so she was "manpowered" into a job in the same industry as my father - and in fact ended up in the same laboratory - replacing a similarly qualified male industrial chemist who could thus be freed to go off and fight in the army.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Whether or not counting energy used by scrubbers (not much), whether a coal plant has scrubbers or not. The same is true with oil and natural gas fired power plants.

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

There is the HadSST2 sea surface temperature index, where there are not many asphalt parking lots or heat islands.

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

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Sure. But extra damage from radiation just adds to the other sources of injury. There's no threshld below which radiation does no harm, and

- equally obviously - radiation doses that are comparable or smaller than other mechanisms of DNA damage don't shorten your life all that much.

Occam's razor says that if breaks in the DNA are the damage mechanism, any break is going to do some damage. Cancer rates aren't extrapolated from dose levels where repair is insignificant, but from dose levels where it took years for the victims to accumulate enough damage to exhibit an increased risk if getting cancer. If you are exposed to radiations levels where repair is insignificant, you don't last long enough to die of cancer.

It isn't. Bullet wounds are different in kind from scratches - they disrupt the tissue over an extended area, messing up the blood supply to the tissue that's going to have to be repaired in a way that doesn't happen with scratches.

Radiation damage is a lot simpler - single sub-atomic particles break discrete strands of DNA, and the repair isn't always perfect.

By making a false analogy with bullet injuries, you've made an implicit claim whihc happens to be wrong.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In , Bill Sloman wrote in part:

According to Met Office version of HadCRUT3, from 1850 to 1920 global temperature averaged about .3 degree C below the "baseline" (nominally the

1961 to 1990 average). CO2 was not up by much in 1920.

Also, notice a periodic component having a variation easily .15 degree from long term trend. We are near one of these peaks, so the long term trend now appears to me .1-.15 degree below the recent peak in smoothed global temperature - as in around or maybe a little over .3 degree C. So, excluding efects of multidecadal oscillations, it looks like global temperature has warmed about .6, maybe .65 degree, not .9 degree.

As of 2005, about 38% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas effect was caused not by CO2, but by methane, nitrous oxide, and halocarbons. So, make that around .37-.4 degree from CO2. The other .23-.25 degree has good hope of not increasing much, since the non-CO2 gases are largely stabilized. In fact, the effect of halocarbons has been slightly decreasing.

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

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CO2

We know that you are a right-wing nitwit. There's no need to recycle denialist propganda to remind us - once again - that you don't know what you are talking about.

The undeniable fact that a few US Meteorological Service weather stations have stayed put as the microclimate around them changes can't rationally be extrapolated into a claim that global tmepratures have not risen by about 0.9C since about 1900, and it doesn't affect the point that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that the current atmospheric CO2 level of 385 ppm is 37.5% higher than it had been - 280 ppm - over the past couple of millenia. It was about 315 ppm in 1958, when the Mauna Loa measurements started, so we've appreciably strengthened the greenhouse effect since then.

The only people who are willing to deny that there is greenhouse warming going on at the monent are denialist propaganda merchants, paid by Exxon-Mobil and the rest of the fossil-carbon extraction industry to cast doubt on the scientific evidence, so that they (the fossil carbon extrction industry) can keep on making money out of digging up a selling fossil carbon for a few more years. We don't exactly know how fast the global temperature is going to rise if we keep on going at the current rate - current estimates range from 1.1 to 6.4=B0C in the year 2100 with 3.75=B0C as the likeliest figure - and we don't know hw much this is going to change our environment, but we do know quite enough to know that this sort of temperature rise is going to get us into some kind of trouble, and that we'd be well advised to limit the atmospheric CO2 concentration at something under 450 ppm.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There are some things that one needs to say to Rich Grise that one knows that he isn't going to process, so they have to be adressed to anybody else who happens to read the post.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

OISM isn't a site I would use about biological effects from particle radiation. Not that they can't have good information there, but Art Robinson (who runs it, mostly) has some pretty "odd" ideas about the healthy effects of radiation that might suggest at least _some_ caution in reading stuff there. He _is_ well-trained... but has extreme, right wing politics and very eclectic ideas on the issue of human exposures to radiation, too.

Aside from that topic, OISM is a complete laugh and not worth any time, at all. Almost nothing useful unless you care about home-schooling conservative Christian children and protecting them from exposure to good science training.

Jon

I have no objection internalising external costs. Indeed, I'm all in favour of it, because it leads to higher economic efficiency. But we need to internalise all costs, not just some. By all means internalise the cost of CO2 emissions, but you also have to internalise the costs of the daytime variability and night-time unavailability of solar power.

Do that, and I'm confident that unsubsidised grid-attached solar panels would not exist because their true cost of reducing CO2 is certainly higher than any likely internalised CO2 cost.

Rising power prices in NSW are already becoming a political issue. Sooner or later, the public will decide that nuclear power is not such a bad option after all.

BTW, I really hate the idea of CO2 sequestration. The accidental escape of large amounts of CO2, by an unanticipated mechanism, could be a disaster on a scale not previously seen anywhere. Chernobyl would look trivial by comparison.

Sylvia.

I don't follow that. The lethal concentration of CO2 is around 12%. Much below that, nothing much happens. A big CO2 release is unlikely to kill anyone, and would have no long-term effects.

It's not like CO2 is toxic, or radioactive, or a "pollutant." It's perfectly natural. Plants love it. A rum and coke, or beer, tastes awful without CO2. Human lungs dump around 5% CO2.

John

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Perhaps, but part of the reason for encouraging people to buy solar panels is to kick-start the process of lowering the cost of the panels by getting them produced in larger numbers - economy of scale. The rule of thumb is that a ten-fold increase in production volume halves the price. Since the process mostly works by motivating manufactureres to find new - cheaper (and usually more capital-intensive) - ways of making their products, the curve of price against production volume tends to look more like a staircase than a smooth curve.

Really? The Lake Nyos incident did kill 1700 people and 3500 livestock,

but it's difficult to imagine geological sequestration failing in a way that would delivering that much CO2 to the surface without some kind of early warning. Dumping the CO2 in a deep ocean trench could set up a closer parallel, but you'd need a deep sub-surface volcano to get the the saturated water out of the trench and high enough in the ocean that it could form bubbles.

As far as I know there aren't any deep subsurface volcanoes, and there's enough methane clathrate on the sea floor that such a volcano could do just as much damage without access to any human-sequestered CO2.

Chernobyl only killed seventy people directly, many fewer than Lake Nyos, but it did lead to the evacuation of 350,400 people, many more than those affected by the Lake Nyos incident, which had no long term effects (if you discount the little fountains that now drain the CO2 out of the depths of Lake Nyos).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The Oregon Institue of Science and Medicine has an entertaining write up on Sourcewatch

d_Medicine

They do seem to have formed a part of the denialist propaganda machine when they circulated the 1998 Oregon Petition.

It fits perfectly into the right-wing nutter story told by the book "The Merchants of Doubt".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Such large-scale fatalities as a result of CO2 have already occurred.

summarizes one such occurance... around 1700 deaths, at distances of up to 25 km away from the point of release.

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
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The problem is that CO2 hugs the ground, displacing the air. The result is death by asphyxiation. I could easily imagine an entire city being taken out.

Sylvia.

I did say by an unanticipated mechanism. CO2 in quantity is very dangerous. I think we need a much better reason for storing it underground than merely that it's economically convenient. If we can put CO2 underground, and expect it to stay there, then lets put radioactive waste down there instead.

Sylvia.