UK fuel theft

So, are folks "selfish" for opting to have kids/grandkids given the expected environment being left for them?

That 800 year number for CO2 subduction is probably ballpark correct.

Weathering of rocks and deep ocean circulations can slowly absorb CO2. Geoengineering by seeding the oceans with extra iron or crushed olivine could speed things up considerably by algal blooms and more alkaline seas. OTOH changing things so radically could be "interesting".

IMO are probably being over optimistic about these options:

As Larkin pointed out, this is a trivial source of Methane.

Both are correct and universally understood.

Unburnt is the British version while burned is the American equivalent. They are synonyms.

Joe

I did some math. In the absence of CO2 emission, the concentration can be expected to decay exponentionally, exp(-t/tau), at least initially. We see yearly CO2 variations of the order of 5 ppm on top of the current concentration of 400 ppm, so a relative variation of 0.0125 in either direction in just half a year. Putting that into the decay equation and solving for tau, I get forty years. Crude, but nothing like 800.

I'd like to know how they came up with 800 years.

Jeroen Belleman

My kids can beat up your non-existant kids.

But righties die faster :-P

There is more to it:

I don't really know, but if memory serves it came out of the "end of ice ages" data. The are big excursions in atmospheric CO2 at the beginnings and end of ice ages - from 270ppm during an interglacial to 180ppm during an ice age, and that seemed to be the time constant for those excursions.

Changes in snow cover/albedo were the driving force, and they seemed to happen faster.

Digging a bit deeper, upper-ocean equilibriation times seem to be a about 300 to 400 years. Deeper still and you get into very confusing stuff, about sea-floor spreading exposing fresh silicate rock for CO2 capture, and subductions zones dragging down carbonate rocks into the molten crust and cooking out their CO2.

The last time there was massive global warming - about 56 million years ago - there were mass extinction events.

You wouldn't like it if it happened. None of the crops that feed you - that have been selectively bred to do well at atmospheric CO2 levels around 270ppm - would like it either. There are bound to be weeds that would like it better, so you would probably starve pretty rapidly but natural variation would ensure that some species would do reasonably well (and adapt like fury to optimise themselves for the new conditions).

Slow breeding species like human being wouldn't do well.

Of course the primates showed just up after the PETM, so they replaced whatever had been occupying our ecological niche before the PETM.

But our plants are well adapted to 270 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So does heat, as Europe is demonstrating at the moment. You do have a enthusiasm for recycling the superficial crap you get fed by climate change denial propaganda, and can't seem to realise quite how gullible this makes you look.

You didn't apply for enough jobs.

John Larkin expects to be flattered more or less nonstop, and anybody who denies him his regular fix is "nasty".

For most of my career, programmers were cheaper than engineers, and if I showed signs of wanting to write a computer program (as system engineers frequently do), I got given a code monkey to do it for me. They got a lot better at it as the computers got faster.

Veggies and flowers are grown in greenhouses at 1000 PPM and more.

Crop yields have increased dramatically in the last hundred years. Selective breeding is fast and getting faster. Some of our favorite things didn't exist 30 years ago.

Mammals were invented in the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum.

They are hungry for CO2 and would like more. Something around 180 is plant starvation.

The cold/heat death ratio is estimated around 10. The euros should get more a/c, if their power grid could handle it.

No, I'm an engineer and I think.

We were just sitting on the deck finishing our Peets and admiring the view. It was borderline too cold.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

After being fired from my job in New Orleans, I spent six months exploring America for a fresh start. Travel expenses were covered by job interviews, so I did a lot of them all over the country.

An accidental event on the UC Berkeley campus made me pick San Francisco.

One of my interns just made the jump from a 2-year community college to junior year at Berkeley. That's unusual.

The guy was genuinely nasty. But HP did pay my expenses.

People love being called code monkeys.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Gerhard Hoffmann snipped-for-privacy@Arcor.De wrote: |---------------------------------------------------------| |"ps. is it unburnt or unburned? Thunderbird flags both."| |---------------------------------------------------------|

It is 'unburnt' but in countries - e.g. the U.S.A. - where they speak partially regularized approximations of English, they think it is 'unburned'.

American English is not regular in each respect though. E.g. 'air' and 'airplane' and 'airspace' and 'aerospace' are in American English. Cf. 'air' and 'aeroplane' and 'airspace' and 'aerospace' are in English English. These 2 words are different to each other: 'airspace' and 'aerospace'. English sucks. (S.

I get the impression that the UK has more mutually-incomprehensable accents than the US has. And the US is bigger.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

There are many words in English where there is an older version where the declension or the parallel is irregular, and the more modern version has been made regular.

Joe

Burned/unburned is more commonly used as the past tense of a verb while burnt/unburnt is an adjective.

You wouldn't say "burned umber" to describe that brownish pigment if the two are synonyms.

Similarly, laying is a verb that operates on a thing; lying defines a state (or the telling of an untruth).

But China is churning out solar cell at a great rate, and if you combine them with a Telsa power wall (or the cheaper, better Chinese equivalent) you can have electricity anywhere you want it. Nation=wide grids are so last-century.

And the sun was a bit smaller.

Greenhouses supply all the water and fertiliser the plants need, kill off weeds and insects, and supply an expensive product.

It's not the whole agricultural industry, just the boutique end of it.

Selective breeding for a new environment is tricky. You've got a find a place for your test plots in the new environment that doesn't actually exist yet.

Don't be silly. They were around and quite diverse before the dinosaurs got killed off 66 million years ago.

They'd expanded into most of the dinosaur niches during the previous eleven million years, and diversified again after the PETM had made a total mess of the ecology.

What a load of nonsense.

For what environment?

It's hard to get people to invest in air-conditioning that can handle an unpredecented heat wave.

You are more a tinkerer than an engineer, and you clearly recycle superficial crap without thinking about what it actually means.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Language evolves over time. The English have had longer to evolve their accents than the US has. Australia is about as big a the US but hasn't had a English-speaking population for nearly as long.

John Larkin claims to be able to think, but isn't all that good at it.

I got quite fond of the programmers who collaborated with me. Some of them were thoroughly brilliant (and one had a wife who was doing a Ph.D. on creating biodegradable polymer plastics). Code monkeys is in the same league as metal bashers and electron wranglers - a comic name.

Somebody who trots around calling himself an engineer may not get that.