DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Ocean Is Abnormally Warm

Personally, I think a big part of our society's problem is that many people seem to believe they just have to tell people what to think instead of teaching them how to think. Too many people think that if they believe something and they can find numbers somewhere to support it, it must be true. Any numbers that don't support it must be false.

Unfortunately, numbers don't always mean what people think they mean. The numbers are the numbers, but they don't actually tell reasons and implications by themselves. They don't tell the whole story.

I think a big part of our educational systems' problem is that we don't teach enough logic. People don't really understand what "numbers" do and don't actually say.

Come on guys, this is obviously fake news.

Global warming and climate change are all liberal hoaxes, remember?

You left out all the hot air being blown around by our politicians.

And all the gears grinding inside people's heads. Gotta be a lot of friction happening there.

I guess they could instead leave those gears idle and to rust.

Hoaxes? No.


Poorly explained and addressed? Yes.

That would explain the friction.

The choice is either try and address some of it or ignore all of it. The friction comes due to people claiming we shouldn't address any of it by using the excuse that some of it isn't all of it.

Those aren't the only choices. Perhaps it can seem that way to those with rusty gears who are used to letting other people do their thinking for them and seemingly believe that everything is binary.

The very fact that I established that CO2 emissions wasn't the only issue in and of itself shows I do not think it's binary. One of the problems is I don't see the other side coming up with any better or more inclusive plans. You're trying to present a point that I already said wasn't all inclusive. Yet it seems you avoided the actual point I made all together.

You presented a binary choice: "The choice is either try and address some of it or ignore all of it."

That's what I replied to. Your presentation of 2 options. The very definition of binary comes down to an either/or proposition.

If you don't think it's binary, why did you present the choices as such?

I didn't avoid the actual point you made. Rather, I couldn't find it. What point did you allegedly make and where did you make it?

It might have been in one of the posts I didn't click to expand. (I doubt it.) All your posts start out collapsed for me. Too bad for me, I have a hard time resisting curiosity. Maybe I am a little insane, I'm not sure why I keep hoping for a different result.

(Think I'm going to call it a day here. After dealing with VA healthcare the past few days, I don't think I'm in the right frame of mind for dealing with any more shenanigans.)

It was so obvious anyone could see it. If 5000 children are starving it doesn't mean you shouldn't feed any of them just because you can't feed all of them.

That's a completely different argument.

Now if you said if 5000 children are starving and someone came up with a plan to magically feed all the children ambrosia of the gods and said there would be world peace and an end to hunger it would be a closer parallel.

And I'd say you need to do a bunch of different food related initiatives to solve hunger issues instead of hoping and praying that your one magic bullet is going to fix everything.

There is no magic bullet. Even you don't have one. Measures that will help aren't a bad thing.

That's my point. There is no magic bullet. Saying something will fix the problem doesn't actually fix the problem. Unfortunately, people propose vague ideas rather than coherent plans. Reducing CO2 sounds good. Not all the ideas to do so actually work and/or are cost effective and/or come free of unintended consequences.

Let's create giant monstrosity CO2 concentrating plants. Let's put that CO2 in bottled water. Where does that CO2 go next? Is it really reducing it or just moving it around? In theory, it sounds good. In practice, it's a corporation developing a never ending revenue stream bilking people that think they are helping the environment. They're charging people for CO2. They're charging more for their "eco-friendly" CO2. They're getting people to donate directly to their profits. They're burning energy to move that CO2 around. Where is that energy coming from? The CO2 is not actually going away. They're probably recollecting the same CO2 and selling it again. It's a great business plan. Selling an up-priced product made from "free" raw materials by claiming it's fighting climate change. Oh, and they are helping contribute to more plastic waste and by products while they are at it.

Now that I'm thinking of plastics, does anyone know if water filled with micro plastics responds the same as water without micro plastics? Studies are showing that micro plastics are pretty much everywhere now. Could the increased presence of plastic contribute to ocean temperature increases?

Dear God man. Sometimes I don't think you hear yourself.

You're right. I don't have an internal monologue. My brain works more visually.

Sometimes I think that all you hear is yourself. Sadly, it becomes ever more apparent that some people either can't or just don't want to understand things that they don't believe they agree with.

I feel it's simply a matter that most people don't see everything as some huge corporate conspiracy theory. What I've actually been saying seems to be something you actually agree with. Or better yet I think we mainly agree all together. There is more to climate change than strictly CO2. Lessening CO2 emissions alone is only a part of the bigger picture. But reducing CO2 emissions helps.

It seems where we disagree, which often seems is the case, is that I believe you can actually start with something that helps and work your way up from there. You seem to indicate of you can't fix everything all at once the answer is to do nothing. And you seem to come up with every excuse in the book to do nothing.

I think wasting money on things that allegedly help the problem, but in reality add to it are counterproductive.

I don't think we should do nothing. I think we should do a lot of different things, but we should probably make sure they actually work before investing heavily and blindly adopting them.

You don't have to do it all at once. What you do do should have more evidence than a financially incentivised corporation saying we think... (I.e, we think we can get the costs down.)

It's hard to tell how well something works until you try it to see how well it works. Scientific studies are not corporations. It's not as if corporations simply made these ideas up out of thin air. The question becomes how do you know whether they can get the costs down if they don't have the opportunity to get the cost down? What I think it's safe to say we both now is that when something new has to go through the R&D process it's always more expensive and those costs have to be recouped early on. Once you move beyond that point the price most always comes down to some point. How much it comes down is certainly debatable. I remember when both the PC and flat screen TV's came out. As with most technology the cost has been greatly reduced over time.

A difference is that it was easy to see what PCs and flat screens did. They were consumer products and not really touted as solutions to societal problems while asking for donations. The type of CO2 removal shown in the video linked by Spiral isn't a very efficient method. This article details why and elaborates on some pros and cons.

CNET article on CO2 removal technology

The solidifying and burying method sounds better than compressing gas and selling it, but I still have concerns, and it's probably more expensive.

I'm with you that the solidifying and burying method sounds the best based on the information I have seen. I still think you are discounting the fact that technology of all types recoups it's R&D funding immediately and usually goes down after that. Once again you seem to insist on using the word "solution" when a far more accurate description would be simply a single tool in a toolbox to help find a solution. There isn't one single thing in and of itself that creates a solution. Not only do we need to remove CO2 from the air we also have to cut down on the CO2 we're releasing into the air. And even those two things alone aren't a total solution.

And there it is the party of no. .”It’s too expensive. Just throwing money at this won’t fix anything or even help. No no no.” The mantra of the GOOOPers.

The mantra of the gaslighter. I can't argue with what they said, so let me pretend they argued something completely different. Let's call them names while we're at it.

It appears this is going to be your word for the day........ gaslighter

I wish it weren't, but gotta be honest and call things what they are.

As you see it doesn't mean that's what they are.

You’re the one that has concerns, and with the cost, but never explain exactly why. Just bing bing bong. Lol “it won’t work, costs too much.” Bla bla excuses.

Trying to induce doubt is another gaslighter tactic.

Your opinions are not facts. Surely you understand that concept rather than try to cast doubt on the person who made an obvious, accurate observation Mr. Gaslighter.

A system that instead of removing CO2 permanently, but rather moves the CO2 somewhere else where it will shortly later be rereleased into the atmosphere didn't seem a particularly effective solution. Just logically, moving CO2 around without changing it somehow to keep it out of the atmosphere seemed a weird way to go about fixing the problem.

I thought I explained that. It appears I need to better account for my (apparently "hostile"/"adversarial") audience.

Okay, let's look at this a different way. What did your vote actually do?

Ahhhh. Calling the process “weird” explains it all. Not a hostile audience. But the comedy of ignorance is overwhelming right now.

I live in Tennessee. My vote never does anything. The hardliners always get elected here. Nobody I will vote for will be elected. There has only actually been one exception since I moved here. Gov. Bill Haslam when he was running for governor. There was no doubt a Republican would win and he was a very moderate, common sense Republican. Given the alternatives I supported him and he was the governor. Things have gone downhill since.

Back to our regularly scheduled program.....

‘Artificial sun’ sets record for time at 100 million degrees in latest advance for nuclear fusion

Scientists in South Korea have announced a new world record for the length of time they sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the sun’s core — during a nuclear fusion experiment, in what they say is an important step forward for this futuristic energy technology.

Nuclear fusion seeks to replicate the reaction that makes the sun and other stars shine, by fusing together two atoms to unleash huge amounts of energy. Often referred to as the holy grail of climate solutions clean energy, fusion has the potential to provide limitless energy without planet-warming carbon pollution. But mastering the process on Earth is extremely challenging.

The most common way of achieving fusion energy involves a donut shaped reactor called a tokamak in which hydrogen variants are heated to extraordinarily high temperatures to create a plasma.

High temperature and high density plasmas, in which reactions can occur for long durations, are vital for the future of nuclear fusion reactors, said Si-Woo Yoon, director of the KSTAR Research Center at the Korean Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), which achieved the new record.

Sustaining these high temperatures “has not been easy to demonstrate due to the unstable nature of the high temperature plasma,” he told CNN, which is why this recent record is so significant.

KSTAR, KFE’s fusion research device which it refers to as an “artificial sun,” managed to sustain plasma with temperatures of 100 million degrees for 48 seconds during tests between December 2023 and February 2024, beating the previous record of 30 seconds set in 2021.

The KFE scientists said they managed to extend the time by tweaking the process, including using tungsten instead of carbon in the “diverters,” which extract heat and impurities produced by the fusion reaction.

The ultimate aim is for KSTAR to be able to sustain plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees for 300 seconds by 2026, a “a critical point” to be able to scale up fusion operations, Si-Woo Yoon said.

What the scientists are doing in South Korea will feed into the development of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France, known as ITER, the world’s biggest tokamak which aims to prove the feasibility of fusion.

KSTAR’s work “will be of great help to secure the predicted performance in ITER operation in time and to advance the commercialization of fusion energy,” Si-Woo Yoon said.

This announcement adds to a number of other nuclear fusion breakthroughs.

In 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in the United States, made history by successfully completing a nuclear fusion reaction which produced more energy than used to power the experiment.

This February, scientists near the English city of Oxford announced they had set a record for producing more energy than ever before in a fusion reaction. They produced 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, roughly enough to power 12,000 homes for the same amount of time.

But commercializing nuclear fusion still remains a long way off as scientists work to solve fiendish engineering and scientific difficulties.

Nuclear fusion “is not ready yet and therefore it can’t help us with the climate crisis now,” said Aneeqa Khan, research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester in the UK.

However, she added, if progress continues, fusion “has the potential to be part of a green energy mix in the latter half of the century.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/01/climate/nuclear-fusion-record-korea-climate-intl/index.html