Can Solar & Wind Fix Everything (e.g., Climate Change) with a battery break-through?

[42OhmsPA]

I can't believe this climate change! 12 hours ago it was raining with thunder and lightning, an hour ago it was foggy, now the sun is coming out. They are saying it's supposed to get cold overnight and there will be bad storms tomorrow. I think I better mow with my diesel tractor than burn some brush to warm it up.

 

[svetz]

..... You want to instantly dismiss it because it is inconvenient and not part of the IPCC propaganda.

I'm sorry you feel that way Bob. I don't consider reading the paper and looking at other theories, comparing how they fit, examining the timelines, saying it is possibly true, and pointing out potential problems as "instantly" dismissing it. I would say it was well considered. But, I tend to trust NASA more than your or my understanding, and they say today's warming isn't (yet) caused by it.

In science there is always something that kicks the idea off.
It's like saying the whole idea of electricity is ridiculous because it's based on 1 guy flying a kite.

Very true, except when an idea is correct with repeated experiments more papers are written on subsequent experiments (e.g., trust, but verify) that build to a consensus. When data conflicts (like it does with the magnetic field reversal), it more often then not just means we still have an imperfect understanding. Which causes more theories and more papers...science isn't a one and done... it's an evolution.

Writing "IPCC Propaganda" shows a disposition not towards leaning into repeated and verified experiments; but a search for any other possible alternative. What's wrong with the science of global warming? All the facts fit it. Many people have replicated the experiments. Additional experiments and observations have only strengthened the theory. Why dismiss all that so easily? (other than it's a government conspiracy or how all the scientists are in on it milking it for money).

Even if a person assumes CO2 is the enemy .......

It's a nit, but it's GHGs and not just CO2.

Without having control of what China and India do

Control? What exactly are you thinking Bob?

First off. Why should any country do anything when you don't believe?
Secondly, as has been discussed, every major country is aware of the problem and is taking some action (or at least regions in some countries like Australia and the U.S.).

Well ..... It's not going to happen now ........ no matter how much the rest of the world tortures themselves to try and make it happen.

It's already happening. It's been happening for a while. You see people installing solar and wind. You've seen battery prices come down. You've seen EVs on the road. You've seen Bill Gates throw money at dozens of technologies hoping one will bear fruit. Lower LCOEs mean there's no way to stop it. Were we quick enough to avoid devastating consequences? I don't think so given those are already happening too.

New innovations are happening. The war against climate change is underway. Talking about what's going on now is what the thread is about.

I can't believe this climate change! 12 hours ago it was raining with thunder and lightning, an hour ago it was foggy, now the sun is coming out. They are saying it's supposed to get cold overnight and there will be bad storms tomorrow. I think I better mow.... Longing for the days when the rate of change was a constant? Me too. 5 Reasons Not to Mow Wet Grass - Lawns

Modern humans emerged about ~300,000 years ago.

 

[svetz]

Exxon is suing its shareholders

B.C. Ferries changing plans for electric ferries

NASA Launches Small Climate Satellite to Study Earth's Poles
Lake Mead's water levels rose again in February, highest in 3 years.
Opinion: It's up 10 feet from last year and with their conservation efforts and this years snow it's expected to increase, so that's really good news. Hopefully not just El Nino and the water will pick up.

California declares no drought for at least two years

US book bans

Republican-controlled state board approved textbooks for the schools’ science curriculums, rejecting several books on climate

Advertising Carbon Capture, ExxonMobil Saw Marginal Role for It in Fighting Climate Change
Opinion: Congressional testimony keeps revealing more...

Ocean water is rushing miles underneath the ‘Doomsday Glacier’
Opinion: The names people come up with for these things. While the Thwaites Glacier is melting faster than previously predicted and possibly even faster with this "rushing" water, the entire glacier would raise the ocean levels a couple of feet. The reason it got nicknamed that is because it also acts as a dam, and predictions are that if all of that went it could raise sea levels as much as 10 feet. Is there a tidal wave in your future? Probably not, it'll still take time and you know how glacial ice moves. ; -) Estimates are around 2100.

How does the Medieval Warm Period compare to current global temperatures?

 

[aenyc]

While they preach cLIEmate change, stuff like this, which is a REAL DANGER to our planet and people goes unnoticed.
Although when you realize that you are the carbon they want to eliminate, it starts to make sense

Hidden Food Threat: Experts Warn Of Dangers Of RNAi Crops​

Imagine a technology that could genetically rewire organisms in real-time, silencing critical genes across entire ecosystems with unknown effects. Sounds like science fiction? It’s not. It’s the reality of a new class of pesticides harnessing RNA interference—or RNAi—and they’re already being deployed in our fields and food supply with minimal testing or oversight. According to organic producers and non-GMO (genetically modified organisms) advocates, the risks could be catastrophic.

Environmental Organization Warns of RNAi Pesticide Dangers​

In 2020, a groundbreaking report from Friends of the Earth (FOE) rang the alarm on the dangers posed by gene-silencing RNAi pesticides. According to the non-governmental environmental organization report, these products can genetically modify organisms in the open environment, with risks of unintended effects on non-target species, human health, and the integrity of organic and non-GMO agriculture. Despite these threats, RNAi pesticides face little to no regulatory scrutiny in most countries, and some have already been approved for use.

In June 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency green-lit the RNAi corn developed by Monsanto and Dow, now being marketed under the trade name SmartStax Pro.

In a press release announcing the approval of SmartStax Pro, regulators praised the product for its value to the farmer and the low impact it has on the environment.

“The ribonucleic acid interference (RNAi) technology found in SmartStaxPro works through a process of gene control that occurs naturally in plants, animals, and humans alike. Scientists harnessed this control process to create the product, which works as a pesticide by silencing or turning off the activity of a gene critical to corn rootworm survival, resulting in the death of the corn rootworm. This product is so specific that it only affects the corn rootworm,” states the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) press release.

RNAi works by using small RNA molecules to interfere with and “silence” the activity of specific genes. While that may sound precise, the FOE report emphasizes that RNAi technology is prone to “off-target effects,” meaning it can unintentionally silence genes in non-target organisms. Since many genes are conserved across species, a pesticide designed for one insect could end up harming beneficial pollinators, soil microbes, or even humans. What’s more, the alteration caused by RNAi can sometimes be passed down to future generations, meaning that a single application could spark uncontrollable ripple effects.

The Friends of the Earth report dubs RNAi pesticides “a vast, open-air genetic experiment,” with entire ecosystems at risk. Because they’re sprayed directly into the environment, controlling exposure is nearly impossible. Any organism that takes up the interfering RNAs could have its genome tinkered with. Some evidence suggests that ingesting RNAs from our diet may even influence human gene expression.

There’s also a risk that RNAi sprays could alter the genetic makeup of the very crops they’re meant to protect, changing nutritional content or toxicity in unpredictable ways.

Could RNAi Pesticides Impact Human Genes?​

What’s particularly concerning is that the off-target effects of RNAi pesticides may extend beyond the farm and into the bodies of consumers. A 2008 study funded by Monsanto revealed that numerous small RNAs from corn, soybeans, and rice had perfect sequence complementarity to human genes. While Monsanto pointed to this finding as evidence of safety, the reality is far more complex and troubling.

As the study showed, there are numerous plant RNAs with sequences identical to human genes. If these dietary RNAs are indeed able to influence human gene expression, as mounting evidence suggests, then the genetic rewiring of our food crops with novel RNAi molecules could have far-reaching and entirely unpredictable effects on our health.

A 2012 study published in Cell Research demonstrated that a specific plant microRNA from ingested rice could be detected in human blood and tissues. When the same plant microRNA was fed to mice, it appeared to modulate the expression of a receptor involved in removing LDL cholesterol. If a natural plant RNA can have such a significant biological effect, what might be the consequences of engineered RNAi molecules?

Many genes are not consistently expressed, and their activity can vary based on environmental conditions. This adds yet another layer of complexity and unpredictability when it comes to assessing the risks of RNAi crops.

Furthermore, the human gut is home to a diverse community of microbes that play a vital role in our health and immune function. Preliminary research suggests that some of these bacteria may be capable of taking up dietary RNAs and incorporating them in such a way as to affect their gene regulation. The effects of RNAi crops on the human microbiome are unknown but could be significant given the importance of gut flora in everything from nutrient absorption to mental health.

​

 

[aenyc]

Taking Advantage of Loose Regulations​

In the United States, the EPA’s regulatory framework for genetically engineered crops was established in 1986 and has only been updated once in the last 30 years.

This old standard is being used to evaluate a whole new kind of pesticide. SmartStaxPro, the RNAi corn developed by Monsanto and Dow, produces a double-stranded RNA that disrupts a critical gene in a major agricultural pest, the western corn rootworm, causing its death. In 2023, the EPA registered an RNAi pesticide that targets the Colorado potato beetle.

According to the FOE report, the companies crafting RNAi pesticides are also filing broad patents that would grant them ownership rights over any organism exposed to their products. This could mean that if a farmer’s crops are unintentionally contaminated by drifting RNAi sprays, the company could lay claim to their harvest.

At the international level, RNAi is barely on the regulatory radar. Technically, RNAi products fall under the “living modified organisms” category defined in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. According to one assessment published in the Annual Review of Plant Biology, “the European GMO regulatory framework is inadequate and needs to be updated.”

For organic and non-GMO advocates, this regulatory vacuum is a recipe for disaster. Without robust safety testing and labeling requirements, RNAi crops could soon infiltrate food supplies worldwide, turning consumers into unwitting test subjects in a massive uncontrolled experiment. Organic farmers may find their crops and local ecosystems irreversibly contaminated by drifting RNAi molecules.

Can We Prevent an Agricultural Disaster?​

Despite these concerns, many consumers may already be eating this genetically altered corn. There is significant adoption of these advanced corn traits, particularly in regions where corn rootworms are prevalent. Based on recent information from Bayer, their SmartStax and SmartStax PRO traits are utilized in about 15 million acres across the United States—nearly 17 percent of the ninety million acres dedicated to corn growing in the United States.

An email was sent to Bayer Crop Sciences requesting comment on the FOE report and the threat of off target consequences related to their RNAi pesticides. No response was returned.

Although advocates for RNAi pesticides promote it as a precise means for targeting a single pest, it’s clear the technology isn’t merely a tweak to existing agricultural practices—it represents a watershed moment in the industrialization of our food supply.

A review of RNAi transgenic plant technology from the Bioscience Resource Project, notes several off-target effects the technology has demonstrated. The report suggests that this technology could lead to “distinct toxicological and environmental hazards.”

”… while RNAi holds great promise for agricultural applications, the potential for OTEs within the plant, in non-target organisms, and in mammals consuming the plant material warrants careful assessment and risk mitigation strategies,” state authors Jonathan R. Latham and Allison K. Wilson.

To mitigate these risks, researchers propose several preconditions for regulatory approval of RNAi transgenes, such as avoiding perfectly duplexed sequences, minimizing complementarity with known human and host sequences, ensuring minimal transgene expression levels, and using short RNAi-triggering sequences and naturally occurring miRNA (microRNA) promoters.

Until these off-target effects can be identified and eliminated, the report calls for “a precautionary approach” to furthering the technology and asks regulators to consider the possible hazards the development of RNAi-based genetically modified crops may cause.

With regulations as they now stand, biotech firms are granted the power to deliberately manipulate gene expression across entire species and ecosystems. Although the technology may be billed as a high-tech solution to move away from toxic pesticides, it is introducing a wide range of potential unintended adverse effects.

 

[aenyc]

 

[TommySr]

What do plants need to grow. Animals eat plants.

D71, plants also need animal waste to grow, animals eats plants and when they die they feed
the plants, when plants die they come soil, they each need the other, they each must live within
the environments, if not they stop living and are no longer an issue for their ecosystem, sometime
in our distant past we to needed to live within our environment also or we would also die becoming
plant food then soil, then something happened I can only guess what caused modern human's greed
but the results are profound, we striped the soil to gorge(verb) on the resources, we even encased our
dead to deprive our environment that resource. good for human's , bad for the rest of the planet.
IMO unsustainable insanity. (end of pagan rant).

**EDIT as it has been pointed out to me plants don't need animal waste to survive (bacteria composing plant matter works)

Just remember the groups of ppl like Bill Gates signed onto depopulation as the final solution to climate change aka population reduction. Agenda 2021

D71, your expanse of world views and events leaves me questioning my bandwidth and attention span,
if I had a dime for every time bill or mr Hawking entered my mind I'd be short for a cup of coffee.

and this is my first look at Agenda 2021


but lucky for me I read books daily.(I think it keeps you from getting Alzheimer )

I’d say you still trust ppl like Bill Gates. I know, Svetz and others like him think Bill Gate’s are great.

D71, I trust bill as much as I trust ORCL, IBM and Apple. they all want my money, and I've been satisficed
with the product(not the price), but I have systems still running on IBM's with 5 1/4 floppy drives and running
on MS-DOS 6, so I feel I'd be a whinny bitch to complain.

 

[svetz]

This is why you don't want the Antarctic glaciers melting...

 

[42OhmsPA]

Longing for the days when the rate of change was a constant? Me too.

Haha no, that would be a big change (kind of like the nice drop in dyed diesel when I got to the pump today), I remember weather like this when I was just a kid and every year after that.

This is why you don't want the Antarctic glaciers melting...

But they already melted millions of years ago, before humans and cow farts.

What Happened the Last Time Antarctica Melted?

Why glaciers melted millions of years ago might tell us something about what’s happening today.

www.discovermagazine.com

It's almost like there is some kind of cycle, that article even mentions CO2 levels similar to what we are experiencing today.

 

[TommySr]

It's almost like there is some kind of cycle, that article even mentions CO2 levels similar to what we are experiencing today.

42OhmsPA, sweet link.. looking for follow up.
cycle or trigger, one would think if it was co2 Related(volcano/asteroid/uncontrolled wild fires) the cores would have that sediment.

 

[RussNM]

plants also need animal waste to grow

False. Plants will do just fine by themselves using the food (produced by bacteria composing plant matter) to get all the nutrients they need to thrive.

 

[svetz]

...what-happened-the-last-time-antarctica-melted...

Guessing you didn't actually click the link I provided given the seriousness of the response... (should have posted in humor I guess) ; -)

Thanks for the link! I didn't realize there were competing theories for where on the globe the continent was 50 million years ago. At least now I know why Australia is shaped the way it is. Cool they can get pollens from ice cores.

She’ll even be looking out for pollen... Antarctica was a big rain forest covered in tree ferns.

 

[TommySr]

False. Plants will do just fine by themselves using the food

RussNM, just for my information does bacteria need animal waste to survive?

 

[TommySr]

Guessing you didn't actually click the link I provided given the seriousness of the response... (should have posted in humor I guess) ; -)

svetz, I thought the segment on carbon capture was interesting, more going on then I imaged even here in the US. (penguin pee was cute)

 

[RussNM]

RussNM, just for my information does bacteria need animal waste to survive?

No.

 

[42OhmsPA]

Guessing you didn't actually click the link I provided given the seriousness of the response

I did but heard it was something about AI and lost interest.

 

[D71]

D71, plants also need animal waste to grow, animals eats plants and when they die they feed
the plants, when plants die they come soil, they each need the other, they each must live within
the environments, if not they stop living and are no longer an issue for their ecosystem, sometime
in our distant past we to needed to live within our environment also or we would also die becoming
plant food then soil, then something happened I can only guess what caused modern human's greed
but the results are profound, we striped the soil to gorge(verb) on the resources, we even encased our
dead to deprive our environment that resource. good for human's , bad for the rest of the planet.
IMO unsustainable insanity. (end of pagan rant).

**EDIT as it has been pointed out to me plants don't need animal waste to survive (bacteria composing plant matter works)


D71, your expanse of world views and events leaves me questioning my bandwidth and attention span,
if I had a dime for every time bill or mr Hawking entered my mind I'd be short for a cup of coffee.

and this is my first look at Agenda 2021

View attachment 217763
but lucky for me I read books daily.(I think it keeps you from getting Alzheimer )

View attachment 217764

D71, I trust bill as much as I trust ORCL, IBM and Apple. they all want my money, and I've been satisficed
with the product(not the price), but I have systems still running on IBM's with 5 1/4 floppy drives and running
on MS-DOS 6, so I feel I'd be a whinny bitch to complain.

Think what you will but…. There are a lot of billionaires building under ground bunkers with blast doors. Hmmmmm….

 

[aenyc]

As you can see, "the sceince" has been corrupted to the core.
You simply can not believe anything the establishment says

Trust The "Science"...That Just Retracted 11,000 "Peer Reviewed" Papers​

It's yet another reminder of why blindly 'trusting the science' may not always be the best go-to move in the future.

217 year old Wiley science publisher has reportedly "peer reviewed" more than 11,000 papers that were determined to be fake without ever noticing. The papers were referred to as "naked gobbledygook sandwiches", Australian blogger Jo Nova wrote on her blog last week.

"It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry," she said. "Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?"


According to Nova's post, professional cheating services are employing AI to craft seemingly "original" academic papers by shuffling around words. For instance, terms like "breast cancer" morphed into "bosom peril," and a "naïve Bayes" classifier turns into "gullible Bayes."

Similarly, in one paper, an ant colony was bizarrely rebranded as an "underground creepy crawly state."

The misuse of terminology extends to machine learning, where a 'random forest' is whimsically translated to 'irregular backwoods' or 'arbitrary timberland'.

Nova writes that shockingly, these papers undergo peer review without any rigorous human oversight, allowing egregious errors, like converting 'local average energy' to 'territorial normal vitality', to slip through.



The publisher Wiley has confessed that fraudulent activities have rendered 19 of its journals so compromised that they must be shuttered. In response, the industry is developing AI tools to detect these fakes, a necessary yet disheartening development. Nova writes:

The rot at Wiley started decades ago, but it got caught when it spent US $298 million on an Egyptian publishing house called Hindawi. We could say we hope no babies were hurt by fake papers but we know bad science already kills people. What we need are not “peer reviewed” papers but actual live face to face debate. Only when the best of both sides have to answer questions, with the data will we get real science:

In March, it revealed to the NYSE a $US9 million ($13.5 million) plunge in research revenue after being forced to “pause” the publication of so-called “special issue” journals by its Hindawi imprint, which it had acquired in 2021 for US$298 million ($450 million).
Its statement noted the Hindawi program, which comprised some 250 journals, had been “suspended temporarily due to the presence in certain special issues of compromised articles”.
Many of these suspect papers purported to be serious medical studies, including examinations of drug resistance in newborns with pneumonia and the value of MRI scans in the diagnosis of early liver disease. The journals involved included Disease Markers, BioMed Research International and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.
The problem is only becoming more urgent. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence raises the stakes even further. A researcher at University College London recently found more than 1 per cent of all scientific articles published last year, some 60,000 papers, were likely written by a computer.
In some sectors, it’s worse. Almost one out of every five computer science papers published in the past four years may not have been written by humans.

In Australia, ABC has reported on this issue, reflecting concerns over diminishing public trust in universities, which are increasingly seen as businesses rather than educational institutions. This perception is fueled by incidents where universities, driven by financial incentives, overlook academic fraud.

The core of the scientific community is corroded, exacerbated by entities like the ABC Science Unit, which rather than scrutinizing dubious research, often shields it.

This ongoing degradation calls for a shift from traditional peer review to rigorous live debates, ensuring accountability by having people argue their cases in real time.

In December 2023, Nature posted that more than 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023 -- a new record.

You can read Nova's full blog post here.

 

[aenyc]

So much for “peer review” — Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers « JoNova

joannenova.com.au

 

[aenyc]

They are wasting energy on "A" "I" (which real purpose is surveillance of you every action - "AI" is just machine learning on huge sets of data, and those huge sets of data is your every action - online and offline, hence surveillance cameras on every corner (And why they really needed 5G - to connect this surveillance to the internet - not to make browsing on your phone "faster")

“The Energy Transition Won’t Happen”: Big Tech Embraces Energy Guzzling AI​

The driving ambition to stay on top appears to have completely overwhelmed former tech company commitments to green virtue signalling.

The “Energy Transition” Won’t Happen
Foundational innovation in cloud technology and artificial intelligence will require more energy than ever before—shattering any illusion that we will restrict supplies.
Mark P. Mills / Eye on the News / Infrastructure and energy, Economy, finance, and budgets, Technology and Innovation
May 23 2024
The laptop class has rediscovered a basic truth: foundational innovation, once adoption proceeds at scale, is followed by an epic increase in energy consumption. It’s an iron law of our universe.
To illustrate that law, consider three recent examples, all vectors leading to the “shocking” discovery of radical increases in expected electricity demand, now occupying headlines today. First, there’s the electric car, which, if there were one in every garage, as enthusiasts hope, would roughly double residential neighborhood electricity demands. Next, there’s the idea of repatriating manufacturing, especially for semiconductors. This is arguably a “foundational innovation,” since policymakers are suddenly showing concern over the decades-long exit of such industries from the U.S. Restoring American manufacturing to, say, the global market share of just two decades ago would see industrial electricity demand soar by 50 percent.
And now the scions of software are discovering that both virtual reality and artificial intelligence, which emerge from the ineluctable mathematics of machine-learning algorithms, are anchored in the hard reality that everything uses energy. This is especially true for the blazing-fast and power-hungry chips that make AI possible. Nvidia, the leader of the AI-chip revolution and a Wall Street darling, has over the past three years alone shipped some 5 million high-power AI chips. To put this in perspective, every such AI chip uses roughly as much electricity each year as do three electric vehicles. And while the market appetite for electric vehicles is sagging and ultimately limited, the appetite for AI chips is explosive and essentially unlimited.
Consider a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Big Tech’s Latest Obsession Is Finding Enough Energy”—because the “AI boom is fueling an insatiable appetite for electricity.” And, as Reuters reports, “U.S. electric utilities predict a tidal wave of new demand . . . . Nine of the top 10 U.S. electric utilities said data centers were a main source of customer growth.” Today’s forecasts see near-term growth in demand for electric power three times as great as in recent years. Rediscovery of the iron law of growth inspired an urgent Senate hearing on May 21 entitled “Opportunities, Risks, and Challenges Associated with Growth in Demand for Electric Power in the United States.” (Full disclosure; a hearing at which I testified.)
…
Each datacenter—and tens of thousands of them exist—has an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. And the nearly 1,000 so-called hyperscale datacenters each consume more energy than a steel mill (and this is before counting the impacts of piling on AI chips). The incredible level of power use derives directly from the fact that just ten square feet of a datacenter today has more computing horsepower than all the world’s computers circa 1980. And each square foot creates electric power demands 100 times greater than a square foot of a skyscraper. Even before the AI revolution, the world was adding tens of millions more square feet of datacenters each year.
…
Read more: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-energy-transition-wont-happen

Bloomberg has a similar take on the situation;

Microsoft Wanted to be Carbon Negative. Then It Went Big on AI
If Microsoft is shooting for the moon on decarbonization, the moon is “more than five times as far away as it was in 2020,” President Brad Smith says on Zero.
By Akshat Rathi, Dina Bass, and Mythili Rao
23 May 2024 at 2:05 pm AEST
In 2020, Microsoft made an ambitious pledge: It would be carbon-negative by the end of the decade. The company was acting in response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 warning that, if the world wanted to keep warming below 1.5C, emissions needed to fall fast.
It was an ambitious target, but at the time it seemed achievable. Now that’s changed. New figures show that Microsoft’s total emissions in 2023 were about 30% higher than in 2020.
The confounding factor, Microsoft President Brad Smith tells Zero host Akshat Rathi, is artificial intelligence. After investing $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft has expanded its AI strategy — and its emissions have ballooned along the way.
The company says it isn’t abandoning its green goals, and has broadened its approach for reaching them. “You’ve gotta be willing to invest and pay for it, you’ve gotta be willing to persist,” Smith said. But can the tech giant have it both ways? Rathi sat down with Zero producer Mythili Rao to talk about his interview with Smith, and why Microsoft says the good AI can do for the world will outweigh its environmental impact.
…
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...limate-targets-at-risk?embedded-checkout=true