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

...another contributor is lawn mowing....
I wonder if that's actually true if you use a solar-powered lawn mower (e.g., electric mower powered by the solar panels on your roof, not on the mower)?

Seems like the grass consumes CO2 out of the air, so as long as you're not burning the grass to get rid of it then it should be sequestered... might be something all us solar power people can do?

Criminy! What do you know... there are panel-on-mower robotic mowers.... -->
automower-lead01.jpg

Update: A 1,000-square-metre area of grass will take up around one tonne of carbon per year. [ref]
Update2: That same reference also says "but that carbon is going straight back ... when ... the biomass is broken down and returned to the atmosphere."
 
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On the topic of wind/solar being more effective with battery storage, I would be in favor of that in spite of my climate denier status. But the net cost would have to be lower than the cost of fossil fuels.

With regard to banning ICE vehicles, it's easy for urban dwellers to be in favor of that. For those of us that travel in very rural areas, for hundreds of miles, that isn't going to happen any time in the next 20 years. There simply isn't a big enough battery and a mobile recharging system to travel long distances pulling heavy loads. My diesel F-350 is clean smelling and soot-less. If it was producing soot, the front of my white trailer would reflect that.
Population density vs pollution allowance. There’s a neat game called factorio about this topic, hehe.

I totally agree that there’s no solution for long haulers and rural peeps that is battery only.

That’s why I hope ICE gets completely banned in city centers. Electric only zones. Pedestrian only zones. The horror ?

Driving a big diesel machine on a ranch or down a freeway with few humans around is fundamentally a different ethical situation than driving the same big diesel machine past a crowd.

For the record, I ain’t comin for yer truck LOL
 
Thank you for doing your part!

Sorry if I came across as judge mental.

People in the city often make the mistake that one solution fits all. No way! I don’t even know how half of a half of a half of this country works ?

I’m investigating peltier for cooling despite many people advising me otherwise, in part because it requires no GHG. ?‍?
 
No luck so far in searching for a good book on the topic. Most deny any change or take it as accepted and go into economics or tech theories to fix it.

The NOAA page has a blurb for What scientific evidence exists that Earth is warming and that humans are the main cause? The relevant response is along the lines: we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we know humans are putting it in the air, we don't know of any other reason why the temperature might be going up.

It's a logical argument, but it sounds more like they're comparing the ppm to the temperature increase to make predictions rather than any sort of greenhouse atmospheric modeling. There's also the "we don't know of" versus "what do you mean you don't know"? Perhaps I'm going about this wrong and should search for atmosphere modeling information?

I did find a $135 text book Climate Change: The Science of Global Warming and Our Energy Future - but the ToC wasn't available and even used was over $100.

Also found a free online text of Introduction to Climate Science here. There's a later chapter on water, but it's what you'll remember from high-school biology.

Probably the most interesting bit about that book is this chapter, which has an image similar to the one from CES/NASA to the right. Sadly, the picture is the extent of it... everything below is me taking a stab at it based on the picture.... so very possibly wrong.

The IR spectrum is 700 nm – 1 mm and that spectrum is how heat escapes. The incoming energy is primarily the visible spectrum (380 to 740 nm).

All objects above absolute zero radiate IR energy at wavelengths that correspond to their temperature. From a calculator, the IR wavelength for 0°F is 11,347 nm and 100°F is 9,320 nm. The area bracketed by the dotted line represents about -89°F to 98°F.

Why the frequencies are important, is because the "greenhouse" gasses only interact at certain frequencies.

Water is probably considered the largest greenhouse gas because there's a lot of it and it's on the left edge working at the frequencies with the highest energy. Same for NO2 and Methane.

Carbon dioxide strongly absorbs energy with a wavelength of ~15 μm ( -112°F). Little easier to see in the other graph, it looks like the bell shaped curve goes from 12,000 to 18,000 nm, or -25°F to -170°F.

Also surprising since I'd never heard it mentioned, is the huge impact of O2/O3, which looks like 9800 to 10500 nm, or 73°F to 37°F,
1626296802340.png

The Boltzman Law gives the amount of power radiated as a function of temperature at P = σ * ε * A * T⁴, so higher temperatures emit more power. If σ * ε * A = Q, then at 0°F, P = 4,228,250,625Q, and at 100°F, P = 9,346,291,742Q, or ~2.21x the amount of energy is radiated from ground at 100°F vs. 0°F.

That CO2 is absorbing IR that is emitting under -25F, which is < 10% of the surface and gets less with global warming too. <sigh> I'm looking for reasons that go the other way.

Interestingly, I ran across something the other day that said oxygen is being depleted (ref), if so, then that seems like it would offset some climate change too, although not necessarily a good thing for us. The IR range seems similar to CO2, so the same temperature range too.

But, at least it seems like a step closer to the questions raised in #9 & #20.
 
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This NASA document does a pretty good job of explaining the natural cycle of earth heating and cooling and ice ages.
But, for reasons they can't explain, it seems there used to be an ice age once every 41,000 years .... but the cycle seems to have changed to more like every 100,000 years.

Any way you look at it, that's a long period of time .... but is it possible we are nearing the end of the last ice age? I didn't look back to see when the last ice age was at it's peak.

It's very interesting that some of these cycles change almost every year and determine things like how much difference in temperature there is between summer and winter and even when the change of seasons occurs.

None of it would seem to explain the somewhat rapid change in the last decade or 2, however.


NASA is actually VERY involved in monitoring climate change and even have satellites being used for that purpose and gathering global data.

It's also interesting that the melting of the ice sheet actually causes shifts in the earth's axis .... so, is it possible this is the built in correction mechanism that will put us back into a cooling cycle?
 
...it seems there used to be an ice age once every 41,000 years .... but the cycle seems to have changed to more like every 100,000 years... is it possible we are nearing the end of the last ice age?
According to Wikipedia, the next ice age isn't due for 1500 years, but given the scale that might be noise. The "Little Ice Age" was 1300 to 1850. The last ice age only ended ~12,000 years ago, as a species we almost got wiped out in a prior one 70,000 years ago (Toba theory).

Wired says another could be here in the 2030s. The information is based on sunspot activity which are a known contributor to the global temperature (other big factors are the Milankovitch cycle, the concentration of greenhouse gases (man-made or volcanic), there are also feedback effects (e.g., ocean currents). The current sunspot number is 23 as we switch to cycle 25. Cycle 24's been a bit weird, cycle 25 was supposed to start in 2019...but cycle 24 has been holding on.

It's fascinating that the Climate Time Machine (embedded in the NASA link Bob provided) shows the temperature rise is greatest over the North pole. Looked frighteningly huge until I realized it was a stretched Mercator map, silly me.

Carbon dioxide strongly absorbs energy with a wavelength of ~15 μm ( -112°F). Little easier to see in the other graph, it looks like the bell shaped curve goes from 12,000 to 18,000 nm, or -25°F to -170°F.

The Boltzman Law gives the amount of power radiated as a function of temperature at P = σ * ε * A * T⁴, so higher temperatures emit more power. If σ * ε * A = Q, then at 0°F, P = 4,228,250,625Q, and at 100°F, P = 9,346,291,742Q, or ~2.21x the amount of energy is radiated from ground at 100°F vs. 0°F.

Given CO2's lower emittance temperature (e.g., the atmosphere doesn't absorb heat from objects over -25°F due to CO2) and lower energy at those wavelengths (about 2.2x less), the bruhaha about CO2 and climate warming must be due to the increased volumes (51 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually does seem like a lot after all). But then I started wondering... if CO2 concentrated at the poles would have a bigger impact. This paper says during summer higher latitudes have less and more during winter. Sounds attributed to energy usage to heat homes during the winter and then it spreads out over the summer.

Cool stuff, this NASA article says the Earth didn't even start to warm up until microbes started releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. The green house gas I never knew about!
 
I was wondering how they know what the temperature was millions of years ago. Fell into a sort of interesting rabbit-hole. From this ref, they do it by measuring the gases trapped in the snow compressed into ice, they take ice-core samples off the poles or where there are very old glaciers and then extrapolate for the rest of the world.

This means past temperatures are estimated with the current greenhouse models. The theory is that before humans started adding CO2 the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was controlled by ocean temperature... but that assumes we know the concentration in the seawater over time.

Seems like a bit of debate although the numbers don't seem to move much. Here's the plot from Wikipedia. Bill's book said models predicted we'd be at +4 by the end of the century. Looks like when we were almost wiped out 70,000 years ago the average temperature was -11. Our ancestors sure were survivors!

1920px-EPICA_temperature_plot.svg.png


At first, I was surprised that climate warming always seems an abrupt uptick....but the scale is 1,000s of years so it's actually fairly gradual.
We've only been man-making CO2 for the last few hundred years, which makes me wonder what caused them in the past. Looks pretty on track with the prior cycles and on that time scale we've only been dumping CO2 by the last millimeter or so.

I know the book An Inconvenient Truth got blasted/debunked for saying it was CO2 (they saw the correlation that temperature rises when CO2 rises and concluded CO2 caused it. But as I recall the CO2 rise in the past was shown to be a following-function; that is oceans release CO2 because the temperature is rising). That was about past measurements though, not CO2 being man-made now.

Climate change from large volcanos (which are the big belchers of CO2 besides us) can herald a cold period (despite all the CO2) because the ash and sulfur dioxide they release into the atmosphere either reflects sunlight or acts as an anti-greenhouse gas. For example, Krakatoa released 110 million tons of CO2, yet there was a -1.2C global temperature difference. Not sure how the past temperature estimations take things like that into consideration or what the general net effect of volcanos are. Even so, humans appear to be doing something like 700x what volcanos do [ref] on average.
 
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Don't know how accurate this is, it's my synopsis from going through a
"denier" site.

This first part seems accurate and goes in the past changes in atmospheric
CO2 came primarily from the oceans based on the temperature
(e.g.,
temperature drove CO2 ppm based on the partial pressure of CO2 in
seawater for a given temperature). This part seems accurate to me as
humans didn't have anything to do with greenhouse gases until the last
couple hundred years and yet there was still climate change. Where else
would it come from given the bit about volcanos in the post above?

The second part is conjecture, it goes just because humans are pumping
CO2 into the air it does not follow that the temperature will rise
corresponding as it has in the past
. That is, previously CO2 ppm could
be used to measure the temperature, but not after humans started
adding to it. The argument makes sense because the past measurements
are just the temperature dependency of CO2's partial pressure in sea-water
and if the atmospheric partial pressure is higher from pollution that just
means CO2 won't come out of the sea-water, not that the temperature goes
up.
1626370927490.png

I'm not sure that's how the pro-climate greenhouse models work though. Partial pressures are really well understood and elementary in chemistry. It seems extremely unlikely any scientist could possibly make such a mistake (although politicians, that's another story).

To me, adding 51 billion tons annually of greenhouse gases must have some impact, but the big question is the impact over time and urgency.

So, you know how everyone says that nearly all reputable scientists agree with humans being the source of climate change? That always bothered me as using that technique in dialog is to message "the group-think believes it and you're dumb if you don't". Turns out that's not even true:
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting states that the report said that 67% of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with 11% disagreeing and the rest undecided.[32]
So, at least I don't feel so stupid now. ;-)
 
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2007 paper, but a fairly understandable description that also discusses water! http://depts.washington.edu/amath/faculty/tung/journals/tung07.pdf

They say:
The controversy centers around the following quantitative question: If the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is doubled, say, from its pre-industrial value of 280 ppm, how much warmer will the global temperature be?
The results from their modeling? Between 1.5 and 4.5°C for double CO2; a wide range because it's really hard to model. They call it a "simple" model. ;-) It includes energy based on latitude, tries to characterize albedo based on T, and impacts of water. It covers Boltzman (watts based on temperature), but it doesn't consider Wein (λ based on T) which I'm starting to think is important.

It included an idea that there's a cap where putting more CO2 won't create any more heat because it's captured all the heat.

It also occurred to me while reading it that it's just not the Earth's surface radiating heat, but also the atmosphere. So the altitude of the various greenhouse gases is important. As the upper atmosphere temperature is very cold, CO2 and O2 may play a larger role there (see #26).

Update: Looking at models might not help... here's a 2015 German Paper that predicts a 0.4°C rise, also accounts for clouds. Their model includes convective heat loss from the earth into the atmosphere, but wasn't sure if they just counted that as a loss or included the re-radiation at a lower temperature. Update: This model must have severe flaws... since 1970 the temperature has already risen 1°C.

Update2: Was wondering how accurate these models are... apparently they check them by running them backward in time to preindustrial times to see if they match. Obviously though, that will only work if the formulas don't have a built-in starting point from there.
 
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Accurate models that predict different things
I'm not quite sure I understand how all the models can be run backwards and show good correlation from pre-industrial times to today, and yet diverge so widely in the next two decades. Possibly that's why there's debate on past temperatures? I guess the delta between .4C and 4C isn't that much for the programs, just an awful lot for the consequences.

Update: Was wondering why they just check model's back to the 1800s (pre-industrial) for accuracy, why not go back half a million years to capture a few climate change cycles...realized they couldn't work as the models are only to calculate warming and don't include any cooling factors other than radiation.

Update 2: The models may not be as far off as thought in the previous post. This chart is a comparison of the IPCC models (it's from 2013 assessment but looks like it was run in 2007, couldn't find anything more recent) and I put on the red dots from the Wikipedia page for the actual temperatures. From what I've read, the difference from reality is probably assumptions about levels of greenhouse gases, actual cloud formation, ground albedo made back in 2007.

1626442556704.png



A cold-fusion story
Back in 1989 chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah did an experiment. They hypothesized that hydrogen fusion was taking place at room temperature in their apparatus. The press went wild, the experiment was attempted elsewhere, and the two were debunked as charlatans. All reputable scientists said it was fake (sound familiar?). They were so vilified that the term cold fusion represented a classic example of pathological science.

Yet they were right.
The problem was they were trying to measure the energy of a closed system with temperature. The slightest unaccounted for thermal leak would through the results off. Imagine trying to accurately measure a thousandth of a volt. Combine that with disbelief that it is possible. Talk about doomed heroes.

Flash forward 30+ years and you find admission from some that tried to duplicate the experiment that they fudged the numbers a bit because they knew it couldn't be real. It wasn't until a Navy researcher stopped trying to measure the temperature and used sensitive film to look for the radiation traces that must occur during fusion where it was conclusively and successfully-repeatedly demonstrated.

Now NASA and others are looking into if it can become a safe way to make power, currently, it's more a curiosity.


A new Yardstick?
Perhaps a more accurate yardstick for climate change would make the math more repeatably the same? Mutation rate of bacteria, ocean levels, wobble of the earth?? Something that ties to both the greenhouse gas levels and temperature from past cycles where one isn't a derivative of the other. Even that probably won't work because past cycles don't seem to be driven by green-house gases. Instead, the pre-industrial greenhouse gases just seemed to give an overall uniform temperature rise.
 
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Just found an interesting alternate theory: Zelandia Switch.

Good find.

Glad to see that some scientists are still studying the natural climate change cycle in an attempt to understand things better.
I have always found that man finds himself dwarfed in the face of natural events .... and have hoped that it is only our tendency to over exaggerate our importance that is driving much of the man made global warming thought. Seems like the oceans can affect CO2 levels more than we can.
Also glad to see there may be natural forces at work which could explain the more rapid warming and that there is a mechanism to reverse it already in place. It also seems that mechanism can result in rapid change in the other direction.

I also wonder about how asteroids and volcanic activity may have factored into things in the past since there was more of both in pre-historic times.
Could you imagine what would happen if Yellowstone actually went off in modern times? Has cooling of the earths mantle slowed down some of the natural cooling episodes?
 
Good find.
The internet is amazing...we live in fantastical times. Amazing I ever got anything back in the slide-rule days.

...I have always found that man finds himself dwarfed in the face of natural events .... and have hoped that it is only our tendency to over exaggerate our importance that is driving much of the man made global warming thought.
Considering the actual temperatures over the last few years have been higher than the predictions I can see why people are concerned. I expect the media and politicians will go into a frenzy when the IPCC releases their new report that will include "tipping points".

Seems like the oceans can affect CO2 levels more than we can.
I was reading a theory earlier where a bunch of iron ended up in the oceans eons ago and triggered an algae bloom that sucked in gigatons of CO2 in a very short time which triggered an ice age. If I can find it I'll update this post with a link. The climate seems both very robust and incredibly unstable.
Update: Found the article...

I also wonder about how asteroids and volcanic activity may have factored into things in the past since there was more of both in pre-historic times.
Me too! At first I was thinking the period between ice ages was too regular to be asteroids, but then saw a theory about how the sun goes up and down like a pony on a merry-go-round as it orbits the galaxy and that corresponds to that period...the theory was that it caused perturbations of orbits in the Oort cloud which caused asteroids to fall inwards. Guess we'll find out, according to that theory we were due and Hale-Bopp was the first of many.

...Has cooling of the earths mantle slowed down some of the natural cooling episodes?
From Wikipedia the Earth's core is only providing 0.03% of the surface heat. Also from Wikipedia, it's cooling about 100 degrees C per billion years and will be molten after the sun goes.
 
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Bill Gates the Climate Guy? Sorry I’ve never had much respect for this guy based upon how he got his start. There used to be a video documentary on how Microsoft and Apple came about (Nerds of the Silicon Valley??), but I can’t find the video now. Basically Bill Gates knew of a firm that had an operating system. Gates and company told IBM that they had this OS and got the contact based upon a tiny exaggeration. Similar line with Apple but from Xerox PARC. Xerox management really was the one to blame and not so much Apple. So here we are today, Bill the Climate Guy, Bill the Over Population Guy, Bill the World Vaccine Guy, Bill all knowing Covid guy,…. Sorry when did Bill get all those science and medical training/degrees? Oh yeah, it comes with the billions of dollars he has. So Bill also says we should black out the sun by aerosolizing dust particles to block out the sun so as to cool the planet.


Gee what could go wrong with such an idea. It’s nice about his efforts to feed, educate, and provide health care for third world countries. Great Noble things to do with his billions but let’s leave the science and medical stuff to those “trained” professionals. Lastly did you know that Bill Gates through his businesses is one of the largest private farmland owner in the US? So Bill the farmer? No, he says it’s just an investment. No plans on shaping the corporate farms or food production for the future. But wait, didn’t Bill say developed countries should stop eating beef and eat synthetic factory made beef instead to reduce methane/green house gas emissions. Sorry, not sure it’s Bill or the media that makes him look bad. Bill isn’t the guy I look up to for answers….but maybe his billions.

As for what we humans can do to stop/reduce global warming/cooling/climate change, the real answer is very little. Sun does what it does and the solar system reacts accordingly. Humans like to think they are all powerful and can control everything. Well I’d like to have the current temperature cooled down from the 100s to the 70s. How about straightening the Earth’s axis so that we don’t have that nasty tilt that causes seasons. Can’t do that can we. Just watch nature wipeout anything that man creates in an instant. Over the lifetime of this planet, humans impact will be so minuscule other than that thin radioactive layer we leave behind. So for now we’ll do the best with the technology and resources that we have until we can have the perfect “clean energy“. Yah know, that’s what they said about nuclear ☢️ a few decades ago too.

As for reducing human CO2 levels to zero, short of humans become extinct it will never happen. To continue to have energy and an advanced life with technology, we need power sources. As humans evolved we used wood, coal, oil, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, …. but all of these are just bandaids / bridges until we can safely implement fusion power plants.

We all want a clean environment but it’s a global balancing act and not one played only by the “developed” countries. One planet, one human race, let’s work together to improve life for all and not just our tribe.
 
Very appreciative of the continuing discussion in this thread. I’m reading and processing but don’t have much insightful to contribute.

The animatrix/matrix has a plot point of blocking out the sun to prevent malevolent robots from accessing the energy, so hopefully we don’t get to a point of desperation that drives humanity to that, hehe. ☀️

Am hoping we can transition to LFP/LTO and other battery chemistries that pack a punch but without weird spicy ingredients, to satisfy our collective need for transport and mechanization. And hopefully be able to engineer synthetic replacements for all the lubrication and process ingredients that use dinosaur soup.

If I can figure out how to fulfill all my electricity needs from locally installed solar, then that can be an example for others.

Manufacturing of solar and batteries and fiberglass turbine props, there’s still a lot of unpleasant materials science stuff that can use development.
 
Really good thread, rare to see a discussion where all views are considered and explored.

I’m a fence sitter on this one - just too plain dumb to understand either side of the equation i guess!

For my part, my family live on a small farm- generate our own electricity and have bore water to grow most of our own food. We are returning our area to it’s equilibrium state with native grasses and have planted over 1000 trees.

Climate scientists no doubt have their place, for me it would be more useful to predict tomorrows temperature than the temperature in 100 years time.
 
Quick Synopsis

On the one hand, we have what looks like we're in a normal
climate cycle.

1920px-EPICA_temperature_plot.svg.png
But 67% of scientists warn that no, temperatures are higher because
of human-made greenhouse gases are adding to the temperature.
The IPCC approved models have been fairly accurate (a little low
the last decade) in regard to actual temperature:

1626442556704-png.56458

If we're going into another ice age, wouldn't a little extra greenhouse gas help take the edge off? Sure, but the scale to the left is in thousands of years, we have to make it there first and predictions are we'll be > +4C before the end of the century without taking actions (+4 means crocodiles above the article circle from Bill's book, see post #4 for quote). We might not be around, but we still want to be good caretakers.

From #9 it's unclear that CO2 is the primary gas to be going after. From #15 it's unclear what anti-greenhouse gases are being emitted by humans and their role. While the models do include water, from #20 its role isn't well understood by me anyway, particularly the relationship between cloud formation and average global temperature. In #26 there's the question of black-box radiation temperature, e.g., if CO2 absorbs at temperatures from IR emitted below -25F, is it really important (it's probably the IR radiation from the cold upper atmosphere)? And no, still haven't found a book that addresses all of these.

There's a simplistic energy calculator people can use to see what sort of things they can take immediate action on that have the biggest impact. For example, energy efficient windows look like they can reduce on average 50% of the home carbon footprint.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting states that the report said that 67% of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with 11% disagreeing and the rest undecided.[32]
Saw Elon Musk yesterday compare it to if smoking caused cancer, as there were paid-for scientists that argued against that case.
Wonder what the percentages were back then and how they compare to today? Just because they disagree doesn't make them evil or in bed with fossil fuels, you need look no farther than DDWFTTW to see a scientist lose $10k on a scientific bet in their field.

The animatrix/matrix has a plot point of blocking out the sun...
Between global warming and an ice age I think I'd take global warming because I've seen all sorts of (albeit drastic) contingency plans (e.g., using nukes to blow dust into the stratosphere matrix style) to keep sunlight from reaching us. But cold? Nuclear power could keep us warm, but how would we grow food on glaciers?

...If I can figure out how to fulfill all my electricity needs from locally installed solar, then that can be an example for others....
You could start a thread on that to bounce ideas around the community. I'm far from neutral too, still need one ICE vehicle for hauling, the PHEV isn't neutral on long-range drives of course, and I still eat food and buy other stuff. Even if everyone duplicated it though, from Bill's book we'd still be creating CO2 from other sectors faster than the sinks can absorb it. Given the half-life, what we have now will be with us for a long time. Seems like a good idea to go to zero so the carbon sinks can catch up (or possibly augment them to go negative?).

Really good thread, rare to see a discussion where all views are considered and explored.
The difference is probably between posters knowing they're right or accepting they might be wrong. That and trying to get the science rather than "just believe me because it's too complicated for you to understand". Pity we don't have a gentle soul from the IPCC as a member that could explain things or put them into perspective as @upnorthandpersonal did on the radiation thread.
 
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