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

I didn't watch the video, just looked like some silly click bait and that turns me off.

without the “carbon cost” of manufacturing and delivery of solar and wind
On this - we already know the answer to the embedded carbon cost of the entire lifecycle of solar PV and wind relative to fossil fuel alternatives which is typically what they are displacing.

Solar PV returns its embedded carbon cost within ~2 years give or take depending on location/insolation conditions. Wind (grid scale) pays back within months.
 
entire lifecycle of solar PV and wind relative to fossil fuel alternatives which is typically what they are displacing.
Yes, but my point was merely that he didn’t mention any co-culpable green energy factors. The carbon ROI is (or can be) short but it exists- along with other things many of which I mentioned. Plus, the per-mile carbon footprint as a cost is extrapolation that doesn’t include the infrastructure support and industry carbon footprint.

My point is I have great distaste for the global warming pill because the shillers are hyper focused instead of holistically informed. Repeaters, not thinkers…you can’t bake a cake without all the ingredients.
 
After watching the doco "Planet of the Humans" I have a different perspective on solar and wind power.

I think the answer is to lessen our demand for electricity, how we do that, I don't know.
 
This article has a very rambling but probably accurate assessment for why we can't trust the climate models.

 
Click-bait title. It's not that we "can't trust" the climate models, for example, that article says:
...we emphasize explicitly and unequivocally that human-caused climate change is real, that it poses significant risks to society and the environment, and that various policy responses in the form of mitigation and adaptation are necessary and make good sense....

Keep in mind that the climate models back in 2007 accurately predicted temperatures of today within their margins for error every year and each year the models get better.

The trick is that "margin for error". The IPCC report is very good at bracketing probabilities around the data. What I think most object to is them publishing scenarios that are less than 50% likely. But, I see their point in doing it as a 50% chance is still a chance of it happening. The article completely ignores that there's any sort of quality level that the IPCC puts on each in it's report.

The article is more about the failure of scientific self-correction in general. The whole gist of the article is what Veritasium said very concisely back in 2016...between P-Hacking and journal policies of replication rejection (~9:24) the actual truth is generally screwed. There is NO COST to getting things WRONG, the COST is not getting them PUBLISHED -- Brian Nosek


The good news is scientists are getting better at it (about 10:15) and the IPCC is well aware of the problem. Probably the real value climate change skeptics have brought to the table is extreme scrutiny to the entire science, which helps keep the whole thing as honest as possible.
 
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What makes me reject the fear-mongering climate crowd is they have an agenda that is anti-capitalism and pro-communism.
Ever seen what happens to the environment in a communist utopia ? It's NASTY. Since wealth is destroyed, the few that are in control don't care about what happens to the environment.

Let me toss out a few facts about CO2 :
1) If you had a box of 10,000 molecules of air, how many molecules would be CO2 ? Answer : 4 out of 10,000
It's called a "trace gas" for a reason. There's very little CO2 in the air.
2) What % of the total CO2 which occurs naturally do we humans contribute ? 90% ? 75% ?
Answer : approximately 4% !

So if we reduced our CO2 output by 50%, which would send us back to the stone age, we would reduce the total CO2 by a whopping 2% !

They won't debate these facts because they would lose.
Remember Trump challenging pro-climate change scientists to a public debate ? Their reply : "the science is settled !"
 
They won't debate these facts because they would lose.
Coming up with completely disingenuous and fallacious arguments doesn't help.

The relative proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere isn't the issue. It's the absolute amount of CO2 which matters because each of those 4 CO2 molecules has huge greenhouse potential. You should be very thankful it's only 4 in 10,000.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased dramatically (up 50%) since before the industrial revolution, this increase has been caused by human activity and we are still adding more CO2 (and other potent greenhouse gases) than ever.

Adding to the prolific release of potent greenhouse gas pollutants is the loss of massive carbon sinks (e.g. deforestation) and the result is the atmosphere and oceans are warming. This is not good.

Climate change is real.
It's bad.
It's caused by us.
We can do something about it.
But it's getting to the stage where we will have set up a state of irreversible damage.

No one needs to invoke "communism" as a reason to keep going the way we are.
 
What makes me reject the fear-mongering climate crowd is they have an agenda that is anti-capitalism and pro-communism.
Just as it's ridiculous to link a snake-bite to a political agenda, so it goes with climate change. Personally, when I see things like "they have an agenda", that smacks of propaganda where someone is trying to sell me something for their gain without real reason. Some probably do have agendas, but just because you heard the evacuation alert from CNN doesn't mean the fire isn't raging down the hillside.

That said, I started the thread as a climate denier/skeptic, mainly because I was around when folks were worried we were going into an ice age and remembered things like CO2 being a weak greenhouse gas compared to things like water vapor (which can be over 1%).

In the beginning, I did the normal thing and ignored it assuming I'd eventually be proven right, stupid scientists always changing their minds and getting things wrong out the gate in their eagerness to publish.

"Fake" science usually gets debunked within a decade, although sometimes you have to dig for it (usually it just slinks away). Except the first IPCC report was in 1990. So, it's been going fairly strong for over 30 years and, like it not, the U.S. entered a treaty to be net-zero by 2050. Ultimately, as a capitalist, it'll be a good thing as cheaper alternatives should win out over more expensive and solar & wind have been cheaper for years (it's the ESS that's been holding it back and that's about to change).

At that point I was starting to think just possibly there might be more to it and it would only be fair to look into it with an open mind. That was a pretty annoying experience as there's more hate for "climate deniers" than there are facts.

But slowly over the course of the thread, wading through the nonsense, I was able to find answers to the questions and started to believe.
Then of course I got fairly angry at all the people that have been crying about climate change for 30 years and haven't done squat to fix it, it was outrageous to learn that what I had done merely to be frugal (solar & EV) was far above the average... and me not even a believer at the time.

Anyway, I invite you to read through the science in the thread and ask questions and poke holes. Can't say that I can answer them, but if they're interesting and not already answered (it's a long thread) I'll try to research them.

1) If you had a box of 10,000 molecules of air, how many molecules would be CO2 ? Answer : 4 out of 10,000
10,000 might sound like a lot, but that volume is way tinier than the head of a pin. How small? From Avogadro's constant and the ideal gas law you can get a rough estimate that 10,000 molecules of air at standard conditions is about 3.7e-13 milliliters of air (ref). So yeah, as @wattmatters said, all those tiny reflectors start to add up. Combine that with their very long half-life and they become a very real problem.
 
invite you to read through the science in the thread and ask questions and poke holes.
The 1941 usda annual publication talked about the global warming trend in a much more clear-headed fashion. They came at it from an adapt and survive perspective.

Allowing a skeptical “if,” if there is a human-caused climate change, one of the issues that stabilizes and generates skepticism is the cultural norm we’ve established that has the attitude that prevention is the primary driver we should consider.

Much like the ridiculous covid vaccine hysteria from the skeptic and believer extremes, the ‘prevention’ scheme entirely mocks a ‘survival’ scenario that holistically involves a broader view and approach to the problem. (While covid is a shorter-term though potentially perpetual emergency, the global temperatures is more on the 50-year to 300-year scale.)

The skepticism thrives in the populous due primarily to parroting in ignorance (people don’t know enough to achieve their own conclusions), but also a broad-based intellectual recoil against assumptions and foregone conclusions that- even if correct- leave those able to draw their own conclusions unwilling to accept mantra science. In their view they truly don’t know what to believe or decide due to the problems they have with the broken logic skeptics and true believers dish out. “X” beach or whatever is supposed to have gone under water in twenty years- 30 years ago (1989).
The rhetoric has to be factual and believable.

It was in 1941…
 
It was in 1941…
Okay, I'm not that old! But I know people were saying it could happen long before that....

In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. (ref)
It makes sense really given the long half-life, every molecule added is going to add just that much more heat for hundreds of years. Not like we've been planting more carbon sinks to counteract it as we went along for the last ~300 hundred years.

But as I said above... it was just in the '60s scientists were saying we were headed into an ice-age. I think it was those predictions not occurring that first made me jaundiced about a good fraction of scientific papers as being hogwash (also, being fair to me as a skeptic, some pre IPCC models did say Florida would be underwater by 2020... so I was right to classify that as nonsense). The problem with being ridiculously wrong at the outset is that you lose credibility (e.g., boy who cried wolf). Perhaps my ignoring it for 3 decades expecting it to go away was bit mule-headed though.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said something interesting a while back... something like:
The most important thing we discovered when we went to the moon was the Earth. (ref)
A lot of the movements around ecology, recycling, etc. only occurred after that, and he postulated it was because we looked at the Earth in a new way. Shatner recently said something similar after his recent space-flight (less precise and full of emotion / wonder as he'd just landed).
 
Believe what you want to believe, but mankind has a history of using fear to control the masses.
The majority of scientists think the world is warming but don't believe it's catastropic.
Why would some try to paint CO2 as dangerous when it's absolutely necessary to life on earth ?
We have had record crop yields in several recent years. The past five years produced the five highest U.S. corn yields
and the five highest soybean yields per acre in history. See page 16 :


Plants love CO2 and when more is present in the atmosphere, they grow faster.
One factor that influences my beliefs are that God knew what he was doing when he made everything. The earth maintains a balance by consuming more CO2 when more is produced (plants grow faster). He gave us oceans of oil to make our lives better. And the fear-mongers want you to believe using fossil fuels will destroy the earth.

Here's another fact that exposes the communists behind climate activism : they oppose nuclear energy. Zero CO2 emissions and they oppose it ?
That should tell you something.......
 

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Why would some try to paint CO2 as dangerous when it's absolutely necessary to life on earth ?
Too much CO2 can kill plants (ref). Like anything else, too much or too little of anything is bad for something.

One factor that influences my beliefs are that God knew what he was doing when he made everything.
Might that not include making us smart enough to fix problems we make?
Anyway, don't want to go down that rabbit hole as religion is touchy on the forums.

Here's another fact that exposes the communists behind climate activism : they oppose nuclear energy.
They have a funny way of showing it then.
China and Russia both have nuclear power plants, heck even Vietnam has at least one. Russia gets over 20% of its power from nuclear (ref).

Accidents do create backlashes and fear though. Chernobyl slowed down Russian nuclear power plant deployments, three-mile island (and 60 other disasters) here in the U.S. have slowed down its adoption and created a lot of resistance. Then there are the 9 nuclear submarine disasters, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan also caused a lot of nuclear dissent. I do agree a lot of that fear is misplaced, more people have died mining coal than from nuclear incidents (more on that here).

What I don't like about nuclear is that I'm a capitalist...current nuclear LCOE costs are much higher than wind or solar (ref). Ditto Coal & Gas. The only thing holding solar/wind back from free-market acceptance is reliability which is currently only cost-effective in geological locations with CAES or PSH (e.g., cheap energy storage). With new cheaper ESSs on the way, solar & wind are poised to dominate. Unless of course, new lower-cost nuclear reactor technologies can compete (and they just might).

Zero CO2 emissions and they oppose it ?
Might want to check your sources.
Russian & China both signed the Paris accords before the U.S. did. Russia just recently committed to 2060 (ref). China admitted a while ago they won't hit net-zero until 2060. The other big countries are all shooting for 2050 (Austrailia's the amusing one, the government hasn't committed but every state and territory government that makes it up has committed). But as the economics shift away from traditional power generation, everyone will get on the bandwagon (even communists can't afford to ignore the $$ savings).
 
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Believe what you want to believe, but mankind has a history of using fear to control the masses.
The majority of scientists think the world is warming but don't believe it's catastropic.
Why would some try to paint CO2 as dangerous when it's absolutely necessary to life on earth ?
It's pretty clear you have little interest in genuine discussion about the (overwhelming amount of) science on the topic of anthropogenic climate change and are just picking up on nonsensical conspiracy theory talking points from who knows where. But wherever they are emerging from it is not a reliable or credible source of information.

All I can ask is that you do better. Until you do, I see little point in further engaging. It's a waste of time as I am not qualified to deal with people suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance in a manner which will help them. I can engage but when someone has entrenched views without the desire to learn nor have developed the critical thinking skills necessary (it's hard to do), it just results in them digging heels in further and gets neither of us anywhere.

Good luck with your conspiracy theories. I wish you well.
 
It's pretty clear you have little interest in genuine discussion about the (overwhelming amount of) science on the topic of anthropogenic climate change and are just picking up on nonsensical conspiracy theory talking points from who knows where. But wherever they are emerging from it is not a reliable or credible source of information.

All I can ask is that you do better. Until you do, I see little point in further engaging. It's a waste of time as I am not qualified to deal with people suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance in a manner which will help them. I can engage but when someone has entrenched views without the desire to learn nor have developed the critical thinking skills necessary (it's hard to do), it just results in them digging heels in further and gets neither of us anywhere.

Good luck with your conspiracy theories. I wish you well.
I don't have a dog in this fight .... but using big words to call a person names is still a personal attack instead of having a discussion ..... and is low class in anybody's book.
 
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We are warned that if we don't mend our ways, in a couple hundred years our fossil fuel usage will cause the oceans to rise 3', inundating the vast majority of populated areas.

A few miles off the coast of where I live lies the Continental Shelf, a deep drop-off from 400' below the surface to much deeper.
10,000 years ago, the Continental Shelf was ocean-front property.
 
I don't have a dog in this fight .... but using big words to call a person names is still calling names instead of debating ..... and is low class in anybody's book.
I didn't call anyone names, just pointing out why it's pointless and a waste of time attempting to engage with such people.

It takes at least 10 times the time and effort to refute a statement of disinformation / misinformation as it does to come up with the nonsense in the first place. In the meantime they ignore that and throw out another bunch of disinformation because "they researched it".

It's complete waste of time and effort, unless and until someone shows a willingness to actually engage in an intellectually honest manner. Otherwise all you end up doing is give them oxygen (pun intended) to throw out more nonsense.

Anyone who throws out stupid old tropes such as "CO2 is only 4 parts in 10000 so how on Earth can it be a problem?" is being intellectually disingenuous and hasn't bothered to make even the slightest effort to assess whether or not what they are writing makes any sense at all. Understanding this stuff is hard.
 
I didn't call anyone names, just pointing out why it's pointless and a waste of time attempting to engage with such people.

It takes at least 10 times the time and effort to refute a statement of disinformation / misinformation as it does to come up with the nonsense in the first place. In the meantime they ignore that and throw out another bunch of disinformation because "they researched it".

It's complete waste of time and effort, unless and until someone shows a willingness to actually engage in an intellectually honest manner. Otherwise all you end up doing is give them oxygen (pun intended) to throw out more nonsense.

Anyone who throws out stupid old tropes such as "CO2 is only 4 parts in 10000 so how on Earth can it be a problem?" is being intellectually disingenuous and hasn't bothered to make even the slightest effort to assess whether or not what they are writing makes any sense at all. Understanding this stuff is hard.
You've wasted a lot of time throwing around insults .... Trying to say someone is suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance ... is nothing but a crass way to call names.
 
You've wasted a lot of time throwing around insults .... Trying to say someone is suffering from a form of cognitive dissonance ... is nothing but a crass way to call names.
Truth can be difficult for some.

You're calling me low class and crass. Pot, kettle, black.

Let me know when they are willing to engage in an intellectually honest discussion. Until then I'll either call it out for the bullshit it really is or ignore it. You have the option to do the same.
 
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