andygates

There's a proof-of-concept test being started in which a big balloon will be used to tether the high end of a hosepipe, and water will be pumped up to be dispersed in a spray. It's a fair old engineering challenge, and the water is just a placeholder for speculative future compounds to cool the atmosphere.  I have a problem with the whole notion of geoengineering: we're already doing it.  We're very successfully engineering the atmosphere to be hotter and wetter, right now. 

There's an analogy with driving towards a precipice: our carbon emmissions are the accelerator; the cliff is, say, 4 degrees of warming (=catastrophe).  What do you do when you are driving towards a bad thing?  You let go the accelerator.  You do not really apply the brake as well... and you sure as hell don't apply a pedal labeled "probably a brake: untested".  There's a reason that the brake and accelerator are worked with the same foot.

I have yet to be swayed by geoengineering.  It strikes me that adding more inputs to a chaotic system in a transitional state is just asking for trouble.  I worry that the gee-whizz relief of being able to "do something" will make it attractive to the people who make such decisions.

The DEFRA bovine-TB-and-badgers consultation is online.  Responses are invited.

( Grink, no ranting. )

I believe that unacceptable (ie, healthy) carcasses will be disposed of quietly, passed-off as roadkill and so on, so the monitoring is likely to be ineffective.

I strongly urge the Department to reconsider the cull.

So, the Plans are Afoot to build a new reactor at Hinkley Point.  Reactor C would be an EPR, a new design which is, apparently, "an evolution of the PWR" and there's tons of bumf at the wiki.  The Finnish and French early adopters are having problems: some of these are to do with safety-control systems (which I'd say are non-negotiable!) and some to do with workmanship (is this a "big project tendering for the lowest bidder" problem, because it seems common?).  Would a Westinghouse AP-1000 be any better? 

I'm of the reluctant opinion that nuclear power is a necessary stopgap in our decarbonisation of energy; it's just a scale thing, really, and very much a lesser evil: I want to see the inherently-safe Generation IV designs in play until the Energy Revolution is completed (and we all have fleets of replicating windmills and space solar and fusion anna Gwendoline), and then mothballed with a "thank feck that's over," like some sort of horrid mecha we no longer need (too much Evangelion before bed) but the evolution of this kit isn't like versions of mobile phone OS.  It takes time, and a gigawatt or two of nuke power is a gigawatt or two that can be not-coal power.  Fundamentally I want to see the death of Drax and something clean to feed these leccy cars.  Scale, see.

Given that opinion, what do the great and good think?  Is Hinkley C a smart step -- safer cleaner and all that -- or just another dangerous boondoggle in a chain of boondoggles?  Would a Westinghouse AP-1000 be any better? 

Do I need to get a badger suit?  ;)

(posts about technical sciencey stuff are fly-paper for the Dunning-Kruger effect: citations always needed)

Politics and religion start from a priori assumptions and go from there to their conclusions, methods and so on.  Science starts with observations; this, I think, is why political and religious types often fail to grok science: they're starting on arbitrary foundations and they know that it's really all opinion.  Thus, when they hit a scientific consensus that is unpalatable - such as climate change and the responsibilities and requirements that come from it - they have great difficulty in parsing what to do.  An ecclesiastical-religion viewpoint would find accommodation; a political one would just shout it down or use rhetoric to get around it.  It's only the fundamental, dogmatic, wild-eyes-and-beard religions that are as implacable.

And thus, this accusation of "global warming religion" -- it's nothing of the sort, but the accuser can't think of anything in their plastic worldview that's as immobile.  They've likely never come across something as immovable that is also unpalatable (gravity, after all, never offended anyone).  The only mental model that's available is religion. 

Science always wins, because science is based on facts.  No amount of wishful thinking would make Lysenko's comradely wheat grow.  No amount of snark will stop CO2 absorbing heat.

it makes me wonder if the cognitive dissonance and plain dumb fury that the denialsphere are feeling is similar to what geocentrists felt when Copernicus presented, and Kepler and Galileo later confirmed, that the Earth goes around the Sun.

Are there any climate models that show no climate chance with increased CO2?  Only I'm tired of playing whac-a-mole with deniers, and before I say "there are no models that show it because it is in defiance of bloody physics!" I need to be sure of it.

Here's a bit more flesh on the bones of this summer's "methane bubbling up in the Laptev Sea" stories from Grist.  Semiletov, the boffin whose annual expedition spotted wide-scale bubbling this year that wasn't previously there, said, "I think we have to tell people that something is happening now with the subsea permafrost." 

Runaway methane emission from under the permafrost could trigger runaway warming, which is a whole bundle of glee. 

Morrison's have started selling B30 biodiesel on most of their forecourts.  That's 30% biodiesel, 70% dinodiesel, with the bio part being made from recycled veg oil and from UK-sourced rapeseed oil.  No palm oil drama, and at that low blend, pretty easy to adopt (your first tank may feel rough: stick it out for two, because the first tank of bio flushes some crap from your tank and that needs to work through).

You know that theory about how methane's trapped under permafrost and it could be a Bad Thing if it was to be released?  Well, it looks like it's happening.

Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, in an Independent article:  "An extensive area of intense methane release was found [in the Laptev Sea, North of Siberia]. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments]."

"The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed."

Oh, crap.

Yay, not many people died.  The partygoers on the Poop Deck scurried home while the waves destroyed nearby bars.  Lots of power is out - can someone tell me why the US has so much power infrastructure aboveground?  And the story of the storm probably has to be the freighter Antalina, which was definitely in peril on the sea: she lost power and the crew just had to ride it out and hope real hard.  That's not a place I'd want to be.  The pic after the cut is a synthetic aperture radar shot showing Antalina in the eye - she's the white dot.  "Ball-shrinking dread" is about the right description for the situation they were in.

( Big pic... )
In unrelated disaster-relief news, did anyone else see Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson piloting a charter jet to rescue XL holidaymakers from their company's collapse?  "I'm here for the catering, I brought along a few bags of croissants."   Truly surreal.

Six Greenpeace protesters are on trial this week. They're taking a ballsy defence: that damaging Kingsnorth (a coal-fired power station and proposed site of a new coal power station soon) is not an offence because they have a lawful excuse.


It could set an interesting precedent.  You can follow trial updates on the Greenpeace blog.