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Lectro was RIGHT--post1626--(climate related)

1/2 of the Great Barrier Reef has died.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-2016-half-the-coral-in-the-great-barrier-reef-has-perished/558302/

This is really, really saddening to me. When I was a kid I dreamed of being a marine biologist and diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I had tons of books about reefs and remember looking at the pictures and hoping to see it one day (this is a big dream when you live in a podunk town in the NC mountains and your parents don't even have enough money to go to myrtle beach). Now it's dying - rather, we collectively murdered it - and I never got the chance to see it.
 
Deacon923 said:
1/2 of the Great Barrier Reef has died.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-2016-half-the-coral-in-the-great-barrier-reef-has-perished/558302/

This is really, really saddening to me. When I was a kid I dreamed of being a marine biologist and diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I had tons of books about reefs and remember looking at the pictures and hoping to see it one day (this is a big dream when you live in a podunk town in the NC mountains and your parents don't even have enough money to go to myrtle beach). Now it's dying - rather, we collectively murdered it - and I never got the chance to see it.
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Since 2016. Man.

All of this recently happened, more or less, off the east coast of Australia. The Great Barrier Reef—which, at 1,400 miles long, is the longest and largest coral reef in the world—was blanketed by dangerously hot water in the summer of 2016. This heat strangled and starved the corals, causing what has been called “an unprecedented bleaching event.”

Though that bleaching event was reported at the time, scientists are just starting to understand how catastrophically transformative it was. A new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, serves as a kind of autopsy report for the debacle.
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Yet it was not the end of troubles for the Great Barrier Reef. In the summer months of 2017, warm waters again struck the reef and triggered another bleaching event. This time, the heat hit the reef’s middle third. Hughes and his team have not published a peer-reviewed paper on that event, but he shared early survey results with me.

Combined, he said, the back-to-back bleaching events killed one in every two corals in the Great Barrier Reef. It is a fact almost beyond comprehension: In the summer of 2015, more than 2 billion corals lived in the Great Barrier Reef. Half of them are now dead.
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Deacon923 said:
1/2 of the Great Barrier Reef has died.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-2016-half-the-coral-in-the-great-barrier-reef-has-perished/558302/

This is really, really saddening to me. When I was a kid I dreamed of being a marine biologist and diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I had tons of books about reefs and remember looking at the pictures and hoping to see it one day (this is a big dream when you live in a podunk town in the NC mountains and your parents don't even have enough money to go to myrtle beach). Now it's dying - rather, we collectively murdered it - and I never got the chance to see it.
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Sincerely sorry to hear this. Both the death of your childhood dream and the death of the reef.

This is what a mass extinction probably looks like.
 
Well look at the bright side. At this rate, maybe the reef will become small enough to where it's a "practical" problem that even Republicans can solve.
 
An unpopular solution for energy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08/we-dont-need-solar-and-wind-to-save-the-climate-and-its-a-good-thing-too/#75137959e4de

"The dilute nature of water, sunlight, and wind means that up to 5,000 times more land and 10 - 15 times more concrete, cement, steel, and glass, are required than for nuclear plants. All of that material throughput results in renewables creating large quantities of waste, much of it toxic...solar panels create 200 - 300 times more hazardous waste than nuclear, with none of it required to be recycled or safely contained outside of the European Union."
 
Based on that article and the companion column he sites, the problem isn't solar and wind per se. The problem is how we store and transmit energy. In that respect, the problem is people live away from the energy.

Solar and wind are not "unreliable" as he says over and over again. That's poor word choice. Solar and wind will be always be with us and we can predict how much solar and wind there will be on a day to day basis. Solar and wind don't occur as consistently as our energy needs. We are the problem, not solar and wind.

From his other column linked in the above column:

In my last column I discussed an apparent paradox: why, if solar panels and wind turbines are so cheap, do they appear to be making electricity so expensive?

One big reason seems to be their inherently unreliable nature, which requires expensive additions to the electrical grid in the form of natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries, or some other form of stand-by power.

Several readers kindly pointed out that I had failed to mention a huge cost of adding renewables: new transmission lines.

Transmission is much more expensive for solar and wind than other plants. This is true around the world — for physical reasons.


Think of it this way. It would take 18 of California’s Ivanpah solar farms to produce the same amount of electricity that comes from our Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.

And where just one set of transmission lines are required to bring power from Diablo Canyon, 18 separate transmission lines would be required to bring power from solar farms like Ivanpha.

Moreover, these transmission lines are in most cases longer. That’s because our solar farms are far away in the desert, where it is sunny and land is cheap. By contrast, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear plants are on the coast right near where most Californians live. (The same is true for wind.)
New transmission lines can make electricity cheaper, but not when they are used only part of the time and duplicate rather than replace current equipment.
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WFU71 said:
An unpopular solution for energy:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08/we-dont-need-solar-and-wind-to-save-the-climate-and-its-a-good-thing-too/#75137959e4de

"The dilute nature of water, sunlight, and wind means that up to 5,000 times more land and 10 - 15 times more concrete, cement, steel, and glass, are required than for nuclear plants. All of that material throughput results in renewables creating large quantities of waste, much of it toxic...solar panels create 200 - 300 times more hazardous waste than nuclear, with none of it required to be recycled or safely contained outside of the European Union."
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Meanwhile, the huge amounts of land required for solar and wind production has had a devastating impact on rare and threatened desert tortoises, bats, and eagles — even when solar and wind are at just a small percentage of electricity supplies.
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birdman "bat" signal
 
awaken said:
birdman "bat" signal
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seriously though...this is why things like solar roofs, solar parking lots, solar freaking roadways, solar buildings are a good idea. The land is already destroyed so slap some solar panels on it.
 
FZ3Z34TH1YONLCJ.LARGE.jpg
 
birdman said:
seriously though...this is why things like solar roofs, solar parking lots, solar freaking roadways, solar buildings are a good idea. The land is already destroyed so slap some solar panels on it.
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And people are already there using energy.
 
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