fake_meows

@ fake_meows @sopuli.xyz

Posts

32
Comments

288
Joined

1 yr. ago

6d ago

Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly
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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 6d ago

Figure 3 and Figure 4 are wild.
The main point of the paper is that "yes, warming has accelerated".
But figure 3 and figure 4 show us HOW MUCH. According to their charts, the rates of warming basically held steady between 1960 and 2015 in a long plateau, then basically doubled in an instant. Doubled. And they are really certain of it.

1w ago

Beware Media Hype. It’s Not the El Nino! (Hansen et al.)

If I follow the article correctly, what Hansen is saying is that the media will say this.

Media: the warming is as bad as the IPCC predicted, but we add to that this super nasty El Niño which is temporary and worse.

But the science is this.

Science: warming is even worse than the IPCC predicted, and BECAUSE its so bad, it created this super bad El Niño which now only confuses the public about how bad it really is in the absense of the El Niño event...

The temperature is the temperature, but these narratives run to almost opposite understandings.

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

These ass-pull numbers are a key point of contention.

There's like four hundred plants of any size, they already account for maybe five percent of global power use, and if humanity built a thousand big plants every three years, we'd be 100% nuclear-powered in a couple decades. We're obviously not gonna do that, but it's your stupid hypothetical.

I'm using 15TW as the target. We currently use 19TW annually.

No, 1000 new plants plus 440 old plants does not make 19TW. They put out around 1000 MW per reactor.

If you math this, you need 19,000 nuclear reactors, you're off a whole order of magnitude.

The error you just made in your math is from the idea that nuclear power is 5% of global power use, then extrapolating from that mistake.

Currently, nuclear power is 9% of electricity production.

Electricity is is around 22% of global power.

Nuclear is less than 2% of global power. (9% of 22%) (0.198)

Let's check our work.

If 440 plants is 1.98% 4400 is 19.8% (replaces all electricity) 22,000 is 100%

We calculated 19,000 the other way. So both methods of estimating are in very close agreement. ( The reason for the difference is that real world reactors vary and are not all 1MW)

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

the central premise of using this for that is... transitioning away from fossil fuels.

This is the core of the problem.

The central fallacy is that there is an "energy transition".

Currently 3/4ths of humanity's energy comes from fossil fuels.

The fallacy is based on some version of Goodhart's Law, "The metric becomes the goal."

A lot of people who believe in an energy transition look at some secondary or tertiary proxy measurements / some second order derivative accounting of growth and they then kind of make a logical leap.

So an example of the kind of thing that I'm thinking about is this:

solar panels produce 0.5% of our electricity
the growth of solar panel installation is accelerating
if this continues and the growth rate continues, we will have a lot of solar panels in the future
at some point the Panel # X Watts/Panel is a number so big that it equals Fossil Fuel energy
this means fossil fuels will be able to go away for energy

So, you don't have to be a logician to see what is wrong with this argument from a soundness standpoint.

Meanwhile:

literally no reduction of fossil fuels has happened despite solar panels being installed, in fact it's the opposite effect, more solar allows us to mine and produce even more fossil fuels than ever before and pollution from this is growing
we are short of all the time, resources and space to set up this many solar panels (to be meaningful in the race with climate change)
you're externalizing the fossil fuel supply chain in this analysis
the sun goes down, so how do you evaluate the real cost of the whole system
you can generate electricity with solar panels, but the supply chain cannot run on electricity

Etc etc

Sustainable and low carbon is only possible from a distorted accounting system. You have to not be a systems thinker to believe that solar is a substitute for coal or oil or natural gas. You can't just pour electrons into a cement plant and get concrete out, that's a naive fantasy. Like, I'm not denying what solar can do, it's just that you're not talking about a future where our civilization can survive.

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

Syringes were made of glass before plastic really existed...

So this is the kind of nonsense that happens when people don't know what the energy cost of anything is.

Glass is 5 times as energy intensive / carbon pollution causing versus plastic.

Glass is just as non sustainable because it's made from stuff like sand that we are running out of.

If you clean and recycle glass, you have to heat it to about 2800 degrees versus the 500 degrees for plastic.

Then you have to add the transport costs for heavy glass containers. If you look at something like the Life Cycle Analysis of wine production, you can plant, irrigate, harvest, ferment, bottle, ship on a boat, truck to a store and have someone drive to the store in a car for LESS carbon than what is embodied in making a glass wine bottle.

Whereas 1 million 2 ounce plastic containers have the carbon intensivity of 30 suburban houses for a year.

But do go on... You were saying something about green and sustainable before all this?

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

Renewable energy infrastructure created with fossil fuels is a fossil multiplier, so it makes sense to use it to extract and refine hydrocarbon resources which do not have a viable EROEI by themselves but are still much better that synthesis from scratch.

One of my old clients was a high level nuclear engineer, and during the conversation he actually advanced an interesting idea. What he said was that even as a fossil fuel multiplier, he felt that nuclear power "didn't really work"... UNLESS you're doing the mining anyways for something else of value.

Basically, the most important insight is that uranium host rock contains copper, gold, silver and rare earth metals in economic concentrations.

So basically, uranium is a by-catch of other mining.

So for this engineer, the issue with nuclear power was that if you have to go out and specially mine for uranium fuel there is not enough economic deposits that have a high enough concentration to return energy.

When uranium is a mere side quest for gold and silver mines, this doesn't come into play. That energy is already paid for, so the refinement of uranium is a smaller price tag that lets you run a positive balance sheet.

The engineer told me that due to the bigger stories around mining valuable metals and a global decline of available mining, uranium would naturally sunset as ore qualities decline.

I don't know how to put any numbers to this story, but he told me that the higher level executives had already started ejecting from a bunch of uranium outfits, basically the writing on the wall was that the smart people were getting out.

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

You are having an episode.

Lol.

The MATH I am using is this;

15,000 reactors. / 365 per year = 41.1 years

I figure its closer to ~50 years because within 40 years we will start replacing the first 500 historical reactors AND all the stations having nuclear accidents along the way. At current rates of accidents, a total fleet of 15,000 stations will have about one nuclear accident per month.

So by the time you're at the 41 year mark, you have already added a new 1000 reactors from the list of the reactors that are old or failed. I'm pretty sure that at the 45 year mark you'll have a failure rate of about 1 per day and you can just keep on building new stations at the same pace infinitely. 1 every day somewhere on earth.

Like, all these ideas are nice thoughts until you start thinking about it quantitatively and gain some perspective and scale. A lot of people are just blind to the numbers and so they don't even see how inane the ideas floating around are.

If you think this is hard or impossible sounding, try it with solar, windmills or even all of the above. Or if you don't want to break out a calculator there are many research papers that have already done this for us...

Like, we all know that solar and wind and nuclear work. The issue is the planetary scale. What kind of civilization could we expect to have in a few years when oil and fossil fuels fail and we don't have any other alternative ready?

Fun fact: If uranium ore needs to be 100ppm concentration to return energy after mining, the planet earth has a mere 5 years supply of high quality uranium ore for a 15 terawatt nuclear station fleet. So in addition to being unable to construct a renewable nuclear infrastructure, we also don't have the fuel for it to run...

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

Nevermind that obviously the number of homes versus the number of people doesn't swing wildly based on oil production

You can't just exist in a housed state without massive ongoing claims on energy flows. The energy used by our housing is over 1/4th of our total energy. Usually when you lose your home you also don't use transportation or buy any good and services, which dramatically reduces energy needs.

Source: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability-indicators/carbon-footprint-factsheet

Unless you think a green civilization is flatly impossible - you're pretending we can't get there except through the energy from burning oil.

Correct. That's what I think the data is saying.

For example, if everyone were to live in a sedentary manner spending all their time raising food using a permaculture method, we have over 5X the number of humans that can be kept alive using the current insolance, land area and other constraints like the planetary nitrogen cycle. There is no sustainable plan for raising the carrying capacity without fossil inputs.

Nobody makes any green tech without using oil, nor do we know how, and there are no major current investments in making any green tech using renewables. The outlook for the next 40 or so years is that the source of the power to make a green civilization is literally the same fossil fuel system we already have. It's not a "new" system and there is no transition. It also doesn't even make sense if you think about it. Like a windmill can't even theoretically be made without fiberglass, carbon fiber, concrete etc. all of which require fossil fuels by definition.

All that carbon will go into the atmosphere where it will persist longer than nuclear waste and keep heating the planet.

In 40 years, if we come up with some magical green tech, it'll already be too late to be meaningful on multiple other fronts.

If we started opening 1 large nuclear plant every day globally starting today, we could not even transition off fossil fuels for all energy within 50 years.

As if the only way to make a solar panel, which produces energy by existing, is by extracting energy from petroleum.

I'll await your citations on any alternatives.

I wish you were right, but this is a fairy tale idea.

1w ago

More than 200,000 people flee or lock down as wildfires sweep France and Spain

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

I feel so bad for the people of Sisters, OR right now. 150 foot tall flames and winds so high they can't fly aircraft to battle the fire today.

I really hope they can save the town. It's such a great spot.

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

This mathematical inevitability isn't a brick wall, it's a kink in the chart.

Is your chart looking at oil volumes? Dollars? Oil per year? Or energy?

What I have been detecting is that oil is doing fine in money terms, or in barrel terms.

But slowly in the background, the energy return has been on a sharp decline. We started with oil producing 99 additional units of free energy for every 1 unit invested (1:100). Currently it is thought that we are using about 5% of all our energy to produce oil (1:17) and its tracking sharply downwards. The "energy cliff" for human civilization is around 1:10 or 1:5.

Offshore and shale oil are already 1:10. Tar sands and Venezuela and other heavy oil deposits are below 1:5.

So there is something that should sharpen your pencil that just happened in the world in 2020 during covid.

Consider the covid event as a "natural experiment" that would reveal what happens when you take the economy offline EXCEPT for the basic maintenance costs of the civilization. Basically the economy didnt really do any growth, but we had to keep making food, fixing what we already have etc.

In developed nations, energy use dropped about 5%, and in developing nations it went down about 10%.

Basically, this is a rough approximation of how much of the economy is available for growth and anything new, and how much it costs to hold all the old stuff together and keep it running.

So let's say that in developed nations, roughly a 90% fraction of energy is just maintenance.

So what happens to growth if the energy return on energy production goes from 17:1 to 15:1?

You just went off a cliff. A completely invisible line that makes growth-expectations modernity no longer possible.

Now if you want to make a solar panel, someone has to become homeless. Growth and new production in any area can only come by shrinking civilization in another area. Or geopolitically, they can eat mud pies in Haiti so that the USA can build MRI centers for pet dogs.

It doesn't matter how many of those barrels of the "no-net-energy" oil you make, you will be scavenging growth potential from reducing what already exists that takes upkeep.

Its a brick wall but WITH AIRBAGS. We will not fully recognize it, but we are for sure feeling it. The reckoning will be far in the future when people's thinking is not as clouded.

The civilization will keep on surviving, but gradually shrinking away in a long slow decline...

1w ago

More than 200,000 people flee or lock down as wildfires sweep France and Spain

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

Oregon checking in. Oregon has already burned the average annual burned acreage in the first month of fire season, exceeding all the acres burned in an entire year last year. A couple of days ago it was at 680,000+ acres so far.

https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/wildfires-670k-acres-what-we-know/

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

Back when I was in Canadian high school, this was before the Alberta's Tar Sands really started opening up production, we learned about how the energy return on producing and refining the tar sands was below the energy obtained. So at the time, one of the proposals was to build nuclear power stations to create steam, heat and electricity to separate the bitumen from the sand.

So basically the idea was to subsidize the production on an energy basis.

The "thought" about how oil works as a molecular material, or an energy package that's completely aside from the normal idea of oil being a primary energy source kind of opened up an understanding for me.

During my lifetime, I think what I've watched play out was that many other mechanics have also subsidized oil production. For example, the stock market and money printing, or the unfiltered ability to dump wastes in the land, water and air. Governments around the world have been mortgaging the future to produce oil today at a financial cost that probably cannot be covered in full by today's societal benefits. We have actually reached into the future to pay for oil today, oil that is not truly economic any more...

I think there is an inflection point where in the past a barrel of oil would give you tremendous economic benefits, and those benefits have dwindled as the product costs more and more. I think eventually the production of oil will flip to a drag on the economy and economic growth. We may already be there. And the thing is, oil is literally our artificial life support system for humanity, and so what will break down first is the economy. We will continue to pump oil just for the molecules even when we have to burn down the rest of the planet to squeeze the last drops out.

People love to focus on "oil" as if whatever comes from a hydrogen fuel cell or a solar panel is fungible with it. You can't make road pavement with electrons. You can't turn electrons into hospital syringes or food. On a molecular basis, oil is by weight one of the most major material inputs into literally every physical thing imaginable. Oil makes the stuff we need to live. We even use more tons of oil in our physical crafting than tons of metal.

Anyhow, as a footnote, I've heard that the tar sands return just 2:1 energy on the energy invested. This is FAR too low to create an energy return for current society. However, these molecules are required not on an energy basis, but for things like paving roads and blending other oil for refining. So... We are there now. We have to make these shitty oil fields produce just to keep the wheels from falling off altogether. And everything else in life will fail first.

1w ago

No Oil, No Transition, No Economy

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 1w ago

less oil is being shipped which means more is still in the ground for future use

When you have an oil deposit that is producing oil and you stop pumping oil, sometimes the field is permanently damaged. That can either affect the total amount of energy from the field or the delivered power (rate you can withdraw).

There are a number of ways the oil field can be damaged. Reservoir clogging can occur from water, parafin or sediment. The land can subside. In injected water fields where oil is being pumped by pressurized water, that water can move into the oil producing zones and displace the oil.

I think this permanent supply loss is all happening, but what's difficult to figure out is what the numbers are. Many mainstream sources did say that 10% of the supply may not return or could take extremely lengthy time periods to restore.

I think the uncertainty comes from the fact that all oil fields are unique AND that oil fields are highly dynamic. So for example, a 30 day production shutdown is different from a 60 day shutdown or a 90 day.

Regardless of our ability to forecast, we don't have "more" oil in the ground for future use, we actually now have less.

2w ago

62.9% of youth agree: "Humanity is doomed"

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 2w ago

A better future IS possible.

Yeah, but will that matter if the world is doomed?

2w ago

The trails got smoother and the bikes got burlier. Something has to give.

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 2w ago

Sometimes park riding actually rewards you without you having to learn anything.

For example, if you take a run down a well built jump line, you just have to hold onto your natural speed and you'll hit the landing. Often steep lippy jumps you can't even see the target. So basically there is no rider judgement going into it, you're just fooling around with jump mechanics.

One younger racer I was mentoring could not hit the crux jump on an intermediate park lap, and I realized that he lacked a beginner skill of being able to adjust his speed for the size of jump.

This same thing happens if you take freeride jumping onto tech trails... An intermediate park rider can struggle with more raw terrain on the same level of difficulty just because they haven't honed that aspect.

Another gotcha is that jumping and riding mechanics actually vary greatly depending on the speed and context. There is no "one correct way" to go off a drop, it is all determined by your entry speed, slope angle, landing zone etc. You have to have a whole crayon box of skills to fully cover it all. Some park riding really simplifies all the other details.

It works the opposite also. A lot of tech riding you never really learn to hit anything at the higher speed that's used on park runs, and it's a pretty big learning curve just due to the higher amplitude and bigger consequences.

2w ago

The trails got smoother and the bikes got burlier. Something has to give.

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 2w ago

I agree with this sentiment.

I was a former racer and a suspension tech. When I get a new bike it takes me a few rides to get the suspension dialled.

However, once dialled, that begins a year of deeper tweaking that could include changing damper shim stacks, various internal reconfigurations with volume spacers and suspension mods.

It basically takes me a year of ownership to really feel like the bike is doing what I want.

I think I can basically take almost any suspension package and eventually modify it to what I imagine. So I don't super care if it's a Fox or Rock Shox or air or coil, these are not essential constraints on ride quality.

I also usually take about 2 years to figure out the wheels and components to a point where things have the right set of characteristics all together. For example, I won't enjoy riding a stiff handlebar with noodly rims, for me it's all a stack of springs that have to respond evenly in various loadings.

Having given this anecdote, what I see other riders doing is total part and total bike swaps. They have a valid issue with some shortcoming on their current ride but they don't have the right strategy of tuning, so what they do is trade one set of problems for a whole new bike, repeat, repeat.

I actually hate riding a new bike, it makes me ride much slower and much worse.

As someone who can do a lot of basic level auto diagnosis and repair, I don't treat a car much different.

When you start to pay other people as mechanics, it is often a rational monetary decision to sell a slightly used item and get a new one... If you flip items fast enough that you never pay for depreciation or maintenance you can get away with it...

2w ago

The trails got smoother and the bikes got burlier. Something has to give.

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 2w ago

a geometry that most hard tail mtb mimic these days, I find it hard to agree.

Back in 2008, there were only two brands that made bikes with geometry that was anywhere at all close to modern, and those brands were Kona and Ragley.

By modern, I'm talking about a rearward bottom bracket that shows up on geometry charts as a steep seat tube angle paired with a slack head angle and long top tube.

You can go onto the website called "bike insights" and plug in your numbers and it'll show up as a graphic which you can compare against something modern. Your bike won't be modern at all.

I'll go further and point out that if your bike didnt come with a dropper post, you're basically riding an antique. The whole world needed dropper posts to deal with the bottom bracket / seat angle / standing up hitting the seat relationship that only started to be a thing within the modern geometry paradigm.

You should test ride something current.

Here, I did the compaison for you at this link. You will be shocked. Note that the Chromag is described as "average" for today.

3w ago

All the call outs for the past 30 years and only now is it clicking

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 3w ago

There are some headlines about how China was expecting constant growth of solar panel sales, and they went all out trying to build this future capacity so that they would be able to corner the market...

But they overestimated the speed of the sales growth and built way more manufacturing capacity than the amount the world wants to buy, meaning the whole system is wildly beyond the needed capacity.

3w ago

All the call outs for the past 30 years and only now is it clicking

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fake_meows @sopuli.xyz 3w ago

as cheap as what China can make.

China has been selling solar panels at a loss because they wanted to scale their industry. They actually sell them below cost and subsidize the production.

The second big reason that they are cheaper is that they use coal and pollute more in the manufacturing process. If they produced panels with as little pollution as a western manufacturing company, the cost would be 10X higher.

In these huge solar panel plants, less than 1% of the current power inputs into the process is rewable, and there are no plans to make it renewable for at least the next 40 years... As in, all these long range power infrastructure investments in China are in coal and fossil fuels for this manufacturing sector.