/sci/ - Science & Math

climate change is a leftist myth

>>9992334
>climate change is a leftist myth
This might surprise you, but scientific research across the world doesn't revolve around one country's political debates.

>>9992334

i wish the countries of the world would just seize the closest unpopulated wasteland possible, surround it with a chainlink fence and armed guard towers every 0.5-1 miles, and fill it with a massive nuclear reactor complex

then again i know nothing about nuclear energy

>>9993776
yea but what if making a worse world for some makes a better world for my nation

>>9993780
it won't, no matter what meme graphs you pull out about crop growths

>>9993779
You can't just put up massive power plants few & far between. The farther the electricity travels, the more the power lines dissipate the energy as heat, which compounds with the fact that you're drawing more current and therefore dissipating that much more heat energy with the greater radius powered. You could alleviate that with thicker & more numerous wires, but that's a higher upfront cost that also compounds with the other factors of long-distance power supply.

Plus, a lot of places just don't have the upfront investment to make in nuclear energy, which has to be provided by another nation a lot of the time anyway because the exact same process used to make fissile nuclear energy material is also used to make weapons-grade material, prompting policing on its availability. Then, there's the fact that nuclear plants take a long time to build, so the politician in power has to really care about the future because they won't be around to take the credit when it's finally built.

Then, there's supporting energy infrastructure & demand to actually get power flowing, labor including specialized staff, radioactive waste disposal, all the nasty little logistics that come with a project like that. It's not so much a problem of whether it's possible; it's more a problem of whether it's economical.

>>9993814
thanks for the info but am i wrong in assuming that in a utopian earth the primary means of generating electricity would probably be nuclear power? it just seems so much more practical than other sources, and whereas the natural gas supply will probably be depleted within 200 years, the radioactive power supply will last much longer

>>9993817
Fossil fuels as a whole aren't running out any time soon. The fuel reserves most often counted are just those that are economically viable at the moment. For instance, no one wants to build a pipeline all the way through entire mountain ranges into bumfuck Alaska to pipe out the massive oil reserves there; it's just not a smart choice to make with your money when you can just build a rig in the middle of Texas at a fraction of the cost. There are huge oil & natural gas reserves, usually in the ocean, that no one wants to touch for similar reasons. Again, economics really skew the energy game.

But yeah, if time & material supply were no objects, nuclear would be the way to go.

>>9993862
I don't think you should really expect any exact numbers from me, my point was just:
>fossil fuels/coal/etc., in producing electricity, have a half life of [VeryLow]/[UnitofMass]
>nuclear energy, AFAIK, in producing electricity, has a half life of [Years]/[UnitofMass]

before you say "well fossil fuels dont have a half life" and "nuclear fuel rods last a lot less than a year" et cetera please understand that i'm just trying to express my belief that the timescale of consumption of fossil fuels is rather fleeting compared to that of nuclear fuels (which may be wrong but that's the thought I'm expressing)

There's plenty that can be done to reverse warming if it gets too out of control. Many of the methods are harmful or destructive to the environment, but as far as we're concerned, the only thing that matters is human survival. Even if we have to turn the Earth into a barren shithole, as long as humans can still live comfortably on it, so what?

But, nature will probably take care of it for us anyway. Aren't we already overdue for a Yellowstone eruption? That'll certainly cool things down for a while; not only will blot out the sun for a couple of years, it will also ensure that lots of people starve to death or die in the following food wars, leading to a reduction in the human burden placed on the environment.

>>9993879
>There's plenty that can be done to reverse warming if it gets too out of control.
no there is not, that's why it hasn't been done yet
>Many of the methods are harmful or destructive to the environment, but as far as we're concerned, the only thing that matters is human survival
that's retarded and evinces a bad understanding of ecology and what would happen if most ecosystems collapsed.
>Even if we have to turn the Earth into a barren shithole
then all humanity will die or wither away
>But, nature will probably take care of it for us anyway. Aren't we already overdue for a Yellowstone eruption? That'll certainly cool things down for a while; not only will blot out the sun for a couple of years, it will also ensure that lots of people starve to death or die in the following food wars, leading to a reduction in the human burden placed on the environment.
retard

There's plenty humans can do to "fix" the climate, we just haven't really put our minds to it. Imagine if we decided: "fuck it, the world's gone to shit, we can't save everything, so we might as well just make our own ecosystem"

Here's an imaginary scenario: We bio-engineer a new type of algae; it's completely white, it floats like a coating of scum on the ocean surface (our oceans now look like pools of semen instead of majestic blue expanses), it engages in photosynthesis, metabolizes hydrocarbons, and is engineered to survive in both cold and warm water. Then, we release it into the ocean; it would spread even faster than the toxic algae blooms we currently have and would thrive across the entire globe. The white algae will reflect sunlight, the massive spread would devour vast quantities of CO2 from the air, O2 concentration in the atmosphere would rise, and sea life would probably experience a mass extinction due to the biome disruption. Eventually, whatever did the best job surviving will be genetically modified to act as our marine food source and balance out the algae levels.

Don't tell me that's impossible, we are completely capable of doing something like that. Genetic engineering is only held back by ethical concerns and fears of unchecked spreading of GMOs. As long as enough money and brain power was poured into it, it would only take us a few years to have a working product. If we were truly up shit creek without a paddle, at least one country would panic and do something insane, possibly even worse than the above scenario (artificially inducing volcanic activity, forcing dust into the atmosphere with machines, dumping white plastic into the ocean to reflect sunlight, etc.)

>>9993812
Don't know where you're getting crop growths I was talking at a geopolitical level