elbarto’s Recent Comments

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  Oh, the humanity

  The argument that evil latte sipping greenies are starving the worlds poor by denying them GMO's is completely bogus.

  Who owns the genes? How many $billions have the Ag science corporations invested in developing and patenting the genes?

  Does anyone seriously think that the "kind and benevolent" Ag corps are going to give their technology to poor starving people for nothing?

  What a joke!

  Think about this; Ag corp X splices in a gene for resistance to virus Y. Virus Y now only affects 1% of crop instead of 20%. Whoops, in a few planting generations, virus Y has now strengthened and again affects 20% of crop. Back to the drawing board for Ag corp. This is a viscious cycle that ensures continued dependence on Ag corp for version 1.X of crop seeds.

  If anything, GMOs are going to feed less and less people simply because the technology is more expensive.

  The world has enough food. Rich people waste enough food to feed those that don't have enough. That's the real problem.

  Want to solve world hunger? - give those poor people some food - then teach them how to grow their own using sustainable permaculture. They can't afford the oil and chemical fertiliser for broad scale monocrops but they have human power.On Study: transgenic soy brings lower yields than conventional posted 1 year, 5 months ago 25 Responses

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  Hot rock energy is not "renewable"

  The average heat flux flowing from the core to the surface is only 0.045 W/m2. Deep rock is only hot because it is well insulated by the earth above it.

  Once water is pumped into a deep hot rock formation and the heat is "mined", the resource is depleted and will take a very very long time to reheat from the tiny trickle of heat coming from the core.

  A deep geothermal power station requires several cubic miles of deep rock to be fractured to allow increased water permeation and steam flow. A hot formation of several cubic miles will cool to the point where it no longer generation steam of sufficient pressure to run turbines after 5-10 years. The power station then need to be move to a new formation.

  I'm not convinced that fracturing and cooling HUGE volumes (several cubic miles per small power station depleted in 5-10 years) deep rock is going to be a sustainable activity. There are so many unforseen dangers, earthquakes, subsidence (even a few inches could destroy a whole city?), draining of aquifers & lakes, etc etc.

  Compare the geothermal average heat flux of 0.045 W/m2 to the average global solar flux of 340 W/m2.
  One could say "does not compute".

  The reason deep geothermal is not providing us with Terawatts of cheap clean electricity is that it really can't. Even if it does manage to provide some significant proporation of our energy requirements for a short time - it is "heat mining" and once mined it is gone, at least on a time scale that is meaningful to us.On Geothermal power: a core climate solution posted 1 year, 5 months ago 16 Responses

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  Welcome to manackermill

  With an undying spray of unintelligible gibberish hammered out in a fervent 24-7 typefest from his/her mom's basement, manacker has hijacked this blog.

  By sheer mind numbing wordmass this has become all about manacker.

  Surely it is time to moderate? On Global temps may drop this year but, alas, world still warming posted 1 year, 6 months ago 132 Responses

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  March Anomaly

  GISS Global Surface Temp Anomaly for March was +0.67ºC (Hadley +0.43ºC). Third hottest March on record. If global warming was over in January, what should we make of March? Is it back on?

  Given the warming from Feb to March 2008, ie +0.41ºC over one month, the globe is now warming at 4.9ºC per year. Perhaps this means the January "Ice Age" is now over?

  Get out your foil hats, deniers, you'll need them to protect your aura from all those "cosmic rays" that are surely driving this warming trend.On Global temps may drop this year but, alas, world still warming posted 1 year, 6 months ago 132 Responses

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  Fossil CO2 is "tagged"

  http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp057/ndp057.htmOn Student charges that textbook downplays climate change posted 1 year, 7 months ago 12 Responses