Comments ataremove has made

A name

From one whom watches ice melt on line,
and with no apologies to John Waters,
I suggest that the opera be named ...

CRY, O Sphere

.................

at a remove

Land use and wildfires

Buenos Aires, Argentina, is choking from the smoke coming from fires on nearby islands set by farmers to clear pasture lands so they can grow more soybeans.  One article I read also included the displaced cattle raisers as setting fires to clear "unused" land to make new pastures for cattle.  
One type of people displace another type of people that displace something else.  Etcetera.
By the way, I read some where that soybean production is down by 15% in Brazil and Argentina for this past growing season (Southern Hemisphere).  This in turn affects the price of soybeans in the USA.  
If more USA farm acres are shifted to maize corn this year (like last year?), then upward price pressure will continue on all agricultural products: corn, wheat, barley, oats, sunflowers, soybeans, rice, etc.  
I view that commodity broker you mentioned above as trying to get others to feed his addiction to playing the commodities trading game.
Mr. Philpott, thank you for your reporting on agricultural issues.  I would like to see you write more on the effects of the  interconnectedness of what crops are planted.
More and more, I think that the first big hit our species is going to take is going to come from the reduction in food production.  Due to internal political pressure, India will soon stop exporting rice.  Vietnam and Thailand are also considering doing the same.  Those are the top three exporters of rice.  
And in Africa, Mugabe has started another wave of reducing agricultural production in Zimbabwe.  

at a remove

Nuke reactor shutdown

What I remember from Navy Nuc days is that at right at shutdown, very short-lived fission products would generate almost 7% of the power at the moment of shutdown.  Within 10 seconds, heat energy from the decay of these isotopes would drop to well below 1% of full power.  So overall this "artifact" is trivial in terms of overall energy waste/inefficiency.  
The thing about pressurized water reactors is that you always have to keep the reactor pumps running to circulate the reactor water to keep the heat content of the reactor plant balanced for any short-term (less than a month or so) shutdown.  This alone subsumes any issue/problem with post-shutdown decay heat generation.  
Yes, during shutdown there is heat generation from long-lived fission products and some naturally occuring fission.  But this is more than offset by heat loss to the air surrounding the reactor vessel.  
Non-trivial is the fact that there are energy-using shutdown, and startup, activities which are necessary to control the stresses from heat and pressure differentials, primarily on the reactor vessel.  That would also hold true for a coal-fired steam-driven plant, although not to the extent that is needed in a similar nuclear plant.
The point about Rankine cycle from the initial comment is huge compared to startup/shutdown energy needs.  From my Navy days, steam-driven plants transfer at best 33% of the energy into usable work.  The rest is waste heat.  Regardless of the heat source: nuclear or fossil fuel.  That's the harsh reality of the Mollier diagram.

at a remove

Critic-al

Did Lomborg actually use the phrase "evolve backwards" in his book?  If he did not, you should not.  That promotes sloppy thinking about evolutionary processes.  The quote you did use directly from Lomborg is almost as bad.  Bad on Lomborg's part.  A population of polar bears can only change their niche if that niche is open.  Yet, per an article in a National Wildlife magazine (Feb/March 2006), barren-ground grizzlies (yes, grizzlies are brown bears) have been noted to be aggressively pushing into polar bear territory since the early 1990's.  A significant amount of information in the article is about and from bear biologist Andrew Derocher, University of Alberta.

www.nwf.org is not a good source for this article.  You may have to go to a library.  However, the site does have a Cool It! page with the phrase "Cool It!" denoted with a trademark.

"Lomborg is giving the bears a few decades to undo tens of thousands of years of evolution."  Uhh, don't count out evolution so quick.  Evolution can be fast.  I remember the case of the blue geese and snow geese from the 1960's.  Also, about the same time as the NWF article, I remember reading about some trophy hunters getting a large male polar bear and claiming via DNA testing that it was a half-and-half:  half polar bear, half grizzly.  A picture accompanied the blurb, and the bear looked all polar to me.

With apologies, the epitaph of the polar bear maybe: "Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking rug."

Populations evolve, individuals do not

at a remove

jabailo

I would change your last sentence to read:
"You can't change anything if you don't put consumption on a slipperier slope."

at a remove

"the end of the road" ?

Okay, I've read the article which ends with:
"If the Ross and Ronne shelves broke up, it would be the end of the road."  

What's he mean "the end of the road" ?

Is this where they are saying that once a major ice shelf is gone, the nearby Antartic ice sheet will flow off the land en masse to float in the sea?  And not wait to be melted in place?  

I remember a few years ago some Brit scientist speculating about this happening.

at a remove

Hey, David,

I've just read thru all the comments to this post over on HuffPost.  Congrats.  You've provoked a bunch of to-the-point and very entertainting comments.  And about time, too.  The vitriol ping-pong between a few of the commenters was bluntly hilarious.  By the way, I view education as the highest form of entertainment.  It looks like a few are teaching themselves what you've suggested.  

One commenter suggested a debate between Gore & Crichton.  And that "Crichton would destroy him on this subject."  I ask what positive result would come from that?  

You can't save the whole world (why would you want to?), just a part of it.  So what is left for each of us is to decide which part we are in.  

I enjoy what you write and the way you write it.

at a remove

THE PUBLIC DOESN'T HAVE THE TIME TO UNDERSTAND.

Or rather the public isn't letting on that they are aware.
For most citizens the way to cope with climate change is to act dumb and play smart.

In the fall of 1999, I was talking with the man (that's MAN not "guy") who farms my parents land. He said that sunflowers did very well that year, but the wheat (the usual big crop in south-central North Dakota) did not do well, only about half the yeild he usually gets. He said, "It was too wet for wheat."  
That was on November 8, 1999, south of Jamestown, ND.  The air temperature was 75 degrees F.  

I know, that's all anecdotal information.  But all the same, the public is aware of global warming.  And most of them are saying, "BRING IT ON, BABY!"  

Also, I couldn't give a hang about polar bears.  Where were they 14,000 years ago?  Certainly not Hudson Bay, which seems to be their main focal point the last few decades.  

ataremove