1 C more temperature -> air can hold 7% more water vapour
…but the peaks of fringe events are quite a bit taller than +1 C. Raising the average by 1 C raises the peaks considerably more.
1 C more temperature -> air can hold 7% more water vapour
…but the peaks of fringe events are quite a bit taller than +1 C. Raising the average by 1 C raises the peaks considerably more.
Summary:
But then, in the geologically abrupt space of only a few decades, this great river of ice all but halted. In the two centuries since, it has moved less than 35 feet a year. According to the leading theory, the layer of water underneath it thinned, perhaps by draining into the underside of another glacier. Having lost its lubrication, the glacier slowed down and sank toward the bedrock below.
/…/
“The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. If it stops moving, Tulaczyk told me he wants to try to secure permission from Greenland’s Inuit political leaders to drain a larger glacier; he has his eye on one at the country’s northeastern edge, which discharges five gigatons of ice into the Arctic Ocean every year. Only if that worked would he move on to pilots in Antarctica.
It’s not wild at all. :) The plan makes sense from a physical perspective, but should not be implemented lightly because:
Interestingly, warfare also has the effect of:
causing houses to be abandoned, necessitating houses elsewhere while the abandoned ones likely get bombed
decreasing the number of future consumers, whose future footprint would depend on future behaviour patterns (hard to predict)
changing future land use patterns, either due to unexploded ordnance or straight out chemical contamination (there are places in France that are still off limits to economic activity, because World War I contaminated the soil with toxic chemicals), here in Estonia there are still forests from which you don’t want trees in your sawmill because they contain shrapnel and bullets from World War II
I have the feeling that calculating the climate impact of actual war is a difficult job.
But they could calculate the tonnage of spent fuel and energy, that would be easier.
Well, a heat wave cannot last forever. And in terms of cold storage - it’s +30 C over here currently already for a week, it has been 1.5 months since the last snowfall - and the last pile of snow on the local airport is still melting. Darkened, not recognizable as the substance it used to be, but existing, without people making the slightest effort to protect it. :)
what the hell are we going to do?
In the very long term, stop climate change.
In the long term - dig in and design heat shelters, most likely. Because it’s cooler underground and heat waves will pass. When a bad one comes, people would stop working and find shelter from it. One can even accumulate cold in a thermal store during cool periods and distribute the cooling effect to premises during heat waves.
In the short term - those who can (there will be an equality and access problem) and those who must (who cannot stop working) would install air conditioners and similar stuff.
I don’t even want to imagine 50 C. In sauna, it’s dry and you manage 30 minutes by sweating. But living in a sauna sounds bloody awful.
Also, almost anyone with a med / bio background will say - emergency rooms will be full at 50 C, and morgues will be crowded a few days after the event. :(
True, but toppling over can leave them intact. One of my foolish neigbours didn’t anchor his panel carriers properly and thought a thick fir hedge would protect them enough. A storm from unexpected direction threw four panel carriers (9 panels each) face down and severed the cables, so everything had to be disconnected and there was a safety risk (but not during night). I helped with the recovery work and not a single panel was broken.
…and that is why I no longer mount any solar panels horizontally. Not a chance in hell of withstanding that, and one of such storms hit within 150 kilometers last year. Within 30 years, I bet I’ll experience this effect.
Meanwhile, vertical panels can be up-armored (e.g. wooden beam running on top) to withstand such events.
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
I noticed a journalist mention (hopefully based on good sources) that this months’s storm was estimated to be 4-5 times weaker than the 1859 storm.
NASA, in their article mentions the recent storm as a G5 level geomagnetic storm caused by an X8.7 level solar flare.
X is the strongest class of solar flares and G is the strongest class of geomagnetic storms, but this was definitely not a record - an X20 flare has been observed once, but as I understand, the ejected particles didn’t hit Earth.
Where I live (latitude 59), a short electrical grid event occurred during the display of auroras. Something tripped and something immediately switched over to replace it, most people didn’t notice anything, but some had to restart various heat pumps and similar devices. Then again, in Europe, the power grid has relatively short lines and many transformers between them, which makes it comparatively less vulnerable.
Regarding transformers: it’s easier to let a power grid trip offline (and transformers are designed to behave so instead of being overpowered) rather than to keep operating despite a Carrington level solar storm and suffer failure on all longer east-west connections.
Also, I don’t think they used capacitors to protect their high voltage lines back in 1921, because the article Overvoltage Protection of Series Capacitor Banks notes:
“Their first application dates back to 1928 when GE installed such a bank – rated 1.2 MVar – at the Ballston Spa Substation on the 33 kV grid of New York Power and Light. Since then, series capacitor banks have been installed on systems across the globe.”
Also, failure on north-south connections isn’t nearly as likely, so a considerable part of the transformer “population” would be spared from impact.
Thus, while a single strong solar storm within the limit charted out in 1859 would be an extreme inconvenience and strong economic setback, it seems unlikely to end civilization.
A long period of severe solar storms could also result in ozone depletion in the atmosphere and become another extreme inconvenience - through increased UV exposure. However, most forms of life have seen such things in their evolutionary past, and humans have the ability to wear glasses, clothes and apply sun screen.
“The City is evaluating the chemical compounds in the spray to determine if they are a hazard either inhaled in aerosol form by humans and animals, or landing on the ground or in the bay.”
If it comes from the bay, I think it’s safe to assume it can go into the bay. :)
As for the rest, I think it’s OK for them to evaluate - and they are likely to reach the concusion that spraying seawater into the air is what the sea does on its own, and humans are pretty well adapted to reasonable amounts, so the instruction will be:
The Ugandan military playing security guards for a China-controlled oil project… I think explaining human rights over there will have to start from zero - and may have to be backed with “or else” statements - if there exists an institution in a suitable position to issue them. :o