[ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 11:23:58AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> > I'm not interested in doom and gloom. I'm interested in solutions. Your
>
> I'm very interested in solutions. But they start with people accepting
> that there is a problem. Even on this list, the ostrichs are in the
> vast majority. Out there, the situation is a lot worse. Most
> of the 7 billion have no clue at all.
>

I reject this. You can develop a better car without saying "All current
cars are doomed to fail by 2021" Even if they are (since they aren't
autonomous).


> Solutions are useless if people are not ready to accept
> them as such. We're not nearly there yet, here.
>

On this list, I think everyone is open to new ideas about where to get more
energy from. And you don't need to be a doom and gloom person to
acknowledge that more energy and cheaper energy are OBVIOUSLY good things.


> > solution matrix seems to rule out most of the most practical energy
> > sources. I'm for solar, but it only has limited practical applications at
> > present.
>
> I disagree very much. For most people on this list PV is
> is a very affordable way to shave off the bulk of your
> electricity bill, or to allow you to live off-grid, which
> vastly enhances your exit options. Bootstrap is a process
> that profits from economies of scale. Why is solar so
> expensive in the sunny US versus the low-flux Germany?
> Because it takes a decade to build the market.
> Don't waste another decade. You can't afford the price.
>

I had solar on my own roof. It was an utter failure. I was lucky not to
have killed myself knocking the snow off. When the $3000 batteries failed
after only 4 years of use, the system was rendered useless. There was so
much electronics overhead that the cost of the panels was less than 50% of
the cost of the overall system.

I had much more luck with my gasoline generators.

Granted, you are probably talking about using the grid as your battery, and
that's fine until the grid fails. There are plenty of gloom and doom grid
people out there, you might get along with them Eugen.


> > > People should not spend synapseseconds on preventing the
> > > CO2 release, but how to mitigate the impact of increased
> > > CO2, which is not just about climate.
> > >
> >
> > I like building buildings out of CO2. Stuff like this:
> > http://bit.ly/15SAPjg
> > Seems like a reasonably good idea in principle, even if this particular
> > solution has problems to be worked out. Concrete is a large contributor
> to
> > atmospheric CO2, I'm sure you knew that.
>
> I would be looking into geopolymers, and in just low-embedded-energy
> structures in general. You have to crunch the numbers whether a steel
> frame house with glass foam/carbon insulation is going to ROI over a
> cob construction, or some advanced low-tech things I've seen on a
> certain subreddit.
>

I think it's a reasonable area of research to figure out how to use
atmospheric CO2 to build walls and stuff. I'll leave it at that.

-Kelly
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