Unsubsidized Renewables Now Cheaper Than Subsidized Fossil F

[pErvinalia]

Yep, you've never lived on the coast. It's a physical phenomenon that almost HAS to occur. Look it up for the physics of it. I can't be arsed wasting my time on a denialist.

If you make the claim without any evidence, then it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that you just dreamed it up.
People who actually have to supply electricity have to deal with the real world, not a world of someone's wishful thinking.

For fuck sake, man. It's fucking basic level physics. Land and water absorb and release heat at a different rate. That creates airflow cycles at the coasts which MUST result in wind flow.

[pErvinalia]

If you make the claim without any evidence, then it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that you just dreamed it up.

snort - you should be one to talk about dreaming things up.

Most people have a basic understanding of how wind is generated and any place on a significant body of water has onshore and off shore winds generated by the differential between land and water.

A wind turbine lasts 30-40 years.....so you'd prefer to import the equivalent fossil fuel use for the same 30-40 years.....

I'm not a big fan of wind....but you are entirely out to lunch.

It's not me, it's the people who have to plan the finances of the country, and have to supply people with energy.
THEY have the experts, THEY do the sums, and wind turns out to be uneconomic every time. Otherwise, they would be going for it. I'm trying to explain to you, why that is, but you don't seem capable of grasping it.

Governments don't buy in gas and coal for fun. They'd love to replace it with wind, and improve the balance of payments accounts. But they don't want to put the prices up more than the public will stand. The fact that you can't grasp it doesn't change anything.

You seem to be forgetting the influence of big oil/coal on political decisions. I thought you understood that we more or less live in corporatocracies where money matters more than sense.

[macdoc]

Geez MM you live in a place with government ownership of power???? That's really too bad.

[macdoc]

This really is a breakthrough

Terrajoule’s chief technology office Robert Mierisch searched back into the historical manuals to develop his idea of using the 300-year-old technology of a steam engine and a pressurised water tank as the means of storage and delivering electricity and/or waste heat on demand. Its proposal use a type of steam engine that has been out of service for decades, apart from tourist ferry or two, has raised eyebrows.

But Arno Penzias, from NEA Venture Partner, and Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 1978, said the company has made outstanding technological progress.“Terrajoule’s energy storage solution removes a fundamental obstacle to the next few decades of sustainable energy growth,” he said in a statement

According to Terrajoule (it now has its own website), the essential characteristic of the its system is its ability to rapidly respond to changes in load, functioning equivalently to the diesel generators it replaces, and without volatile fuel costs.

“Energy storage is based on pressurized saturated water, with 98% storage/retrieval efficiency,” it says in its press release. “Energy conversion is performed via reciprocating steam piston engines that are highly efficient across a wide range of operating power. The system generates steam through mature solar concentrator technology” (such as parabolic troughs).”

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/solar-s ... gine-10979

What a brilliant bit of sleuthing to come up with this...

The more I read on it the the more impressed.....this really brilliant and could decentralize power for many areas. That is quite a sweeping statement from the Nobel physicists and I think he is correct.

[pErvinalia]

The efficiency figures are very impressive. Also simple and very clean storage technology.

[mistermack]

as long as you don't think we're going to need the CO2 to stave off the overdue next ice age.

we already did.

No we didn't. We're still in the last ice-age. Check out Greenland and the Antarctic, and the frozen north. We're in an interglacial, and the next MAJOR glaciation isn't due for about seventy thousand years, if you go on the theories about wobbles of orbits etc.
But going by history, we could have a glaciation at any time now.

[macdoc]

Oh bullshit.

The next glaciation is put off indefinitely ..... in all but deniers fantasies

Next ice age delayed by global warming
10 January 2012

Antarctica
Without human carbon dioxide emissions the next ice age would be imminent, according to a Nature Geoscience study led by a UCL scientist.

In the paper, scientists led by Professor Chronis Tzedakis (UCL Geography) have been able to ‘fingerprint’ the timing of past ice age activations, or ‘glacial inceptions’ by identifying the onset of abrupt temperature changes in Greenland and Antarctica.

By applying this ‘fingerprint’ method to a nearly identical interglacial period with similar levels of summer solar radiation to our own current period, some 780 thousand years ago, the researchers have been able to determine that glacial inception would indeed be expected to occur sometime within the next 1500 years, a blink of an eye in the context of the Earth’s lifespan. But due to high CO2 levels, and associated radiative forcing of global temperatures, it is expected to be delayed.
Professor Tzedakis said: “Uncertainty over an imminent hypothetical ice age arises from the unusually weak minimum in summer solar radiation, which characterises the present situation. It has thus been proposed that times of weak solar radiation force interglacials to last 20 thousand years or more.”

“Uncertainty over an imminent hypothetical ice age arises from the unusually weak minimum in summer solar radiation, which characterises the present situation.”
Professor Chronis Tzedakis
A reduction in summer solar radiation energy, or insolation, is the primary trigger for the start of a new ice age. The team found that the onset of the ice age around 780 thousand years ago occurred when the reduction in summer solar radiation was very weak (like today), but CO2 levels were lower than pre-industrial concentrations, thereby offsetting the effect of the weak solar radiation forcing.

CO2 concentrations are another factor that impacts on the start of ice ages. With the rise of human civilisation, agriculture and the industrial revolution, CO2 levels have increased over the past few thousand years, preventing the onset of the next ice age.

Professor Tzedakis added: “While verification of an imminent glacial inception will elude us at current CO2 concentrations, it is important to reiterate that the current solar radiation forcing and lack of new ice growth mean that natural variability will not be moderating the effects of anthropogenically-induced global warming.”

Here is what it would take to get us to another glacial period in near term....

Sun stays quiet for a century ...knocks .1 degree off and maybe impacts Europe worse.

India continues to pump out SO2 in ever increasing amounts so global dimming becomes the prevailing driver offsetting and more the C02 signal.

C02 emissions drop precipitously in North America and Europe and a major campaign for reforestation and land use management kicks into gear sequestering unprecedent amounts of carbon ..perhaps with genetic engineering fungi introduced into forest.

Two or three major volcanoes of Pinatubo class occur in diverse areas reducing global air lines flights for several years with sustained eruptions ejecting dust and more S02 into the stratosphere.
The clearer skies without contrails promote faster radiation to space ( recall 911 ), the S02 creates more dimming, the dust curtails airline travel, has some dimming impacts and promotes wide spread plankton growth in the Pacific sucking up more C02.

The combination drops the global temp 3 degrees in a year and then heads down as a major algae bloom in the Pacific from the constant dust continues and the cooler ocean absorbs more C02 starts a downward accelerated cooling.

Unlikely? maybe
Historical precedent?? Yep.

Dust Veil of AD 536
Cometary Impact, Volcanic Eruption or Near Miss?

By K. Kris Hirst
See More About disasters medieval vikings

Volcanic ash from the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010 makes for a pretty sunset on the northern coast of France.

Angus MacRae
According to written records and supported by dendrochronology and archaeological evidence, for 12-18 months in AD 536-537, a thick, persistent dust veil or dry fog darkened the skies between Europe and Asia Minor. The climatic interruption brought by the thick, bluish fog extended as far east as China, where summer frosts and snow are recorded in historical records; tree ring data from Mongolia and Siberia to Argentina and Chile reflect decreased growing records from 536 and the subsequent decade.

The climatic effects of the dust veil brought decreased temperatures, drought and food shortages throughout the affected regions: in Europe two years later came the Justinian smallpox plague. The combination killed perhaps as much as 1/3 of the population of Europe; in China the famine killed perhaps 80% of people in some regions; in Scandinavia the losses may be been as much as 75-90% of the population, as evidenced by the numbers of deserted villages and cemeteries.

Historical Documentation

The rediscovery of the AD 536 event was made during the 1980s by American geoscientists Stothers and Rampino, who searched classical sources for evidence of volcanic eruptions. Among their other findings, they noted several references to environmental disasters around the world between AD 536-528.

Contemporary reports identified by Stothers and Rampino included Michael the Syrian, who wrote "the sun became dark and its darkness lasted for one and a half years... Each day it shone for about four hours and still this light was only a feeble shadow...the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes." John of Ephesos related much the same events. Prokopios living in in Africa and Italy, said "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed."

An anonymous Syriac chronicler wrote "...the sun began to be darkened by day and the moon by night, while ocean was tumultuous with spray, from the 24th of March in this year till the 24th of June in the following year..." and the following winter in Mesopotamia was so bad that "from the large and unwonted quantity of snow the birds perished."

Cassiodorus, praetorian prefect of Italy at the time, wrote "so we have had a winter without storms, spring without mildness, summer without heat". John Lydos, in On Portents, writing from Constantinople, said: "If the sun becomes dim because the air is dense from rising moisture--as happened in [536/537] for nearly a whole year...so that produce was destroyed because of the bad time--it predicts heavy trouble in Europe."

And in China, reports indicate that the star of Canopus could not be seen in as usual in the spring and fall equinoxes of 536, and the years AD 536-538 were marked by summer snows and frosts, drought and severe famine. In some parts of China, the weather was so severe that 70-80% of the people starved to death.

more

http://archaeology.about.com/od/medi...-of-AD-536.htm

Could we trigger it and then natural events enhance it? - yep. Add in a few comets and interesting times

CO2 magnification of climate drivers works both ways.
The system is ponderous to shift directions but C02s main role is usually feedback. Currently it is the primary driver due to our actions.
We've seen that lack of understanding of CO2s role frequently in this thread.

Quote:
Common Climate Misconceptions
CO2 as a Feedback and Forcing in the Climate System
Zeke Hausfather — October 25, 2007

A fundamental misconception about the role that carbon dioxide plays in glacial transitions has helped fuel the argument that the lag time between temperature and CO2 in the paleoclimate record casts doubt on carbon dioxide as an important greenhouse gas.
It’s crucial that media reporting on climate change understand an important distinction between the dual roles of greenhouse gases as both forcings and feedbacks.

http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org...limate-system/

So not impossible...but unlikely.

What's for sure ...BAU without curbing CO2 emissions WILL make for interesting times...and already is.

Reality tho

Meanwhile "it" is getting warmer and we have net ice mass loss globally ..not good prognosis for glaciation.

Arctic warmth unprecedented in 44,000 years, reveals ancient moss
19 hours ago

When the temperature rises on Baffin Island, in the Canadian high Arctic, ancient Polytrichum mosses, trapped beneath the ice for thousands of years, are exposed. Using radiocarbon dating, new research in Geophysical Research Letters has calculated the age of relic moss samples that have been exposed by modern Arctic warming. Since the moss samples would have been destroyed by erosion had they been previously exposed, the authors suggest that the temperatures in the Arctic are warmer than during any sustained period since the mosses were originally buried.
The authors collected 365 samples of recently exposed biological material from 110 different locations, cutting a 1000 kilometer long transect across Baffin Island. From their samples the authors obtained 145 viable measurements through radiocarbon dating. They found that most of their samples date from the past 5000 years, when a period of strong cooling overtook the Arctic. However, the authors also found older samples which were buried from 24,000 to 44,000 years ago.
The records suggest that in general, the eastern Canadian Arctic is warmer now than in any century in the past 5000 years, and in some places, modern temperatures are unprecedented in at least the past 44,000 years.

The observations, the authors suggest, show that modern Arctic warming far exceeds the bounds of historical natural variability.

more
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-arctic-...s-reveals.html

how science works....try it some time

[Jason]

I thought our axial tilt and eccentricity of orbit were wrong for another ice age. The timing is 'right', but the physics are 'wrong'. There is/was no impending ice age - our tilt is too great and our orbit too eccentric.

[mistermack]

Macdoc, you keep posting the most stupid extracts.

The moss simply shows what we already know. We are at the top of a warming cycle. Nobody is disputing that the arctic is warmer than it has been. Leave that poor strawman alone. He hasn't done you any harm, and bashing him about doesn't prove anything.

Can you not read a fucking graph? I've posted this enough times, but here we go again. It's on wikipedia's ice-age page, and it's the official Vostok Ice-core record.
Any schoolkid could look at this graph, and conclude that the Arctic SHOULD be at it's warmest for 120,000 years, and the exact same thing happened four more times in the last 450,000 years:

[macdoc]

I gotta love your bullshit nonsense ...we are NOT at the top of a warming cycle

We were part way down orbitally to a minor ice age...
The Holocene optimum ws 6-8000 BP



more detail for recent.


Then industrial society began and we reversed it out and are heading out of any Holocene range.

Do you just make things up as you go FFS?

What is warming the oceans???



witches and cauldrons....that would make more sense than you are.

[macdoc]

Natural Cycle Departure

The natural cycle is range bound and well understood, largely constrained by the Milankovitch cycles. Since the beginning of the industrial age, humankind has caused such a dramatic departure from the natural cycle, that it is hard to imagine anyone thinking that we are still in the natural cycle.

Natural vs. Modern Forcing


Climate Forcing & Temperature

Natural vs. Modern Climate Path


Mheel Attribution Chart

This departure is so dramatic that it has instigated a new era. According to some studies, there is enough evidence to state that we have departed the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene. Simply put, based on the evidence, mankind has forced the Earth climate system to depart from it's natural cycle forcing.

[macdoc]

and Europe has your ilk completely on ignore MM

Europe will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, the toughest climate change target of any region in the world, and will produce 27% of its energy from renewable sources by the same date.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... -deal-2030

[mistermack]

I was right, you can't read a simple graph.

The Vostok ice-cores show that we had EIGHT degrees of perfectly natural global warming taking the Earth out of the previous major glaciation.
Since then, we've had ups and downs of about +- 1 degree, but the average is about four or five degrees ABOVE the long term average for the last half million years. And that's without any of the recent warming.

So the Oceans SHOULD still be warming, and the ice-caps SHOULD still be melting. Simply because we are four or five degrees above the long-term average.
It's a very good thing that we ARE at five degrees above the average. We would be in shit-street if the Earth returned to it's normal temperature, for the last half million years.

[Jason]

Re the energy storage solution: Sugar batteries of the future.

Well.. I guess they could use electricity from renewable resources to produce the sugars, enzymes, and junk. Or just grow crops to make batteries. Whatever. It's still cool.

[macdoc]

The Vostok ice-cores show that we had EIGHT degrees of perfectly natural global warming taking the Earth out of the previous major glaciation.

and just exactly how did that "natural warming occur".....come on ....orbitals as a temperature driver on their own is nowhere near that..

The last Milankovitch cycle, which had a minimum about 50,000 years ago and a maximum about 20,000 years ago is one of the most interesting. The minimum is 340.545 W m-2 and the maximum is 304.780 W m-2, a difference of 0.07% which is an order of magnitude less that the overall range. What makes this cycle so interesting is that while the change in global radiation was so small, the change at 65 ºN in July was enough to take us out of the last age into the current warm interglacial.

http://www.climatedata.info/Forcing/For ... ycles.html

.or maybe you did not know that - that tipping point is enough to warm the planet just enough to kick off the feedbacks in warming direction, just as moving INTO the lower irradiance kicks off the same feedbacks to cool the planet.

I'll give you a hint.....it's called CO2

where did the CO2 come from ??

the OCEAN

what then magnified it

WATER VAPOUR

Read some fucking climate science and stop making stupid arguments with no basis in the physics of our planet...

CO2 as a Feedback and Forcing in the Climate System
Zeke Hausfather — October 25, 2007

A fundamental misconception about the role that carbon dioxide plays in glacial transitions has helped fuel the argument that the lag time between temperature and CO2 in the paleoclimate record casts doubt on carbon dioxide as an important greenhouse gas.
It’s crucial that media reporting on climate change understand an important distinction between the dual roles of greenhouse gases as both forcings and feedbacks.
In the geologic past, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases acted primarily as feedbacks to external climate forcings. Our current and basically unprecedented experience is that we as humans are directly emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that affect climate change.
That distinction – greenhouse gases as both forcings and feedbacks – is critical in understanding the behavior of these gases in the paleoclimatic and present periods.
Click for larger imate
View larger image
The figure to the right shows changes in temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past 450,000 years. Four distinct ice ages occurred during that time. The strong correlation of the curves makes it immediately apparent that some relationship seems to exist between temperature and CO2.
During both the transition in to and out of a glacial period, CO2 concentrations appear to lag temperature changes by an average of between 600 and 1,000 years (though some recent research suggests that this lag may be shorter than previously thought).
If CO2 lags behind temperature changes, it stands to reason that some other mechanism is responsible for the initial temperature change. In fact, we do know just such a mechanism that does a reasonably good job accounting for the initial cause and end of ice ages: changes in orbital forcing known as Milankovitch cycles.

Milankovitch cycles refer to the effects of periodic variations in Earth’s orbit on the amount of solar radiation reaching parts of the Earth’s surface. Three cycles are particularly important: the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit (e.g., how elliptical the Earth’s orbit is); the axial tilt of the Earth (known as obliquity); and the change in the direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation (known as precession). Each of these Milankovitch cycles has a recurring periodic variation, and the overlap of these periods combine to change the total solar forcing in a way that helps explain Earth’s periodic ice ages, as shown below.
co2_2_tmb.jpg - 8867 Bytes
View larger image

Initial temperature changes at the beginnings and ends of ice ages are caused by changes in orbital forcings. These temperature changes have effects on the natural carbon, nitrogen, and methane cycles. In particular, initial warming reduces ocean uptake of atmospheric carbon (because warmer water can absorb less CO2 from the atmosphere), and warmer temperatures increase the decay rate of vegetative matter. Similarly, cooling at the start of an ice age increases ocean uptake and reduces emissions from vegetative decay.

There are many other important interactions between temperature changes and the carbon cycle and many outstanding questions are only beginning to be answered by paleoclimatologists. However, the role of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses as a feedback to Milankovitch forcings during glacial and interglacial transitions provides a compelling explanation for observed changes.

Jeff Severinghaus, professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, succinctly explains:
The contribution of CO2 to the glacial-interglacial coolings and warmings amounts to about one-third of the full amplitude, about one-half if you include methane and nitrous oxide.

So one should not claim that greenhouse gases are the major cause of the ice ages. No credible scientist has argued that position (even though Al Gore implied as much in his movie). The fundamental driver has long been thought, and continues to be thought, to be the distribution of sunshine over the Earth’s surface as it is modified by orbital variations …
The greenhouse gases are best regarded as a biogeochemical feedback, initiated by the orbital variations, but then feeding back to amplify the warming once it is already underway.

Current climatic changes are substantially different from those that occurred in the past. For one thing, they are happening at a much faster rate than changes in past glacial periods. Significant climate changes are occurring over the course of decades and centuries, rather than millennia. Scientists know that Milankovitch forcings are not having a significant impact on changes observed over the past century, as they do not operate on such a short timescale, and scientists have good measurements of what their effect should be. For the first time, greenhouse gasses are primarily acting as forcings in the climate system instead of as a feedback to external forcing (though their role as feedbacks is still important, as illustrated in discussions of a potential methane feedback from melting arctic permafrost).

While the lag between temperature and greenhouse gas changes in the paleoclimate record is important in understanding the function of greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s climate, and has helped in estimating the effects of CO2 concentrations on radiative forcing, it in no way discredits the conventional knowledge that CO2 is forcing recent changes in the Earth’s climate.
As Eric Steig, a geochemist at the University of Washington who works extensively with ice cores, remarks, “the ice core data in no way contradict our understanding of the relationship between CO2 and temperature”.

http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/20 ... te-system/

Eric knows more than I do

you know absolutely nothing about the geophysics of the planet as you've shown time and time again.