zen_brassica
28d ago
Right, because the activists (the people who matter) have more important goals than cutting emissions.
As a counterpoint, one of the biggest, most effective climate change activism groups (Citizens Climate Lobby) focuses almost exclusively on practical policy to cut emissions, mainly a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
Going back to the root though, with things like geoengineering -- I'm not 100% against it, but I'm much more in favor of addressing the root cause, rather than trying to put a band-aid on it. First issue, and maybe the biggest, is the moral hazard -- if you start geoengineering, that means countries won't try as hard to reduce emissions, immediately negating some of the benefit of geoengineering. Second, specifically for putting sulfur into the atmosphere to reduce solar irradiance, you don't get to control where that goes. It wanders all over the place, changing weather patterns, possibly causing storms or droughts. Third, cooling the earth but leaving CO2 levels higher doesn't solve ocean acidification.
I suspect that we'll need to do it at some point, but I think it is best to push hard on reducing emissions first and foremost. And maybe I partly believe this because I think that practically speaking, we can do it without a substantial reduction in living standards, if we start using carbon taxes effectively, and streamline nuclear regulations to the point where it's actually viable again.
zen_brassica
28d ago
I came here to post something similar. The short version is, while the article author says:
In normal sensate reality, heat only flows from hot to cold, but the greenhouse effect appears to involve an inverted heat flow within this system.
Heat DOES flow from cold to hot, it just must be less than the heat flowing from hot to cold, and that is what the referenced diagram shows.
zen_brassica
28d ago
Many climate activists are very much in favor of nuclear power, myself included. Sometimes it's a matter of going with the flow and allocating your advocacy resources where you think the'll make the most difference. Nuclear is a hard sell for a lot of people, and getting new plants open will take a long time mainly due to regulatory barriers -- which have to change before you can even start constructing. Solar and wind are seeing a lot of growth right now, and while they don't solve the baseline load problem, will make a dent in the issue in the meantime.
I don't disagree that many people who label themselves "climate activists" are irrationally fearful of nuclear, but they are not as representative of the entire group as the article.
This doesn't make any sense to me. The adiabatic lapse rate describes how the temperature would change if you took a parcel of air, did not allow it to exchange heat (that's the adiabatic part, right?) and moved it up or down so it expands or contracts. As pressure increases or decreases, so does temperature.
But in the Grand Canyon, if gravity is pulling cooler, denser air down, and letting warmer, less dense air rise (as must happen), that's going to result in a cooling effect, not a warming effect. Yes, the cooler air may get a bit more compressed as it falls, and thus rise a little in temperature, but you're also losing warm air that was even warmer when it was at the same altitude, so air circulation would result in a net loss of heat. If you have two regions of air at the same altitude and one is warmer, it will have a rising force compared to the other. Gravity can't make it fall relative to the other one. (To be precise, they could both be rising or falling, just that the cooler one will always fall relative to the warmer one, unless there's momentum of air coming in from outside the system and interacting with the geometry of the landscape, like winds blowing across the canyon).
Gravity is not pulling air downward in a thermodynamics-violating way. If we started out with an atmosphere that was not in steady state, where it was a lot more diffuse and bigger than it should be, then yes, as gravity pulled it down and compressed it, it would get warmer. But that would only happen once (or rather it would oscillate like a spring for a while but eventually settle down).
So yeah, I don't get this at all. I don't know if the temperature gradient at the Grand Canyon is completely due to the greenhouse effect, but I'm pretty sure it's not anything to do with what you're saying, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
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