Month: May 2021

Guest contribution by Willis Eschenbach

From the viewer:

Japan has just raised its target of reducing CO2 emissions from 26 to 46 percent (by 2030 compared to 2013). But how did this number come about, was Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi asked? By carefully analyzing the threat and making a realistic assessment of what could be achieved, taking into account all relevant factors? Well, um no, according to Koizumi, the number 46 only appeared to him in a kind of vision as a “silhouette”.

Shinjiro Koizumi, son of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, made an interview with TBS last weekend. Despite her face mask, the interviewer was clearly baffled by the discovery that the country’s emissions target appeared to have no scientific basis. She asked the Minister to confirm what he had said; and he did.

The country is clearly in the best hands …

So I resume my quixotic quest to keep countries from emulating lemmings and chasing one another by jumping off the cliff. Here is the ugly truth.

In 2013, Japan emitted 1.3 gigatons (GT, 109 tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2). Japan emitted 1.1 GT CO2 last year. To hit the magic number of 54% of 2013 emissions, they need to cut emissions to 709 megatons (Mt 106 tons) per year. So you have to reduce your emissions by 396 Mt / year. (Note that this does not mean reducing emissions by 396 million tonnes each year. This means that the annual emission rate is reduced by 396 million tonnes.)

How much do they need to reduce their fossil fuel consumption? Well, Japan emits roughly 245,000 tons of CO2 per terawatt hour (TWh or 1012 watt hours) of fossil fuel energy use. This means that they have to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels by around 1,620 TWh per year. (The current energy consumption of Japanese fossil fuels is around 4,540 TWh / year.)

To calculate the additional CO2 emission free generation capacity they need, we need to divide the terawatt hours / year by 8,760 hours per year to convert it to TWh generation capacity … and then double it.

Why double up? Because this is an average consumption and every power grid must be able to handle peak loads and have reserves available if part of the generation system inevitably fails or needs maintenance. You need about twice the average consumption to cover peak consumption plus the necessary reserves. This means that they need around 369 gigawatts (GW or 109 watts) of new emission-free generation capacity.

Susquehanna steam power station

The only currently available CO2-emission-free basic power source is nuclear energy. Oh, you can add meaningless expensive unreliable intermittent renewables if you want, wind and sun. But you still need basic power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing …

From now until the first day of 2030 there are 452 weeks. Japan needs 369 additional GW of nuclear power to meet the target.

To achieve Minister Koizumi’s dream-driven goal, Japan would have to find a location for a brand new 1.6 GW nuclear power plant every two weeks, obtain all permits and licenses for excavation, manufacture, installation, testing and commissioning from now until 2030. (For comparison: each of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant was half the size, 0.8 GW …)

A new. Nuclear. Plant. Everyone. Two. Weeks. Until. 2030.

Yes, that’s perfectly legitimate …

In the USA, it usually takes more than ten years from the preliminary feasibility studies to the final connection of a nuclear power plant. Here’s an overview of the process … and people in the industry have said it’s optimistic.

In addition, the move from burning fossil fuels to nuclear power for heating and transportation means expanding the entire power grid including substations, switchgear, transmission lines, transformers, and power lines in and around homes. The cost of building nuclear power plants and upgrading the power grid will be a huge burden for generations to come.

Look, someone in charge has to stand up and say “That is airy, fairy-like, impossible feel-good madness!” I, my beautiful ex-fiancé, am watching “The Right Stuff” tonight … how did we ever get from that kind of personal strength to our current politicians who perfectly embody “The Wrong Stuff”? Very few of these modern day pussycats have the albondigas that Maggie Thatcher had – they just love to dance and pose for the camera, signaling virtues with classy-sounding wake-up guidelines that can never be implemented.

As I have said about this claim in other countries, Minister Koizumi’s visionary plan is like a 12 year old boy donning blue tights with red skivvies over them, putting on a cloak, proudly declaring he is Superman and jumping out a fourth floor window …

…

…

… won’t fly and there will be a lot of pain for everyone involved.

And all of this to fight an imaginary “climate emergency”.

Sigh … unfortunately there seem to be countless Roolz …

Greetings to all,

w.

My previous equally quixotic analyzes: The calculations for the world that will go to zero by 2050 are included in my post Light Green Impossibilities. The calculations for the US to achieve 50% of 2005 CO2 emissions by 2030 are included in The Latest US CO2 Fantasy.

And the immeasurably small theoretical cooling until 2050, when the US goes to zero CO2 emissions tomorrow, is calculated in Going To Zero. TL; DR version – As you go up in altitude, the air gets cooler. The US would go to zero emissions tomorrow theoretically By 2050, cool the globe by the same amount you would get if you went up three flights of stairs …

My usual request: If you comment Please quote the exact words They are discussing. This avoids at least some of the misunderstandings that plague the Intarwebs.

Data: All data for these analyzes is available on Max Roser’s most informative website, Our World In Data. The consumption of fossil fuels is there and the CO2 emissions are there.

Lemmings: Yes, I know they don’t line up to jump off a cliff to their death, that was just a Disney fantasy … but the US, UK, Japan and many other countries sure are.

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Sometimes astronomers come up with fantastic names for certain phenomena and then feel that they cannot use them in formal scientific contexts. Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) are one of them – colloquially they are referred to as “spaghetti”, in which a star is pulled apart until its component looks like a spaghetti chain.

Astronomers have long known this process that occurs when a star comes too close to a black hole. Most of the knowledge, however, comes from studying the bursts of radiation given off by the black hole as it engulfs the star. A team led by Giacomo Cannizzaro and Peter Jonker from SRON, the Dutch Institute for Space Research, and Radboud University now believe they have received the first glimpses of a star that is actively spaghettified around the pole of a black hole.

An image of the accretion disk of the supermassive black hole as the center of M87.
Photo credit: EHT Collaboration

These filaments of material have never been imaged before, as most of the image instances of an “accretion disk,” known as the disks of material surrounding the black holes, are viewed from the edge, meaning they appear as a ribbon of material in front of the black hole , just as Saturn’s rings would appear if viewed from the edge. The SRON team first captured information about the accreditation disc while looking at one of the poles of the black hole.

Accretion disks emit X-rays but do not do so directly. When the SRON team found that they had captured X-ray signatures in their spectra, they found that they were viewing the accretion disk of a black hole from a new perspective. This perspective would be like looking down at the rings of Saturn from far above the pole of the planet and finally being able to really appreciate how many there are.

UT video describing the process of falling into a black hole.

And there are really many strands of material wrapped around this observed black hole – the team recorded separate absorption lines indicating that multiple strands of material are wrapped around the star multiple times. This ball of yarn pattern is similar to what would be expected in a spaghetti-proofing process. Additionally, there was no Doppler shift in the data, indicating that the material was not rotating, which in turn suggests the underlying cause of the disc.

While the spectral data has not yet been translated into a pretty image for public consumption, it puts another feather in the cap of the TDE theory of how stars interact with black holes. Let’s hope astronomers can come up with some other unique names for more esoteric processes – a battering perhaps?

Learn more:
SRON astronomers see the first evidence of a spaghetti-stripe star with a silhouette
MNRAS – Accretion Disc Cooling and Narrow Absorption Lines in the Tidal Disturbance Event AT? 2019dsg
UT – Astronomers watch a star become spaghettified by a black hole
UT – matter is burned when it falls into a black hole
Tech Explorist – Astronomers see the silhouette of the spaghetti star

Mission statement:
Artist’s impression of a black hole spaghettifying a star.
Photo credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss

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Guest essay by Eric Worrall

What could possibly go wrong? Victoria wants all new car sales to be electric by 2030 and plans to retire its largest reliable power generator by 2028.

The Victorian government plans to increase sales of electric cars dramatically by 2030

From state political reporter Richard Willingham exclusively
Posted 5 hours ago, updated 4 hours ago

The state government wants half of all new cars sold in Victoria to be zero-emission vehicles by 2030 and is offering subsidies of up to $ 3,000 to kick off ownership.

The Andrews government will provide 20,000 subsidies of up to $ 3,000 for new electric vehicle purchases under $ 69,000 as part of a $ 100 million electric vehicle use plan.

The first 4,000 grants will be available starting Sunday.

“When people get an electric vehicle, they start saving significant dollars on their bills,” Climate Change Minister Lily D ‘Ambrosio told ABC.

…

Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-01/victorian-plan-to-boost-zero-emission-cars/100108626

The government of Victoria, one of Australia’s least sunny states, believes solar and wind power will make up for the deficit caused by the closure of their shippable power plants.

Victoria regularly suffers from managed outages and the occasional widespread power outage. Hence, the Victorian power grid is unlikely to cope with a demand flow by adding more electric vehicles to the road, even if the large coal-fired power station remains open.

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By earthly standards, the surface of Mars is the image of devastation. Not only is it irradiated and cold enough to make Antarctica look bland, but it’s a thousand times drier than the driest places on earth. However, under the superarid surface of the Red Planet, there is abundant water ice that could one day be accessible to human explorers (and even settlers).

This is particularly the case in the mid-latitude region known as Arcadia Planitia, a smooth plain in the northern Mars lowlands. The region is showing signs of glaciers and glacier activity, according to new research conducted with support from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). These results could prove very useful in future human landings and exploration of Mars, not to mention possible colonization.

The study, recently published in the journal Icarus, was led by Shannon Hibbard – a Ph.D. Candidate in Geology and Planetary Science from the University of Western Ontario (UWO). She was joined by Dr. Gordon R. Osinski of the UWO Institute for Earth and Space Research (IESE) and Etienne Godin, data scientist at Laval University’s Center for Northern Studies; and Nathan Williams and Matthew Golombek of NASA JPL.

MRO studies the water cycle of Mars. Photo credit: NASA / JPL / Corby Waste

Is there ice on Mars?

Speculations about the existence of ice on Mars go back centuries but remained uncertain until NASA’s Viking missions were the second and third missions to land on Mars in the 1970s. These indicated the presence of atmospheric water vapor and glacier-like features, which included widespread waves and accumulations of unconsolidated material (moraines).

These features are often associated with glacial landscapes here on earth. Since it has not yet been confirmed that Mars once had water on its surface, the scientific community cautiously referred to these features as “viscous flow features”. And since exposed water ice on Mars is sublimated by the low air pressure and solar radiation, the researchers suspected that these glaciers would need to be protected by a thick layer of regolith.

By 2002, sensor data obtained from the Mars Odyssey orbiter confirmed the presence of subterranean water ice in the mid-latitude region of Mars. These results were confirmed in 2008 by the Phoenix Lander, which identified the presence of subterranean water ice in the northern Arctic plain. Then came the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which discovered abundant subterranean water ice beneath the flat plains of Arcadia Planitia.

The MRO’s ground penetrating radar indicated that this ice extended down from the surface (under a layer of dust and debris) to a depth of 38 meters (~ 125 ft). The data provided by these and other missions have collected data that has enabled scientists to map, catalog, and categorize thousands of features that are likely the result of glacial activity.

Underground water ice on Mars, cool colors are closer to the surface than warm colors. The outlined box is the ideal region for sending astronauts to dig for water ice. Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU

Glaciers in the region

For their study, Hibbard and her colleagues mapped dozen of surface features in Arcadia Planitia and looked for the same “tortuous features”. They found waves and furrows in valleys and on slopes that are typical wherever ice flowed downhill. However, Hubbard and her team also found these features in a flat-lying region of Arcadia Planitia that was isolated from any cliffs or slopes.

This left only one possibility, namely that glaciers once flowed over these flat areas of the surface. As Hibbard explained in an interview with GlacierHub:

“It was very exciting to find possible flow features in this flat lying region. Previous studies have shown that there is a buried ice sheet at our study site, and our evidence of channeled ice in that ice sheet suggests that Mars has more complex glacier dynamics. “

To determine how this ice sheet would flow, Hibbard and her team compared the flow characteristics of Arcadia Planitia with similar characteristics in the ice flows of Antarctica – where regions in the flat ice sheet move faster than their surroundings. Although the researchers do not know the exact cause of these ice flows, they concluded that it could be due to a combination of subterranean topography and melting at the bottom of the ice sheet.

In the case of Arcadia Planitia, the ice sheet has since stopped flowing and has become a standing ice stream that accumulates a thicker layer of surface debris. These unique properties provide an important opportunity for future crewed missions to Mars. In short, could this water ices be made for human consumption?

Artist rendering from NASA HiRISE data of a medium latitude glacier on Mars isolated from a surface layer of dust and rock. The hotel is located on the Mesa Wall in Protonilus Mensae on Mars. Photo credit: Kevin Gill

Human rated missions

While most of the glaciers on Mars and their underground ice reside near cliffs and slopes, the Arcadia Planitia Glacier forms a temperate flat ice sheet that is near the surface. Additionally, geographic hazards (such as boulders and debris) are few, making it both an ideal landing site and a good place for in situ resource use (ISRU) on future human missions.

This distinguishes it from glacial fields that are closer to the polar regions, are easily accessible, but are extremely cold compared to the mid-latitudes. As Germán Martínez, a member of the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), told GlacierHub in a statement:

“[I]In general, it is more practical to go to low and medium latitudes, where temperatures are milder and solar energy is available year round. However, in these middle and low latitudes, the water ice is usually deeper underground than in polar latitudes. “

In addition, the Arcadian ice studied by Hibbard and her colleagues may be more accessible than other known water ice deposits at medium Martian latitudes. So if crewed missions take place regularly on Mars, this ice can prove indispensable for astronauts and their habitats, supplying everything from drinking and irrigation water to raw materials for making fuel.

Over time, the underground glacier can be opened up for an even more ambitious purpose – like terraforming Mars! If Mars is ever to become a warmer, wetter planet (as it was billions of years ago), underground ice deposits like this are essential for the transition.

Further reading: Columbia Climate School, Icarus

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