RE: Forests and carbon capture
02-28-2019, 04:45 PM (This post was last modified: 02-28-2019, 04:46 PM by Dartz.)
02-28-2019, 04:45 PM (This post was last modified: 02-28-2019, 04:46 PM by Dartz.)
Britain deforested its island to keep its Navy afloat. And to provide food to London. And to fuel its industry before they figured out they could dig coal out of the ground and use it to make both coke and town-gas, because charcoal had far less shit in it than cheap coal did. Coal impurities like sulphur could contaminate iron and make it brittle.
Anyway.
5 Sigma is 5 standard devitions. Or a 1 in a Million chance they could be wrong. It's the level of consensus you need to announce shit like the Higgs Boson and stuff as 'discovered' and not just a sort of vague, well we know it's there but we're just not certain, certain.
It's as certain as the general roundness of the world. And while we've since discovered that the world isn't technically round - more like a squashed ball than truly spherical - that's about the level of certainty we're at. the next level is refining the understanding and the details behind it, rather than completely inverting.
The only people who deny it are the people who have to make their money by denying it. The lobbyist. The company with it's business model it does not want to change. Exxon doesn't want to go full Kodak (Then again, lookl how Fujifilm's doing....) And while I can be cynical of the sheer churn of goods the New Green Thing is creating, replacing dead or life-expired infrastructure for more efficient versions is not stupid.
Closing innefficient, but still broadly functional, services may be. Sometimes it's better to make upstream or configuration changes.
Sure. We managed to get oil consumption down by nearly 50% in the holiday home, by modifying the configuration of the system to run the 2-decade old oil boiler hotter, for longer. It cost less that fitting a new condensing boiler, and had a far bigger effect. And the old burner is robust and reliable, and runs better if it's running hot and long, rather than short-cycling. We changed the thermostat controls too.
The system also performs a lot better, with much faster heat up times.
And can make use of Solar thermal energy in the summer.
The real killer. We used half as much oil. While the house was occupied for twice as many days.
Anyway.
5 Sigma is 5 standard devitions. Or a 1 in a Million chance they could be wrong. It's the level of consensus you need to announce shit like the Higgs Boson and stuff as 'discovered' and not just a sort of vague, well we know it's there but we're just not certain, certain.
It's as certain as the general roundness of the world. And while we've since discovered that the world isn't technically round - more like a squashed ball than truly spherical - that's about the level of certainty we're at. the next level is refining the understanding and the details behind it, rather than completely inverting.
The only people who deny it are the people who have to make their money by denying it. The lobbyist. The company with it's business model it does not want to change. Exxon doesn't want to go full Kodak (Then again, lookl how Fujifilm's doing....) And while I can be cynical of the sheer churn of goods the New Green Thing is creating, replacing dead or life-expired infrastructure for more efficient versions is not stupid.
Closing innefficient, but still broadly functional, services may be. Sometimes it's better to make upstream or configuration changes.
Sure. We managed to get oil consumption down by nearly 50% in the holiday home, by modifying the configuration of the system to run the 2-decade old oil boiler hotter, for longer. It cost less that fitting a new condensing boiler, and had a far bigger effect. And the old burner is robust and reliable, and runs better if it's running hot and long, rather than short-cycling. We changed the thermostat controls too.
The system also performs a lot better, with much faster heat up times.
And can make use of Solar thermal energy in the summer.
The real killer. We used half as much oil. While the house was occupied for twice as many days.
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.