Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Global Cooling????

Jump to new
Smurf1976 said:
.... That and avoiding any other form of organised activity that involves travel to get there. ...
Click to expand...
I had a win this week - yaahoooooo ;), someone wanted me to travel interstate for a seriously optional meeting - I replied by email - "Due to the fact that a plane taking off uses all the oxygen that the Daintree forest makes in a day - and the subsequent risk of global warming, I would prefer to have a teleconference" - and that's what happened:) as the kiwis would say ...

Score :- Conservationists seven, airline pollution sucks!!

http://www.daintree-rec.com.au/daintree.html
Many millions of years ago Australia was warm and humid and rainfall was plentiful. During this time rainforest thrived in places such as the Ayers Rock region. It's hard to believe this would be possible as anyone who has visited our red centre will tell you not much rain falls there now. However this is a good example of how old our continent is and just how much change has occurred.

As Australia became more arid, there were fewer and fewer places rainforests were able to survive. In the Daintree region, however the climate and topography were ideal, so the area became a last remaining refuge for rainforest. Within this refuge many species were able to live comfortably without reason to change.... their descendants still living today retaining many of their ancestors primitive characteristics, some dating back 110 million years!

One species in particular, the Idiot Fruit, (Idiospermum australiense), commonly known as the Idiot Fruit, is one of the rarest and most primitive of the flowering plants. Its discovery in 1970 was arguably Australia's most significant botanical find, greatly increasing scientists awareness of just how ancient these forests really are.
Click to expand...

Gee - and all this time I thought Idiospermum australiense was something rejected at the Sydney sperm bank ;)

PS I originally heard that quote about forests > oxygen > detroyed by 1 plane etc applied to an English forest - (lets say Sherwood forest lol - only one I know!!) - and I can't recall if its a day or an hour or a week! - but hey!! 78.76% of all statistics are made up on the spot !! - and buga it it sounds plausible to me. Poor little green leaves trying to compete with 4 SCREAMING jet turbines!! they've got a "green leaf's chance in hell" of competing. :(
 
Just a question - where have you felt hottest ?
( and I'm not talking about a night as a strip club lol)

Me? Melbourne (allegedly only) 43degC - few years back - I was waiting for a taxi to the airport - there were fires up north ( as there are this weekend - commisserations folks) - another bloke and I agreed to share a taxi to airport -
Turns out my fellow passenger was an unreasonable d..head - he INSISTED that the airconditioner be on - the taxidriver explained that the car would boil .. insisted - sure enough, the radiator boiled within a couple of blocks - lol.
This other passenger REFUSED to travel another yard in this taxi , and got off at the next corner. !!

Meanwhile , we hobbled off to the airport - cars parked in each and every opportunity for some shade along the sides of the Tullamarine motorway ...women trying to cool babies etc ....

The only time that I can recall that it was cooler with the window (almost fully) up than fully open - because the air was like a furnace - even travelling at 80kph or whatever.

Boy that was hot!! Melbourne is one cruel place when it's hot ! :2twocents
 
Hottest I ever remember was driving across a stoney claypan on a Gascoyne(wa) station a long time ago.. The homestead thermometer said 47c that day which was hot enough but when a willy willy came across the claypan it was like being in a furnace.. eyeball singing stuff. Temp was still 38c at midnight..

BTW 2020, do you fly HG's ? I fly the stiff wing variety..
 
Lert said:
BTW 2020, do you fly HG's ? I fly the stiff wing variety..
Click to expand...
m8, the concept of unpowered flight really intrigues me. I posted #26 on favourite lyrics and I think I explained that the picture was my daughter not me (Stanwell Tops) - with an instructr ;) but she's just a kid btw :-
https://www.aussiestockforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4327&page=8&pp=20

As for myself? Yesterday I posted a picture of Mt Alava in American Samoa, 1650 ft high. Can't tell you how often I've been up there and tossed a coin to see if I was brave enough to jump off or not ;)
There were 3 co-owners in an old Rogallo - developed as you probly know by NASA for soft landings of returning craft and stuff. One of us DID jump off - got caught in the trees 50 feet down - broke the central tube - lucky to return to "base" by the cable car rather than gravity ;)
He also once landed upside down in the sail at our 85 foot "training hill" - in a quarry lol - a most unforgiving landing!
I broke my arm in a bad landing at same site.
but - b4 I shuffle off this mortal coil, I plan to do that mountain lol. (or equivalent I guess)
btw also - the best of us (HG pilots in Pago Pago) was an american who jumped off that 1650 foot mountain many times. He was BRILLIANT !! He returned to USA - had a lightweight - prop was laminated carbon fibre - with an adhesive brand sticker - the glue attacked the epoxy - the prop fell to pieces in mid-air - (all from the Coroner's hearing) need I say more :(
 
2020hindsight said:
Just a question - where have you felt hottest ?
( and I'm not talking about a night as a strip club lol)

Me? Melbourne (allegedly only) 43degC - few years back - I was waiting for a taxi to the airport - there were fires up north ( as there are this weekend - commisserations folks) - another bloke and I agreed to share a taxi to airport -
Turns out my fellow passenger was an unreasonable d..head - he INSISTED that the airconditioner be on - the taxidriver explained that the car would boil .. insisted - sure enough, the radiator boiled within a couple of blocks - lol.
This other passenger REFUSED to travel another yard in this taxi , and got off at the next corner. !!

Meanwhile , we hobbled off to the airport - cars parked in each and every opportunity for some shade along the sides of the Tullamarine motorway ...women trying to cool babies etc ....

The only time that I can recall that it was cooler with the window (almost fully) up than fully open - because the air was like a furnace - even travelling at 80kph or whatever.

Boy that was hot!! Melbourne is one cruel place when it's hot ! :2twocents
Click to expand...
Issues of global warming / cooling aside, that sounds like a dodgy taxi. In theory at least, the car shouldn't overheat sitting still with no wind in 43 degrees with the air-conditioner going flat out. If the car was actually moving then no way should it overheat. But then some car manufacturers do some pretty dodgy things when it comes to radiators and more importantly the fan...

As for me, hottest I recall ever being was having to literally sit on the highway (work related) when it was 39 degrees. Burnt bottom from sitting there and burnt hands trying to get up again. Sunburnt too. Job got done OK however.

A really hot place though is to find a house with black roof tiles with no foil under them and no roof ventilators either. Now, put your overalls etc on and go and do some work in the roof space when it's 40 degrees outside. Even better if you need to wear a respirator, goggles and ear muffs too. Seriously, don't do it unsupervised as you might literally pass out. Spare a thought for the tradespeople who have no choice. Being outside or sitting in an office with no air-conditioning is nothing compared to the heat in a roof even when it's only 30 outside.

Metal casting places get pretty hot too. And it never gets cold in a power station even in mid-Winter. Needless to say it's not the best place to be in Summer. It has been known to snow (literally) inside the cell room at Zinifex in Hobart. They've fixed the roof now though so presumably that doesn't happen anymore. :2twocents
 
smurf - (or anyone out there electrically inclined)
I joked with the lady down the road that I was slow putting up Xmas lights this year because I was having conscience issues with global warming - (it was in jest btw).
She countered that a stack of decorative lights were about equivalent to boiling a jug of water.
Was just interested in checking out the math.
(another nice math Ive got myself into)
I mean we can probably enjoy Xmas - including house decoration - with a clear conscience I imagine ;)
 
How much power / energy in Xmas lights ( assuming I’ve got this right.)
I think some people are effectively boiling anywhere up to 14 jugs continuous ( but you need about 80,000 lights to do that - see para c below). most people less than 1 jug i would think.

energy to boil a jug is say 2.4kW jug x 3 mins. = 0.12 kWhr ( or 2c if you pay 18c / kWhr)

energy with say 8 rope lights each 9m long running for 1 hour?
power 72m with 36 W/m = 2.6 kW
energy to run for an hour nonstop = 2.6 kWhr.
this is equivalent to boiling 21 or 22 jugs or water every hour., i.e. continuous jug boiling.
cost per hour for 8 such ropelights = 2.6 x .18 = 47c. (if you pay 0.18 per kWhr)

notes :-
a) maybe don’t leave em on all night
b) blinking, fading, chasing etc cycles help - could reduce the above energy consumption and cost to half (or even less).
c) some people have up to 80,000 lights each at about 0.42w (equiv to about 1000m of rope lights) = 34kW - leaning towards excessive . - plus it would be costing them $6 per hour to run. - depending on blinking ect :2twocents
 
I wouldn't be too worried about Christmas lights as a cause of greenhouse emissions.

Whilst individual light displays can use quite a bit of power when operating, they are generally on for no more than about 2% of the time over the year (assuming 8:45pm switch on and off at 1am which is the generally accepted practice in Hobart - I assume it's similar elsewhere) and most houses don't have extensive displays.

Bottom line is it doesn't have a noticeable impact on power demand overall. Sure, there is a bit of a spike in demand when the sun goes down but that happens every day of the year. It doesn't get noticeably bigger in December.

As for the maths, fairy lights typically have 0.1875 Watt bulbs. Put up 10,000 of them and you've got a decent size display but the power use, including transformer losses, is no more than about 2500 Watts. Run that for 4 hours every night from 1st December to 5th January (12 days of Christmas...) and it's a total of 360 kilowatt hours used.

Now, an all-electric house in a cold climate (eg Tas) would typically use 20,000 kilowatt hours per annum, half of that for heating and a quarter of that for hot water. Adding another 360 kWh for Christmas lights is no big deal especially when you consider that household use of electricity is only 20% of total demand anyway (varies between the states).

Even if you compare it to a typical house in a warmer climate (eg Adelaide) using 5000 kWh per annum, it's only a 7% or so increase and then only for a very small % of houses.

So, we're adding maybe 5% to the power demand of perhaps 2% of houses with significant scale Christmas lights displays. That's 0.1% of domestic electricity or 0.02% of total electricity use. In other words, if we got rid of Christmas lights it would offset growth in power demand for all of 3 days. Not a big saving but one which would disappoint a lot of young kids to achieve. It would be better, and far more effective, to just switch every office computer off at night instead or stop leaving the TV on standby.

Obviously there are individual houses using lots of power for light displays but it's not a big deal overall. Even my own display, which is understood to be the highest powered private house display in the state and is quite well known (a few hundred visitors tonight - there are quite a few people standing in the driveway right now), uses less power each year than would be saved by putting in one domestic solar hot water heater. (Peak power 18.7 KW, average load during operation 11 KW).

The attached graph shows Victorian power demand (had to pick somewhere and Vic is larger than Tas) for the past 24 hours. Not much of a spike when the lights go on. The 2 spikes in the early hours of the morning are due to off-peak hot water switching on. Note the scale doesn't start at zero. Green line is demand for power with scale on the right. Red line is spot price with scale on the left. Note that the time is standard time NOT daylight savings time. Source of the chart - NEMMCO (National Electricity Market Management Company). :2twocents
 

Attachments

  • GRAPH_5VIC1.gif
    GRAPH_5VIC1.gif
    10.2 KB · Views: 191
Tonight - 8.35pm SBS. - Nuclear Nightmares.
Climate change is one of the major hot topics in politics today. Faced with potential global catastrophe, a controversial technology is back on the policy agenda - nuclear energy. But it is taken as a given by most people - experts as well as lay people - that radiation is terribly bad for our health, and that an expansion of nuclear power would inevitably lead to thousands of deaths from cancer. But what is the truth? In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, experts predicted thousands of deaths from cancer. Yet, when an authoritative report was published it found that 50 workers in the plant died from acute radiation sickness and so far only nine of those can be attributed to the accident. This documentary explores the possibility that it is our fear of radiation that is the problem. Are we fighting a technology which may be vital in the fight to save our civilisation from the effects of global warming?
Click to expand...
If there's a god, this show will be available for download in a few days. - fingers crossed.
 
With rain falling solidly all Saturday in much of Tasmania and recent falls elsewhere, those who proclaim that short term weather patterns are due to climate change must be feeling a bit foolish. More to the point, they're making an outright mockery of what is a very serious debate.

Never rain again? Of course it will and yes we've had serious droughts long before climate change was an issue. I just hope some of these attention grabbing fools (especially certain high profile politicians) stop blaming climate change for everything that happens with the weather in the hope of some political gain and start focusing on what it really is - a long term problem that needs long term solutions which most of us won't live long enough to see any real benefit from but are nonetheless morally obliged to pursue. :2twocents
 
Smurf1976 said:
With rain falling solidly all Saturday in much of Tasmania and recent falls elsewhere, those who proclaim that short term weather patterns are due to climate change must be feeling a bit foolish. More to the point, they're making an outright mockery of what is a very serious debate.

Never rain again? Of course it will and yes we've had serious droughts long before climate change was an issue. I just hope some of these attention grabbing fools (especially certain high profile politicians) stop blaming climate change for everything that happens with the weather in the hope of some political gain and start focusing on what it really is - a long term problem that needs long term solutions which most of us won't live long enough to see any real benefit from but are nonetheless morally obliged to pursue. :2twocents
Click to expand...
I don't suppose you are actually surprised that politicians prefer to focus on "climate change" rather than take responsibility for their lack of planning regarding basic infrastructure. The population of S.E. Qld, e.g. has been growing at an exponential rate for many years, politicians have trumpeted this growth as a reflection of Qld being "the smart State" etc etc. But they have simply failed to plan accordingly for the increased population: hence the current panic about dams running dry.

If politicians existed for a reason other than their own gratification and actually had the good of the population at heart, then the sort of measures which are being belatedly undertaken at present would have been in place at least a decade ago.

Julia
 
re that SBS doco over the perceived threat of reactors - after researching it, they conclude that we over-react - that the potential damage due to radiation in the event of another chenobyl has been exaggerated. :2twocents

One week to middle of summer - really mild so far (in Sydney).
and TV tonight had new yorkers sunning themselves in shorts cossies etc when normally they'd be using snow shovels to get the car out of the garage. Wierd.

agree smurf, morally no question but to address it asap.
and julia - thanks for taking all those thirsty old bugas off our hands ;)
 
http://www20.sbs.com.au/sbs_front/index.html# - Click on "Dateline interviews Al Gore"
global warnings on global warming if you like.
He is sceptical about nuclear.
Post Stern report, he says analysis of the economics means that we are hurting ourselves by not going along with Kyoto.

Gore says that at least John Howard has watched his movie (An Inconvenient Truth).
Meanwhile GW Bush steadfastly refuses to watch it. (such an enlightened example).
There are many other Dateline interviews worth watching incidentally.

You can also get a short summary of the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" (on "Movie Show" , right hand side)
 
2020hindsight said:
re that SBS doco over the perceived threat of reactors - after researching it, they conclude that we over-react - that the potential damage due to radiation in the event of another chenobyl has been exaggerated.
Click to expand...
Attached pdf file from SBS ;)
- the relative effects of global warming and nuclear radiation.
You have to open the pdf file folks.
 

Attachments

  • Nuclear Nighmares.pdf
    42.1 KB · Views: 97
From post # 2 on this thread ..I notice tonight there is an article on SBS at 8.30
The Gulf Stream and the Next Ice Age
bound to be on this sorta stuff (I'm guessing)
2020hindsight said:
Then there are the Local theories - eg the theory that Florida will fry, and at the same time England will freeze. This theory was on TV recently. Basically the warm Gulf stream is pivotal to the climates of both. After travelling north east from the tropics, it hits the northern Atlantic where due to its high salt content it sinks, then returns at a lower level to be reheated etc. They call it "the conveyor". Trouble is the salt is being diluted by melting iceberg/ polar cap etc, and when this happens the conveyor stops. etc etc .
Click to expand...

This program explores the results of a recent American government report that believes that the collapse of thermohaline circulation (the global circulation of deep ocean currents) will take place around the year 2010 and impose a minor ice age on Europe. Could Dublin acquire a climate like Spitzberg, and London like that of Siberia?
Click to expand...
 
and at 10.47pm on ABC "What would Jesus drive?"
cripes - I have an old mazda 626 he can have for a song - assuming anything would be an improvement to a donkey ;) only needs about 3 miracles to get it shipshape.

I jest , sure to be an interesting show, see how I'm travelling with "my homework"

PS this assumes that Jesus would be into minimisation of global warming - when in fact he probably didn't realise we lived on a "globe" :confused:

PS Wasn't there a quote somewhere that Moses "burned up the desert in his Triumph" ? (or maybe it was a pharoah?) details escape me, I ain't no expert on the old testament :2twocents

PS Jesus opinion? - probably irrelevant , what matters now is the opinion of the modern equivalents of his Dad - the GW Bush's and J Howard's of the world who
a) encourage us to selfishly take more than our share, and
b) are the only major industrialised nations to refuse to sign Kyoto. :(

PS nice quote at the end of "2057 - The World in 50 Years : The World "
"evolution is the exception, extinction is the rule " :2twocents
 
...collapse of thermohaline circulation (the global circulation of deep ocean currents) will take place around the year 2010
Click to expand...
2010, that's just 3 years away!

If it really is going to happen that quickly then it's adapt or die. 2010 is as good (or bad) as it happening literally today - we won't be even 1% more prepared than we are now by 2010.
 
2020hindsight said:
PS Jesus opinion? - probably irrelevant , what matters now is the opinion of the modern equivalents of his Dad
Click to expand...

Yes, fundametalist Old Testament followers are back...
It absolutely astounds me that this is possible in this day and age!
 
Top