COP 26 What are your thoughts?

[ILLYRIAN]

As far as I'm concerned some countries think of themselves as more important than other countries. China has said it will cut coal out by 2060, India thinks it is more important than any possibility other countries might cease to be and Australia told the meeting one thing yet tells the people of Australia the opposite, just as it did to The Paris meeting.

 

[nightshade]

I need to read it in more detail but at the moment I'm agreeing with Greta it's all very blah, blah blah.

Phased down, with no time scale means nothing.
Same as inefficient fossil fuel subsidiaries.

I do want to read more of the reforestation plan, and see what Brazil has agreed to, if anything!

Companies, rather than countries seem to come out with better targets. Which is something at least.

From this, I don't even have any confidence that they will get it to 2.4, let alone 1.5.

 

[Mr Trick]

Yeah the targets sound all well and good, but I'm not convinced they have conrete plans on how to achive it. I'm sure some progress has been made, but not enough by the sound of it. BTW it should have been a virtual meeting for so many reasons.

 

[Ethan Reigns]

This is grandstanding at its worst. A bunch of politicians get together to set goals knowing they will not be in office when they fail to meet them or efforts to meet them destroy society but they get the momentary buzz of being on the side of the angels. Goals do nothing without a plan of how to get there and no one had anything to say about that because trendy renewables are not going to get within orders of magnitude of meeting the goals.

It will take more nuclear power and recently Rolls Royce announced it was going into the small nuclear reactor business. For older reactors, there are plans to build a nuclear fuel rod reprocessing plant in New Brunswick and there are already "environmentalist" idiots protesting it. Fuel rods become unusable after 5% of the nuclear material has been consumed and this would go a long way towards making nuclear power cheap but as I mentioned, there is major opposition from idiots. (Stupid people are like Glow Sticks: I just want to snap them and shake them until the light comes on.) Thorium reactors offer the promise of more fuel and less of a problem with any nuclear waste because the half-life of thorium is 150 years, not the many thousands of years of uranium.

Where is the power going to come from for all the electric vehicles? I know what the alternate energy sources can do because I worked at a company that made solar array inverters (that take the DC power from a solar array and create AC from it) in a 30 KW to 500,000 KW size and fuel cell inverters in the 1.2 MW and 2.4 MW size. There are times of day when you are guaranteed to get no power from solar and the array output has to be between 350 and 600 volts or the inverter shuts down, so clouds can interrupt output. The province of Ontario uses 15,000 megawatts on a typical day and over 19,000 on a day like Christmas when everyone has the oven on.

There are greater things affecting the climate than carbon dioxide. One of them is the huge mounds of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean, cutting the oxygen content in the water. The item that is the greatest indicator of the true nature of global warming is the movement of the north magnetic pole which is heading towards Russia at the rate of 100 metres per day and this rate is accelerating. Not every part of the world is participating in global warming. Toronto has registered temperatures of 40°C/104°F in the past (five times during my lifetime) but all these temperatures were recorded over 40 years ago. I assume the earth's crust is getting thicker under us. I would want to see temperature trends in deep mines before I credit carbon dioxide as the cause of climate change. Carbon dioxide concentration was 280 ppm in the pre-industrial era and plants from that era showed signs of stress with more stomata (breathing holes) in the leaves than plants now. At present, the concentration of CO2 is about 415 ppm. In the era of the dinosaurs, the concentration was 1100 ppm and the temperatures were 5°C/9°F higher than at present. The oxygen concentration was higher then at 30% so the fictional stories of people regenerating dinosaurs like Jurassic Park would have to contend with dinosaurs that were in a constant stage of asphyxia.

Let's start teaching people about the environment, down to the basics and let's make physics courses mandatory for all students in any course including the arts. When people complain about the environment and know nothing about the physics, they only succeed in making a bad problem worse by adopting grandstanding moves that do nothing but siphon money away from things that might work. I had one Greenpeace canvasser get ozone depletion gases and greenhouse gases mixed up. Since Greenpeace only seems to use money for advertising, I sent him away with nothing. Let's try a simple set of test questions:

1. What gases are not greenhouse gases by molecular structure?
2. What range of wavelengths correspond to normal earth temperatures?
3. What wavelengths are absorbed by carbon dioxide?
4. Has the world ever been warmer in prehistoric times?
5. Has the world ever been warmer in modern times?
6. Do modern high-compression automotive engines make the problem worse or better?
7. What determines if a year is going to be El Niño or La Niña?

1. Only monatomic molecules and diatomic molecules where both atoms are the same are not greenhouse gases. The rest of them are.
2. 8 to 14 micrometres with the shorter wavelengths being hotter.
3. Carbon dioxide absorbs wavelengths longer than 10 micrometres but has limited absorption for shorter wavelengths.
4. In the time of the dinosaurs the average temperature was 5°C/9°F higher and due to the plant growth, the amount of oxygen in the air was 30%.
5. A thousand years ago it was warmer. We know this because settlers in Greenland grew crops of rye. What followed was the "Little Ice Age".
6. Older low-compression engines had an air cycle efficiency of about 54%. High-compression gasoline engines have an air cycle efficiency of about 57%. Diesel engines have an air cycle efficiency of about 68%.
7. El Niño is when undersea volcanoes east of the Philippines are active and La Niña is when they are not.

Consider yourself much more educated than most people if you got one question right. Activism requires knowledge. A proper lobbying effort to aid the environment would have a bill spelled out in all the necessary legalese, ready to be passed by congress and the senate - they won't do it themselves and they don't have the education to know what to put in it. The accompanying documentation in the bill should spell out the cost of implementation and the cost of the measure not being implemented. A bunch of people carrying signs and shouting slogans is not going to get anywhere. Pick an issue, do your homework, put a bill ready to be passed in the hands of the congressmen and push it through. This is the only way to be effective. And it won't happen.


I find things like the Paris Accord and the Kyoto Accord that preceded it to be political grandstanding and virtue signaling on a mass scale. The average politician can't tell thermodynamics from thermal underwear, so they make promises for the future knowing full well that when the deadline comes, they will be retired/incapacitated/dead or otherwise not having to carry any responsibility for failure.

The problem is, no one is laying out a path for what must be done. Measures that supposedly promote the environment may turn out to not be so useful. For example, I have noticed a lot of cars that shut off engines when they stop at a light. They rely on a rapid restart to avoid using fuel during the stop. But where a person may explicitly start the engine four times a day, with automatic stop/start, this could become thirty times a day. Good for fuel consumption but lets say every 20,000 starts you need to replace the starter. You are comparing the energy saved at a number of stops with the energy cost to manufacture a new starter motor. With copper and steel melting at high temperatures and machining creating scrap and using fuel, it then becomes a comparison of fuel saved at each stop versus energy cost of a new starter. The savings from auto stop/start may go negative.

What would I consider the major steps needed to help the environment? Here is a partial list as I see it:

1. Fuel rod reprocessing plants located at each nuclear power generator. In Canada, every fuel rod is stored onsite at the nuclear power station. Since the fuel rods are still full of fissionable material, reprocessing would allow for tremendous economy - we could use the fuel until it was all gone. This would be a robotic system since people would not be able to tolerate the radiation.

2. Biodegrading bacteria for rubber. So far, there is no realistic way of disposing of tires. The generation of a biodegrading agent would help tremendously.

3. Packaging materials that are biodegradable in a few years to create non-toxic rubble rather than a few hundred years to destroy oceans.

4. Solar desalination plants for providing water to coastal regions. This could help farmland encroach on desert land. Think of the Sahara or the Australian outback becoming fertile again.

5. Worldwide standards so manufacturers cannot avoid the cost of environmentally safe processing by offshoring to a country without standards.

6. Effective farming methods that prevent fertilizer from escaping into local rivers and lakes.

I find things like the Paris Accord and the Kyoto Accord that preceded it to be political grandstanding and virtue signaling on a mass scale. The average politician can't tell thermodynamics from thermal underwear, so they make promises for the future knowing full well that when the deadline comes, they will be retired/incapacitated/dead or otherwise not having to carry any responsibility for failure.

The problem is, no one is laying out a path for what must be done. Measures that supposedly promote the environment may turn out to not be so useful. For example, I have noticed a lot of cars that shut off engines when they stop at a light. They rely on a rapid restart to avoid using fuel during the stop. But where a person may explicitly start the engine four times a day, with automatic stop/start, this could become thirty times a day. Good for fuel consumption but lets say every 20,000 starts you need to replace the starter. You are comparing the energy saved at a number of stops with the energy cost to manufacture a new starter motor. With copper and steel melting at high temperatures and machining creating scrap and using fuel, it then becomes a comparison of fuel saved at each stop versus energy cost of a new starter. The savings from auto stop/start may go negative.

Meeting of world governments do not seem to be generating the incentives to go green and in a lot of cases, governments may be lobbied into opposing these measures. We have to kill the lobbying problem before anything will change.

 

[nightshade]

I'm starting to go through it all now, but thought I would post up the Queen's message at the start for anyone who hasn't heard it:

Thank you, Prime Minister Holness, for your kind words of introduction.

I am delighted to welcome you all to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference; and it is perhaps fitting that you have come together in Glasgow, once a heartland of the industrial revolution, but now a place to address climate change.

This is a duty I am especially happy to discharge, as the impact of the environment on human progress was a subject close to the heart of my dear late husband, Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh.

I remember well that in 1969, he told an academic gathering:

“If the world pollution situation is not critical at the moment, it is as certain as anything can be, that the situation will become increasingly intolerable within a very short time … If we fail to cope with this challenge, all the other problems will pale into insignificance.”

It is a source of great pride to me that the leading role my husband played in encouraging people to protect our fragile planet, lives on through the work of our eldest son Charles and his eldest son William. I could not be more proud of them.

Indeed, I have drawn great comfort and inspiration from the relentless enthusiasm of people of all ages – especially the young – in calling for everyone to play their part.

In the coming days, the world has the chance to join in the shared objective of creating a safer, stabler future for our people and for the planet on which we depend.

None of us underestimates the challenges ahead: but history has shown that when nations come together in common cause, there is always room for hope. Working side by side, we have the ability to solve the most insurmountable problems and to triumph over the greatest of adversities.

For more than seventy years, I have been lucky to meet and to know many of the world’s great leaders. And I have perhaps come to understand a little about what made them special.

It has sometimes been observed that what leaders do for their people today is government and politics. But what they do for the people of tomorrow — that is statesmanship.

I, for one, hope that this conference will be one of those rare occasions where everyone will have the chance to rise above the politics of the moment, and achieve true statesmanship.

It is the hope of many that the legacy of this summit – written in history books yet to be printed – will describe you as the leaders who did not pass up the opportunity; and that you answered the call of those future generations. That you left this conference as a community of nations with a determination, a desire, and a plan, to address the impact of climate change; and to recognise that the time for words has now moved to the time for action.

Of course, the benefits of such actions will not be there to enjoy for all of us here today: we none of us will live forever. But we are doing this not for ourselves but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps.

And so, I wish you every good fortune in this significant endeavour.

The Queen’s speech at the COP26 Evening Reception

 

[ILLYRIAN]

No one on this forum has mentioned about cows doing bottom burps and producing excess methane.
Now,
I am aware that this site has a thing about not talking of politicians - strangely enough the one way to cut methane distribution around the world is to stop politicians talking!

 

[nightshade]

I think everyone knows by now that we have to cut down on the amount of livestock that is bred for meat and dairy.

I think next year's COP will be more interesting with them being able to evaluate and adjust the targets that were made this year.

 

[nightshade]

New cars and vans to be zero emissions by 2035, that's 14 years away, and my current car is older than that!

A lot of manufacturers have agreed to this, but looking through the list it doesn't appear like the Far East companies have.

It'll depend on how the second hand market goes for electric vehicles, how cheap they will be to buy and how long batteries last.

I do still have my car, but I've started a savings pot to get a hybrid one next year or the year after. The second hand hybrid market is reasonably priced, so I should be able to afford one