Recent content by DrLOAC

Doesn’t seem that amazing until you realize they’ve increased output 10,000 times since the 50’s. One more order of magnitude should do it.

As a safety engineer let me just say that a design where two transformers can go down and cut off access to power from both the primary AND backup is a failure. It’s 1 fault tolerant at best and possibly 0 fault tolerant if the same failure took down both transformers. There’s no reason it...

I enjoy some of the subtle anti-EV bias you can find in online media. Google fed me this article as one of their curated news links that pops up on their home page. https://www.hotcars.com/how-to-save-thousands-when-installing-an-ev-charger-at-home/ In the article they stated the following...

It’s interesting about the Permian extinction event which was potentially started by vulcanism. In an area known as the Siberian Traps a massive amount of magma erupted for several 100,000s years. It seems it burned through huge amounts of sediment a coal releasing massive amounts of...

Some small good news. A new commercial product - carbon negative concrete bricks. https://www.mcgilltribune.com/sci-tech/mcgill-alumni-create-worlds-first-carbon-negative-concrete-20092022/ The novel cement-free process will help remove 330 lbs (150 kgs) of Co2 for every ton of concrete produced.

Just to provide a scale for the amount of heat the oceans have absorbed: That’s about 3.7x10^23 joules of energy over the last 50 years in the upper 2000m of the worlds oceans. Equivalent to: ~ 200 Hiroshima sized A-bombs exploding every minute over the last 50 years. Enough energy to run...

I’m a big fan of low birth rates stemming from 1st world lifestyles. Climate impact can be viewed as carbon intensity per person. While 1st world lifestyles have increased carbon use they also reduce population growth. Do poverty reduction, then people have fewer kids. Then the people who are...

This is a another standard fallacy. The problem isn’t with the grid. The grid can support charging a 50/50 mix of EVs/ICE today without much of any change. Don’t believe me? Follow along We’ll use Texas’s crappy grid as an example. Here’s a standard summer day for Texas’s grid: Demand at...

Space based solar power is limited for a number of reasons. The biggest is up mass. The largest solar arrays ever flown are on the ISS. Each set of two arrays came up as an integrated truss which contained all the equipment to deploy 2 sets of arrays, provide 2 axis pointing, battery storage...

It’s blatantly obvious SCOTUS is playing Calvinball with the law. They have a desired partisan result and pick the argument or even outright make up the facts to reach that result.

That’s a good point. Without doing a thermal analysis I’m not sure how it all balances out.

It’s negligible because it all* gets turned into heat eventually

Sorry bud but your appeal to ignorance is exceptionally wanting when compared to basic physics or my own experience. I have direct experience with heat and mass transfer, space based thermal systems, solar power systems, risk management, and systems engineering. I’ve looked at the climate...

How do you think we adapt? Since you don’t seem to have a background in how large scale engineering/design/ infrastructure projects occur let me fill you in. The first thing is to estimate or model the issue that requires you to do the project in the first place. An example, DOT comes out...

I always love it when climate “skeptics” pull the Al Gore card. Apparently you folks think because Al Gore spoke, or bought a house or flew in an airplane that the basic physics of heat transfer no longer function and carbon reduction solutions can’t work because markets don’t function...