There Is Gas Under the Tundra
lensculture.com
lensculture.com
Love the guy taking a rest in the snow.
<div class="article-photo-placeholder"><img data-progressive-url="https://prod-lensculture-photos.s3.amazonaws.com/original/ce95b807-b76a-4557-a8ac-bb53cabff94a.jpg" src="https://prod-lensculture-photos.s3.amazonaws.com/small/ce95b807-b76a-4557-a8ac-bb53cabff94a.jpg" class="photo progressive-image-loading"></div>
So their code is just deranged.
Disabling uBlock origin didn't help, neither did disabling DuckDuckGo privacy extensions.
I use NoScript and a bunch of other extensions, but disabling them didn't help. And sure, I could have spent more time debugging it, but damn. These are image files!
Websites that "need" javascript to display a 26 year old image format and/or text(!!!) can go pound sand.
> Websites that "need" javascript to display a 26 year old image format and/or text(!!!) can go pound sand.
I registered at MeWe. And ever since, I've been getting "Updates at MeWe" with just this: "Please view this email in an HTML compatible email client." Why they can't include plaintext of the actual update is beyond me. I emailed them about it, but never heard back. So I've written them off as clueless.
Completely understand. The number of mails I have to pipe through w3m or lynx in order to read them has been steadily climbing, and it's obsurd.
The pictures are beautiful indeed :)
To my knowledge, only two companies worldwide possess the ability to explore in such harsh conditions: ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.
Russia, via Rosneft, opted to partner with ExxonMobil to explore the region and created the project photo-documented by the original post. It is known as Sakhalin-1 [1]. ExxonMobil is the principal operator and a 1/3 partner.
This article by CNBC [2] does a decent job of discussing the project and some of the economic and political issues involved. Personally, I found the contents below the fold the most informative and insightful.
Associated links: [1] https://www.sakhalin-1.com/ [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/exxon-mobil-could-tap-huge-a...
Economic pressure on Russia leads to increase of importance of oil and gas sector as other sectors plunge. This leads to more capacity, more offering. Which leads to price correction, even more offering as prices fall and have to be made for. Which in total leads to massive use of cheap gas.
If there was someone committed to decrease in fossil fuel usage they will be making sure that Russia turns into Norway economically and politically. Meaning much fewer extraction of much more expensive fuels and more effort to not knock the ecology in the process.
It is assumed that Syrian crisis started happening when its Oil exports dipped in red, as in existing Syrian economy would consume more Oil than they were capable to extract. Worsening climate did not help of course.
The last time it happened - mid 198x - the USSR collapsed.
The oil price drop in 2014-2016 delivered a significant jolt to Russia causing economical crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_financial_crisis_(2014.... Among other effects, that affected new weapons systems and armed forces modernization, etc. It also lead to very unpopular pension (social security) eligibility age increase. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_financial_crisis_(2014... :
"According to New World Wealth study, over 2,000 millionaires emigrated from Russia."
Just to corroborate this, I found this interesting website [1].
"The top exports of Russia are Crude Petroleum ($75.7B), Refined Petroleum ($43.1B), Petroleum Gas ($16B), Coal Briquettes ($10.4B) and Raw Aluminium ($6.08B)"
I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destruction.
The last generation plants were a military money hack. The plants that got funded interestingly were good at producing materials used for bombs. Not good designs that are financially viable without military money. Or even designs that are safe.
They are too expensive to close down properly. That's why not one has been closed down in the USA. That's not a safe design.
If the military jerks didn't hijack things so the power plants were designed wrong we would probably have had better designs made and more research going into the right directions. Instead we have a sea of toxic waste and bullshit plants to clean up.
Blaming environmentalists is fucking stupid.
What's your counter argument? Something like...
War is peace, hate is love, ignorance is strength?
Bullshit.
Do you mean Tschernobyl? It depends how you define 'huge areas in Europe', there is a good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an...
According to this table, 10 % of Austria is contamined with 37–185 kBq/m2 (lowest contamination of this table). You can eat food grown anywhere in Austria, I do not know where 'food not edible' starts.
But just the fact that you now have to discuss such things is wrong enough.
New England has lost over 600 ski areas. There are fewer and fewer places with good enough conditions to grow coffee (a shame as I feel like the culture around fine coffee is just now coming into existence in the US). Enjoy oysters, clams, and scallops while you can as ocean acidification is killing them in droves. As soil heats due to global warming, it releases carbon dioxide, accelerating these effects.
I don't think the world is the same for anyone working in these industries or in tourism. Folks on HN are also generally isolated from the effects of the kinds of droughts that caused the Arab Spring, or from having to home refugees of climate change whose islands are disappearing to the rising sea levels.
It has been argued that Yemen is the first resource exhaustion war - the country has extremely limited water supplies.
The West is going to have to look at the possibility of a lot of refugees in the future, with the option of taking them in or watching them die.
Being near the cost isn’t necessarily worse than being inland as the sea can help regulate the extreme temperatures. I live in a costal city which basically sits around 100meters above sea level, on a good foundation, so the higher amount of rainfall and increasing sea levels aren’t really a worry. I work in another city 40km in land. In the winter my work place can be absolutely frozen while my hometown sits around 0 degrees, and vice versa in the summer. We had a really bad heatwave this summer, but it was 5 degrees worse at my work place than my home.
But basically you’re only going to be fine if you live as far north as Canada or northern Germany.
You’re spot on about climate refugees though. Syria was/is a war about water control, and now Yemen is in the same boat.
The real worry isn’t that though. It’s all the methane gas locked in the permafrost. It might make the air unbreatheable to humans, and then the rest really won’t matter.
That doesn't mean you get to mess it up for the rest of us.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082017/heatwaves-deadly...
This seems weird. A lot of tropical places are both hotter and more humid than this limit, and people seem to have adapted.
Where? As far as I can tell, the highest wet-bulb temperatures are around the Persian Gulf, and although they sometimes come close to the human survival limit, they do not yet exceed it.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-...
As for migrating to cooler climates , what is the time scale? A century? 50 years? 20 years? What about technological solutions that come into existence during that time frame? Are we going to discount them?
Doomsday implies the human race can't adapt.
Edit: people flagging valid & non-harmful opinions just because you don't like them needs to stop.
Scrubbing would only become possible if we either:
- develop unlimited free energy (fusion, or incredibly cheap solar)
- let plants do the work for us, harvesting the Earth's tremendous isolation.
Either of these solutions almost implies that the climate battle is already won. In the first case, if clean energy is cheap enough to scrub carbon, then it is cheap enough to displace all other power sources. In the latter case, the slow pace of photosynthesis means we'd have to stop burning carbon (and stop burning forests) for a long time until CO2 concentrations stabilize, which is exactly what the Kyoto protocol was all about.
With our technology, it's still considered a nation-scale accomplishment to build a bridge spanning 55 km, or a dam spanning 2 km. Those kinds of engineering accomplishments are currently the likes of which most nations can only dream.
All we can currently do on the planetary scale is resource extraction -- fishing, strip mining, and deforestation. And accidentally altering the atmospheric composition of course.
I guess we can try to cover the entire ocean in floating white plastic pellets, to increase its albedo? That would probably work.
Also, I firmly believe that we can figure out how to make things like methane and oil from biological processes; it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think we're quickly getting to a point where this is a political problem instead of a technology problem.
We have to either bio-engineer organisms to make them better producers (as we do for producing medicines, etc), or use any of the non-biologic processes for fuel synthesis, like Fischer-Tropsch.
If renewables plus storage aren't enough to get us to zero emissions, we need nuclear.
If humans don't extract and burn the gas, the gas will be released as-is into the atmosphere by beavers thawing out the permafrost.[1] Natural gas is actually a stronger greenhouse gas than its combustion products.[2]
[1] https://www.alaskapublic.org/2018/07/11/beavers-are-moving-i...
[2] "Natural gas is thus a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide due to the greater global-warming potential of methane" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas#Natural_gas
But it naturally decomposes into CO2 in a few years once in the atmosphere, so the net effect is more or less the same.
The GP is right: it would be much better if the methane just stays where it is.
Methane is ~36x more potent as a greenhouse gas over a 100-year timespan. This includes the eventual decay to CO2.
Here's what I have:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane
"Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated lifetime of 9.1 years in the atmosphere..."
Either way, the conclusion is the same: better to leave it where it is.
I just searched "methane 36x more potent", here is a random result:
"CO2, by definition, has a GWP of 1... Methane (CH4) is estimated to have a GWP of 28–36 over 100 years" https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
>"Either way, the conclusion is the same: better to leave it where it is."
So, you are in favor of the gas being released as methane then? Your reasoning is not clear.
EDIT:
To make it clear: Humans burning this gas for fuel leads to less greenhouse effect than would otherwise occur.
Deciding whether or not to burn this methane is kind of like being adrift on the north Atlantic and deciding whether or not to burn the ship to stay warm.
>"There is a huge amount of carbon stored in permafrost. Right now, the Earth's atmosphere contains about 850 gigatons of carbon. (A gigaton is one billion tons—about the weight of one hundred thousand school buses). We estimate that there are about 1,400 gigatons of carbon frozen in permafrost." https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html
The beavers are going to do their thing and create comfortable habitats for themselves, which is melting the permafrost. So it looks like this gas is coming out one way or the other.