hnmullany

I wrote an introductory piece on the economics and technology of enhanced geothermal with good technical sources. I think it summarizes the state of the tech better than the New Yorker article.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-fracked-geothermal-energ...

The more competitive the market, the less that companies are able to pass on income tax increases (as opposed to input tax increases - like tariffs). If companies are able to pass along income tax increases, it means that they have pricing power.

That's because the original responder's data was about medicare fraud although the estimate was provided by the Social Security Administration

Here is an overview I wrote of next generation methods for ammonia synthesis:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/climatetech-134-de-carbonizin...

(FWIW - there are many many promising lab results that turn out to be false positives because the researchers did a bad job of controlling potential contamination in their ammonia measurements. Low concentrations of ammonia are everywhere, and you have to do a really good job making sure you're not measuring background levels vs. what you think you're producing)

Soil nitrate fixation is also energy intensive. The nitrogenase enzyme takes about 27 ATPs to break a single N2 bond. Legumes feed about a third of their entire photosynthesis output to their nitrogen fixing nodules in order to generate significant amounts of nitrates.

There is no free lunch.

Therapy = Exactly. He thinks he has freedom and agency but he's just being puppeteered by conflicting subconscious forces he doesn't understand and seems to have no insight into. This is a man who's in a self-driving car turning a steering wheel that's connected to nothing.

Vegetation-type is determined by temperature and precipitation. You can't un-desertify a true desert unless you irrigate. Most of these projects that "succeed" - miraculously correlate with good rainfall experience.

Most of the Sahel revegetated all by itself, when the decadal drought ended in the 90's.

Re-vegetation projects can help put vegetation back when it's been removed by shitty management practises like severe over-grazing.

It can also help speed revegetation if there are no nearby seed sources and dispersion speeds for those species are low. But dry-adapted vegetation seeds can usually persist for very long periods of time waiting for water.

I also found Echopraxia extremely confusing and had to read that AMA to figure out what the hell I just read.

These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.)

If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).

No-till conservation cropping systems produce better physical soil health and higher soil organic carbon, but they do require higher herbicide use:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360507198_Are_No-Ti...

Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from these piles would likely be rather high, potentially negating any carbon sequestration benefits

Electric arc furnaces use scrap steel as input - Nucor has been doing this in the US since the 70's. They don't reduce iron ore directly.

I always think of this part from Wonderboys:

https://youtu.be/BrVl1hWrWBs?si=UPgOdjd6ujlJ1UKP&t=95

I hacked together an SVG-filter based median filter once. It was horribly inefficient, but it worked: https://codepen.io/mullany/pen/ngJWvx

Biogas plants still need quite a bit of harvested biomass added tp the manure. Manure by itself has too low a Carbon/Nitrogen ratio, and without supplementation, it will over-produce Ammonia, inihibiting the anaerobic bacteria that digest the feedstock. So you have to add sileage or switchgrass.

N-fixation does happen in the soil, but legumes have root nodules that host rhizobium bacteria and can assimilate the N much more easily

Amphibians have low dispersal speeds. Precipitation changes are a big driver, more than temperature:

Paper reference:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40419628

Climate change is a catastrophe, but it's not going to be the apocalypse and if we keep working on mititgation, there is a good chance it will merely be a "normal" scale disaster.

For example - it's possible that tundra methane emissions in many areas could be mitigated relatively quickly by the regrowth of birch and pine scrubland whose increased evapotranspiration will reduce water tables and eliminate methane emissions. And aboveground carbon sequestration in woody tree mass could outweigh losses from belowground oxidation. This already occurs in fenlands in Southern Finland (paper I read)

We don't know enough about methane hydrates to assess their stability.

Many ecosystems will be reasonably resilient to climate change - maybe up to 2/3 of them, although some specific species groups like tropical amphibians are going to have a really bad time.

I believe that it's only thin film solar panels that have high heavy metal content but mono-crystalline panels - which are now the super-dominant technology having drastically decreased in cost - are fairly non-toxic.

Waste brine is substantially more dense than regular seawater, so it tends to form a coherent layer that doesn't mix easily: it's why waste brine sinks to the sea-bed and spreads out in a layer.

Apart from whether the economics make sense brine disposal from desalinization is a big issue. Waste with high salt concentrations can wipe out marine life - it would be nice if this piece took the issue a little more seriously. It's a continuing problem in the Canary Islands which are dependent on desalinization plants:

"Rejected brine is a serious threat to marine ecosystems, causing negative effects on both flora and fauna. This is especially so when the optimal initial high dilution capacity is lacking in the discharge system. Consequently, brine discharge plumes spread over large areas of the sea floor and modify the structure and distribution of benthic communities such as seagrass habitats. ... Rejected brine disposal costs are between 5 and 33% of the whole desalinization process, depending on the characteristics of the brine, its pretreatment level before disposal, disposal method, and volume"

from: Jiménez-Arias, D., Morales-Sierra, S., García-Machado, F.J., García-García, A.L., Luis, J.C., Valdés, F., Sandalio, L.M., Hernández-Suárez, M. & Borges, A.A. 2020, "Rejected brine recycling in hydroponic and thermo-solar evaporation systems for leisure and tourist facilities. Changing waste into raw material", Desalination, vol. 496, pp. 114443.

If you want a deep dive on drought - this is a good recent book by someone who knows what they're talking about:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drought-Interdisciplinary-Perspecti...

Here's a summary of several papers taken from a paper I'm in the process of writing:

Climate change is expected to alter global water regimes significantly, although there is disagreement on regional specifics and uncertainty in precipitation models (Trenberth et al., 2014). Precipitation and runoff modeling is complicated by incomplete historical field measurements, an inability to reproduce existing regional drying patterns, sensitivity to the choice of initial conditions for sea surface temperature, and poor aerosol forcing accuracy among other challenges (Dai, 2013).

While these and other uncertainties, such as the net effects of vegetation feedback and CO2 levels on soil moisture are acknowledged by the authors, the most recent climate model ensemble, CMIP6, forecasts further whole year drying in western North America, Central America, Europe and the Mediterranean, the Amazon, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia (Cook et al., 2020). This general aridification forecast is not universally supported, and other researchers believe that since the paleoclimate record demonstrates that warmer paleoclimates are also wetter, it is more likely that the vegetation response modeling in CMIP6 is decisively incorrect, and that it is more likely that overall precipitation will increase while intra-year seasonal variability also increases under climate change (Zaitchik et al., 2023).

The combination of increased temperatures, more variable soil moisture and higher CO2 levels make forecasting future crop yield responses under climate change challenging and response results from experimental simulation and statistical modeling vary widely (Jones et al., 2014). For example, in a well-controlled growth chamber study of wheat response under RCP8.5 temperature and CO2 levels, crop lifecycle shorted appreciably but yields were not affected and one of the study’s cultivars had approximately 25% higher yield under simulated climate change (Sabella et al. 2020). Conversely, a meta-analysis of 91 statistical studies of crop response showed a mildly negative response for most crops/climate combinations to climate, but the variance of results across the included studies was extremely high (Challinor et al. 2014).

While future water regimes are uncertain, there is high certainty about how current water regimes compare to historical averages. With some regional exceptions, the last hundred and fifty years has been a well-watered period compared to the millennial average. From 951CE to 1500CE, the North American continent experienced four major multi-decadal droughts, and the early 19th century was a period of recurring severe drought in the America West (Cook et al., 2007). During the last millennium, Europe experienced two exceptional periods of multi-decadal dryness, from 1400 to 1480CE and from 1770 to 1840CE (the Sporer and Dalton minima respectively) (Ionita et al., 2021).

More recently, Europe experienced significant agricultural drought in 2003, 2015 and 2018 and recent tree-ring research indicates that drought severity in 2015-2018 is anomalous compared to a baseline of 1600CE to present (Freund et al., 2023). Globally, drought frequency has increased in China and India; and recent droughts in the African Sahel are historically unprecedented in duration and frequency (Mishra and Singh, 2010). However, to date, the overall magnitude of the increase in drought severity, as measured by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI: range -10 to +10), has been small. In North America, for example, there has been a mean -0.3 decrease in the PDSI vs. a 1950-1970 baseline, compared to the historical overall range of approximately -4 to +4 (Trenberth et al., 2014).

There ARE conflicting projections. There are 2 schools - general aridification - which the CMIP6 projections kind of reflect, and the wet gets wetter, dry gets dryer schools. This paper does a good job of summarizing the issues:

Zaitchik, B.F., Rodell, M., Biasutti, M. and Seneviratne, S.I., 2023. Wetting and drying trends under climate change. Nature Water, pp.1-12.

One of the benefits of flooding is that it keeps soil pathogens in check - so you don't need to use crop rotation when you grow rice. Would be interesting to see what year 2 of this looks like and whether temporary flooding is enough to do this,.

You might want to check out their columnar compression & their continuous aggregate blog posts:

https://www.timescale.com/blog/timescaledb-2-3-improving-col...

https://www.timescale.com/blog/massive-scale-for-time-series...

"The Sense of an Ending" is a good book (then movie) with this theme (although in the opposite way)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sense_of_an_Ending

Kudzu does well at forest edges, so you tend to see it by roads - it's not successful in the interior where seedlings don't get enough light.

So, basically, there are price assymmetries (BLS sticker price data), but consumers adjust the mix of cuts of beef they buy in favor of cheaper cuts (scanner data) so the overall effect is to produce something that looks like symmetry?

You still need to add fertilizers that's not what this is about. (And you absolutely drive over crops with tractors)