Daily Archives: September 11, 2014
Your Questions About Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air
Ken asks…
Where is harder to survive..?
Northern Canada/Russia (with lots of cold and snow) or a desert in Nevada?
Assume that there is no countries or cities around, you are the only human in the world and you have to survive by yourself. I am talking about lifetime sustained survival. Not just survive until you get out kind of thing.
PS: I didn’t use a desert in Africa like sahara because obviously there is absolutely 0 chance of sustainable human life.
admin answers:
The Sahara desert has been home to thousands of people for thousands of years. So has the Namib desert and the Kalahari desert where the bushmen have hunted very skillfully for many generations and they eat well.
The Nevada desert can feed you too if you find the skills to get the food it harbours.
Learn some biology. Then you can eat. Learn geology and you can find water. And oil.
The driest desert in the world is the Atacama. It’s beautiful. I’ve been twice. It’s got places where no rain has fallen for more than four hundred years.
But it hasn’t got the driest air in the world.
That’s in Antarctica where water is frozen out of the air and where scientific instruments, especially for infra red measurements which get ruined by water vapour in the air absorbing infra red, are stationed in the scientific research stations at Ross Island and around the South Pole.
It’s easy to look it up. ..Antarctic Research Stations.
The driest air in the world lays over a huge sheet of ice and snow…frozen water.
Cold places give you water but more importantly they demand more in supplies than hot places. It takes more energy and more materials to heat things than to cool them.
Without enough heat you’re soon dead. Providing it and keeping it is costly in materials and clothing..
Deserts get cold at night, even the Sahara. You get a break from the heat and bright Sun.
You can burn camel dung or other dung and dried grasses to get enough heat for cooking. That’s all the heat you need.
Move when it’s cooler in the morning and evening and get shade under a high tent or in the shadow of rocks during the hottest part of the day.
You can cross the Sahara with a lighter load than for crossing Siberia.
Both places you need wildlife to live on or take your own animals. Move to where they can eat so you can keep them alive.
The reindeer herders in the far north of Finland do that, where a warm night in winter is -20C.
Reindeer provide milk and meat, furs for clothing and shoes, tents and sleeping mats, and bone for knives and ornaments.
Sami people have been living in the far north for more than two thousand years
http://norskfolke.museum.no/en/Stories/Set-1/Sami-baptismal-boots/ .. .
Http://www.suite101.com/content/the-sami-of-the-north-a222034 . . . .
In the Sahara camels and goats and sometimes sheep provide the milk and meat, and give wool for cloth to make clothing and tents and bedding rolls, and leather for shoes.
Nomads move to where the grazing is best, in the Gobi desert, and in the Sahara and Namib deserts.
In both cold and hot places you can trap birds and small animals.
Hares and arctic foxes in the far north…or lizards and snakes and the few small mammals that live in the desert..
Many cold places have rivers with fish, and by the coast the sea provides food as well….seaweeds, molluscs, fish and seals.
Desert or frozen tundra…you can live in both and thousands do.
In desert you can still get water.
Hang a fine net to collect the dew. Some plants do that.
Dew collects on the hairy leaves and stems overnight in desert air and provides water for birds and small animals. Be up early enough or it’s gone down animals throats or into the plant or back up into the sky.
That’s where the net idea came from….hairy plants that collect water from dew.
Nets are also used to collect water from fog in remote mountains,and in deserts eg in Chile.
Http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/11/1101_TVdesertbeetle.html . . . . . .
You can dig condensation pits or condense water from plants.
Http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Water-in-the-Desert . . .. ..
You can dig into the desert where the signs tell you water lays underneath. When it’s close enough to the surface wind-blown seeds take root and you get an oasis.
Thousands of people have lived in deserts and frozen tundra for thousands of years, long before modern equipment existed like expensive water reservoirs for backpacks instead of far more useful and versatile water bottles which keep Arabian nomads alive in the fierce desert heat but are too simple for ‘must have the latest’ techy walkers.
Learn to live where you are and then you can live. Generations long past past did that quite well enough for the current populations to be there……
Have fun
Desert walks….
Http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100704125838AAOUFkW . . . . . . .
Mandy asks…
So why isn’t nuclear power being developed if global warming is such a threat?
Sustainable Development Commission statement on nuclear power: http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/presslist.php/51/nuclear-power-wont-fix-it
Further to my question on Nuclear Power (yes or no) many AGW proponents pointed out that they were in favour of it, or at least had no serious objections.
But if that’s at all representative, and if AGW is such a threat, why isn’t nuclear power being actively pursued? Take the UK, pretty much all ‘Green’ groups vehemently oppose it. The government is being advised on it’s energy policy by a commission which it set up and appointed Jonathan Porritt to head (ex-Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner).
It’s obvious that – for the short and even medium term – renewables and energy saving won’t cut it. See the calculations at www.withouthotair.com
I ask because it seems that both warmists and sceptics seem to agree on nuclear. If that’s at all representative of the views of most people then why aren’t we actually doing something rather than planning another massive conference in some far-flung location?
admin answers:
Because a lot of the people who are in charge of solving global warming are either:
a. Completely ignorant of the fact that wind and solar can’t solve global warming.
B. Heavily influenced by fossil fuel interests that would be hurt if nuclear power took away their market in the process of solving global warming.
B(2). Influenced by the fossil fuel unions who don’t want to lose their power (the workers don’t have much to worry about though, the time it’ll take to switch to nuclear will be more than enough for retraining and a lot of them would probably end up working at a vastly safer nuclear plant anyway).
C. See global warming as a means to force people to use less energy and return to ‘simpler’ times whether the population wants it or not (never mind that most people would choose global warming over what the greens want).
D. Are afraid of losing the votes of the anti-nuclear kooks.
The green groups should not be thought of as environmentalists, for the most part they are urban trendoids who don’t really have a clue about the environment but want to feel good about doing something. There’s also a big focus on appearance for the greens and probably a bit of residual Christian morality making a virtue of sacrifice.
The views you get here probably aren’t representative of the majority of the population although the anti-nuclear movement is in decline, they should be almost gone within the decade.
The scientific community probably hasn’t done enough to tell the public and politicians what the scientific consensus on nuclear power is and why renewable energy isn’t going to be able to do what we need it to.
As for _Sustainable energy without the hot air_, that is probably a bit (or maybe a lot) optimistic for renewables although it covers the UK which has a relatively high population density, other countries might be able to get all their energy from renewables assuming that enough decent energy storage systems could be built (we don’t really have that though, pumped hydro is the best we’ve got but we don’t have enough suitable sites for it).
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