Science Greta Thunberg Megathread - Dax Herrera says he wouldn't have a day ago (I somewhat doubt that)

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? How can a 16-year-old girl in plaits, who has dedicated herself to the not-exactly sinister, authoritarian plot of trying to save the planet from extinction, inspire such incandescent rage?

Last week, she tweeted that she had arrived into New York after her two week transatlantic voyage: “Finally here. Thank you everyone who came to see me off in Plymouth, and everyone who welcomed me in New York! Now I’m going to rest for a few days, and on Friday I’m going to participate in the strike outside the UN”, before promptly giving a press conference in English. Yes, her second language.

Her remarks were immediately greeted with a barrage of jibes about virtue signalling, and snide remarks about the three crew members who will have to fly out to take the yacht home.

This shouldn’t need to be spelled out, but as some people don’t seem to have grasped it yet, we’ll give it a lash: Thunberg’s trip was an act of protest, not a sacred commandment or an instruction manual for the rest of us. Like all acts of protest, it was designed to be symbolic and provocative. For those who missed the point – and oh, how they missed the point – she retweeted someone else’s “friendly reminder” that: “You don’t need to spend two weeks on a boat to do your part to avert our climate emergency. You just need to do everything you can, with everyone you can, to change everything you can.”

Part of the reason she inspires such rage, of course, is blindingly obvious. Climate change is terrifying. The Amazon is burning. So too is the Savannah. Parts of the Arctic are on fire. Sea levels are rising. There are more vicious storms and wildfires and droughts and floods. Denial is easier than confronting the terrifying truth.

Then there’s the fact that we don’t like being made to feel bad about our life choices. That’s human nature. It’s why we sneer at vegans. It’s why we’re suspicious of sober people at parties. And if anything is likely to make you feel bad about your life choices -- as you jet back home after your third Ryanair European minibreak this season – it’ll be the sight of small-boned child subjecting herself to a fortnight being tossed about on the Atlantic, with only a bucket bearing a “Poo Only Please” sign by way of luxury, in order to make a point about climate change.

But that’s not virtue signalling, which anyone can indulge in. As Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and their-four-private-jets-in-11-days found recently, virtue practising is a lot harder.

Even for someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, some of the criticism levelled at Thunberg is astonishing. It is, simultaneously, the most vicious and the most fatuous kind of playground bullying. The Australian conservative climate change denier Andrew Bolt called her “deeply disturbed” and “freakishly influential” (the use of “freakish”, we can assume, was not incidental.) The former UKIP funder, Arron Banks, tweeted “Freaking yacht accidents do happen in August” (as above.) Brendan O’Neill of Spiked called her a “millenarian weirdo” (nope, still not incidental) in a piece that referred nastily to her “monotone voice” and “the look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes”.

But who’s the real freak – the activist whose determination has single-handedly started a powerful global movement for change, or the middle-aged man taunting a child with Asperger syndrome from behind the safety of their computer screens?

And that, of course, is the real reason why Greta Thunberg is so triggering. They can’t admit it even to themselves, so they ridicule her instead. But the truth is that they’re afraid of her. The poor dears are terrified of her as an individual, and of what she stands for – youth, determination, change.

She is part of a generation who won’t be cowed. She isn’t about to be shamed into submission by trolls. That’s not actually a look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. It’s a look that says “you’re not relevant”.

The reason they taunt her with childish insults is because that’s all they’ve got. They’re out of ideas. They can’t dismantle her arguments, because she has science – and David Attenborough – on her side. They can’t win the debate with the persuasive force of their arguments, because these bargain bin cranks trade in jaded cynicism, not youthful passion. They can harangue her with snide tweets and hot take blogposts, but they won’t get a reaction because, frankly, she has bigger worries on her mind.

That’s not to say that we should accept everything Thunberg says without question. She is an idealist who is young enough to see the world in black and white. We need voices like hers. We should listen to what she has to say, without tuning the more moderate voices of dissent out.

Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergency of new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.

joconnell@irishtimes.com
https://twitter.com/jenoconnell

https://web.archive.org/web/2019090...certain-men-1.4002264?localLinksEnabled=false
Found this thought-provoking indeed.

 

[WonderWino]

"Let it mellow, bigot!"

If its yellow let it mellow, if its brown flush it down

I'm gonna laugh if she becomes the DiCaprio of the Nobel Peace Prize, constantly being nominated, yet never winning.

I'd laugh more if she got nominated and lost the win to trump. The salt would be enough to supply the entire salt fish industry for centuries

Fusion power is a theoretical that has been "almost here" for the last 50 years

Theoretical in the sense we haven't managed to build a working reactor for it yet, but its observed in nature via stars so the concept is sound and has been proven to be possible. Whether we'll ever manage to duplicate it in a technological manner is another matter. Its certainly possible to do, logically it has to be. But if we do it, it'll still probably be a few hundred years off at a minimum

It's still technically possible though, that's what makes it so fucking infuriating. Clean safe power with clean plentiful fuel and harmless byproducts that as far as we know can only be sustained at the heart of a fucking star. It would be less annoying if it was just flat out impossible. God is a fucking troll.

For once supernatural called it

Have we ever tried converting fat people to biofuel?

Didn't the Germans try something like that? Arbeit Mact Frei and all that

 

[Un Platano]

About 4.5 billion tons.

That's 4.5x10^10^9 tons of uranium in 1.32*10^18 (1) tons of water. That's 3 parts per billion or a grade of 0.000000033% uranium. That's less than a thousandth of the average crustal abundance of uranium at 6 ppm or 0.0006%. It's easy to say "If you can figure out a process to extract _______ from sea water, you have an effectively unlimited supply of _______" for just about any resource, because the ocean is huge. The problem is that the concentrations are so vanishingly small that there's no way to process all of that. To make 1 kg of uranium from seawater you'd need to process 3*10^8 cubic meters of of seawater. How big is that anyway?

Let's assume you do build a machine that is capable of 100% beneficiation at such small concentrations (a feat in its own right, and we're going to completely ignore it). The next step is supplying it with seawater. You can't just suck water out of the sea and dump it back in somewhere else nearby because in the long run that will end up recirculating the already depleted water. It will also require huge amounts of energy to accelerate the water through any such system due to the huge volumes required. The best way to supply that water is by sticking it in the middle of an oceanic current. One of the fastest in the world is the Gulf Stream, which travels at an average speed of about 6.4 km/hour (2), or 1.8 m/s. If we wanted to produce a kilogram of uranium in one month, we would have to feed 3*10^11 kilograms of water through it per month. This works out to 116000 cubic meters of water per second. With a feed velocity of 1.8 m/s, the machine would need to have an intake pipe with an area of 64000 m^2, or almost 300 meters wide, to make a single kilogram of uranium per month. The setup would need to be huge to compete with land-based uranium production, which currently totals about 53 million kg per year globally in 2019. (3) To equal the current land production rate, the setup would need a cross section of over 280000 square kilometers, which is larger than New Zealand.

One novel approach to separating the uranium from the water is to use a specially treated yarn that selectively and reversibly absorbs uranium from the fluid around it. However, this still has a hard limit on the rate that uranium can be absorbed at. We can think of the above example not as a production rate, but as a feed rate- 1 kg of uranium passes through a 300m wide section per month. It's another thing entirely to determine how much of that you can pull out.

The reason why this is currently a nonviable competitor to uranium is the inherent difference between crustal abundance and oceanic abundance. The ocean is more or less uniform in all places in the world, while the distribution of scarce elements in the crust is not. Average crustal abundance is a misleading statistic because most of the world's uranium is tied up in a few highly concentrated deposits, and this makes it significantly easier to extract. Oceanic minerals in the parts per billion are not competing with land minerals in the parts per million, they're competing with deposits where the abundance is in the single digit percent range.

 

[neverendingmidi]

Theoretical in the sense we haven't managed to build a working reactor for it yet, but its observed in nature via stars so the concept is sound and has been proven to be possible. Whether we'll ever manage to duplicate it in a technological manner is another matter. Its certainly possible to do, logically it has to be. But if we do it, it'll still probably be a few hundred years off at a minimum

That's a pretty big leap. "We've seen it in stars, so we can do it" is on par with "People get pregnant, so we can grow babies in mason jars" or as seen with troons "fish can change their sex, so humans can too" levels of wishful thinking.

 

[Antipathy]

That's a pretty big leap. "We've seen it in stars, so we can do it" is on par with "People get pregnant, so we can grow babies in mason jars" or as seen with troons "fish can change their sex, so humans can too" levels of wishful thinking.

It's more, "we've seen it in stars, so it's theoretically possible, and we're trying" rather than "we can do it right now".
Fusion is the Holy Grail of clean energy. You can find hydrogen just about anywhere, the byproduct of hydrogen fusion is helium, an element with many industrial uses, and the energy yield could be insane.

The only problem is that in order to get the process going, you need heat and pressure to a degree that is sadly just not possible with current material science.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

It's more, "we've seen it in stars, so it's theoretically possible, and we're trying" rather than "we can do it right now".
Fusion is the Holy Grail of clean energy. You can find hydrogen just about anywhere, the byproduct of hydrogen fusion is helium, an element with many industrial uses, and the energy yield could be insane.

The only problem is that in order to get the process going, you need heat and pressure to a degree that is sadly just not possible with current material science.

You just know the greens would find some next level mental gymnastics for how fusion would kill us all and all forms of nuclear should be banned

 

[CaesarCzech]

I don't know what to say about that trashfire. My idea was that the market could save the environment while creating jobs to do it is good. What if the Government helped low income people in cold states hire contractors to reinsulate their houses?

Once that plan succeeds in lowering heating costs and energy usage, and it's so basic and sound that it can't help but to succeed, we can move on to something else.

View attachment 1127458
Take notes Alex

That would be contraproductive considering it would work, the goal for them is to basically use ecology as an excuse to pull multicultural socialism out of the hat. And also make you eat bugs because neoliberal elite has the utterly stupid idea that YOU should self flagerate for what they believe are their sins, and they are collectivists.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

That's a pretty big leap. "We've seen it in stars, so we can do it" is on par with "People get pregnant, so we can grow babies in mason jars" or as seen with troons "fish can change their sex, so humans can too" levels of wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking in the sciences is fine, it's often a source of experimental inspiration. Posing the question "if x works like this and y is similar to x then will y behave like x?" is entirely valid.
The keystone of science is determining the use of collected data and drawing useful or practical conclusions from said data.

Spoiler: Wishful Thinking

Mathematically you can winnow quite a bit of useful metals from seawater, but it isn't feasible on a practical scale aside from an extremely minor side benefit of desalination plants. Lithium is probably the best candidate for this due to its alkali metal properties.
So if sodium and potassium salts are concentrated in the brine pools of desalination plants, then lithium salts must be as well. If so, then it should be far more feasible to mine lithium from desal. brine than normal seawater, thus supplement the supply of lithium salts and/or metal while providing clean drinking water to coastal cities.


Regarding uranium, if there's uranium in solution, then there must be a more concentrated source for the metal. Uranium is an actinide whose metal salts (minerals) are not exceedingly soluble in water. If you wanted to mine uranium or other heavier metals from the ocean then setting up capture systems around black smokers would be more effective than surface or current capture. The water there is a hot soup of highly concentrated hydrothermally mobilized minerals.

Directly mining the seafloor is probably a more worthwhile effort than trying to catch ions from seawater, as the ions in solution needed to be mobilized from a non-liquid solute. The nature of oceanic crust production at the mid-ocean ridges almost ensures hydrothermal alteration of the surface proximal oceanic crust, so it may be possible to find hydrous metallic minerals in areas of the seafloor that have been heavily hydrothermally altered.

 

[Psyduck]

Any nudes get posted yet

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Any nudes get posted yet

No and I would never hope to see them if they were.

 

[vertexwindi]

Any nudes get posted yet

Even if she were legal, the Farms have been taken down before because the feds confused a small dick as being CP, so I wouldn't recommend it.

 

[CWCissey]

Any nudes get posted yet

Dude, we're already banned in Australia, we don't need to do it again.

 

[Overly Serious]

The only problem is that in order to get the process going, you need heat and pressure to a degree that is sadly just not possible with current material science.

Fusion has been successfully carried out by us here on Earth. It's not only possible, it's been done. What has proven difficult is making it energy self-sufficient.

 

[AnOminous]

It's more, "we've seen it in stars, so it's theoretically possible, and we're trying" rather than "we can do it right now".

Well, we can actually induce fusion. We have been able to for decades. What we can't do is do it stably or efficiently enough that it doesn't cost vastly more to do it than any energy we can get out of it. It might actually be more efficient just to put lots of solar panels around the giant fusion reactor we already have 8.3 light minutes away. The good thing about that is once you get started on it, you can recycle the energy obtained to continue building even more until you have a complete Dyson sphere.

 

[Antipathy]

Fusion has been successfully carried out by us here on Earth. It's not only possible, it's been done. What has proven difficult is making it energy self-sufficient.

Well, we can actually induce fusion. We have been able to for decades. What we can't do is do it stably or efficiently enough that it doesn't cost vastly more to do it than any energy we can get out of it. It might actually be more efficient just to put lots of solar panels around the giant fusion reactor we already have 8.3 light minutes away. The good thing about that is once you get started on it, you can recycle the energy obtained to continue building even more until you have a complete Dyson sphere.

Perhaps I misspoke. With current materials science, the cost to keep whatever is undergoing fusion contained is higher than the cost to create fusion, and it cannot be sustained for long enough to be used as a means of generation electricity, let alone a reliable one.

 

[AnOminous]

Perhaps I misspoke. With current materials science, the cost to keep whatever is undergoing fusion contained is higher than the cost to create fusion, and it cannot be sustained for long enough to be used as a means of generation electricity, let alone a reliable one.

I didn't mean to suggest you were wrong, just to emphasize the point that practicality is more the issue than possibility. I dumbly threw in the word "ackshyually" which implies that, that was my mistake.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

Even if she were legal, the Farms have been taken down before because the feds confused a small dick as being CP, so I wouldn't recommend it.

That reminds me, do we have a selfies thread.

 

[Frostnipped Todger]

Dude, we're already banned in Australia, we don't need to do it again.

Can confirm that we're back. Not sure why, it just started working again one day.

 

[moocow]

The good thing about that is once you get started on it, you can recycle the energy obtained to continue building even more until you have a complete Dyson sphere.

I saw the "Late" rating on your post before I read this part, and for a brief, glorious moment I found myself thinking "wait, we built a fucking Dyson sphere already?!?!"

 

[Comicsgeist]

Perhaps I misspoke. With current materials science, the cost to keep whatever is undergoing fusion contained is higher than the cost to create fusion, and it cannot be sustained for long enough to be used as a means of generation electricity, let alone a reliable one.

Well a multinational project in France is building the largest fusion reactor ever to a commercial scale, but it's still about 5 years or so away from operation:

World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment Clears Milestone

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is set to launch operations in 2025

www.scientificamerican.com

Under construction:

 

[LetThemEatCake]

Well a multinational project in France is building the largest fusion reactor ever to a commercial scale, but it's still about 5 years or so away from operation:

World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment Clears Milestone

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is set to launch operations in 2025

www.scientificamerican.com

Under construction:

Wow, and nobody in the mass media or 'climate emergency', anti-fossil fuel movements ever mention this. Once that thing gets producing power, the gig is up for 'renewables', isn't it? Going to be hard to sell wood pellets and endless little windmills that collectively produce a few percent of the nations' power needs when you have a fusion reactor online.