@lovendures there are no words for this insanity. 5 minutes into the news and I'm reduced to single syllable words.  

@lovendures wow.  You can't spell "Wyoming" without "omg".  If there are any sane states left, they should counter-sue WY for polluting the air and water with their coal products.  Just like people sued Big Tobacco for selling cancer sticks.  If WY is so worried about losing jobs, maybe they should start building windmills, or find another way to make a living- some way that doesn't involve poisoning the rest of us. 

@lovendures.  Some states are saner than others, but I’m pretty sure all states have their own anti-vaxxer, flat earther, conspiracy theorist fringe.  It’s absurd.  I want to wake up from this bad dream.

Does anyone see hydrogen fuel taking off in the future?

I get this feeling that the big oil companies are going to move to hydrogen as their next big thing because I just see there being no way that they as going to roll over and give way to electric vehicles. So what I'm saying is, I wouldn't be surprised if they see hydrogen as their new oil that they can make $$$ from.

Perhaps we will also see hydrogen fueled Aircraft as one way to cut aviation emissions?

Last I heard, I think Saudi Arabia were investing quite heavily into Hydrogen as well. 

It will be interesting to see how successful and practical ii will be to implement, if they do indeed push to go down the hydrogen route.

@luminous  Hydrogen technology has a lot of problems to overcome before it becomes a truly viable and common fuel.   Basically you can get hydrogen one of two ways:  1) by breaking down hydrocarbons (requiring a lot of energy and producing carbon dioxide as a byproduct) or by 2) electrolysis of water (H2O).   Option #1 is kind of pointless as an alternative to fossil fuels because it uses fossil fuels and produces greenhouse emissions.  Option #2 can be relatively clean, depending on where you get the energy to split the water into H2 and O2.  Photoelectric cells are probably the cleanest way to accomplish this but cost and scaling up involve a lot of technological hurdles.  Then you have the problem of storing the hydrogen, which is very flammable and extremely volatile. But for some applications, hydrogen may be more practical than using photocells directly or as electicity stored in batteries. 

   I'm not up on the latest in the field but it is my feeling that we have more mature "green" technologies already available: e.g., wind, solar, tidal power, etc.,that can be more widely applied than hydrogen and that just need legal and economic boosts to take over.  (This is not a psychic call, just a moderately informed opinion.)    All in all though, where energy is concerned there is no "free lunch", meaning there's going to be an environmental, social and/or economic cost to anything we can come up with. 

@luminous I wondered about the viability of hydrogen fuel many years ago and thought it had been discarded. So glad you asked.

 @ana I am impressed with your knowledge. This is not the first time I've wondered, "What does that woman do for a living and/or what is her training that she's so technologically literate?"

When I focus on the climate crisis,  I see first a shift in the human psyche and I actually see the Greek myth of Psyche, goddess of the soul, unfolding. In the myth, Psyche is a beautiful young mortal woman, the youngest of four sisters,  who must accomplish four difficult tasks to succeed.

Her journey is fraught with rivals' jealously and treachery, just as ours is fraught with the greedy fossil fuel profiteers and their sycophants. But her goodness inspires earthly creatures including insects, the River God, and Zeus in the form of an eagle, to help her.   She fails the final task but is rescued and made immortal.  

She reminds me of the youngest member of Congress, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and the youngest queen of sustainability, Greta Thunberg. 

I realize this story is not the technological fix people had in mind, but I before will be relying on the technological fix, we first must evolve in heart and hands (@Michelle, I'm thinking of you) and that, like Psyche, who was the youngest daughter in her family, some very young women are going to lead the way. :-)

I'm going to take a big step out on the woo tree and propose that free energy technology will play a major role in the decades to come. We've had visions here and there that point to an unconventional energy source like free energy. And Nikola Tesla had free energy figured out more than a century ago.  J.P. Morgan shut down Tesla's projects not because of a problem with the technology, but because he figured that if he couldn't meter the energy produced by Tesla's contraptions, then they shouldn't be invested in.

Before these technological advances can flourish, however, I agree with Jeanne; we must first spiritually evolve. 

@coyote  I have one foot in the woo-tree or I wouldn't be here.   I was not aware of Tesla's "free energy" ideas so I looked into it.  I cannot find anything detailed about it from reputable sources, only that it was supposed to involve tapping into the charged particles in the atmosphere.  And evidently Tesla started out by simply theorizing that the charged particles could be use to *transmit* electricity wirelessly, but then took it a step further and postulated that the charge differential between particles in the upper atmosphere could be used as an actual *source* of electric power.    Sort of like capturing lightning, but in a more controlled way.   I talked about it with my son.  He's a 3rd year EE student and has an interest in Tesla, but he was not familiar with the concept either. After discussing it for a while we concluded that while such a thing might be possible in theory, getting it scaled up to make enough electricity to make the infrastructure (giant towers and such) economically feasible would be a difficult task.  But perhaps possible (and very cool).  I haven't read Tesla's notes and not being a physicist or an electrical engineer, I probably wouldn't understand them anyway, so I will not make any judgement.  

Anyhow, regardless --- supposing this was done, it would not really be "free" energy.   The tools and mechanisms to capture the energy would have a monetary cost, and surely there would be safety issues and environmental costs to pay,  just as there are with solar, wind, tidal power, etc. 

And one  other thing about "free" energy:  Back in the day, one of my professors  said it was probably a good thing that free, infinite power was not available because it would just allow people to totally exploit and destroy all the resources of Earth.  That idea stuck with me.   Perhaps we do not have infinite free energy because we're not wise enough to handle it.        

Posted by: @jeanne-mayell

@luminous I wondered about the viability of hydrogen fuel many years ago and thought it had been discarded. So glad you asked.

 @ana I am impressed with your knowledge. This is not the first time I've wondered, "What does that woman do for a living and/or what is her training that she's so technologically literate?"

Well- I have advanced degrees in a couple different scientific fields, work at a university, read a lot of random stuff, and several of my family members are engineers. 

@ana. Well.  That explains it.  :-) ❤️ 

@jeanne-mayell  I know I'm not the only over-educated person here.  ?  

Hopeful news.

Spreading coffee pulp, a waste product from coffee production, over degraded lands helps them recover quickly, a recent study found. By dumping 30 truck-loads of coffee pulp on a plot of degraded land in Costa Rica, researchers watched a small forest grow at a remarkable speed in just two years.

Researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawaii discovered the coffee pulp treated plot grew 80 percent of a canopy cover, compared to the control plot, which only grew 20 percent. The canopy was also four times taller than the control area's, BES reported.

https://www.ecowatch.com/coffee-pulp-forest-restoration-2651255600.html?utm_campaign=RebelMouse&socialux=facebook&share_id=6462979&utm_medium=social&utm_content=EcoWatch&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2Xjhj-AfHjhtmgM_ELTMqxjMYahMr_5DttbSWb4TEbAyJmXmQSvdYAKe4

@lovendures. I love the idea of using coffee pulp.  I throw all our coffee grounds into the garden every morning. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57232644

Mast Upgrade: UK experiment could sweep aside fusion hurdle

https://www.floodmap.net/

This website is quite an eye opener to the sea level rise impact around the globe.

In the UK where I live, if the sea level rises to 40 meters then my town is completely flooded.

If sea levels rise to 70 meters in the next 30-40 years from the ice caps melting then many coastal city's will be totally gone, as well as much of the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark etc. Many people will either die or have to migrate elsewhere.

I think the US will have an advantage due to its large land mass, but that doesn't discount the huge scale damages and losses to many of the large cities and coastline states such as Florida, New York and California.

I don't know if the ice caps will melt by 2050, but if they do, then it will mean globally we have massively underestimated the impact of climate change - because from what I've read, many scientists believe the sea level will rise a maximum of 2.5 meters by 2100 and that the ice caps will not have fully melted, but a part of me feels they are underestimating this.

@luminous    That's a really good map.  Thanks for posting the link.  

Earth is an incredibly complicated system and we still do not understand all the variables affecting climate change and sea level. The atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere (ice), biosphere, and solid Earth are all involved and can affect each other in ways that can easily tip the balance one way or another.  There are many, many other factors that can come into play, some predictable, some not.  For example, emissions from a major volcanic eruption can block enough sunlight to lower average global  temperature a up to degree  for a year or two.  (Examples: Mt Pinatubo, 1991; El Chichon 1982, and most famously, Mt. Tambora, 1812, which led to the "Year Without a Summer" . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)    I remember El Chichon 1982 because we had to fire up the heater in August, which was totally bizarre. 

Honestly, I keep hoping for a few major eruptions to occur and give us some extra time.    

The folks who work on climate modeling do their best and have been doing so for decades.  Only recently are they getting due attention to their work.   It may become necessary to artificially intervene in climate by putting dust or aerosols into the atmosphere but that is very risky-- we cannot be certain exactly how much we could tip the balance and/or what the side effects might be.

Anyhow  after that pendantic ramble, the map shows that sea level has to go up over 50 meters before I get beachfront property in an archipelago.  

@luminous

Thats a good resource. The website Climate Central offers flood maps, but only up to 3 meters. Jeanne has seen global sea levels rising 20 feet/6 meters by the end of the century. All of the icecaps will eventually melt after that, though. 

As you probably know, even a rise of 0.5 meters per decade would be catastrophic. But that’s the trajectory we’re on. Here in the US, people will start moving away from the coast when banks stop underwriting mortgages for flood prone property. I think that development will happen this decade, and the current boomtown atmosphere in South Florida is a sign that we’re at the brink.

Here's a comprehensive resource for climate change in the US.  It's the National Climate Assessment report prepared by a consortium of US government agencies, particularly NOAA:

https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/

It's a lot to wade through but if you go to the "Chapters" link you will see some chapters that focus on different topics and regions of the country. You don't need to be a scientist or expert to understand most of it. 

Posted by: @coyote

But that’s the trajectory we’re on. Here in the US, people will start moving away from the coast when banks stop underwriting mortgages for flood prone property. 

Being located on a high spot makes me feel like the people in the full Titanic lifeboats who had to stop desperate others from crawling on board and sinking the boats.  ?   We've already got too much so-called "growth" in this area.  

@luminous Thank you for posting that climate map. I've been using something over the years that is not nearly as good as that one.  Big help and big awakening. I noticed that it explains a prediction I had had in 2013. 

In 2013, I was trying to figure out how high the seas would rise by end of century. First a figure of 80 feet popped in my head, and that would mean all of Florida would be gone. But then I did a visioning and saw that south Florida would be underwater, not all of Florida. Looking at @luminous' map, shows that the total flooding over of south Florida would mean 20 foot sea level rise. 

20 feet sea level rise is the figure projected by James Hansen in his worst case scenarios. Hansen in the former outspoken NASA scientist under Bush who has had both the most dire and the most accurate predictions for sea level rise.