🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jan9.170924.140@amd.com> phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) writes:
%In article <1991Jan9.110448.22547@agate.berkeley.edu> elm@sprite.Berkeley.EDU (ethan miller) writes:
%|And you don't believe that this will happen?  As another post mentions,
%
%Well, how fast are the ice caps going to melt? So fast that the
%Gulf Stream won't have time to throughly mix the fresh water
%throughout the oceans?

Perhaps you don't understand the problem.  Currently, the driving
force in the Gulf Stream is water sinking in the North Atlantic.
This sinking sucks more water in behind it.  That's how you get
a current.  Now, why does the water sink?  Because it's denser
than surrounding water.  This increased density is due to higher
salinity.  The water is saltier because water evaporates but
salts don't, so the concentration of salts goes up.  So far,
so good.  This is what happens today.  Now, if you provide
a relatively constant flow of fresh water, it will redilute
the saltier water, making it sink slower and slowing down
the Gulf Stream.  As other posts have noted, melting the polar
caps won't appreciably change the oceans' salinity.  What's
important to the Gulf Stream is the relative salinity of the
Stream and the rest of the ocean.  That difference is caused
by evaporation, which won't change if the oceans get
saltier or less salty.  In the same way, adding fresh
water to salty water will always make it less salty, no matter
what the salinity of the salty water.  As an interesting
aside, the effect would be minimized if the polar cap melted
all at once.  If that occurred, there would be no constant
inflow of fresh water to slow down the Gulf Stream (but I
shudder to think of the other consequences :-).

%Another thing that bugged me was first he complained about
%aid to developing countries and how it was spent on useless
%things like power plants, and then later on his solution to
%global warming includes building power plants in developing
%countries.

Power plants *are* useless if you have nothing to use them
for and lack the infrastructure to support them.  What if
a turbine blade breaks?  Go to a developed country for a
replacement.  You rely on developed countries for all of
your goods.  And what is the power used for?  All sorts
of things you buy from the US and Japan.  How do you pay
for these things, then?

%He doesn't really give any solutions to the problem of how
%do we make power if we can't burn any more fossil fuel. He
%trots out the old liberal dreams of conservation, wind power,
%etc.

Burning biomass is another solution of his, and it works quite
well.  So does burning methane produced by garbage.  In Hawaii,
they burn off the majority of the sugar cane plant.  If they
harvested that and burned it to produce power, think of how
much energy they could generate.  It's also worth examining
the rationale behind lack of conservation.  If it's less
expensive to buy a new one than it is to fix the old one,
we'll buy a new one.  Common sense.  However, his argument
is that it's really not cheaper to buy a new one in the long
run.  I agree.  We've already seen this with gold plating
for ICs.  There are companies that recycle the gold and
resell it.  They didn't used to do this, so why start now?
The price of gold hasn't changed, but the demand has increased.
It's now cost-effective to recycle gold even without any
incentive.  Now, consider plastic.  It's cheaper to make
new plastics out of petroleum than it is to recycle them.
However, does this consider the disposal cost of old plastics?
I doubt it.  Once that is factored in, it may be cheaper
to recycle.

%I don't understand why all this stuff that everyone knows
%about and hasn't really worked in the past is going to work
%in the future. I also don't understand why the hardware stores
%are allowed to have booming sales in electric heaters. Electric
%heat is such an inefficient way to get heat I think it should be
%outlawed... Just two weeks ago I saw a family go in and
%buy three 1500W electric heaters. What's the point of my
%installing a 20W compact fluorescent light bulb to save
%55 watts when these people are blowing 36,000 watt hours
%every night, 1 million watt hours every month?

Electric heat is indeed less efficient than gas heat, but only
because converting fossil fuel to electricity isn't as efficient
as using fossil fuel directly.  Your argument is the worst
kind of argument, though.  "He's not doing it; why should I?"
If it's cheaper for you (and it is) to use fluorescent bulbs,
use them.  Every little bit helps.  Incidentally, I'd bet
that the family with the electric heaters uses a lot less
energy than you think.  Space heating is more efficient
than central heat in some ways, since you only heat the
rooms you need when you need them heated.  Can you say that
about your (gas) heating system?  That was one of the
points Burke made, incidentally.  We have the technology
to use less energy today.  Japan uses about 1/4 the energy
per person that we do.  It's not because they live more simply--
it's because they use energy more efficiently.  It's time this
country followed their example, at least in energy use.

ethan
=================================
ethan miller--cs grad student   elm@sprite.berkeley.edu
#include <std/disclaimer.h>     {...}!ucbvax!sprite!elm
Witty signature line condemned due to major quake damage.