[Discuss] [Mostly OT:] Visualizing Canada's Carbon

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-01-22 15:27-0800 pw wrote:

...something entirely off-topic, but most interesting nevertheless.

> ...]Requires permanently burying 376,646,357.25 tonnes of wood
> to remove from atmosphere.

And don't forget the energy cost (and associated carbon emission) of burying
that amount of wood).  The big oil companies talk a lot about how they are
working on a technical solution to bury carbon dioxide, but I think it
cannot possibly work because of the huge energy costs which more than defeat
the purpose.  I suspect this is the modern equivalent of the
perpetual-motion machine scams, and done for the same reasons (the greed
motive).

> I think I'd like an alternate energy source for
> my computer...
> Is anyone running on wind generation?

We all are. I say that since some of the electric power in Canada is already
provided by wind generation.  However, there just isn't much of it yet
compared to some other contries such as the Netherlands.

I think the answers must be (a) real energy conservation and (b) non-carbon,
non-nuclear energy sources such as wind power, hydro power, direct solar
power, geothermal, etc. I exclude both carbon-based and nuclear-based energy
since both have unsustainably expensive waste management issues.

In the nuclear case, they have managed temporarily to avoid footing the bill
that will eventually come due by cheap (and unsafe) temporary storage of
nuclear waste.

For the carbon case we are beginning to realize what the bill will be.  The
models are consistently clear that the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere,
the higher the probability of extreme weather.  Nobody knows whether
hurricane Katrina was the direct result of the CO2 poisoning of our
atmosphere.  However, it certainly was a wake-up call about the huge
economic cost of extreme weather and has motivated most people on issues (a)
and (b) above.

With regard to the energy-conservation solution above, probably the most
cost-effective thing each person can do is to encourage the "use-it-up,
wear-it-out" mentality in themselves and others.  And that brings us neatly
back on topic again since Linux runs fine on older boxes that those XP users
who want to switch to Vista must replace.

I did buy a new box recently even though Linux was running fine on the old
box, and I still feel slightly guilty about it.  However, the motivation was
that the 2001 box we replaced consumed a lot of power (roughly 100 watts
more than now) and produced an uncomfortable amount of office noise to
dissipate all that heat. Of course, some would argue a 2001 box is more
likely to fail than a modern box, but I am not so sure about that.  Anyhow,
I hope to get at least 10 years out of the box I just bought.  I don't think
that would be possible without a UPS, but the fact is I do protect our
computer equipment with UPS's, and the results have been excellent over the
last 12 years compared to relatively bad PC hardware reliability for the
astrogroup computers during that same time span where they "saved money" by
not buying UPS's.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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