Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (23235)	11/11/2008 1:03:56 PM
From: miraje	Respond to of 36917

Other low-lying Pacific islands that could disappear in this century include...Fiji My my, Fiji will disappear? Major LOL!! worldatlas.com ..The majority of Fiji is mountainous (volcanic in origin) with several peaks exceeding 3000 ft.. _____________________________________________________________ And those awful humans and their nasty civilization are causing a catastrophic rise in sea level.. Gasp!! worldclimatereport.com ..We have written about sea level rise many times in the past, and there is no doubt that the sea is currently rising worldwide. However, the sea level rise has been taking place almost monotonically over the past 8,000 years, with substantial decadal variability embedded in the trend. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.”..

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (23235)	11/11/2008 1:32:29 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 36917

Wharf, no worries about Maldives. I already have a plan. I will buy a lot of land in Australia and will swap that land for their land. They can move out and I can move in. I quite fancy owning my own country. I will send an inspectorate in February [after their wedding] to Maldives to report back to me and to conduct preliminary negotiations for transfer of sovereignty to me. I am happy to put my money where my mouth is. As is usual with such things, the Maldivinians are really just wanting to do an international swindle, playing on the guilt of a gullible rich and stupid West, hoping to nab a lot of land in Australia [they don't really want to relocate to impoverished India and Sri Lanka - that's just window dressing]. When I show up to offer them a deal, they will renege and make some weak excuses. You are being played for a fool and as Lenin said, they need "useful idiots" to swallow their bait, hook, line and sinker. Even if there is no global warming, I will enact my plan which is to accept rubbish from around the world, which will be piled a kilometre high to provide tsunami resistant living quarters. With an international airport at that altitude there will be significant fuel savings on takeoff and landings as well as time savings. It will double as a satellite launch platform. Being near the equator, and at a high elevation, launch costs will be much reduced plus it will be cheap anyway in a tax free environment. Being a tax free international financial centre, it will be a booming place. Citizenships will be a privately owned tradeable property right. It will be the first country with a futures market. It will of course have a new currency, the Qi, which the world will adopt because it will be the best possible currency. The normal intrinsically unstable inflationary fiat currencies run by central banker bandits will be an anachronism like sea shells and silver. Tell you buddies in Maldives to drop me a line if they are serious. It will also get a name change from "bad diving", hmm, haven't thought of it, but perhaps simply Qi. As the ice age returns, citizenship values will zoom as billions flee the accumulating snow and seek refuge in good, safe, prosperous, happy, pleasant places nearer the equator. Mqurice

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (23235)	11/11/2008 2:00:37 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

They could make money hand over fist if they sold off the uninhabited atolls as independent countries, even the ones currently underwater. Failure to think outside the box...

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (23235)	11/11/2008 2:04:19 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 36917

Scientists say a rock can soak up carbon dioxide By Timothy Gardner Timothy Gardner Thu Nov 6, 6:28 pm ET NEW YORK (Reuters) – A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say. When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite. Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter said the naturally occurring process can be supercharged 1 million times to grow underground minerals that can permanently store 2 billion or more of the 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity every year. Their study will appear in the November 11 edition of the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. Peridotite is the most common rock found in the Earth's mantle, or the layer directly below the crust. It also appears on the surface, particularly in Oman, which is conveniently close to a region that produces substantial amounts of carbon dioxide in the production of fossil fuels. "To be near all that oil and gas infrastructure is not a bad thing," Matter said in an interview. They also calculated the costs of mining the rock and bringing it directly to greenhouse gas emitting power plants, but determined it was too expensive. The scientists, who are both at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, say they have kick-started peridotite's carbon storage process by boring down and injecting it with heated water containing pressurized carbon dioxide. They have a preliminary patent filing for the technique. They say 4 billion to 5 billion tons a year of the gas could be stored near Oman by using peridotite in parallel with another emerging technique developed by Columbia's Klaus Lackner that uses synthetic "trees" which suck carbon dioxide out of the air. More research needs to be done before either technology could be used on a commercial scale. Peridotite also occurs in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea and Caledonia, and along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and in smaller amounts in California. Big greenhouse gas emitters like the United States, China and India, where abundant surface supplies of the rock are not found, would have to come up with other ways of storing or cutting emissions. Rock storage would be safer and cheaper than other schemes, Matter said. Many companies are hoping to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by siphoning off large amounts of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and storing it underground. That method could require thousands of miles of pipelines and nobody is sure whether the potentially dangerous gas would leak back out into the atmosphere in the future. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner, editing by Eric Beech)