Board index › Topical Discussion › Computers, Math, Science, and Technology

What If We Burned All The World's Fossil Fuels?

Page 3 of 4 [ 59 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4  Next

Previous topic | Next topic

kokopelli
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Nov 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,657
Location: amid the sunlight and the dust and the wind

11 Aug 2018, 1:53 pm

auntblabby wrote:
kokopelli wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
kokopelli wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
another thing, the warmer it gets up north, the more northerly will be the infestation of Africanized ["killer"] bees. I DON'T want those bastards anywhere near me! 8O


How do you feel about fire ants?

they can go suck eggs as well. :x


When I lived in the Houston area, there were plenty of fire ants around. They never really bothered me much. On at least one occasion, I got a great number of bites on my ankle while mowing my yard. I just shook them off and kept mowing. The more common larger ants tend to be much more of a problem for me.


wow :o you sound like you have what used to be called "true grit." :wtg: I've noticed the bees and skeeters are ganging up worse here as our hot seasons have gotten longer and hotter. I don't like that trend one bit.


Not that much. Once I got a bunch of ants in my pants crawling up my legs. At one point, there were enough biting that I pulled my pants off then and there and then headed for privacy.



auntblabby
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Feb 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 113,697
Location: the island of defective toy santas

11 Aug 2018, 2:09 pm

kokopelli wrote:
Not that much. Once I got a bunch of ants in my pants crawling up my legs. At one point, there were enough biting that I pulled my pants off then and there and then headed for privacy.


that sounds like a royal PITA.



kokopelli
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Nov 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,657
Location: amid the sunlight and the dust and the wind

12 Aug 2018, 3:22 am

auntblabby wrote:
kokopelli wrote:
Not that much. Once I got a bunch of ants in my pants crawling up my legs. At one point, there were enough biting that I pulled my pants off then and there and then headed for privacy.


that sounds like a royal PITA.


It was a bit embarrassing, too.

I shook them out as much as I could and reluctantly put them back on for the drive home. When I got there, I didn't waste any time before taking them off and tossing in the washing machine to drown the ants.



auntblabby
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Feb 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 113,697
Location: the island of defective toy santas

12 Aug 2018, 5:28 am

^^^I wonder what good, in the grand scheme of things, those little blighters do?



kokopelli
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Nov 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,657
Location: amid the sunlight and the dust and the wind

12 Aug 2018, 12:43 pm

auntblabby wrote:
^^^I wonder what good, in the grand scheme of things, those little blighters do?


They probably help get rid of vegetative matter.

When I was a kid, I was very fascinated by ants. I used to stand there and watch them and got bit frequently.

Sixty years ago at a church picnic when I was about two or three years old, I sat down in an ant bed to watch the ants. I got so many bites that day that they took me to the emergency room to be checked out. The last time someone asked me about that was only about five or ten years ago!



kokopelli
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Nov 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,657
Location: amid the sunlight and the dust and the wind

12 Aug 2018, 12:53 pm

I've been tempted to try this out:



auntblabby
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Feb 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 113,697
Location: the island of defective toy santas

12 Aug 2018, 10:03 pm

^^^that is fascinating :idea: would you say ants were a hobby of yours?



naturalplastic
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 26 Aug 2010
Age: 69
Gender: Male
Posts: 34,091
Location: temperate zone

12 Aug 2018, 11:29 pm

auntblabby wrote:
^^^I wonder what good, in the grand scheme of things, those little blighters do?


Eat plants, and scavenge dead animals and in general work the biomass back into the soil for renewal.

Ants are pretty obvious in their role in the machinery of the woods that you may hike in. Theyre not like say: blood sucking ticks, that are less obvious in what role they play in the ecology.

Some ants farm by raising crops of fungus that grow on the leaves they gather. Other ants are cowboys that herd aphids. And you have predatory ants. A junior highschool buddy from Costa Rica told me about the army ants in his country that would march through the woods in long columns by the thousands devouring everything in their path, and about how he would....drip lighter fluid along the columns and set the whole army of ants on fire. I guess that's how they get their kicks in Central America. :lol:



auntblabby
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Feb 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 113,697
Location: the island of defective toy santas

12 Aug 2018, 11:37 pm

well the, skeeters surely can't have any real utility.



Vonu
Butterfly
Butterfly

Joined: 13 Aug 2018
Age: 69
Gender: Male
Posts: 13

13 Aug 2018, 3:56 pm

Spiderpig wrote:
We won't burn all of them, but we will burn all the ones that can be extracted profitably. To know the consequences, just wait and see.


The consequences so far is that we keep going back to dry holes that aren't dry anymore, as they would remain if they were just small deposits of dead dinosaurs.
One has to wonder how long we will have to deal with the political ramifications of science driven by people's paychecks instead of the actual data.



Vonu
Butterfly
Butterfly

Joined: 13 Aug 2018
Age: 69
Gender: Male
Posts: 13

13 Aug 2018, 3:58 pm

auntblabby wrote:
well the, skeeters surely can't have any real utility.


Mosquitos are the ultimate proof that life's number one purpose is reproduction.



kokopelli
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Nov 2017
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,657
Location: amid the sunlight and the dust and the wind

13 Aug 2018, 5:13 pm

Vonu wrote:
Spiderpig wrote:
We won't burn all of them, but we will burn all the ones that can be extracted profitably. To know the consequences, just wait and see.


The consequences so far is that we keep going back to dry holes that aren't dry anymore, as they would remain if they were just small deposits of dead dinosaurs.
One has to wonder how long we will have to deal with the political ramifications of science driven by people's paychecks instead of the actual data.


It should be obvious that over time we have increased our ability to get more oil or gas from a well with more modern techniques.

It's difficult to imagine a dry hole becoming less dry. A dry hole, after all, is a hole that never produced anything. You probably mean a well that is no longer producing. Such a well would normally be capped. I assume that it would be cheaper to drill a new well than to try to get through the cap.



Mythos
Velociraptor
Velociraptor

User avatar

Joined: 12 Aug 2018
Gender: Male
Posts: 457
Location: England

13 Aug 2018, 11:32 pm

We won't, because we'll either be dead from our new lovely Venus like planet or extinct in the midst of thermonuclear war before then.



Spiderpig
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 14 Apr 2013
Gender: Male
Posts: 7,893

14 Aug 2018, 4:35 pm

Vonu wrote:
The consequences so far is that we keep going back to dry holes that aren't dry anymore, as they would remain if they were just small deposits of dead dinosaurs.


Those are the actions. For the consequences, we’ll have to wait and see.

Vonu wrote:
One has to wonder how long we will have to deal with the political ramifications of science driven by people's paychecks instead of the actual data.


I wonder what you’re implying. That oil is actually renewable at a non-negligible rate compared with consumption? That would require our well-established understanding of how it formed to be false, in addition to an alternate, many orders of magnitude faster process no hint of which has ever been observed. Or do you mean that reserves are simply much bigger than we know? Well, the funny thing is that even if both hypotheses were true, with our nice habit of increasing consumption in a roughly exponential (in the strict mathematical sense, i.e., taking approximately the same time to double it over and over again) fashion over time, they still wouldn’t last that long.


_________________
The red lake has been forgotten. A dust devil stuns you long enough to shroud forever those last shards of wisdom. The breeze rocking this forlorn wasteland whispers in your ears, “Não resta mais que uma sombra”.