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Most_Work_3313 t1_j71lbar wrote

Why is there a photo of steam coming from a chimney?

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CantThinkOfOneUs t1_j71lull wrote

Because cooling towers look scary, great for my web article which is designed to be shared by people who don't read more than one sentence in!

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draculamilktoast t1_j73av9k wrote

I have the perfect solution for such people and it is to write everything in a single extraordinarily long sentence that just doesn't stop when normally you might think some punctuation would make sense but it just keeps on going like the world is about to end in an instant because sometimes all you get is a single thought that contains so many ideas in it that splitting it into more than a single sentence or paragraph would feel unnatural but writing it all out in one giant single mental breath makes sense and as you do that your reader is bound to have a mental collapse of proportions that are enough to make them question reality in a way that ensures they either have to ignore what you say or accept it as their new reality and that is what happens with sentences that just never end as it feels you must be running out of air internally but you don't do that as the human brain is capable of incredible feats of self-deception if motivated properly

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a_filing_cabinet t1_j73d5pn wrote

Wow. That is so much worse than a normal paragraph. Incredible effort, I am never reading that

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InformationHorder t1_j71lv72 wrote

I was just about to say, what a hideously disingenuous thumbnail picture. Thats fucking water steam and nothing more.

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dern_the_hermit t1_j73otxe wrote

That's apparently Lethabo Power Station:

> Lethabo Power Station in the Free State, South Africa, is a large coal fired power station owned and operated by Eskom.

Bolding mine.

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corythegreatdeesnuts t1_j741j9k wrote

Just water steam coming out from the power plant using the lowest grade coal in the world, constantly polluting the air to 15x the legal limit. Super disingenuous, right?

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InformationHorder t1_j7479g3 wrote

Because that looks like literally every other nuke power plant which only produce water steam.

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10ebbor10 t1_j77x7h2 wrote

Usually the nuke plants don't have a big pile of coal on the side.

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AbbydonX OP t1_j71ltpq wrote

The media seems to like using photos of cooling towers rather than smoke stacks on articles about emissions and pollution. I guess it’s more dramatic though it would be much easier to measure CO2 emissions if it was that obvious.

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YpsilonY t1_j71z9yb wrote

Because most power plants have them and big as they are, they usually dominated the picture. The power plant in the picture is in fact a coal power plant in South Africa.

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Baige_baguette t1_j725qba wrote

Because that appears to actually be a coal fired power station? Yes I know the cooling towers are producing steam but there look to be at least two other towers which most likely are not.

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a_filing_cabinet t1_j73e2yq wrote

Nuclear plants have other towers as well. Hell, the one near my house doesn't even have cooling towers, just a couple thin ones

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oregon_assassin t1_j73xsgz wrote

The coal fire plant I worked at in Oregon only had visible smoke come from the stack on start up where they used diesel to get the furnace going.

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ferrel_hadley t1_j71crol wrote

Its a newer version of existing ESA satellites.

https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/missions/ghgsat

I am not sure this really conveys that this is simply an upgrade to an existing program.

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AbbydonX OP t1_j71dv2b wrote

GHGSat is a Canadian company though it has an agreement with ESA to enable data sharing as part of the Third Party Mission Programme. Their first demonstration satellite could detect CO2 but the following five satellites were optimised for methane detection. Presumably this was because it is much easier to detect methane. A quick search doesn't reveal any technical details on the new GHGSat-C10 sensor. However, it is basically the same as the previous ones but it has been optimised for detection of carbon dioxide spectral features instead.

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Dur-gro-bol t1_j74f99h wrote

I was going to say, this is already a thing. The refinery I work at tries to only burn their flairs on cloudy days to avoid detection and fines

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cynical_gramps t1_j7263bf wrote

It’s just an upgrade to existing satellites, we’ve had satellites watching emissions for a while now

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thulesgold t1_j731fxv wrote

Strange title. Is this satellite going to drop down and make arrests itself?

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AbbydonX OP t1_j739xoq wrote

The first paragraph is clearer but the title is an unfortunately inaccurate summary by the editor.

> The first-ever satellite designed to detect emitters of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is set to launch to space this year, promising to provide authorities with a tool to police compliance with emission reduction efforts designed to slow down climate change.

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kayl_breinhar t1_j74de82 wrote

Is there a CanadaArm on it that wags a robotic finger in silent judgment?

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Conscious_Exit_5547 t1_j72uu99 wrote

Unless there's a laser that can blow up offenders, I'm not clicking the bait...

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wdwerker t1_j74s43z wrote

Are they going to total up government and military sources?

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INTJstoner t1_j719cfu wrote

China, Russia and US&A about the get fined, alot!

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toothpastetitties t1_j727zus wrote

China and India most likely. China is building coal plants like crazy.

USA is trying to pave their way for nuclear energy.

Canada is still waiting for unicorn fart energy to happen.

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Jaggedmallard26 t1_j72biae wrote

China is the only country actually successfully building new nuclear plants. They're just industrialising so fast even that isn't fast enough. Literally the only country that doesn't take 20 years to build a nuclear plant still can't build them fast enough.

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ferrel_hadley t1_j71soti wrote

Russia does collect significant money from carbon credits.

This would not be all that great for verification in the west where we can easily just sit outside a factory with actual instruments. Its design is more for wider biosphere monitoring as sinks and sources are a huge huge variable in climate predictions. In terms of gross national emissions we can kind of work out out for measuring "air masses" and existing monitoring facilities.

I am really not sure anyone is burning enough coal or making enough cement to be climate relevant and not being obvious to anyone who cares.

I am not really all that blow away by the tone of the article. The biosphere is where most of the big research from this will be done.

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whoamvv t1_j75fbay wrote

And what? Twitter shame them? Fine for their sofa change? Who is even enforcing this shit? They gonna send the executives to black collar prison?

You want to know who is breaking carbon limits? EVERYONE. Every fucking one is spewing carbon was past any sane level. There, just saved you 15 mill on a satellite.

Besides, nobody with any power to stop them gives a fuck, so there is no point to finding out, anyway.

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-Lysergian t1_j77uemy wrote

But at some point in the future, it may make sense to do military strikes on carbon emitters. Probably not, but you can't do it without the capabilities.

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VulcanXIV t1_j71qp6e wrote

I used to get upset about these emissions, but now I realize that China, Russia, North Korea and Co. will never disadvantage themselves by reducing them. Way too much poverty and constrained economies to ever expect them to act like western countries

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ferrel_hadley t1_j71sydc wrote

>Russia, North Korea

North Korea is the most basket case country in the world Its emissions per capita are minimal.

Russia has seen its CO2 emissions collapse along with its post Soviet economy.

China has a whole host of issues that will be beyond the scope of this topic, but they will also be massively impacted by climate change. Way more than any western country not called Australia. (Though while Florida is not a country its another that is in for a very tough time)

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ShaliCorvian t1_j73hnc3 wrote

Does it also measure water vapor from clean energy fission plants?

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dern_the_hermit t1_j73paea wrote

That's a coal burning power plant.

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ShaliCorvian t1_j73w4g1 wrote

Those are cooling towers at a fission plant, not a coal burning plant. I have been in one of these. One of my first jobs out of graduate school as a physicist was at a nuclear research facility.

Here: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-101-how-does-nuclear-reactor-work

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Rez-User t1_j74nukm wrote

Gets used as a new way to fuck small businesses Fuck

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