Comments on: Crossing fingers had worked pretty well in the past

By: Sam J.

Sam J. — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 15:37:55 +0000

They really should have some sort of spark gap everywhere. I know they have some overload systems. It may well be that they have plenty enough already to keep most stuff running.

Transformers are not weak wimpy things. Of course like everything I’m sure they make them closer to the edge now than they used to.

By: Sam J.

Sam J. — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 15:31:42 +0000

EdH says,”I suspect the difficulty in replacing big transformers is a bit over exaggerated…”

To build exact replacements would take forever but you are right that something could be rigged up. In fact smaller transformers can be paralleled and added in series to get the same voltage matching of larger ones. It would be a mess and there would be a few impressive explosions but I expect they could rig something up.

Of course a lot of people would die because it would still take months.

By: EdH

EdH — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 19:12:08 +0000

I suspect the difficulty in replacing big transformers is a bit over exaggerated.

We only build six a year because we only need six a year. They are fundamentally very simple machines that can, in an emergency, be built with very simple materials.

Getting a PERMIT from the government to install might take years…

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 06:37:44 +0000

So true.

By: Sam J.

Sam J. — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 05:47:03 +0000

There’s a massive black matte all across North America. I think it corresponds to the extinction of a large number of Megafauna. Of course “scientist”, I say that loosely, say that humans wiped them out hunting. Snicker.

Flare???? Comet hitting Greenland (possible best guess).

Of course not all scientist think it was human hunters

https://www.pnas.org/content/105/18/6520

By: Gavin Longmuir

Gavin Longmuir — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 15:29:18 +0000

From the article: “They [forest fires] filled the atmosphere with smoke, noticeably cooling the Earth for several years, delaying and masking a much bigger and more devastating effect. Vast quantities of carbon were transferred during the fires from living plants into heat-trapping gasses”

Greta approved this message.

Alternative version — the smoke and the CO2 offset each other’s effect on global temperature, delivering no net change. In the meantime, the higher CO2 resulted in an explosion of plant growth (see: The Carbon Cycle, which apparently Greta & Algore have never heard of) providing lots of food for the human race.

Aside from that, the issue of solar effects on the electric grid is serious — as is outsourcing the manufacture of transformers to other countries. But it would not be the end of the human race — Bangladeshi peasants would carry on as before while more technically-advanced civilizations crumbled. The phoenix would arise again — and probably make the same mistakes! We are human, after all.