Lem's "Solaris" also described a planet near double star. Don't want to argue much about imaginary worlds but how Tatooine and Solaris systems differ from each other?
With regards to the planets themselves, Solaris is covered in an ocean (spoiler rot13: na bprna bs try gung vf erirnyrq gb or n fvatyr, cynarg-rapbzcnffvat ragvgl), whereas Tatooine is a desert planet.
The systems are different in that Tatooine (as far as I remember) orbits around a pair of stars. Solaris is orbiting between the two stars in an orbit that should be highly unstable but for reasons unknown the planet appears to be stabilizing itself.
I still remember how I lost my RVdeathmobile due to slippery road — the car felt from the bridge. It was such a nice car — with superalloy platings that I took from downed heli, plently of clean water ( I was boiling it in batches and filling one of RV tanks with it), all sorts of fuel and even turrets!
Fanniest death was caused by exploding arms. I found a distant house by the road and tried to make it my base. One night my char woke up due to the pain — fingers have exploded or something like that happened! I think it was some sort of fungal infection and unfortunately I had no medicine for cure...
I have an impression that in recent years MIT produces much ado about nothing. In that particular case, capture method requires energy input from, let me guess, coal burning? Moreover, you can't trick chemistry: more efficient capture implies higher affinity of CO2 towards this "CO2 battery". Higher affinity means that more energy would be required for regeneration of the "battery".
From chemistry point suggested process is indistinguishable from the following process: pass air over CaO or Ca(OH)2 solution to turn it into CaCO3. Heating of CaCO3 will release CO2 thus regenerating CaO, which could be reused again. This process would require energy input — like MIT tech.
Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing. More CO2 in atmosphere means more carbon will be available for capture by plants, which means more crops and trees.
It only means more crops and trees if you magically don't get other effects like drought, heat stress, erosion from drought followed by torrential rainfall, loss of icecap melt for irrigation, invasive insects and disease, and forest fires, all of which we're seeing quite a bit.
And of course we have ways to produce energy now without burning fossil fuels.
I should admit that my specialty is chemistry and not environmental science so it is hard to make arguments here. Just a few comments:
- it should be proven that these other effects are the causes not correlations.
- what invasive diseases you are talking about? smallpox or syphilis?
- drought was always a thing, e.g. great famine of 1921 in USSR was caused by it. That was way before modern levels of global warming.
- There were at least 5 ice ages. Are the humans responsible for their endings?
I am convinced that climate is changing — just not fully convinced what is the human role in it.
Since you have a science background, I'll strongly recommend the recent short book The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss, which details how our CO2 emissions change the planet's temperature. It's fairly basic thermodynamics and was predicted with decent accuracy over a century ago.
Also there are several chapters in Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren that go into the geological record, with multiple lines of evidence that all point to a similar sensitivity of the planet's average temperature to CO2 levels.
(Regarding invasive diseases, I meant primarily things affecting forests.)
Check Lehninger "Principles of Biochemistry".
RuBisCo (most abundant enzyme in nature) fixates CO2 before they could be turned into sugars but this enzyme operates in suboptimal conditions at current CO2 concentrations. Thus increased CO2 concentration would improve crop yields.
Agree about most of your text with one note:
Expenses are always Debits, thus they increased by Debits. Consider buying a can of CocaCola by cash:
- you give your cash — its amount decreases, that is you credit your Assets:Cash account
— money flow goes to Expenses account, let's assume Expenses:Food.
In terminology of beancount this transaction will look like this:
From the perspective of the asset-holder, expenses are increased by Debits, yes - unless you're a bank and want to account for both parties with a single set of ledger entries.
For example, if you are a bank and I am your customer, then when I spend some of my money to buy your products, my Expense is your Income. My cash asset is your liability.
At scale, it can be convenient to construct statements for both parties by regarding the same entries as credit-normal. Alternatively you have to mirror all entries in a 99%-similar ledger, but reversed.
Does it matter who holds an asset when determining whether to debit or credit an expense? I would think the question is who is making the expense, not who holds an asset, which may or may not be used to pay the expense.
In any case, unless you are talking from multiple perspectives, which would be unnecessarily confusing, expenses and income have opposite signs.
