All I can think is Wood's Metal.
But I'd think he's know that.

Wood's metal, also known as Lipowitz's alloy or by the commercial names Cerrobend, Bendalloy, Pewtalloy and MCP 158, is a eutectic, fusible alloy with a melting point of approximately 70 °C (158 °F). It is a eutectic alloy of 50% bismuth, 26.7% lead, 13.3% tin, and 10% cadmium by weight.

I don't support our pulling out of the Paris Accord. I think it was the wrong thing to do. And I don't mind GDP growth for other nations, even China. What I do mind is the notion that the world's greatest polluter can increase its amount of Co2 emitted and still be touted as successfully contributing to reduced Co2 emissions worldwide.

"Telling China to limit their total CO2 emission to pre 2005 values is like telling a teenager in the middle of puberty to limit their food consumption to the same amount as when they were 9 years old. It's just not an option."

Who's telling China to do that? I only suggested that China's pledge to reduce their Co2 emissions to 60-65% of their 2005 levels as a ratio of GDP isn't all that it's made out to be. Your analogy is faulty because food consumption is necessary for life, but spending billions on destroying coral reefs while making artificial islands in the South China Sea is not. The CCP certainly has the funds necessary to effect a bigger, better and faster transition to green energy. Put another way, I believe that China has the potential to benefit both their people through economic growth and simultaneously do more in combating global climate change. I simply don't trust their current government to do it. I've been living in China now for over 19 years...and one thing that strikes me is the prevalence of appearance over substance. Perhaps you simply give them more credence in the latter, while my own perception seems to verify the former.

"But their total emissions is still increasing! This is just a farce and they're doing nothing!"

The second half of your statement is a strawman. They are doing something, just not enough, imho. And China's emissions have yet to plateau, therefore it's not an achievement yet.

"Now you may say "China's not putting funds towards green energy!" Well, that's also not true. China already surpassed the US, in spending on renewable energy. In fact, China spent $103 billion on renewable energy in 2015, far more than the US, which only spent $44 billion. Also, they will continue to pour enormous amounts of resources into renewable energy, far more than any other country."

This is also misleading. What I'm suggesting is that China could do more. It's certainly a matter of opinion on whether the Chinese government is properly funding green initiatives. For example, both your article and the amounts you cite ignore the fact that those numbers include Chinese government loans, tax credits, and R&D for Chinese manufacturers of solar panels...both for domestic use AND especially for export. The government has invested heavily into making solar panels a "strategic industry" for the nation. Their cheaper manufacturing methods, while polluting the land and rivers with polysilicon and cadmium, have created a glut of cheap panels...with a majority of the panels they manufacture being exported to Japan, the US and Europe. It's also forced many "cleaner" manufacturers of solar panels in the US and Europe out of business. China continues to overproduce these panels, and thus have "installed" much of the excess as a show of green energy "leadership." But what you don't hear about much is curtailment, that is the fact that huge percentages of this green energy never makes its way to the grid. It's lost, wasted...and yet we're supposed to give them credit for it? So...while you appear to want to give them full credit for their forward-looking investments, I will continue to look deeper and keep a skeptical eye on a government that has certainly earned our skepticism.

""But China is building more coal plants!" Well that's not really true either. China just scrapped over 100 coal power projects with a combined power capacity of 100 GW . Instead, the aforementioned investments will add over 130GW in renewable energy. Overall, Chinese coal consumption may have already peaked back in in 2013."

Well, yes, it really is true. China announcing the scrapping of 103 coal power projects on January 14th this year was a step in the right direction, and certainly very well timed politically. But you're assuming that that's the entirety of what China has recently completed, is currently building, and even plans to build. If you look past that sensationalist story, you'll see that they continue to add coal power at an accelerating pace. As to China's coal consumption already having peaked...lol...well, if you think they'd never underreport and then quietly revise their numbers upwards a couple of years later, then you should more carefully review the literature.

"So in the world of reality, how is China doing in terms of combating global warming? It's doing a decent job. So no "@Diogenes", China is NOT the single biggest factor in our future success/failure, because it is already on track to meeting its targets."

Well, your own link states:

"We rate China’s Paris agreement - as we did its 2020 targets - “medium.” The “medium“ rating indicates that China’s targets are at the last ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution. This means they are not consistent with limiting warming to below 2°C, let alone with the Paris Agreement’s stronger 1.5°C limit, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort."

And if the greatest emitter of Co2 isn't the biggest factor, then what is? I'm not saying that China bears all the responsibility or even blame. I'm far more upset with my own country and government. But to suggest that China adding the most Co2 of any nation on earth (almost double what the US emits) isn't the largest single factor that influences AGW...I'm having trouble processing your rationale for saying so. Even if we don't question if they're on track to meet their targets, they'll still be the largest emitter of Co2...unless India somehow catches up to them.

To restate my position:
The US shouldn't have withdrawn from Paris.
China is not a global leader in fighting climate change.
To combat climate change, every nation needs to pull together.
China is not "pulling" at their weight, which means that other nations must take up more of the slack.
Surging forward, while "developed" nations stagnate will weaken the CCP's enemies...and make no mistake, they view most of us as their enemies.
The former is part of the CCP's long-term strategy for challenging the current geopolitical status quo.
I believe that the Chinese Communist Party is expending massive amounts of resources abroad and militarily, when the bulk of those funds would better serve their own people, environment and combating the global crisis of climate change.

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

If this is for real...

FINALFUCKINGLY!

It always blows my mind that in 2014 with all our technology we still don't have any newer battery technology than lithium ion and nickel cadmium.

*promote

Don't worry guys, they didn't just do this to US cities, but the cities of some of their allies, too!

"1950 - 1953: The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.)."

They got their cadmium zinc sulfide from United Nuclear? (note: UN doesn't sell ZnCdS, only CdS)
Also, see Operation LAC

@robbersdog49
This will forever be a discussion between people who work with colours.
In the print industry, the photographic industry or the artists of the world.

The truth is it's different for what ever your process is.
RGB for Light
CMYK for Print
& RYB for artists
I work in all three industries and need to switch my brain back and forth between them constantly.

What they are showing here at the most primary level is the RYB colour wheel that kids learn first. It's basic paints and crayons. These are the base pigments used in paints; Cadmium Yellow & Red, Phthalocyanine (Phthalo) Blue or Cobalt Blue. The closest paint colour to magenta would be a Quinacridone.
The primary colours are the ones all others are made from. These are the ones you can't make by adding something else. We use the chemicals that are the absolute most pure to create these pigmants. They are the highest level of purity and intensity a colour can be. Once you start mixing them, the intensity can only be reduced.
Of course these would be balanced using a titanium white, Iron Oxide Black (plus Umber & Sienna).

As we get older, science class points out that light works differently and is a process that works in subtractive colour. Light being white and the other colours being made by adding filters to block various parts of the spectrum.A blue surface isn't so much blue as it just holds on to all wavelengths of the spectrum but reflects the part of the spectrum that is blue. (Etc.)

In indusry, (and most people still don't under stand this process), the printing process uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black) (in a transparent or dot)layered fashion to simulate a full colour image.

And don't forget Hexachrome (CMYKOG) which also ads the Orange and Green coloured inks (because simple CMYK cannot simulate every colour).

The CMYK colour system is a simulation of colour and are NOT primary colours. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black are the primary colours within that system only.

ROY G BIV
R Y B are more accurately the Primary Colours in the light and colour spectrum. The coulours between them OG(I)V are all Secondary colours.

*Sidenote: Magenta is an odd coulour which comes from that one man out theory. Indigo is the invisible colour in the spectrum that breaks the rule. That's why in order to create a Cyan colour in paint, we use a Quinacridone pigment. Quinacridone is a transparent colour only and can't be made opaque without mixing it with another pigment and loosing it's purity. It's a damm expensive pigment so it's rarely used.

>> ^robbersdog49:

Primary colours of light are Red Green and Blue.
Primary colours of pigment are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
I'm a geeky printer so this bugs the hell out of me. Blue is a mix of Cyan and Magenta, so it's not primary. It's a mix. Red is a mix of Magenta and Yellow.
Maybe they just weren't clever enough to find rhymes for Magenta or Cyan. It's just a shame they had to be wrong.

I remember first year of art school where we had to unlearn all we thought we knew about colour and relearn about the nuances in colours that we were never exposed to as a non-artist.

There are the hues
Primary: red, blue, yellow (white and black)
Secondary: orange, purple, green
Tertiary: red-orange, red-blue, yellow-blue, yellow-green ect.
Or even further - Quad-clours: red-red-blue or yellow-yellow-green

The complements: colours the appear on complete opposite sides of the colour wheel.
red compliments green, yellow complements purple, orange complements blue

And then the variations:

Intensity: Intensity can only be controled by the purity of the pigment being used. You can never increase the intensity of a colour, you can only decrease it by the means of combining it with any other pigment. The reason why artists pay premium prices for pure colours such as cadmium.
Value: colour changes made when mixing with various degrees of complement colours - mixing red with green, yellow with purple, mixing orange with blue.
Shade: colour changes made when mixing with various degrees of white (tints) or black (shades) to a hue. Black creating low values, white creating high values.
Coverage: Opaque vs. transparent/translucent applications

Using this structure, all the colour terms an average person uses now means nothing to me. words such as teal, brown, periwinkle etc.

These colours can now be described using a more precise system which includes a higher degree of variation..
Brown: low-intensity, low-value, red-brown.
Auqa: high-intensity, high-value, blue-green

OK class dismissed... There will be no test on today's lesson

I think communities like these warning consumers of the evils of products could and already are greatly more effective than government regulators. While I still agree with legal accountability in such matters, in the case of government oversight, the illusion of safety is far worse imo. Would rather have to be a smart consumer and read some consumer reports on things than just ideally consume some cadmium because I thought that was big brothers job. Places like this, in other words, can be a much more effective big brother for a broader array of things than could be expected from an FDA of 10 thousand people.

"As of Oct. 1, 2009, FDA employs the following numbers* of people in its centers/offices:
Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) 946
Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) 2,889
Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) 1,203
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) 877
Center for Tobacco Products (CTP)** 194
Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) 436
National Center for Toxicological Research (NCTR) 217
Office of the Commissioner (OC) 859
Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA) 3,895
Total 11,516"

It is unreasonable to expect that few people to be effective over such a huge range of products and food services.

Why do you have such a blind allegiance to the republican ideals?

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

The manufacture of solar panels requires the use of toxic elements such as cadmium, lead, mercury, et al...

The manufacture of solar panels requires the use of toxic elements such as cadmium, lead, mercury, et al... The productive lifespan of a solar cell is 20 to 25 years. Over a 20 year time frame, 1 square foot of solar panelling will generate about 360kWh of electricity.

The average household uses 1,000kWh a month. This would require 666 sq ft of solar paneling. There were 105 million households in the US in 2000. This means to supply only the residential needs of the U.S. we would need 70 BILLION square feet of solar paneling every 20 years. Those facile with math will note this is 2,590 square miles – enough to cover the entire state of Rhode Island. Twice. This doesn’t include the batteries and inverters each system will require… It also doesn't account for each household taking on the potential additional electrical load of charging up an EV every day...

The cost? $50,000 per household. Given average household utility costs, it will take the full 20 year lifespan of the system for the investment to accomplished nothing more than to have paid for its own 'cost' in household utility savings. And at that time you'll have to buy it all over again...

Solar power is currently a pipe dream. We do not have the technology either in solar cells or batteries to make it efficient or cost effective. Even the kindest estimate puts viable solar power for residential use a full 30 years down the road. Now is not the time. Fossil and Nuclear for the win.

Your solution to any problem is no solution at all, just criticize anyone for offering an alternative.

Funny, I got the impression you were the one opposing nuclear power as a solution. It seems your criticism of every solution is to define it as part of the problem.

Solar panels are not more toxic than nuclear power, and their production would not cause ecologic disasters the likes of which we're seeing in the gulf.

And I never said any of that. I called you out for claiming that solar panels are clean and tidy compared to nuclear, and safe from systematic problems that come with major corporations cutting corners on a massive scale. The most efficient solar cells today contain heavy metals in them like cadmium. If you replace the world's current electric capacity with nothing but solar panels, the disposal of old panels will NOT be a problem one can ignore. The temptation to save costs by disposing of them cheaply and ignoring contamination will be as great as it is with any other industry you decry today. Sure, the disposal is a problem that can be easily handled, but so is the disposal of old nuclear fuel...

"One nuclear plant creates thirty to forty tons of waste per year. That waste is deadly for tens of thousands of years."

When you say 'deadly', I say 'useful'. Here in Canada we run our nuclear reactors on fuel rods made from American nuclear 'waste'. Simply put, any waste that still has high radioactivity is also still useful as a power source. It's not waste to be stored for eons, it's future fuel being stored for later use.

"Each house could have its own solar cells and supply its own energy."

Right, and your the one suggesting we trust Bubba not to dump his cadmium filled solar panels in his backyard somewhere to save a few bucks.

Both solar and nuclear have their own issues, but we have methods of handling those problems for nuclear already, today. For solar the biggest unsolved problem is that they just don't work well enough at a reasonable price. Maybe someday they'll improve enough to supplement the nuclear delivered base load, but until then nuclear is a very desirable replacement for coal and oil.

>> ^grinter:

Manufacturing lack of demand?
There should be a cleanwater.gov . That shows the results for weekly tests of the tap water for every district nation wide. And those tests should be based on revised standards that criteria for things like cadmium.
This really would Not be that hard to do, or cost that much. The city checks the water regularly anyway... they'd just have to upload their results to the central server.



Something like this already exists.
http://www.ewg.org/tap-water/whatsinyourwater/NE/City-of-Lincoln/3110926/
Enter your own zipcode.

Manufacturing lack of demand?

There should be a cleanwater.gov . That shows the results for weekly tests of the tap water for every district nation wide. And those tests should be based on revised standards that criteria for things like cadmium.

This really would Not be that hard to do, or cost that much. The city checks the water regularly anyway... they'd just have to upload their results to the central server.