Vacation Deniers
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So, this seems to be a disagreement between two points of view:
A. We don't know what the climate will do in the future, but we probably want to change our behaviour on the offchance that we'll have better outcomes in the future.
B. We don't know what the climate will do in the future, so we should just continue doing things the same way we've always done them, everything will probably be fine, or it won't but there's nothing we can really do about it.
Does that seem like a fair analysis of the discussion so far?
C: We don't know what the climate will do in the future, but we probably want to change our behavior on the off-chance that we'll have better outcomes in the future, and we won't worry about the risk that, because we don't know everything about how climate works, by changing our behavior we may be making things worse.
Filed under: ice ages are a thing, you know
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@tar said:
So, this seems to be a disagreement between two points of view:
A. We don't know what the climate will do in the future, but we probably want to change our behaviour on the offchance that we'll have better outcomes in the future.
B. We don't know what the climate will do in the future, so we should just continue doing things the same way we've always done them, everything will probably be fine, or it won't but there's nothing we can really do about it.
Does that seem like a fair analysis of the discussion so far?
C: We don't know what the climate will do in the future, but we probably want to change our behavior on the off-chance that we'll have better outcomes in the future, and we won't worry about the risk that, because we don't know everything about how climate works, by changing our behavior we may be making things worse.Filed under: ice ages are a thing, you know
D. We're probably changing stuff all over the place, but there's no good reason to think emitting CO2 is even our biggest effect on temperature. Plus, the extra CO2 is good for plants and making food and stuff. There is currently no good alternative to the energy sources we have, and while researching new stuff is prudent, forced adoption of immature technologies now is going to reduce standards of living and reduce our inability to adapt to potential problems in the future (whatever their causes).
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going to [...] reduce our inability to adapt
Wouldn't that be a good thing?
I'm aware you meant "reduce our ability".
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Plus, the extra CO2 is good for plants and making food and stuff.
To a certain point...then it causes necrosis. Also, the higher CO2 levels only help when plants are undergoing photosynthesis. During transpiration it is harmful.
To be fair though, the point that it is shown to be harmful in most plants is twice what atmospheric concentrations are now. But, if they go high enough, it could kill all our food crops well before the concentrations alone would harm us.
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This is just so full of shit I can't even.
All I see is someone dismissing real science on really shaky grounds. The link in the OP was another example of quackery I've seen for years. Cite a few cherry picked pieces of real science, tell your own quack story about it, then claim your story is better than the real science done by real scientists in a whole field.
The question is no longer whether to deprecate fossil fuels (why the fuck aren't we on nuclear?), whether the climate is changing, or whether we are a significant cause of it. The question is what we're going to do about it.
Yeah, hasty, knee-jerk reactions in public policy are a bad idea. However, poo-pooing electric cars because of ridiculous concepts like "energy density" is just wrongheaded. Changes to the system must be gradual: phase in developing technologies like solar as you upgrade the infrastructure to support growth and innovation. If fossil fuels are so great, why don't I cook my food with them? Why don't I fill my laptop with gasoline? Electricity is much more versatile. Yes, right now it's coming from dirty sources. That's because of naysaying assholes spreading FUD about better technologies. (Did I mention nuclear?) The only thing stopping public policy from shifting to a progressive stance is wrongheaded morons making arguments intended only to confuse the public.
But then we get a whole other problem: it's so hard to focus the public on new solutions like solar that they don't get that we're really having an arms race with our resources. Fossil fuels are limited, making any steps away from them we can make useful. However, new technologies themselves are based on limited resources (rare earth metals). However, this is a different problem, because it changes the point of rarity from the thing you're using as fuel to the thing you're using to generate the fuel. You keep stepping forward to stay ahead of the sustainability curve.
In the US, at least, this is a partisan issue, and it confuses me that it is. Or, at least, it would if the right were anything like what they think they are like. Energy has a direct analogy in finance: diversify, or die. It's pretty simple.
TLDR: the paper cited doesn't say what the article cited says it does.
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Also while I'm busy pissing people off:
GMOs are awesome and "Organic" is a fraud.
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In the US, at least, this is a partisan issue, and it confuses me that it is. Or, at least, it would if the right were anything like what they think they are like. Energy has a direct analogy in finance: diversify, or die. It's pretty simple.
QFT. The "greens" are after a silver bullet that they will never get. Solar and wind are helpful, but nowhere near the panacea they're made out to be.
As far as energy density goes -- the main missing link is the ability to take electrical energy + readily available materials and efficiently turn it into transportable chemical energy. The best we have so far is a pile of growlamps with an oil crop underneath...
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All I see is someone dismissing real science on really shaky grounds. The link in the OP was another example of quackery I've seen for years. Cite a few cherry picked pieces of real science, tell your own quack story about it, then claim your story is better than the real science done by real scientists in a whole field.
You're not wrong. But it is more like: "Here is a fucking mountain of evidence the size of Everest that shows we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change." "Oh yeah, here is a small folder with snippets that show otherwise...if you are half drunk and look at them with a severe confirmation bias."
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If fossil fuels are so great, why don't I cook my food with them?
And just to be a pendantic dickweed, I assume you do not have a gas stove? ;)
Filed under: It is 4PM EST, why the hell is the site "read-only" right now??
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And just to be a pendantic dickweed, I assume you do not have a gas stove? ;)
Filed under: <a>It is 4PM EST, why the hell is the site "read-only" right now??
Shameless plug: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedailywtf
Actually, that problem is just as common on reddit.
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QFT. The "greens" are after a silver bullet that they will never get. Solar and wind are helpful, but nowhere near the panacea they're made out to be.
As far as energy density goes -- the main missing link is the ability to take electrical energy + readily available materials and efficiently turn it into transportable chemical energy. The best we have so far is a pile of growlamps with an oil crop underneath...
Indeed; I wind up arguing this issue on both sides. My "environmentalist" friends want to burn down every coal plant (ironic, I know) and set up solar panels tomorrow. My "pro-fossil" friends deny that solar is a viable technology... even when well-off individuals in their own (usually affluent) neighborhoods have installed solar panels and are now selling energy back to the local utility and have stopped paying $1000/month power bills to heat and cool their ridiculous 5000sqft homes.
I wonder what happened to those carbon nanotube sheet batteries...
You're not wrong. But it is more like: "Here is a fucking mountain of evidence the size of Everest that shows we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change." "Oh yeah, here is a small folder with snippets that show otherwise...if you are half drunk and look at them with a severe confirmation bias."
Indeed; it's like saying that you can't cut your grass to within a mm tolerance, so you're just going to let it grow. Until we have perfect knowledge, we shouldn't do anything about the problem. The same logic gets replicated with GE technology in the GMO/agriculture "debate", which is mostly still an embarrassment of the left in the US, but it is slowly becoming a nonpartisan piece of pseudoscience.
And just to be a pendantic dickweed, I assume you do not have a gas stove?
To be fair, I was always confused by electric stoves in houses with gas. However, most of my meals are prepared with electric devices, like the microwave or crock pot. The oven (which is electric) accounts for maybe 20% of our meals. However, I do have a gas hot water heater, and it is much cheaper than electric.
As with many things, I am a shitty environmentalist. I could have probably afforded an electric car, but I got a gasoline engine. And, in my area, most of our power comes from the local nuclear plant, so it would have been way more "green" than in my home state (West Virginia, notable for being where Silent Hill is found).
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why the fuck aren't we on nuclear?
- People are scared of nuclear meltdowns (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island)
- Nuclear fuel is not renewable.
- If we switch over to generating the bulk of our electricity from nuclear generators, then we have to figure out where to store all that waste. There's enough political wrangling over storing the nuclear waste generated in the US now, adding significantly more waste to the pile would just cause a shit storm.
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If we switch over to generating the bulk of our electricity from nuclear generators, then we have to figure out where to store all that waste.
You obviously know nothing about LFTR and similar tech. Not all nuclear is OMG radioactive waste everywhere!!1!1!eleven. You'll note that "conventional" nuke plant tech was widely deployed during the Cold War, when a primary criterion for deciding which tech to use was whether it would produce waste that could be used in nuke warheads. Head, remove from ass.Some will note that I'm rather touchy about this subject. That's not only because the U.S. government has been extremely hostile to producers of energy that don't fit certain political criteria. It is also because several plausible scenarios exist in which ready access to energy could be quickly, drastically reduced.
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even when well-off individuals in their own (usually affluent) neighborhoods have installed solar panels and are now selling energy back to the local utility and have stopped paying $1000/month power bills to heat and cool their ridiculous 5000sqft homes
How much of the cost of those panels was subsidized byyou, me and every other taxpayerthe government?
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Until we have perfect knowledge, we shouldn't do anything about the problem.
Hey, you can do whatever you like - be the change that you want to see in the world, as Gandhi would say. Just use your own resources to do it, rather than making everysuckertaxpayer pay for it. Yes, that means not taking subsidies for it. Wait, it's not such a good deal, is it, when you can't socialize the costs? Funny thing, that.
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You obviously know nothing about LFTR and similar tech. Not all nuclear is OMG radioactive waste everywhere!!1!1!eleven. You'll note that "conventional" nuke plant tech was widely deployed during the Cold War, when a primary criterion for deciding which tech to use was whether it would produce waste that could be used in nuke warheads. Head, remove from ass.
The general public is not aware of LFTR because it is still immature. As such, it is not going to influence their nuclear opinions.
Also, most nuclear waste cannot be used in war heads. If you disagree here, you're ignoring all the sludge and byproducts from the refining process, as well as the non-refuelable reactors from nuclear-subs. If you don't believe me, go tour Hanford.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYxlpeJEKmw
i believe the reason goven. we went uranium because you can make uranium into a bomb. you can't do that so easily with thorium.
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i believe the reason goven. we went uranium because you can make uranium into a bomb.
My point is that spent fuel does not constitute the majority of nuclear waste. There are other byproducts which cannot be used to make anything more than a dirty bomb.
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true, but in LFTR even the spent fuel is rather hard to use to make a nuke. not the same with U238. ;-)
also i was cold.... so i stoked a fire.
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good scene. better movie... need to rewatch that soon.
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Why do you think Death Valley is the hottest place?
It isn't. The Lut Desert is hotter (at least in the period 2003–2010).
The only reason that Death Valley was thought for years to be the hottest place, was that it was the hottest place where people regularly put thermometers. People mostly stay out of the really inhospitable deserts on the grounds that they're absolutely awful places to be alive in…
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To be fair though, the point that it is shown to be harmful in most plants is twice what atmospheric concentrations are now.
I suspect it's a lot higher. IIRC, greenhouses regularly add CO2 up to 1000-2000ppm.
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The link in the OP was another example of quackery I've seen for years. Cite a few cherry picked pieces of real science, tell your own quack story about it, then claim your story is better than the real science done by real scientists in a whole field.
Huh? Can you be specific?
TLDR: the paper cited doesn't say what the article cited says it does.
That's total bullshit of a TLDR. This is the first time you brought that up (maybe that's what you were thinking in the first paragraph, but there's no way this is a reasonable tldr for what you ultimately submitted).
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You're not wrong. But it is more like: "Here is a fucking mountain of evidence the size of Everest that shows we are experiencing anthropogenic climate change." "Oh yeah, here is a small folder with snippets that show otherwise...if you are half drunk and look at them with a severe confirmation bias."
That's a load of shit. You may not realize it. There is evidence that the climate is changing. This isn't a surprise. What do you think is the evidence that it's anthropomorphic? It's the models. Which suck ass at predicting anything, BTW.
That's an Everest of bullshit, and if you think models that can't predict reality are good proof, then I don't know what I could possibly say to convince you, because your position is faith based and not rational.
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My "pro-fossil" friends deny that solar is a viable technology... even when well-off individuals in their own (usually affluent) neighborhoods have installed solar panels and are now selling energy back to the local utility and have stopped paying $1000/month power bills to heat and cool their ridiculous 5000sqft homes.
Have they gotten to the point where they're a good deal without the extra tax breaks / subsidies yet?
I can't speak to what your friends say and think, but my position is that if it isn't competitive then it isn't competitive and we need to keep working on it.
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The only reason that Death Valley was thought for years to be the hottest place, was that it was the hottest place where people regularly put thermometers.
OK, fair enough. It's definitely the hottest place in the US. Which is what really matters.
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I suspect it's a lot higher. IIRC, greenhouses regularly add CO2 up to 1000-2000ppm.
We don't eat roses.
I can pretty much guarantee they do not go above 1500ppm, unless they are giving their workers SCBAs as part of their PPE. Also, you are kind of forgetting that they do an air exchange once the light levels drop as it harms the plants during transpiration. Unless your models show the CO2 levels on the planet rising and falling with the sun, you still don't have a point...even if you eat roses.
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I was being facetious. Roses are most tolerant of, and benefit the most from CO2 enrichment.
So does marijuana, BTW. Lots of food crops are sensitive to high CO2 levels during transpiration.
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People are scared of nuclear meltdowns (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island)
Nuclear fuel is not renewable.
If we switch over to generating the bulk of our electricity from nuclear generators, then we have to figure out where to store all that waste. There's enough political wrangling over storing the nuclear waste generated in the US now, adding significantly more waste to the pile would just cause a shit storm.I know; it's frustrating that people are so terrified of it, though. It is quite unjustified. The waste isn't a small problem, but it is significantly less troublesome than CO2 and the environmental problems associated with coal (and, to a lesser degree, natural gas) and petrol. It is true that nuclear is not renewable, but that's not different from fossil fuels, and nuclear is a major step forward from them.
So, yeah, I understand the political realities that make nuclear untenable. I just think they are dumb, and do not match the reality of the state of the technology.
How much of the cost of those panels was subsidized by you, me and every other taxpayer the government?
I think you may have those strikethroughs backwards.
It varies, but over the lifetime of the panels I am willing to believe the cost is justified by the reduction in pollution. I wonder if the equivalent carbon credits would pay for them. Part of my example was to show that the same people capable of making use of the technology are opposing it despite that the personal benefit is often right in front of them.
Besides, I don't oppose subsidies like subsidies are all evil. I think many (perhaps most) are actually good ideas. Then again, I'd also tax the people I'm talking about at a higher rate, too, so they'd be the ones paying for their own solar.
Hey, you can do whatever you like - be the change that you want to see in the world, as Gandhi would say. Just use your own resources to do it, rather than making every sucker taxpayer pay for it. Yes, that means not taking subsidies for it.
You're welcome to your libertarian frontier as soon as you can launch yourself to Mars, though I suspect it's already been claimed in the name of
SpainMurica.Wait, it's not such a good deal, is it, when you can't socialize the costs? Funny thing, that.
Actually, even without the tax break or subsidy or whatnot, the people I know who went solar would have made bank either way, and I suspect the cost of their usual energy bills would make their entire neighborhood swapping to solar quite profitable. However, their HOA banned the panels on account of them not being "cosmetic", and the two houses that have it were grandfathered in for the period of time the current owners live there. As usual, it's politics, not economy or science, that gets in the way of these advances.
The general public is not aware of LFTR because it is still immature. As such, it is not going to influence their nuclear opinions.
And there are quite a few possible new nuclear technologies that have zero or almost zero research funding on account of the FUD. It's quite frustrating for a scientist. For nuclear physicists and engineers, I imagine it's about as frustrating as the nonsense over GE technology ("GMOs") is to biologists and agricultural scientists.
i believe the reason goven. we went uranium because you can make uranium into a bomb. you can't do that so easily with thorium.
From what little I know, this is true, but misleadingly so. Much of the nuclear research that went into developing nuclear weapons was easily translated to nuclear power. Since thorium was not a viable core material, nuclear power was based on uranium and plutonium instead.
My point is that spent fuel does not constitute the majority of nuclear waste. There are other byproducts which cannot be used to make anything more than a dirty bomb.
There are proposed molten salt reactors that can render some kinds of pre-existing waste radioinactive. I don't know how well they work or how much of existing waste falls into those types, but it seems like a silly thing not to put effort into on a larger scale.
Huh? Can you be specific?
The blog entry by Anthony Watts, who is well known as a climate crank, is wrong about what the paper it cites about oscillations actually says.
That's total bullshit of a TLDR. This is the first time you brought that up (maybe that's what you were thinking in the first paragraph, but there's no way this is a reasonable tldr for what you ultimately submitted).
It's a shorter sentence version of exactly the first thing I typed that you quoted, actually. I may have said more than this, but that does not mean that I didn't say it. You may have meant that I did not attempt to support it, which is true. I did not. I don't think cranks need to be specifically debunked in detail every time they are cited. No proof was given that climate models are problematic, so there's no need to bother proving that they aren't.
What do you think is the evidence that it's anthropomorphic? It's the models.
This is not true. We spit out mountains of CO2. CO2 traps heat. Earth heats up. This doesn't depend on the details of a specific model any more than you burning your hand on the oven depends on the details of the differential equations governing dispersion and diffusion being linear or nonlinear.
That's an Everest of bullshit, and if you think models that can't predict reality are good proof, then I don't know what I could possibly say to convince you, because your position is faith based and not rational.
What do you think about string theory?
Have they gotten to the point where they're a good deal without the extra tax breaks / subsidies yet?
Please see my answer to this same point above.
I can't speak to what your friends say and think, but my position is that if it isn't competitive then it isn't competitive and we need to keep working on it.
Except it is competitive and is getting better. However, even if it weren't competitive, as a solution to the fossil problem it would be good. We have similar bumps in consumer technology where costlier products with higher inefficiencies or modest gains are favored because they improve some other, non-market aspect of the technology. That non-market aspect isn't always sensible, as with Apple products, but it is important. In the case of energy, the non-market aspects are far more important than the market aspects. For instance, if fusion power cost us as much as coal used to and always did, it would still be worth the cost.
As I believe I made clear earlier, however, I do not regard solar as a panacea. It's just a step forward.
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Re: Watts and his "science", BTW:
Skeptical Science
Examines the science and arguments of global warming skepticism. Common objections like 'global warming is caused by the sun', 'temperature has changed naturally in the past' or 'other planets are warming too' are examined to see what the science really says.
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Two can play that game:
The Truth about Skeptical Science
Source: Skeptical Science Forums Skeptical Science is a climate alarmist website created by a self-employed cartoonist , John Cook (who ...
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Two can play that game:
Source: Skeptical Science Forums Skeptical Science is a climate alarmist website created by a self-employed cartoonist , John Cook (who ...
I don't think you're playing the same game that I am.
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Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus
SCUBA for land. A real pain in the dick to wear all day.
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I can pretty much guarantee they do not go above 1500ppm,
Yes, I think it's more in the range of 1000ppm.
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SCUBA for land. A real pain in the dick to wear all day.
Are you sure you are wearing it correctly?
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The blog entry by Anthony Watts, who is well known as a climate crank, is wrong about what the paper it cites about oscillations actually says.
OK, got a link about that? Or at least an argument?
No proof was given that climate models are problematic, so there's no need to bother proving that they aren't.
That's not true. Whether the error was what was claimed or not, it was a problem with them.
This is not true. We spit out mountains of CO2. CO2 traps heat. Earth heats up. This doesn't depend on the details of a specific model any more than you burning your hand on the oven depends on the details of the differential equations governing dispersion and diffusion being linear or nonlinear.
But now, by how much. The direct greenhouse effect from CO2 is pretty small. But that's not where the big sensitivity to the change in CO2 comes from. "Mountains of CO2" is still a trace amount of the atmosphere, and won't cause the 2-4 degree celsius increase in average temperature. There has to be something else happening to get there.What do you think about string theory?
I think it seems pretty controversial. I haven't studied it enough to have much of an opinion beyond that.
Except it is competitive and is getting better.
That's good. Then it doesn't need subsidies, and people should start adopting it because it works. I have doubts, however, because it reverses the centralized model and decentralizes it, removing a lot of economies of scale.
Re: Watts and his "science", BTW:
Examines the science and arguments of global warming skepticism. Common objections like 'global warming is caused by the sun', 'temperature has changed naturally in the past' or 'other planets are warming too' are examined to see what the science really says.
Touché. One climate crank site countered with another.
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Touché. One climate crank site countered with another.
http://www.ribbed.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Cranks_3PSC_pro_group.jpg
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Much of the nuclear research that went into developing nuclear weapons was easily translated to nuclear power.
This
is probably the correct causation...Then, the first application of nuclear power was to submarine propulsion which has its own criteria for what the "optimal" technology should be...
From I've read, in general, the issue of conventional fission yielding weapon-izable material, actually slowed the push for more nuclear power - rather than the reverse.
("You want to ship breeder reactors to where??")By the time the practical engineering downsides of conventional fission started rearing their heads, the whole industry was tarred and feathered - and there's not enough funding working on other approaches.
Need to read up on LFTR...
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Why is that woman's head on backwards?
Because she was in that horrible movie "Death Becomes Her".
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I can see right through you.
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why the fuck aren't we on nuclear?
Because the people running and controlling nuclear power plants are incompetent, lazy, stupid and/or corrupt. And I don't want people like that in control of a technology that could render whole regions inhospitable for thousands of years.
See Fukushima, Germany's "Endlager" problem (yes, dropping metal barrels down a salt mine is a bad idea and the UK's "just throw them into the sea" solution of old is not much better), Belgium's problems with cracks in the reactor vessel...Yes, yes, LFTR are so much better. But that technology has been "ready to use in 20 years" since 1975.
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that technology has been "ready to use in 20 years" since 1975
Nuclear fusion power has been "ready to use in 20 years" for quite a while also. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try for it, does it?Oh, and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Background (emphases mine):
Alvin M. Weinberg pioneered the use of the MSR at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At ORNL, two prototype molten salt reactors were successfully designed, constructed and operated. These were the Aircraft Reactor Experiment in 1954 and Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment from 1965 to 1969. Both test reactors used liquid fluoride fuel salts. The MSRE notably demonstrated fueling with U-233 and U-235 during separate test runs. Weinberg was removed from his post and the MSR program closed down in the early 1970s, after which research stagnated in the United States. Today, the ARE and the MSRE remain the only molten salt reactors ever operated.
These MSR's, a type of LFTR, were producing plenty of power just fine. Today, this shit could go from concept to production in ten years. China's already ahead of the Western world on this; they're not stupid.
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Today, this shit could go from concept to production in ten years. China's already ahead of the Western world on this; they're not stupid.
So let them be the innovators and us the copycats for once. I'm fine with that.
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Lockheed Martin thinks they're close to achieving usable fusion. I forget if it was 5 years out or 10 years out.
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So let them be the innovators and us the copycats for once. I'm fine with that.
I'm not. LFTR would eventually get us off the foreign oil teat. If you've been paying attention to world events, then you'd know just how important it is.
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Lockheed Martin thinks they're close to achieving usable fusion. I forget if it was 5 years out or 10 years out.
10.It's always 10 years out ;)
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I'm not. LFTR would eventually get us off the foreign oil teat.
So? I'm not suggesting not to use it. I'm suggesting to let someone else do the work and steal the implementation once it's (almost) ready. Just like China used to do for decades.If you've been paying attention to world events, then you'd know just how important it is.
I'm not sure. "But they have Thorium!" doesn't quite have that ring as a reason to invade a country. "But they want democracy!" is still more convincing.
Dasht-e Lut - Wikipedia
