Extreme warming of tropical waters during the Paleocene–Eocene
Thermal Maximum
ABSTRACT The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), ca. 56 Ma, was a major global environmental perturbation attributed to a rapid rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Geochemical records of tropical sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) from the PETM are rare and are typically affected by post-depositional diagenesis. To circumvent this issue, we have analyzed oxygen isotope ratios (d18O) of single specimens of exceptionally well-preserved planktonic foraminifera from the PETM in Tanzania (~19°S paleolatitude), which yield extremely low d18O, down to <–5‰. After accounting for changes in seawater chemistry and pH, we estimate from the foraminifer d18O that tropical SSTs rose by >3 °C during the PETM and may have exceeded 40 °C. Calcareous plankton are absent from a large part of the Tanzania PETM record; extreme environmental change may have temporarily caused foraminiferal exclusion.
Bold mine. Keep in mind that for a human being a temperature of 37 °C is normal body temperature and 40 °C is a high fever.
Hey Fred, did you forget to lock the gate? The villagers are showing up again.
Please don’t feed the villagers and if you do, remember to lock the gate.
We’re getting hammered here on the BC coast. I live on Johnstone Strait, the main route for Fraser River salmon runs in addition to Juan De Fuca. Where are salmon? 2 weeks late by my experience. I’m waiting to go fishing. I live on (looking at it right now out my window) a pretty substantial Vancouver Island river, (Salmon River). On July 11th about 500 pinks came in to hold in front of my house. On July 20th about 150 springs came in. This is early and the river has never been lower due to drought conditions. Within the next 2 weeks we should have thousands of salmon come in….but they are not out front, yet. Plus, the river is just too low and warm right now…with scant rain in the forecast. If they come in they will most likely die before spawning.
I usually fish, everyday. This year I put my rods away and am mulling over the idea of stopping river fishing, altogether. My hope is that the fish sense the conditions and are remaining out to feed longer. This occasionally happens. But we also have a fire starting up near Nanaimo and the drought has no end in sight. It is pretty scary. I am hoping all Island rivers are closed to fishing…there is talk about it but nothing happening, yet.
We get dry summers when the woods are closed to travel and work. But this year it has started 3 weeks early.
I’ll keep you posted. Some good news? My pond is full to the brim….thank you beavers who live across the road and keep the table high. I use a fire pump to water my remote gardens and have no worry of running low. Great bean, squash, and spud crops. Great year for vegetables, all around.
We can smell smoke from Siberian fires. I have worked on many fires in a former life, flying support. I can only imagine the hell of California.
I usually fish, everyday. This year I put my rods away and am mulling over the idea of stopping river fishing, altogether.
I wish you the best of conditions.
I occasionally fish the Skeena up north of you on the mainland.
Largest steelhead on the Planet.
Paulo,
The smoke may be from Oregon and California fires, at least in part. Northerly winds at the 700 millibar level have been bringing that here to the Central Puget Lowland and we aren’t all that far from you.
G I G A News for TeslaHeads! Elon just Tweeted to his 22 million disciples – time to take TSLA Private @ 420 /Share! Major upsides here since TSLA can focus past the Next Quarter. Wipes out BILLIONS in Shorts. What a Bloodbath !!! No one else could source cells in this volume to pull this off, photon years ahead with Panasonic and GIGAFactory. Hope he’s got a Ludicrous mode Body Guard.
Wow. 13.5 thousand in one month. Color me unimpressed
“U.S. vehicle sales fell by 3.1% to 16.7 million (seasonally adjusted annualized rate) units in July – below the consensus forecast for a more modest pullback to 17.0 million units. Relative to this time last year, sales are a touch (0.1%) lower.”
Cash flow negative tight oil booms. Cash flow negative electric car guru clowns. What will America think of next?
Dudes shilling for Musk remind me of Texas Tea shilling for shale.
Musk will never save humanity as that was never was his goal!
However, TESLA is NOT a car company, it is a clean energy tech company and whether or not it will ever be profitable has very little to do with its automobile sales. And even if TESLA goes belly up it has already disrupted the energy production and storage paradigm. So for that alone, credit should be given where credit is due.
Cheers!
Oh hey, more typical marketing-spam-sounding commentary from Fred.
“Dudes shilling for Musk remind me of Texas Tea shilling for shale.”
“electric car guru clowns”
His EV company will soon be reducing gasoline use by an additional 5 million gallons per year every year as the new EV’s roll out. It may lead to much more. More importantly he gave the whole land transport industry a big kick in the ass to get started, with major results worldwide. His knock-on effect is huge.
His solar power companies are reducing the use of coal and natural gas.
His battery power systems are reducing the use of fossil fuels and allowing the increased implementation of solar and wind power technology.
His rocket company has found a much more efficient way to put satellites into orbit.
All of his tech is scalable and he has opened up his electric car patents to outside use (open source) so everyone can use them to move forward. Yes, he and his teams are making a huge difference. They got the car industry off it’s collective ass. Now China and other countries are zooming ahead like there is no tomorrow.
He has done more to saving the world from global warming than anyone else, because he is changing the paradigm as well as being an inventor and innovating entrepaneur in clean energy/transport. Everything he does is to make things more efficient and less polluting, even simple minds can see that, unless they have their heads stuck up the Koch’s asses.
“electric car guru clowns. What will America think of next?”
WTF have you done? Or does sounding like the Russian version of an Archie Bunker FF shill make you feel superior?
“I wonder if he’ll ever turn a profit at it.”
If he never turns a bit of profit, he will be a huge winner in fighting the human attack against this world. His stuff is not just words, not just policy, it’s real world changing out there and working stuff and it’s changing the world right now. No pipe dreams.
On the other hand Tesla and the Gigafactories could be in big trouble if what I hear about new battery tech that is being put into commercial use elsewhere in the world is even half true. Still, they have the high ground and probably know more about what others are doing than the media is revealing. Tesla may turn out to be just the primer in the shot toward fast renewable/EV tech, or it could be another giant company in a few years. We need giant companies to get this all rolled out, small companies are too vulnerable. We need CEO’s and owners that don’t give a shit if they really make a profit in doing it.
Range Anxiety? More like range boredom. Two hobbyists built electric car from spare parts, now they’re going after a record set by Tesla https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbnvZlPZZQc
It will probably be a few years before we see the first million mile EV.
Much technology, channeled through us as it were, is what got us into the messes we are in, in the first place.
So Musk, or shallow dime-a-dozen declarations (amid ‘token’ concerns for the ecosystem) by the anonymous online likes of you, GoneFishing, isn’t going to automagically change any of that.
Gasoline usage can go down when it simply doesn’t get used. You don’t need new ‘waste streams’ from new technologies to achieve that.
Trump Cabinet Member:
Wilbur Ross is accused of swindling $120 million from associates and ‘could rank among the biggest grifters in American history,’ according to a bombshell Forbes report
Republican voters seem to like/respect that kind of thing. After all, they voted for the bankruptcy king.
It does appear to be a asset, not a liability.
Also, ignorance is a plus, and admired by our Repug Friends.
The idiot continues to show his distain for the environment –
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Wednesday issued a directive that prioritizes water for fighting wildland fires over protecting endangered species. The move comes just two days after California officials dismissed President Donald Trump’s claims that the fires have been exacerbated by a water shortage resulting from “bad environmental laws.”
To California, The Wildfires Are Tragic. To The Trump Administration, They’re Convenient. The Commerce Department has ordered that water use be prioritized for firefighters — who say water isn’t the issue. The decision isn’t really about fire.
In other news, there are seismic shifts underway in the global economic paradigm. The new global powers apparently are charting courses that at least for the moment do not include the US in the conversation, let alone in a leadership role. However there are hints that if the agreements recently signed by the EU and China are fully implemented then the rest of the world will pretty much have to fall in line and follow their lead. To be clear the 20th century linear economic growth model no longer works in the currently developing global ecosystem and the outmoded thinking that highlights nationalism and trade barriers is counterproductive to solving our global predicaments.
It took me a while to find it, but I finally did come across the definition of the ‘circular economy’ referred to-
‘economic relationships that rotate in a circular circulation manner, so to speak’
Its all becoming so much clearer now. Trapezoidal flows are so yesterday.
It took me a while to find it, but I finally did come across the definition of the ‘circular economy’ referred to-
‘economic relationships that rotate in a circular circulation manner, so to speak’
Not exactly! The concept of a circular economy is to model its functioning on how an ecosystem works. In a healthy ecosystem there is no waste.
Everything is used as an input to another trophic level. The main source of energy for the entire system is sunlight which is used by photosynthetic organisms to produce organic compounds from CO2, H2O and minerals.
See simplified diagram of a functioning ecosystem below. Actually it might be useful to think of the diagram as representing a single slice through a much more complex interconnected spherical system.
.
And so in a circular economy we all go down the toilet together?
In a circular economy what goes down the toilet is used as an input resource for some other process 😉
Haw haw! You are the proverbial drunk uncle ruining Thanksgiving diner by blabbing out right wing propaganda at the top of your lungs.
This is part of an increasing trend that developing countries are looking to Europe for the answer to their problems, not America.
Trump has abdicated America’s former role as Leader of the Free World, and its City on the Hill and American Exceptionalism rhetoric isn’t taken seriously by anyone outside the country any more.
It’s time for Americans to wake up and start fixing their country.
Start with the Senate. Recognizing the unlikelyhood of Trump leaving any time soon (that is before January 2021) our best hope is to thwart him in the Senate. Remember that the Senate must confirm all federal judgeships, all cabinet posts and all senior executive appointees. The Senate also acts as final jury in impeachments. There are 15 Senate races that are important to gain seats in November: AZ, FL, IN, MI, MO, MT, ND, NJ, NV, OH, PA, TN, TX, WI, WV.
Some are long shots but you can’t win if you don’t play.
One of the largest banks issued an alarming warning that Earth is running out of the resources to sustain life
HSBC said companies and governments are not “adequately prepared” for climate effects.
One of the world’s largest banks says the planet is running out of resources and warns that neither governments nor companies are prepared for climate change.
The world spent its entire natural resource budget for the year by August 1, a group of analysts at HSBC said in a note that cited research from the Global Footprint Network (GFN).
That means that the world’s citizens used up all the planet’s resources for the year in just seven months, according to GFN’s analysis.
Could we be seeing a turning of civilization? The banks getting on the global warming/overshoot band wagon too? Recent studies have shown that global temperatures by the year 2100 could be up to 15% higher than the highest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the embedded link: When climate models are constrained by what scientists actually observe, the authors said, they generally project more warming. The models that most accurately reflect today’s climate therefore tend to be the ones that predict the most warming by the end of the century.
Okay, so what will be done about it? More papers, more articles, more yammering?
Another beautiful day here. Into the mid 80’s and partly sunny. Been a great summer here temperature and weather wise except for that one storm that crushed several houses in the neighborhood, even had some of the insects come back lately, though the frogs seem to have disappeared again. The bird migration is starting, so seeing more species types now. Leaves have been falling off some trees for a couple of weeks now, we have had plenty of rain.
I suspect that my area will lose a lot of trees over the next decade, from storms. One big abandoned wooded area next to me is now almost wide open in the center due to storms taking down the trees over the last eight years. It used to be packed full of trees 70 to 90 feet high. More are growing, but it will take 60 years or more to replace them if the storms don’t get worse. Lots of dirt movement downhill due to erosion from the strong storms.
Apparently there are more tree diseases coming along. I watched a lot of the hemlock forest die over the last decade. Change is happening quickly even in more out of the way and temperate places, not near the edge. Poisons are everywhere.
Okay, so what will be done about it? More papers, more articles, more yammering
You forgot MORE DENIAL!
Sad to say but the fact is that now we need more political action than scientific work.
It’s highly likely that the continued existence of institutions like HSBC and the big investors that they advise is completely antithetical to solving either climate change or resource limits, and I’m betting the authors of these papers know that.
I would tend to agree but with the following caveat:
There is no way they are unaware of the the fact that climate change and resource depletion is a fundamental threat to their very existence and have probably been aware of that fact for a long time. So with regards their sounding such an alarm, ‘They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t’!
Still, that fact that they are openly stating this reality to the world at large may indicate a willingness to start a discussion about necessary fundamental global economic and social paradigm change.
When one of the biggest global international banks openly discusses climate change threats, at the very least, it marginalizes and makes it a bit more difficult for those that still attempt to deny our current state of affairs to ply their doubt sowing trade.
It seems the cat is now pretty much out of the bag! 😉
There is no global warming. The Sun is quieting down and global cooling is underway instead.
It would be funny if you weren’t serious.
Folks don’t waste your time here. He isn’t interested in factual reality.
He is a Euan Mearns groupie. I think they get paid by the fossil industry.
And that comment pretty much summarises why we are so fucked.
GENEVA—Saying the time to act has come and gone, a group of researchers from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned Tuesday that any hope for the future of humanity now hinges on the possibility that scientists like themselves are simply making all of this up. “After reviewing our climate models and projections of worldwide CO2 emissions, we have come to the conclusion that the only scenario in which the human race survives is if our thousands upon thousands of meticulous empirical studies on climate change turn out to be something we’ve been lying about all along,” said climate scientist Philip Vanderwall,
😉
LOL! I do love good satire but I just don’t think that is far enough away from the actual truth to make it work anymore…
If nothing else, I will leave a note to my son, admitting that I too was involved in that massive, nefarious conspiracy spanning every country on the face of the earth in order to do my part in saving the planet for future generations. Unfortunately, despite all our best efforts, it just wasn’t enough!
😉
David,
I thought the following would be a good explanation of climate change for my Grandson (age 10) but perhaps it might suffice for you as well. If it’s too advanced perhaps you should wait a few years until after you’ve grown up a bit. Concentrate hard now.
FROM GREENHOUSE TO HOTHOUSE: CLIMATE CHANGE
“The mechanism by which atmospheric gases warm the planet has been well understood since the 19th century. High CO2 levels early in the Earth’s history, wrote the geologist Thomas Sterry Hunt in 1867, had created the sort of climate that would have resulted if we “had covered the Earth with an immense dome of glass, had transformed it into a great orchid house”. The term “greenhouse effect” was coined.
But a “hothouse” sounds far more intense. From the 16th century, a hothouse was a bathhouse or a brothel, or a heated room for drying linen, and then a heated greenhouse for cultivating exotic species, metaphorically extended to an environment in which anything grows very quickly. Its products are often said to be highly delicate, if not sickly. We are already wilting like hothouse flowers this summer, and there might be no way to smash the glass.”
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
– George Carlin
A Worrying New Energy Chart Shows The World Is Not Even Close to Kicking Coal Three charts, produced and published by the oil and energy giant BP, which releases a Statistical Review of World Energy every year, has revealed that after several years of free fall, the global consumption and production of coal is making a comeback.
Looking at the first graph, you can see that last year, coal consumption grew for the very first time since 2013.
While China’s coal output in 2017 increased by 3.6 percent, America’s coal output increased by nearly double that number, shooting up by 6.9 percent.
Almost 50 years of warnings and the best we have done is hold back the rise, which is a considerable feat in a fast growing world that is not really serious yet about survival.
Besides that nasty coal, is oil exploration in a (former) wildlife refuge playing cricket? Out of sight, out of mind I suppose. Somehow, I keep forgetting EVs are going to save the planet: too busy tracking wildfires raging across Siberia, California, Europe, and yes, in my own backyard — British Columbia.
SEE THE SCARS THAT OIL EXPLORATION CUT ACROSS ALASKA’S WILDERNESS
“Matt Nolan, who runs a mapping business in Alaska using aerial photography, was flying a small plane to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeastern part of the state last month when he noticed a pattern on the tundra. Dr. Nolan, a geophysicist, saw a grid of tracks left by heavy vehicles involved in recent seismic testing for oil and gas exploration in an area called Point Thomson. The tracks, several hundred yards apart, were as regular as a checkerboard and ran across the landscape just outside of the refuge. A similar dense grid may soon cover some of the refuge itself, perhaps beginning as early as December, if seismic testing starts under a plan to sell leases for oil and gas exploration that was approved by Congress last year and that is strongly opposed by environmental and conservation groups. The northern part of the refuge, 1.5 million acres of the Arctic coastal plain known as the 1002 Area, is thought to overlie billions of barrels of oil and gas.
Disturbances like the tracks Dr. Nolan saw could remain for decades or longer like a tattoo on the refuge, a vast tableau of mosses, sedges and shrubs atop permafrost that is considered one of the most pristine landscapes in North America. There are still signs, for example, of a much less dense pattern of tracks from the only other time testing was allowed there, in the mid-1980s, and of the only drilling pad, which was built at the same time.
Maybe a complete collapse of industrial civilization would be a good thing!
It would open up new ways of looking at the world. Right now we are stuck in BAU with our heads up our asses!
Some people think that since coal has declined in USA over the past 10 years (since fracking), it must be so everywhere.
But the USA has been very fortunate to have very much Nat Gas which has replaced coal for electricity production, with lesser contribution by very strong wind and solar resource in the USA.
Many other countries who use coal don’t have the luxury of such easy/inexpensive replacement.
Of the top ten coal consuming countries, only two have plentiful alternatives- USA and Russia (Russia could use Nat gas if they had too).
That leaves China, India, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and Poland. Many of these countries are in extremely poor shape when it comes to energy security.
For example, %net imports of energy consumption as of 2015 is Germany 64%, Japan 95%, S. Korea 87%, India 36%, Turkey 81%.
Don’t expect these countries to miraculously do without coal anytime soon.
you can click on the map to see a particular country graph- try India
Hickory,
Try India indeed. They’ve become the top recipient of US coal exports and they’ll bring it in from wherever they can get it. India is the scary member of the pack.
I believe Australia is their biggest supplier of coal.
Remember Ian Plimer? Quite possibly the inspiration for the First Dog on the Moon character Ian the Climate Denialist Potato. Well, he’s back. Just in time for the crucial vote on the National Energy Guarantee this Friday at CoAG and, more importantly, next Tuesday in the Coalition party room.
“Climate policy is underpinned by two fallacies. The first is that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. The second is that future climate can be predicted from computer models,” he writes, casually batting away decades of scientific research and an overwhelming global consensus.
The Victoria Labor state government has thrown down the gauntlet to the federal Coalition government and its climate-denying conservative wing, demanding three-year reviews as the price of its support for the proposed National Energy Guarantee.
The ACT government has also refined its condition of support, suggesting a review once the target gets close to the 26 per cent by 2030 target that the federal government is seeking to set in stone. It pretty much amounts to the same thing demanded by Victoria, given that the 26 per cent target will be met within a few years.
“We can still get this right – but only if Malcolm Turnbull stares down the climate-crazies in his party and puts a workable scheme on the table that doesn’t hurt local jobs and households,” energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio says in a statement.
The demands of Victoria and ACT – which reflect their long expressed concern about the inadequacies of the NEG – are designed to test both the Coalition and the big business claim that they are looking for a bipartisan solution, rather than simply legislating to block renewables in their tracks.
However, federal environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg on Wednesday refused to budge, saying the Coalition was focused on prices rather than emissions, and even citing the risk of blackouts.
The Victoria government has defined four concrete conditions it wants in exchange for supporting Australia’s much-maligned National Energy Guarantee. If neglected, those red lines could turn into an insurmountable obstacle at Friday’s vote on the national strategy.
Casting a long shadow over the NEG – which needs the unanimous support of state and territory ministers – the clear and unambiguous statement issued by Daniel Andrews’ Labor administration said Victoria can support the NEG only if specific conditions are met that keep energy prices low and support employment.
“We won’t support any scheme that puts our renewable energy industry and Victorian jobs at risk,” Victoria Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change Lily D’Ambrosio said in a statement.
Victoria says the conditions will also ensure the Victorian Renewable Energy Target of 40% clean energy by 2025 – and the thousands of local jobs it supports – will be protected.
With a growing clamour of voices warning about the disincentives for renewables embodied in Australia’s National Energy Guarantee (NEG), a new poll shows most Aussies want clean power to play a greater role in the country’s energy mix and say they should be used as the sole guarantee of lower electricity prices.
The poll, conducted by ReachTEL for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, suggests 70% of respondents want an ambitious renewable energy target, and more than 67% agree renewable energy should receive more government support than fossil fuels.
Those figures do not align with the policy settings of the NEG, which envisage only a 2% increase in renewable energy’s share in the national electricity market over the next decade.
Although the NEG is said to offer a promise of AU$150 (US$111) of savings per year, it is not clear how this is calculated, due to a lack of modeling information in the final design of the NEG, released by the Energy Security Board last week.
Maybe the reason for the above poll results is this:
Australia’s big three gen-tailers continue their orgy of money making at the expense of consumers, with EnergyAustralia this week reporting a trebling of its half-year profit, even as wrung out customers quit the company by the tens of thousands.
The owner of the ageing Yallourn brown coal generator, itself owned by Hong Kong-listed CLP Group, on Monday reported a net profit of $A375 million to June 2018, up from $A129 million a year earlier.
The surge in profit comes off the back of sustained high wholesale electricity prices – even despite a reported customer churn of around 60,000 for the half – and apparently unscathed by the energy policy war playing out between the federal government and the states.
Rupert Murdoch needs to be taken out and shot for crimes against humanity.
“…this paper aims at re-locating a position for the politicization of growth-driven capitalism vis-à-vis the latest and most sophisticated version of the ‘sustainable’ fetishized commodity: the ‘zero-waste’ value chain and the general project of the ‘circular economy’ it promises to realize…
Such ideal of ‘circularity’, which wasteless-ness management could realize, is the imaginary the paper intends to problematize. Why? Because the harmony it upholds veils, as a fetishist fantasy, the possibility of politicizing the rules of a capitalist economy and of preventing the unsustainable human and environmental wastings the latter cannot help but multiply…
In particular, we focus on how zero-waste practices can divert our attention from the planned obsolescence that has been built into the production and marketing of products devised by companies like Apple… Quite simply, as the Apple brand proudly displays its achievements in complying with design-for-recycling standards of production (Underwriters Laboratory, 2016), the public turns oblivious of the environmental consequences of Apple’s competitive business strategy, which seeks for consumers to dispose of old versions of Apple products in favour of new releases as quickly as possible… the marketing of the circular leads the consumer to conceive the purchase of Apple commodities as the perfect antidote against Apple’s own wasteful logic…”
“… just as increased use can reduce the environmental benefits of light-emitting diodes or hybrid cars, increased production and consumption, which we have termed circular economy rebound, can reduce the benefits of the circular economy…
…the economy part of the circular economy tends to be overlooked. [LOL] The circular economy is typically conceptualized as a pure engineering system, a worldview that leads to implicit unfounded assumptions about the impact of the circular economy on primary production. When these complex socioeconomic factors are included, the environmental outcome of the circular economy becomes ambiguous.…
Unfortunately for environmental proponents of the circular economy, our suggestions are unlikely to be attractive to most for-profit companies and are probably impossible for publicly owned corporations. As mentioned, not all proponents of the circular economy intend for it to be environmentally beneficial. For instance, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company views the circular economy as an opportunity not for environmentalism, but for arbitrage. McKinsey & Company explicitly advise their clients that marketing secondary products, components, and materials in a way that does not cannibalize existing sales (i.e., does not displace primary production) will create the largest profits (McKinsey & Company 2014). This means that simply introducing the circular economy concept to free markets and profit-maximizing firms (as the EC has actively done) is very likely to result in rebound.”
In June, President Trump directed the DOE to devise a plan to keep the uneconomic generators online, saying their retirement could put national security at risk. The order came the same day as the release of the NSC memo, which argued the large plants are more secure than those fueled by natural gas.
Contrary to the word from Washington, D.C., utility-scale renewables are not “badly behaved coal plants” that threaten grid reliability and national security, Seb Henbest, lead author of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance New Energy Outlook, wrote July 25. “By 2050, we’re painting a picture of an electricity system utterly reshaped around cheap wind, solar and batteries.”
Wind and solar were 8.2% of U.S. generation in 2017, with wind at 6.3% and solar at 1.9%, and U.S. grids are integrating record levels of renewables without disruption. Wind was 54% of Texas generation on October 27, 2017, and wind and solar together provided 64.6% of California’s power on May 26, 2018.
Investors say “phenomenally abundant” renewables could support a trillion-dollar U.S. market by 2030 and solar will play a key part, according to an April American Council on Renewable Energy survey.
Utilities are seeing the opportunity and responding, according to the 2018 Utility Solar Market Snapshot released in July by the SEPA.
I cannot see how this is going to end well if the Trump administration’s efforts to bail out coal and nuclear are even remotely successful.
Organic solar cells set ‘remarkable’ energy record
Manufacturers have long used silicon to make solar panels because the material was the most efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.
But organic photovoltaics, made from carbon and plastic, promise a cheaper way of generating electricity.
This new study shows that organics can now be just as efficient as silicon.
Commercial solar photovoltaics usually covert 15-22% of sunlight, with a world record of 26.6% reached in Japan in 2016.
Organics have long lingered at around half this rate, but this year has seen some major leaps forward.
In April researchers were able to reach 15% in tests. Now this new study pushes that beyond 17% with the authors saying that up to 25% is possible.
This is important because according to estimates, with a 15% efficiency and a 20 year lifetime, organic solar cells could produce electricity at a cost of less than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
OPV seems to crop up on a regular basis but no sign of it leaving the labs. The question is how much rare or toxic stuff does it use? Will it scale or will it always be an expensive novelty?
NAOM
The question is how much rare or toxic stuff does it use?
I guess it all depends on how toxic and rare carbon-based materials and plastics are… From the article:
What are organic solar cells? The term organic relates to the fact that carbon-based materials are at the heart of these devices, rather than silicon. The square or rectangular solid solar panels that most of us are familiar with, require fixed installation points usually on roofs or in flat fields.
Organic photovoltaics (OPV) can be made of compounds that are dissolved in ink so they can be printed on thin rolls of plastic, they can bend or curve around structures or even be incorporated into clothing.
Well, let us not forget that cyanide contains carbon. It is not so much the organic base but any additives, dopants, dyes etc. OPVs seem to keep popping up then…
NAOM
Fig. 1. Schematic of plastic solar cells. PET – polyethylene terephthalate, ITO – indium tin oxide, PEDOT:PSS – poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), active layer (usually a polymer:fullerene blend), Al – aluminium.
Interesting, quite a chemical soup is required. They would need to be able to produce these as a moving ribbon , think printing newsprint, rather than disk at a time o be effective. I am still concerned what ‘magic soup’ they may add to improve characteristics and lifetime. They don’t sound anywhere near to commercial yet.
NAOM
This is important because according to estimates, with a 15% efficiency and a 20 year lifetime, organic solar cells could produce electricity at a cost of less than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Not if the idiots who support the current administration in the US have their say!
Truth be told, the agenda of the fossil fuel supporting, climate change denying, fascist, authoritarian populist religious right, is still being pushed hard and the majority of the American public is sound asleep at the wheel! Fuck these people!
At ‘America First Energy Conference’, Solar Power Is Dumb, Climate Change Is Fake
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Pumping carbon dioxide into the air makes the planet greener; the United Nations puts out fake science about climate change to control the global energy market; and wind and solar energy are simply “dumb”.
These are among the messages that flowed from the America First Energy Conference in New Orleans this week, hosted by some of the country’s most vocal climate change doubters – and attended by a handful of Trump administration officials.
The second annual conference, organized by the conservative thinktank the Heartland Institute, pulled together speakers from JunkScience, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center For Industrial Progress, along with officials from the U.S. Department of Interior and the White House for panels that included: “Carbon Taxes, Cap & Trade, and Other Bad Ideas,” “Fiduciary Malpractice: The Sustainable Investment Movement,” and “Why CO2 Emissions Are Not Creating A Climate Crisis.”
One of the scariest parts of a very scary movie——–
Yeah, except that we are now reliving it in real time!
I’m afraid so—-
It didn’t end well for them, in fact it was really bad.
Over on the oil side they are ringing the peak oil gong, not going to be fun with half the government or more in fantasyland along with at least a third of the population.
So put some popcorn in the microwave, sit back and enjoy the show. It’s an oldie but goodie rerun.
Cheers!
Only on the surface, the ice is thinner and younger now.
Also, 2012 is an example of an extreme, which might happen again. If that extreme happened again next year, there would be no ice in September.
I meant to compare it to the extreme. I especially like the nsidc site because it lets you look at the annual curves for over 20 years either singly or in groups. It paints a pretty ugly history of how the extent is trending down but with wide variation.
Where do you get the thickness data? I do wonder if the minimum extent goes up and down so dramatically why the thickness would act differently by much.
I don’t think there is good comprehensive (or even representative) thickness data.
Is there?
There are several sources I use. PIOMAS has volume data and NSDIC has area data. I don’t use sea ice extent because it can be off by 40 to 60 percent from actual sea ice area due to the 15% rule.
According to PIOMAS average Arctic sea ice thickness has dropped below one meter at least twice. Almost a meter loss since 1990. Combine that with an area loss of about 40 percent at minimum and it gives about 1/3 of the ice volume now compared to about 1990.
Big Trouble Musk-Land
Inside Tesla’s troubled New York solar factory
Republican New York state Assemblyman Ray Walter, who represents a district near the factory, said it concerned him that only a small portion of the plant appeared functional when he toured it in March.
“After investing $750 million of taxpayer money, we want it to work out,” he said. “It just does not look like it’s heading down that path.”
Tesla said in its statement that the facility now employs about 600 people and is on track to meet all of its commitments.
None of the Tesla sources could provide a production figure for the solar roof, saying only that output was low and frequently interrupted. They said only the textured black version of the solar roof had been produced so far, one of four varieties Tesla is marketing.
LOL! Where exactly is the BIG TROUBLE in Musk-Land?!
I think you selectively forgot to mention this part from the same article:
Empire State Development, the state’s economic development arm, is overseeing the agreement. The agency believes Tesla is currently meeting its obligations, said spokeswoman Pamm Lent, adding that the company would face penalties of $41.2 million a year if it falters.
And for the 100th time why are TESLA’s problems any more or less relevant than any other business’. Some businesses succeed, others fail. It’s what happens in a free market dog eat dog, capitalist system.
The Struggle Continues For Bankrupt Shale Drillers
So who’s going to be left holding the bag on all of that?!
The problem is the entire failed capitalist system!
Cheers!
P.S.
You want to talk about BIG TROUBLE?!
How’s this?
Today, about 7 metric tons of fish are caught per 1,000 kilometers traveled by the fleets of 20 countries, less than a third of the more than 25 metric tons they caught in the 1950s
Mongabay
What was the world population in the 1950’s compared to today?
What was the world population in the 1950’s compared to today?
The population in the US has more than tripled since my birth in CA.
I think you other humans need to get off my planet– I was here first!
Yeah! Says the guy who ate all our fish! 😉
I was actually a commercial fisherman in Guam.
Troll fished– mostly sold to sushi bars (they knew their fish!)
Don’t do it anymore– collapsing planet, and you get real tired of killing things. But at least you know how things work– something only a small fraction of people know.
“The cost per watt for those systems was listed at nearly $6, according to the records. That’s about double the national average for solar systems. ”
Each solar watt comes with a free roof attached. This comment totally omits the fact that people who install these are also installing a long life roof whereas conventional panels you have to provide the roof first.
The Vogtle plant is the sole nuclear facility under construction in the United States and has become a symbol of an industry plagued by delays and cost overruns.
The $27 billion pricetag is more than double what Southern estimated the Vogtle expansion would cost when Georgia regulators approved it in 2008, and the plant is more than five years behind schedule.
If they had used half of $27 billion and started construction of solar farms starting in about 2013, when construction of the nuclear units began, they might have been able to build about 3 GW of solar PV at $4.00 per watt construction costs and would have been able to complete construction easily within two years. If they then took the escalation in costs of the nuclear facility up to the present they could have maybe financed another 2 GW of PV at $2.50 per watt. Taking the expected 8.4 billion in expected escalation until scheduled completion in 2021 and 2022, they could have built another 5 GW at more than $1.50 per watt. So they could have ended up with 10 GW of solar PV over a ten year period for a similar amount of money they are paying for a problem plagued 2.234 GW nuclear expansion.
I know it’s an apples versus oranges comparison but still, 10 GW of solar PV could possible generate almost as much total electricity over a year as 2.234 GW of nuclear capacity. Mind boggling!
No SWAT team involved apparently.
GERMAN POLICE SAVE MAN FROM BABY SQUIRREL TERROR
“German police have come to the rescue of a man being chased by a baby squirrel. Officers in the south-western city of Karlsruhe responded to the call for help and arrived to see the creature still terrorizing the caller. The squirrel was taken into custody after it abruptly fell asleep. A police report of the incident says the persistent rodent has become their new mascot and has been dubbed Karl-Friedrich.”
“The greatest area of consensus between the volcanists and the impacters seems to be on what insults to sling. Both sides accuse the other of ignoring data. Keller says that her pro-impact colleagues “will not listen or discuss evidence that is contrary to what they believe”; Alan Hildebrand, a prominent impacter, says Keller “doesn’t look at all the evidence.” Each side dismisses the other as unscientific: “It’s not science. It sometimes seems to border on religious fervor, basically,” says Keller, whose work Smit calls “barely scientific.” Both sides contend that the other is so stubborn, the debate will be resolved only when the opposition croaks. “You don’t convince the old people about a new idea. You wait for them to die,” jokes Courtillot, the volcanism advocate, paraphrasing Max Planck. Smit agrees: “You just have to let them get extinct.”
All the squabbling raises a question: How will the public know when scientists have determined which scenario is right? It is tempting, but unreliable, to trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Forty-one co-authors signed on to a 2010 Science paper asserting that Chicxulub was, after all the evidence had been evaluated, conclusively to blame for the dinosaurs’ death. Case closed, again. Although some might consider this proof of consensus, dozens of geologists, paleontologists, and biologists wrote in to the journal contesting the paper’s methods and conclusions. Science is not done by vote.”
I’m sure everybody is tired of my lecturing them about badmouthing people who disagree with them concerning politics and culture.
But in the end each of us has to decide whether it’s more important to vent our frustrations and have some fun at the expense of the political opposition, OR win over some opposition and fence sitting VOTERS.
Now I’m just another born and bred redneck southern hillbilly, from a fundamentalist/ evangelical / conservative culture, and don’t give a damn who knows it. There’s plenty to be proud of, plenty to be ashamed of, in EVERY culture I know anything about, and if I say so myself, I’m VERY well read.
People are basically all alike, when you get down to the nitty gritty.
NOTE THAT THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE VOLCANISM/ IMPACT WARS ARE MOSTLY TENURED SCIENTISTS! Virtually all of them are well trained professionals, excepting of course such people as write about this debate for public consumption. They may or may not know doo doo from apple butter.
MY POINT is that if tenured professors at well known universities, some of these universities being generally acknowledged as among the best of the best, can’t be bothered to seriously consider what the opposition has to say……….
Well, why should anyone here have a problem understanding why poor and poorly educated or totally uneducated people have a problem understanding economic and environmental politics?
If we try to meet such people as my neighbors and a substantial portion of my own family halfway, and talk to them respectfully, and LISTEN to their concerns, we can win them over ……. often enough to win elections.
We only need to move a couple of per cent of voters from the R side to the D side, as a general rule, in the upcoming elections this fall and in 2020.
Personally I’m spending nearly all the time I used to spend here on that very job…….. and I’m succeeding, one person at a time, by talking to less well off older women who are worried about their future health care costs…….. one on one.
BY talking to people who have had somebody close to them die ……. very possibly because of environmental pollution, having been exposed on the job to dangerous pollutants. One of them was one of my last surviving uncles, who lost the use of his legs in his old age due to having used really nasty pesticides all thru his younger years, in the professional opinions of the neurologists at Wake Forest U/Bowman Gray who did all they could for him.
A heart to heart with his four kids, all of them middle aged working class people, resulted in the promise of four votes for the D’s from here on out. It didn’t hurt that I could show them how much cheaper certain drugs ( one of them being a diabetic) are in Canada than they are here in Virginia, and WHY.
Another neighbor is obsessed with fishing, to the point that every dime he can put his hands on goes into his boat and the truck he uses to tow it. He USED to vote R without a second thought…….. until I took the time to gradually introduce him to the real facts involving pollution and fishing within three hundred miles of our local community. He now acknowledges that the D’s are the party of the environment, although he is still convinced the R’s are right about a lot of things, such as too many immigrants taking too many jobs that would otherwise be available to local people who lack the education and or skills necessary to land more desirable jobs. Jesus, according to his preacher, doesn’t believe in abortions, etc.
He’s a work in progress, but I’m going to win him over, for sure, because he has heart trouble out the ying yang, and I’m gradually introducing him to the FACTS involving health care, Democrats, and Republicans.
He’s gradually coming to the realization that his very LIFE may well depend on the D’s controlling health care politics.
There are enough people in HIS shoes alone to put the D’s in control…….. if we could muster enough people to talk to them, and LISTEN to them, one on one.
Here’s a long read that every last regular here should really enjoy, while taking it to heart about being TOO SURE he has all the answers.
I read the entire piece and my take away is this:
First, that is exactly how science works. See Thomas Kuhn, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’
The Resolution of Revolutions These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another.
Bold mine.
Of course there is always controversy and ego involved if an established theory is disputed. Second, I’m neither a geologist nor a paleontologist and have not read enough of the relevant literature to be able to judge the merits of Dr. Keller’s arguments. However, I do know that the asteroid impact theory has quite a lot of solid evidence to back it up. And I also know there has been quite a bit written in the scientific literature that seems to point a smoking gun at the contribution of massive basaltic lava flows to other mass extinction events.
So it seems to me, that it might be conceivable that the two theories may not be mutually exclusive and may indeed both have played roles it the extinction of the Dinosaurs and other forms of life 65 mya, give or take.
That being said, there seems to be little doubt that humans and our activities are playing a significant role in what may be a sixth mass extinction event and ushering in a new geologic era which some are calling The Anthropocene. Denial of the fact that CO2 is a green house gas and that it is contributing to the warming of the planet and contributing to climate change is no longer a valid debating point.
Ignorance and Science denial are a very different beasts from heated scientific debate. The layperson seems to think they can see anything they please just because there is scientific debate..
Convincing people who believe otherwise is a rather daunting task for many reasons and I will not list them here as most readers of this site are already quite familiar with them.
Now, while being engaged in swaying political opinion amongst voters at this particular junction in American history is still a valid and most nobel use of one’s time, It is not an endeavor for which I have any personal appetite. So if you are so inclined, more power to you, and I hereby remove my hat in respect.
Cheers and best of luck!
“So, it seems to me, that it might be conceivable that the two theories may not be mutually exclusive, and may indeed both have played roles it the extinction of the Dinosaurs and other forms of life 65 mya, give or take.”
BINGO, the always rational Fred Magyar gets tonight’s stuffed animal – a full-sized Brontosaurus. Also add to discussion the fact that the “Dinosaur Extinction” was not as abrupt as commonly portrayed. Many of these fellows had gone the way of the dodo long before the Permian–Triassic extinction event. Hobbits developing a taste for dino eggs? Regardless, around the P–Tr boundary there was an 8 °C rise in temperature and an abrupt increase in CO2 levels (by 2000 ppm). Be warned all you David Archibalds!
Estimable DougL,
Wrong extinction. It’s the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction (around 66 million years ago) that’s associated with the final disappearance of the dinosaur species that hadn’t already disappeared, not the Permo-Triassic one. The Permo-Triassic extinction was pre-dinosaur and pre-mammal and actually had two pulses (since you ask) with the second, about 252 million years ago, doing most of the work.
The Permo-Triassic (THE biggie!), Triassic-Jurassic (A biggie), and Cretaceous-Tertiary (‘nother biggie) are all associated with enormous outpourings of basaltic lava; only the Cretaceous-Teriary one had an auxiliary impact to help out. As Walter Alvarez put it “Sometimes you have a really bad day.”
Synapsid —
Thanks, I stand corrected.
“He now acknowledges that the D’s are the party of the environment”
OldFarmerMac, sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote party. Which is a problem the Democrats have a lot more often than Republicans. Now you seem to be a person who preaches “do as I say and not as I do”.
I’m with Fred, I’m done babysitting people who vote against their own best interest. As long as the Fox News cancer exist in America. Democracy is a dying breed along with the environment.
HB–
On a micro level big differences (women’s rights, the environment {as long as it doesn’t infringe on donors profits}), etc.
Macro level? The Dims and Repugs are remarkable the same.
Can you say Capitalism comrades? I knew you could—-
Hence the problem– a slow (maybe) or fast death.
We are all going to die. It was only a couple of months ago you traveled to the big city for a heart procedure. That Democratic supported socialized Medicare paid your capitalistic doctor bills now didn’t it?
The Republicans would rather cut Medicare spending and build a new arm of the military called the Space Force. Maybe you should register to vote.
Hard to get more macro than the environment
Well, the US is 31st in the world.
Costa Rica beat us at 30, but spends 1/5 as much per person.
Cuba is right behind– but its spending a fraction of ours.
Obviously, we are not Japan or France, which spends half as much, and has much better systems.
“halfway, and talk to them respectfully, and LISTEN to their concerns,”
Thanks OFM. I respect that work.
I actually doubt that talking to “them” will do any good. The 35% hard core Trumpsters will not succumb to anything like reason. However there is a middle 30-some% that will listen. The battle in 2018 is to energize a lazy and disheartened base and to have those patient conversations with the reasonable folk who have convinced themselves that both parties are corrupt.
That last bit is true but right now irrelevant.
OFM,
Surprising what common sense and civility can do isn’t it, especially when you can back it up with evidence. Keep it up–we need more of your approach. I use it too.
That Atlantic link, now: I wish someone other than Bianca Bosker had written it. Tigers in Belize, anacondas in Madagascar, impact generating “fireballs, crushing tsunamis”–high-school students can do better. There’s a good deal of content that’s informative in the article if you don’t let the style get in the way.
The limits to global‐warming mitigation by terrestrial carbon removal
Our results show that those tCDR measures are unable to counteract “business‐as‐usual” emissions without eliminating virtually all natural ecosystems. Even if considerable (Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 [RCP4.5]) emissions reductions are assumed, tCDR with 50% storage efficiency requires >1.1 Gha of the most productive agricultural areas or the elimination of >50% of natural forests. In addition, >100 MtN/yr fertilizers would be needed to remove the roughly 320 GtC foreseen in these scenarios. Such interventions would severely compromise food production and/or biosphere functioning. Second, we reanalyze the requirements for achieving the 160–190 GtC tCDR that would complement strong mitigation action (RCP2.6) in order to avoid 2°C overshoot anytime. We find that a combination of high irrigation water input and/or more efficient conversion to stored carbon is necessary. In the face of severe trade‐offs with society and the biosphere, we conclude that large‐scale tCDR is not a viable alternative to aggressive emissions reduction.
That is far too complex of a comment for 99% of the audience to understand whatever point you are trying to make.
TL;DR translation for the 99%
‘We’re fucked’
NAOM
1) It’s rather condescending and hubristic to think you know what 99% of the audience can or can’t understand (or even 1%). 2) There’s a simple language summary after the abstract in the linked article, many papers have them these days. 3) Not every comment has to be making a point or driving some political debate, they might just be considered of interest to others, whether the poster or the reader agrees or not with each other or the linked articles.
Actually, since the intended audience of that comment is the readership of POB, I’d say that is an incorrect assessment! As for you, it is difficult to tell if you are a troll or a bot or just another idiot!
Exerpted from the conclusions section:
This leaves us with a rather clear, but hardly comforting overall conclusion: Holding the 2°C line seems only feasible if two sets of climate action work hand in hand. On the one hand, greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced as early and as effectively as possible [Luderer et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2016]. In fact, an even more aggressive strategy than reflected by the RCP2.6 scenario should be pursued, aiming at the “induced implosion” of most fossil fuel‐driven business cases in the next couple of decades [Rockström et al., 2016; Schellnhuber et al., 2016]. On the other hand, tCDR can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately. This means that the biological extraction of atmospheric CO2 as well as the suppression of CO2 release from biological systems must draw upon all possible measures—whether they are optimal or not, whether they are high‐ or low‐tech. We therefore suggest fully exploring the pertinent options available now [Rockström et al., 2017a], which include reforestation of degraded land [Lamb et al., 2005; Chazdon, 2008; Reij and Winterbottom, 2015; Morrison, 2016] and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage, e.g., within the Bonn Challenge initiative (http://www.bonnchallenge.org/) or the New York Declaration on Forests [International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (n.d.) Streck et al., 2016]. Further options range from up‐scaled agro‐forestry approaches [Faße et al., 2014; Lasco et al., 2014; Zomer et al., 2016] to the application of biochar [Woolf et al., 2010; Crombie et al., 2015; Smith, 2016] and various no‐tillage practices for food production on appropriate soils [Lal et al., 2012; Davin et al., 2014; Mangalassery et al., 2014; Rockström et al., 2017b]. Also, it becomes overwhelmingly evident that humanity cannot anymore afford to waste up to 50% of its agricultural harvest along various consumption chains [Smith et al., 2013; Hiç et al., 2016] or to go on operating ineffective irrigation systems [Jägermeyr et al., 2015].
So the bottom line is: Do not wait for first‐best solutions, neither in emissions reductions action nor in tCDR practice!
Bold mine.
Unfortunately within the context of the continued inertia of BAU on a planet already in deep ecological overshoot the implications of these conclusions do not bode well. As it is, our total CO2 emissions have already passed the 400 ppm mark and we are now seeing overall average global temperature increases over preindustrial baseline hitting the 1 °C mark with some very troubling signs that certain feedbacks and tipping points in planetary systems may already have been triggered.
It is increasingly becoming clear that a 2 °C increase might be quite dangerous and even a 1.5 °C may make large swaths of currently inhabited areas uninhabitable. Again, the big danger lies in the unknown risks of feedbacks and tipping points.
Here is a highly insulated and sealed house near Boston. It will need very little heat and almost no cooling, which means all the extra cost of insulation and vapor control is far more than taken care of by the smaller heating unit cost an the savings in fuel.
However, to get the real mindset of people listen carefully at 8:00 minutes where the architect explains that “it’s not about efficiency”. That will explain not only the market but how efficiency can be marketed to the public that is not interested in reducing emissions or even saving money.
Heh! Finally, an architect that even ole Doc Joe Lstiburek, can approve of… 😉
Re: Comment at the 8:00 min mark you mention. It’s a tough but true lesson that needs to be learned at the school of hard knocks. Nobody buys energy efficiency!
Regardless, nice house! 6′ X 11′ window with an R7 value, ain’t too shabby either. Wonder what that costs?
Though I’m guessing that for those really cold Boston winter nights I’d probably hang some really thick drapes as an added layer of protection against the chill…
R7 windows are not top of the line tech. It’s R14 now with a special internal layer of clear plastic instead of a third glass layer, really takes care of infrared losses.
I find modern windows an amazing piece of technology that are very poorly placed, sized and utilized. Crazy people spend huge amounts on a window then cover it up with drapes and blinds for privacy/appearance . That prevents both light entry and view to the outside. Defeats the purpose methinks.
.
Crazy people spend huge amounts on a window then cover it up with drapes and blinds for privacy/appearance . That prevents both light entry and view to the outside. Defeats the purpose methinks.
Yeah, R14 would prevent that problem!
I have no cure for crazy, but if you think increased R factor will do it, I am for it. :=)
Kevin, it’s clear to anyone who has been keeping up with environmental destruction and global warming. This is a planning paper, meant to point out that a certain geo-engineering technique is non-scalable But on a larger scale it’s an indicator of a bigger problem.
The planning ahead time is over, as exemplified by more and more scientists, engineers and their papers not only promoting mitigation but also bringing forward the absolute need for various global geo-engineering techniques (that may or may not work or even be scalable) to gain control over the situation. The panic is setting in at the academic levels. It is starting to filter down to the government and public levels due to real world events. Once panic sets in, some real action will be taken.
Problem is it will be crisis action, reactionary instead of planned. Planning time is over. All planning ahead is fake, time ran out. Like realizing the enemy breached the wall of the castle and they are now inside with you. It’s plan C time, immediate action, major protection is gone. Not going to be good no matter how it turns out.
There is also the great possibility that given the scale of the problem and the current inability to work together on even simple problems, unified global action will never really be taken and what will be will be.
So far unified global action appears to be to continue pumping more GHG into the air and continue/maintain global environmental destruction.
That is far too complex of a response for Kevin to understand…
I was aiming for the 5 percent who don’t have their head in the sand (or elsewhere).
Is the revolutionary Tesla Semi dead? Some analysts believe so
“Tesla didn’t mention the all-important Semi during its controversial first-quarter earnings statement….”
Earnings statement, I believe they are using that term loosely.
DAVID STOCKMAN: THE WORLD ECONOMY IS AT AN EPOCHAL PIVOT
“David Stockman warns that the global economy has reached an ‘epochal pivot’, a moment when the false prosperity created from $trillions in printed money by the world’s central banks lurches violently into reverse….Stockman’s main warning is that there’s no bid underneath this market — that when perception shifts from greed to fear, the bottom is much farther down than most investors realize. In his words, it’s ‘rigged for implosion’.”
Sigh. Implosion you say? Back to neutron stars. Less confusing, more fun!
I think that both The author of the Forbes article, John Tamny and Tyler Durden, who wrote the one for Zerohedge, should read Douglas Rushkoff’s book: ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity’.
The gist of which is, “It is the OS Stupid”!
“We are running a 21st-century digital economy on a 13th Century printing-press era operating system.”
Douglas Rushkoff
For the record, I believe Rushkoff is at least somewhat on board with the ideas behind the concept of a circular ecosystem like economy as formulated by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and in synch with a sustainable vs growth based economic model Such as Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics.
In any case if you haven’t read Rushkoff’s book here’s a youtube of a talk he gave at the Google Campus on his thesis of why ‘Growth is the Enemy of Prosperity’.
Now (in Canada) we must have triple glazed (Argon filled) windows. A friend who is a chemist/biologist who works for federal government identifying toxic chemicals used in buildings says: “Modern homes and business are created to be leak proof; meaning, toxins are sealed in and fresh air is sealed out! So, open windows and ventilate regularly, especially during winter months.”
Example: Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are a group of chemicals that vaporize easily and bring gas pollutants into buildings from a variety of sources. There are over 400 compounds in the VOC family which have been identified and of these over 200 can be found in carpeting. Also, Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) are industrial toxic chemicals that have been used for over 30 years as flame-retardants. Although PBDEs are being phased out, many are still used in North America. Research has linked PBDE exposure to an array of adverse health effects including thyroid hormone disruption, permanent learning and memory impairment, behavioral changes, hearing deficits, delayed puberty onset, decreased sperm count, fetal malformations and, possibly, cancer.
Of course, this is only touching the surface because there are now literally thousands of toxic chemicals being (increasingly) locked in our homes and offices. Some of the worst being flame retardants, cleaning fluids, and varnishes.
Bottom line: don’t seal your own coffin — ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. This advice comes from a toxicologist.
In Norway they would say: “open your window, cuddle up to your partner, it’s healthier.” Should I also mention that Norwegians seem to think zero degrees C is a comfortable bedroom temperature?
Err, I think you mean Argon filled. There are heat-exchange ventilation systems that bring fresh air in and extract stale air out, usually from the smellier and more humid parts of the house, providing a flow of clean air without losing heat. I looked at these more than 2 decades ago in the UK.
NAOM
Thanks, fixed. My brain doesn’t work anymore. BTW according to Wiki, UK building regulations require one air change every two hours (0.5 ACH). With traditional extract – only ventilation that means a house boiler needs to warm up a house-full of cold air 12 times a day. For what it’s worth. 🙂
Yep, hence the popularity of heat exchange ventilation. UK had the 2 1/2 glazed windows that had the plastic middle film with low-e glass and argon filling too. Wasn’t a help on my house so not worth the expense, too many other heat losses, so settled for double – stopped ice forming on the inside.
NAOM
My older sister who lies in London, England sent this article to me a couple years ago, along the same lines:
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.
The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.
Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood, and fat. None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment — and so our bodies — could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.
“Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.”
Oh yes we do.
I think that much of the worlds population is subject to the same experiment, some more and some less than Americans. Different emphasis in different countries, and a huge variation within countries.
China has been playing catch up in this experiment very quickly in the past 20 yrs.
Where does Germany puts its industrial waste?
My friends from Calif who just visited Copenhagen were very surprised at how much people smoked there.
I am surprised that people do live as long as they do.
Should I also mention that Norwegians seem to think zero degrees C is a comfortable bedroom temperature?
In my youth I spent a winter in New England sleeping in an uninsulated attic. I had a great down sleeping bag and have not slept better since.
July 2018 warmest month in California history; unprecedented early-season wildfire activity continues
“On the evening of July 26, the Carr Fire made an unexpected and ultimately devastating run into the western side of Redding, CA–consuming nearly 1500 structures and taking six lives. Unlike during recent California firestorms in the “wildland-urban interface” (like those in Santa Rosa and Ventura last year), this run was not wind-driven: there were no “Diablo” or “Santa Ana”-like wind conditions. Instead, what occurred was far more remarkable from a meteorological perspective: the Carr Fire essentially developed its own mesoscale convective weather system directly on top of the system of Redding, which ultimately produced a half-mile wide “fire vortex” equivalent in strength to violent EF-3 tornado (with winds near 150 mph).”
Forget programming – the best skill to teach children is reinvention. In this exclusive extract from his new book, the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind.
Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the 22nd century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them and navigate the maze of life?
Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.
Yep, Yuval is most certainly right about one thing! Change is not only, the only constant, but the rate of change is constantly increasing 😉
Re: The ‘What is a Coder’ cartoon in the linked article:
A small team of student AI coders beats Google’s machine-learning code
The success shows that advances in artificial intelligence aren’t the sole domain of elite programmers.
BTW if anyone should want an example of the kind of ultra simplistic, dysfunctional and dangerous, lack of critical thinking skills that the old school system has produced, they need look no further then this comment from over on the petroleum side by Fernando Leanme, regarding his certainty that he knows geoengineering will work as he thinks it will.
2050? No way to have any clue what the state of civilization will be in 2050. Thinking that things will progress as normal while a multitude of indicators are showing it will not is good for books and blogs. Meanwhile reality marches on in the form of doing most things just as we used to but more and faster.
I read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens because of the hype around it. The first half is fascinating. The second half is a hoax–full of cornucopian assumptions and denial of ecological/energy constraints to growth.
The paragraph you quote says nothing. Read it again, closely.
I remember when Life magazine came out with predictions about the year 2000. A joke!
I smell yet another fake intellectual.
Yuval is a great intellect, but you are right he does not and cannot accept the upcoming collision of externalities that make it impossible to predict the future beyond about 2025 to 2030. Our timeline of reliable(better than 50%) prediction about civilization is narrowing down, in a few years it will be down to months, then weeks, then days. Unless of course we make some fast major changes starting…. yesterday.
There are a baker’s dozen of externalities that are converging and not in a good way for people or for the ecosystems.
Yuval is a great intellect, but you are right he does not and cannot accept the upcoming collision of externalities that make it impossible to predict the future beyond about 2025 to 2030.
Correct on both counts. However to be fair, he often makes the point in his lectures and his books that:
1) He is not in any way shape or form making specific predictions about the future.
And
2) that despite the upcoming collision of externalities which he clearly states includes all the uncertainties of climate change, (so he is not completely unaware), it is still up to us as individuals and societies to chose how we use the disruptive technologies we are developing.
Of course I think he probably realizes that neither of those two points excludes the non zero chance of a complete collapse of human civilization leading to an extinction of the human race.
The announcement from Beijing at the end of May, detailing cuts to solar incentives, and the suspension of many PV projects, came as a surprise both inside and outside of China. Since then, the global solar energy industry has been in turmoil.
Manufacturers are trying to adapt to the new situation and counteract falling prices. EPC companies, meanwhile, are waiting to see how far prices will fall, to make their projects as cost-effective as possible.
It is undisputed that huge PV module overcapacities exist. In China alone, capacities have been massively built up in recent years. But the world market will shrink this year – probably the very first time ever. GTM Research recently downgraded its forecast to around 85 GW of newly installed capacity in 2018. In comparison, last year saw around 100 GW installed.
An eye to the future
But China would not be China, if it did not try to help the domestic companies that have been supported financially, and with creating a large domestic market in recent years. So while it is slowing down growth at home, it is looking to position Chinese companies more strongly abroad.
The “One Belt One Road” initiative, and the “International Capacity Cooperation” have been actively promoting this goal for some time now. And at the end of June, a new central element was added, focusing specifically on the areas of PV and wind power.
Am I right in interpreting this to mean that the Chinese government is now intent on exporting their boom in solar PV installations, especially to emerging markets as stated towards the end of the article at PV Magazine?
From the co-author of the paper posted by George Kaplan on the last thread: https://m.phys.org/news/2018-08-earth-hothouse-state.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvu5i2mJsI0
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber: Climate Change Extremes, Tipping Points and Health Risks
Year round ‘Lethal Wet Bulb Temperatures’ in most of the tropics?
Wonder how hot the ocean will get.
Dunno!
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/114568/1/739.full.pdf
Extreme warming of tropical waters during the Paleocene–Eocene
Thermal Maximum
ABSTRACT
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), ca. 56 Ma, was a major global environmental perturbation attributed to a rapid rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Geochemical records of tropical sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) from the PETM are rare and are typically affected by post-depositional diagenesis. To circumvent this issue, we have analyzed oxygen isotope ratios (d18O) of single specimens of exceptionally well-preserved planktonic foraminifera from the PETM in Tanzania (~19°S paleolatitude), which yield extremely low d18O, down to <–5‰. After accounting for changes in seawater chemistry and pH, we estimate from the foraminifer d18O that tropical SSTs rose by >3 °C during the PETM and may have exceeded 40 °C. Calcareous plankton are absent from a large part of the Tanzania PETM record; extreme environmental change may have temporarily caused foraminiferal exclusion.
Bold mine. Keep in mind that for a human being a temperature of 37 °C is normal body temperature and 40 °C is a high fever.
Hey Fred, did you forget to lock the gate? The villagers are showing up again.
Please don’t feed the villagers and if you do, remember to lock the gate.
We’re getting hammered here on the BC coast. I live on Johnstone Strait, the main route for Fraser River salmon runs in addition to Juan De Fuca. Where are salmon? 2 weeks late by my experience. I’m waiting to go fishing. I live on (looking at it right now out my window) a pretty substantial Vancouver Island river, (Salmon River). On July 11th about 500 pinks came in to hold in front of my house. On July 20th about 150 springs came in. This is early and the river has never been lower due to drought conditions. Within the next 2 weeks we should have thousands of salmon come in….but they are not out front, yet. Plus, the river is just too low and warm right now…with scant rain in the forecast. If they come in they will most likely die before spawning.
I usually fish, everyday. This year I put my rods away and am mulling over the idea of stopping river fishing, altogether. My hope is that the fish sense the conditions and are remaining out to feed longer. This occasionally happens. But we also have a fire starting up near Nanaimo and the drought has no end in sight. It is pretty scary. I am hoping all Island rivers are closed to fishing…there is talk about it but nothing happening, yet.
We get dry summers when the woods are closed to travel and work. But this year it has started 3 weeks early.
I’ll keep you posted. Some good news? My pond is full to the brim….thank you beavers who live across the road and keep the table high. I use a fire pump to water my remote gardens and have no worry of running low. Great bean, squash, and spud crops. Great year for vegetables, all around.
We can smell smoke from Siberian fires. I have worked on many fires in a former life, flying support. I can only imagine the hell of California.
I usually fish, everyday. This year I put my rods away and am mulling over the idea of stopping river fishing, altogether.
Hey! On the west coast of Florida we have no more need for fishing gear. All we have to do is collect the dead fish that wash up on the beaches for a stretch of 100 miles due to toxic Red Tide.
https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/100-miles-dead-marine-life-57047875
I wish you the best of conditions.
I occasionally fish the Skeena up north of you on the mainland.
Largest steelhead on the Planet.
Paulo,
The smoke may be from Oregon and California fires, at least in part. Northerly winds at the 700 millibar level have been bringing that here to the Central Puget Lowland and we aren’t all that far from you.
G I G A News for TeslaHeads! Elon just Tweeted to his 22 million disciples – time to take TSLA Private @ 420 /Share! Major upsides here since TSLA can focus past the Next Quarter. Wipes out BILLIONS in Shorts. What a Bloodbath !!! No one else could source cells in this volume to pull this off, photon years ahead with Panasonic and GIGAFactory. Hope he’s got a Ludicrous mode Body Guard.
Wow. 13.5 thousand in one month. Color me unimpressed
“U.S. vehicle sales fell by 3.1% to 16.7 million (seasonally adjusted annualized rate) units in July – below the consensus forecast for a more modest pullback to 17.0 million units. Relative to this time last year, sales are a touch (0.1%) lower.”
https://economics.td.com/us-vehicle-sales
I’m sure Elon Musk will be saving the human race any minute now. I wonder if he’ll ever turn a profit at it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/pe-ratio
Cash flow negative tight oil booms. Cash flow negative electric car guru clowns. What will America think of next?
Dudes shilling for Musk remind me of Texas Tea shilling for shale.
Musk will never save humanity as that was never was his goal!
However, TESLA is NOT a car company, it is a clean energy tech company and whether or not it will ever be profitable has very little to do with its automobile sales. And even if TESLA goes belly up it has already disrupted the energy production and storage paradigm. So for that alone, credit should be given where credit is due.
Cheers!
Oh hey, more typical marketing-spam-sounding commentary from Fred.
“Dudes shilling for Musk remind me of Texas Tea shilling for shale.”
“electric car guru clowns”
His EV company will soon be reducing gasoline use by an additional 5 million gallons per year every year as the new EV’s roll out. It may lead to much more. More importantly he gave the whole land transport industry a big kick in the ass to get started, with major results worldwide. His knock-on effect is huge.
His solar power companies are reducing the use of coal and natural gas.
His battery power systems are reducing the use of fossil fuels and allowing the increased implementation of solar and wind power technology.
His rocket company has found a much more efficient way to put satellites into orbit.
All of his tech is scalable and he has opened up his electric car patents to outside use (open source) so everyone can use them to move forward. Yes, he and his teams are making a huge difference. They got the car industry off it’s collective ass. Now China and other countries are zooming ahead like there is no tomorrow.
He has done more to saving the world from global warming than anyone else, because he is changing the paradigm as well as being an inventor and innovating entrepaneur in clean energy/transport. Everything he does is to make things more efficient and less polluting, even simple minds can see that, unless they have their heads stuck up the Koch’s asses.
“electric car guru clowns. What will America think of next?”
WTF have you done? Or does sounding like the Russian version of an Archie Bunker FF shill make you feel superior?
“I wonder if he’ll ever turn a profit at it.”
If he never turns a bit of profit, he will be a huge winner in fighting the human attack against this world. His stuff is not just words, not just policy, it’s real world changing out there and working stuff and it’s changing the world right now. No pipe dreams.
On the other hand Tesla and the Gigafactories could be in big trouble if what I hear about new battery tech that is being put into commercial use elsewhere in the world is even half true. Still, they have the high ground and probably know more about what others are doing than the media is revealing. Tesla may turn out to be just the primer in the shot toward fast renewable/EV tech, or it could be another giant company in a few years. We need giant companies to get this all rolled out, small companies are too vulnerable. We need CEO’s and owners that don’t give a shit if they really make a profit in doing it.
Range Anxiety? More like range boredom.
Two hobbyists built electric car from spare parts, now they’re going after a record set by Tesla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbnvZlPZZQc
For those still running ICE’s.
The million mile Lexus. It drips oil , it rattles, it’s needs some work, but it still runs great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyB63m-iiOU&t=471s
It will probably be a few years before we see the first million mile EV.
Much technology, channeled through us as it were, is what got us into the messes we are in, in the first place.
So Musk, or shallow dime-a-dozen declarations (amid ‘token’ concerns for the ecosystem) by the anonymous online likes of you, GoneFishing, isn’t going to automagically change any of that.
Gasoline usage can go down when it simply doesn’t get used. You don’t need new ‘waste streams’ from new technologies to achieve that.
Trump Cabinet Member:
Wilbur Ross is accused of swindling $120 million from associates and ‘could rank among the biggest grifters in American history,’ according to a bombshell Forbes report
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Wilbur-Ross-is-accused-of-swindling-120-million-13137677.php
Republican voters seem to like/respect that kind of thing. After all, they voted for the bankruptcy king.
It does appear to be a asset, not a liability.
Also, ignorance is a plus, and admired by our Repug Friends.
The idiot continues to show his distain for the environment –
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Wednesday issued a directive that prioritizes water for fighting wildland fires over protecting endangered species. The move comes just two days after California officials dismissed President Donald Trump’s claims that the fires have been exacerbated by a water shortage resulting from “bad environmental laws.”
To California, The Wildfires Are Tragic. To The Trump Administration, They’re Convenient. The Commerce Department has ordered that water use be prioritized for firefighters — who say water isn’t the issue. The decision isn’t really about fire.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-administration-politics-water-california-wildfires_us_5b6b8a6de4b0bdd062063481
In other news, there are seismic shifts underway in the global economic paradigm. The new global powers apparently are charting courses that at least for the moment do not include the US in the conversation, let alone in a leadership role. However there are hints that if the agreements recently signed by the EU and China are fully implemented then the rest of the world will pretty much have to fall in line and follow their lead. To be clear the 20th century linear economic growth model no longer works in the currently developing global ecosystem and the outmoded thinking that highlights nationalism and trade barriers is counterproductive to solving our global predicaments.
https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/news/china-eu-agreement-paves-way-for-global-adoption-of-circular-economy?utm_source=All+Subscribers&utm_campaign=21b58f073c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_13_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f507e40a10-21b58f073c-87396085
China-EU agreement paves way for global adoption of circular economy
Mr Yang Chun Ping – Circular economy in China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-36deRWjx0&list=PLXT_ozykGVanA0x8nK7BP7AHNP9Ln2B4P&index=10
It took me a while to find it, but I finally did come across the definition of the ‘circular economy’ referred to-
‘economic relationships that rotate in a circular circulation manner, so to speak’
Its all becoming so much clearer now. Trapezoidal flows are so yesterday.
It took me a while to find it, but I finally did come across the definition of the ‘circular economy’ referred to-
‘economic relationships that rotate in a circular circulation manner, so to speak’
Not exactly! The concept of a circular economy is to model its functioning on how an ecosystem works. In a healthy ecosystem there is no waste.
Everything is used as an input to another trophic level. The main source of energy for the entire system is sunlight which is used by photosynthetic organisms to produce organic compounds from CO2, H2O and minerals.
See simplified diagram of a functioning ecosystem below. Actually it might be useful to think of the diagram as representing a single slice through a much more complex interconnected spherical system.
.
And so in a circular economy we all go down the toilet together?
In a circular economy what goes down the toilet is used as an input resource for some other process 😉
Haw haw! You are the proverbial drunk uncle ruining Thanksgiving diner by blabbing out right wing propaganda at the top of your lungs.
This is part of an increasing trend that developing countries are looking to Europe for the answer to their problems, not America.
Trump has abdicated America’s former role as Leader of the Free World, and its City on the Hill and American Exceptionalism rhetoric isn’t taken seriously by anyone outside the country any more.
It’s time for Americans to wake up and start fixing their country.
Start with the Senate. Recognizing the unlikelyhood of Trump leaving any time soon (that is before January 2021) our best hope is to thwart him in the Senate. Remember that the Senate must confirm all federal judgeships, all cabinet posts and all senior executive appointees. The Senate also acts as final jury in impeachments. There are 15 Senate races that are important to gain seats in November: AZ, FL, IN, MI, MO, MT, ND, NJ, NV, OH, PA, TN, TX, WI, WV.
Some are long shots but you can’t win if you don’t play.
https://www.businessinsider.com/hsbc-warns-earth-is-running-out-of-resources-for-life-2018-8
One of the largest banks issued an alarming warning that Earth is running out of the resources to sustain life
HSBC said companies and governments are not “adequately prepared” for climate effects.
One of the world’s largest banks says the planet is running out of resources and warns that neither governments nor companies are prepared for climate change.
The world spent its entire natural resource budget for the year by August 1, a group of analysts at HSBC said in a note that cited research from the Global Footprint Network (GFN).
That means that the world’s citizens used up all the planet’s resources for the year in just seven months, according to GFN’s analysis.
Could we be seeing a turning of civilization? The banks getting on the global warming/overshoot band wagon too?
Recent studies have shown that global temperatures by the year 2100 could be up to 15% higher than the highest projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From the embedded link:
When climate models are constrained by what scientists actually observe, the authors said, they generally project more warming. The models that most accurately reflect today’s climate therefore tend to be the ones that predict the most warming by the end of the century.
Okay, so what will be done about it? More papers, more articles, more yammering?
Another beautiful day here. Into the mid 80’s and partly sunny. Been a great summer here temperature and weather wise except for that one storm that crushed several houses in the neighborhood, even had some of the insects come back lately, though the frogs seem to have disappeared again. The bird migration is starting, so seeing more species types now. Leaves have been falling off some trees for a couple of weeks now, we have had plenty of rain.
I suspect that my area will lose a lot of trees over the next decade, from storms. One big abandoned wooded area next to me is now almost wide open in the center due to storms taking down the trees over the last eight years. It used to be packed full of trees 70 to 90 feet high. More are growing, but it will take 60 years or more to replace them if the storms don’t get worse. Lots of dirt movement downhill due to erosion from the strong storms.
Apparently there are more tree diseases coming along. I watched a lot of the hemlock forest die over the last decade. Change is happening quickly even in more out of the way and temperate places, not near the edge. Poisons are everywhere.
Okay, so what will be done about it? More papers, more articles, more yammering
You forgot MORE DENIAL!
Sad to say but the fact is that now we need more political action than scientific work.
It’s highly likely that the continued existence of institutions like HSBC and the big investors that they advise is completely antithetical to solving either climate change or resource limits, and I’m betting the authors of these papers know that.
I would tend to agree but with the following caveat:
There is no way they are unaware of the the fact that climate change and resource depletion is a fundamental threat to their very existence and have probably been aware of that fact for a long time. So with regards their sounding such an alarm, ‘They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t’!
Still, that fact that they are openly stating this reality to the world at large may indicate a willingness to start a discussion about necessary fundamental global economic and social paradigm change.
When one of the biggest global international banks openly discusses climate change threats, at the very least, it marginalizes and makes it a bit more difficult for those that still attempt to deny our current state of affairs to ply their doubt sowing trade.
It seems the cat is now pretty much out of the bag! 😉
There is no global warming. The Sun is quieting down and global cooling is underway instead.
It would be funny if you weren’t serious.
Folks don’t waste your time here. He isn’t interested in factual reality.
He is a Euan Mearns groupie. I think they get paid by the fossil industry.
And that comment pretty much summarises why we are so fucked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFuFm0m2wj0
“Get Back Up Again” Clip | TROLLS
“If you knock, knock, knock me over, I will get back up again”!
Climate Researchers Warn Only Hope For Humanity Now Lies In Possibility They Making All Of This Up
GENEVA—Saying the time to act has come and gone, a group of researchers from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned Tuesday that any hope for the future of humanity now hinges on the possibility that scientists like themselves are simply making all of this up. “After reviewing our climate models and projections of worldwide CO2 emissions, we have come to the conclusion that the only scenario in which the human race survives is if our thousands upon thousands of meticulous empirical studies on climate change turn out to be something we’ve been lying about all along,” said climate scientist Philip Vanderwall,
😉
LOL! I do love good satire but I just don’t think that is far enough away from the actual truth to make it work anymore…
If nothing else, I will leave a note to my son, admitting that I too was involved in that massive, nefarious conspiracy spanning every country on the face of the earth in order to do my part in saving the planet for future generations. Unfortunately, despite all our best efforts, it just wasn’t enough!
😉
David,
I thought the following would be a good explanation of climate change for my Grandson (age 10) but perhaps it might suffice for you as well. If it’s too advanced perhaps you should wait a few years until after you’ve grown up a bit. Concentrate hard now.
FROM GREENHOUSE TO HOTHOUSE: CLIMATE CHANGE
“The mechanism by which atmospheric gases warm the planet has been well understood since the 19th century. High CO2 levels early in the Earth’s history, wrote the geologist Thomas Sterry Hunt in 1867, had created the sort of climate that would have resulted if we “had covered the Earth with an immense dome of glass, had transformed it into a great orchid house”. The term “greenhouse effect” was coined.
But a “hothouse” sounds far more intense. From the 16th century, a hothouse was a bathhouse or a brothel, or a heated room for drying linen, and then a heated greenhouse for cultivating exotic species, metaphorically extended to an environment in which anything grows very quickly. Its products are often said to be highly delicate, if not sickly. We are already wilting like hothouse flowers this summer, and there might be no way to smash the glass.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/09/greenhouse-hothouse-verbal-climate-change-irreversible-global-warming-scientists
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
– George Carlin
A Worrying New Energy Chart Shows The World Is Not Even Close to Kicking Coal
Three charts, produced and published by the oil and energy giant BP, which releases a Statistical Review of World Energy every year, has revealed that after several years of free fall, the global consumption and production of coal is making a comeback.
Looking at the first graph, you can see that last year, coal consumption grew for the very first time since 2013.
While China’s coal output in 2017 increased by 3.6 percent, America’s coal output increased by nearly double that number, shooting up by 6.9 percent.
https://www.sciencealert.com/worrying-energy-chart-coal-consumption-production-renewables
Almost 50 years of warnings and the best we have done is hold back the rise, which is a considerable feat in a fast growing world that is not really serious yet about survival.
Besides that nasty coal, is oil exploration in a (former) wildlife refuge playing cricket? Out of sight, out of mind I suppose. Somehow, I keep forgetting EVs are going to save the planet: too busy tracking wildfires raging across Siberia, California, Europe, and yes, in my own backyard — British Columbia.
SEE THE SCARS THAT OIL EXPLORATION CUT ACROSS ALASKA’S WILDERNESS
“Matt Nolan, who runs a mapping business in Alaska using aerial photography, was flying a small plane to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeastern part of the state last month when he noticed a pattern on the tundra. Dr. Nolan, a geophysicist, saw a grid of tracks left by heavy vehicles involved in recent seismic testing for oil and gas exploration in an area called Point Thomson. The tracks, several hundred yards apart, were as regular as a checkerboard and ran across the landscape just outside of the refuge. A similar dense grid may soon cover some of the refuge itself, perhaps beginning as early as December, if seismic testing starts under a plan to sell leases for oil and gas exploration that was approved by Congress last year and that is strongly opposed by environmental and conservation groups. The northern part of the refuge, 1.5 million acres of the Arctic coastal plain known as the 1002 Area, is thought to overlie billions of barrels of oil and gas.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/climate/alaska-anwr-seismic-testing-tracks.html
Disturbances like the tracks Dr. Nolan saw could remain for decades or longer like a tattoo on the refuge, a vast tableau of mosses, sedges and shrubs atop permafrost that is considered one of the most pristine landscapes in North America. There are still signs, for example, of a much less dense pattern of tracks from the only other time testing was allowed there, in the mid-1980s, and of the only drilling pad, which was built at the same time.
Maybe a complete collapse of industrial civilization would be a good thing!
It would open up new ways of looking at the world. Right now we are stuck in BAU with our heads up our asses!
Some people think that since coal has declined in USA over the past 10 years (since fracking), it must be so everywhere.
But the USA has been very fortunate to have very much Nat Gas which has replaced coal for electricity production, with lesser contribution by very strong wind and solar resource in the USA.
Many other countries who use coal don’t have the luxury of such easy/inexpensive replacement.
Of the top ten coal consuming countries, only two have plentiful alternatives- USA and Russia (Russia could use Nat gas if they had too).
That leaves China, India, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and Poland. Many of these countries are in extremely poor shape when it comes to energy security.
For example, %net imports of energy consumption as of 2015 is Germany 64%, Japan 95%, S. Korea 87%, India 36%, Turkey 81%.
Don’t expect these countries to miraculously do without coal anytime soon.
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-world-consumption-data.html
you can click on the map to see a particular country graph- try India
Hickory,
Try India indeed. They’ve become the top recipient of US coal exports and they’ll bring it in from wherever they can get it. India is the scary member of the pack.
I believe Australia is their biggest supplier of coal.
Oops wrong-
https://www.exportgenius.in/blog/australias-coal-exports-in-2017-australia-coal-exports-statistics-293.php
And India does get 12% of USA exported coal , which is the most of any individual country (2017).
Not even remotely survivable —
But I’m betting Pakistan will go over the Falls first.
Federal budget deficit increases 79% in July
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/federal-budget-deficit-increases-79-in-july-2018-08-10?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Increases? That is good right?
In Australia the “debate” continues:
States return serve to Frydenberg, as News Corp rolls out climate deniers
Remember Ian Plimer? Quite possibly the inspiration for the First Dog on the Moon character Ian the Climate Denialist Potato. Well, he’s back. Just in time for the crucial vote on the National Energy Guarantee this Friday at CoAG and, more importantly, next Tuesday in the Coalition party room.
“Climate policy is underpinned by two fallacies. The first is that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. The second is that future climate can be predicted from computer models,” he writes, casually batting away decades of scientific research and an overwhelming global consensus.
Victoria calls out Coalition’s “climate crazies”, Frydenberg digs in
The Victoria Labor state government has thrown down the gauntlet to the federal Coalition government and its climate-denying conservative wing, demanding three-year reviews as the price of its support for the proposed National Energy Guarantee.
The ACT government has also refined its condition of support, suggesting a review once the target gets close to the 26 per cent by 2030 target that the federal government is seeking to set in stone. It pretty much amounts to the same thing demanded by Victoria, given that the 26 per cent target will be met within a few years.
“We can still get this right – but only if Malcolm Turnbull stares down the climate-crazies in his party and puts a workable scheme on the table that doesn’t hurt local jobs and households,” energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio says in a statement.
The demands of Victoria and ACT – which reflect their long expressed concern about the inadequacies of the NEG – are designed to test both the Coalition and the big business claim that they are looking for a bipartisan solution, rather than simply legislating to block renewables in their tracks.
However, federal environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg on Wednesday refused to budge, saying the Coalition was focused on prices rather than emissions, and even citing the risk of blackouts.
PV Magazine’s take:
Australian states harden stance on unambitious national policy as energy bodies take opposing sides
The Victoria government has defined four concrete conditions it wants in exchange for supporting Australia’s much-maligned National Energy Guarantee. If neglected, those red lines could turn into an insurmountable obstacle at Friday’s vote on the national strategy.
Casting a long shadow over the NEG – which needs the unanimous support of state and territory ministers – the clear and unambiguous statement issued by Daniel Andrews’ Labor administration said Victoria can support the NEG only if specific conditions are met that keep energy prices low and support employment.
“We won’t support any scheme that puts our renewable energy industry and Victorian jobs at risk,” Victoria Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change Lily D’Ambrosio said in a statement.
Victoria says the conditions will also ensure the Victorian Renewable Energy Target of 40% clean energy by 2025 – and the thousands of local jobs it supports – will be protected.
Then there’s this:
Majority of Australians want more renewables, poll shows
With a growing clamour of voices warning about the disincentives for renewables embodied in Australia’s National Energy Guarantee (NEG), a new poll shows most Aussies want clean power to play a greater role in the country’s energy mix and say they should be used as the sole guarantee of lower electricity prices.
The poll, conducted by ReachTEL for Greenpeace Australia Pacific, suggests 70% of respondents want an ambitious renewable energy target, and more than 67% agree renewable energy should receive more government support than fossil fuels.
Those figures do not align with the policy settings of the NEG, which envisage only a 2% increase in renewable energy’s share in the national electricity market over the next decade.
Although the NEG is said to offer a promise of AU$150 (US$111) of savings per year, it is not clear how this is calculated, due to a lack of modeling information in the final design of the NEG, released by the Energy Security Board last week.
Maybe the reason for the above poll results is this:
EnergyAustralia trebles profit, even as consumers flee
Australia’s big three gen-tailers continue their orgy of money making at the expense of consumers, with EnergyAustralia this week reporting a trebling of its half-year profit, even as wrung out customers quit the company by the tens of thousands.
The owner of the ageing Yallourn brown coal generator, itself owned by Hong Kong-listed CLP Group, on Monday reported a net profit of $A375 million to June 2018, up from $A129 million a year earlier.
The surge in profit comes off the back of sustained high wholesale electricity prices – even despite a reported customer churn of around 60,000 for the half – and apparently unscathed by the energy policy war playing out between the federal government and the states.
Rupert Murdoch needs to be taken out and shot for crimes against humanity.
Against wasted politics: A critique of the circular economy
The Circular Economy Will Not Save the World. This is Why. (Part 2 of 2)
And so in a circular economy we all go down the toilet together
Report: FERC working with White House, NSC on coal and nuclear bailout
In June, President Trump directed the DOE to devise a plan to keep the uneconomic generators online, saying their retirement could put national security at risk. The order came the same day as the release of the NSC memo, which argued the large plants are more secure than those fueled by natural gas.
An offer utilities can’t refuse: The low cost of utility-scale solar
Contrary to the word from Washington, D.C., utility-scale renewables are not “badly behaved coal plants” that threaten grid reliability and national security, Seb Henbest, lead author of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance New Energy Outlook, wrote July 25. “By 2050, we’re painting a picture of an electricity system utterly reshaped around cheap wind, solar and batteries.”
Wind and solar were 8.2% of U.S. generation in 2017, with wind at 6.3% and solar at 1.9%, and U.S. grids are integrating record levels of renewables without disruption. Wind was 54% of Texas generation on October 27, 2017, and wind and solar together provided 64.6% of California’s power on May 26, 2018.
Investors say “phenomenally abundant” renewables could support a trillion-dollar U.S. market by 2030 and solar will play a key part, according to an April American Council on Renewable Energy survey.
Utilities are seeing the opportunity and responding, according to the 2018 Utility Solar Market Snapshot released in July by the SEPA.
I cannot see how this is going to end well if the Trump administration’s efforts to bail out coal and nuclear are even remotely successful.
Warning, life support failure on all decks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3hbVM3_Ksw
.
Machine culture is nothing new.
1936 Footage of Car Assembly Line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPpTK2ezxL0
1940s USA, Industry, Factory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aStMvcdFO74
1950s Factory Operation – This Is Automation – Automated Manufacturing – CharlieDeanArchives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WW_WbYVlU0
Organic solar cells set ‘remarkable’ energy record
Manufacturers have long used silicon to make solar panels because the material was the most efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.
But organic photovoltaics, made from carbon and plastic, promise a cheaper way of generating electricity.
This new study shows that organics can now be just as efficient as silicon.
Commercial solar photovoltaics usually covert 15-22% of sunlight, with a world record of 26.6% reached in Japan in 2016.
Organics have long lingered at around half this rate, but this year has seen some major leaps forward.
In April researchers were able to reach 15% in tests. Now this new study pushes that beyond 17% with the authors saying that up to 25% is possible.
This is important because according to estimates, with a 15% efficiency and a 20 year lifetime, organic solar cells could produce electricity at a cost of less than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45132427
OPV seems to crop up on a regular basis but no sign of it leaving the labs. The question is how much rare or toxic stuff does it use? Will it scale or will it always be an expensive novelty?
NAOM
The question is how much rare or toxic stuff does it use?
I guess it all depends on how toxic and rare carbon-based materials and plastics are… From the article:
What are organic solar cells?
The term organic relates to the fact that carbon-based materials are at the heart of these devices, rather than silicon. The square or rectangular solid solar panels that most of us are familiar with, require fixed installation points usually on roofs or in flat fields.
Organic photovoltaics (OPV) can be made of compounds that are dissolved in ink so they can be printed on thin rolls of plastic, they can bend or curve around structures or even be incorporated into clothing.
Well, let us not forget that cyanide contains carbon. It is not so much the organic base but any additives, dopants, dyes etc. OPVs seem to keep popping up then…
NAOM
Fig. 1. Schematic of plastic solar cells. PET – polyethylene terephthalate, ITO – indium tin oxide, PEDOT:PSS – poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), active layer (usually a polymer:fullerene blend), Al – aluminium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell
.
Interesting, quite a chemical soup is required. They would need to be able to produce these as a moving ribbon , think printing newsprint, rather than disk at a time o be effective. I am still concerned what ‘magic soup’ they may add to improve characteristics and lifetime. They don’t sound anywhere near to commercial yet.
NAOM
This is important because according to estimates, with a 15% efficiency and a 20 year lifetime, organic solar cells could produce electricity at a cost of less than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Not if the idiots who support the current administration in the US have their say!
Truth be told, the agenda of the fossil fuel supporting, climate change denying, fascist, authoritarian populist religious right, is still being pushed hard and the majority of the American public is sound asleep at the wheel! Fuck these people!
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2018-08-09/at-america-first-energy-conferenc-solar-power-is-dumb-climate-change-is-fake
At ‘America First Energy Conference’, Solar Power Is Dumb, Climate Change Is Fake
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Pumping carbon dioxide into the air makes the planet greener; the United Nations puts out fake science about climate change to control the global energy market; and wind and solar energy are simply “dumb”.
These are among the messages that flowed from the America First Energy Conference in New Orleans this week, hosted by some of the country’s most vocal climate change doubters – and attended by a handful of Trump administration officials.
The second annual conference, organized by the conservative thinktank the Heartland Institute, pulled together speakers from JunkScience, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Center For Industrial Progress, along with officials from the U.S. Department of Interior and the White House for panels that included: “Carbon Taxes, Cap & Trade, and Other Bad Ideas,” “Fiduciary Malpractice: The Sustainable Investment Movement,” and “Why CO2 Emissions Are Not Creating A Climate Crisis.”
…4-Star General Warns: President Trump Behavior ‘More Alarming And Illogical’ | The Last Word
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmLxwMD3Q30
Here’s pretty much what a Trump rally and his supporters look like…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co
Tomorrow belongs to me Cabaret
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19IhRaWZUl4&vl=en
Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The 20th Century”
One of the scariest parts of a very scary movie——–
Yeah, except that we are now reliving it in real time!
I’m afraid so—-
It didn’t end well for them, in fact it was really bad.
Over on the oil side they are ringing the peak oil gong, not going to be fun with half the government or more in fantasyland along with at least a third of the population.
So put some popcorn in the microwave, sit back and enjoy the show. It’s an oldie but goodie rerun.
Cheers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVo5I0xNRhg
The MAIN Reason Why Germany Lost WW2 – OIL
Solar panels are LEDs running backwards in time, so the comparison to OLED technology is interesting. Most of the industry expects OLEDs to take over.
Chinese EV battery Giga-factories on line and growing and growing fast.
https://qz.com/1317745/here-are-all-the-gigafactories-that-chinese-electric-vehicle-battery-giants-are-building/
Vix
13.05
+1.78(+15.79%)
Hmmm– Is it starting to happen?
Would need to be several times higher before a real risk occurs,, it may be up very short term but is not that high overall.
NAOM
Ok—
But it is interesting.
The Vix has been incredibly at a low point.
Time will tell——
The incredibly low bit is more troubling.
NAOM
Not much solid ice left in the Arctic Ocean, still over a month to go to minimum.
I think that right now the Arctic looks much better than in 2012.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
The long term trend however is dismal.
Only on the surface, the ice is thinner and younger now.
Also, 2012 is an example of an extreme, which might happen again. If that extreme happened again next year, there would be no ice in September.
I meant to compare it to the extreme. I especially like the nsidc site because it lets you look at the annual curves for over 20 years either singly or in groups. It paints a pretty ugly history of how the extent is trending down but with wide variation.
Where do you get the thickness data? I do wonder if the minimum extent goes up and down so dramatically why the thickness would act differently by much.
I don’t think there is good comprehensive (or even representative) thickness data.
Is there?
There are several sources I use. PIOMAS has volume data and NSDIC has area data. I don’t use sea ice extent because it can be off by 40 to 60 percent from actual sea ice area due to the 15% rule.
According to PIOMAS average Arctic sea ice thickness has dropped below one meter at least twice. Almost a meter loss since 1990. Combine that with an area loss of about 40 percent at minimum and it gives about 1/3 of the ice volume now compared to about 1990.
Big Trouble Musk-Land
Inside Tesla’s troubled New York solar factory
Republican New York state Assemblyman Ray Walter, who represents a district near the factory, said it concerned him that only a small portion of the plant appeared functional when he toured it in March.
“After investing $750 million of taxpayer money, we want it to work out,” he said. “It just does not look like it’s heading down that path.”
Tesla said in its statement that the facility now employs about 600 people and is on track to meet all of its commitments.
None of the Tesla sources could provide a production figure for the solar roof, saying only that output was low and frequently interrupted. They said only the textured black version of the solar roof had been produced so far, one of four varieties Tesla is marketing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/inside-teslas-troubled-new-york-solar-factory-idUSKBN1KT0DU
Big Trouble Musk-Land
LOL! Where exactly is the BIG TROUBLE in Musk-Land?!
I think you selectively forgot to mention this part from the same article:
Empire State Development, the state’s economic development arm, is overseeing the agreement. The agency believes Tesla is currently meeting its obligations, said spokeswoman Pamm Lent, adding that the company would face penalties of $41.2 million a year if it falters.
And for the 100th time why are TESLA’s problems any more or less relevant than any other business’. Some businesses succeed, others fail. It’s what happens in a free market dog eat dog, capitalist system.
Oh, BTW, look! BIG TROUBLE in Shale Oil-Land!
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Struggle-Continues-For-Bankrupt-Shale-Drillers.html
The Struggle Continues For Bankrupt Shale Drillers
So who’s going to be left holding the bag on all of that?!
The problem is the entire failed capitalist system!
Cheers!
P.S.
You want to talk about BIG TROUBLE?!
How’s this?
Today, about 7 metric tons of fish are caught per 1,000 kilometers traveled by the fleets of 20 countries, less than a third of the more than 25 metric tons they caught in the 1950s
Mongabay
What was the world population in the 1950’s compared to today?
What was the world population in the 1950’s compared to today?
The population in the US has more than tripled since my birth in CA.
I think you other humans need to get off my planet– I was here first!
Yeah! Says the guy who ate all our fish! 😉
I was actually a commercial fisherman in Guam.
Troll fished– mostly sold to sushi bars (they knew their fish!)
Don’t do it anymore– collapsing planet, and you get real tired of killing things. But at least you know how things work– something only a small fraction of people know.
“The cost per watt for those systems was listed at nearly $6, according to the records. That’s about double the national average for solar systems. ”
Each solar watt comes with a free roof attached. This comment totally omits the fact that people who install these are also installing a long life roof whereas conventional panels you have to provide the roof first.
NAOM
Southern increases Vogtle nuke price tag by $1.1 billion
The Vogtle plant is the sole nuclear facility under construction in the United States and has become a symbol of an industry plagued by delays and cost overruns.
The $27 billion pricetag is more than double what Southern estimated the Vogtle expansion would cost when Georgia regulators approved it in 2008, and the plant is more than five years behind schedule.
If they had used half of $27 billion and started construction of solar farms starting in about 2013, when construction of the nuclear units began, they might have been able to build about 3 GW of solar PV at $4.00 per watt construction costs and would have been able to complete construction easily within two years. If they then took the escalation in costs of the nuclear facility up to the present they could have maybe financed another 2 GW of PV at $2.50 per watt. Taking the expected 8.4 billion in expected escalation until scheduled completion in 2021 and 2022, they could have built another 5 GW at more than $1.50 per watt. So they could have ended up with 10 GW of solar PV over a ten year period for a similar amount of money they are paying for a problem plagued 2.234 GW nuclear expansion.
I know it’s an apples versus oranges comparison but still, 10 GW of solar PV could possible generate almost as much total electricity over a year as 2.234 GW of nuclear capacity. Mind boggling!
No SWAT team involved apparently.
GERMAN POLICE SAVE MAN FROM BABY SQUIRREL TERROR
“German police have come to the rescue of a man being chased by a baby squirrel. Officers in the south-western city of Karlsruhe responded to the call for help and arrived to see the creature still terrorizing the caller. The squirrel was taken into custody after it abruptly fell asleep. A police report of the incident says the persistent rodent has become their new mascot and has been dubbed Karl-Friedrich.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45150298
LOL! My sister lives near Karlsruhe, nice town.
eFredM,
The retractable dog leash was invented there.
Are you yanking my chain? 😉
Nah, he’s leading you on.
I did two years in Karlsruhe in the 60s. Absolutely loved it.
Hated the Army, however.
Coming back here a few minutes to post something every once in a while is a real pleasure, but I don’t have time enough anymore to post much myself.
Hang in there, everybody.I’m lurking, and still gathering great links and comments for my own work in progress, and thanks.
Here’s a long read that every last regular here should really enjoy, while taking it to heart about being TOO SURE he has all the answers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/
Here’s a couple of paragraphs from this piece.
“The greatest area of consensus between the volcanists and the impacters seems to be on what insults to sling. Both sides accuse the other of ignoring data. Keller says that her pro-impact colleagues “will not listen or discuss evidence that is contrary to what they believe”; Alan Hildebrand, a prominent impacter, says Keller “doesn’t look at all the evidence.” Each side dismisses the other as unscientific: “It’s not science. It sometimes seems to border on religious fervor, basically,” says Keller, whose work Smit calls “barely scientific.” Both sides contend that the other is so stubborn, the debate will be resolved only when the opposition croaks. “You don’t convince the old people about a new idea. You wait for them to die,” jokes Courtillot, the volcanism advocate, paraphrasing Max Planck. Smit agrees: “You just have to let them get extinct.”
All the squabbling raises a question: How will the public know when scientists have determined which scenario is right? It is tempting, but unreliable, to trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Forty-one co-authors signed on to a 2010 Science paper asserting that Chicxulub was, after all the evidence had been evaluated, conclusively to blame for the dinosaurs’ death. Case closed, again. Although some might consider this proof of consensus, dozens of geologists, paleontologists, and biologists wrote in to the journal contesting the paper’s methods and conclusions. Science is not done by vote.”
I’m sure everybody is tired of my lecturing them about badmouthing people who disagree with them concerning politics and culture.
But in the end each of us has to decide whether it’s more important to vent our frustrations and have some fun at the expense of the political opposition, OR win over some opposition and fence sitting VOTERS.
Now I’m just another born and bred redneck southern hillbilly, from a fundamentalist/ evangelical / conservative culture, and don’t give a damn who knows it. There’s plenty to be proud of, plenty to be ashamed of, in EVERY culture I know anything about, and if I say so myself, I’m VERY well read.
People are basically all alike, when you get down to the nitty gritty.
NOTE THAT THE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE VOLCANISM/ IMPACT WARS ARE MOSTLY TENURED SCIENTISTS! Virtually all of them are well trained professionals, excepting of course such people as write about this debate for public consumption. They may or may not know doo doo from apple butter.
MY POINT is that if tenured professors at well known universities, some of these universities being generally acknowledged as among the best of the best, can’t be bothered to seriously consider what the opposition has to say……….
Well, why should anyone here have a problem understanding why poor and poorly educated or totally uneducated people have a problem understanding economic and environmental politics?
If we try to meet such people as my neighbors and a substantial portion of my own family halfway, and talk to them respectfully, and LISTEN to their concerns, we can win them over ……. often enough to win elections.
We only need to move a couple of per cent of voters from the R side to the D side, as a general rule, in the upcoming elections this fall and in 2020.
Personally I’m spending nearly all the time I used to spend here on that very job…….. and I’m succeeding, one person at a time, by talking to less well off older women who are worried about their future health care costs…….. one on one.
BY talking to people who have had somebody close to them die ……. very possibly because of environmental pollution, having been exposed on the job to dangerous pollutants. One of them was one of my last surviving uncles, who lost the use of his legs in his old age due to having used really nasty pesticides all thru his younger years, in the professional opinions of the neurologists at Wake Forest U/Bowman Gray who did all they could for him.
A heart to heart with his four kids, all of them middle aged working class people, resulted in the promise of four votes for the D’s from here on out. It didn’t hurt that I could show them how much cheaper certain drugs ( one of them being a diabetic) are in Canada than they are here in Virginia, and WHY.
Another neighbor is obsessed with fishing, to the point that every dime he can put his hands on goes into his boat and the truck he uses to tow it. He USED to vote R without a second thought…….. until I took the time to gradually introduce him to the real facts involving pollution and fishing within three hundred miles of our local community. He now acknowledges that the D’s are the party of the environment, although he is still convinced the R’s are right about a lot of things, such as too many immigrants taking too many jobs that would otherwise be available to local people who lack the education and or skills necessary to land more desirable jobs. Jesus, according to his preacher, doesn’t believe in abortions, etc.
He’s a work in progress, but I’m going to win him over, for sure, because he has heart trouble out the ying yang, and I’m gradually introducing him to the FACTS involving health care, Democrats, and Republicans.
He’s gradually coming to the realization that his very LIFE may well depend on the D’s controlling health care politics.
There are enough people in HIS shoes alone to put the D’s in control…….. if we could muster enough people to talk to them, and LISTEN to them, one on one.
Here’s a long read that every last regular here should really enjoy, while taking it to heart about being TOO SURE he has all the answers.
I read the entire piece and my take away is this:
First, that is exactly how science works. See Thomas Kuhn, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’
The Resolution of Revolutions
These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another.
Bold mine.
Of course there is always controversy and ego involved if an established theory is disputed. Second, I’m neither a geologist nor a paleontologist and have not read enough of the relevant literature to be able to judge the merits of Dr. Keller’s arguments. However, I do know that the asteroid impact theory has quite a lot of solid evidence to back it up. And I also know there has been quite a bit written in the scientific literature that seems to point a smoking gun at the contribution of massive basaltic lava flows to other mass extinction events.
So it seems to me, that it might be conceivable that the two theories may not be mutually exclusive and may indeed both have played roles it the extinction of the Dinosaurs and other forms of life 65 mya, give or take.
That being said, there seems to be little doubt that humans and our activities are playing a significant role in what may be a sixth mass extinction event and ushering in a new geologic era which some are calling The Anthropocene. Denial of the fact that CO2 is a green house gas and that it is contributing to the warming of the planet and contributing to climate change is no longer a valid debating point.
Ignorance and Science denial are a very different beasts from heated scientific debate. The layperson seems to think they can see anything they please just because there is scientific debate..
Convincing people who believe otherwise is a rather daunting task for many reasons and I will not list them here as most readers of this site are already quite familiar with them.
Now, while being engaged in swaying political opinion amongst voters at this particular junction in American history is still a valid and most nobel use of one’s time, It is not an endeavor for which I have any personal appetite. So if you are so inclined, more power to you, and I hereby remove my hat in respect.
Cheers and best of luck!
“So, it seems to me, that it might be conceivable that the two theories may not be mutually exclusive, and may indeed both have played roles it the extinction of the Dinosaurs and other forms of life 65 mya, give or take.”
BINGO, the always rational Fred Magyar gets tonight’s stuffed animal – a full-sized Brontosaurus. Also add to discussion the fact that the “Dinosaur Extinction” was not as abrupt as commonly portrayed. Many of these fellows had gone the way of the dodo long before the Permian–Triassic extinction event. Hobbits developing a taste for dino eggs? Regardless, around the P–Tr boundary there was an 8 °C rise in temperature and an abrupt increase in CO2 levels (by 2000 ppm). Be warned all you David Archibalds!
Estimable DougL,
Wrong extinction. It’s the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction (around 66 million years ago) that’s associated with the final disappearance of the dinosaur species that hadn’t already disappeared, not the Permo-Triassic one. The Permo-Triassic extinction was pre-dinosaur and pre-mammal and actually had two pulses (since you ask) with the second, about 252 million years ago, doing most of the work.
The Permo-Triassic (THE biggie!), Triassic-Jurassic (A biggie), and Cretaceous-Tertiary (‘nother biggie) are all associated with enormous outpourings of basaltic lava; only the Cretaceous-Teriary one had an auxiliary impact to help out. As Walter Alvarez put it “Sometimes you have a really bad day.”
Synapsid —
Thanks, I stand corrected.
“He now acknowledges that the D’s are the party of the environment”
OldFarmerMac, sometimes you just have to hold your nose and vote party. Which is a problem the Democrats have a lot more often than Republicans. Now you seem to be a person who preaches “do as I say and not as I do”.
I’m with Fred, I’m done babysitting people who vote against their own best interest. As long as the Fox News cancer exist in America. Democracy is a dying breed along with the environment.
HB–
On a micro level big differences (women’s rights, the environment {as long as it doesn’t infringe on donors profits}), etc.
Macro level? The Dims and Repugs are remarkable the same.
Can you say Capitalism comrades? I knew you could—-
Hence the problem– a slow (maybe) or fast death.
We are all going to die. It was only a couple of months ago you traveled to the big city for a heart procedure. That Democratic supported socialized Medicare paid your capitalistic doctor bills now didn’t it?
The Republicans would rather cut Medicare spending and build a new arm of the military called the Space Force. Maybe you should register to vote.
Hard to get more macro than the environment
Well, the US is 31st in the world.
Costa Rica beat us at 30, but spends 1/5 as much per person.
Cuba is right behind– but its spending a fraction of ours.
Obviously, we are not Japan or France, which spends half as much, and has much better systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
They obviously have socialized medicine.
“halfway, and talk to them respectfully, and LISTEN to their concerns,”
Thanks OFM. I respect that work.
I actually doubt that talking to “them” will do any good. The 35% hard core Trumpsters will not succumb to anything like reason. However there is a middle 30-some% that will listen. The battle in 2018 is to energize a lazy and disheartened base and to have those patient conversations with the reasonable folk who have convinced themselves that both parties are corrupt.
That last bit is true but right now irrelevant.
OFM,
Surprising what common sense and civility can do isn’t it, especially when you can back it up with evidence. Keep it up–we need more of your approach. I use it too.
That Atlantic link, now: I wish someone other than Bianca Bosker had written it. Tigers in Belize, anacondas in Madagascar, impact generating “fireballs, crushing tsunamis”–high-school students can do better. There’s a good deal of content that’s informative in the article if you don’t let the style get in the way.
The limits to global‐warming mitigation by terrestrial carbon removal
Our results show that those tCDR measures are unable to counteract “business‐as‐usual” emissions without eliminating virtually all natural ecosystems. Even if considerable (Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 [RCP4.5]) emissions reductions are assumed, tCDR with 50% storage efficiency requires >1.1 Gha of the most productive agricultural areas or the elimination of >50% of natural forests. In addition, >100 MtN/yr fertilizers would be needed to remove the roughly 320 GtC foreseen in these scenarios. Such interventions would severely compromise food production and/or biosphere functioning. Second, we reanalyze the requirements for achieving the 160–190 GtC tCDR that would complement strong mitigation action (RCP2.6) in order to avoid 2°C overshoot anytime. We find that a combination of high irrigation water input and/or more efficient conversion to stored carbon is necessary. In the face of severe trade‐offs with society and the biosphere, we conclude that large‐scale tCDR is not a viable alternative to aggressive emissions reduction.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016EF000469
That is far too complex of a comment for 99% of the audience to understand whatever point you are trying to make.
TL;DR translation for the 99%
‘We’re fucked’
NAOM
1) It’s rather condescending and hubristic to think you know what 99% of the audience can or can’t understand (or even 1%). 2) There’s a simple language summary after the abstract in the linked article, many papers have them these days. 3) Not every comment has to be making a point or driving some political debate, they might just be considered of interest to others, whether the poster or the reader agrees or not with each other or the linked articles.
Actually, since the intended audience of that comment is the readership of POB, I’d say that is an incorrect assessment! As for you, it is difficult to tell if you are a troll or a bot or just another idiot!
Exerpted from the conclusions section:
This leaves us with a rather clear, but hardly comforting overall conclusion: Holding the 2°C line seems only feasible if two sets of climate action work hand in hand. On the one hand, greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced as early and as effectively as possible [Luderer et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2016]. In fact, an even more aggressive strategy than reflected by the RCP2.6 scenario should be pursued, aiming at the “induced implosion” of most fossil fuel‐driven business cases in the next couple of decades [Rockström et al., 2016; Schellnhuber et al., 2016]. On the other hand, tCDR can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately. This means that the biological extraction of atmospheric CO2 as well as the suppression of CO2 release from biological systems must draw upon all possible measures—whether they are optimal or not, whether they are high‐ or low‐tech. We therefore suggest fully exploring the pertinent options available now [Rockström et al., 2017a], which include reforestation of degraded land [Lamb et al., 2005; Chazdon, 2008; Reij and Winterbottom, 2015; Morrison, 2016] and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage, e.g., within the Bonn Challenge initiative (http://www.bonnchallenge.org/) or the New York Declaration on Forests [International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (n.d.) Streck et al., 2016]. Further options range from up‐scaled agro‐forestry approaches [Faße et al., 2014; Lasco et al., 2014; Zomer et al., 2016] to the application of biochar [Woolf et al., 2010; Crombie et al., 2015; Smith, 2016] and various no‐tillage practices for food production on appropriate soils [Lal et al., 2012; Davin et al., 2014; Mangalassery et al., 2014; Rockström et al., 2017b]. Also, it becomes overwhelmingly evident that humanity cannot anymore afford to waste up to 50% of its agricultural harvest along various consumption chains [Smith et al., 2013; Hiç et al., 2016] or to go on operating ineffective irrigation systems [Jägermeyr et al., 2015].
So the bottom line is: Do not wait for first‐best solutions, neither in emissions reductions action nor in tCDR practice!
Bold mine.
Unfortunately within the context of the continued inertia of BAU on a planet already in deep ecological overshoot the implications of these conclusions do not bode well. As it is, our total CO2 emissions have already passed the 400 ppm mark and we are now seeing overall average global temperature increases over preindustrial baseline hitting the 1 °C mark with some very troubling signs that certain feedbacks and tipping points in planetary systems may already have been triggered.
It is increasingly becoming clear that a 2 °C increase might be quite dangerous and even a 1.5 °C may make large swaths of currently inhabited areas uninhabitable. Again, the big danger lies in the unknown risks of feedbacks and tipping points.
Here is a highly insulated and sealed house near Boston. It will need very little heat and almost no cooling, which means all the extra cost of insulation and vapor control is far more than taken care of by the smaller heating unit cost an the savings in fuel.
However, to get the real mindset of people listen carefully at 8:00 minutes where the architect explains that “it’s not about efficiency”. That will explain not only the market but how efficiency can be marketed to the public that is not interested in reducing emissions or even saving money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7BqObGA6ss
Heh! Finally, an architect that even ole Doc Joe Lstiburek, can approve of… 😉
Re: Comment at the 8:00 min mark you mention. It’s a tough but true lesson that needs to be learned at the school of hard knocks. Nobody buys energy efficiency!
Regardless, nice house! 6′ X 11′ window with an R7 value, ain’t too shabby either. Wonder what that costs?
Though I’m guessing that for those really cold Boston winter nights I’d probably hang some really thick drapes as an added layer of protection against the chill…
R7 windows are not top of the line tech. It’s R14 now with a special internal layer of clear plastic instead of a third glass layer, really takes care of infrared losses.
I find modern windows an amazing piece of technology that are very poorly placed, sized and utilized. Crazy people spend huge amounts on a window then cover it up with drapes and blinds for privacy/appearance . That prevents both light entry and view to the outside. Defeats the purpose methinks.
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Crazy people spend huge amounts on a window then cover it up with drapes and blinds for privacy/appearance . That prevents both light entry and view to the outside. Defeats the purpose methinks.
Yeah, R14 would prevent that problem!
I have no cure for crazy, but if you think increased R factor will do it, I am for it. :=)
Kevin, it’s clear to anyone who has been keeping up with environmental destruction and global warming. This is a planning paper, meant to point out that a certain geo-engineering technique is non-scalable But on a larger scale it’s an indicator of a bigger problem.
The planning ahead time is over, as exemplified by more and more scientists, engineers and their papers not only promoting mitigation but also bringing forward the absolute need for various global geo-engineering techniques (that may or may not work or even be scalable) to gain control over the situation. The panic is setting in at the academic levels. It is starting to filter down to the government and public levels due to real world events. Once panic sets in, some real action will be taken.
Problem is it will be crisis action, reactionary instead of planned. Planning time is over. All planning ahead is fake, time ran out. Like realizing the enemy breached the wall of the castle and they are now inside with you. It’s plan C time, immediate action, major protection is gone. Not going to be good no matter how it turns out.
There is also the great possibility that given the scale of the problem and the current inability to work together on even simple problems, unified global action will never really be taken and what will be will be.
So far unified global action appears to be to continue pumping more GHG into the air and continue/maintain global environmental destruction.
That is far too complex of a response for Kevin to understand…
I was aiming for the 5 percent who don’t have their head in the sand (or elsewhere).
Is the revolutionary Tesla Semi dead? Some analysts believe so
“Tesla didn’t mention the all-important Semi during its controversial first-quarter earnings statement….”
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/analyst-believe-tesla-semi-project-is-dead/
Earnings statement, I believe they are using that term loosely.
DAVID STOCKMAN: THE WORLD ECONOMY IS AT AN EPOCHAL PIVOT
“David Stockman warns that the global economy has reached an ‘epochal pivot’, a moment when the false prosperity created from $trillions in printed money by the world’s central banks lurches violently into reverse….Stockman’s main warning is that there’s no bid underneath this market — that when perception shifts from greed to fear, the bottom is much farther down than most investors realize. In his words, it’s ‘rigged for implosion’.”
Sigh. Implosion you say? Back to neutron stars. Less confusing, more fun!
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-11/david-stockman-world-economy-epochal-pivot
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2013/04/01/david-stockman-brings-new-meaning-to-flawed-economic-analysis/#5c6616cf24bd
I think that both The author of the Forbes article, John Tamny and Tyler Durden, who wrote the one for Zerohedge, should read Douglas Rushkoff’s book: ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity’.
The gist of which is, “It is the OS Stupid”!
“We are running a 21st-century digital economy on a 13th Century printing-press era operating system.”
Douglas Rushkoff
For the record, I believe Rushkoff is at least somewhat on board with the ideas behind the concept of a circular ecosystem like economy as formulated by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and in synch with a sustainable vs growth based economic model Such as Kate Raworth’s Donut Economics.
In any case if you haven’t read Rushkoff’s book here’s a youtube of a talk he gave at the Google Campus on his thesis of why ‘Growth is the Enemy of Prosperity’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EnmH95016w
Douglas Rushkoff: “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus” | Talks at Google
For anyone who wants to see a live ISS view of our beautiful planet.
https://www.n2yo.com/space-station/
An alternate view from someone who knows.
Now (in Canada) we must have triple glazed (Argon filled) windows. A friend who is a chemist/biologist who works for federal government identifying toxic chemicals used in buildings says: “Modern homes and business are created to be leak proof; meaning, toxins are sealed in and fresh air is sealed out! So, open windows and ventilate regularly, especially during winter months.”
Example: Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are a group of chemicals that vaporize easily and bring gas pollutants into buildings from a variety of sources. There are over 400 compounds in the VOC family which have been identified and of these over 200 can be found in carpeting. Also, Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) are industrial toxic chemicals that have been used for over 30 years as flame-retardants. Although PBDEs are being phased out, many are still used in North America. Research has linked PBDE exposure to an array of adverse health effects including thyroid hormone disruption, permanent learning and memory impairment, behavioral changes, hearing deficits, delayed puberty onset, decreased sperm count, fetal malformations and, possibly, cancer.
Of course, this is only touching the surface because there are now literally thousands of toxic chemicals being (increasingly) locked in our homes and offices. Some of the worst being flame retardants, cleaning fluids, and varnishes.
Bottom line: don’t seal your own coffin — ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. This advice comes from a toxicologist.
In Norway they would say: “open your window, cuddle up to your partner, it’s healthier.” Should I also mention that Norwegians seem to think zero degrees C is a comfortable bedroom temperature?
Err, I think you mean Argon filled. There are heat-exchange ventilation systems that bring fresh air in and extract stale air out, usually from the smellier and more humid parts of the house, providing a flow of clean air without losing heat. I looked at these more than 2 decades ago in the UK.
NAOM
Thanks, fixed. My brain doesn’t work anymore. BTW according to Wiki, UK building regulations require one air change every two hours (0.5 ACH). With traditional extract – only ventilation that means a house boiler needs to warm up a house-full of cold air 12 times a day. For what it’s worth. 🙂
Yep, hence the popularity of heat exchange ventilation. UK had the 2 1/2 glazed windows that had the plastic middle film with low-e glass and argon filling too. Wasn’t a help on my house so not worth the expense, too many other heat losses, so settled for double – stopped ice forming on the inside.
NAOM
My older sister who lies in London, England sent this article to me a couple years ago, along the same lines:
Industrial Toxins Silently Poisoning Americans: Largest Uncontrolled Experiment in History
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote.
The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.
Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood, and fat. None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment — and so our bodies — could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.
“Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.”
Oh yes we do.
I think that much of the worlds population is subject to the same experiment, some more and some less than Americans. Different emphasis in different countries, and a huge variation within countries.
China has been playing catch up in this experiment very quickly in the past 20 yrs.
Where does Germany puts its industrial waste?
My friends from Calif who just visited Copenhagen were very surprised at how much people smoked there.
I am surprised that people do live as long as they do.
Should I also mention that Norwegians seem to think zero degrees C is a comfortable bedroom temperature?
In my youth I spent a winter in New England sleeping in an uninsulated attic. I had a great down sleeping bag and have not slept better since.
Pumped hydro energy-
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-12/how-to-transform-a-tasmanian-wilderness-into-a-giant-battery
July 2018 warmest month in California history; unprecedented early-season wildfire activity continues
“On the evening of July 26, the Carr Fire made an unexpected and ultimately devastating run into the western side of Redding, CA–consuming nearly 1500 structures and taking six lives. Unlike during recent California firestorms in the “wildland-urban interface” (like those in Santa Rosa and Ventura last year), this run was not wind-driven: there were no “Diablo” or “Santa Ana”-like wind conditions. Instead, what occurred was far more remarkable from a meteorological perspective: the Carr Fire essentially developed its own mesoscale convective weather system directly on top of the system of Redding, which ultimately produced a half-mile wide “fire vortex” equivalent in strength to violent EF-3 tornado (with winds near 150 mph).”
http://weatherwest.com/archives/6411
Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century
Forget programming – the best skill to teach children is reinvention. In this exclusive extract from his new book, the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind.
Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the 22nd century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them and navigate the maze of life?
Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.
Yep, Yuval is most certainly right about one thing! Change is not only, the only constant, but the rate of change is constantly increasing 😉
Re: The ‘What is a Coder’ cartoon in the linked article:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611858/small-team-of-ai-coders-beats-googles-code/
A small team of student AI coders beats Google’s machine-learning code
The success shows that advances in artificial intelligence aren’t the sole domain of elite programmers.
BTW if anyone should want an example of the kind of ultra simplistic, dysfunctional and dangerous, lack of critical thinking skills that the old school system has produced, they need look no further then this comment from over on the petroleum side by Fernando Leanme, regarding his certainty that he knows geoengineering will work as he thinks it will.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/world-natural-gas-2018-2050-world-energy-annual-report-part-3/#comment-648247
Good luck with that!
2050? No way to have any clue what the state of civilization will be in 2050. Thinking that things will progress as normal while a multitude of indicators are showing it will not is good for books and blogs. Meanwhile reality marches on in the form of doing most things just as we used to but more and faster.
I read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens because of the hype around it. The first half is fascinating. The second half is a hoax–full of cornucopian assumptions and denial of ecological/energy constraints to growth.
The paragraph you quote says nothing. Read it again, closely.
I remember when Life magazine came out with predictions about the year 2000. A joke!
I smell yet another fake intellectual.
Yuval is a great intellect, but you are right he does not and cannot accept the upcoming collision of externalities that make it impossible to predict the future beyond about 2025 to 2030. Our timeline of reliable(better than 50%) prediction about civilization is narrowing down, in a few years it will be down to months, then weeks, then days. Unless of course we make some fast major changes starting…. yesterday.
There are a baker’s dozen of externalities that are converging and not in a good way for people or for the ecosystems.
Yuval is a great intellect, but you are right he does not and cannot accept the upcoming collision of externalities that make it impossible to predict the future beyond about 2025 to 2030.
Correct on both counts. However to be fair, he often makes the point in his lectures and his books that:
1) He is not in any way shape or form making specific predictions about the future.
And
2) that despite the upcoming collision of externalities which he clearly states includes all the uncertainties of climate change, (so he is not completely unaware), it is still up to us as individuals and societies to chose how we use the disruptive technologies we are developing.
Of course I think he probably realizes that neither of those two points excludes the non zero chance of a complete collapse of human civilization leading to an extinction of the human race.
Cheers!
China sets up International Investment Alliance for Renewable Energy
The announcement from Beijing at the end of May, detailing cuts to solar incentives, and the suspension of many PV projects, came as a surprise both inside and outside of China. Since then, the global solar energy industry has been in turmoil.
Manufacturers are trying to adapt to the new situation and counteract falling prices. EPC companies, meanwhile, are waiting to see how far prices will fall, to make their projects as cost-effective as possible.
It is undisputed that huge PV module overcapacities exist. In China alone, capacities have been massively built up in recent years. But the world market will shrink this year – probably the very first time ever. GTM Research recently downgraded its forecast to around 85 GW of newly installed capacity in 2018. In comparison, last year saw around 100 GW installed.
An eye to the future
But China would not be China, if it did not try to help the domestic companies that have been supported financially, and with creating a large domestic market in recent years. So while it is slowing down growth at home, it is looking to position Chinese companies more strongly abroad.
The “One Belt One Road” initiative, and the “International Capacity Cooperation” have been actively promoting this goal for some time now. And at the end of June, a new central element was added, focusing specifically on the areas of PV and wind power.
Am I right in interpreting this to mean that the Chinese government is now intent on exporting their boom in solar PV installations, especially to emerging markets as stated towards the end of the article at PV Magazine?