122 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, August 14, 2020”

  1. In case you were wondering:

    GLOBAL METHANE EMISSIONS SOARING

    “Global methane emissions at nearly 570 million tons for the 2008 to 2017 decade, which is 5% higher than emissions recorded for the early 2000s and the equivalent of 189 million more cars on the world’s roads. Anthropogenic sources like agriculture, waste, and fossil fuels contributed roughly 60% of these emissions.” I’m guessing they mean ICE cars. ?

    NB: in 2018, the global electric car fleet was slightly over a paltry 5 million vehicles.

    https://phys.org/news/2020-08-qa-global-methane-emissions-soaring.html

    1. Does anybody have a good link that discusses the amount of electricity used to produce gasoline and diesel fuel compared to the amount it takes to run electric cars and trucks an equivalent distance?

      I have found some but they are not the sort I want…. not from reputable scientists or organizations.

      1. I don’t really understand your question, however, according to my (somewhat dated) Engineer’s Manual, it takes roughly 8 kWh to drill, transport and refine one gallon of gasoline. NB, one US liquid gallon equals about 3.78 litres.

        1. Doug,

          Does your manual give any information as to whether that’s just the electrical input to the process of producing gasoline, or whether it is all the energy inputs converted to an electricity equivalent?

          I suspect that OFM is looking for just the electrical component. For instance, I remember someone reporting that US refineries overall use an average of about 5GW to operate.

          2. Thanks everybody.
            What I’m actually trying to ask, if I can make it a little more clear, is this.

            How much electrical energy in total, roughly is used in the start to finish process of producing gasoline and diesel fuel on a per liter or gallon basis, including distribution and retailing operations?

            It’s easy to convert kilowatt hours to miles in an electric vehicle, for any given make and model. The Tesla S for instance goes about a mile on about three hundred fifty watt hours or 0.35 kilowatt hours.

            I have read that if we put all the electrical energy used into producing and distributing gasoline and diesel fuel that this would be close to enough to run all cars and trucks on electricity, without actually needing to generate MORE electricity than we do already.

            Doug’s reference is the sort of one I was looking for. It may be off a little either way, but it’s from a rock solid source, even if dated somewhat.

            So the electricity going into making that gallon would run a Tesla S well over twenty miles.

            Considering the size, weight and performance of the S, this is in the neighborhood of breakeven in reference to my question. A compact car would go farther on the gasoline, but it would also use a lot less electricity too, in about the same proportion, so far as I know.

        2. My electric cars (Leaf and Volt) get 4 miles per KWH. So, if it takes 8 KWH to make one gallon of gas, that is 32 miles in an electric car — more than the average car gets by burning the gasoline…

          1. Using the data from NickG’s link, in 2018 U.S. Refineries used 48,086,000,000 kWh of direct electrical power. In 2018, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, combined highway and transit passenger miles were 5.6 trillion, so at 4 miles per kWh efficiency, the electricity used by U.S. refineries if directed to EV’s instead would have provided about 3.4% of U.S. ground passenger miles assuming one person per vehicle.

            Somebody please double check me if you feel inclined.

            https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles

            1. I’d lean towards vehicle miles, just for light vehicles. That’s about 3.2T miles, giving about a 6% share.

    3. There are organizations who are exploring the ideas of assisted colonization and assisted migration, to help plants and animals move to new (cooler) areas as their habitat gets too hot, flooded, plowed or paved.
      A form of planet engineering.
      Examples-
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_colonization
      https://depts.washington.edu/oldenlab/assisted-migration-good-idea-or-misguided-hope/
      http://www.torreyaguardians.org/assisted-migration.html

      “The most interesting species is one that has not yet gone extinct”

    1. Re-attachment & Prioritizing Priorities

      I just put that in the last threads but it seems worth carrying over.
      Jack Alpert’s video, despite, and at strange odds with, its sort of cutesy homemade quality (in similar feel to his related ‘retro 90’s’ website BTW), feels more than a bit blood-curdling and on some par with some dystopic horror fiction, if you know how to listen.
      Still, though, I’m unsure I agree with his carrying capacities, or at least wonder how they were arrived at, and went over that kind of thing before on here.
      That said, however, even if the planet can support more humans than Alpert and others might think, it is indeed a long way from here to there.
      But that’s why I keep talking about self-empowerment vis-a-vis lifestyle changes and getting off the dystem ASAP and why I’ve said such things as you can’t eat solar panels unless they are leaves.
      Leaves are ‘solar panels’.
      ‘Windmills’ are seeds blown and scattered by the wind.

      Even in a hypothetical corporation worth its salt, they would be prioritizing priorities…

      In an increasingly populated, socially unstable, degrading and insecure world, what are the priorities?

      To me, they are environmental, water, soil, food and real community security…

      We increasingly don’t know how to grow our own food, make our own clothes, build our own houses, or even forge real communities.

      And we offshore our children, like product manufacturing, to daycares, babysitters and elementary and high schools while both parents work at jobs jobs jobs that do little for their self-empowerment, save to consume and empower the 1%, governments and assorted cannibal-level parasites.

      Distant and relatively unknown State politicians do nowhere near real communities make, nor much of anything else for that matter. If anything, they add to the degradation.

      That’s detachment. People have psychological illnesses related to it and as someone who may have some background in it, you likely appreciate that.

      We are very detached in many ways. And so I am unsurprised that it would manifest in what some of us think our priorities might be.

      Technology is detachment.

  4. “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”
    https://www.automotiveworld.com/news-releases/kansas-city-international-airport-adds-three-byd-buses/
    “The buses were built at BYD’s Coach & Bus factory in Lancaster, California, the first American bus manufacturing facility to have both a unionized workforce and a Community Benefits Agreement, which sets goals for hiring veterans, single parents, second chance citizens, and others facing hurdles in obtaining manufacturing employment” (as well, it’s perhaps worth noting that a quick glance at the Co’s CEO’s Twitter feed doesn’t reveal any obvious personality disorders).

    1. Speaking of jobs- my engineering friends new product for the utility scale solar industry
      https://vimeo.com/361411415

      The Future of Solar Foundations
      Ojjo’s Earth Truss™ Solar Foundation System
      A Major Reduction in Structural Steel-

      Ojjo offers a new way to approach solar foundation design. Solar foundations using driven piles are not optimized for solar-specific load conditions, so they require a lot more material than necessary. Ojjo’s Earth Truss system offers a more efficient use of material because the loads are resisted by the strong axes of the structure. In addition to a 50% reduction in steel, the optimized structural configuration of the Earth Truss minimizes embedment depth, which greatly reduces sub-surface risk.

      1. Put on a blue hat man-
        Forbes-
        “The renewable energy industry has become a major U.S. employer. E2’s recent Clean Jobs America report found nearly 3.3 million Americans working in clean energy – outnumbering fossil fuel workers by 3-to-1. Nearly 335,000 people work in the solar industry and more than 111,000 work in the wind industry, compared to 211,000 working in coal mining or other fossil fuel extraction. Clean energy employment grew 3.6% in 2018, adding 110,000 net new jobs (4.2% of all jobs added nationally in 2018), and employers expect 6% job growth in 2019.

        E2 reports the fastest-growing jobs across 12 states were in renewable energy during 2018, and renewable energy is already the fastest-growing source of new U.S. electricity generation, leading the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to forecast America’s two fastest-growing jobs through 2026 will be solar installer (105% growth) and wind technician (96% growth).”

        https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2019/04/22/renewable-energy-job-boom-creating-economic-opportunity-as-coal-industry-slumps/#5001b7336654

        1. If you are really serious about jobs-

          https://www.rewiringamerica.org/jobs-report
          “Based on an extensive industrial and engineering analysis, our new report demonstrates that an aggressive national commitment to electrify all aspects of our economy would create up to 25 million good-paying American jobs over the next 15 years and 5 million sustained jobs by mid-century. This is the first analysis of the job opportunities that would result from a rapid and total decarbonization of the economy as a whole. Unlike other approaches, which tend to see climate change policy as primarily environmental in nature, the study also imagines the electrification of America as fundamentally infrastructure designed to power America and its economy in the 21st century.”

          Read the report, and then do whats best for the country and vote for these Democratic initiatives.

  5. 1st six months of 2020-
    69 to 1
    We have a winner- Heat.

    69 monthly national/territorial 2020 heat records beaten or tied
    One monthly national cold record has been beaten or tied in 2020

    Additionally, Six all-time national/territorial heat record set or tied in 2020.
    None for cold records.
    https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/08/july-2020-one-of-earths-three-warmest-july-months-on-record/

    meanwhile on a weather note, yesterday central california blew through old heat records, many of which were set only last year.
    Ex. Santa Cruz 105 (prior record 96), Santa Rosa 106 (prior 101), Oakland 100 (prior 90).
    source- NWS

    1. Arctic Ocean methane looking good as well:

      Arctic Ocean methane levels measured by the MetOp-1 satellite recorded a mean methane level on August 4, 1917, of 293 ppb; on the morning of August 8, 2020, this satellite recorded 469 ppb methane. A healthy increase, no? ?

      NB: MetOp is a series of three polar-orbiting meteorological satellites developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and operated by the EU for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites.

      1. Estimable DougL,

        You may be able to convince me that satellites in polar orbit were measuring atmospheric methane in 1917 but you’ll never get me to believe that it was ESA that put them up there and not NASA.

        1. L.O.L. Of course you don’t! Here’s some light reading for you.

          COMPARISONS OF METHANE RETRIEVALS FROM IASI RADIANCE SPECTRA WITH GROUND-BASED FTIR MEASUREMENTS IN THE ARTIC AND TROPICS

          “The Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), launched on 19 October 2006, is a Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) onboard METOP-1, observing the radiance of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere in nadir mode. Using a line-by-line spectral simulation and inversion code, ASIMUT, for the retrieval of chemical species from infrared spectra, IASI methane column time series have been retrieved above Saint-Denis, Re ́union (21°S, 55°E) in the southern hemisphere tropics and the Arctic site of Kiruna, Sweden (68°N, 20°E). These satellite data are compared with correlative ground-based data from solar absorption Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) measurements which are carried out on a regular basis at Kiruna and on a campaign basis at Saint-Denis. Total vertical column measurements and averaging kernels are compared and average agreements of -0.4% for Kiruna and -4.7% for Saint-Denis are found. The averaging kernels show that the ground-based retrievals have a higher range of sensitivity (0 to between 28 and 40 km) than the IASI retrievals (0 to between 14 and 16 km). The comparisons show good performance of the IASI methane retrievals.”

          https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009ESASP.675E..20K/abstract

    2. I’ve been living in Florida for some years now, 90+ degrees everyday in the summer months doesn’t make a blink an eye. So to hear the scientists have determined the normal temperatures we get around here in July were a record heat wave is weird to me lol.

      1. Parts of California currently experiencing extreme heat with significantly increased potential for heat related illnesses, particularly for those working or participating in outdoor activities. Possibly another example of hot weather exacerbated by climate change. Hearing people deny what climate scientists are telling us is weird to me.

        BTW “In an average year, Florida will face “105 days with a heat index over 100 degrees F (up from just 25 days historically) and 63 days with a heat index over 105 degrees F,” noted the study published by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the journal Environmental Research Communications.”

      2. It might might be weird to you Thomas, but thats the cool thing about science-
        You explore the world and find out where the facts take you.
        You know whats even weirder than temperature measurements-
        look closeup in a microscope at the tissues of living things- you will see that all are made up from tiny individual living units, called cells!
        Now that is weird.

  6. https://electrek.co/2020/08/14/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-driving-quantum-leap-new-rewrite/

    There’s a serious possibility that fully self driving cars will be a common place reality within five or ten years, assuming at least two or three companies manage to come up with competitive systems. Somebody else may beat Tesla to the punch, although my guess at the moment is that Tesla is likely to be the first to market with a viable system.

    A robo taxi that runs on electricity and costs no more than a hundred grand and stands up to commercial use can probably displace at least a dozen cars at the margin, maybe even more. ( I find it amusing that just about every body ASSUMES a self driving car must be an electric. There’s no reason why a gasoline or diesel powered car can’t be self driving, and considering the price of batteries, it’s possible one built to commercial rather than throw away standards might be quite profitable used as a robo taxi. )

    It would take millions of them to do very much about rush hour traffic. People who have to get to work at a specific time would still very likely have to have a personal car.

    But talking about the margins again, I’m thinking LOTS of employers, especially smaller ones and some larger ones, would be more than willing to stagger working hours so as to make it easier to hire good help. Shifting a Walmart clerk’s working hours as little as thirty minutes could be the difference that makes a robotaxi reservation available.

    Some organizations could shift the starting times of large numbers of people so as to make robotaxi’s more practical. Factories typically work seven to three, three to eleven and eleven to seven, if they run three shifts. A manager willing to shift those hours by one hour might find he could attract and keep better employees by doing so.

    It costs ME at least a hundred fifty bucks a month to own and drive a car, and I don’t go very far or very often and I drive one that’s totally depreciated and do everything myself except safety inspections and front end alignments, etc. Ten bucks or so is all I spend on gasoline most weeks.

    Most people who buy a new car are spending upwards of a thousand a month on it total. That’s enough that somebody who can get by ok using a robo taxi could easily have well over five hundred bucks a month extra disposable income.

    1. OFM, it costs me about $210 per month to run a 11 year old car here in the UK. I put another $130 per month into a replacement fund. Average UK cost is £3,1oo per year or $335 per month. I’m sure some new cars are closer to the $1, 000 per month you mention…

      1. The thousand dollar figure I mention includes the payment which just about everybody has to make on a new car, which is typically financed at least four years these days, and often five, six, or even seven years.

        Even a cheap really cheap new car, including taxes and fees, generally costs twenty thousand bucks here, and financed for four years, that’s five thousand a year just in principal on the loan, never mind interest, insurance, tags, finance charges, maintenance, gasoline and any out of warranty repair work.

        Insurance in some American cities costs well into three figures per month.

        Once the payments are over, the monthly costs of having the car drops by well half or more in most cases.

  8. From the link I just posted:

    Germany is still the go to place to see the future in pv, even though the solar resource in cloudy Germany isn’t very good compared to most of the USA.

    xxxx

    From pv magazine Germany.
    German market research company EUPD Research reports that thus far this year PV systems with up to 10 kW of capacity have reached a combined installed power output of 427 MW.

    Given the current growth trend, the company expects that around 800 MW may be installed in all of 2020, which would beat the previous record year 2011 by about 40 MW. A total of 108,000 small photovoltaic systems will have been newly installed by the end of the year. The company cites the increasing attractiveness of self-consumption solutions as a driver, adding that falling system prices and rising electricity costs are also contributing to this year’s performance.

    The detailed analysis of the installation figures for the first half of the year shows an above-average growth in small systems between 7 and 10 kW — a 153% increase year-on-year. This confirms the long-term trend towards larger systems in the small system segment, according to the market researchers. While the average output of the small photovoltaic systems was still 7.35 kW in 2019 as a whole, the systems installed in the first six months of this year have already reached 7.48 kW.
    Popular content

    The end customer monitor from EUPD Research shows the growing importance of self-consumption. Today, only 6% of system owners take measures to increase their own consumption rate. A total of 82% of the operators of newly installed systems in 2020 adapt the use of household appliances to the availability of solar power. Around 41% rely on battery storage to increase their own solar consumption.

    More than a quarter of PV system buyers in 2020 intend to buy an electric car or have already done so. The vehicle’s additional power consumption of 2,500 to 4,000 kWh means that self-consumption increases significantly. A good fifth of system operators are considering using smart home applications in the future; 14% want to buy a heat pump.

    1. For comparison sake, look what Germany has to work with vs USA
      Global tilted irradiation at optimum angle (in kWh/m2)-
      Germany Berlin 1260
      Germany best site 1450
      SeattleWA 1450
      BuffaloNY 1570
      BangorME 1640
      ChicagoIL 1660
      Phila/Richmond 1750
      Atlanta 1900
      Denver 2120

      1. The Germans have foresight enough to understand that in the future, fossil fuels absolutely will be in short supply, assuming Old Man Business As Usual continues to stagger along, due to growing population and depletion, and therefore, very expensive.

        And in addition to foresight, they have the will power and organizational smarts to act on their understanding.

        They understand that history is not over, and that it’s a very dangerous thing for them to be dependent on imported gas and oil, because war is not an IF in future terms, it’s a WHEN question.

        Every dime they put into renewable electricity today will probably save them a dollar later on, in terms of avoiding the purchase of imported gas and oil.

        Plus they’re earning a lot of foreign exchange exporting pv goods, services and expertise, etc. A mark earned selling pv is just as good as one earned exporting a car.

        1. You have quite a rosy view of Germany.
          As a German, I am far less optimistic about our change management.

  9. Sunday morning trivia: concrete

    “With three tonnes per year used for every person in the world, there are few parts of the planet that concrete hasn’t reached. The production of concrete is also a huge emitter of CO2. At least 8% of humanity’s carbon footprint comes from the concrete industry, mostly from the production of cement – one of concrete’s principal components. The cement industry generates around 2.8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year – more than any country other than China or the US.”

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200811-the-eco-friendly-alternatives-to-ocean-concrete

  10. Trump spent the day or the day after his brother died having a great time playing golf, according to the retired celebrity athlete who played with him.

    But the orangutan WAS at least willing to take a minute to say his brother was his best friend and that he loved him.

    1. Orangutan are actually nice people.
      Only humans could behave as disgracefully as trump.

      1. I sympathize with your sentiments relative to the Current Occupant, but it may be a bit too harsh on humans:

        “ Gómez’s team calculated that at the origin of Homo sapiens, we were six times more lethally violent than the average mammal, but about as violent as expected for a primate. But time and social organizations have sated our ancestral bloodthirst, leaving us with modern rates of lethal violence that are well below the prehistoric baseline. We are an average member of an especially violent group of mammals, and we’ve managed to curb our ancestry.”

        https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/humans-are-unusually-violent-mammals-but-averagely-violent-primates/501935/

        1. Tell that to former civilians places like of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, MyLai.
          And, about 72 Billion land animals are killed each for human food.
          No not harsh enough, by a trillion miles.

          1. Don’t forget violence against shrubs, trees, forests, insects, etc. Also don’to forget violence against manufactured goods – humans trash obsolete items regularly, thereby converting natural resources into buried waste

          2. Hickory —

            I agree, “… according to biologists, humans may have evolved a bit in past 10,000 years. For example, when the northern Europeans, living in a climate with little sunshine, started to farm wheat, a food low in vitamin D, they evolved fair skin to compensate and get more of the vitamin. More recently, Shakespeare’s plays reveal that no matter how much language, technology and mores have changed in the past 400 years, human nature is largely undisturbed: Macbeth’s ambition, Hamlet’s indecision, Iago’s jealousy, Kate’s feistiness and Juliet’s love are all instantly understandable.” However, since the 1940s, when 5.4 million to 5.8 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, not a chance.

            https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/basic-human-nature-can-it-be-changed.html

        2. Intentional cruelty by human beings is/has been on a scale and intensity that ranks us at the very bottom of any species scale of decency of behavior.
          If that isn’t crystal clear to everyone, well, what happened to your brain?

          1. Well, that raises a lot of questions. One is: did you read the article I linked? What did you think of what it said?

      2. Yes, I occasionally remember to apologize to any orangutans, or their close kin, such as chimps and gorillas, for calling trump an orangutan.

        A lot of our cousins are undoubtedly smarter than trump, and not only smarter, they’re also better mannered.

  11. RECORD ARCTIC BLAZES MAY HERALD NEW ‘FIRE REGIME’ DECADES SOONER THAN ANTICIPATED

    “Looking at carbon emissions from fires in the Arctic Circle, 2020 is already the top year even when the Jan. 1 to Aug. 11 period is considered, vs. the full 365 days for each of the other years. Last year had set a record for such emissions, with 180 megatons of carbon dioxide emitted by Arctic fires, but 2020 has eclipsed it so far, with about 240 megatons through Aug. 11. Arctic wildfire emissions rose significantly from June into July, particularly in the northern Russia Sakha Republic, a pattern also observed last year.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/08/14/record-arctic-fires/?arc404=true

    1. Meanwhile, not to be outdone —

      FIRES ARE RAGING IN THE AMAZON — AGAIN

      “One year has passed since the world was shocked by the images of the fires blazing across the Amazon in Brazil. But since then, the forest hasn’t stopped burning —and 2020 could be even more devastating for the rainforest and the Indigenous Peoples who call it home. Last week, Greenpeace Brazil flew over the state of Mato Grosso to capture images of the Amazon. Even though the government had ordered a ban on forest fires in the state starting at the beginning of July, the photos show smoke, flames, and just how ineffective the ban has been…

      The consequences of this destruction are dire. From Siberia to the Amazon, fires are raging across the world. Losing our forests means losing the fight against the climate crisis, putting biodiversity at risk of extinction, and threatening the lives of Indigenous Peoples who depend on the forest standing for their survival. Fighting to protect the forest and Indigenous lands from fires and deforestation become even more difficult—and crucial —during a pandemic.”

      https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/44159/fires-brazil-bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-2020/

  12. Great, this is all we need right now.

    WORSE TO COME? MALAYSIA DETECTS NEW CORONAVIRUS STRAIN ‘DG14G’ WHICH IS ‘TEN TIMES’ DEADLIER

    “A new strain of the novel coronavirus called ‘D614G’, deemed ten times deadlier, has been detected in Malaysia, said Director General of Health Noor Hisham Abdullah in a Facebook post on Saturday. The mutation has been spotted in three cases from a cluster which started when a restaurant owner and permanent resident returned to the country from India. It has also been detected in another cluster case which started from an individual who returned from the Philippines.”

    https://ca.yahoo.com/news/worse-come-malaysia-detects-coronavirus-061800712.html

  13. This question is for Dennis in particular and any body else who is willing to answer.
    But I’m pretty well convinced that Dennis is the best informed person among us when it comes to understanding what’s going on in the economy.
    So here she goes.

    How is it that the stock market is still going up, when the fundamentals seem to be most definitely indicating it should be going down, as I see it?

    I do understand overshoot, or irrational exuberance as some famous investor once said.

    But it doesn’t seem to me that tax cuts for the rich, etc, would be enough to keep the market going up this long.

    Personally my opinion is that the whole financial market system is a house of cards and that it might collapse any year, or any DAY for that matter.

    1. I had heard that the stock market is most algorithm trading (70%) now, and no longer reflects the state of the economy. In the same way that the market can tank overnight, but nothing (except expectations) has changed.

    2. The stock market:
      In this time of crises, many losing their job, zero or negative interest rates, most people don’t look at fundamentals anymore

    3. My two cents ofm-
      One big factor providing stock market momentum is, just like in 2009, the liquidity provided by the fed and other central bankers of the world. They are doing all they can to keep the train moving, and have been remarkably successful thus far in both of these “episodes”.
      Without the Fed monetary interventions, we would see nothing short of severe calamity in both of these times.
      Yes, we see calamity for many, but I was referring to calamity for the whole.

      People argue that the fed should stay on the sideline (or be dissolved). Those are people who don’t really understand the big picture dynamics, or those who like to watch buildings on fire even as people jump from the upper floor windows.

      Also, some companies are actually doing very well, and their stock look great. Other aren’t doing so well, and their stocks do look limp.

      2. Thanks Hickory,

        I see your point about liquidity and momentum, but I still just can’t see why the long term economic outlook lends support to the stock market at current levels.

        Maybe most of the people in it are simply gambling that they will be able to get out, fast enough, when the realization that they’re like the coyote in the road runner cartoon…… way the hell up in the sky, with nothing under them except the hard stony ground way down there.

        Maybe it’s half stimulus and half irrational exuberance.

    4. Just saw an article related to this-
      About 2/3rds of the companies in sp500 are down thus far this year.
      Most of the dollar gains are concentrated among the big guys- Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and in some select sectors like medical supply.
      A 10% gain in Apple offsets 20% losses in [dozens] of smaller companies on the overall sp500 performance tally.

      https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-stocks-to-rule-them-all-big-techs-might-in-five-charts/

      1. ..and in today’s Guardian there’s this:

        The only V-shaped recovery after coronavirus will be in the stock markets
        https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/18/recovery-stock-markets-central-bank

        The rapid bounce in stock markets helps to give the impression that everything is under control and the economic crisis is drawing to a close. Traditional wisdom has it that share prices anticipate events so rising stock markets reflect the fact that the world is on course for a rapid recovery that will see life return to normal in 2021. This might be true for the high net-wealth individuals invested in hedge funds. For almost everybody else, it is nonsense on stilts, as the 7,000 Marks & Spencer workers earmarked for redundancy over the next three months would readily testify. The gulf between what is happening in the real world and what is happening in the financial markets has never been wider.

        The reason for that is simple. Financial markets were once seen primarily as places where businesses and governments could raise capital for productive investment. Over the years, the centre of gravity of western economies – and the US and the UK in particular – shifted from production to speculative finance, most of it debt-fuelled.

      2. I wonder how long it will take for companies such as Apple to finally come back down to Earth. Sooner or later, such companies won’t have anything to sell that’s really much better than the competition, because nobody stays on top forever.

        There are according to what I read some entire countries that have standardized their government computer systems on open source, so as to avoid paying Microsoft.

        I’ll continue to pay Bill Gates because I don’t have anybody to teach me the ins and outs of open source and I’m not willing to spend a lot of time figuring it out for myself.

        But it sucks that the community colleges support his near monopoly and teach it almost exclusively at the intro level.

        1. OFM, open-source isn’t the only alternative to the MS empire. I’m typing this on a 6 year old Chromebook which cost $260. It’s just a web browser onto the cloud where I do all my spreadsheets and Word-style documents (Google docs). It’s a bit different to Excel and Word but not much. Haven’t touched MS since I left work 5 years ago…

    5. It seems pretty clear to me that the fed is using its money hose to inflate the stock market which is then benefiting mostly the obvious suspects, the online shopping, tech companies. As an old bastard living on a pension and SS I guess I should be grateful because this has the knock on effect of keeping pension funds Insurance Companies and the like solvent. But the benefit goes to people like me and the billionaires who own these companies and the mostly wealthy individuals who have made large investments in these individual stocks. This seems unfair to say the least because there is a large section of the “leadership” in this country who look at the performance of the stock market and wash their hands of any responsibility to respond to the urgent needs of the real economy that is falling apart all around us. I really don’t know how sustainable this situation is.

      1. “pretty clear to me that the fed is using its money hose to inflate the stock market”

        The fed can add liquidity. They don’t have much role in picking the winners and losers.
        That privilege goes to the congress and the executive branch .
        Its the congress and the executive branch who are responsible for directing the money to particular sectors, such as households, small businesses, military, medical care, or to the multinational corporations, etc.

        1. don’t pretend to be an expert. But my understanding is that the fed is adding liquidity primarily to the banks and other institutions by buying bonds in massive quantities. What folks do with all this capital is up to those who have access to it. Mostly wealthy individuals with large lines of credit and institutions. They in turn are investing that capital in a few choice companies in the stock market to a large extent. This is monetary policy or quasi monetary policy.

          The other piece, the one you reference is fiscal policy. That is where Congress comes in. The stimulus etc. That has been underfunded and goes to individuals and as we all know has pretty much run out. The monetary side of it is essentially limitless because the fed is committed to do “whatever it takes”. They don’t buy stocks directly but you can follow their actions back to the stock market.

          Of course I don’t know jack shit about these things. But that is my sense of what is happening.

    6. OFM,

      Understanding the stock market is mostly about market psychology and that is not an area I focused on. For the real economy, which I understand to some degree there can be a severe disconnect between stock market valuations and how the economy is doing. I tend to agree financial markets are currently a house of cards. Have you seen The Big Short? There are probably a bunch of traders who are shorting certain financial instruments, and those may eventually pay out big time. I am not a financial whiz and have no idea what a good play would be. No doubt it would be very high risk and potentially huge returns.

      In any case there will be a severe stock market correction, probably within a year, but getting the timing right is very tricky, I have no idea how one would do it and if I did I would not reveal that secret. 🙂

  14. More grim news on forests, as if we needed more grim news.

    FOREST DESTRUCTION SPIKED IN INDONESIA DURING CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN

    Forest loss in Indonesia rose 50% in the first 20 weeks of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, according to data from the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland – which operates a global warning system for forest loss – and analysed by Greenpeace. Analysis of the same data by WWF Germany found that in March alone, forest clearance in Indonesia was up 130% compared to the three-year average for March 2017 to 2019 with an estimated 130,000 hectares razed – the greatest recorded loss of any country that month. It is the starkest example of a global trend that saw forest loss alerts rise significantly since the start of the pandemic across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

    “Deforestation increase could be one of the most long-term impacts of the Covid-19 crisis as governments all over the world are thinking about the short term.”

    https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/08/18/forest-destruction-spiked-indonesia-coronavirus-lockdown/

    1. Definition- Wildlife (in million tonnes)
      1.Before humans- all land animals above ground 1374
      2.Now- non human/non-domesticed above ground 39

      Approximately

  15. Word of caution for those who seek to retire fossil fuel generation-
    proceed gradually and don’t be naive, with the risk of losing peak generation capacity.

    “California has also lost a good deal of the generation capacity that it had in years past, Berberich noted. “In 2006, we had a lot more capacity on the system,” including the now-closed San Onofre nuclear power plant and thousands of megawatts of natural-gas plants that have since closed. California is set to close even more gas-fired power plants…”

    https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-californias-shift-from-natural-gas-to-solar-is-playing-a-role-in-rolling-blackouts

    1. California is a leader in innovative utility management: they’ve had some success in reducing the regulatory incentive for over investment in expensive generation. But CA utilities are still moving very slowly on the cheapest, most effective way to handle peak demand: Integrated Demand Supply Management. Here’s an article from 2018, touting the fact that PG&E was spending a grand total of $9M on IDSM!

      https://www.utilitydive.com/news/integration-is-the-next-step-in-demand-side-management-heres-how-3-utilit/543636/

      1. I would wager that the calif grid management is as ready as any in the county to integrate wind and solar on a second by second basis. And yes, still plenty of room to improve.
        But even the most flexible and robust grid management won’t make up for shortfall in supply at peak times of demand.
        Its a clear and simple take home message for all people who make policies, vote or ponder these issues- you can’t cut back on fossil generation until you have built out the replacement sources adequately, or you will have state of emergency, as the Calif governor officially declared the situation currently during this heat event.
        If you are trying to get the public to accept energy innovation, getting it wrong does your mission no service- quite the opposite.

        1. even the most flexible and robust grid management won’t make up for shortfall in supply at peak times of demand.

          Uhmm…well, sure it can. The problem California is facing is a common one, and it’s created by the current pricing structure: retail power prices have traditionally been unrelated to the wholesale cost of power, especially for residential consumers (industrial/commercial consumers have had a clumsy system with something called “demand charges”, which charge them for their simple, single peak of consumption).

          So…it has made sense for people to turn off the A/C when they leave the house, or use their smart thermostats to turn up the temperature during the day, and then come home and crank up the A/C. That’s true even though that’s a very expensive way to run things.

          Similarly, you’ve got a lot of people installing PV in California: it’s now required in new construction, by state law, and retrofits are massively incentivized by CA’s tiered price structure. Unfortunately, there’s little incentive to include battery storage to move power from the daytime to the evening peak.

          So. To sum up, the duck curve and the evening peak are artificial results of current regulation and pricing policy, and utility malign neglect of IDSM programs.

          1. I disagree with you.
            I think its a big mistake to aggressively shut down gas peaker plant capacity before you are ready handle the load without blackouts and emergency declarations.
            Its a public relation nightmare for renewable energy proponents, giving naysayers great material.
            Its naive to say its just a matter of managing the demand.

            “So. To sum up, the duck curve and the evening peak are artificial results of current regulation and pricing policy, and utility malign neglect of IDSM programs.”
            No not artificial- its what the real situation is, despite decades of energy conservation policy and sophisticated electrical system deployment.
            Its hot like an oven over much of the state.
            The kind of heat the people die of.

            I’m sorry if its hard for you to swallow the idea that we are not ready to get of Nat Gas. But that is where we stand now. Maybe in a decade or three if we get much more serious about solar deployment, etc. Not even close now.

            Just looked it up cal iso- right now (this minute) renewables are providing 9% of the calif electrical load, and yesterday renewables provided 19% full day demand, and this is during bright sunshine mid august.

            1. As a long time advocate of renewables I agree with you. The worst case scenario is if, in our urgency to make the transition we validate all the arguments the fossil fuel advocates have been making about the unreliability of renewables by prematurely shutting down the gas fired plants when we have yet to build out the solar and wind capacity. If the transition leads to a reduction in service quality there will be a backlash that sets the movement back a decade.

            3. Well, it does look like a planning screwup. We don’t really know the source – maybe climate change has changed the statistical frequency of high temperatures, and the planning models haven’t been adjusted to reflect that. Heck – there may be no real data to use for such adjustments – we’re in unknown territory. I do know that there’s been a loud and healthy debate in California about how much NG generation was needed: some people were convinced that it was being overbuilt. If I understand the current debate correctly, no one is blaming wind & solar – no one is suggesting that wild-eyed environmentalists deliberately blocked NG generation due to their excessive anti-GHG zeal (despite the badly written headline). It’s just been a debate about how much NG generation is needed, based mostly on dollars and cents, and differing planning projections. Maybe the anti-NG people were wrong: certainly we’re now hearing that idea from a vocal representative of the pro-NG group. Maybe California was just unlucky. You can’t anticipate everything.

              One thing I’m sure of: we don’t need fossil fuel in case of emergencies due to unusually high peak demand. Sure, that’s one approach, but it’s expensive to have on standby (and polluting, if you actually use it a significant amount). It would be much less expensive to just flatten the duck curve with DSM – it’s an old, very well tested and effective method, but it’s underused because it reduces utility revenues and profits. It would be somewhat less expensive to use batteries to move power from the daytime, where there’s a surplus of solar power, to the evening.

              In any case, we don’t need to keep fossil fuel around. We should be discontinuing it as quickly as we can reduce consumption and build substitutes.

            4. “In any case, we don’t need to keep fossil fuel around.”
              You still don’t get it. I’m not surprised.

            5. If you disagree, please be specific.

              Let me expand on one point here: the transition from FF to solar is not responsible for this blackout: no one is really saying it is. Solar eliminated the daytime peak, leaving a lower evening peak. So, solar meant that less peak capacity was needed. The question in the last few year in California has been how much to reduce peak capacity, not whether to reduce it.

              Could planners have anticipated this problem? IOW, did the grid have inadequate reserves, given what the planners knew? Possibly. But that’s not related to solar.

            7. “no one is suggesting that wild-eyed environmentalists deliberately blocked NG generation due to their excessive anti-GHG zeal (despite the badly written headline)”.

              Oh please! You start decommissioning natural gas plants prior to having black outs and you will see huge multi-million dollar ad campaigns by the natural gas trade associations saying exactly that and worse. Every other commercial on TV will be some poor family sitting around a dark kitchen table with a kerosene lamp and a coleman stove with a baby crying and a voice over telling them how clean safe natural gas can give them all the energy they need for generations. I’m in Colorado and we tried to pass a law making the frackers stay something like 200 yards away from schools and residential areas and this is the kind of shit we got! I’m just saying, don’t let a lack of imagination let you underestimate what they are willing to do to protect their market share.

            8. I agree – I wouldn’t put anything past them.

              You can’t give in to them by giving them what they want. But you have to be ready for their disinformation campaigns.

            9. You just have to make absolutely sure you have more than enough excess capacity before you start decommissioning those gas plants or they will break it off in your ass. In the end its a good thing. More renewables!

  16. Climate models and precautionary measures

    “This leads to the following asymmetry in climate policy. The scale of the effect must be demonstrated to be large enough to have impact. Once this is shown, and it has been, the burden of proof of absence of harm is on those who would deny it. It is the degree of opacity and uncertainty in a system, as well as asymmetry in effect, rather than specific model predictions, that should drive the precautionary measures. Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the ’climate crisis’ that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it.”

  17. Infinity Breaks Determinism
    a special exclusive to Peak Oil Barrel

    You can’t calculate from initial conditions and then work forward from there if there are no initial conditions.
    In an infinite system, there are no initial conditions, so everything that came before that goes into our behavior is in a sense relatively meaningless because it goes back to infinity.
    We fundamentally have free will if the universe is infinite because infinity breaks determinism.

    Even if one had a gateway or funnel that funneled all conditions at some arbitrary point, they would still be holding that funnel, and so affecting it. They would have to go through their own funnel which would cause a feedback loop.

    So, fundamentally, there is free will simply because there is no beginning. This makes infinity and consciousness appear very interwoven, even one-and-the-same.

    If, as a thought experiment, a god was sitting at a desk with the universe as a blackish ball (with little suns and galaxies and whatnot visible on the fringes), hovering a couple of inches over the desk, he would immediately realize a big problem:

    The universe they were looking at, to make itself visible, would have to be leaking (radiation) into their room. This would effectively turn the room merely into another area of the universe they were peering at.

    In other words, in order to know something, one has to interact with it and vice-versa.

    That’s a big problem for conscious entities who want to make accurate predictions, which are fundamentally impossible because of this.
    I mean, maybe another god was sitting at another desk looking at the universe with the smaller god in their room inside it looking at another universe and so on…
    That might annoy any god who wanted to think they were a god. So there is probably no god either and that ‘God’ is simply yet another anthropomorphization.

    But then, we have children, and their children have children and their children’s children have children, and so on.

    Maybe the universe is like that too.

    Where the universe goes or what it does seems in a way kind of irrelevant if it’s part of an infinite structure that will keep on keeping on and has kept on keeping on, for eternity.

    Maybe we already know where it goes, and that’s to eternity.

    Eternity is a very long time. It is so long in fact that it makes a ‘very long time’ meaninglessly short.

    But it has to be this way if we want unpredictability, consciousness and free will. They are all probably one and the same with infinity.

    Long live infinity.

    1. Put another way perhaps, if infinity goes into ‘determining’ you, what does that even mean?
      Maybe it’s a fundamental ‘release’ or ‘blowout’ ‘valve’ from a kind of deterministic prison and into fundamental free will. Freedom.

      IOW, if there is an infinite number of variables that go into you, your behavior at any given point in time can’t be computed back far enough to get a deterministic answer.

      Infinity, quite literally, frees you.

      Yaayyyy! ^u^

      This is a cause for celebration.

      1. You are the guy that said: “Why should COVID-19 land on such a round year number as 2020?”

        Based on that, I won’t read any of your stuff unless you retract the above question or admit that you were just making a weak joke. Life is too short.

          1. Society 2020 12:1

            I was not speaking necessarily for myself but attempting to put my head in the heads of others, including politicians. You’d think that no one trash-talked Trump in the past 4 years on here.
            It’s entirely plausible that a bunch of politicians and their assorted colleagues would gather around the boardroom table and say something like, “Well, it’s almost 2020. We’re running short on all kinds of things; this and that’s going on here and there; the IPCC is saying this has to happen before 2030; etc., so now’s as good a time as any to wind things up/down and set others in motion, etc..”
            BTW, calling practically every possibility a ‘conspiracy theory’ just sounds like the other extreme; conspiracy-theory-paranoia or phobia. People are opportunistic social creatures. They plan, conspire, scheme.

            See also this bomb; the coincidences of EROEI of 12:1 for health care, the apparent current draw of 12:1 and a concurrent ‘global health pandemic’.

        2. The Picture In A Frame’s Dent

          Ya that 2020 thing just adds to the weirdness of it all, so it had to be mentioned. It couldn’t be helped.
          It’s like commenting on a curious dent a picture frame has on one side I guess.
          Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s everything, or at least more than some want to realize ay?

          Perhaps by accident, someone who happens to be zooming into the artwork for restoration purposes, accidentally zooms in on that dent and finds a microscopic picture etched within it that somehow philosophically upends the main artwork that we’re all, including Caelan, supposed to notice instead, right?

          I hope your comment isn’t to imply that human psychology and its myriad of manifestations and effects (myth, religion, art, denial, psychopathy, emotion, tradition, custom, belief, ritual, etc.) don’t exist and don’t affect anything in physical reality like, say, the climate or ecosystem or society and technology and so forth.

          But I find it strangely delicious that it happens to land under mine talking about the infinity that feeds into us and also that you at least appear to work with numbers and climate modeling.

          Models, numbers and the kitchen sink affect human psychology which in turn affect physical reality. That’s why we have uncertainty.

          Even the very small numbers. You take a very small seemingly insignificant one out and maybe it throws the model off completely.

          If you don’t want to read my blasphemy, then don’t.

          Let your model of reality conform to something you feel better about.

          “Oh, I noticed you have a speck of something on your lapel. Here, let me flick it off for you.”

          …And in doing so, miss my bus that drives off a bridge…

          “We impose a psychological order on the world that is not really there. Number is a great example of that…

          …our perception of numbers is affected by our experience with them. A classic paper by Sharon Armstrong, Lila Gleitman and Henry Gleitman from a 1983 issue of Cognition points out that round numbers like 100 are considered better examples of numbers than less frequently noticed numbers like 101, 99, or even 171. We focus on these round numbers. We think that they are more typical examples of numbers. We recognize them faster. We generally think of them as better numbers than less typical numbers.” ~ Psychology Today

          ——

          “Studies show that round prices… appear to be more popular than non-round prices in many financial markets, such as IPO markets, stock markets, and foreign exchange markets (Kandel, Sarig, and Wohl; Harris; Fischer). Technical analysts take this price clustering one step further by assessing its relationship to market trends. Results of technical analysis suggest that trends tend to increase after certain prices levels (specifically round prices) are crossed (Osler).

          …Since psychological biases, such as price preference, may result in increased risks and unexpected outcomes (Kahneman and Riepe), it is important to research whether this particular bias exists in markets outside of the financial
          industry.” ~ ‘The Preference for Round Number Prices’, Joni M. Klumpp, B. Wade Brorsen, and Kim B. Anderson

            1. 2020 Baptism

              Maybe it didn’t have to because it had itself baptised a pandemic in 2020, after maybe having itself engineered and escaped from a lab by yet other conscious entities.
              ‘Who’ needs consciousness when consciousness can be infected to do your bidding? 🙂

          2. Yes, but you see, you have to wind it up then to get it going for 2020– dress rehearsals and all that.

            Especially when your polity has relatively unsuccessfully (in the interests of securing resources/energy?) tried proxies, color revolutions, murdering Generals, torturing ‘some folks’, installing false presidents, creating false flags, and lying about stuff like WMD, etc., and with lots of things breathing down its neck, for 2020.

            But what are those?
            Oh they are ‘whack‘, and can be safely discounted in some people’s mental constructs of reality, right Paul?

    1. Hickory —

      Interesting but not exactly new. I recall discussing some of these ideas with Power Engineers in China 30 years ago. Meanwhile please note: “China’s primary grid operator has energized its biggest and most powerful line yet, a 1.1-million-volt direct current (DC) behemoth that crushes world records for voltage, distance and power.”

      https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-power-transmission-records

      1. Yes, most of the grid upgrade proposals and tactics are primarily ‘simple’ issues of getting the planning done and getting the job done. Here in the states, its a big hodgepodge of agencies with poor central coordination and longterm planning.

        1. And don’t forget the NIMBY’s and BANANAS.
          Build absolutely nothing anytime anywhere.
          We have one here who doesn’t want to ever build anything bigger than a chicken coop ever again.

  21. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy (unless that nicer guy was orangutan himself)

    from the Guardian:
    Steve Bannon arrested and charged with defrauding ‘We Build the Wall’ donors – live

  22. THE HARD TRUTHS OF CLIMATE CHANGE — BY THE NUMBERS

    A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions. As global temperatures rise, they put billions of people at risk of heatwaves, water shortages and a range of other problems. And these impacts fall hardest on the poorest and most vulnerable people.

    https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-02711-4/index.html?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=093e3be58a-briefing-dy-20200820&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-093e3be58a-45646834

  25. It’s altogether possible the whole world will go to hell in a hand basket due to forced climate change, because we may have or will pass tipping points that make hell on Earth all over the Earth our future reality.

    But I’m somewhat optimistic that some of the more prosperous and better situated countries such as the USA and Canada will be able to pull thru the next century or so more or less whole, at least compared to a lot of other countries.
    https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/08/19/morning-brief-texas-solar-hits-a-turning-point-new-round-of-coal-plant-retirements/

    Trump style politics aren’t capable of trumping an industry that can run the competition out of business in terms of dollars and cents.

    1. The world will keep going on and on, whether climate change is truthful or not.

      1. Oh the world, sure. Its the people and eco-systems that will be fucked. And its happened over and over and over again. Despite our experience of a relatively stable climate, in the long history of the Earth the climate is extremely unstable. We just lucked out, until we fucked up. The climate is a complex non-linear dynamic system. The so called “Skeptics” are entirely correct to have doubts about climate models. Not because they are too alarmist. But because scientists are ultraconservative. And science still hasn’t really come to grips with nonlinear dynamics. The conservatism of science makes the default assumption that change is gradual and occurs over long periods of time. We are learning that this isn’t true. Change can and often is abrupt and brutal. When the addition of a small change to a complex model results in a drastic “crazy” result the impulse is to throw it out. That can’t be right. Tweek the model to make it “more realistic. This is bias that is pervasive. The right assumes that the primary bias in Climate Science is over emphasize the effects of climate change to increase funding etc. This is exactly the opposite of what has been happening over the years. The really scary stuff has been systematically suppressed because it just seemed “out of the mainstream”. Like plate tectonics did a hundred years ago. No, this is going to worse than you think. This is going to worse than the “skeptics” think. Buckle up because it is not going to be a slow gradual process. More like waves or irreversible disasters.

            2. Should look into what kinds of things Richard Lindzen has said, and realize that this is what the attitude is in the field

              https://davidappell.blogspot.com/2014/01/richard-lindzens-paradox-for-ages.html

              “I’ve asked very frequently at universities: ‘Of the brightest people you know, how many people were studying climate […or meteorology or oceanography…]?’ And the answer is usually ‘No one.'”

              …

              “You look at the credentials of some of these people [on the IPCC] and you realise that the world doesn’t have that many experts, that many ‘leading climate scientists'”.

              …

              “Oh yeah,” said Lindzen. “I don’t think there’s any question that the brightest minds went into physics, math, chemistry…”

              Lindzen = “hold my beer”

            3. I always understood that Lindzen’s early skepticism was perceived (retroactively maybe), as valuable testing of the climate models. He’s a mathematician primarily, so maybe that’s accurate.

              But his more recent work was not considered rigorous, and there’s a lot of modern data and theory that he seemed to dismiss without any justification other than ‘he didn’t think so’.

              And as for Lindzen’s comment, all the basic science around climate change was conducted by physicists, chemists, and mathematicians, so he should be happy about that.

              Much of the impact of climate science was delayed due to the lack of communication between different disciplines. I remember a biologist said it was pretty late before biologists realized they needed to be talking to geologists about the geologic carbon cycle, and the chemists and physicists and oceanographers and meteorologists needed to be aware of each others work. Everyone was making simplified assumptions about what the other fields knew or didn’t know.

            4. GerryF,
              There’s a significant distinction between AGW climate change (which is straight-forward to understand) and the complex natural variations in climate, such as the El Nino/La Nina cycles and jet-stream reversals which are challenging fluid dynamics problems.

              The issue is that Lindzen tried to claim the latter was easily understood while still early in his career, and then later in his career Lindzen stated that the accepted AGW model was all wrong. He’s what they call a scientific contrarian — trying to screw with everyone’s understanding because he can. This is well documented:

              “Lindzen has been called a contrarian, in relation to climate change and other issues.[83][84][85] Lindzen’s graduate students describe him as “fiercely intelligent, with a deep contrarian streak.”[86]

              The characterization of Lindzen as a contrarian has been reinforced by reports that he claims that lung cancer has only been weakly linked to smoking.[87][88]”

              Lindzen is a world-class science grifter — my own boasting pales in comparison.

            5. Paul,

              I know a couple of self-identified contrarians, and I think I found it sometimes straightforward to recognize when they were talking outside of their area of expertise – usually when they casually dismissed the work of specialists as ill-founded without actually looking at it.

              I didn’t know Lintzen’s path as you described so thanks for that. Dyson was another person often considered a climate contrarian and i remember watching him being interviewed and thinking that he was trying to dismiss detailed work using broad fundamental brushstrokes, and that it was interesting, but he didn’t seem to know enough details about the subject, (and the interviewer didn’t seem to know what to ask).

            6. The issue with climate science and contrarians is that there is little in terms of controlled experiments to resolve differences of opinion. Somebody like Lindzen can come along and make assertions that can never be tested. This is completely different than the land of experimental control that SW and I come from. For example, in the semiconductor research discipline, Lindzen would have been quickly outed as a fraud, especially if he kept pushing his models contrary to the experimentally gathered evidence.

            7. Here is a recent (made over the weekend) assertion by a retired climate scientist Gerald Browning who worked for NCAR in the 1970’s. The paper itself doesn’t include this strong a claim, but apparently Gerald Browning explains how all of climate science is wrong. Hello humility?


              NCAR=National Center for Atmospheric Research

  27. Interesting things happening in Australia. It is the coming around to the end of their “winter” season and records are being broken for the amount of electricity coming from renewable sources.

    Wind and solar output surge to new record high in main grid

    Output from wind and solar have surged to two new record highs in the National Electricity Market over the past 24 hours, with sunny and windy conditions combined to push their combined output towards 12 gigawatts, or nearly 50 per cent of total demand.

    The Australian Energy Market Operator, which recently released its 20-year blueprint mapping a path to up to 94 per cent renewables by 2040, celebrated the first record with a Tweet that noted the combined output of wind farms, and small and large-scale solar generation, exceeded 11,700MW for the first time.

    That smashed a record set back in November 2019, where combined wind and solar output hit 11,300MW.

    But it has taken less than 24-hours for the record to be broken yet again.

    In the meantime the pace of solar installations in Australia is at an all time high according to the following article:

    Rooftop solar’s stunning surge to new records, as Australia installs reach 2.5 million

    Defying Covid-19, Australia’s rooftop solar installs set new monthly record for July and surpass 2.5 million total installs.

    All this is happening despite the Australian federal government’s opposition to renewable energy and support for fossil fuels. The Australian federal government is also not interested in encouraging it’s citizens to look at electric vehicles and despite that, it appears that there is a substantial amount of interest according to the following article:

    Australia gets “F” for Fail on EV policy, even as consumer interest jumps

    Australia’s federal government has been given an F for “fail” for its policy efforts to support the uptake of electric vehicles, even as new data shows that more than half of the nation’s driving population is actively considering an EV for their next car.

    According to the latest State of the Electric Vehicle report, published on Wednesday by the Electric Vehicle Council, enthusiasm for EVs is “rising markedly” in Australia, despite the stubborn persistence of myths about range, and the stubborn refusal of the federal government to do anything at all to drive the market.

    The report also shows “plenty of room to improve” for state and territory governments when it comes to electric vehicles, with the ACT alone in scoring above a C, thanks to its EV tax incentives and a government fleet EV target.

    In its first year of giving a letter grading to each state, territory, and federal jurisdiction, the EVC has given the ACT the top score of a B; NSW and Queensland both a C; Victoria and Tasmania a D; and Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and the federal government all Fs.

    One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that in Australia, the state governments are somewhat in line with the wishes of the electorate but, that the federal government is firmly in the pocket of the FF oligarchs and the Murdoch owned media.

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