Comments not related to Oil and Natural Gas in this thread.
Thanks.
245 thoughts to “Open Thread- Non-Petroleum July 5, 2017”
Good time for an Arctic Sea Ice update:
The temperatures north of 67N have been cool. Not surprisingly, this has shrunk the large lead 2017 had in volume in the race for record low Sept min volume. See chart below.
2017 no longer has the lowest average annual area, as shown by the second graph in the next post.
Now for area vs temps chart:
As before, the temps are NCEP reanalysis from here:
Each dot represents the annual average of the Temperature anomaly versus the annual average of the Area (or Volume) anomaly, except 2017 which is year-to-date (Jan-Jun).
Anomalies are calculated versus a 32 year baseline of 1979 to 2010.
WTF? Sorry. I’m a fairly numerate guy and interested in polar sea/land ice melting but I have no idea what you’re talking about or what you’re trying to convey. Must be getting old 🙂
Hey, I’m getting old, too!
What happens when two old guys try to communicate a complex idea? Maybe not much.
I’ll try to explain it more fully. Fer sure, I’ve taken some liberties with assuming readers are familiar with my previous graphs showing the same kind of plots. Maybe you never saw those previous posts, or the idea didn’t sink in then, or… most likely… I never gave a good enough explanation then either.
…..
The plots show 2 variables plotted against each other – an X-Y plot. Time is not shown directly at all.
The X-axis is the Average Temperature Anomaly for a given year, the Y-axis the average Sea Ice Volume (or Area) Anomaly for that same year. The data come from the websites given above… I put them in a spreadsheet, and calculate an average for each month for the years 1979 to 2010 to find the Monthly Baseline.
(Temperatures are for 67N-90N)
Then I subtract each month’s value from the Baseline to find the Monthly Anomaly. Finally, the average of the 12 monthly anomalies is averaged again to find the Annual Average Anomaly for each year. That is what is plotted… the Average Annual Anomaly for Volume (Y-axis) vs the Annual Average Anomaly for Temperature (X-axis) for each year from 1979 to 2017.
Same for Area versus Temperature… the second plot.
The points are connected by a dotted line, so you can usually follow the progression of warmer years and less ice. The last point near the lower right is for 2017 (2nd highest temp, lowest ice volume, 5th lowest area). Unlike all the others, this point only represents data from January to June – it is not a full year’s Average Annual Anomaly.
Hope that helps, please ask more detailed questions if that is still unclear.
Here’s another of my peculiar plots in the same style that I like a lot…
CO@ versus GISS Temperature:
I get it, when it’s colder in the Arctic more ice forms and than when it’s warmer.
The last graph is a tough one. Either higher temperatures force more CO2 into the atmosphere or higher CO2 concentration makes higher temperature. Or both.
No, no, no! What you are missing is the correlation between the increased O2 that is being added to all that carbon when you combust organic compounds such as say CH4 in the presence of O2 and you get CO2 and H20 and some heat… Now, while correlation is not causation, usually where there is smoke there is also fire. Or is it the other way around and where there is fire there is soot which causes a bunch of problems of it’s own, even some cooling upon occasion. In any case wherever there is fire, ice tends to melt. So you see it is really the O2 that is the root cause of the warming problem and that goes all the way back about 3.5 billion years when those pesky cyanobacteria started a climate cataclysm by using solar energy and photosynthesis to produce vast amounts of O2 and as it is apparent from the graphs when that combines with carbon we’re fucked… So go burn some anthracite!
😉
Fred, don’t blame the O2, it is only following it’s natural tendencies. Blame all those green plants for producing so much of it.
Not to worry, nature has built the counter-agent to plants and plant produced O2. Humans, the solution to all that toxic O2. Soon green plants will be reduced to a small portion of the ecosystem and put in their place. Nature just took it’s sweet time settling that problem. Maybe Nature doesn’t have a watch and one day seems much like the next, so what is the hurry anyway?
Still, we are here to take care of the problem and if we are really good at maybe we can achieve runaway warming and clean the Earth of that pesky infection it has, called life. Must make it really itchy having all that stuff growing on and crawling over it.
Just as a back-up and if we are impatient we built lots of nuclear weapons, poison gases and bio-weapons (Round-up and others).
I realize the red “line” is not linear but this might be lost on some people.
Perhaps a batter way to do this would be to plot temp vs natural log of CO2 so the relationship would be linear, then show the straight line with the equation of the line.
Then the slope times the natural log of 2 would give an empirical estimate of the transient climate response (TCR). In theory this should be in the range of 1.6C to 2 C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 over the short term. Medium term (after the ocean warms up in 500 years) the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) might be in the range of 2C to 4 C if atmospheric CO2 remained at 2 times baseline (278-280 ppm) over that period. Long term ( as ice sheets melt, permafrost melts, and biomes change) maybe 2000 years to 10,000 years the Earth System Sensitivity (ESS) would be larger still (4C to 8C) if atmospheric CO2 remained at 558 ppm (double preindustrial Holocene average).
I know most people know this, but some readers may not.
The estimated range of TCR, ECS, and ESS is a matter of contention amongst scientists, I have given the mainstream range of estimates
New research from Harvard suggests my ranges for ECS are probably not right. See
Abstract
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report widened the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) range from 2° to 4.5°C to an updated range of 1.5° to 4.5°C in order to account for the lack of consensus between estimates based on models and historical observations. The historical ECS estimates range from 1.5° to 3°C and are derived assuming a linear radiative response to warming. A Bayesian methodology applied to 24 models, however, documents curvature in the radiative response to warming from an evolving contribution of interannual to centennial modes of radiative response. Centennial modes display stronger amplifying feedbacks and ultimately contribute 28 to 68% (90% credible interval) of equilibrium warming, yet they comprise only 1 to 7% of current warming. Accounting for these unresolved centennial contributions brings historical records into agreement with model-derived ECS estimates.
“I know most people know this, but some readers may not.”
I assure everybody from the bottom of my heart, and put my good name as the resident token redneck conservative of this forum on it to boot, that excepting the rather small minority of people who have some formal university level training in the physical sciences and mathematics that NOBODY actually GETS IT, although they may ACCEPT it, as a matter of tribal loyalty and solidarity.
I guarantee ya all that a typical CPA or lawyer or pharmacist or physician or high school teacher ( other than a science or math teacher) does not and CANNOT GET IT, without devoting a substantial amount of time to learning to understand not only the math and physics, but this sort of graph in and of itself.
Once upon a time, back in the dark ages, I acquired a solid basic education in the physical and life sciences, plus some training in the basics of math, but half a century plus later, I have to think a minute or five or ten just to FOLLOW these arguments, never mind performing any of the calculations involved, personally, etc.
The biggest failing of the human race might NOT be failing to understand the exponential function.
Our biggest failing might be that the very small percentage who actually THINK hard and deep NEVERTHELSS fail to understand that the typical citizens understands about as much of this sort of stuff as a dog understands of balancing a check book.
The story goes that a bearded pipe smoking earth shoe wearing English professor at a small New England college for women said something along this line:
” I can’t understand how Mc Govern lost. Every body I know voted for him.”
Put another way, they say nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the public.
Twain said it something like this.
“Ain’t we got ever fool in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
Making fun of the fools IS fun, but it’s just digging the hole DEEPER.
Might be time to look at the 25th?
(we let Sir Ronnie The lessor go too long, he was bat shit crazy most of his second term, and wasn’t the brightest porch light out of the gates):
I’m willing to give him some slack, but it is worth watching- his handlers are sleeping on the job.
As I said, in a reply to Fred
Before you wish for it, look who you get in exchange. There may be times when the devil you know may be better.
NAOM
Pence is the ultimate corporate whore and lap dog, and can get down on his knees as fast as HRC, but with different sponsors.
He probably knows the levers to pull, and where they are.
But just another BAU death wish political operative.
Cheeto Jesus is truly nuts!
And I replied there that I know full well the what is next in line is twice as bad 🙁
I find it hard to believe that ANYBODY could be twice as bad as Trump.
On the video it almost looks like his handlers are actually enjoying the moment… but regardless something is seriously wrong with Trump. If he had to navigate the world on his own There would be a Silver Alert on him in a New York minute, no pun intended.
At G20 Trump and Putin learn the Norks have launched nuclear attacks on their countries. Putin snaps out the launch codes to his team from memory. Trump asks “How do you use this?”
The military prepared for problems with nuclear weapon control and prepared for it. In a moment of rage Trump takes the launch codes and breaks open the biscuit. Inside is the word… BANG.
I listened to the podcast and heard the statement about how deep and cold the oceans were…
So I thought it appropriate to put that misconception, into perspective.
The graphic of the planet with the blue sphere representing all the water on the planet, was I believe, originally produced by the USGS. So I scaled it and added the dimensions and a thin border which represents our atmosphere.
The diameter of the planet is roughly 12, 700 Km. All the water on the planet including oceans, lakes river icecaps and glaciers would form a sphere 1385 Km in diameter. The part of our atmosphere that really matters to life on earth and it is roughly 100 Km deep.
That’s all we have folks, so stop fucking it up!
.
“The part of our atmosphere that really matters to life on earth and it is roughly 100 Km deep.”
That’s a bit misleading Fred. On a Mt. Everest ascent, the “Death Zone” begins at about 8,000 m from which point unassisted by compressed air or oxygen, severe altitude sickness sets in, debilitating the human body and eventually resulting in death. The low density of air at this altitude makes acclimation impossible.
Oxygen is recommended above 14,000 feet for pilots and above 15,000 feet for all occupants of aircraft.
But that is just people, geese are known to fly at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) and some vultures can reach 37,000 feet (11,300 meters). People are wimpy.
http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=132415
Especially interesting is the response from Steveo. 1. The lungs of all birds have a totally different design from that of the mammalian lung, one which allows pure inspired air to come to within only a few microns of the air-blood exchange surface. This allows the A-a gradient to be reduced to only 1-2mmHg. Mammals can reduce the A-a gradient to no less than about 30mmHg.
2. The hemoglobin of Bar-headed geese has higher than normal hemoglobin-O_{2} affinity, which shifts the Hb-O_{2} curve to the left, thereby increasing O_{2} saturation levels under hypoxic conditions.
3. The bird lung structure allows for more complete removal of CO_{2} from the blood. Flying birds may therefore have a relative alkalosis which also shifts the Hb-O_{2} dissociation curve to the left, further increasing O_{2} saturation levels under hypoxic conditions.
4. There is some evidence suggesting that Bar-headed geese are capable of increasing capillary density in muscle tissue. This decreases the diffusion distance for O_{2} from capillaries to cells, allowing the same amount of O_{2} to diffuse at a smaller partial pressure gradient.
5. Bar-headed geese can increase cerebral blood flow during hypoxia, allowing for increased O_{2} delivery to the brain.
Doug, point taken!
I was not trying to be deliberately misleading. In part I was engaging in a bit of artistic license. However I also considered some of the other protections against radiation that our atmosphere provides us and mostly my decision to chose 100 Km was due to the fact that it is a nice round number and also that is the height to which extreme UV penetrates. My decision was not based on O2 content alone as a metric for benefits to life on our planet.
I had looked at this graphic representation at this site before I chose the 100 Km mark for my illustration: http://www.theozonehole.com/atmosphere.htm
Idiot! You just drowned much of the western US. California thought they had problems from El Nino, now look what El Fredo has done. Oh, the humanity. Not even considering all the dead sea life because he put all the water in one big blue marble over desert country. 🙂
I shot the sheriff
But I did not kill the Coral Sea
All around in my home town
They’re trying to track me down
They say they want to bring me in guilty
For the killing of the Coral Sea…
Hi Gone fishing,
The median estimate from the paper for ECS is 3.4 C. The GCMs vary from 1.9 C to 6.4 C for ECS, roughly matching the 95% confidence interval (2.2 C to 6.1 C).
It would be interesting to see which of these models would match the paleoclimate data best as I think they focused on the instrumental period of 1850 to 2010, when developing the models.
We now have paleoclimate estimates covering 12k BP to 150 BP, it would seem a test of these models against that plus the instrumental period would be of interest.
Though there are many difficulties with making these comparisons. See for exampe
Sounds like many people and models will be wrong and the ones that are right or near right can take no solace in it because no one really listened anyway since the field is muddled with error. Too bad that no one will care by the time the consortium comes to a consensus, if ever.
Let the market decide.
The Border Between Reason and Nonsense – Lawrence Krauss at the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism
“I don’t want a theory of everything. I just want a theory of something.”
“String theory does not tell us anything new.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYtXhl9xqDo
Of course the title is so tantalizingly applied to present political circumstances, it is hard to resist.
In the collision debris, physicists have found no particles that could comprise dark matter, no siblings or cousins of the Higgs boson, no sign of extra dimensions, no leptoquarks — and above all, none of the desperately sought supersymmetry particles that would round out equations and satisfy “naturalness,” a deep principle about how the laws of nature ought to work.
“It’s striking that we’ve thought about these things for 30 years and we have not made one correct prediction that they have seen,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
“Most ideas are wrong.” Lawrence Krauss
As a practical matter, we may be pretty close to knowing all we will ever know based on super high energy physics experiments, because it costs so very much to build the laboratories to run the experiments. The ones we have may be all the ones we will ever have.
Is there any real likelihood of building a new generation of such expensive experimental equipment,at a time when we are butting up against all sorts of economic limits imposed on us by nature’s realities that we sum up using the words depletion and overshoot?
And as as abstract or theoretical matter, why should we arrogantly assume we CAN understand physical realities beyond a certain level of complexity, or maybe I should say simplicity, in the ultimate sense?
So far as I can see, except in the utterly abstract realm of high mathematics, we understand every thing in terms of something else, and in the last analysis, we MUST leave some things unexplained, or in other words, accept them as givens, without explanation.
Perhaps I should use an example to try to make myself clear. As a person who uses iron in my day to day life, I need know only a few things about it, such as that cast iron is brittle, it’s very resistant to fire, it is subject to rust but not to the extent of steel, etc. As a welder, I need to know quite a bit more to practice the trade. An engineer needs to know A LOT MORE, but generally speaking, engineers leave the REAL NITTY GRITTY to metallurgists, or to engineers who specialize in metallurgy as part of their profession. The metallurgists need to go to physicists, or do the physics themselves, at some point. At some point past that, the physicists defer to the pure mathematicians, or else, they have to do the math themselves.
And as they say about mathematicians, they don’t really want to talk to anybody but God.
At every single level all the way along the continuum, we defer to a specialist.
At some point, there is a very real possibility that the last specialist, the physicist / mathematician is going to hit the wall, because his brain was not really designed to work at such a rarefied level by it’s creator, Darwinian evolution.
Maybe the mathematican/ physicist community will eventually scale the wall. Most dogs can learn to come, stay, poop outside, etc. Extremely smart dogs, Einstein dogs, Ivy League type dogs, can learn to recognize the words that identify a few hundred objects by name, and fetch them, but I doubt any dog at all has the capacity to ever understand math that is easily grasped by six year old naked apes, such as basic addition and subtraction using numbers larger than ten. Some dogs can count a little, as can some birds. If crows see four men enter a field, they won’t go there until they see four men leave. But if ten men enter, they can’t tell if one or two remain hidden, waiting to shoot a crow.
It seems arrogant as hell, to me, to assume that we will be able to understand nature at the deepest level. There may yet be another dozen layers of the onion of reality that we know less than nothing about, and will never know anything about , because we are like the crow confronted with counting past four. Not enough processing capacity between the ears, no idea how to construct an experiment to even look for new data.
I’m all for continued research, I’m just saying we shouldn’t be surprised when we hit some walls here and there. Maybe we will eventually cross the wall in terms of high energy physics. Sometimes it takes a LONG time, in human terms, to penetrate another layer of the onion.
As a practical matter, we may be pretty close to knowing all we will ever know based on super high energy physics experiments, because it costs so very much to build the laboratories to run the experiments. The ones we have may be all the ones we will ever have.
And who exactly is this WE you speak of, Kemosabe?!
I believe, that on this particular matter, no pun intended, you are very probably going to be roundly proven wrong… again no pun intended 😉
An international league of scientists is kicking off the decades-long process of developing the successor to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
More than 500 scientists gathered in Berlin, Germany, from 29 May to 2 June to discuss the future of particle physics. The event was organised by the Future Circular Collider (FCC) Study, an international collaboration of physicists, and focused on developing the next Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will be seven times more powerful…
…EuroCirCol, a four-year European-funded study, is now investigating future experiments and the technology needed to get there. The project is laying the foundation for a particle accelerator three times larger than the LHC, with double-strength magnets enabling researchers to smash particle beams together with a power of up to 100 tera electron Volts—an acceleration of particles roughly equivalent to 10 million lightning strikes.
According to Professor Michael Benedikt, leader of the FCC, this energy leap could let us spot previously unobserved particles even heavier than the Higgs boson, which would give a deeper insight into the laws that govern the universe.
Fortunately for humanity the Europeans find value in scientific research and are more than willing to put their brains and money behind it!
Particle physics is a waste of time and money. They haven’t found anything useful for 30 years.
Put the money into materials science (a.k.a. real physics) which has been discovering all kinds of amazing stuff constantly for the last 30 years.
OFM, I think we have more pressing and immediate problems than particle physics. Nowhere near enough research has been done on how to switch a civilization composed of multiple nations, composed of multiple cultures, from non-sustainable to fully sustainable activity.
Or is it just going to be all ad-libbed because we are so enthralled with other pursuits? Sounds like avoidance.
“As a practical matter, we may be pretty close to knowing all we will ever know based on super high energy physics experiments, because it costs so very much to build the laboratories to run the experiments. The ones we have may be all the ones we will ever have.”
Well yes however, neutron stars display conditions and phenomena not observable elsewhere such as: hyperon-dominated matter, de-confined quark matter, superfluidity and superconductivity with temperatures near 1000 kelvin, opaqueness to neutrinos, magnetic fields in excess of 1000 Gauss.
I prefer Cavorite over neutronium. Neutronium is such a downer.
Meanwhile the global entertainment industry only grosses 2 trillion per year. Watching people play pretend, dance and sing isn’t too costly. Fantasy is so much better, no wonder denialism is so popular.
Well, here is the USA, it is one of our strong points—
really good at entrainment, growing lots of grain, writing software (although this is declining), the Dog Track down on Wall Street of course, and blowing shit up.
True. We certainly don’t have much money or time left over for really important things or research.
Hail to Disney, Hollywood and Wall Street.
“There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
snow crash – 1992
Snow Crash was a good book—
But Stephenson is just for escape now, and not as chewy as in the past.
“It’s striking that we’ve thought about these things for 30 years and we have not made one correct prediction that they have seen” ~ article, via Hightrekker
I’m a climate scientist. And I’m not letting trickle-down ignorance win.
By Ben Santer
July 5, 2017 at 6:00 AM
The study of climate science will not get us out of the darkness nor will it change the direction of civilization. Understanding how sharp blades are made and how a guillotine works never stopped anyone from getting their head chopped off.
Sooner or later, people will realize that the climate has become really strange. At that point, they will demand that governments do something to fix things and the scientists will have already studied the problem and come up with answers. That said, one can only hope that the transition from fossil carbon to renewable alternatives takes place before the damage has become terminal.
Not worried about terminal, I just think it’s stupid to pursue that which we know harms the world while there are other ways available.
There appears a lot of faith riding on so-called government about so-called renewables, as if some people can’t think much of anything else.
Caelan, you know as well as the rest of us that renewables are, in actual fact, renewable, so why do you keep spouting shit?
True, but…
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the midst of the French Revolution the revolting citizens led a priest, a drunkard and an engineer to the guillotine. They ask the priest if he wants to face up or down when he meets his fate. The priest says he would like to face up so he will be looking towards heaven when he dies. They raise the blade of the guillotine and release it. It comes speeding down and suddenly stops just inches from his neck. The authorities take this as divine intervention and release the priest.
The drunkard comes to the guillotine next. He also decides to die face up, hoping that he will be as fortunate as the priest. They raise the blade of the guillotine and release it. It comes speeding down and suddenly stops just inches from his neck. Again, the authorities take this as a sign of divine intervention, and they release the drunkard as well.
Next is the engineer. He, too, decides to die facing up. As they slowly raise the blade of the guillotine, the engineer suddenly says, “Hey, I see what your problem is, the rope is getting stuck in the pulley…”
By COP21 we needed drastic cuts (which are probably going to be seen as idle promises) plus the vapour technology of BECCs to stay below 2K. With the new ECS estimates does that mean we are now bound for, say 4K? And with the new findings on increased soil respiration, permafrost melt and hydrates giving more natural sources of CO2, do we get there even faster and/or without it requiring as much fossil fuel burning?
Worth noting that even with such a big increase in the predicted ECS the scientists are probably still erring on the side of caution, so even bigger revisions might be coming as new research gets reviewed and verified.
It’s not the ECS figure that bothers me, but a huge new potential feedback that has mostly been ignored is rearing it’s ugly head. The Southern Ocean is a huge place and if the modeled prediction of less cloud cover is correct, that could make the largest of the multiple feedbacks that already are in play.
Ho Hum, I put the Harvard version of this and an actual interview of the lead researcher up above at 07/05/2017 8:21 pm. Is this repetition from another more flamboyant source a result of the new “ostracism button” where people don’t see what is going on because they ignore it?
Hi Gone Fishing,
Sometimes people skim and/or don’t click on links.
I thought the Harvard article was great, thanks. Following the link gets you to the full paper if one clicks on the “new research” link in the article. The paper is open access.
It’s something of a question how much you can trust the thickness models but by Jaxa the Pacific side looks in dreadful shape. Last year the extent was about the same but there was still a chunk of multiyear, thick ice between the pole and the Beaufort to slow things down, but it all eventually melted out. So now there’s thin, smashed up ice, and lots of melt ponds, with a low bringing rain over most of it predicted for the next three days.
The only thick ice left is now pushed up against Svalbard on the Atlantic side and, it’s also smashed up but in thicker bits and almost bound to melt out or get pushed into the Atlantic and quickly die.
It’s in the 50’s in Barrow, Alaska and the surrounding land snow cover is gone. Ice melting should be well on it’s way now.
Good thing much of the Greenland ice cap is at high altitude keeping it nice and cold. Summit Camp at a balmy 12F.
So what does Science Nordic have to say about an ice free Arctic.
North Dakota was just ranked as the top state to start a business. A drought can’t get in the way of what everybody wants, which is jobs, money, and prosperity.
Birth rate by state in 2016, ranked from highest to lowest.
Utah,17.03
North Dakota,15.61
Alaska,15.21
Texas,14.63
District of Columbia,14.47
South Dakota,14.06
Nebraska,13.97
Idaho,13.66
Louisiana,13.60
Oklahoma,13.58
Kansas,13.31
Hawaii,12.97
Wyoming,12.95
California,12.85
Georgia,12.76
Arkansas,12.72
Arizona,12.69
Mississippi,12.67
Iowa,12.58
Minnesota,12.58
Indiana,12.57
Nevada,12.52
Kentucky,12.46
Washington,12.46
Tennessee,12.30
Colorado,12.28
New Mexico,12.25
Missouri,12.23
Maryland,12.21
Virginia,12.20
Illinois,12.11
Alabama,12.05
Montana,11.98
New York,11.98
North Carolina,11.97
Ohio,11.89
South Carolina,11.75
Delaware,11.52
Wisconsin,11.45
Michigan,11.43
New Jersey,11.43
Oregon,11.38
Pennsylvania,11.02
Florida,10.91
West Virginia,10.78
Massachusetts,10.59
Rhode Island,10.20
Connecticut,10.01
Vermont,9.65
Maine,9.43
New Hampshire,9.21
It’s obvious you don’t understand what stats mean.
Birth rate- the number of live births per thousand of population per year.
Small populations can have high birth rates. Large populations can have low ones. Communities with less woman having lots of kids can have higher birth rates than large populations of women having fewer kids.
Stay in School Kids! Or you’ll end up like Bob Frisky lol. Jesus that’s just pathetic Bob. Did you finish grade 8 math?
Electrification is happening a lot faster than people expect. Tesla is really hurting other car manufacturers in the high end luxury market. Their success is scaring other manufacturers and they are not ready to just roll over and let Tesla dominate the entire market. Up until now, most electric models have been “compliance” cars with limited appeal designed just to meet the California (and other) mandates. But now they are getting serious.
Both Porsche and Mercedes are going after Tesla in the high end. They will have 300+ miles of range and support 15 minute supercharging. Mercedes is building a gigafactory in Europe, like Tesla’s, to make the batteries.
Volkswagen is ramping up also and completely phasing out Diesels (especially because of diesel gate).
BMW has that i3 (a “compliance” car). That car is ugly and limited range and I don’t see the point of a fossil fuel range extender that needs refilling every 100 miles. Also, it can’t be built in mass volume – it’s designed to be a niche product. But, rumors are they are announcing a real model 3 electric in September…
Electric is just better – faster, better handling, and much simpler. It’s going to happen fast.
There will be a turning point. Places that sell petrol(gas) will realise that it is more profitable to sell electricity or sell the site for commercial development. Falling sales of fossil fuel will cause profits to fall. Falling profits will mean less outlets. Less outlets will mean more will turn away from fossil fuel. More turning away will mean less sales and so the cycle will begin. The change may be slow now but accelerating and when it reaches a certain point that acceleration, itself, will accelerate.
Political policies aimed at propping up IfCE engines, in the US, may help the US in the short term. In the long term, they will be turning out products that are not wanted and will cause a crash as exports fall away.
NAOM
Cool, but I agree 2040 is kind of uninspired… “Banning sales of diesel and gasoline vehicles by 2040 is a bit like banning sales of horses for road transportation by 2040: there won’t be any to ban.”
Bloomberg projections have EVs taking off in the US and Europe – but show rising demand for fossil cars in the third world. I really doubt that will happen, they may prefer shorter range EVs over fossil cars in the third world. But, I don’t think they are ready to admit it at Bloomberg that oil demand is going away so soon.
That is part of my point, there will come a point where the change will hit a critical point and accelerate rapidly. Maybe France sees that there will be little left by 2040 and that will close the door. As for 3rd world, hybrids are entering the market here, in Mexico, and I think I will start to see more charge points(spotted one outside the Nissan showroom this week). As for places like Africa, China is trying to move in and will want export markets for their manufacturers so maybe we’ll see.
NAOM
Announcements like this might be useful for strategic planning, though. If you are writing research reports for either oil companies or auto companies, and you want to suggest to stockholders and executives that the future won’t be business as usual, having announcements like this give some credibility to your projections.
Bloomberg projections have EVs taking off in the US and Europe – but show rising demand for fossil cars in the third world. I really doubt that will happen, they may prefer shorter range EVs over fossil cars in the third world. But, I don’t think they are ready to admit it at Bloomberg that oil demand is going away so soon.
Let’s not forget that EVs include electric bikes and I have a hunch that in what is known as the so called third world, sales of electric scooters and bikes will take off a lot sooner than electric cars.
A new electric bicycle report from Navigant Research suggests that by 2025, e-bike sales could lead to annual revenues of $24.3 billion.
The electric mobility revolution is in full swing, and although much of the attention tends to get focused on electric cars and buses and such, the highest selling electric vehicles on the planet are actually electric bicycles (e-bikes), with a projection of some 35 million e-bikes being sold this year.
This popularity is with good reason. E-bikes are much more affordable than a full-sized electric passenger vehicle, they’re smaller and easier to park, and because they’re not really that different from a conventional bicycle, it’s not much of a leap for the average consumer to adopt this electric transport option. E-bikes don’t require a license, don’t require any additional infrastructure to operate, and are zero-emissions at the point of use, so they are an increasingly appealing option for low-carbon and low-cost mobility. Add to that the fact that battery technology is improving all the time, both in increased capacity and decreased costs, and that e-bikes are a great last-mile and multi-modal option for increasingly crowded cities, it’s no wonder that the e-bike market is exploding.
Yes, e bikes make a lot of sense for people without a lot of money. They can be outfitted with carts to haul both cargo and multiple passengers. There isn’t a lot of need to have a bigger vehicle in many cases.
Yes, e-bikes are a great option. But, if you are comparing to walking, or biking an electric car with only 50 miles of range is a pretty good option and they can be cheaper than even a low end fossil car. Electric motors are much simplier, it’s just the batteries that need to come down in cost (and they are)
FWIW, every one of the traditional automakers are still dragging their feet on the switch to electric — even Volvo and Mercedes. That said, they’re moving a lot faster than they were last year. And Tesla won’t let them slow down, since Tesla is accelerating. Tesla’s goal was originally to kick the other automakers into doing the right thing…
Meanwhilce, China’s moving *fast*.
Hey guys, anybody and everybody,
I need some help finding an article or essay that will not offend the majority of people who are more or less scientifically illiterate, an explanation that they will accept, concerning thinking for themselves, that allows them to see and understand and accept the FACT that they must defer to people who actually KNOW science in respect to questions about changing climate, resource depletion and similar matters.
Most likely this essay has already been composed and published, and is freely available in one form or another in the public domain. The problem is that I haven’t run across it. Hopefully somebody here has read it, in one form or another , and will kindly provide me a link to it, and thanks in advance. I intend to link to it, or incorporate it whole into my book, or quote from it and use it as a launching point to go further into the subject.
If I don’t find it, it means many more hours laboring at composing it myself.
Consider my trying to pass as a real soldier for instance. I know ten times as much military history and theory as the average boot camp kid, and LOTS of stuff about military gear, but hardly anything at all about the actual day to day minute details of a soldiers life, such as EXACTLY what is expected of him in a given situation. Put me in uniform, even if I LOOKED like a soldier, and a real one with an iq over a hundred would spot me for a fake within thirty seconds to five minutes, and it wouldn’t take five minutes unless I kept my mouth shut, lol.
BUT I could most likely spot a fake soldier, because I know some stuff every real soldier knows, but a fake would not LIKELY know, especially if the fake soldier’s supposed specialty happens to overlap with some specialty of my own.
I know a lot about trucks for instance and somebody faking it as a trucker would give himself away to me within five or ten minutes conversation about old times on the road.
Now at some point we all must trust to the knowledge of professionals, be they lawyers, physicians, engineers, or others, when we need them either directly, for instance we need surgeons to perform operations for us. I need not go into the several criteria we use when we select a personal physician,other than to say if one is out of the mainstream, to any great extent, we generally evaluate him as incompetent. None of us HERE in this forum would argue that a physician who believes in spirits rather than microbes is well qualified to look after us. Well, Caelan might, I ‘m not altogether sure he believes in microscopes and such.
At a second level we must rely on professionals to tell us what to believe, and what policies we should follow or at least advocate. At this level for instance we depend on nutritionists to tell us what we should feed our kids, and what we should eat or not eat, ourselves, and what sort of laws and regulations should be in effect in regard to our food supply, etc. We don’t need appointments to get this info, it’s freely available in books and on websites, etc.
Now at this level of interaction, a problem arises in that some people who are professionally qualified to give advice give BAD advice deliberately, because they have sold out for the proverbial few pieces of silver, and of course there are some more who are have professional training who make honest mistakes. I ‘m not talking about this latter small minority. ( And of course the profession as a whole might be wrong , but let’s not go there for the moment. )
This problem is compounded by the fact that most of us, at some level, lack a deep enough understanding of the abc’s of the relevant subject matter to decide for ourselves who to trust, and who not to. What we usually do, in such circumstances, is decide to trust the ones who are trusted, OR SUPPORTED, by our friends, relatives, and coworkers, our peers, and or the ones who are trusted, or supported, by the leaders we look up to. The grease monkey is apt to trust his lead mechanic when it comes to choosing motor oil, and the typical layman usually or at least very often tries to decide what he will do when he has to make a decision by observing what people he looks up to do in similar circumstances.
There are obviously MANY people who are willing to prostitute themselves professionally, and who do so, for instance nutritionists who work for fast food companies. And there are obviously millions of people who are perfectly willing to give bad advice because at one level or another, they have skin in the game. There are MORE millions of people who are giving bad advice, but in good faith, because they have been had themselves.
It can be and usually IS VERY HARD for people who lack a basic education in the physical and life sciences to tell who is who, when it comes to deciding who to trust. It’s a sad but indisputable fact that the very large majority of us Yankees do lack such an educational background, and thus are subject to being lead around by the nose like dogs on a leash.
Some people will argue otherwise, but I am PERSONALLY convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the average big D Democrat you are apt to meet who works in a factory or as a clerk or any job that doesn’t require some higher level TECHNICAL education believes in forced climate change NOT because he understands the science, but rather because his TRIBE, the Democratic Party/ liberalish leaning establishment professes belief in the same.
(FORTUNATELY the big D Democrats are right on this particular issue, lol, meaning we have at least one party without its head up its ass in this particular respect. )
Likewise the average big R Republican who lacks a technically sound education is apt to disbelieve in climate change not because of what he does or does not know about the science himself, but rather BECAUSE his TRIBE disbelieves, or PROFESSES disbelief. There are many many Republican types, a fair assortment of them known to me personally, who know better but profess disbelief in the need for strong environmental laws. I could name a dozen easily that I talk to personally at least once in a while.
SO- HOW do we explain to such a person, who is honestly confused about who is telling the truth, who he or she should trust, without condescension, without insult, without turning this person away ?
I’m thinking that one way to do it is to ask him to consider which professions he considers trustworthy, and which has mostly trustworthy members. If he believes that physicians are as a group trustworthy, then it is reasonable for him to believe or at least consider, anytime physicians as a group disagree or outright contradict the message presented by some other group or profession, that the second group is either lying outright or at least seriously and grievously cherry picking the truth.
I have never yet met either a physician or a nurse who says sugary soft drinks are good for you, or that typical fast food is good for you, although some will say that these things are not harmful in SMALL quantities once in a while.Ninety nine point nine nine percent of all physicians are opposed to the consumption of sugar filled cola drinks, etc. But the entire soft drink and fast food industries do everything within their power to convince us these things are harmless and even good for us.
So- If we trust engineers as a group, we should trust people that engineers trust, for instance physics professors, lol. If we trust professional soldiers, of the kind that graduate from the service academies and eventually wear stars , and they believe in peak oil, and in forced climate change, then we should believe in peak oil and forced climate change as well. If the engineers and generals trust physics professors, and they do climate science, and work with climate scientists, then we should trust physicists and climate scientists.
I need examples of any work along this line, and any criticism of the approach is welcome.
I need some help finding an article or essay that will not offend the majority of people who are more or less scientifically illiterate, an explanation that they will accept, concerning thinking for themselves, that allows them to see and understand and accept the FACT that they must defer to people who actually KNOW science in respect to questions about changing climate, resource depletion and similar matters.
You might start with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s short talk about what science is and what it does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MqTOEospfo
Science in America – Neil deGrasse Tyson
Thanks Fred, there’s so much out there I didn’t know about this particular Tyson piece. He’s one of my favorite guys, because he not only knows his stuff, he’s REALLY good at communicating with the public.
I will send him an email, what the hell, he wouldn’t be the first famous person who took time to respond to an out of the blue email from me.
The world trend is toward increased religion and superstition. The religions are moving toward more fundamentalist doctrines and private religious schools are on the rise while science is being ignored or outright attacked.
I doubt if any reasoned enlightenment will not be adjusted to fit the local religious doctrine and thus not fit reality very well. It will be diluted and changed.
Personally, I do not think that the Crusades ever really ended and it will get much worse with time. As more terrorism and invasion takes place, conservative Christians will just get more fanatical and lock down their beliefs even more. I think even the liberals will start to move more to the right with time. Prognosis: conflict at all levels including internally as non-homogeneous cultures sort themselves out
Result: Maybe nature will do us in as we weaken ourselves fighting each other.
Well, it depends. If they don’t recognize ANY form of scientific authority, and believe that the Bible says the earth is flat so it’s flat, then they’re hopeless.
If they do have some respect for authority, you could point out that Arrhenius, one of the *founders of Chemistry*, actually predicted and explained global warming due to CO2 emissions. So we’ve known about it since the *19th century*. It shouldn’t be surprising that there’s 100% scientific consensus after *over 100 years* of people arguing about it. Disputing it is exactly like arguing about Newton’s theory of gravity or whether the Earth is round.
If they’re flat-earthers, don’t even try to talk to them. Make fun of them and ostracise them.
Daily Caller = the usual FUD. Opposite of reality. Distinct from truthful.
In the reality based community, old measurements are less accurate than modern ones made with modern instruments. Old measurements require calibration and homogenization against modern, more accurate measurements.
Most of the older measurements are wrong in the same direction – colder than they would be if accurately measured. This is the opposite of what the Daily Caller falsehood-filled article claims.
The net effect of calibrating the older, less accurate measurements against modern methods is to REDUCE the apparent warming trend, as shown below.
These Wing Pawns are wounded by ideology and ignorance.
Fer criminies sake TT, who ya try in to kid besides yourself, Go read my post upthread with a link to a Climate scientist who will not tolerate trickle down ignorance such as the B.S. you just linked to.
People around here aren’t half as ignorant as you seem to think.
Do you even have a clue what it takes to get a degree in climate science?!
I think if any of my sons had told me they wanted to be climate scientists I would have took them out back for a good whoopin. I raised my boys right I will tell you that. Didn’t teach them to be liars, cheats, thieves, conmen, deceivers and such. Some parents these days make me absolute sick with the lack of any morality or decentness they pass on to there kids these days!
So you think assault and battery is moral and decent?
NAOM
You got to do what you got to do to teach the right values when it comes to your own kids. My daddy use to beat the fear of Our Lord into me once an a while, his daddy did the same & so on & so on.
Kinda the “Strong Daddy”model of the reactionary mind.
Daddy is always right, and you don’t question Daddy.
So, a whole family that thinks assault and battery are moral and decent. I hope the law catches up with you.
NAOM
Texans with daddy issues. Navy is full of ’em. Most join after becoming tired of living in cheap hotels.
Spare the rod, spoil the child. ???????
I guess I failed! My son, despite my shortcomings, grew up to be a decent adult, now majoring in Computer Science. I taught him math, physics, chemistry and biology. Also how to have respect for other people and different cultures. Never once did I give him any reason to fear me. Fuck off, Troy!
What, you didn’t beat your boy regularly? Guess I’m a looser as well because it never occured to me to beat our two girls who were total dropouts: one a concert pianist the other a nuclear physicist. Just imagine what they could have done with regular thrashings.
Doug,
‘Sociogeopolitical’ dynamics and disruptions affect different people, families, populations and generations differently.
What many people are currently doing can be highly specialized, and as we both may agree, increasing systemic entropy may start leaning increasingly heavily on many forms of specialization, with some kinds of people, who may have thrived in some niches that the system helped open up with certain levels of energy and complexity, finding it increasingly tough-going as their niches slowly disappear, possibly forever.
James Howard Kunstler had a recent podcast with a guest who wrote a book about ‘Women of The Verge of A Societal Breakdown’.
Are you not actually a Magyar (Christian), perchance? The Christian perspective on fatherhood in relation to both properly and successfully rearing a child dictates that discipline be seen as an act of love. That is, correcting unwelcome behaviors in one’s child is a definitive way to prove love, rather than hate. God, thus, inflicts pain through discipline on children whom He loves (Hebrews 12:5-11).
The sentiment of gentle physical punishment for unacceptable or immoral misdeeds is certainly omnipresent – e.g., Proverbs 13:24, 22:15, 23:13-14, 29:15-17. Importantly, however, we shall not get ahead of ourselves, because it is important to remember that effective correction of your child’s behavior cannot be done by the rod alone – e.g., Proverbs 1:7, 2 Timothy 3:15, Luke 2:52, Deuteronomy 6:6-9, Ephesians 6:1-3, Proverbs 1:8-9, 15:5. Most importantly of all, in Hebrews 12:11 see how guidelines shall be established with the intent of your child earning respect for your true masculinity.
Lol Nothing like Bronze Age tribal dogma when you need a little parenting advice.
Oy vey! 9/11 conspiracy theories, FEMA camps, psychic hotlines, birthers, truthers, President Obama applying the directives of the New World Order, chemtrails, PizzaGate, Planet Nibiru, and now Old Testament parenting advice. America can’t collapse fast enough. I hope Trump gets two terms.
Like many pagan religions as tengriism and the norse belief, the magyars belived that the world is a tree (“Világfa” in Hungarian) composed by different layers, the top layer is where the main and elder dieties, the middle layer where fantastic creatures lived and secondary dieties, lesser gods, fantastic creatures and the humans, the last layer was a hell-like domain, where the bad souls went.
And child abusing Christians have a special place in that bottom layer…
“America can’t collapse fast enough.” ~ Survivalist
Amen.
Assault is not justified by 2000 year old mythology.
As part of the process of my gradual severance from the status-quo, I have been slowly teaching myself wild edibles and medicinals.
In doing so, I often come across nutrient and other ingredient comparisons with industrially-grown produce and how the latter can be sorely lacking in those regards.
This is yet another likely example of how so-called technology ultimately fails and is failing.
So, after reading your comment, it made me wonder about more ways in how the apparent industrial ‘down-sampling’ of the value of our food may be affecting us, such as by not affecting us in the contexts in which we evolved.
Wintergreen, for example, apparently contains something like the ‘active ingredient’ of aspirin, but rather than getting a ‘targetted’ hit in its consumption like one might with something like aspirin, one is getting a ‘whole food’ effect.
Also, apparently, we need some ‘nutrients’ to break down other ‘nutrients’ into usable or digestible forms, so if we’re missing some kinds from our diet and industrial food/consumption-system, then we may be missing some things in our diets, including those that might help with our moods and so forth.
You won’t get this kind of knowledge, experience and self-empowerment reading about electric cars and batteries, etc., alone, though.
**Please note: If you choose to forage, do so responsibly, such as by coaxing new growth from a plant you use (and may therefore continue to use and others may use) and by not killing it in the process, such as by yanking the whole thing out by the root, unless it is the root you are going for and there are plenty of specimens available. Even so, consider seed-saving, seed-bombing and seed-planting and what I call, decentralized gardening. Lastly, pay attention to, respect and encourage beneficial symbiotic relationships and discourage some species that may be problematic or invasive. Nature can adapt to invasive species, but perhaps not at some levels and speeds.
“The Eden that Europeans described when they reached North America was not a wilderness, but a well-managed resource, a complex combination of nature and culture, ecology and economy, a system so subtle and effective that it eluded the settlers who saw only natural wealth free for the taking. The result of this land grab in North America is that only 2% of the land is now wild, its major rivers are polluted, its lakes have caught fire, and its forests are dying from the top down. The tragedy of this commons was that it never really was a commons after colonization, but was surrendered to plunder, privatization, and exploitation in the name of Manifest Destiny and progress.” ~ intelligentagent.com
As part of the process of my gradual severance from the status-quo, I have been slowly teaching myself wild edibles and medicinals.
Please, speed up your severance and quit preaching your specious bullshit here or anywhere else! There is absolutely no way in hell that 7.5 billion humans can currently live on this planet by following any of your prescriptions.
Have you ever, even for second, stopped to think that what you are prescribing is not a solution but a death sentence for the vast majority of people living today.
If you find yourself so clear in thought and purpose, then hopefully, it’s because you have just enjoyed a fresh cup of doubly strong Doubt, and it made your mind and soul feel quenched, refreshed and invigorated.
But if you found yourself not so clear in thought and purpose after that cup of Doubt, it’s contents may have been an life saving antidote.
What you are preaching is as bad and unscientific as Lysenkoism was under Joseph Stalin and would also lead to mass starvation and death!
Your ideas might have worked in a pristine wild environment with a global population under a billion. Unfortunately that train has long left the station.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
What did your sons go on to do with their lives? I hazard a guess it didn’t involve much education.
They want this country to commit suicide by stupidity.
One is a bus mechanic mostly school buses and charter buses, one is manager of a drywall installation business for new home construction. The other works jobs in construction or retail off & on to earn enough to pay the bills along with having some beer money but I always tell him to keep his girlfriend close because she brings in most of the cash to support himself & his kids.
Do they beat the crap out of their own kids or do you help out just to keep your hand in?
In most civilized countries they have laws against child abuse which is what you are describing, When they catch up with individuals like you, they prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and make them do many years of hard time.
You are obviously a very sick and depraved bastard.
Furthermore your post, for all intents and purposes, constitutes slander and incitement of violence against climate scientists. That alone borders on criminal behavior.
I call for you to be immediately and permanently banned from this site!
My thoughts exactly!
“Didn’t teach them to be liars, cheats, thieves, conmen, deceivers and such”
So you told them “Do as I say, not as I do”.
Poe’s law alert.
“It is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.”
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck it is indistinguishable from a duck! Same with incitement to violence if your ‘Poe’ incites violence then it is no longer just ‘Poe’ but it has become defacto incitement to violence and is therefore inexcusable.
I will refrain from giving specific examples but I could easily create a long list!
If perchance Navypop is indeed ‘Poe’, which I do not think it is, then he, she or it, has crossed an invisible line and doing so should have consequences.
Not to worry, Navypop, even if you get banned from here, you can rest in the comfort of knowing that it was from a site some of whose participants regularly support and/or promote the ‘spoils’ of the status-quo’s crony capitalist plutarchy, despite knowing full well of its modus operandi, often conducted in suits of particular kinds, of violence, coercion, theft, murder, ideological manipulation, kidnapping and assorted peonage and slavery, etc.. The latter is apparently like those American slave-holding-and-selling ‘founding daddies’, who apparently just couldn’t help themselves, being ‘products of their time’, the poor dears– like this site’s participants.
The hypocrisy and denial is so thick
You can throw it against a wall and it will stick
“During the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, the United States deported between 500,000 and 2 million people of Mexican descent (including the illegal expulsion of up to 1.2 million U.S. citizens) to Mexico (see Mexican Repatriation)…
More recent Mexican immigrants joined them in those areas, and the minority had long been informally segregated and restricted to an area of the city with the oldest, most run-down housing. Job discrimination in Los Angeles forced many Mexicans to work for below-poverty level wages. The Los Angeles newspapers described Mexicans with racially inflammatory propaganda, suggesting a problem with juvenile delinquency. These factors caused much racial tension between Mexicans and whites.
During this time Los Angeles was going through an expansion. The city planners did not plan the expansion well, as it caused disruptions in communal sites, family sites, and family patterns of social interactions. One major decision that was made was to put a Naval school for the Naval Reserve Armory in the Chavez Ravine which was primarily a Hispanic area. This would later be a hot spot for encounters between the zoot suiters and sailors.” ~ Wikipedia
Not to worry, Navypop, even if you get banned from here, you can rest in the comfort of knowing that it was from a site some of whose participants regularly support and/or promote the ‘spoils’ of the status-quo’s crony capitalist plutarchy, despite knowing full well of its modus operandi, often conducted in suits of particular kinds, of violence, coercion, theft, murder, ideological manipulation, kidnapping and assorted peonage and slavery, etc.. The latter is apparently like those American slave-holding-and-selling ‘founding daddies’, who apparently just couldn’t help themselves, being ‘products of their time’, the poor dears– like this site’s participants.
So the hypocrites like you who support fossil fuel technology and climate change deniers instead of renewables and science, don’t know squat about the world or history, now also support child abusers too?!
Gee, why am I not the least bit surprised?!
And to top it off for someone like you who spends an inordinate amount your precious time on this site has the gall to badmouth both the site and its participants.
Why don’t you just pack up and leave! Don’t let the door hit you in the ass when you do!
Yeah, Caelan,
Your hypocrisy and denial is so thick
You can throw it against a wall and it will stick
Flying Fred
Don’t you just hate being ‘thrown into the same mix’ with those you oppose?
Same shit, different flies(/levels/scales)?
My old girlfriend wanted me to ‘take care of her’, so I told her back, I said, “Baby? I can hardly take care of myself!” So she left me to go back to her folks and that was that. But I helped her move! That was my way of at least showing her at the last minute that I could take care of her.
Hot spells are seldom associated with strong winds.
We need to be honest about the fact that for a long time to come, at least a couple of decades, probably longer, we are going to need a robust fossil fuel or nuclear generating industry to cover the inevitable days and weeks when wind and solar power let us down.
It’s better to keep the emphasis on the savings in purchased fossil fuel, and the resultant “everything else held equal” lower prices of coal and gas as wind and solar power ramp up, local jobs, local control, local tax revenues, etc.
It’s often true that local consumer electricity costs go up a little, per household per month, but it’s equally true that such a household benefits to some extent by way of buying anything and everything that is energy intensive, from food to furniture, a little bit cheaper, and that more local jobs also mean a more vigorous local economy.
I can’t prove it , but I strongly suspect that a family that pays a couple of bucks or a little more extra per month, in order to pay for their utility adding in some wind and solar capacity, get most or all or even more back in other ways, that same month.
And for every case when it’s shown that electricity bills go up a little , due to adding in renewables, there seems to be a case showing that that bills can and DO also go DOWN.
And can point out that once a wind or solar farm is built, the owners generally sell the output at a very favorable to consumers guaranteed long term rate, thus helping to reduce FUTURE rate increases due to the likely higher costs of purchased fuel five, ten, twenty or more years down the road.
All the talk about the limited service life of a solar farm or wind farm is mostly just that, talk, because when the time comes to replace panels and turbines, replacing them will cost only a minor fraction of the cost of building a new from scratch energy farm, and the old equipment can in many cases be reused in other markets where the reduced output will still be economic.
IF it’s not economic to replace old turbine towers, it WILL be economic to replace the turbines on them with smaller lighter ones that put less stress on the tower, and substantial amounts of electricity will still be generated.
I wouldn’t have ANY trouble at all finding prime space for ten or twenty thousand watts worth of panels that have degraded down to fifty percent of their original output, so long as I get them cheap, lol.
The gung ho renewables enthusiasts are ALREADY on board, they aren’t going over to the Koch brothers camp, no siree. We don’t need to pander to them, we need to win over the middle of the road voter who doesn’t really have an opinion either way, other than what he might have heard from either pro or con friends and coworkers, etc.
While we’re at it, we can be making a good start on winning over even hard core bau types who don’t actually own or work in the fossil fuel industries.Trying to enlighten THAT kind is a waste of time, because their paychecks and dividend checks depend on their NOT getting it.
Most of the hard core bau types that profess to believe in free markets and rant about subsidized renewable energy will endorse renewables, and even subsidies for renewables, once they come to understand that renewables are in their enlightened best interests.The less intelligent ones will only get it once they see their electricity bill go DOWN , but the smarter ones understand something of the bigger picture including public health issues, local control issues, cheaper water treatment plants since the water coming downstream to their town may be cleaner, with fewer mines upstream, etc.
If the buildings and houses had ice storage for cooling then there would not be much of a problem.
Or just add some solar cells to the roof. Hot days with little wind tend to be sunny, you just need both wind and solar. Solar tends to match loads from A/C pretty well, peaking in the middle of the day.
Plus, it’s really not the end of the world if demand has to be cut back for a short time if supply is a little short. Back in the bad old days with Enron, California had regular rolling blackouts – painful, but not the end of the world. In response, they added more options to reduce load – to get a lower rate, large users agree to allow the power company to turn off the A/C or slow down some industrial process if needed to meet supply. We no longer suffer rolling blackouts, but on occasion they do cut some load but nobody even notices.
Preston, in California peak solar is usually between 12pm and 1pm. Peak aircon? No idea. But peak demand is usually 6pm-7pm, way after peak solar.
The title to the link says it all, but I tend to read as much between the lines in a lot of cases as I read ON the lines.
I have followed French politics more closely than most Yankees for many years, and have a GREAT deal of respect for the French people, especially in terms of their leaders being forward looking in taking care of France’s long term interests and security.
They built their fleet of nukes to be sure, in large part, to be sure they would have electricity in the event they might have problems importing fossil fuels, ditto they electrified their national rail system ahead of just about every body else, etc.
They are not saying so , not loudly anyway, that they are hedging their bets on the future of the country by getting away from gasoline and diesel fueled cars, but I have NO doubt that their economic and military security are as much on their minds as climate when they make this sort of decision.
It’s good politics sometimes, and this is one of those times, to mention only half the reasons you might be doing or NOT doing some particular thing.
When I talk about the future, and I’m talking to Joe and Suzy Sixpack, I talk about renewable energy jobs, local tax revenue, denying money and power to their enemies, real or imagined, renewable energy coming down in price when the long term trend in fossil fuel prices is has ALWAYS been up, lol. Old country folks can remember twenty five cents a gallon gasoline, and two bucks is eight times as much, and they understand that two bucks will sooner rather than later, probably go back to three or four bucks again, and then higher, due to depletion and inflation, etc.
They EASILY also understand that wind and solar farms built with borrowed money will be repaying that borrowed money with inflated money, and selling electricity into price inflated markets.
They ALSO EASILY understand that when the market is glutted with a particular product, or people providing a particular service, that the price of that product or service is depressed, some times to the point of actually crashing, like the price of coal, and the price of oil, in recent years, and that the MORE wind and solar power we have, the LOWER the price of gas and coal will be, everything else held equal.
But they DO need to be REMINDED of these things, tactfully, without talking down to them, and without actually insulting them, deliberately, as so many members of this forum are prone to do.
Well, you guys who insist on talking about wingnuts, rednecks, rural people and white working class people as if they are idiots and second class human beings are doing your part to make sure they continue to vote for Republicans, and for Trump type Republicans at that.
BUT I do not expect any of you to change, because it’s well known, among people who care to know, that tribal loyalties TRUMP actual FACTS just about every time, and that making fun of the “them”camp is oe of the primary and best AND most enjoyable ways of demonstrating membership in good standing in the “in” camp.
So- go ahead, continue to make fun of the people who voted for Trump, and help him and the Republicans win again, in the upcoming midterm elections. A few of them at least will be visiting this site, and some of that few would hang around to learn about the things we discuss here, if they weren’t talked about like ………. well you know the words we don’t usually use in public anymore, select anyone of them and fill in the blank to suit yourself.
I leave off the climate talk, because it grates on their nerves , culturally. I don’t deny it, I just don’t emphasize it. Discussion of common ground makes friends.
Having sex can cause infertility. A novel concept but a real one.
“About 78 million people pick up the STI each year and it can cause infertility”
“In the past 15 years therapy has had to change three times following increasing rates of resistance worldwide. ”
“We are now at a point where we are using the drugs of last resort, but there are worrying signs as treatment failure due to resistant strains has been documented.” http://www.bbc.com/news/health-40520125
This opens up the possibility of a major increase in infertility if the bacteria mutates further. Since many carriers exhibit no symptoms it’s a stealth disease catching the unwary and unprepared.
It never ceases to leave me laughing a cynical belly laugh when people who are supposedly scientifically literate consistently bad mouth religion ( which DESERVES bad mouthing in many respects of course ) while NEVER acknowledging that religions are basically no more and no less than evolved behaviors which confer fitness or survival value on those who practice them, on average, over time.
If this were not true, then there wouldn’t BE any religions, lol.
It’s damned rare for really serious Baptists to ever fall victim to a venereal disease, because the really serious ones do not practice premarital sex, and do not sleep around once married, and even STAY married more often than other couples for the sake of their kids and their ( supposed) eternal souls.
This is not to say Baptist boys and girls don’t indulge, but rather that they indulge less often, lol, in accordance with how serious their parents are, about keeping an eye on them, and on how seriously they take their religious lessons personally.
I knew a number of Baptist girls back when I was a kid who absolutely refused to have sex until they got married – to friends of mine, which is why I know. The guys always bragged about their conquests. This is not to say there weren’t more new kids around eight months after a wedding than you would expect statistically, but only a few more, not LOTS more.
And none of this is to say that when circumstances change, the fitness value of religions and other evolved behaviors will remain the same, or even continue to exist.
In a modern Western European society, it’s unlikely that being a serious follower of any religion confers survival value.
But being a serious follower of Mohamed certainly confers survival value in certain countries. As a matter of fact, being at least an outwardly serious follower of Mohamed is NECESSARY to survive in some places.
There are probably also some places left where you are at risk of your life if you aren’t at least an outwardly serious follower of Jesus as well, lol.
“…religions are basically no more and no less than evolved behaviors which confer fitness or survival value on those who practice them…” And here I thought the purpose of a religion was to achieve the goal of salvation — saving your soul. So, do other species have religion as well? Are there (tiny) alters hidden away in ant hills and bee hives to help these critters survive? If not, why not? Or, do only humans have a soul worth saving? (Pretty insulting to my dog if that’s the case.) Is that why it’s OK for humans to propagate at the expense of other plants and animals? Just imagine — a billion plus (human) souls queued up at the Pearly Gates seeking immortality. Now that’s Survival Value. Yup, survival of the species in spades!
Religions currently are parasitic meme sets using humans as hosts for their own replication, at the expense of human genetic fitness.
Like a lancet fluke, or Toxoplasma gondii, they rewire the hosts brains for , in the case of Taxo loss of a fear of cats by rats so the rat will be eaten, and the parasite can complete its cycle, or a snail that contains a lancet fluke climbing to a top of a grass leaf so it can be eaten by sheep so the parasite can complete its cycle.
Religion rewires homo sapiens brains for its replication.
Hi Hightrekker,
I believe you are entirely mistaken.
Religions have proven themselves to be VERY USEFUL in terms of Darwinian fitness on countless occasions, serving as the glue that has held various cultures and societies together, enabling them to EITHER over run and out compete other societies, or successfully resist being over run by competing societies.
Religions may go the way of cave fishes eyes, I will not argue that they will not , lol, depending on how the cards fall over the coming decades and centuries.
You can rest assured that if the shit hits the fan HARD, I will be very glad that many members of my family, including some close relatives, are members in good standing in a church that will do quite a bit to support members in distress. It does this on a regular ongoing basis, and it does it EXTREMELY efficiently.
The preacher gets paid less than half what a social worker gets, and puts in twice as many visits. He tells me which old woman in the church, or in the neighborhood, is without money to repair her house, or buy fuel oil, and I go with a couple of other guys and we work on her leaky roof, or cut her a load of firewood, etc. We lose virtually nothing in terms of parasitic losses to bookkeepers, advertising, fundraisers, rent, or salaries and bonuses to administrators, etc. I do this sort of thing a couple of times most months, two hours or more. I also help out with the fire department, etc, the same way.
We try to look after members first, or family of members, but we don’t ignore other people who have problems.
I know, I help with this work, although I absolutely DO NOT advertise the fact LOCALLY that I am a firm believer in Darwinian evolution, and put my faith in books such as the ones written by professors of the physical and life sciences rather than preachers and priests.
My old Daddy has outlived nearly all his close family, or else the remainder of them are now too old to get around, and he has outlived almost all his old friends and coworkers as well. The younger extended family have either moved away, or else they just don’t come, it’s not that they don’t care at all, but that there are SO MANY people to visit, and so many things they must or want to do, etc. Great grandchildren seldom know their great grandparents except from holiday gettogethers, etc.
SO- MOST of the people who come to visit and cheer him up and help him have an enjoyable experience are the middle aged women to older women who still drive who come around a couple or three at a time, to visit the older church members who are now too old to actually get to church, except for funerals, mainly, and mainly their OWN funerals.
NOTE I do NOT maintain that religions are useful under all circumstances, and pointed out that they have little or no survival value in some of the more modern societies such as those of Western Europe, and in some major parts of Yankee society.
Would the world be better off without religions? Now that’s a hell of an interesting question.
Let’s not forget that nature ABHORS a vacuum, and that some classic Russian novelist or another has one of his characters say that when men cease to believe in GOD, they do not henceforth believe in NOTHING.
Maybe without religions we would ONLY have societies similar to modern well educated liberal democratic societies.
OR MAYBE we would only have societies run by psychopaths who think murder on the grand scale is an excellent management tool, not to mention great fun as well.
I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know that we exist as nuclear families, extended families, local tribal groups or communities of various sorts in modern times, and continuously on up to the people bonded together economically and politically as members of a given nation state.
If preachers and priests don’t compose the rules, SOMEBODY ELSE WILL.
WHY should we think that SOMEBODY would prove to be any better ethically and morally than the preachers and priests?
Stalin and Chairman Mao certainly didn’t earn their place in the history books by doing better by their people than priests, lol.
And yes, I know about the history of the Catholic Church, and the Pope and his Cardinals at times being some of the lowest of low life scumbags ever, etc , etc, etc.
I know about priests piling the skulls of victims of human sacrifice into small mountains too.
BUT I don’t see any particular reason to think (except in societies that have happily matured to such a state as that of a typical Western European country ) that whoever takes the place of priests will necessarily be any better than the priests themselves. They might, they might not.
I agree religion is a natural phenomena , and has possibly brought genetic fitness in the past, with group cohesion, and as Dennett has pointed out, possibly even a heath policy.
However in its present parasitic form, this is no longer the case– we are not talking about tribal cohesion, we are taking about species extinction through parasitic infection.
We discount the future, think heuristically rather than critically, live by story and myth rather than observation, and infected by a genetically dangerous parasite.
This brought fitness in the past, but is a liability in the current collapsing ecology.
Stalin and Chairman Mao certainly didn’t earn their place in the history books by doing better by their people than priests, lol.
These were religious societies, not atheist.
Russia was incredibly immersed in superstitious Christianity, and China living in it’s Confucian and Buddhist feudal past.
Hardy religion free societies.
It is one of my theories that The Cultural Revolution in China would not of been possible with out the strict family hierarchy, and its associated shame, that Confucianism brought to Chineese Feudal Society.
Bluntly, Stalin and Mao did do better than the medieval priests of Europe’s Dark Ages.
That was a very, very low standard to beat.
Are there (tiny) alters hidden away in ant hills and bee hives to help these critters survive? If not, why not? Or, do only humans have a soul worth saving? (Pretty insulting to my dog if that’s the case.)
Not a single whale or dolphin that I have ever encountered, struck me as being preoccupied with either deities or an afterlife.
.
But they haven’t accepted Jesus as their personal savior.
Obviously, they are going to hell.
Hi Fred,
I have a sense of humor and you have put many a grin on my old face, and succeeded once again.
Here’s a point. You only have to be right fifty one percent of the time to make out like a bandit in the stock market, if you are in for the long term and make a lot of trades.
I have NEVER contended that any religion is any BETTER in any sort of cosmic sense than any other, or that forty nine percent of the time, religions are anything other than a curse.
I won’t argue that times haven’t changed in such a fashion that more often than not, at this juncture in history, religions are a net negative influence on human happiness and prosperity, etc.
I believe you and I both understand that Mother Nature ( a meme or intellectual construct approaching God(dess) stature in the minds of the most dedicated and intellingent environmentally conscious people I have encountered ) doesn’t give a rats ass about ANYTHING, being non sentient, and not even a physical living creature. She simply keeps score by who wins in the survival game, and sometimes a particular trait or behavior is a winning trait or behavior, sometimes it’s not.
My thinking is that some sort of BELIEF system, or system of beliefs, is essential glue that enables a family, tribe or society to adhere together, and thus gain the advantages of cooperative behavior.
Insects and other so called lower life forms achieve cooperative behavior mostly by way of instinct, but with an element of intelligence involved as the species in question evolves greater behavioral complexity. Wolves are quite intelligent, in my opinion, compared to social herbivores, etc. Chimps are so intelligent that if they had the right sort of vocal apparatus, and looked more like us, a few of them at least could likely pass for “less than gifted” humans.
I am not at all sure we are really any more intelligent than dolphins, in the last analysis, although they obviously have no opportunity to master fire or making tools, lacking the right sort of limbs, and living in water.
Maybe dolphins are as rational as most men, which is not saying a hell of a lot, is it?
I maintain that unless religions have survival value, they would not be so common, they would have faded out a long time ago.
I do NOT maintain that under the conditions prevailing TODAY even in my backwoods community that religion confers substantial survival value, but otoh, I can think of a few people who would be dead, if it weren’t for the fact that local churches have donated substantial amounts of money and man ( or woman ) power to helping them live.
Religion is fading out FAST, in evolutionary or historical terms in my own community, for a number of reasons. The church I attended as a child is now attended by ninety percent older people, and only ten percent kids. The welfare state has mostly supplanted the church operated social safety net here. ETC ETC ETC
Will this be a BETTER community if the church closes its doors?
Well, that depends on what fills the social and economic and cultural niche that was formerly filled by the defunct church.
I don’t personally believe in an afterlive, or any of the supposed things associated with an afterlife.
But I DO believe that the devil I know may not be as bad as the devil I don’t which MIGHT replace the current devil, lol.
It may be impossible to arrive at a logically defensible answer in respect to whether religion has historically been a plus or minus, overall. Some people will point out that religion has been used to justify slavery, while some others point out that the most dedicated and effective of the American abolitionists were very strongly committed to their Christian religion.
Religions are fading out fast in countries that are economically prosperous and safe and that have more or less adequate government operated safety nets, and so far as I am concerned, this is ok with me.
As a matter of fact I often argue that the more liberalish socialist leaning left wing need only wait in order to gain control over our Yankee society, because the older more conservative generations are dying off fast now. There aren’t a whole lot of WWII vets left now, and I USED to know dozens of boomers at least well enough to say hello who are pushing up daisies already.
Just about every young person I encounter is more liberal in terms of cultural values than his or her parents, by a country mile, on average. This is also OK with me, it’s BETTER than just ok, it’s FINE with me.
BUT – and this is a very BIG but, it is not always best to get what you wish for right away, because what you wish for ALWAYS has strings attached. The leftish leaning wing of our society got most of what it wished for over the last few decades mostly by way of the courts, which is all fine and good, ok with me.
But the strings attached include the Trump administration, which is the result of political backlash from the conservative wing of our society more than any thing else.
Some famous old general once said when asked why he halted his army for a rest every hour even on an emergency march that THAT was the FASTEST way of getting there.
MAYBE we would as individuals on average, and as a country, be better off if our society had changed more slowly over the last few decades. Sometimes maybe the best way to get rid of a powerful and dangerous opponent is to just allow him to die of old age, especially when you have good reason to believe over half of his children will be on your side by the time he is gone.
I am not arguing that this IS the case, but rather that it’s a possibility worth some thought. As I see it, most of the opposition to good environmental policies and law in this country is the result of cultural backlash, which in turn is the result of strong environmental policies being ( correctly) associated with the enemy ( the liberal wing of our society ) by the people of the conservative wing.
So- tribal loyalty trumps everything else, nearly every time, and cultural conservatives are thus highly prone to opposing strong environmental laws.
It’s VERY unfortunate that the environment has become a political football, but that’s the way it is. If the leftish leaning wing had been less successful in forcing fast change, the rightish leaning wing would be far more amenable to sensible environmental policies.
I maintain that unless religions have survival value, they would not be so common, they would have faded out a long time ago.
Of course and most competent evolutionary biologists would agree.
However as the environment chnages so does what does or does not constitute survival value. There are biologists such as Dawkins who contend that certain extremely virulent strains of religious memes are now counter productive and their survival value has become questionable.
Personally I accept the idea that religion still holds survival value as a form of tribal glue. What I see happening is that tribalism, itself may no longer have as much evolutionary survival value as it did back on the African plains, when our biggest concerns were to keep from being eaten by lions…
I guess going forward we will find out if humans will survive at all.
I used to read Dawkins quite regularly and enthusiastically. He’s a great writer, and quite accomplished as a scientist , although more so as a writer.
My own personal interpretation of Darwinian evolution is that once we got to the point we mostly whipped out the lions and the snakes, etc, and starting competing among ourselves, so that the tribe over the mountain or across the river or plain morphed into the ENEMY………..
Well, now, a virulent religion has evolutionary value in my estimation IF the followers / practicioners of said virulent religion prosper at the expense of anybody else or everybody else .
It has not been about the SPECIES for thousands of years now, it’s been about the TRIBE in the case of naked apes, and it’s still about the tribe rather than about the species, on a day to day basis.
This can change and IS changing, and maybe it IS about the species now, rather than the tribes.
I recognize that as a species, we aren’t going to last forever, and we probably won’t last even a tenth as long as the cock roach tribe has lasted ALREADY, lol.
We ARE capable of deliberately OR inadvertently damaging our blue marble so severely we WILL perish, every last one of us, and I appreciate the argument that our survival as a species is at risk, but I really do think the risk is small to maybe even trivial….
Because………
It’s my opinion, after devoting years to thinking about it, that while MOST of us are at high risk of perishing as the result of overshoot, barring lucky miracles on the birth rate front, renewable energy front, political front, etc,
…….It’s rather unlikely that we will screw up the planet so badly that ALL of us perish. Even if ninety to ninety nine percent of us die as the result of overshoot culminating in a flat out WWIII, there will likely still be a few spots capable of supporting naked apes and a few naked apes in some of those spots, enough to repopulate.
Some of us are fond of pointing out that insects can serve as highly nutritious and even gourmet fare, and any lucky surviving naked apes aren’t going to have to start over from SCRATCH without useful tools , etc.
Books will survive, etc. There are literally thousands of stainless steel butcher knives in any fair sized town, countless stainless steel pots, glass jugs, countless thousands of items of clothing made out of fabrics that literally last for decades without rotting, etc.
Guns would be used mostly to rob other naked apes, or to defend against robbery, but if they wero to be needed for other purposes …….. say to kill a gone back to wild longhorn bull…….. for dinner ……….
If kept greased to prevent rust, guns last almost forever, and there are tens of million of rounds of ammo all over the place for the taking, and modern ammunition still shoots just fine when it’s old enough to have great grandchildren, if kept dry.
Survivors will have a few decades at least to learn how to survive living a more or less primitive life style while salvaging the remains of our present civilization.
That’s long enough for some survivors to master the job.
Actually, I think religious belief systems are the problem.
I think religion per se is not actually about belief systems. Religion is about a community with a set of shared rituals and practices which hold them together.
“Orthodox” Judaism doesn’t actually require any beliefs. It simply requires *orthopraxy* — do the rituals.
It’s the belief systems which mess people up. I think it’s a good idea to have the religious communities and practices — it’s when the religion starts engaging in mind control by demanding particular beliefs, *despite and contrary to all evidence*, that it becomes a problem. Christianity started doing this before the end of the 2nd century (I blame St. Paul, who totally trashed the religion of Jesus) and only got worse for the next several hundred years, before the Protestant Reformation started to make it *slightly* better.
The conflation of belief with religion is a very Christian problem.
Most European Union countries lack a clear strategy for redirecting public and private funds towards more sustainable investments as they shift to a low-carbon economy, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said Thursday.
“Only a few European countries have turned their climate and energy objectives into concrete investment needs and plans to date,” it said as it released a new study….
The EU estimates it should have investments of around 177 billion euros ($200 billion) per year from 2021-2030 to meet climate and energy targets, which will require a doubling of current investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Although I don’t know what the Chinese have planned for Europe, I wouldn’t be surprised if the investment money comes from there.
China, just like Europe, is a country poor in oil and gas resources.
Much of its foreign investment seems to be directed towards securing future oil and gas resources for itself.
“China is primarily concerned that the Venezuelan opposition, were it to assume control of the government, would be unfriendly to China,” said Margaret Myers, co-author of the report and a director with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue….
“The Chinese government and also the policy banks have lots of concerns, but China also sees longer-term opportunity in Venezuela because it has lots of oil and minerals,” said Renmin University of China professor Cui Shoujun….
Venezuela is part of China’s stronger economic and strategic focus on Latin America. In November, Beijing released a strategic blueprint for the region, its first in eight years.
Last year’s $21.2 billion—mostly for infrastructure and raw-material projects—was more than either the Inter-American Development Bank or the World Bank lent to Latin America and the Caribbean, the report said.
China’s decision to concentrate its financial firepower on Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela reflects in part these countries’ rich natural resources….
Loans to secure gas and oil in some countries doesn’t mean China won’t also make investments in renewables in Europe. China can expand its influence across the globe via different activities in different regions. I imagine it is more effective than trying to win over the world militarily.
I seldom agree with GST but in this particular case, I think he is dead on, that China is doing everything possible politically and economically to secure adequate energy supplies for the coming years.
I personally believe that the Chinese believe that they simply cannot ramp up renewable energy fast enough to transition away from fossil fuels before fossil fuel supplies come up short, expensive , and risky in terms of obtaining them.
And I think they are right about that.
We’re going to be depending on depleting fossil fuels for quite some time yet, because the transition to renewables IS going to take quite some time, at least three or four decades, at best.
Glenn,
China isn’t going to the the only ‘geopolitical entity’ vying for Venezuela’s oil… What is your take on that? How do you think things will play out in that regard and also with respect to Jeffrey Brown’s ELM?
Caelan,
I think we’re in the throes of a transition from a uni-polar world (U.S. hegemony) to a tri-polar world (shared power between the U.S., Russia and China), and that Venezuela is one of the many proxies where this transition is being fought out.
Patrick Lawrence summed it up quite well in the Nation:
It is a fight in defense of American primacy. It is the American policy elite resisting the limits to American power the 21st century imposes even as we speak.
In this the confrontation with North Korea—which is at bottom a confrontation with China—ranks with Ukraine and Syria. The three are fundamentally similar in character. As in Europe, then as in the Middle East, so now in Asia: Washington wages rear-guard actions to preserve a prerogative that rests, finally and only, on military might.
Ukraine, Syria, North Korea: Take these three together and they mark a very critical turn in our great nation’s place in the world. We must not miss this moment’s significance.
Yet one cannot decide: Do the policy cliques in Washington so badly misread all three of these questions such that they have matured, in consequence, into full-dress crises? Or do they read them very well and are ruled by a desire to preserve American preeminence as long as possible and at any cost? I tend to the latter view but do not rule out the former. They are not, at the horizon, exclusive of one another.
On this point I find more certainty: Washington cannot possibly win its fight in defense of unchallenged power….
In my read they cannot hold out indefinitely, and when they cave it will be a good thing for Americans as well as everyone else. In defeats lie our victories: We must embrace this. It will be so for some years to come.
Thanks again. Looks like I have my reading cut out for me. ‘u^
Yeah, I agree with you, Glenn. I’ve been hoping the US would give up on its hopeless attempts to cling to empire sooner rather than later, but it seems nobody in the US power elite has the wisdom of the post-WWII British government.
NASA IMAGES CAPTURE WORST SIBERIAN WILDFIRES IN 10,000 YEARS (30 JUN 2017)
“Siberian boreal forests play a crucial role in the carbon cycle, making up nearly 10 percent of the planet’s land surface and housing more than 30 percent of the carbon on Earth. That means that when these forests burn, they are releasing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. The loss of carbon absorption in combination with the release of carbon, creates a vicious cycle that leads to more global warming and, as a result, more wildfires. Not to mention, these wildfires can also hasten the melting of Arctic ice, which is already disappearing at alarming rates. This occurs when the fires produce hordes of soot that fall on snow and ice, darkening their surface and causing them to absorb more sunlight.”
HAUNTINGLY FREAKISH SIBERIAN WILDFIRES NOW FLICKER TO LIFE IN APRIL
This year’s early wildfire eruption in Siberia comes after 2014, 2015, and 2016 wildfire outbreaks during similar timeframes and following similarly abnormal warm periods. These fires tended to crop up south of Lake Baikal or closer to the China-Russia border. This year, the early fire outbreak appears to have emerged both further north and generally along a wider expanse than during past years.
If past years are any guide, we can expect the present fire season’s early start to produce blazes that continue through September and that peak sometime during late June through August. The fires will tend to be very large and will probably range as far north as the Arctic Ocean.
These fires will gain ignition from new Arctic thunderstorms. They will be fed by new fuels such as thawing permafrost and trees harmed by northward invading species or by climates warming at rates far faster than they can handle. And they will be capable of casting off gigantic smoke plumes that encircle the higher latitude reaches of the globe.
NASA needs to get back to being all about space exploration, nothing else.
In 2006 this was removed from the NASA mission statement “to understand and protect the home planet” . So Jimmy, apparently they are just exploring the closest planet available, not the home planet.
1) National AERONAUTICS and Space Administration
2) Last I heard, Earth was part of space.
NAOM
Last I heard, Earth was part of space.
Negative! Earth is the center of the known Universe!
But then again, so is everywhere else…
Yes Fred, you have hit on it!! Eureka!!
Using the unique properties of dark mater and dark energy we can force the universe into submission making us the center. It will be ours at last!!! BwaaHAAAAHAAAHAAA.
Brought to you by the Wile E. Coyote school of physics. Where quantum gravity and quantum time were first demonstrated to the public during acceleration events. Donations welcome (no Road Runners accepted).
Also brought to you by the ACME explosives company. In business since the Big Bang.
Yep!
Either everywhere is the center of the Universe or nowhere is the center of the Universe… but one thing is for sure, the cosmic background radiation is real and so is the red shift, whether you believe it or not 🙂 https://xkcd.com/54/
Red shift illustration, mine.
.
I just want to know where the brass ring is located.
It’s attached to that big stopper stuck in that black hole on the bottom of the cosmic swimming pool. All you gotta do is dive down and pull it up…
The other brass ring, the one we should not touch. Getting the brass ring just gets one more of the same and we really need to get off this ride, try another one.
TESLA TO BUILD WORLD’S LARGEST LITHIUM ION BATTERY IN AUSTRALIA
“The 100-megawatt (129 megawatt hour) battery should be ready this year. There is certainly some risk, because this will be largest battery installation in the world by a significant margin, Mr Musk said in Adelaide on Friday. He added that, the next biggest battery in the world is 30 megawatts.”
“It will completely transform the way in which renewable energy is stored, and also stabilize the South Australian network as well as putting downward pressure on prices,” Mr Weatherill said.
I generally tend to take Musk at his word, except when it comes to delivery dates, lol, but I don’t see any reason to think this super giant battery installation is going to be physically or technically dangerous.
So far as I can see, such large batteries consist of many smaller ones, separately housed, and far enough apart to be safe from each other in the event of one of them catching fire, etc, but close enough to easily wire all of them together.
Maybe he means it will be risky from an economic or political standpoint.
Such super batteries are sure going to be useful in smoothing out short term peaks and valleys in wind and solar power production that happen because of cloud cover or the wind dying down unexpectedly and so forth, and once there are enough of them…….. then they can be recharged by that famously dependable Aussie sun, and carry a big share of the night time load, saving ever more coal and gas.
He stands to be $50 million out of pocket if he does not hit the deadline. I would term that a form of risk.
Tesla founder Elon Musk has thrown down a challenge to the Australian government, saying that he can build a battery array capable of resolving South Australia’s energy stability issues within 100 days. Musk took to social media to make the challenge, saying that Tesla could develop a 100 MWh system to stabilize the state’s electricity network, within 100 days of a contract being signed, or that he’ll provide it for free.
Okay Elon, it’s put up or shut up time!
Team Koch will have a big party if he fails!
The energy instability is due to legal restrictions on PV. Elon does see this as a way to demonstrate the tech and profit from the situations. The real problem lies with the government in this case.
Those who have been researching the situation say that the problem is specifically caused by the actions of the *federal* government of Australia. (And it is the *state* government of South Australia which is ordering the batteries.)
The installation will be paired with a wind farm in South Australia. At 129 MWh, it will become the world’s largest lithium-ion battery projects, and is being developed in conjunction with French renewable energy firm Neoen.
The survey, published by Roy Morgan on Thursday, shows that on average almost one in four Australian households (23.2 per cent) own a “Home Solar Electric Panel”, as at March 2017. Uptake is shown to be strongest in South Australia, at 32.8 per cent; then Queensland, at 30.2 per cent; and Western Australia, at 26.6 per cent.
The numbers are in keeping with the findings of May 2017 data from SunWiz, which suggested Australian households – and businesses – were installing rooftop solar PV at a rate not seen since 2012.
“There will be at least 30,000 battery systems installed and possibly more than 40,000,” concludes Solarwiz founder Warwick Johnston. He points to the uptick of battery installs in the 2H 2016 as indicating the market segments’ steep growth trajectory.
This level of battery storage installation would place Australia as a rival to distributed storage leader Germany regarding volume, which hit 52,000 cumulative residential systems last month. Germany’s solar energy association, BSW-Solar, forecasts that number to top 100,000 in 2018.
The expiry of some premium solar FITs this year, particularly in New South Wales but also in Victoria and South Australia, is predicted to be a driver on storage coupled to household rooftop solar systems. However, Sunwiz notes that new solar arrays are being combined with storage, indicating that there is a sizable market of ‘early adopters’ embracing storage and ready to pay a premium for it.
“There is pride in owning a battery system,” says Johnston. “These are generally wealthier people who have got the multiple tens-of-thousands [of dollars] to spend, and then they have something to show off in their garage. They certainly like the feeling of energy independence and self-sufficiency that comes from having a battery PV storage system.”
Australia is shaping up to be an extremely interesting case study in the adoption of renewable sources for electricity generation. Doesn’t look like it according to the screenshot of the NEM Watch Widget below but, lets see what it looks like in six hours time (mid day in Australia) then check back again in six months and again in six years.
For some perspective here’s a little screenshot from http://www.gaisma.com/en/ showing that at 6:55 am., half an hour after the above screenshot was taken, the sun had just come up on the north east coast of Australia.
Such super batteries
Super batteries?
They are lithium ion– the Japanese commercialized them in the early 1990’s.
Campers, can you say bottleneck?
I knew you could!
What year was the combustion engine commercialized?
Bob, did you tell us before about your lithium investments upon my mention of a possible lithium ‘bottleneck’ and/or u-shaped cost curves, or was it someone else?
Thanks, campers, that was great… Now can you say, u-shaped cost curves? …Come on, now, all together…
Anyway, the ~150 year old ICE seems to be approaching its bottleneck…
1698
I actually said SUPER LARGE, lol.
Compared to existing , they are supersized.
But you’re right, it’s a relatively old technology, and while it may be that such batteries can be manufactured at much lower costs than at present, they will never be four or five times as powerful per unit mass or unit volume.
The theoretical limit for lithium batteries is 3 kWh/kg. MIT demonstrated (in the lab) 2.5 kWh/kg. Right now they are in the range of 0.3 kWh/kg.
Practically speaking 1 kWh/kg is quite enough to run vehicles. A 150 kg battery would give a range of 400 miles using 80 percent of it’s charge.
However lithium is not the only contender for batteries.
However lithium is not the only contender for batteries.
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I never thought of Hamsterium. Maybe Guineapigite would be more powerful.
Actually researchers tried direct solar powering hamsters. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between solar input and power produced. There was a direct relationship between increased power and early failure.
Probably needs some work. 🙂
There was a direct relationship between increased power and early failure.
Probably needs some work. ?
Yeah, especially in some of the earlier generators they had to keep replacing faulty components due to low EROEI.
.
Sounds like they misapplied the technology.
Mind you, if this was in Peru and you switched to guinea Pigs then there would be a ready market for failed units.
NAOM
Mind you, if this was in Peru…
Not to worry! Technology advances by leaps and bounds.
Despite all the naysayers, one of the pioneers of this technology, Elan Mask, is working on a giga project and thinks he has found the ultimate solution by using Capybaras in a giant linked powerwall network down in the recently recovered continent of Atlantis…
Should the Capybara modules fail, they are even more recyclable than guinea pigs and might solve both the world’s energy and food problem in one fell swoop! 😉
Capybara
Source Wikipedia
The capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is the largest rodent in the world. Also called chigüire, it is a member of the genus Hydrochoerus, of which the only other extant member is the lesser capybara (Hydrochoerus isthmius). Close relatives are guinea pigs and rock cavies, and it is more distantly related to the agouti, the chinchilla, and the coypu.
Adult capybaras grow to 106 to 134 cm (3.48 to 4.40 ft) in length, stand 50 to 62 cm (20 to 24 in) tall at the withers, and typically weigh 35 to 66 kg (77 to 146 lb), with an average in the Venezuelan llanos of 48.9 kg (108 lb).[10][11][12] The top recorded weights are 91 kg (201 lb) for a wild female from Brazil and 73.5 kg (162 lb) for a wild male from Uruguay.[
Roast Capybara recipes available upon request!
Th difference between 1 and .3 is quite significant.
All of a sudden, you have a 450 kg battery.
Yes, it’s about 3.3 times different. So?
Nope, Tesla 85 kWh battery weighs 544 kg. Your response is backwards, are we trying to make them heavier or lighter? I say go for lighter. 150 to 200 kg would be much better. Less material too as well as better capability. That is the direction batteries are headed now.
Lithium batteries have not progressed because there was no need. They were quite adequate for many years. Now there is a need for better. This will drive change but it will take time to move through the system and depose the current champions. I doubt we will see the same batteries in 10 years time though we see the same batteries now as 10 years ago.
NAOM
Needs can be ‘manufactured’… right under your nose… without your knowledge, understanding or consent.
It’s a large part of why I prefix some words, like ‘technology’, with ‘pseudo’.
See also:
“Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, proposes that the mass communication media of the U.S. ‘are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion’, by means of the propaganda model of communication.” ~ Wikipedia
It’s worse than even the simple math.
Palette-cabin in progress composite render/screen-grab below.
I have yet to find out if or how to get the seams of the individual planks in a render, such as to highlight the joints or how to increase the contrast…
2 palettes by 4 and you can make each out if you look closely. Some boards were popped off the get the support beams in.
The ground floor isn’t actually a floor per se, and the height is somewhat minimal ~6′ or so, so the thing is on stilts so as to offer sufficient clearance to develop, store, add to, etc., below.
It looks bigger than it is because of the increased camera angle to get most of it in the frame.
As usual, if you select the image, you can get a larger display of it.
I have to get the ‘footings’ below the frost line, etc., but one thing at a time…
“It has been seen all throughout human history – a bustling community experiences a population boom and technological advancement until, seemingly overnight, it plummets into total collapse.”
“It is argued that, in all advanced industrial societies (not necessarily only capitalist ones), technology becomes a means of domination, control, and exploitation, or more generally something which threatens the survival of humanity.” ~ Wikipedia
“The contemporary cult of anthropolatry… insists that humanity is destined to bestride the stars, outlive the sun, give meaning and purpose to the cosmos, and so on. That enthusiastic embrace of the quality the ancient Greeks called ‘hubris’ is its distinctive feature. It’s also its distinctive flaw, because—as an honest scientific assessment of our limited gifts and vast dependencies could have predicted a long time ago— the project of living like gods isn’t working too well for us these days. Despite the increasingly shrill claims of Man’s devout worshippers, what’s more, it shows no signs of working any better in the foreseeable future—quite the contrary, in fact.” ~ John Michael Greer
“It has been seen all throughout human history – a bustling community experiences a population boom and technological advancement until, seemingly overnight, it plummets into total collapse.”
Sure! As long as your definition of ‘overnight’ is a couple of centuries long…
As an example, the Roman Empire took a few centuries. Check out ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ by Tainter. He actually studied the subject.
BTW,
I have yet to find out if or how to get the seams of the individual planks in a render, such as to highlight the joints or how to increase the contrast…
…It looks bigger than it is because of the increased camera angle to get most of it in the frame.
As usual, if you select the image, you can get a larger display of it.
Sounds like you haven’t quite mastered the use of your advanced computer and graphics technology. That’s Ok, it took me a good quarter of century using many different kinds of advanced software and thousands of computer hours to become reasonably competent… Even today I’m still learning.
Oh, and your house on stilts looks rather shaky and potentially unsafe I doubt it would pass code in a shanty town. I highly recommend you consult with a competent civil engineer before you put yourself and other’s at risk. Oh, never mind, civil engineers use technology and you of all people wouldn’t be caught dead being so hypocritical as to employ something as unethical as electricity, computers and software…
Just make sure your construction isn’t what ends up collapsing!
Yes, maybe the Roman’s ‘decline/collapse’ was a long-drawn-out sordid and tortuous affair that resisted putting itself out of its misery for some time. We might be in for something along those lines this time around too, perhaps thanks to similar dynamics, such as especially given that some of the mindless status-quo cheerleading and protectionism is going on from people who should know better.
As for the pallet cabin, when we weren’t wearing diapers and sucking our thumbs like we are now, we have been building our own dwellings for a very long time without the career clowns, coercion and codes currently collapsing community, culture and climate, and will likely be doing so again, if we last, for some time to come.
We don’t actually need much to be content, happy, healthy and fulfilled, etc., and what we do need, we appear to be losing– in the interest of what we don’t really need, ironically.
Attached is an image of Bear River, Nova Scotia, that happens to have, possibly heritage, buildings on stilts and in the water and a tidal river no less. We almost bought an old church there.
Speaking of which, and of different and/or more natural, self-empowering, local, community-oriented, small-scale and fulfilling ways to live…
“Bear River is home to the first solar aquatics waste water management facility in North America; the facility is still functioning well and is now being expanded. The community is known for its thriving artistic community, the largest per capita in Nova Scotia. There are many artist studios, shops and galleries in the downtown and immediate area. Crafts produced include clothing, woodwork, pottery, quilts, fabric arts, and an assortment of painted media.” ~ Wikipedia, Bear River, NS entry
This building is in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and the very useful open area under it plays host to different social activities, including the weekend farmers’ market. Been there, done that.
And you seriously believe that such construction is within your skill set?!
It ain’t about being happy or not having codes for buildings. It’s about actually knowing what you are doing. Check out the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. Hint, the twig house didn’t keep the wolf out…
Good luck with your palettes on stilts! Beware of storms, high winds, fires, termites, carpenter ants, beavers and swift flowing waters. But if you insist on building it, at the very least stop using your computer, don’t use any hammers or saws, power tools should be completely out of the question! Maybe make yourself some stone axes and bind every thing together with twine.
Oh, sorry, stone axes are an early form of, you guessed it, technology.
Yeah, Fred is right. You don’t seem to know what you’re doing.
Expertise is a real thing, Caelan. My expertise is in the oldest documented profession in the world — accounting, which predates written language.
You clearly lack expertise in engineering and architecture (which are also extremely old professions, dating to ancient Egypt). It might be wise for you to acquire some expertise in the area.
Yair . . .
Caelen MacIantyre.
Your methodology looks off. Little forty five degree braces do not a stable structure make.
It beats me why you would try to reinvent the wheel. Its all very basic stuff and it’s all been done before . . . pallets are built for a purpose.
I find it highly amusing and highly instructive that the CUBANS of all people are probably ahead of everybody else in learning how to use the microbial biome to advantage in agriculture, and in actually putting the knowledge to work.
This is the happy consequence of necessity being a harsh taskmaster, and the Castro regime having little or no choice in the matter, being unable to buy or manufacture much in the way of pesticides and other industrial agricultural chemicals.
This link is a good place to start, it’s a fairly decent and still reasonably short overview of the circumstances that led to the Cubans undertaking this initiative, and their results.
Google Cuban agriculture and biocontrols, food production, micro biome, etc and a few more words along these lines and you will get lots of hits, many of them that contain more specific and more up to date information.
If I could be young again, knowing what I know now, I would make a career of doing this sort of research.
I find it highly amusing and highly instructive that the CUBANS of all people are probably ahead of everybody else in learning how to use the microbial biome to advantage in agriculture, and in actually putting the knowledge to work.
Brazil has been quietly importing Cuban Doctors and scientists for a long time. As far as I know they are highly competent.
Cuban doctors are all over the Third World, and are extremely well trained.
Castro really pissed off the capitalist world by dying of old age.
Lets face it campers:
“Governments exist to cheerlead capitalism and provide military force when limits are met as banks grow their loan portfolios as fresh tissue is metabolized. Communists and environmentalists are on the black list, climate change is a hoax, as well as anything standing in the way of expansion of the banking system.”
Don’t forget insurance companies.
The New Nation-States
How Trump’s rejection of the Paris accord is reshaping the political landscape.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
July 6, 2017
the Paris decision may also reshape the world for the better, or at least the very different. Consider: A few days after Trump’s Rose Garden reveal, California Governor Jerry Brown was in China, conductingwhat looked a lot like an official state visit. He posed with pandas, attended banquets—and sat down for a one-on-one meeting with President Xi Jinping, which produced a series of agreements on climate cooperation between China and California. (Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, was in Beijing the same week: no pandas, no sit-down with Xi.) It was almost as if California were another country. Call it a nation-state—a nation-state that has talked about launching its own satellites to monitor melting polar ice. (Rat does; he calls it The Republic of Awesome)
I believe that timing is everything. And at this MOMENT we are on the cusp of a violently disruptive revolution. I think the existing utility companies WILL do exactly what large corporations always do, behave badly and not even in their own interests. It remains ridiculously expensive to build your own power plant using batteries and equipment and photovoltaics, but it is now only painfully expensive. Some (like me) will be sufficiently enraged by utility company misbehavior to do it anyway. Costs will continue to drop as individuals choose to adopt this anyway, which will lead to more individuals making the same choice in a cascade effect just as all technologies are wont to do.
My observation is that all of this typically takes decades of grueling effort and ridiculous expenditures by the adventurous, followed by a sudden hockey-stick upturn in the adoption curve by all. This lunge will finally and inevitably occur within the next 10 short years. Ultimately, even the utility companies will adopt photovoltaics as their main source of electricity – assuming they even survive at all as we know them.
Hmmm? Where have I heard this before?
My favorite Trump supporter at it again, providing us with an interesting look at the future of energy and transportation as he sees it. Of course Jack being Jack, he has to throw a little global warming denial in there but, since he’s on the same page as me most of the time, I’ll give him a pass.
Hmmm? Where have I heard this before?
My favorite Trump supporter at it again, providing us with an interesting look at the future of energy and transportation as he sees it. Of course Jack being Jack, he has to throw a little global warming denial in there but, since he’s on the same page as me most of the time, I’ll give him a pass.
I can’t imagine where you might ever have heard such a thing… 😉
Cheers!
If anything he’s a little bit behind the curve. Mass adoption is already happening in Australia. Some utility companies are already adopting PV as their main source of electricity.
Since a 20 square meter thermal collector with 72 percent collection efficiency will produce 72 million BTU for collection and use annually (Northeast US 40 N) why are we heating with natural gas/oil/propane?
All we need to do is devise appropriate storage and distribution systems.
“All we need to do is devise appropriate storage and distribution systems.”
As long as capitalism doesn’t get in the way, no problem with distribution.
Storage?
Can you say bottleneck?
So there is a bottleneck between my yard and my house? Underground insulated storage using rock and water plus some internal storage.
And how is that scaling?
5% of global storage yet?
Your question is meaningless unless you define your terms.
Scaling just fine. Used even in some large resorts in Europe where solar insolation is lower than USA.
5% global share yet?
Don’t get me wrong- passive solar is great.
I lived in Micronesia for a year without electricity- water from rain off the roof, spearfished to trade with the locals, and must confess, did use a bit of Kerosene for lighting and cooking.
But hot shower from a solar heated hose was wonderful!
You didn’t answer the question, merely showed a lack of vision. All things start small.
You sound like you are either against proper solutions or are just very cynical about their implementation.
Most things only occur when people are very positive about them and move forward against the odds.
This is a well developed technology in Europe, just in the US we are backward about it. No magic or even much high tech involved, just simple construction. Yet to many it seems out of reach just because some major corporation is not knocking down their door to sell it to them.
Same was true of EV’s. Now look at them, entering the terrible two’s.
Lets hope–
Seems like a solution that doesn’t require a techno narcissistic fantasy.
I have used a coil of black plastic pipe on many occasions as a makeshift solar water heater when there was pressurized water but no way to heat it. I just put a fitting in each end of the coil (the pipe being purchased for later use on the job) and hooked it to a hose on each end. Let that sucker lay in the sun for a couple of hours mid summer and it will make water hot enough you can’t stand to shower in it.
Very refreshing when doing nasty work such as renovating an old house, you just take your shower before it gets too hot, lol. In cool weather it will only get lukewarm to moderately hot in three or four hours.
I have a home made solar domestic hot water system that can supply our entire needs eight or nine months out of the year, but it’s out of service due to leak. Need to fix that.
‘Our forecast doesn’t hinge on countries adopting stringent new fuel standards or climate policies,’ said Colin McKerracher, the head of advanced transport analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. ‘It’s an economic analysis, looking at what happens when the upfront cost of electric vehicles reaches parity. That’s when the real shift occurs.’”
Expanding Into The Space Created By The Expansion
The potential problem with stuff like this is that they become their own self-fulfilling prophesies…
“Oh, look! Look! EV’s may go mainstream very soon! No, really! It’s true! Very soon! So, hop on the bandwagon, everyone! Let’s be part of the in-crowd of a new thing! Don’t get left behind!”
BNEF is being unrealistically pessimistlc.
“Cost competitive with petroleum-powered cars” happens one car segment at a time. (Because cars aren’t all the same price, you know.) It has already happened in luxury sedans, luxury SUVs, high-end sports cars, city buses, and mini “city cars”. It will happen in mid-range cars next year, and in tractor-trailers around 2020.
So why do they think it will be delayed until 2025?
In March, and again in April, U.S. monthly electricity generation from utility-scale renewable sources exceeded nuclear generation for the first time since July 1984. This outcome reflects both seasonal and trend growth in renewable generation, as well as maintenance and refueling schedules for nuclear plants, which tend to undergo maintenance during spring and fall months, when overall electricity demand is lower than in summer or winter.
Record generation from both wind and solar as well as recent increases in hydroelectric power as a result of high precipitation across much of the West over the past winter contributed to the overall rise in renewable electricity generation this spring, while nuclear generation in April was at its lowest monthly level since April 2014. However, EIA’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) projects that monthly nuclear electricity generation will surpass renewables again during the summer months of 2017 and that nuclear will generate more electricity than renewables for all of 2017.
Of course, anybody who’s been paying attention to the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly already knew this. 😉
What we did not know was, when last it was that this was the case. From the graph below we can see that there was a significant increase in nuclear capacity throughout the 80s with a slight increase in the late 90s. The big story here is the growth of wind and solar which, if it continues apace will result in renewables generating more than nuclear most of the time, if not all the time.
Putting aside the incredible dangers, nuclear does not have much of a future if it can’t be produced at a much lower cost.
Funny you should bring that up. Here’s PV Magazine’s take on the same story:
At 1 MW, it isn’t the largest solar power project in the nation, or even the state. But the 3,000 solar panels on bend of a river near the Tennessee/Virginia tell a story which is playing out across the United States, and the world.
Next to the solar plant, which was recently put online by Birdseye Renewable Energy and United Renewable Energy, towers the concrete ruins of a nuclear power plant which began construction in 1978. However, work on the Phipps Bend Nuclear Power Plant was stopped by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) three years later.
The new solar plant will now sell power to local utility Holston Electric through a TVA program.
Citing contemporary documents, local press concluded that the Phipps Bend Nuclear Power plant was the victim of declining power demand due to aluminum plants shutting down in the South, but globally the tide of nuclear was turning.
Citing contemporary documents, local press concluded that the Phipps Bend Nuclear Power plant was the victim of declining power demand due to aluminum plants shutting down in the South, but globally the tide of nuclear was turning.
Yeah, it is indeed but perhaps not in the way the author may have intended that statement. The one in my own backyard is sure to be one that will fall victim to sea level rise in the not too distant future.
Ironically the article contradicts it’s own rising tide scenario at the end by saying this.
And aside from active nuclear programs in nations including China and India, globally nuclear power is on the decline. This is largely due to its inability to compete on cost with wind, solar and natural gas, which can cost half as much (or less) per unit of energy delivered.
Regardless of the economics of nuclear power generation these plants tend not to work too well when they are flooded.
As Sea Levels Rise, Are Coastal Nuclear Plants Ready?
Some low-lying plants face a watery future, but the legacy of Fukushima is spurring action.
Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida’s Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032.
At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world’s seas continue to rise.
NASA Images Capture Worst Siberian Wildfires in 10,000 Years
I spent 9 years in wildfire as a younger man. Thrilling stuff. I feel that this is one of the more tangible positive feedback loops. It’s easy to see; expanding wildfire range, longer wildfire seasons, and more intense wildfire behavior. Lightning detection and mapping is also produces interesting data sets.
Volcano reveals simpler than expected cloud-climate response to tiny aerosol particles
That’s for sure! We just had the G-20 minus Trump to show just how Great the world really thinks America is! On a planet of 7.5 billion humans, 63 million anti science, anti international trade and pro 19th century fossil fuel technology is a sure way to bring about a Neo-American Isolationism, to our detriment, not benefit, mind you… This picture of Trump says it all!
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Wow, that bridge in China is amazing. Anyone who doesn’t see China as a top tier nation has had their head under the pillow for a long time. They deserve a lot of respect, and elbow room.
And it’s got pedestrian walkway for the locals. Nice touch.
The Chines won’t stop at their borders either — they are expanding across Central Asia as well.
Hi George Kaplan,
Check your e-mail please.
G19 outmaneuvers climate Rogue Trump, ignores Donald & Ivanka: “With the US absent from climate discussions because Trump withdrew from the Paris Accords, the remaining 19 members of the G20 were able to craft a much stronger statement on climate change and addressing it than the US would normally allow. US governments are typically deeply beholden to Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal.
The danger was that Saudi Arabia in particular might balk, but the kingdom seems to be more afraid of Merkel and her allies than it is of Trump. Besides, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has already admitted that oil is over with, and he is looking for a soft landing for the Saudi economy by turning oil wealth into investment wealth before the black gold comes to be recognized as worthless (it already is worthless, but most people just don’t realize it yet).”
A long time ago, one or another Saudi said that the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stone, and that the Iron Age did not pass due to a lack of iron, and that the Age of oil will not pass due to a lack of oil.
But the stinky black stuff sure is useful for now, and will still be necessary but in declining quantities for quite some time to come, probably another thirty years or longer imo.
Maybe the Saudis have concluded that the USA might actually not NEED to import oil, or at least not import oil from the Eastern Hemisphere, and that therefore they better get with the program that the rest of their customers have adopted, and get away from oil while the getting is still good.
The transition from an oil export dependent economy to one based on other sources of income is going to be one hell of a tough one for them, and it’s going to take a long time.
But it appears that maybe at least some of their leaders understand that it MUST happen, or else they go back to riding camels.
Personally I wouldn’t want to be a Saudi under any possible circumstances other than being a member of the royal family with a connection to the oil money.
I think that barring MIRACLES ninety eight percent of them will have to either emigrate or starve when the oil money runs out. If the climate heats up as much as some people think it will, it might actually be impossible to even survive there except by living underground.
The end of the ‘oil age’ may be where ‘the economy’ ends as well, and where the debt bubble, among other bubbles, goes “pop!“. ^u^
OFM, the number of cars in the world has doubled since 2002. That is more than another 500 million cars on the roads in just 15 years. It took the whole history of cars to get the first 500 million on the road from 1895 to 2000.
Cars are being taken up by developing countries at a faster pace than ever before. I don’t now how many other types such as the small motorcycles are being produced, but they too are growing fast.
At that pace of growth it will not be long before oil demand outstrips oil production unless new vehicles are very efficient and many use other sources of power. The age of oil is already ending, the age of electricity may get a good run but for sure the age of overshoot is upon us in so many ways.
No, we are not being blindsided, we knew and were warned, but like all animals we follow our inborn directives to grow and spread and fulfill our desires. Although we have the delusion that we do not.
Good time for an Arctic Sea Ice update:
The temperatures north of 67N have been cool. Not surprisingly, this has shrunk the large lead 2017 had in volume in the race for record low Sept min volume. See chart below.
2017 no longer has the lowest average annual area, as shown by the second graph in the next post.
Now for area vs temps chart:
As before, the temps are NCEP reanalysis from here:
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl
Area and volume from here:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/iN_ice_area.dat
Source page: http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectindex.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
… with the latest months’ volumes estimated from the graph by Wipneus on his page:
https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas
Each dot represents the annual average of the Temperature anomaly versus the annual average of the Area (or Volume) anomaly, except 2017 which is year-to-date (Jan-Jun).
Anomalies are calculated versus a 32 year baseline of 1979 to 2010.
WTF? Sorry. I’m a fairly numerate guy and interested in polar sea/land ice melting but I have no idea what you’re talking about or what you’re trying to convey. Must be getting old 🙂
Hey, I’m getting old, too!
What happens when two old guys try to communicate a complex idea? Maybe not much.
I’ll try to explain it more fully. Fer sure, I’ve taken some liberties with assuming readers are familiar with my previous graphs showing the same kind of plots. Maybe you never saw those previous posts, or the idea didn’t sink in then, or… most likely… I never gave a good enough explanation then either.
…..
The plots show 2 variables plotted against each other – an X-Y plot. Time is not shown directly at all.
The X-axis is the Average Temperature Anomaly for a given year, the Y-axis the average Sea Ice Volume (or Area) Anomaly for that same year. The data come from the websites given above… I put them in a spreadsheet, and calculate an average for each month for the years 1979 to 2010 to find the Monthly Baseline.
(Temperatures are for 67N-90N)
Then I subtract each month’s value from the Baseline to find the Monthly Anomaly. Finally, the average of the 12 monthly anomalies is averaged again to find the Annual Average Anomaly for each year. That is what is plotted… the Average Annual Anomaly for Volume (Y-axis) vs the Annual Average Anomaly for Temperature (X-axis) for each year from 1979 to 2017.
Same for Area versus Temperature… the second plot.
The points are connected by a dotted line, so you can usually follow the progression of warmer years and less ice. The last point near the lower right is for 2017 (2nd highest temp, lowest ice volume, 5th lowest area). Unlike all the others, this point only represents data from January to June – it is not a full year’s Average Annual Anomaly.
Hope that helps, please ask more detailed questions if that is still unclear.
Here’s another of my peculiar plots in the same style that I like a lot…
CO@ versus GISS Temperature:
I get it, when it’s colder in the Arctic more ice forms and than when it’s warmer.
The last graph is a tough one. Either higher temperatures force more CO2 into the atmosphere or higher CO2 concentration makes higher temperature. Or both.
No, no, no! What you are missing is the correlation between the increased O2 that is being added to all that carbon when you combust organic compounds such as say CH4 in the presence of O2 and you get CO2 and H20 and some heat… Now, while correlation is not causation, usually where there is smoke there is also fire. Or is it the other way around and where there is fire there is soot which causes a bunch of problems of it’s own, even some cooling upon occasion. In any case wherever there is fire, ice tends to melt. So you see it is really the O2 that is the root cause of the warming problem and that goes all the way back about 3.5 billion years when those pesky cyanobacteria started a climate cataclysm by using solar energy and photosynthesis to produce vast amounts of O2 and as it is apparent from the graphs when that combines with carbon we’re fucked… So go burn some anthracite!
😉
Fred, don’t blame the O2, it is only following it’s natural tendencies. Blame all those green plants for producing so much of it.
Not to worry, nature has built the counter-agent to plants and plant produced O2. Humans, the solution to all that toxic O2. Soon green plants will be reduced to a small portion of the ecosystem and put in their place. Nature just took it’s sweet time settling that problem. Maybe Nature doesn’t have a watch and one day seems much like the next, so what is the hurry anyway?
Still, we are here to take care of the problem and if we are really good at maybe we can achieve runaway warming and clean the Earth of that pesky infection it has, called life. Must make it really itchy having all that stuff growing on and crawling over it.
Just as a back-up and if we are impatient we built lots of nuclear weapons, poison gases and bio-weapons (Round-up and others).
WE are the Monsters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYtXhl9xqDo
Hi Wehappyfew,
I realize the red “line” is not linear but this might be lost on some people.
Perhaps a batter way to do this would be to plot temp vs natural log of CO2 so the relationship would be linear, then show the straight line with the equation of the line.
Then the slope times the natural log of 2 would give an empirical estimate of the transient climate response (TCR). In theory this should be in the range of 1.6C to 2 C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 over the short term. Medium term (after the ocean warms up in 500 years) the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) might be in the range of 2C to 4 C if atmospheric CO2 remained at 2 times baseline (278-280 ppm) over that period. Long term ( as ice sheets melt, permafrost melts, and biomes change) maybe 2000 years to 10,000 years the Earth System Sensitivity (ESS) would be larger still (4C to 8C) if atmospheric CO2 remained at 558 ppm (double preindustrial Holocene average).
I know most people know this, but some readers may not.
The estimated range of TCR, ECS, and ESS is a matter of contention amongst scientists, I have given the mainstream range of estimates
New research from Harvard suggests my ranges for ECS are probably not right. See
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1602821
Abstract
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report widened the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) range from 2° to 4.5°C to an updated range of 1.5° to 4.5°C in order to account for the lack of consensus between estimates based on models and historical observations. The historical ECS estimates range from 1.5° to 3°C and are derived assuming a linear radiative response to warming. A Bayesian methodology applied to 24 models, however, documents curvature in the radiative response to warming from an evolving contribution of interannual to centennial modes of radiative response. Centennial modes display stronger amplifying feedbacks and ultimately contribute 28 to 68% (90% credible interval) of equilibrium warming, yet they comprise only 1 to 7% of current warming. Accounting for these unresolved centennial contributions brings historical records into agreement with model-derived ECS estimates.
Full paper at
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1602821.full
“I know most people know this, but some readers may not.”
I assure everybody from the bottom of my heart, and put my good name as the resident token redneck conservative of this forum on it to boot, that excepting the rather small minority of people who have some formal university level training in the physical sciences and mathematics that NOBODY actually GETS IT, although they may ACCEPT it, as a matter of tribal loyalty and solidarity.
I guarantee ya all that a typical CPA or lawyer or pharmacist or physician or high school teacher ( other than a science or math teacher) does not and CANNOT GET IT, without devoting a substantial amount of time to learning to understand not only the math and physics, but this sort of graph in and of itself.
Once upon a time, back in the dark ages, I acquired a solid basic education in the physical and life sciences, plus some training in the basics of math, but half a century plus later, I have to think a minute or five or ten just to FOLLOW these arguments, never mind performing any of the calculations involved, personally, etc.
The biggest failing of the human race might NOT be failing to understand the exponential function.
Our biggest failing might be that the very small percentage who actually THINK hard and deep NEVERTHELSS fail to understand that the typical citizens understands about as much of this sort of stuff as a dog understands of balancing a check book.
The story goes that a bearded pipe smoking earth shoe wearing English professor at a small New England college for women said something along this line:
” I can’t understand how Mc Govern lost. Every body I know voted for him.”
Put another way, they say nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the public.
Twain said it something like this.
“Ain’t we got ever fool in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”
Making fun of the fools IS fun, but it’s just digging the hole DEEPER.
Might be time to look at the 25th?
(we let Sir Ronnie The lessor go too long, he was bat shit crazy most of his second term, and wasn’t the brightest porch light out of the gates):
Confused POTUS
https://digbysblog.blogspot.ro/2017/07/confused-potus.html
I’m willing to give him some slack, but it is worth watching- his handlers are sleeping on the job.
As I said, in a reply to Fred
Before you wish for it, look who you get in exchange. There may be times when the devil you know may be better.
NAOM
Pence is the ultimate corporate whore and lap dog, and can get down on his knees as fast as HRC, but with different sponsors.
He probably knows the levers to pull, and where they are.
But just another BAU death wish political operative.
Cheeto Jesus is truly nuts!
And I replied there that I know full well the what is next in line is twice as bad 🙁
I find it hard to believe that ANYBODY could be twice as bad as Trump.
On the video it almost looks like his handlers are actually enjoying the moment… but regardless something is seriously wrong with Trump. If he had to navigate the world on his own There would be a Silver Alert on him in a New York minute, no pun intended.
At G20 Trump and Putin learn the Norks have launched nuclear attacks on their countries. Putin snaps out the launch codes to his team from memory. Trump asks “How do you use this?”
The military prepared for problems with nuclear weapon control and prepared for it. In a moment of rage Trump takes the launch codes and breaks open the biscuit. Inside is the word… BANG.
Back in my hole.
NAOM
Cheeto Jesus couldn’t correctly name the country he’d just bombed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eSz8GM5hvM
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/4-times-trump-has-inspired-widespread-speculation-about-his-cognitive-decline/
Oh no, ECS may be much higher than we think. The IPCC has given up on estimates of ECS due to conflicting papers showing up lately.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/07/conflicting-estimates-of-rise-in-global-temperature-resolved/
https://soundcloud.com/harvard/slow-climate-mode-reconciles-historical-and-model-based-estimates-of-climate-sensitivity
I listened to the podcast and heard the statement about how deep and cold the oceans were…
So I thought it appropriate to put that misconception, into perspective.
The graphic of the planet with the blue sphere representing all the water on the planet, was I believe, originally produced by the USGS. So I scaled it and added the dimensions and a thin border which represents our atmosphere.
The diameter of the planet is roughly 12, 700 Km. All the water on the planet including oceans, lakes river icecaps and glaciers would form a sphere 1385 Km in diameter. The part of our atmosphere that really matters to life on earth and it is roughly 100 Km deep.
That’s all we have folks, so stop fucking it up!
.
“The part of our atmosphere that really matters to life on earth and it is roughly 100 Km deep.”
That’s a bit misleading Fred. On a Mt. Everest ascent, the “Death Zone” begins at about 8,000 m from which point unassisted by compressed air or oxygen, severe altitude sickness sets in, debilitating the human body and eventually resulting in death. The low density of air at this altitude makes acclimation impossible.
Oxygen is recommended above 14,000 feet for pilots and above 15,000 feet for all occupants of aircraft.
But that is just people, geese are known to fly at 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) and some vultures can reach 37,000 feet (11,300 meters). People are wimpy.
http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=132415
Especially interesting is the response from Steveo.
1. The lungs of all birds have a totally different design from that of the mammalian lung, one which allows pure inspired air to come to within only a few microns of the air-blood exchange surface. This allows the A-a gradient to be reduced to only 1-2mmHg. Mammals can reduce the A-a gradient to no less than about 30mmHg.
2. The hemoglobin of Bar-headed geese has higher than normal hemoglobin-O_{2} affinity, which shifts the Hb-O_{2} curve to the left, thereby increasing O_{2} saturation levels under hypoxic conditions.
3. The bird lung structure allows for more complete removal of CO_{2} from the blood. Flying birds may therefore have a relative alkalosis which also shifts the Hb-O_{2} dissociation curve to the left, further increasing O_{2} saturation levels under hypoxic conditions.
4. There is some evidence suggesting that Bar-headed geese are capable of increasing capillary density in muscle tissue. This decreases the diffusion distance for O_{2} from capillaries to cells, allowing the same amount of O_{2} to diffuse at a smaller partial pressure gradient.
5. Bar-headed geese can increase cerebral blood flow during hypoxia, allowing for increased O_{2} delivery to the brain.
Doug, point taken!
I was not trying to be deliberately misleading. In part I was engaging in a bit of artistic license. However I also considered some of the other protections against radiation that our atmosphere provides us and mostly my decision to chose 100 Km was due to the fact that it is a nice round number and also that is the height to which extreme UV penetrates. My decision was not based on O2 content alone as a metric for benefits to life on our planet.
I had looked at this graphic representation at this site before I chose the 100 Km mark for my illustration:
http://www.theozonehole.com/atmosphere.htm
Idiot! You just drowned much of the western US. California thought they had problems from El Nino, now look what El Fredo has done. Oh, the humanity. Not even considering all the dead sea life because he put all the water in one big blue marble over desert country. 🙂
I shot the sheriff
But I did not kill the Coral Sea
All around in my home town
They’re trying to track me down
They say they want to bring me in guilty
For the killing of the Coral Sea…
Hi Gone fishing,
The median estimate from the paper for ECS is 3.4 C. The GCMs vary from 1.9 C to 6.4 C for ECS, roughly matching the 95% confidence interval (2.2 C to 6.1 C).
It would be interesting to see which of these models would match the paleoclimate data best as I think they focused on the instrumental period of 1850 to 2010, when developing the models.
We now have paleoclimate estimates covering 12k BP to 150 BP, it would seem a test of these models against that plus the instrumental period would be of interest.
Though there are many difficulties with making these comparisons. See for exampe
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2842/full#share-this
Sounds like many people and models will be wrong and the ones that are right or near right can take no solace in it because no one really listened anyway since the field is muddled with error. Too bad that no one will care by the time the consortium comes to a consensus, if ever.
Let the market decide.
The Border Between Reason and Nonsense – Lawrence Krauss at the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism
“I don’t want a theory of everything. I just want a theory of something.”
“String theory does not tell us anything new.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYtXhl9xqDo
Of course the title is so tantalizingly applied to present political circumstances, it is hard to resist.
Yeah!
https://xkcd.com/171/
String Theory is background dependent.
Game over.
CERN has not been kind to String Theory:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-means-for-physics-20160809/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/supersymmetry-bet-settled-with-cognac-20160822/
In the collision debris, physicists have found no particles that could comprise dark matter, no siblings or cousins of the Higgs boson, no sign of extra dimensions, no leptoquarks — and above all, none of the desperately sought supersymmetry particles that would round out equations and satisfy “naturalness,” a deep principle about how the laws of nature ought to work.
“It’s striking that we’ve thought about these things for 30 years and we have not made one correct prediction that they have seen,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
“Most ideas are wrong.” Lawrence Krauss
As a practical matter, we may be pretty close to knowing all we will ever know based on super high energy physics experiments, because it costs so very much to build the laboratories to run the experiments. The ones we have may be all the ones we will ever have.
Is there any real likelihood of building a new generation of such expensive experimental equipment,at a time when we are butting up against all sorts of economic limits imposed on us by nature’s realities that we sum up using the words depletion and overshoot?
And as as abstract or theoretical matter, why should we arrogantly assume we CAN understand physical realities beyond a certain level of complexity, or maybe I should say simplicity, in the ultimate sense?
So far as I can see, except in the utterly abstract realm of high mathematics, we understand every thing in terms of something else, and in the last analysis, we MUST leave some things unexplained, or in other words, accept them as givens, without explanation.
Perhaps I should use an example to try to make myself clear. As a person who uses iron in my day to day life, I need know only a few things about it, such as that cast iron is brittle, it’s very resistant to fire, it is subject to rust but not to the extent of steel, etc. As a welder, I need to know quite a bit more to practice the trade. An engineer needs to know A LOT MORE, but generally speaking, engineers leave the REAL NITTY GRITTY to metallurgists, or to engineers who specialize in metallurgy as part of their profession. The metallurgists need to go to physicists, or do the physics themselves, at some point. At some point past that, the physicists defer to the pure mathematicians, or else, they have to do the math themselves.
And as they say about mathematicians, they don’t really want to talk to anybody but God.
At every single level all the way along the continuum, we defer to a specialist.
At some point, there is a very real possibility that the last specialist, the physicist / mathematician is going to hit the wall, because his brain was not really designed to work at such a rarefied level by it’s creator, Darwinian evolution.
Maybe the mathematican/ physicist community will eventually scale the wall. Most dogs can learn to come, stay, poop outside, etc. Extremely smart dogs, Einstein dogs, Ivy League type dogs, can learn to recognize the words that identify a few hundred objects by name, and fetch them, but I doubt any dog at all has the capacity to ever understand math that is easily grasped by six year old naked apes, such as basic addition and subtraction using numbers larger than ten. Some dogs can count a little, as can some birds. If crows see four men enter a field, they won’t go there until they see four men leave. But if ten men enter, they can’t tell if one or two remain hidden, waiting to shoot a crow.
It seems arrogant as hell, to me, to assume that we will be able to understand nature at the deepest level. There may yet be another dozen layers of the onion of reality that we know less than nothing about, and will never know anything about , because we are like the crow confronted with counting past four. Not enough processing capacity between the ears, no idea how to construct an experiment to even look for new data.
I’m all for continued research, I’m just saying we shouldn’t be surprised when we hit some walls here and there. Maybe we will eventually cross the wall in terms of high energy physics. Sometimes it takes a LONG time, in human terms, to penetrate another layer of the onion.
As a practical matter, we may be pretty close to knowing all we will ever know based on super high energy physics experiments, because it costs so very much to build the laboratories to run the experiments. The ones we have may be all the ones we will ever have.
And who exactly is this WE you speak of, Kemosabe?!
I believe, that on this particular matter, no pun intended, you are very probably going to be roundly proven wrong… again no pun intended 😉
https://phys.org/news/2017-05-physicists-large-hadron-collider-big.html
An international league of scientists is kicking off the decades-long process of developing the successor to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
More than 500 scientists gathered in Berlin, Germany, from 29 May to 2 June to discuss the future of particle physics. The event was organised by the Future Circular Collider (FCC) Study, an international collaboration of physicists, and focused on developing the next Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will be seven times more powerful…
…EuroCirCol, a four-year European-funded study, is now investigating future experiments and the technology needed to get there. The project is laying the foundation for a particle accelerator three times larger than the LHC, with double-strength magnets enabling researchers to smash particle beams together with a power of up to 100 tera electron Volts—an acceleration of particles roughly equivalent to 10 million lightning strikes.
According to Professor Michael Benedikt, leader of the FCC, this energy leap could let us spot previously unobserved particles even heavier than the Higgs boson, which would give a deeper insight into the laws that govern the universe.
Fortunately for humanity the Europeans find value in scientific research and are more than willing to put their brains and money behind it!
Particle physics is a waste of time and money. They haven’t found anything useful for 30 years.
Put the money into materials science (a.k.a. real physics) which has been discovering all kinds of amazing stuff constantly for the last 30 years.
OFM, I think we have more pressing and immediate problems than particle physics. Nowhere near enough research has been done on how to switch a civilization composed of multiple nations, composed of multiple cultures, from non-sustainable to fully sustainable activity.
Or is it just going to be all ad-libbed because we are so enthralled with other pursuits? Sounds like avoidance.
“As a practical matter, we may be pretty close to knowing all we will ever know based on super high energy physics experiments, because it costs so very much to build the laboratories to run the experiments. The ones we have may be all the ones we will ever have.”
Well yes however, neutron stars display conditions and phenomena not observable elsewhere such as: hyperon-dominated matter, de-confined quark matter, superfluidity and superconductivity with temperatures near 1000 kelvin, opaqueness to neutrinos, magnetic fields in excess of 1000 Gauss.
I prefer Cavorite over neutronium. Neutronium is such a downer.
Meanwhile the global entertainment industry only grosses 2 trillion per year. Watching people play pretend, dance and sing isn’t too costly. Fantasy is so much better, no wonder denialism is so popular.
Well, here is the USA, it is one of our strong points—
really good at entrainment, growing lots of grain, writing software (although this is declining), the Dog Track down on Wall Street of course, and blowing shit up.
True. We certainly don’t have much money or time left over for really important things or research.
Hail to Disney, Hollywood and Wall Street.
“There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
snow crash – 1992
Snow Crash was a good book—
But Stephenson is just for escape now, and not as chewy as in the past.
I wouldn’t speak too soon
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40521445
NAOM
It means they’re getting close. ‘u^
June 2017 was the 2nd warmest on record globally. More discussion is available at:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/resources/data-analysis/average-surface-air-temperature-analysis/monthly-maps/june-2017
NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite has not been declared operational and its data are preliminary and undergoing testing.
http://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-16&sec=full_disk&x=6272&y=1856&z=1&im=12&ts=1&st=0&et=0&speed=130&motion=loop&map=1&lat=0&p%5B0%5D=16&opacity%5B0%5D=1&hidden%5B0%5D=0&pause=20170702134538&slider=-1&hide_controls=0&mouse_draw=0&s=rammb-slider
hanks, try this
https://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/goes/abi/goesEastconusband14.html
NAOM
Anybody for a Wing Pawn Global Cooling News Update?
Hopes of mild climate change dashed by new research
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/05/hopes-of-mild-climate-change-dashed-by-new-research
Liberal Lies!
Liberal Lies!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/posteverything/wp/2017/07/05/im-a-climate-scientist-and-im-not-letting-trickle-down-ignorance-win/
I’m a climate scientist. And I’m not letting trickle-down ignorance win.
By Ben Santer
July 5, 2017 at 6:00 AM
The study of climate science will not get us out of the darkness nor will it change the direction of civilization. Understanding how sharp blades are made and how a guillotine works never stopped anyone from getting their head chopped off.
Sooner or later, people will realize that the climate has become really strange. At that point, they will demand that governments do something to fix things and the scientists will have already studied the problem and come up with answers. That said, one can only hope that the transition from fossil carbon to renewable alternatives takes place before the damage has become terminal.
Not worried about terminal, I just think it’s stupid to pursue that which we know harms the world while there are other ways available.
There appears a lot of faith riding on so-called government about so-called renewables, as if some people can’t think much of anything else.
Caelan, you know as well as the rest of us that renewables are, in actual fact, renewable, so why do you keep spouting shit?
True, but…
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the midst of the French Revolution the revolting citizens led a priest, a drunkard and an engineer to the guillotine. They ask the priest if he wants to face up or down when he meets his fate. The priest says he would like to face up so he will be looking towards heaven when he dies. They raise the blade of the guillotine and release it. It comes speeding down and suddenly stops just inches from his neck. The authorities take this as divine intervention and release the priest.
The drunkard comes to the guillotine next. He also decides to die face up, hoping that he will be as fortunate as the priest. They raise the blade of the guillotine and release it. It comes speeding down and suddenly stops just inches from his neck. Again, the authorities take this as a sign of divine intervention, and they release the drunkard as well.
Next is the engineer. He, too, decides to die facing up. As they slowly raise the blade of the guillotine, the engineer suddenly says, “Hey, I see what your problem is, the rope is getting stuck in the pulley…”
By COP21 we needed drastic cuts (which are probably going to be seen as idle promises) plus the vapour technology of BECCs to stay below 2K. With the new ECS estimates does that mean we are now bound for, say 4K? And with the new findings on increased soil respiration, permafrost melt and hydrates giving more natural sources of CO2, do we get there even faster and/or without it requiring as much fossil fuel burning?
Worth noting that even with such a big increase in the predicted ECS the scientists are probably still erring on the side of caution, so even bigger revisions might be coming as new research gets reviewed and verified.
It’s not the ECS figure that bothers me, but a huge new potential feedback that has mostly been ignored is rearing it’s ugly head. The Southern Ocean is a huge place and if the modeled prediction of less cloud cover is correct, that could make the largest of the multiple feedbacks that already are in play.
Ho Hum, I put the Harvard version of this and an actual interview of the lead researcher up above at 07/05/2017 8:21 pm. Is this repetition from another more flamboyant source a result of the new “ostracism button” where people don’t see what is going on because they ignore it?
Hi Gone Fishing,
Sometimes people skim and/or don’t click on links.
I thought the Harvard article was great, thanks. Following the link gets you to the full paper if one clicks on the “new research” link in the article. The paper is open access.
Arctic ice extent near levels recorded in 2012
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2017/07/arctic-ice-extent-near-levels-recorded-in-2012/
JAXA data has, as for today’s date, 2017 in 3rd place and 2007 in 7th place.
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop.ver1/data/graph/plot_extent_n_v2.csv
It’s something of a question how much you can trust the thickness models but by Jaxa the Pacific side looks in dreadful shape. Last year the extent was about the same but there was still a chunk of multiyear, thick ice between the pole and the Beaufort to slow things down, but it all eventually melted out. So now there’s thin, smashed up ice, and lots of melt ponds, with a low bringing rain over most of it predicted for the next three days.
The only thick ice left is now pushed up against Svalbard on the Atlantic side and, it’s also smashed up but in thicker bits and almost bound to melt out or get pushed into the Atlantic and quickly die.
It’s in the 50’s in Barrow, Alaska and the surrounding land snow cover is gone. Ice melting should be well on it’s way now.
Good thing much of the Greenland ice cap is at high altitude keeping it nice and cold. Summit Camp at a balmy 12F.
So what does Science Nordic have to say about an ice free Arctic.
http://sciencenordic.com/when-will-arctic-be-ice-free
Not everything in North Dakota is a rape and scrape oil fiasco and debt credit game:
Drought gets worse, with no end in sight
http://www.willistonherald.com/news/drought-gets-worse-with-no-end-in-sight/article_3120d610-5df9-11e7-9812-a71957fd3e19.html
North Dakota was just ranked as the top state to start a business. A drought can’t get in the way of what everybody wants, which is jobs, money, and prosperity.
https://wallethub.com/edu/best-states-to-start-a-business/36934/
North Dakota is a total sausage party.
https://www.commerce.nd.gov/uploads/8/CensusNewsletterAug2015.pdf
Well, I guess all those young men must be getting pregnant and having babies then.
https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2016/demo/popest/state-total.html
Birth rate by state in 2016, ranked from highest to lowest.
Utah,17.03
North Dakota,15.61
Alaska,15.21
Texas,14.63
District of Columbia,14.47
South Dakota,14.06
Nebraska,13.97
Idaho,13.66
Louisiana,13.60
Oklahoma,13.58
Kansas,13.31
Hawaii,12.97
Wyoming,12.95
California,12.85
Georgia,12.76
Arkansas,12.72
Arizona,12.69
Mississippi,12.67
Iowa,12.58
Minnesota,12.58
Indiana,12.57
Nevada,12.52
Kentucky,12.46
Washington,12.46
Tennessee,12.30
Colorado,12.28
New Mexico,12.25
Missouri,12.23
Maryland,12.21
Virginia,12.20
Illinois,12.11
Alabama,12.05
Montana,11.98
New York,11.98
North Carolina,11.97
Ohio,11.89
South Carolina,11.75
Delaware,11.52
Wisconsin,11.45
Michigan,11.43
New Jersey,11.43
Oregon,11.38
Pennsylvania,11.02
Florida,10.91
West Virginia,10.78
Massachusetts,10.59
Rhode Island,10.20
Connecticut,10.01
Vermont,9.65
Maine,9.43
New Hampshire,9.21
It’s obvious you don’t understand what stats mean.
Birth rate- the number of live births per thousand of population per year.
Small populations can have high birth rates. Large populations can have low ones. Communities with less woman having lots of kids can have higher birth rates than large populations of women having fewer kids.
Stay in School Kids! Or you’ll end up like Bob Frisky lol. Jesus that’s just pathetic Bob. Did you finish grade 8 math?
Carmaker Volvo has said all new models will have an electric motor from 2019.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40505671
Electrification is happening a lot faster than people expect. Tesla is really hurting other car manufacturers in the high end luxury market. Their success is scaring other manufacturers and they are not ready to just roll over and let Tesla dominate the entire market. Up until now, most electric models have been “compliance” cars with limited appeal designed just to meet the California (and other) mandates. But now they are getting serious.
Both Porsche and Mercedes are going after Tesla in the high end. They will have 300+ miles of range and support 15 minute supercharging. Mercedes is building a gigafactory in Europe, like Tesla’s, to make the batteries.
Volkswagen is ramping up also and completely phasing out Diesels (especially because of diesel gate).
BMW has that i3 (a “compliance” car). That car is ugly and limited range and I don’t see the point of a fossil fuel range extender that needs refilling every 100 miles. Also, it can’t be built in mass volume – it’s designed to be a niche product. But, rumors are they are announcing a real model 3 electric in September…
Electric is just better – faster, better handling, and much simpler. It’s going to happen fast.
And again
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/06/france-ban-petrol-diesel-cars-2040-emmanuel-macron-volvo
There will be a turning point. Places that sell petrol(gas) will realise that it is more profitable to sell electricity or sell the site for commercial development. Falling sales of fossil fuel will cause profits to fall. Falling profits will mean less outlets. Less outlets will mean more will turn away from fossil fuel. More turning away will mean less sales and so the cycle will begin. The change may be slow now but accelerating and when it reaches a certain point that acceleration, itself, will accelerate.
Political policies aimed at propping up IfCE engines, in the US, may help the US in the short term. In the long term, they will be turning out products that are not wanted and will cause a crash as exports fall away.
NAOM
Cool, but I agree 2040 is kind of uninspired… “Banning sales of diesel and gasoline vehicles by 2040 is a bit like banning sales of horses for road transportation by 2040: there won’t be any to ban.”
Bloomberg projections have EVs taking off in the US and Europe – but show rising demand for fossil cars in the third world. I really doubt that will happen, they may prefer shorter range EVs over fossil cars in the third world. But, I don’t think they are ready to admit it at Bloomberg that oil demand is going away so soon.
That is part of my point, there will come a point where the change will hit a critical point and accelerate rapidly. Maybe France sees that there will be little left by 2040 and that will close the door. As for 3rd world, hybrids are entering the market here, in Mexico, and I think I will start to see more charge points(spotted one outside the Nissan showroom this week). As for places like Africa, China is trying to move in and will want export markets for their manufacturers so maybe we’ll see.
NAOM
Announcements like this might be useful for strategic planning, though. If you are writing research reports for either oil companies or auto companies, and you want to suggest to stockholders and executives that the future won’t be business as usual, having announcements like this give some credibility to your projections.
Bloomberg projections have EVs taking off in the US and Europe – but show rising demand for fossil cars in the third world. I really doubt that will happen, they may prefer shorter range EVs over fossil cars in the third world. But, I don’t think they are ready to admit it at Bloomberg that oil demand is going away so soon.
Let’s not forget that EVs include electric bikes and I have a hunch that in what is known as the so called third world, sales of electric scooters and bikes will take off a lot sooner than electric cars.
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/07/13/global-e-bike-sales-expected-reach-24-3-billion-annually-2025/
A new electric bicycle report from Navigant Research suggests that by 2025, e-bike sales could lead to annual revenues of $24.3 billion.
The electric mobility revolution is in full swing, and although much of the attention tends to get focused on electric cars and buses and such, the highest selling electric vehicles on the planet are actually electric bicycles (e-bikes), with a projection of some 35 million e-bikes being sold this year.
This popularity is with good reason. E-bikes are much more affordable than a full-sized electric passenger vehicle, they’re smaller and easier to park, and because they’re not really that different from a conventional bicycle, it’s not much of a leap for the average consumer to adopt this electric transport option. E-bikes don’t require a license, don’t require any additional infrastructure to operate, and are zero-emissions at the point of use, so they are an increasingly appealing option for low-carbon and low-cost mobility. Add to that the fact that battery technology is improving all the time, both in increased capacity and decreased costs, and that e-bikes are a great last-mile and multi-modal option for increasingly crowded cities, it’s no wonder that the e-bike market is exploding.
Yes, e bikes make a lot of sense for people without a lot of money. They can be outfitted with carts to haul both cargo and multiple passengers. There isn’t a lot of need to have a bigger vehicle in many cases.
Yes, e-bikes are a great option. But, if you are comparing to walking, or biking an electric car with only 50 miles of range is a pretty good option and they can be cheaper than even a low end fossil car. Electric motors are much simplier, it’s just the batteries that need to come down in cost (and they are)
FWIW, every one of the traditional automakers are still dragging their feet on the switch to electric — even Volvo and Mercedes. That said, they’re moving a lot faster than they were last year. And Tesla won’t let them slow down, since Tesla is accelerating. Tesla’s goal was originally to kick the other automakers into doing the right thing…
Meanwhilce, China’s moving *fast*.
Hey guys, anybody and everybody,
I need some help finding an article or essay that will not offend the majority of people who are more or less scientifically illiterate, an explanation that they will accept, concerning thinking for themselves, that allows them to see and understand and accept the FACT that they must defer to people who actually KNOW science in respect to questions about changing climate, resource depletion and similar matters.
Most likely this essay has already been composed and published, and is freely available in one form or another in the public domain. The problem is that I haven’t run across it. Hopefully somebody here has read it, in one form or another , and will kindly provide me a link to it, and thanks in advance. I intend to link to it, or incorporate it whole into my book, or quote from it and use it as a launching point to go further into the subject.
If I don’t find it, it means many more hours laboring at composing it myself.
Consider my trying to pass as a real soldier for instance. I know ten times as much military history and theory as the average boot camp kid, and LOTS of stuff about military gear, but hardly anything at all about the actual day to day minute details of a soldiers life, such as EXACTLY what is expected of him in a given situation. Put me in uniform, even if I LOOKED like a soldier, and a real one with an iq over a hundred would spot me for a fake within thirty seconds to five minutes, and it wouldn’t take five minutes unless I kept my mouth shut, lol.
BUT I could most likely spot a fake soldier, because I know some stuff every real soldier knows, but a fake would not LIKELY know, especially if the fake soldier’s supposed specialty happens to overlap with some specialty of my own.
I know a lot about trucks for instance and somebody faking it as a trucker would give himself away to me within five or ten minutes conversation about old times on the road.
Now at some point we all must trust to the knowledge of professionals, be they lawyers, physicians, engineers, or others, when we need them either directly, for instance we need surgeons to perform operations for us. I need not go into the several criteria we use when we select a personal physician,other than to say if one is out of the mainstream, to any great extent, we generally evaluate him as incompetent. None of us HERE in this forum would argue that a physician who believes in spirits rather than microbes is well qualified to look after us. Well, Caelan might, I ‘m not altogether sure he believes in microscopes and such.
At a second level we must rely on professionals to tell us what to believe, and what policies we should follow or at least advocate. At this level for instance we depend on nutritionists to tell us what we should feed our kids, and what we should eat or not eat, ourselves, and what sort of laws and regulations should be in effect in regard to our food supply, etc. We don’t need appointments to get this info, it’s freely available in books and on websites, etc.
Now at this level of interaction, a problem arises in that some people who are professionally qualified to give advice give BAD advice deliberately, because they have sold out for the proverbial few pieces of silver, and of course there are some more who are have professional training who make honest mistakes. I ‘m not talking about this latter small minority. ( And of course the profession as a whole might be wrong , but let’s not go there for the moment. )
This problem is compounded by the fact that most of us, at some level, lack a deep enough understanding of the abc’s of the relevant subject matter to decide for ourselves who to trust, and who not to. What we usually do, in such circumstances, is decide to trust the ones who are trusted, OR SUPPORTED, by our friends, relatives, and coworkers, our peers, and or the ones who are trusted, or supported, by the leaders we look up to. The grease monkey is apt to trust his lead mechanic when it comes to choosing motor oil, and the typical layman usually or at least very often tries to decide what he will do when he has to make a decision by observing what people he looks up to do in similar circumstances.
There are obviously MANY people who are willing to prostitute themselves professionally, and who do so, for instance nutritionists who work for fast food companies. And there are obviously millions of people who are perfectly willing to give bad advice because at one level or another, they have skin in the game. There are MORE millions of people who are giving bad advice, but in good faith, because they have been had themselves.
It can be and usually IS VERY HARD for people who lack a basic education in the physical and life sciences to tell who is who, when it comes to deciding who to trust. It’s a sad but indisputable fact that the very large majority of us Yankees do lack such an educational background, and thus are subject to being lead around by the nose like dogs on a leash.
Some people will argue otherwise, but I am PERSONALLY convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the average big D Democrat you are apt to meet who works in a factory or as a clerk or any job that doesn’t require some higher level TECHNICAL education believes in forced climate change NOT because he understands the science, but rather because his TRIBE, the Democratic Party/ liberalish leaning establishment professes belief in the same.
(FORTUNATELY the big D Democrats are right on this particular issue, lol, meaning we have at least one party without its head up its ass in this particular respect. )
Likewise the average big R Republican who lacks a technically sound education is apt to disbelieve in climate change not because of what he does or does not know about the science himself, but rather BECAUSE his TRIBE disbelieves, or PROFESSES disbelief. There are many many Republican types, a fair assortment of them known to me personally, who know better but profess disbelief in the need for strong environmental laws. I could name a dozen easily that I talk to personally at least once in a while.
SO- HOW do we explain to such a person, who is honestly confused about who is telling the truth, who he or she should trust, without condescension, without insult, without turning this person away ?
I’m thinking that one way to do it is to ask him to consider which professions he considers trustworthy, and which has mostly trustworthy members. If he believes that physicians are as a group trustworthy, then it is reasonable for him to believe or at least consider, anytime physicians as a group disagree or outright contradict the message presented by some other group or profession, that the second group is either lying outright or at least seriously and grievously cherry picking the truth.
I have never yet met either a physician or a nurse who says sugary soft drinks are good for you, or that typical fast food is good for you, although some will say that these things are not harmful in SMALL quantities once in a while.Ninety nine point nine nine percent of all physicians are opposed to the consumption of sugar filled cola drinks, etc. But the entire soft drink and fast food industries do everything within their power to convince us these things are harmless and even good for us.
So- If we trust engineers as a group, we should trust people that engineers trust, for instance physics professors, lol. If we trust professional soldiers, of the kind that graduate from the service academies and eventually wear stars , and they believe in peak oil, and in forced climate change, then we should believe in peak oil and forced climate change as well. If the engineers and generals trust physics professors, and they do climate science, and work with climate scientists, then we should trust physicists and climate scientists.
I need examples of any work along this line, and any criticism of the approach is welcome.
I need some help finding an article or essay that will not offend the majority of people who are more or less scientifically illiterate, an explanation that they will accept, concerning thinking for themselves, that allows them to see and understand and accept the FACT that they must defer to people who actually KNOW science in respect to questions about changing climate, resource depletion and similar matters.
You might start with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s short talk about what science is and what it does.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MqTOEospfo
Science in America – Neil deGrasse Tyson
Maybe reach out and contact Dr. Tyson directly, I have a hunch he would respond.
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/contact
Thanks Fred, there’s so much out there I didn’t know about this particular Tyson piece. He’s one of my favorite guys, because he not only knows his stuff, he’s REALLY good at communicating with the public.
I will send him an email, what the hell, he wouldn’t be the first famous person who took time to respond to an out of the blue email from me.
The world trend is toward increased religion and superstition. The religions are moving toward more fundamentalist doctrines and private religious schools are on the rise while science is being ignored or outright attacked.
I doubt if any reasoned enlightenment will not be adjusted to fit the local religious doctrine and thus not fit reality very well. It will be diluted and changed.
Personally, I do not think that the Crusades ever really ended and it will get much worse with time. As more terrorism and invasion takes place, conservative Christians will just get more fanatical and lock down their beliefs even more. I think even the liberals will start to move more to the right with time. Prognosis: conflict at all levels including internally as non-homogeneous cultures sort themselves out
Result: Maybe nature will do us in as we weaken ourselves fighting each other.
Well, it depends. If they don’t recognize ANY form of scientific authority, and believe that the Bible says the earth is flat so it’s flat, then they’re hopeless.
If they do have some respect for authority, you could point out that Arrhenius, one of the *founders of Chemistry*, actually predicted and explained global warming due to CO2 emissions. So we’ve known about it since the *19th century*. It shouldn’t be surprising that there’s 100% scientific consensus after *over 100 years* of people arguing about it. Disputing it is exactly like arguing about Newton’s theory of gravity or whether the Earth is round.
If they’re flat-earthers, don’t even try to talk to them. Make fun of them and ostracise them.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/05/exclusive-study-finds-temperature-adjustments-account-for-nearly-all-of-the-warming-in-climate-data/?utm_source=site-share
Daily Caller = the usual FUD. Opposite of reality. Distinct from truthful.
In the reality based community, old measurements are less accurate than modern ones made with modern instruments. Old measurements require calibration and homogenization against modern, more accurate measurements.
Most of the older measurements are wrong in the same direction – colder than they would be if accurately measured. This is the opposite of what the Daily Caller falsehood-filled article claims.
The net effect of calibrating the older, less accurate measurements against modern methods is to REDUCE the apparent warming trend, as shown below.
One more:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/7/31/1438307089303/a8de4360-fca6-4b5a-92f7-819699ab4fe8-620×485.png?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=e88f068b34a63cc9ef83969051e228aa
These Wing Pawns are wounded by ideology and ignorance.
Fer criminies sake TT, who ya try in to kid besides yourself, Go read my post upthread with a link to a Climate scientist who will not tolerate trickle down ignorance such as the B.S. you just linked to.
People around here aren’t half as ignorant as you seem to think.
Do you even have a clue what it takes to get a degree in climate science?!
I think if any of my sons had told me they wanted to be climate scientists I would have took them out back for a good whoopin. I raised my boys right I will tell you that. Didn’t teach them to be liars, cheats, thieves, conmen, deceivers and such. Some parents these days make me absolute sick with the lack of any morality or decentness they pass on to there kids these days!
So you think assault and battery is moral and decent?
NAOM
You got to do what you got to do to teach the right values when it comes to your own kids. My daddy use to beat the fear of Our Lord into me once an a while, his daddy did the same & so on & so on.
Kinda the “Strong Daddy”model of the reactionary mind.
Daddy is always right, and you don’t question Daddy.
So, a whole family that thinks assault and battery are moral and decent. I hope the law catches up with you.
NAOM
Texans with daddy issues. Navy is full of ’em. Most join after becoming tired of living in cheap hotels.
Spare the rod, spoil the child. ???????
I guess I failed! My son, despite my shortcomings, grew up to be a decent adult, now majoring in Computer Science. I taught him math, physics, chemistry and biology. Also how to have respect for other people and different cultures. Never once did I give him any reason to fear me. Fuck off, Troy!
What, you didn’t beat your boy regularly? Guess I’m a looser as well because it never occured to me to beat our two girls who were total dropouts: one a concert pianist the other a nuclear physicist. Just imagine what they could have done with regular thrashings.
Doug,
‘Sociogeopolitical’ dynamics and disruptions affect different people, families, populations and generations differently.
What many people are currently doing can be highly specialized, and as we both may agree, increasing systemic entropy may start leaning increasingly heavily on many forms of specialization, with some kinds of people, who may have thrived in some niches that the system helped open up with certain levels of energy and complexity, finding it increasingly tough-going as their niches slowly disappear, possibly forever.
James Howard Kunstler had a recent podcast with a guest who wrote a book about ‘Women of The Verge of A Societal Breakdown’.
See also Fundamental Attribution Error
Are you not actually a Magyar (Christian), perchance? The Christian perspective on fatherhood in relation to both properly and successfully rearing a child dictates that discipline be seen as an act of love. That is, correcting unwelcome behaviors in one’s child is a definitive way to prove love, rather than hate. God, thus, inflicts pain through discipline on children whom He loves (Hebrews 12:5-11).
The sentiment of gentle physical punishment for unacceptable or immoral misdeeds is certainly omnipresent – e.g., Proverbs 13:24, 22:15, 23:13-14, 29:15-17. Importantly, however, we shall not get ahead of ourselves, because it is important to remember that effective correction of your child’s behavior cannot be done by the rod alone – e.g., Proverbs 1:7, 2 Timothy 3:15, Luke 2:52, Deuteronomy 6:6-9, Ephesians 6:1-3, Proverbs 1:8-9, 15:5. Most importantly of all, in Hebrews 12:11 see how guidelines shall be established with the intent of your child earning respect for your true masculinity.
Lol Nothing like Bronze Age tribal dogma when you need a little parenting advice.
Oy vey! 9/11 conspiracy theories, FEMA camps, psychic hotlines, birthers, truthers, President Obama applying the directives of the New World Order, chemtrails, PizzaGate, Planet Nibiru, and now Old Testament parenting advice. America can’t collapse fast enough. I hope Trump gets two terms.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/violence-more-common-in-bible-than-quran-text-analysis-reveals-a6863381.html
Are you not actually a Magyar (Christian), perchance?
Oh, for Arany Atyácska’s sake! The Magyars were anything but Christians! They were pagan polytheists.
http://www.moddb.com/groups/polytheism/features/hungarianmagyar-mythology
Like many pagan religions as tengriism and the norse belief, the magyars belived that the world is a tree (“Világfa” in Hungarian) composed by different layers, the top layer is where the main and elder dieties, the middle layer where fantastic creatures lived and secondary dieties, lesser gods, fantastic creatures and the humans, the last layer was a hell-like domain, where the bad souls went.
And child abusing Christians have a special place in that bottom layer…
“America can’t collapse fast enough.” ~ Survivalist
Amen.
Assault is not justified by 2000 year old mythology.
NAOM
You might benefit from microdosing some LSD.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/style/microdosing-lsd-ayelet-waldman-michael-chabon-marriage.html
As part of the process of my gradual severance from the status-quo, I have been slowly teaching myself wild edibles and medicinals.
In doing so, I often come across nutrient and other ingredient comparisons with industrially-grown produce and how the latter can be sorely lacking in those regards.
This is yet another likely example of how so-called technology ultimately fails and is failing.
So, after reading your comment, it made me wonder about more ways in how the apparent industrial ‘down-sampling’ of the value of our food may be affecting us, such as by not affecting us in the contexts in which we evolved.
Wintergreen, for example, apparently contains something like the ‘active ingredient’ of aspirin, but rather than getting a ‘targetted’ hit in its consumption like one might with something like aspirin, one is getting a ‘whole food’ effect.
Also, apparently, we need some ‘nutrients’ to break down other ‘nutrients’ into usable or digestible forms, so if we’re missing some kinds from our diet and industrial food/consumption-system, then we may be missing some things in our diets, including those that might help with our moods and so forth.
You won’t get this kind of knowledge, experience and self-empowerment reading about electric cars and batteries, etc., alone, though.
**Please note: If you choose to forage, do so responsibly, such as by coaxing new growth from a plant you use (and may therefore continue to use and others may use) and by not killing it in the process, such as by yanking the whole thing out by the root, unless it is the root you are going for and there are plenty of specimens available. Even so, consider seed-saving, seed-bombing and seed-planting and what I call, decentralized gardening. Lastly, pay attention to, respect and encourage beneficial symbiotic relationships and discourage some species that may be problematic or invasive. Nature can adapt to invasive species, but perhaps not at some levels and speeds.
“The Eden that Europeans described when they reached North America was not a wilderness, but a well-managed resource, a complex combination of nature and culture, ecology and economy, a system so subtle and effective that it eluded the settlers who saw only natural wealth free for the taking. The result of this land grab in North America is that only 2% of the land is now wild, its major rivers are polluted, its lakes have caught fire, and its forests are dying from the top down. The tragedy of this commons was that it never really was a commons after colonization, but was surrendered to plunder, privatization, and exploitation in the name of Manifest Destiny and progress.” ~ intelligentagent.com
As part of the process of my gradual severance from the status-quo, I have been slowly teaching myself wild edibles and medicinals.
Please, speed up your severance and quit preaching your specious bullshit here or anywhere else! There is absolutely no way in hell that 7.5 billion humans can currently live on this planet by following any of your prescriptions.
Have you ever, even for second, stopped to think that what you are prescribing is not a solution but a death sentence for the vast majority of people living today.
Here’s an excerpt from a comment by Richard C to a TED talk entitled: GOSPEL OF DOUBT
by Casey Gerard
https://www.ted.com/talks/casey_gerald_the_gospel_of_doubt/discussion
If you find yourself so clear in thought and purpose, then hopefully, it’s because you have just enjoyed a fresh cup of doubly strong Doubt, and it made your mind and soul feel quenched, refreshed and invigorated.
But if you found yourself not so clear in thought and purpose after that cup of Doubt, it’s contents may have been an life saving antidote.
What you are preaching is as bad and unscientific as Lysenkoism was under Joseph Stalin and would also lead to mass starvation and death!
Your ideas might have worked in a pristine wild environment with a global population under a billion. Unfortunately that train has long left the station.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
What did your sons go on to do with their lives? I hazard a guess it didn’t involve much education.
They want this country to commit suicide by stupidity.
One is a bus mechanic mostly school buses and charter buses, one is manager of a drywall installation business for new home construction. The other works jobs in construction or retail off & on to earn enough to pay the bills along with having some beer money but I always tell him to keep his girlfriend close because she brings in most of the cash to support himself & his kids.
Do they beat the crap out of their own kids or do you help out just to keep your hand in?
In most civilized countries they have laws against child abuse which is what you are describing, When they catch up with individuals like you, they prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and make them do many years of hard time.
You are obviously a very sick and depraved bastard.
Furthermore your post, for all intents and purposes, constitutes slander and incitement of violence against climate scientists. That alone borders on criminal behavior.
I call for you to be immediately and permanently banned from this site!
My thoughts exactly!
“Didn’t teach them to be liars, cheats, thieves, conmen, deceivers and such”
So you told them “Do as I say, not as I do”.
Poe’s law alert.
“It is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.”
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck it is indistinguishable from a duck! Same with incitement to violence if your ‘Poe’ incites violence then it is no longer just ‘Poe’ but it has become defacto incitement to violence and is therefore inexcusable.
I will refrain from giving specific examples but I could easily create a long list!
If perchance Navypop is indeed ‘Poe’, which I do not think it is, then he, she or it, has crossed an invisible line and doing so should have consequences.
Not to worry, Navypop, even if you get banned from here, you can rest in the comfort of knowing that it was from a site some of whose participants regularly support and/or promote the ‘spoils’ of the status-quo’s crony capitalist plutarchy, despite knowing full well of its modus operandi, often conducted in suits of particular kinds, of violence, coercion, theft, murder, ideological manipulation, kidnapping and assorted peonage and slavery, etc.. The latter is apparently like those American slave-holding-and-selling ‘founding daddies’, who apparently just couldn’t help themselves, being ‘products of their time’, the poor dears– like this site’s participants.
The hypocrisy and denial is so thick
You can throw it against a wall and it will stick
Zoot Suit Riot ~ Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
Not to worry, Navypop, even if you get banned from here, you can rest in the comfort of knowing that it was from a site some of whose participants regularly support and/or promote the ‘spoils’ of the status-quo’s crony capitalist plutarchy, despite knowing full well of its modus operandi, often conducted in suits of particular kinds, of violence, coercion, theft, murder, ideological manipulation, kidnapping and assorted peonage and slavery, etc.. The latter is apparently like those American slave-holding-and-selling ‘founding daddies’, who apparently just couldn’t help themselves, being ‘products of their time’, the poor dears– like this site’s participants.
So the hypocrites like you who support fossil fuel technology and climate change deniers instead of renewables and science, don’t know squat about the world or history, now also support child abusers too?!
Gee, why am I not the least bit surprised?!
And to top it off for someone like you who spends an inordinate amount your precious time on this site has the gall to badmouth both the site and its participants.
Why don’t you just pack up and leave! Don’t let the door hit you in the ass when you do!
Yeah, Caelan,
Your hypocrisy and denial is so thick
You can throw it against a wall and it will stick
Flying Fred
Don’t you just hate being ‘thrown into the same mix’ with those you oppose?
Same shit, different flies(/levels/scales)?
My old girlfriend wanted me to ‘take care of her’, so I told her back, I said, “Baby? I can hardly take care of myself!” So she left me to go back to her folks and that was that. But I helped her move! That was my way of at least showing her at the last minute that I could take care of her.
One of the best books ever on energy https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Civilization-History-MIT-Press/dp/0262035774
It’s hot in Texas– bad for the wind turbines:
Searing Heat Is Hurting Texas Wind Power
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-05/searing-heat-is-eating-away-at-wind-rich-texas-s-bounty-of-power
Hot spells are seldom associated with strong winds.
We need to be honest about the fact that for a long time to come, at least a couple of decades, probably longer, we are going to need a robust fossil fuel or nuclear generating industry to cover the inevitable days and weeks when wind and solar power let us down.
It’s better to keep the emphasis on the savings in purchased fossil fuel, and the resultant “everything else held equal” lower prices of coal and gas as wind and solar power ramp up, local jobs, local control, local tax revenues, etc.
It’s often true that local consumer electricity costs go up a little, per household per month, but it’s equally true that such a household benefits to some extent by way of buying anything and everything that is energy intensive, from food to furniture, a little bit cheaper, and that more local jobs also mean a more vigorous local economy.
I can’t prove it , but I strongly suspect that a family that pays a couple of bucks or a little more extra per month, in order to pay for their utility adding in some wind and solar capacity, get most or all or even more back in other ways, that same month.
And for every case when it’s shown that electricity bills go up a little , due to adding in renewables, there seems to be a case showing that that bills can and DO also go DOWN.
And can point out that once a wind or solar farm is built, the owners generally sell the output at a very favorable to consumers guaranteed long term rate, thus helping to reduce FUTURE rate increases due to the likely higher costs of purchased fuel five, ten, twenty or more years down the road.
All the talk about the limited service life of a solar farm or wind farm is mostly just that, talk, because when the time comes to replace panels and turbines, replacing them will cost only a minor fraction of the cost of building a new from scratch energy farm, and the old equipment can in many cases be reused in other markets where the reduced output will still be economic.
IF it’s not economic to replace old turbine towers, it WILL be economic to replace the turbines on them with smaller lighter ones that put less stress on the tower, and substantial amounts of electricity will still be generated.
I wouldn’t have ANY trouble at all finding prime space for ten or twenty thousand watts worth of panels that have degraded down to fifty percent of their original output, so long as I get them cheap, lol.
The gung ho renewables enthusiasts are ALREADY on board, they aren’t going over to the Koch brothers camp, no siree. We don’t need to pander to them, we need to win over the middle of the road voter who doesn’t really have an opinion either way, other than what he might have heard from either pro or con friends and coworkers, etc.
While we’re at it, we can be making a good start on winning over even hard core bau types who don’t actually own or work in the fossil fuel industries.Trying to enlighten THAT kind is a waste of time, because their paychecks and dividend checks depend on their NOT getting it.
Most of the hard core bau types that profess to believe in free markets and rant about subsidized renewable energy will endorse renewables, and even subsidies for renewables, once they come to understand that renewables are in their enlightened best interests.The less intelligent ones will only get it once they see their electricity bill go DOWN , but the smarter ones understand something of the bigger picture including public health issues, local control issues, cheaper water treatment plants since the water coming downstream to their town may be cleaner, with fewer mines upstream, etc.
If the buildings and houses had ice storage for cooling then there would not be much of a problem.
Or just add some solar cells to the roof. Hot days with little wind tend to be sunny, you just need both wind and solar. Solar tends to match loads from A/C pretty well, peaking in the middle of the day.
Plus, it’s really not the end of the world if demand has to be cut back for a short time if supply is a little short. Back in the bad old days with Enron, California had regular rolling blackouts – painful, but not the end of the world. In response, they added more options to reduce load – to get a lower rate, large users agree to allow the power company to turn off the A/C or slow down some industrial process if needed to meet supply. We no longer suffer rolling blackouts, but on occasion they do cut some load but nobody even notices.
Preston, in California peak solar is usually between 12pm and 1pm. Peak aircon? No idea. But peak demand is usually 6pm-7pm, way after peak solar.
http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
Yes, it’s called the “duck curve”. And that’s for California overall, A/C demand peaks when outside temps peak, usually in the afternoon.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/06/france-ban-petrol-diesel-cars-2040-emmanuel-macron-volvo
The title to the link says it all, but I tend to read as much between the lines in a lot of cases as I read ON the lines.
I have followed French politics more closely than most Yankees for many years, and have a GREAT deal of respect for the French people, especially in terms of their leaders being forward looking in taking care of France’s long term interests and security.
They built their fleet of nukes to be sure, in large part, to be sure they would have electricity in the event they might have problems importing fossil fuels, ditto they electrified their national rail system ahead of just about every body else, etc.
They are not saying so , not loudly anyway, that they are hedging their bets on the future of the country by getting away from gasoline and diesel fueled cars, but I have NO doubt that their economic and military security are as much on their minds as climate when they make this sort of decision.
It’s good politics sometimes, and this is one of those times, to mention only half the reasons you might be doing or NOT doing some particular thing.
When I talk about the future, and I’m talking to Joe and Suzy Sixpack, I talk about renewable energy jobs, local tax revenue, denying money and power to their enemies, real or imagined, renewable energy coming down in price when the long term trend in fossil fuel prices is has ALWAYS been up, lol. Old country folks can remember twenty five cents a gallon gasoline, and two bucks is eight times as much, and they understand that two bucks will sooner rather than later, probably go back to three or four bucks again, and then higher, due to depletion and inflation, etc.
They EASILY also understand that wind and solar farms built with borrowed money will be repaying that borrowed money with inflated money, and selling electricity into price inflated markets.
They ALSO EASILY understand that when the market is glutted with a particular product, or people providing a particular service, that the price of that product or service is depressed, some times to the point of actually crashing, like the price of coal, and the price of oil, in recent years, and that the MORE wind and solar power we have, the LOWER the price of gas and coal will be, everything else held equal.
But they DO need to be REMINDED of these things, tactfully, without talking down to them, and without actually insulting them, deliberately, as so many members of this forum are prone to do.
Well, you guys who insist on talking about wingnuts, rednecks, rural people and white working class people as if they are idiots and second class human beings are doing your part to make sure they continue to vote for Republicans, and for Trump type Republicans at that.
BUT I do not expect any of you to change, because it’s well known, among people who care to know, that tribal loyalties TRUMP actual FACTS just about every time, and that making fun of the “them”camp is oe of the primary and best AND most enjoyable ways of demonstrating membership in good standing in the “in” camp.
So- go ahead, continue to make fun of the people who voted for Trump, and help him and the Republicans win again, in the upcoming midterm elections. A few of them at least will be visiting this site, and some of that few would hang around to learn about the things we discuss here, if they weren’t talked about like ………. well you know the words we don’t usually use in public anymore, select anyone of them and fill in the blank to suit yourself.
I leave off the climate talk, because it grates on their nerves , culturally. I don’t deny it, I just don’t emphasize it. Discussion of common ground makes friends.
Having sex can cause infertility. A novel concept but a real one.
“About 78 million people pick up the STI each year and it can cause infertility”
“In the past 15 years therapy has had to change three times following increasing rates of resistance worldwide. ”
“We are now at a point where we are using the drugs of last resort, but there are worrying signs as treatment failure due to resistant strains has been documented.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-40520125
This opens up the possibility of a major increase in infertility if the bacteria mutates further. Since many carriers exhibit no symptoms it’s a stealth disease catching the unwary and unprepared.
It never ceases to leave me laughing a cynical belly laugh when people who are supposedly scientifically literate consistently bad mouth religion ( which DESERVES bad mouthing in many respects of course ) while NEVER acknowledging that religions are basically no more and no less than evolved behaviors which confer fitness or survival value on those who practice them, on average, over time.
If this were not true, then there wouldn’t BE any religions, lol.
It’s damned rare for really serious Baptists to ever fall victim to a venereal disease, because the really serious ones do not practice premarital sex, and do not sleep around once married, and even STAY married more often than other couples for the sake of their kids and their ( supposed) eternal souls.
This is not to say Baptist boys and girls don’t indulge, but rather that they indulge less often, lol, in accordance with how serious their parents are, about keeping an eye on them, and on how seriously they take their religious lessons personally.
I knew a number of Baptist girls back when I was a kid who absolutely refused to have sex until they got married – to friends of mine, which is why I know. The guys always bragged about their conquests. This is not to say there weren’t more new kids around eight months after a wedding than you would expect statistically, but only a few more, not LOTS more.
And none of this is to say that when circumstances change, the fitness value of religions and other evolved behaviors will remain the same, or even continue to exist.
In a modern Western European society, it’s unlikely that being a serious follower of any religion confers survival value.
But being a serious follower of Mohamed certainly confers survival value in certain countries. As a matter of fact, being at least an outwardly serious follower of Mohamed is NECESSARY to survive in some places.
There are probably also some places left where you are at risk of your life if you aren’t at least an outwardly serious follower of Jesus as well, lol.
“…religions are basically no more and no less than evolved behaviors which confer fitness or survival value on those who practice them…” And here I thought the purpose of a religion was to achieve the goal of salvation — saving your soul. So, do other species have religion as well? Are there (tiny) alters hidden away in ant hills and bee hives to help these critters survive? If not, why not? Or, do only humans have a soul worth saving? (Pretty insulting to my dog if that’s the case.) Is that why it’s OK for humans to propagate at the expense of other plants and animals? Just imagine — a billion plus (human) souls queued up at the Pearly Gates seeking immortality. Now that’s Survival Value. Yup, survival of the species in spades!
Religions currently are parasitic meme sets using humans as hosts for their own replication, at the expense of human genetic fitness.
Like a lancet fluke, or Toxoplasma gondii, they rewire the hosts brains for , in the case of Taxo loss of a fear of cats by rats so the rat will be eaten, and the parasite can complete its cycle, or a snail that contains a lancet fluke climbing to a top of a grass leaf so it can be eaten by sheep so the parasite can complete its cycle.
Religion rewires homo sapiens brains for its replication.
Hi Hightrekker,
I believe you are entirely mistaken.
Religions have proven themselves to be VERY USEFUL in terms of Darwinian fitness on countless occasions, serving as the glue that has held various cultures and societies together, enabling them to EITHER over run and out compete other societies, or successfully resist being over run by competing societies.
Religions may go the way of cave fishes eyes, I will not argue that they will not , lol, depending on how the cards fall over the coming decades and centuries.
You can rest assured that if the shit hits the fan HARD, I will be very glad that many members of my family, including some close relatives, are members in good standing in a church that will do quite a bit to support members in distress. It does this on a regular ongoing basis, and it does it EXTREMELY efficiently.
The preacher gets paid less than half what a social worker gets, and puts in twice as many visits. He tells me which old woman in the church, or in the neighborhood, is without money to repair her house, or buy fuel oil, and I go with a couple of other guys and we work on her leaky roof, or cut her a load of firewood, etc. We lose virtually nothing in terms of parasitic losses to bookkeepers, advertising, fundraisers, rent, or salaries and bonuses to administrators, etc. I do this sort of thing a couple of times most months, two hours or more. I also help out with the fire department, etc, the same way.
We try to look after members first, or family of members, but we don’t ignore other people who have problems.
I know, I help with this work, although I absolutely DO NOT advertise the fact LOCALLY that I am a firm believer in Darwinian evolution, and put my faith in books such as the ones written by professors of the physical and life sciences rather than preachers and priests.
My old Daddy has outlived nearly all his close family, or else the remainder of them are now too old to get around, and he has outlived almost all his old friends and coworkers as well. The younger extended family have either moved away, or else they just don’t come, it’s not that they don’t care at all, but that there are SO MANY people to visit, and so many things they must or want to do, etc. Great grandchildren seldom know their great grandparents except from holiday gettogethers, etc.
SO- MOST of the people who come to visit and cheer him up and help him have an enjoyable experience are the middle aged women to older women who still drive who come around a couple or three at a time, to visit the older church members who are now too old to actually get to church, except for funerals, mainly, and mainly their OWN funerals.
NOTE I do NOT maintain that religions are useful under all circumstances, and pointed out that they have little or no survival value in some of the more modern societies such as those of Western Europe, and in some major parts of Yankee society.
Would the world be better off without religions? Now that’s a hell of an interesting question.
Let’s not forget that nature ABHORS a vacuum, and that some classic Russian novelist or another has one of his characters say that when men cease to believe in GOD, they do not henceforth believe in NOTHING.
Maybe without religions we would ONLY have societies similar to modern well educated liberal democratic societies.
OR MAYBE we would only have societies run by psychopaths who think murder on the grand scale is an excellent management tool, not to mention great fun as well.
I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know that we exist as nuclear families, extended families, local tribal groups or communities of various sorts in modern times, and continuously on up to the people bonded together economically and politically as members of a given nation state.
If preachers and priests don’t compose the rules, SOMEBODY ELSE WILL.
WHY should we think that SOMEBODY would prove to be any better ethically and morally than the preachers and priests?
Stalin and Chairman Mao certainly didn’t earn their place in the history books by doing better by their people than priests, lol.
And yes, I know about the history of the Catholic Church, and the Pope and his Cardinals at times being some of the lowest of low life scumbags ever, etc , etc, etc.
I know about priests piling the skulls of victims of human sacrifice into small mountains too.
BUT I don’t see any particular reason to think (except in societies that have happily matured to such a state as that of a typical Western European country ) that whoever takes the place of priests will necessarily be any better than the priests themselves. They might, they might not.
I agree religion is a natural phenomena , and has possibly brought genetic fitness in the past, with group cohesion, and as Dennett has pointed out, possibly even a heath policy.
However in its present parasitic form, this is no longer the case– we are not talking about tribal cohesion, we are taking about species extinction through parasitic infection.
We discount the future, think heuristically rather than critically, live by story and myth rather than observation, and infected by a genetically dangerous parasite.
This brought fitness in the past, but is a liability in the current collapsing ecology.
Stalin and Chairman Mao certainly didn’t earn their place in the history books by doing better by their people than priests, lol.
These were religious societies, not atheist.
Russia was incredibly immersed in superstitious Christianity, and China living in it’s Confucian and Buddhist feudal past.
Hardy religion free societies.
It is one of my theories that The Cultural Revolution in China would not of been possible with out the strict family hierarchy, and its associated shame, that Confucianism brought to Chineese Feudal Society.
Bluntly, Stalin and Mao did do better than the medieval priests of Europe’s Dark Ages.
That was a very, very low standard to beat.
Are there (tiny) alters hidden away in ant hills and bee hives to help these critters survive? If not, why not? Or, do only humans have a soul worth saving? (Pretty insulting to my dog if that’s the case.)
Not a single whale or dolphin that I have ever encountered, struck me as being preoccupied with either deities or an afterlife.
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But they haven’t accepted Jesus as their personal savior.
Obviously, they are going to hell.
Hi Fred,
I have a sense of humor and you have put many a grin on my old face, and succeeded once again.
Here’s a point. You only have to be right fifty one percent of the time to make out like a bandit in the stock market, if you are in for the long term and make a lot of trades.
I have NEVER contended that any religion is any BETTER in any sort of cosmic sense than any other, or that forty nine percent of the time, religions are anything other than a curse.
I won’t argue that times haven’t changed in such a fashion that more often than not, at this juncture in history, religions are a net negative influence on human happiness and prosperity, etc.
I believe you and I both understand that Mother Nature ( a meme or intellectual construct approaching God(dess) stature in the minds of the most dedicated and intellingent environmentally conscious people I have encountered ) doesn’t give a rats ass about ANYTHING, being non sentient, and not even a physical living creature. She simply keeps score by who wins in the survival game, and sometimes a particular trait or behavior is a winning trait or behavior, sometimes it’s not.
My thinking is that some sort of BELIEF system, or system of beliefs, is essential glue that enables a family, tribe or society to adhere together, and thus gain the advantages of cooperative behavior.
Insects and other so called lower life forms achieve cooperative behavior mostly by way of instinct, but with an element of intelligence involved as the species in question evolves greater behavioral complexity. Wolves are quite intelligent, in my opinion, compared to social herbivores, etc. Chimps are so intelligent that if they had the right sort of vocal apparatus, and looked more like us, a few of them at least could likely pass for “less than gifted” humans.
I am not at all sure we are really any more intelligent than dolphins, in the last analysis, although they obviously have no opportunity to master fire or making tools, lacking the right sort of limbs, and living in water.
Maybe dolphins are as rational as most men, which is not saying a hell of a lot, is it?
I maintain that unless religions have survival value, they would not be so common, they would have faded out a long time ago.
I do NOT maintain that under the conditions prevailing TODAY even in my backwoods community that religion confers substantial survival value, but otoh, I can think of a few people who would be dead, if it weren’t for the fact that local churches have donated substantial amounts of money and man ( or woman ) power to helping them live.
Religion is fading out FAST, in evolutionary or historical terms in my own community, for a number of reasons. The church I attended as a child is now attended by ninety percent older people, and only ten percent kids. The welfare state has mostly supplanted the church operated social safety net here. ETC ETC ETC
Will this be a BETTER community if the church closes its doors?
Well, that depends on what fills the social and economic and cultural niche that was formerly filled by the defunct church.
I don’t personally believe in an afterlive, or any of the supposed things associated with an afterlife.
But I DO believe that the devil I know may not be as bad as the devil I don’t which MIGHT replace the current devil, lol.
It may be impossible to arrive at a logically defensible answer in respect to whether religion has historically been a plus or minus, overall. Some people will point out that religion has been used to justify slavery, while some others point out that the most dedicated and effective of the American abolitionists were very strongly committed to their Christian religion.
Religions are fading out fast in countries that are economically prosperous and safe and that have more or less adequate government operated safety nets, and so far as I am concerned, this is ok with me.
As a matter of fact I often argue that the more liberalish socialist leaning left wing need only wait in order to gain control over our Yankee society, because the older more conservative generations are dying off fast now. There aren’t a whole lot of WWII vets left now, and I USED to know dozens of boomers at least well enough to say hello who are pushing up daisies already.
Just about every young person I encounter is more liberal in terms of cultural values than his or her parents, by a country mile, on average. This is also OK with me, it’s BETTER than just ok, it’s FINE with me.
BUT – and this is a very BIG but, it is not always best to get what you wish for right away, because what you wish for ALWAYS has strings attached. The leftish leaning wing of our society got most of what it wished for over the last few decades mostly by way of the courts, which is all fine and good, ok with me.
But the strings attached include the Trump administration, which is the result of political backlash from the conservative wing of our society more than any thing else.
Some famous old general once said when asked why he halted his army for a rest every hour even on an emergency march that THAT was the FASTEST way of getting there.
MAYBE we would as individuals on average, and as a country, be better off if our society had changed more slowly over the last few decades. Sometimes maybe the best way to get rid of a powerful and dangerous opponent is to just allow him to die of old age, especially when you have good reason to believe over half of his children will be on your side by the time he is gone.
I am not arguing that this IS the case, but rather that it’s a possibility worth some thought. As I see it, most of the opposition to good environmental policies and law in this country is the result of cultural backlash, which in turn is the result of strong environmental policies being ( correctly) associated with the enemy ( the liberal wing of our society ) by the people of the conservative wing.
So- tribal loyalty trumps everything else, nearly every time, and cultural conservatives are thus highly prone to opposing strong environmental laws.
It’s VERY unfortunate that the environment has become a political football, but that’s the way it is. If the leftish leaning wing had been less successful in forcing fast change, the rightish leaning wing would be far more amenable to sensible environmental policies.
I maintain that unless religions have survival value, they would not be so common, they would have faded out a long time ago.
Of course and most competent evolutionary biologists would agree.
However as the environment chnages so does what does or does not constitute survival value. There are biologists such as Dawkins who contend that certain extremely virulent strains of religious memes are now counter productive and their survival value has become questionable.
Personally I accept the idea that religion still holds survival value as a form of tribal glue. What I see happening is that tribalism, itself may no longer have as much evolutionary survival value as it did back on the African plains, when our biggest concerns were to keep from being eaten by lions…
I guess going forward we will find out if humans will survive at all.
I used to read Dawkins quite regularly and enthusiastically. He’s a great writer, and quite accomplished as a scientist , although more so as a writer.
My own personal interpretation of Darwinian evolution is that once we got to the point we mostly whipped out the lions and the snakes, etc, and starting competing among ourselves, so that the tribe over the mountain or across the river or plain morphed into the ENEMY………..
Well, now, a virulent religion has evolutionary value in my estimation IF the followers / practicioners of said virulent religion prosper at the expense of anybody else or everybody else .
It has not been about the SPECIES for thousands of years now, it’s been about the TRIBE in the case of naked apes, and it’s still about the tribe rather than about the species, on a day to day basis.
This can change and IS changing, and maybe it IS about the species now, rather than the tribes.
I recognize that as a species, we aren’t going to last forever, and we probably won’t last even a tenth as long as the cock roach tribe has lasted ALREADY, lol.
We ARE capable of deliberately OR inadvertently damaging our blue marble so severely we WILL perish, every last one of us, and I appreciate the argument that our survival as a species is at risk, but I really do think the risk is small to maybe even trivial….
Because………
It’s my opinion, after devoting years to thinking about it, that while MOST of us are at high risk of perishing as the result of overshoot, barring lucky miracles on the birth rate front, renewable energy front, political front, etc,
…….It’s rather unlikely that we will screw up the planet so badly that ALL of us perish. Even if ninety to ninety nine percent of us die as the result of overshoot culminating in a flat out WWIII, there will likely still be a few spots capable of supporting naked apes and a few naked apes in some of those spots, enough to repopulate.
Some of us are fond of pointing out that insects can serve as highly nutritious and even gourmet fare, and any lucky surviving naked apes aren’t going to have to start over from SCRATCH without useful tools , etc.
Books will survive, etc. There are literally thousands of stainless steel butcher knives in any fair sized town, countless stainless steel pots, glass jugs, countless thousands of items of clothing made out of fabrics that literally last for decades without rotting, etc.
Guns would be used mostly to rob other naked apes, or to defend against robbery, but if they wero to be needed for other purposes …….. say to kill a gone back to wild longhorn bull…….. for dinner ……….
If kept greased to prevent rust, guns last almost forever, and there are tens of million of rounds of ammo all over the place for the taking, and modern ammunition still shoots just fine when it’s old enough to have great grandchildren, if kept dry.
Survivors will have a few decades at least to learn how to survive living a more or less primitive life style while salvaging the remains of our present civilization.
That’s long enough for some survivors to master the job.
Actually, I think religious belief systems are the problem.
I think religion per se is not actually about belief systems. Religion is about a community with a set of shared rituals and practices which hold them together.
“Orthodox” Judaism doesn’t actually require any beliefs. It simply requires *orthopraxy* — do the rituals.
It’s the belief systems which mess people up. I think it’s a good idea to have the religious communities and practices — it’s when the religion starts engaging in mind control by demanding particular beliefs, *despite and contrary to all evidence*, that it becomes a problem. Christianity started doing this before the end of the 2nd century (I blame St. Paul, who totally trashed the religion of Jesus) and only got worse for the next several hundred years, before the Protestant Reformation started to make it *slightly* better.
The conflation of belief with religion is a very Christian problem.
Apparently having sex can also cause religion.
Can I haz religion?
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No opportunity to prey is ever passed up.
EU Countries Lack Investment Strategy In Shift To Low-Carbon Economy
http://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/150902/EU_Countries_Lack_Investment_Strategy_In_Shift_To_LowCarbon_Economy
Although I don’t know what the Chinese have planned for Europe, I wouldn’t be surprised if the investment money comes from there.
China, just like Europe, is a country poor in oil and gas resources.
Much of its foreign investment seems to be directed towards securing future oil and gas resources for itself.
Loans to secure gas and oil in some countries doesn’t mean China won’t also make investments in renewables in Europe. China can expand its influence across the globe via different activities in different regions. I imagine it is more effective than trying to win over the world militarily.
I seldom agree with GST but in this particular case, I think he is dead on, that China is doing everything possible politically and economically to secure adequate energy supplies for the coming years.
I personally believe that the Chinese believe that they simply cannot ramp up renewable energy fast enough to transition away from fossil fuels before fossil fuel supplies come up short, expensive , and risky in terms of obtaining them.
And I think they are right about that.
We’re going to be depending on depleting fossil fuels for quite some time yet, because the transition to renewables IS going to take quite some time, at least three or four decades, at best.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oncor-m-a-berkshire-hathaway-idUSKBN19R2NF
Glenn,
China isn’t going to the the only ‘geopolitical entity’ vying for Venezuela’s oil… What is your take on that? How do you think things will play out in that regard and also with respect to Jeffrey Brown’s ELM?
Caelan,
I think we’re in the throes of a transition from a uni-polar world (U.S. hegemony) to a tri-polar world (shared power between the U.S., Russia and China), and that Venezuela is one of the many proxies where this transition is being fought out.
Patrick Lawrence summed it up quite well in the Nation:
Thanks for the insight, Glenn, that seems to make sense. I might read the full article-in-question when I get the time.
Russia-China Alliance Is Real – and the US is the Big Loser
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/russia-china-alliance-real-and-us-big-loser/ri20305
Thanks again. Looks like I have my reading cut out for me. ‘u^
Yeah, I agree with you, Glenn. I’ve been hoping the US would give up on its hopeless attempts to cling to empire sooner rather than later, but it seems nobody in the US power elite has the wisdom of the post-WWII British government.
NASA IMAGES CAPTURE WORST SIBERIAN WILDFIRES IN 10,000 YEARS (30 JUN 2017)
“Siberian boreal forests play a crucial role in the carbon cycle, making up nearly 10 percent of the planet’s land surface and housing more than 30 percent of the carbon on Earth. That means that when these forests burn, they are releasing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. The loss of carbon absorption in combination with the release of carbon, creates a vicious cycle that leads to more global warming and, as a result, more wildfires. Not to mention, these wildfires can also hasten the melting of Arctic ice, which is already disappearing at alarming rates. This occurs when the fires produce hordes of soot that fall on snow and ice, darkening their surface and causing them to absorb more sunlight.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-images-capture-worst-siberian-wildfires-in-10-000-years
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/30/siberia-is-on-fire/
HAUNTINGLY FREAKISH SIBERIAN WILDFIRES NOW FLICKER TO LIFE IN APRIL
This year’s early wildfire eruption in Siberia comes after 2014, 2015, and 2016 wildfire outbreaks during similar timeframes and following similarly abnormal warm periods. These fires tended to crop up south of Lake Baikal or closer to the China-Russia border. This year, the early fire outbreak appears to have emerged both further north and generally along a wider expanse than during past years.
If past years are any guide, we can expect the present fire season’s early start to produce blazes that continue through September and that peak sometime during late June through August. The fires will tend to be very large and will probably range as far north as the Arctic Ocean.
These fires will gain ignition from new Arctic thunderstorms. They will be fed by new fuels such as thawing permafrost and trees harmed by northward invading species or by climates warming at rates far faster than they can handle. And they will be capable of casting off gigantic smoke plumes that encircle the higher latitude reaches of the globe.
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/04/24/hauntingly-freakish-siberian-wildfires-now-flicker-to-life-in-april/
NASA needs to get back to being all about space exploration, nothing else.
In 2006 this was removed from the NASA mission statement “to understand and protect the home planet” . So Jimmy, apparently they are just exploring the closest planet available, not the home planet.
1) National AERONAUTICS and Space Administration
2) Last I heard, Earth was part of space.
NAOM
Last I heard, Earth was part of space.
Negative! Earth is the center of the known Universe!
But then again, so is everywhere else…
Yes Fred, you have hit on it!! Eureka!!
Using the unique properties of dark mater and dark energy we can force the universe into submission making us the center. It will be ours at last!!! BwaaHAAAAHAAAHAAA.
Brought to you by the Wile E. Coyote school of physics. Where quantum gravity and quantum time were first demonstrated to the public during acceleration events. Donations welcome (no Road Runners accepted).
Also brought to you by the ACME explosives company. In business since the Big Bang.
Yep!
Either everywhere is the center of the Universe or nowhere is the center of the Universe… but one thing is for sure, the cosmic background radiation is real and so is the red shift, whether you believe it or not 🙂
https://xkcd.com/54/
Red shift illustration, mine.
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I just want to know where the brass ring is located.
It’s attached to that big stopper stuck in that black hole on the bottom of the cosmic swimming pool. All you gotta do is dive down and pull it up…
The other brass ring, the one we should not touch. Getting the brass ring just gets one more of the same and we really need to get off this ride, try another one.
TESLA TO BUILD WORLD’S LARGEST LITHIUM ION BATTERY IN AUSTRALIA
“The 100-megawatt (129 megawatt hour) battery should be ready this year. There is certainly some risk, because this will be largest battery installation in the world by a significant margin, Mr Musk said in Adelaide on Friday. He added that, the next biggest battery in the world is 30 megawatts.”
“It will completely transform the way in which renewable energy is stored, and also stabilize the South Australian network as well as putting downward pressure on prices,” Mr Weatherill said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-40527784
I generally tend to take Musk at his word, except when it comes to delivery dates, lol, but I don’t see any reason to think this super giant battery installation is going to be physically or technically dangerous.
So far as I can see, such large batteries consist of many smaller ones, separately housed, and far enough apart to be safe from each other in the event of one of them catching fire, etc, but close enough to easily wire all of them together.
Maybe he means it will be risky from an economic or political standpoint.
Such super batteries are sure going to be useful in smoothing out short term peaks and valleys in wind and solar power production that happen because of cloud cover or the wind dying down unexpectedly and so forth, and once there are enough of them…….. then they can be recharged by that famously dependable Aussie sun, and carry a big share of the night time load, saving ever more coal and gas.
He stands to be $50 million out of pocket if he does not hit the deadline. I would term that a form of risk.
NAOM
From March 10, 2017
Elon Musk throws down “serious” challenge to tackle South Australia’s energy crisis
Okay Elon, it’s put up or shut up time!
Team Koch will have a big party if he fails!
The energy instability is due to legal restrictions on PV. Elon does see this as a way to demonstrate the tech and profit from the situations. The real problem lies with the government in this case.
Those who have been researching the situation say that the problem is specifically caused by the actions of the *federal* government of Australia. (And it is the *state* government of South Australia which is ordering the batteries.)
Here’s PV Magazines take on the same story:
Tesla teams with Neoen to build 129 MWh lithium-ion battery in Australia
As a follow up:
One-quarter of Australian homes now have solar
New installs and retrofits behind Australia’s residential storage boom
Australia is shaping up to be an extremely interesting case study in the adoption of renewable sources for electricity generation. Doesn’t look like it according to the screenshot of the NEM Watch Widget below but, lets see what it looks like in six hours time (mid day in Australia) then check back again in six months and again in six years.
For some perspective here’s a little screenshot from http://www.gaisma.com/en/ showing that at 6:55 am., half an hour after the above screenshot was taken, the sun had just come up on the north east coast of Australia.
Such super batteries
Super batteries?
They are lithium ion– the Japanese commercialized them in the early 1990’s.
Campers, can you say bottleneck?
I knew you could!
What year was the combustion engine commercialized?
Bob, did you tell us before about your lithium investments upon my mention of a possible lithium ‘bottleneck’ and/or u-shaped cost curves, or was it someone else?
Thanks, campers, that was great… Now can you say, u-shaped cost curves? …Come on, now, all together…
Anyway, the ~150 year old ICE seems to be approaching its bottleneck…
1698
I actually said SUPER LARGE, lol.
Compared to existing , they are supersized.
But you’re right, it’s a relatively old technology, and while it may be that such batteries can be manufactured at much lower costs than at present, they will never be four or five times as powerful per unit mass or unit volume.
The theoretical limit for lithium batteries is 3 kWh/kg. MIT demonstrated (in the lab) 2.5 kWh/kg. Right now they are in the range of 0.3 kWh/kg.
Practically speaking 1 kWh/kg is quite enough to run vehicles. A 150 kg battery would give a range of 400 miles using 80 percent of it’s charge.
However lithium is not the only contender for batteries.
However lithium is not the only contender for batteries.
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I never thought of Hamsterium. Maybe Guineapigite would be more powerful.
Actually researchers tried direct solar powering hamsters. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between solar input and power produced. There was a direct relationship between increased power and early failure.
Probably needs some work. 🙂
There was a direct relationship between increased power and early failure.
Probably needs some work. ?
Yeah, especially in some of the earlier generators they had to keep replacing faulty components due to low EROEI.
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Sounds like they misapplied the technology.
Mind you, if this was in Peru and you switched to guinea Pigs then there would be a ready market for failed units.
NAOM
Mind you, if this was in Peru…
Not to worry! Technology advances by leaps and bounds.
Despite all the naysayers, one of the pioneers of this technology, Elan Mask, is working on a giga project and thinks he has found the ultimate solution by using Capybaras in a giant linked powerwall network down in the recently recovered continent of Atlantis…
Should the Capybara modules fail, they are even more recyclable than guinea pigs and might solve both the world’s energy and food problem in one fell swoop! 😉
Capybara
Source Wikipedia
The capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is the largest rodent in the world. Also called chigüire, it is a member of the genus Hydrochoerus, of which the only other extant member is the lesser capybara (Hydrochoerus isthmius). Close relatives are guinea pigs and rock cavies, and it is more distantly related to the agouti, the chinchilla, and the coypu.
Adult capybaras grow to 106 to 134 cm (3.48 to 4.40 ft) in length, stand 50 to 62 cm (20 to 24 in) tall at the withers, and typically weigh 35 to 66 kg (77 to 146 lb), with an average in the Venezuelan llanos of 48.9 kg (108 lb).[10][11][12] The top recorded weights are 91 kg (201 lb) for a wild female from Brazil and 73.5 kg (162 lb) for a wild male from Uruguay.[
Roast Capybara recipes available upon request!
Th difference between 1 and .3 is quite significant.
All of a sudden, you have a 450 kg battery.
Yes, it’s about 3.3 times different. So?
Nope, Tesla 85 kWh battery weighs 544 kg. Your response is backwards, are we trying to make them heavier or lighter? I say go for lighter. 150 to 200 kg would be much better. Less material too as well as better capability. That is the direction batteries are headed now.
Lithium batteries have not progressed because there was no need. They were quite adequate for many years. Now there is a need for better. This will drive change but it will take time to move through the system and depose the current champions. I doubt we will see the same batteries in 10 years time though we see the same batteries now as 10 years ago.
NAOM
Needs can be ‘manufactured’… right under your nose… without your knowledge, understanding or consent.
It’s a large part of why I prefix some words, like ‘technology’, with ‘pseudo’.
See also:
It’s worse than even the simple math.
Palette-cabin in progress composite render/screen-grab below.
I have yet to find out if or how to get the seams of the individual planks in a render, such as to highlight the joints or how to increase the contrast…
2 palettes by 4 and you can make each out if you look closely. Some boards were popped off the get the support beams in.
The ground floor isn’t actually a floor per se, and the height is somewhat minimal ~6′ or so, so the thing is on stilts so as to offer sufficient clearance to develop, store, add to, etc., below.
It looks bigger than it is because of the increased camera angle to get most of it in the frame.
As usual, if you select the image, you can get a larger display of it.
I have to get the ‘footings’ below the frost line, etc., but one thing at a time…
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Researchers reveal the signs that show civilization is set to collapse
“It is argued that, in all advanced industrial societies (not necessarily only capitalist ones), technology becomes a means of domination, control, and exploitation, or more generally something which threatens the survival of humanity.” ~ Wikipedia
“It has been seen all throughout human history – a bustling community experiences a population boom and technological advancement until, seemingly overnight, it plummets into total collapse.”
Sure! As long as your definition of ‘overnight’ is a couple of centuries long…
As an example, the Roman Empire took a few centuries. Check out ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ by Tainter. He actually studied the subject.
BTW,
I have yet to find out if or how to get the seams of the individual planks in a render, such as to highlight the joints or how to increase the contrast…
…It looks bigger than it is because of the increased camera angle to get most of it in the frame.
As usual, if you select the image, you can get a larger display of it.
Sounds like you haven’t quite mastered the use of your advanced computer and graphics technology. That’s Ok, it took me a good quarter of century using many different kinds of advanced software and thousands of computer hours to become reasonably competent… Even today I’m still learning.
Oh, and your house on stilts looks rather shaky and potentially unsafe I doubt it would pass code in a shanty town. I highly recommend you consult with a competent civil engineer before you put yourself and other’s at risk. Oh, never mind, civil engineers use technology and you of all people wouldn’t be caught dead being so hypocritical as to employ something as unethical as electricity, computers and software…
Just make sure your construction isn’t what ends up collapsing!
Yes, maybe the Roman’s ‘decline/collapse’ was a long-drawn-out sordid and tortuous affair that resisted putting itself out of its misery for some time. We might be in for something along those lines this time around too, perhaps thanks to similar dynamics, such as especially given that some of the mindless status-quo cheerleading and protectionism is going on from people who should know better.
As for the pallet cabin, when we weren’t wearing diapers and sucking our thumbs like we are now, we have been building our own dwellings for a very long time without the career clowns, coercion and codes currently collapsing community, culture and climate, and will likely be doing so again, if we last, for some time to come.
We don’t actually need much to be content, happy, healthy and fulfilled, etc., and what we do need, we appear to be losing– in the interest of what we don’t really need, ironically.
Attached is an image of Bear River, Nova Scotia, that happens to have, possibly heritage, buildings on stilts and in the water and a tidal river no less. We almost bought an old church there.
Speaking of which, and of different and/or more natural, self-empowering, local, community-oriented, small-scale and fulfilling ways to live…
This building is in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and the very useful open area under it plays host to different social activities, including the weekend farmers’ market. Been there, done that.
And you seriously believe that such construction is within your skill set?!
It ain’t about being happy or not having codes for buildings. It’s about actually knowing what you are doing. Check out the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. Hint, the twig house didn’t keep the wolf out…
Good luck with your palettes on stilts! Beware of storms, high winds, fires, termites, carpenter ants, beavers and swift flowing waters. But if you insist on building it, at the very least stop using your computer, don’t use any hammers or saws, power tools should be completely out of the question! Maybe make yourself some stone axes and bind every thing together with twine.
Oh, sorry, stone axes are an early form of, you guessed it, technology.
^ More glossolalia from Fred, folks.
Yeah, Fred is right. You don’t seem to know what you’re doing.
Expertise is a real thing, Caelan. My expertise is in the oldest documented profession in the world — accounting, which predates written language.
You clearly lack expertise in engineering and architecture (which are also extremely old professions, dating to ancient Egypt). It might be wise for you to acquire some expertise in the area.
Yair . . .
Caelen MacIantyre.
Your methodology looks off. Little forty five degree braces do not a stable structure make.
It beats me why you would try to reinvent the wheel. Its all very basic stuff and it’s all been done before . . . pallets are built for a purpose.
Cheers.
Response is here.
“There is nothing in the center of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillo’s”
-Hightower
Goodbye, and Good Riddance, to Centrism
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-centrism-w487628
Satellite Perspective on Arctic Lightning
http://ak-wx.blogspot.ca/2017/07/satellite-perspective-on-arctic.html?m=1
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-litter-bugs-chocolate.html
I find it highly amusing and highly instructive that the CUBANS of all people are probably ahead of everybody else in learning how to use the microbial biome to advantage in agriculture, and in actually putting the knowledge to work.
This is the happy consequence of necessity being a harsh taskmaster, and the Castro regime having little or no choice in the matter, being unable to buy or manufacture much in the way of pesticides and other industrial agricultural chemicals.
This link is a good place to start, it’s a fairly decent and still reasonably short overview of the circumstances that led to the Cubans undertaking this initiative, and their results.
Google Cuban agriculture and biocontrols, food production, micro biome, etc and a few more words along these lines and you will get lots of hits, many of them that contain more specific and more up to date information.
If I could be young again, knowing what I know now, I would make a career of doing this sort of research.
I find it highly amusing and highly instructive that the CUBANS of all people are probably ahead of everybody else in learning how to use the microbial biome to advantage in agriculture, and in actually putting the knowledge to work.
Brazil has been quietly importing Cuban Doctors and scientists for a long time. As far as I know they are highly competent.
Cuban doctors are all over the Third World, and are extremely well trained.
Castro really pissed off the capitalist world by dying of old age.
Lets face it campers:
“Governments exist to cheerlead capitalism and provide military force when limits are met as banks grow their loan portfolios as fresh tissue is metabolized. Communists and environmentalists are on the black list, climate change is a hoax, as well as anything standing in the way of expansion of the banking system.”
Don’t forget insurance companies.
The New Nation-States
How Trump’s rejection of the Paris accord is reshaping the political landscape.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
July 6, 2017
the Paris decision may also reshape the world for the better, or at least the very different. Consider: A few days after Trump’s Rose Garden reveal, California Governor Jerry Brown was in China, conductingwhat looked a lot like an official state visit. He posed with pandas, attended banquets—and sat down for a one-on-one meeting with President Xi Jinping, which produced a series of agreements on climate cooperation between China and California. (Trump’s secretary of energy, Rick Perry, was in Beijing the same week: no pandas, no sit-down with Xi.) It was almost as if California were another country. Call it a nation-state—a nation-state that has talked about launching its own satellites to monitor melting polar ice. (Rat does; he calls it The Republic of Awesome)
https://newrepublic.com/article/143600/new-nation-states-trump-rejection-paris-accord-reshaping-political-landscape
Yeah, I’ve been expecting this for a while. Have you noticed that Governor Cuomo of New York is also acting like a head of state?
Finding Ways to Think About the Future…
Hmmm? Where have I heard this before?
My favorite Trump supporter at it again, providing us with an interesting look at the future of energy and transportation as he sees it. Of course Jack being Jack, he has to throw a little global warming denial in there but, since he’s on the same page as me most of the time, I’ll give him a pass.
Hmmm? Where have I heard this before?
My favorite Trump supporter at it again, providing us with an interesting look at the future of energy and transportation as he sees it. Of course Jack being Jack, he has to throw a little global warming denial in there but, since he’s on the same page as me most of the time, I’ll give him a pass.
I can’t imagine where you might ever have heard such a thing… 😉
Cheers!
If anything he’s a little bit behind the curve. Mass adoption is already happening in Australia. Some utility companies are already adopting PV as their main source of electricity.
Since a 20 square meter thermal collector with 72 percent collection efficiency will produce 72 million BTU for collection and use annually (Northeast US 40 N) why are we heating with natural gas/oil/propane?
All we need to do is devise appropriate storage and distribution systems.
“All we need to do is devise appropriate storage and distribution systems.”
As long as capitalism doesn’t get in the way, no problem with distribution.
Storage?
Can you say bottleneck?
So there is a bottleneck between my yard and my house? Underground insulated storage using rock and water plus some internal storage.
And how is that scaling?
5% of global storage yet?
Your question is meaningless unless you define your terms.
Scaling just fine. Used even in some large resorts in Europe where solar insolation is lower than USA.
5% global share yet?
Don’t get me wrong- passive solar is great.
I lived in Micronesia for a year without electricity- water from rain off the roof, spearfished to trade with the locals, and must confess, did use a bit of Kerosene for lighting and cooking.
But hot shower from a solar heated hose was wonderful!
You didn’t answer the question, merely showed a lack of vision. All things start small.
You sound like you are either against proper solutions or are just very cynical about their implementation.
Most things only occur when people are very positive about them and move forward against the odds.
This is a well developed technology in Europe, just in the US we are backward about it. No magic or even much high tech involved, just simple construction. Yet to many it seems out of reach just because some major corporation is not knocking down their door to sell it to them.
Same was true of EV’s. Now look at them, entering the terrible two’s.
Lets hope–
Seems like a solution that doesn’t require a techno narcissistic fantasy.
I have used a coil of black plastic pipe on many occasions as a makeshift solar water heater when there was pressurized water but no way to heat it. I just put a fitting in each end of the coil (the pipe being purchased for later use on the job) and hooked it to a hose on each end. Let that sucker lay in the sun for a couple of hours mid summer and it will make water hot enough you can’t stand to shower in it.
Very refreshing when doing nasty work such as renovating an old house, you just take your shower before it gets too hot, lol. In cool weather it will only get lukewarm to moderately hot in three or four hours.
I have a home made solar domestic hot water system that can supply our entire needs eight or nine months out of the year, but it’s out of service due to leak. Need to fix that.
We are heating with gas and propane out of habit.
Never underestimate the power of habit. :sigh:
I’m ripping out my gas heating this year.
When Will Electric Cars Go Mainstream? It May Be Sooner Than You Think – The New York Times: “Between 2025 and 2030, the group predicts, plug-in vehicles will become cost competitive with traditional petroleum-powered cars, even without subsidies, and even before taking fuel savings into account. Once that happens, mass adoption should quickly follow.
‘Our forecast doesn’t hinge on countries adopting stringent new fuel standards or climate policies,’ said Colin McKerracher, the head of advanced transport analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. ‘It’s an economic analysis, looking at what happens when the upfront cost of electric vehicles reaches parity. That’s when the real shift occurs.’”
Expanding Into The Space Created By The Expansion
The potential problem with stuff like this is that they become their own self-fulfilling prophesies…
“Oh, look! Look! EV’s may go mainstream very soon! No, really! It’s true! Very soon! So, hop on the bandwagon, everyone! Let’s be part of the in-crowd of a new thing! Don’t get left behind!”
BNEF is being unrealistically pessimistlc.
“Cost competitive with petroleum-powered cars” happens one car segment at a time. (Because cars aren’t all the same price, you know.) It has already happened in luxury sedans, luxury SUVs, high-end sports cars, city buses, and mini “city cars”. It will happen in mid-range cars next year, and in tractor-trailers around 2020.
So why do they think it will be delayed until 2025?
Monthly renewable electricity generation surpasses nuclear for the first time since 1984
Of course, anybody who’s been paying attention to the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly already knew this. 😉
What we did not know was, when last it was that this was the case. From the graph below we can see that there was a significant increase in nuclear capacity throughout the 80s with a slight increase in the late 90s. The big story here is the growth of wind and solar which, if it continues apace will result in renewables generating more than nuclear most of the time, if not all the time.
Putting aside the incredible dangers, nuclear does not have much of a future if it can’t be produced at a much lower cost.
Funny you should bring that up. Here’s PV Magazine’s take on the same story:
PV plant built on nuke site as renewables surpass nuclear in March, April
Citing contemporary documents, local press concluded that the Phipps Bend Nuclear Power plant was the victim of declining power demand due to aluminum plants shutting down in the South, but globally the tide of nuclear was turning.
Yeah, it is indeed but perhaps not in the way the author may have intended that statement. The one in my own backyard is sure to be one that will fall victim to sea level rise in the not too distant future.
Ironically the article contradicts it’s own rising tide scenario at the end by saying this.
And aside from active nuclear programs in nations including China and India, globally nuclear power is on the decline. This is largely due to its inability to compete on cost with wind, solar and natural gas, which can cost half as much (or less) per unit of energy delivered.
Regardless of the economics of nuclear power generation these plants tend not to work too well when they are flooded.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/energy/2015/12/151215-as-sea-levels-rise-are-coastal-nuclear-plants-ready/
As Sea Levels Rise, Are Coastal Nuclear Plants Ready?
Some low-lying plants face a watery future, but the legacy of Fukushima is spurring action.
Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida’s Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032.
At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world’s seas continue to rise.
NASA Images Capture Worst Siberian Wildfires in 10,000 Years
It’s only going to get worse.
https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-images-capture-worst-siberian-wildfires-in-10-000-years
I spent 9 years in wildfire as a younger man. Thrilling stuff. I feel that this is one of the more tangible positive feedback loops. It’s easy to see; expanding wildfire range, longer wildfire seasons, and more intense wildfire behavior. Lightning detection and mapping is also produces interesting data sets.
Volcano reveals simpler than expected cloud-climate response to tiny aerosol particles
https://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2017/volcano-reveals/
We Yankees aren’t the big dog anymore.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170531-chinas-impossible-engineering-feat
That’s for sure! We just had the G-20 minus Trump to show just how Great the world really thinks America is! On a planet of 7.5 billion humans, 63 million anti science, anti international trade and pro 19th century fossil fuel technology is a sure way to bring about a Neo-American Isolationism, to our detriment, not benefit, mind you… This picture of Trump says it all!
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Wow, that bridge in China is amazing. Anyone who doesn’t see China as a top tier nation has had their head under the pillow for a long time. They deserve a lot of respect, and elbow room.
And it’s got pedestrian walkway for the locals. Nice touch.
The Chines won’t stop at their borders either — they are expanding across Central Asia as well.
Hi George Kaplan,
Check your e-mail please.
G19 outmaneuvers climate Rogue Trump, ignores Donald & Ivanka: “With the US absent from climate discussions because Trump withdrew from the Paris Accords, the remaining 19 members of the G20 were able to craft a much stronger statement on climate change and addressing it than the US would normally allow. US governments are typically deeply beholden to Big Oil, Big Gas and Big Coal.
The danger was that Saudi Arabia in particular might balk, but the kingdom seems to be more afraid of Merkel and her allies than it is of Trump. Besides, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has already admitted that oil is over with, and he is looking for a soft landing for the Saudi economy by turning oil wealth into investment wealth before the black gold comes to be recognized as worthless (it already is worthless, but most people just don’t realize it yet).”
A long time ago, one or another Saudi said that the Stone Age did not end due to a lack of stone, and that the Iron Age did not pass due to a lack of iron, and that the Age of oil will not pass due to a lack of oil.
But the stinky black stuff sure is useful for now, and will still be necessary but in declining quantities for quite some time to come, probably another thirty years or longer imo.
Maybe the Saudis have concluded that the USA might actually not NEED to import oil, or at least not import oil from the Eastern Hemisphere, and that therefore they better get with the program that the rest of their customers have adopted, and get away from oil while the getting is still good.
The transition from an oil export dependent economy to one based on other sources of income is going to be one hell of a tough one for them, and it’s going to take a long time.
But it appears that maybe at least some of their leaders understand that it MUST happen, or else they go back to riding camels.
Personally I wouldn’t want to be a Saudi under any possible circumstances other than being a member of the royal family with a connection to the oil money.
I think that barring MIRACLES ninety eight percent of them will have to either emigrate or starve when the oil money runs out. If the climate heats up as much as some people think it will, it might actually be impossible to even survive there except by living underground.
The end of the ‘oil age’ may be where ‘the economy’ ends as well, and where the debt bubble, among other bubbles, goes “pop!“. ^u^
OFM, the number of cars in the world has doubled since 2002. That is more than another 500 million cars on the roads in just 15 years. It took the whole history of cars to get the first 500 million on the road from 1895 to 2000.
Cars are being taken up by developing countries at a faster pace than ever before. I don’t now how many other types such as the small motorcycles are being produced, but they too are growing fast.
At that pace of growth it will not be long before oil demand outstrips oil production unless new vehicles are very efficient and many use other sources of power. The age of oil is already ending, the age of electricity may get a good run but for sure the age of overshoot is upon us in so many ways.
No, we are not being blindsided, we knew and were warned, but like all animals we follow our inborn directives to grow and spread and fulfill our desires. Although we have the delusion that we do not.
Hi all,
New Post by George Kaplan on Gulf of Mexico
http://peakoilbarrel.com/gulf-of-mexico-discoveries-reserves-and-production/
and a new Open Thread Non-Petroleum
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-9-2017/