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'Moore's Law' For Carbon Would Defeat Global Warming (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A streamlined set of goals for reducing carbon emissions could simplify the way nations approach the quest to reduce human impact on the planet. A group of European researchers have a refreshingly straightforward solution that they call a carbon law -- or, as the Guardian has coined it, a "Moore's law for carbon." The overarching goal is simple: globally, we must halve carbon dioxide emissions every decade. That's essentially it. The rule would ideally be applied "to all sectors and countries at all scales," and would encourage "bold action in the short term." Dramatic changes would naturally have to occur as a result -- from quick wins like carbon taxes and energy efficiency regulations, to longer-term policies like phasing out combustion-engine cars and carbon-neutral building regulations. If policy makers followed the carbon law, adoption of renewables would continue its current pace of doubling energy production every 5.5 years, and carbon dioxide sequestration technologies would need to ramp up in order for the the planet to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century, say the researchers. Along the way, coal use would end as soon as 2030 and oil use by 2040. There are, clearly, issues with the idea, not least being the prospect of convincing every nation to commit to such a vision. The very simplicity that makes the idea compelling can also be used as a point of criticism: Can such a basic rule ever hope to define practical ideas as to how to change the world's energy production and consumption? The study has been published in the journal Science.
The priesthood has spoken and we all must give them money or become infidels. Climate change must not be questioned. Let us all be thankful for our daily readings from the Gospel of Al Gore.
Moores law for transistors works with roughly the same amount of investment each year. This doesn't work in many other areas. You can't double clean energy production every 5 years without doubling the investment.
It really doesn't take much to get published in Science these days, does it?
The climate change scientists have been telling us for a long time that global warming is causing Antarctic sea ice to grow. Now they're saying that Antarctic sea ice is at a record low and global warming is to blame. That was on Slashdot just a couple of days ago. If global warming is responsible for making Antarctic sea ice to expand but also to shrink, it is not falsifiable. That I'd a key requirement for scientific theories. Global warming is not a theory. It's supposedly responsible for warmer winters but also for colder and snowier winters. This is pseudoscience. It is on par with intelligent design, Niburu, and vaccines causing autism. Remember that the only statistically significant link between vaccines and autism occurs when the data are adjusted to supposedly account for lots of external factors. And that is a so 100% true of global warming. It is pseudoscience and its followers are religious shills.
Pass a law giving everyone a magic wand.
I love how political types think that we just need to mandate using less power, oh and this time at ever increasing rates because that worked for a few decades for transistors.
Ironically, computers are one of the least regulated industries on the planet.
If you want to see what mandated goals do, check out your health insurance bill, the government has been regulating that industry for 40 years.
Great! While you're at it, why don't you also legislate other simple overaching goals, like halving the murder rate every decade, doubling economic output every decade, doubling IQs every decade, and halving deaths from cancer every decade? Heck, go all the way and double life expectancy every decade too! You can probably hire some of the central planners of the former USSR to make that happen, they have nearly half a century of experience in how to set goals like that and achieve them.
If by "bold action", you mean government corruption, followed by economic collapse and hunting rats for food, and finally bloody revolutions, that is certainly true.
The overarching goal is simple: globally, we must halve carbon dioxide emissions every decade.
And if we don't do that, say because developing world countries have better things to do than turn their economies upside down for First World causes? What's plan B? Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with the real world strategy of adaptation not the imaginary ones of radical greenhouse gases emission reduction.
i don't think these individuals understand what Moore's law is about! ;)
"quick wins like carbon taxes and energy efficiency regulations"
Good Grief!! Shakes Head
Moore's Law wasn't a goal someone set and then did.
It was merely an observation of a pace of technical advance.
The idea that you would propose something like this, as if the proposal itself was actually accomplishing something, is asinine.
-Styopa
...not a regulation.
Virtually all of the posts critical of global warming are now at -1. These views are being censored, despite raising very credible objections. This is incredibly biased and is clearly a strong effort to censor the truth. Notice that nobody ever addresses the objections, because it's simply not possible for the AGW supporters to do so.
Have gnu, will travel.
"The most heavily polluting industries are the so called Green industries"
Care to back that up with facts? How about that nice family with two kids? That doesn't pollute?
Any plan that says it will phase out coal in 10 years and oil in 20 that doesn't involve lots and lots of dead humans is beyond ludicrous.
Any problem can be solved if you assume an exponential growth of a factor.
If we simply cut our carbon emissions in half every decade, the problem goes away. It's so elegant and simple - if only someone had thought of this before! And for my next trick, I will solve poverty by printing unlimited amounts of money and just giving it to anyone who wants it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Moore's law meant you got MORE. This means you get less. Half the energy every decade. This is a prescription for misery and starvation.
Who writes all this crap?
Tax credits and cheap government loans would make solar and wind power cheaper. The phasing out of low mileage cars and trucks would reduce CO2. And the phasing out of low efficiency lightening and appliances would also reduce CO2.
As an MIT alum, I'm getting tired of MIT's far left politics, and as a regular alumni donor, I've told them as much. I no longer want to see their leftist emails and leftist publications.
MIT, as a great science and engineering institution, should stick to science and engineering and drop the politics.
Preventing global warming is not an intellectual problem that can be solved by smart people. Its a political problem that requires creating balance between competing interests. The problem isn't setting a goal, its getting everyone engaged in solving the problem so that they are assured that they are not being asked to assume all the burdens while others get most of the benefits.
People who fly to conferences on global warming ought to be asked just how important their presence at the conference was. Because the typical airline trip contributes more to global warming than a typical household does in two months. The solutions to global warming are not going to be found in more investment, its less consumption that is needed. It would seem that means the burden is going to have be placed on those that are consuming the most. That means the rich and powerful, so the problem is unlikely to be solved.
Lake Baotou and Lake Karachay stand as examples.
Solar Enrgy isn't always as Green as you Think - IEEE Spectrum, 13, Nov, 2014
These should get you started.
I'll pick on India, as I like to. For the most part (ie >50%) people there are desperately poor, have unreliable power, no proper sewage system, fairly corrupt government, and are indian. There is not much we can do about the latter. But for the rest of it even their monumentally stupid government realises they need to get people off the subsistence farming model and for that they need electricity. And, since airy fairy renewables are not cost effective without subsidies, that means coal. And lots of it. Whatever western wankers might think, the impact of the west on CO2 for the next few decades is tiny compared with the third worlders who want, reasonably enough, to join the first world party.
See also: creationism. vaccines cause autism. chemtrails. lizards control whitehouse. smoking is good for you.
wake up sheeple!
So your argument is: "because some other people believe crazy things, your position is crazy".
That's your argument against climate change sceptics. Right?
I've read a lot from people who have theories of how the universe works, or how to make a free energy system, or how to make anti gravity.
Occasionally a physicist (or chemist, or whatever) will point out a logical flaw in that person's theory, and ask them to explain the inconsistency.
You can probably imagine what their response is.
I just want to be clear on where you're coming from.
We can point out potential flaws in the measurements, theory, prediction models(*), and political actions, and ask for an explanation.
And your response is "because some other people believe crazy things, your position is crazy".
That's what you're saying. Right?
(*) A good potential flaw: Why is there more than one predictive model for climate? Shouldn't there be only one model that everyone uses?
stop breeding for one, preferably two decades, filth
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I have to wonder if people even care that we keep burning fossil fuels. If you look at current polling the concern over catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is far down the list of what people are concerned about. People are more concerned about things like having a job, not getting killed by Muslims, and if they can catch the next Pokemon.
Look at the powers that be in US Congress, they seem to "know" that CO2 causes CAGW, that nuclear power is a carbon free energy source, and that the US Navy has developed the technology to use nuclear energy and seawater to make mil-spec aviation fuel. But when the US Navy asks for funds to build more nuclear powered ships and develop this fuel synthesis process it gets denied.
Why should I care about CAGW if the people in Congress do not? They should be aware of the threats posed by things like global warming, Islamic jihad, and Pokemon roaming freely, and they seem to choose catching Pokemon.
We have the "war monger" Republicans, and the "tree hugger" Democrats, voting on what kind of ships to build for the US Navy and US Coast Guard. The US Navy wants three dozen nuclear powered destroyers. You'd think a reasonable decision would be to agree that since we need a navy, and we don't want to keep burning fuel oil, that the Navy would get the nuclear powered ships they want. No, they got more oil burning ships. Is this because the Republicans are running things? No, this got approved when the Democrats were in charge. So even the Democrats don't seem concerned about CAGW any more.
The US Coast Guard wants six new ice breakers. This is so we can keep three ships in constant rotation on each pole to service shipping around the North Pole and scientific and humanitarian efforts around the Antarctic. Congress didn't fund this. Perhaps this is consistent with the claim that the ice will just disappear soon. Russia has been operating nuclear powered icebreakers for years now. You'd think that the USA could use a few to make sure those new Navy destroyers don't get stuck in the ice should we find ourselves in a war in the North Atlantic again. Congress didn't fund new icebreakers, much less nuclear powered ones, and so we keep operating the old oil burning ones in sensitive Arctic and Antarctic waters. While operating oil fired icebreakers is not quite the same threat to the environment as sailing a single hull oil tanker in the North Pacific one would think that reducing the number of oil fired ships in these waters would be a good thing, especially those that are there to make sure the existing oil fired ships aren't trying to dodge icebergs and other hazards.
Congress does not seem concerned about CAGW. If they were then we'd be building a new civilian nuclear power plant every month, the US Navy would have every ship larger than an inflatable dinghy powered by a nuclear reactor, the US Coast Guard would have a half dozen nuclear powered ice breakers, all the armed forces would be burning synthesized fuel (not only because of CAGW but because of other national security concerns) in their jeeps/generators/stoves/planes/tanks/helicopters/whatever, and on and on.
Again, Congress knows what the threats are better than I ever could because they have access to experts in climate, energy, national security, and so on while I do not. Since they seem to be occupied with playing Pokemon then all must be well with the world.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
But it Aint't gonna happen. Next Idea?
Is this a joke?
sounds like "trump says its ok", i like the Trump shift as a means of we are not okay with your ancient louis 14 way of doing things as for the rest im not really into CEO morgan politics
a simplified rule will be abused by marketeers, theres certain laws you nerds living in the universe need to acknowledge, get out into the metaverse, spend some time
a 'simple" set of rules will be used by each faction to prove what they were saying before
five minutes with your sensei for you then you come tell me im wrong
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I'll be a billionaire in less than 30 years. Ergo I'm already rich.
You misspelled 'Arrhenius'.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
What an interesting inversion of logic. Yes, CO2 pollution is a first world problem, and therefore something about India? Can I have some of what you're smoking?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
He has a job to do with explaining why dumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere should result in a cooling trend. Let me take a stab though and assume that you're talking about one David W. Titley, rear admiral USN, professor at Penn State. Let's see what Wikipedia says about him.
He was formerly a climate change skeptic, but later changed his mind after looking at the evidence of what factors influence climate—which are, according to Titley, "what are the larger things doing — what is the ocean doing? What is the sun doing? And what's our atmosphere doing?"[3] Since then, he has described climate change as "one of the driving forces in the 21st century" and said that it contributed to the 2011 Arab Spring.[4]
I guess you two don't keep in touch much. He had the courage to admit he was wrong and to learn the science. Maybe you should too.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
What sort of colossal moron would focus on percent generation and ignore the top-ten list of production capacity at the head of the page? What the fuck are you on?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
It's cute how you think you have any idea what would make global warming falsifiable. It's cute because you have no idea what the evidence is or how the theory was developed. Global warming is not based on statistics, nor models. Also, when it was proposed initially in 1896 it was immediately discredited, and you can find meteorology textbooks from the 1950s that not only deny that climate changes but explicitly deny anything but the most minor role to carbon dioxide. This is a theory that had to fight for acceptance. Sufficiently good evidence was acquired in the middle of the 20th Century to change that consensus, almost in parallel with Wegener's theory of continental drift. If you don't know why, go look it the fuck up.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Plastics and packaging don't contribute the the problem of atmospheric carbon significantly. The issue is that we burn hydrocarbons.
The amount of shitposting here is getting out of hand, and this "junk science" phrase being repeated so often is more suggestive of a botnet. If there is a mind behind this though, it's one that posted anonymously specifically to insulate themselves from a contrary viewpoint. Denying basic reality is its own issue, but I'm not sure what's worse, that someone has an interest in making it seem like there's a wave of moronic activity, or that there actually is.
The theory of global warming is at least as well established as plate tectonics or relativity, and predates both.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Not a denier in most senses of the word, but I don't prescribe to the doom and gloom media portrayals or the fixes that involve countries paying for their carbon output to other countries, or any other such, socialistic in nature, fixes. I am a big fan of basic research and "sciencing" our way out of this problem.
A couple times a month there are technologies on the front page of Slashdot that make me think if we did this at a large enough scale we could solve this issue. I realize there are often issues of scale that prevent this, but combinations of multiple technologies will hopefully get us there in the near future.
There was one such tech last month, I believe, that was a plastic and glass film that could be produced for 50 cents a square meter that would push a significant amount of energy off planet into space. I did some rough math on it and figured out that it would cost about 6 trillion dollars of the stuff to radiate as much energy back into space as global warming is estimated to be trapping. This is not counting the fact that you could put it on places that would reduce energy costs for air conditioning and refrigeration. 6 trillion is a lot, but it would be less than a percent of world GDP over the course of 10 years. As I recall, this was a material that actually existed and was not just some theory on the drawing board.
This combined with increased adoption of Solar, the potential for getting Fusion working in the next 20 years (I know always in the next 20 years, but some real improvements are happening), electric vehicles, and increased power storage capabilities could bring the world to carbon neutrality before the doom and gloom predictions come true. I think getting carbon neutral power generation tech into maturity and adoptable by third world countries trying to be first world countries is the best way forward.
We have learned over the past 30 or more years, it is very difficult to convince people that limiting their lifestyle or country to help fix a problem that will probably not have a noticeable effect on them or their family in the next 30 years. I suggest we immediately abandon that method as it just hurts the cause. Focus on the positive cool tech and money saving efficient ways of solving this problem and the denialists will slowly fade into the background while we usher in a world with inexpensive electricity and extreme efficiency.
And when we are starving to death because there isn't enough CO2 for the plants?
Nothing we do will change the fact our solar environment is heating up, we need to become a subterranean civilization or expect extinction.
Do you want to lower CO2 emissions? The answer is simple.
1. Ban coal.
2. Replace coal with natural gas, nuclear, and wind.
3. Stop worrying about cars, trains, and planes. Power plants are the biggest producers of CO2 and are centralized.
4. Understand Solar is not the answer. The demand vs production curve does not work out. It is a good supplement in hot areas with a lot of sun in the summer but unless we go with orbital solar power stations it is not a good baseload solution. It just looks good and seems easy.
Why natural gas since it does produce CO2? Simple it produces about half the CO2 per BTU as coal does and is cheap. If you replaced every coal plant with natural gas you would have a massive savings in CO2 for a low cost. The next step would be to move large trucks, trains, and ships to natural gas. That would save about 20% on the CO2 they produce but since large trucks and trains have centralized fueling locations it would again be pretty simple to do.
You need to also think about the social cost of ending coal production You will be converting towns into ghost towns, Mining coal does pay pretty well and is pretty labor intensive. Sure you can retrain the miners for new jobs but those jobs will not be in the same location as the mine. You will not pay to relocate all the people in the town that depend on the mine. Think of the people that run the shops, restaurants, car lots, teach in the schools and so on. You can not get around the fact that you are going to cause a huge amount or problems and the idea of "job retraining " will not prevent it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"CO2 and temperature have NOT moved in unison. In fact, during the Jurassic, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere plummeted while temperatures rose. The same thing disparity occurred in the Eocene. It is therefore not possible to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between CO2 and temperature over the long-term history. Carbon is not the enemy. It is actually the reason that we are alive.”
The committee would get together and determine if the parents were progressive enough to reproduce. I would rather limit population through natural selection. Let the strongest and most virile inhabit the carbon neutral planet. The thing that bothers me most about democrats and republicans is their willingness to give up their own agency to a bureaucracy with a nice name or to a police state.
Dude, I just solved global warming! We just half-life the shit out of it. Done and done!
It must be wonderful to have such a simple mind as yours.
There never was such a thing as honest money. My new mission in life is to get people to stop defending their ill-conceived notions as virtuous.
World population is increasing exponentially. In addition, average wealth is increasing at some rate, perhaps not exponentially. That is the fundamental driver of global warming. If you can decrease the generation of greenhouse gases exponentially faster than population growth times wealth, you will win. However, you might also cause wealth to diminish exponentially, as all resources become devoted to reducing greenhouse gases.
This is like ancient civilizations that devoted all their resources to religious rituals and eventually starved.
Another cheaper approach is to have a global nuclear war. This will rapidly reduce the main drivers -- population and wealth, and in addition all the dust that gets sent into the atmosphere will cool off the warming that has already occurred.
Of course, we could just have global population reduction by less violent means, but that is opposed by Republicans, evangelicals, and Catholics.
It's double military spending every five years, not triple it one you uneducated beffoon!
I heard you liked Moore's Law so I applied Moore's Law to Moore's Law so you could double your efficiency while it also exponentially increased!
Moore's "Law" is an observation, not a law, so... let's start with that.
There is so much wrong with this idea it's hard to nail it down into a short, simple comment. Moore's OBSERVATION is the result of the fact that consumer demand provides incentive to make ever-more-powerful computing devices, which it is possible to make because they started out woefully inefficient, and are performing a task on an intangible and abstract thing: information. While data can be RECORDED and an idea has physical reality in the fact that it occurs to people using electrochemical reactions in and between neurons, there is no real, fundamental correlation between data you could be trying to record or manipulate and what you choose to use, or the mass of it, that you're trying to record the data with.
I'll illustrate: I could carve my grocery shopping list into a pair of stone tablets. 1. E G G S. 2. O R A N G E J U I C E ... and so on. I could spray-paint it onto a freeway overpass visible from the aisle in front of the dairy case at my local supermarket. I could hire an a cappella group to harmonize the items on my list, follow me around the store and sing the list to me over and over again. I could pour it out onto a panel of glass using a mixture of maple syrup and superglue, then leave it where ants could get to it, wait until they get stuck, then gently rinse off whatever's left, leaving just the ants stuck to it, spelling out the items on my list... or I could arrange gold atoms on a sheet of woven carbon nanotubes, using roughly 9x9 sprites to form the letters, or I could spell it out using DNA molecules... the thing I'm trying to record is simply the information itself. The only real limits are determined in one direction by how large and elaborate a thing I can get my hands on and manipulate to encode the data on, (obviously I can't spell it out using the orbits of planets arranged so that their orbits spell out the words, for example,) to how small and elegant I can write and read. Spelling it out using gold atoms would be at least extremely difficult, and hugely impractical, as well as defeating the purpose of being an easy to use memory-aid.
Those who would argue that there is a fundamental smallness limit, using individual atoms to spell it out are ignoring the fact that there are particles smaller and more fundamental than atoms, which is a TECHNOLOGICAL limitation, not a theoretical one. We know of quarks, and there's what I've heard described as a "whole zoo" of exotic and tiny particles, but if you'll pardon my extension of the zoo metaphor, all the zoos in the world combined don't have even a single instance of EVERY animal, since scientists and biologists discover theretofore unknown species all the time. Obviously, before their discovery, you wouldn't find one of them in A ZOO. So if it were the case that in fact a quark is itself composed of large numbers of even tinier, more fundamental particles, it will turn out to be the case that you could theoretically write your grocery list using THOSE particles... and that would be far smaller than the previously imagined to be fundamentally smallest list made of atoms.
The list could of course be made even smaller than that, by writing the second item using the abbreviation "OJ" instead, which I bring up to point out that most people familiar with our society and culture and who speak English would recognize OJ on a grocery shopping list as dereferencing to that sweet but tart, yellowish/reddish liquid made mostly of water and citric acid... here part of the information is stored inside a lot of people's heads, in advance, and the letters "OJ" simply act as a pointer TO that information.
BY CONTRAST, carbon dioxide pollution emitted by, for example, the burning of fossil fuels for energy, is a function of how efficiently we can extract energy from the bonds between the carbon and whatever it was connected to BEFORE being reacted with atmospheric oxygen gas, which is limited by the amount of ener
In other news, Moore's Law for War would defeat global conflict. We just need to halve killings every decade.
In other news, Moore's Law for Rape would defeat global rape. We just need to halve rapes every decade.
In other news, Moore's Law for would defeat . We just need to halve every decade.
When "researchers" point out obvious things like "Reducing carbon would defeat global warming they are philosophers.
Scientists would posit something with a body of evidence to bring new facts to bear on the world around them - they just provide data.
Lawmakers would enact legislation to effect change within their body of influence. And if they're good ones, add enforcement.
Philosophers make grand statements like, "If we do good things, good things will happen."
Empty.
This sounds like a nice idea but the actual implementation is a lot harder. Top down forcing this on people is very politically expedient and correct but the people proposing such things are not actually coming up with solutions, they're just dream about an ideal they want. The real world is a lot harder to deal with and isn't easily regulated and legislated.
Aside from being impossible to achieve, this is dumb beyond belief. CO2 is plant food, not poison gas.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
is one take that is not out of line with most I've seen. Almost all projected growth in CO2 emissions to 2040 is China and India.
Actually, while it's not as fast as Moore's law, the cost of solar historically has come down by 22% for each doubling in volume. Here's the solar learning curve: http://costing.irena.org/media...
Granted, at a certain solar production capacity the cost goes up again due to storage needs, but batteries also follow a learning curve: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jRpo...
I'm going to apply Moore's law to my investment portfolio, now.
Why didn't I think of that before? I could have been, like, literally a gazillionaire by now. Totes!
By applying Moore's Law, we can:
- halve obesity every 10 years!
- halve hunger every 10 years!
- halve poverty every 10 years!
- halve disease every 10 years!
The thing all these have in common? There's no suggested mechanism at all beyond the buzzphrase "Moore's Law".
Good Lord, the "refreshingly simple" insight is nothing more than "astoundingly stupid", "useless", and "naïve to the point of total irrelevance".
Australia pretty much proves that carbon taxes do not work.
Expose!! We do NOT want to: reduce Human impact on the planet! That phrase is very telling, the right mind frame is to adapt the planet to Human needs. Reduce Human impact on the planet? To give more impact to what? Whom? (!) Say good bye! They must be very crowded in there! We want our impact to be sustainable, for instance, and permanent, and attuned to Human values... etc. I am very optimistic, but even then, since we invented fire we have been adapting to smoke and probably to more polluted environments. We claim economics, but even then I think we have some kind of imperative to leave no resources available without use, on principle. If at all we want there to be a HUGE Human impact so that when we say good bye and something else come by, it can say: Geez! There were some critters in here!
(Oops! I think the author of the article hears voices, aka schizophrenia, hence the comment on the article famous phrase).