That's an empty claim, because no existing technology can meet the need.
Look, this is stupid. I didn't say anything about "meeting the need" (presumably replacing fossil fuels altogether). We are going to have SOME non-fossil energy technologies, and ALL of them can be scaled up TO SOME EXTENT. The magnitude of that extent is irrelevant to my argument, which is that fusion power will play essentially no role in whatever energy technologies we end up deploying this century. Increasing solar power by x% (even if x=1% or something trivial) is still vastly more feasible - in costs and timescales - than increasing fusion power by the equivalent amount of energy.
You're missing my point. My point is, no matter what your target is for non-fossil energy sources, that target will be more quickly and cheaply met by anything but fusion.
Your solutions are about changing people's lifestyles. People, including me, will tell you to fuck off and die.
That's hilarious.
If you really cared about nuclear power, you'd advocate a carbon pricing scheme just like James Hansen does. That would make nuclear power more competitive with fossil fuels, because they're being effectively subsidized by the market distortion which ignores their negative economic impacts on the environment.
For that matter, if you really cared about freedom and not forcing decisions on people, you'd advocate pricing carbon so the market would be aware of its real costs, and could therefore adjust the energy sector accordingly. This could be by ramping up nuclear power, or solar, or decreasing fossil energy consumption, or increasing efficiency, or whatever makes the most economic sense.
Advocating a particular technology is "picking winners", an anti-market approach. Why do you hate capitalism?
We can't realistically hurry it up in any useful way. It would take decades just to deploy on a wide scale even if was available now and made economic sense. It's not. If you want to embark on a crash program, better to ramp up an existing technology that is already in deployment.
Fusion could have a long term payoff in terms of energy production, and could be worthwhile on those grounds alone. I'm just saying it won't have much payoff in terms of climate mitigation.
All of that is paranoid nonsense. Correcting the market distortions introduced by negative externalities by pricing them is a market solution that has been advocated by mainstream economists for nearly a century. I mean really, it's practically Economics 101.
I have to say that the pro-warming side lost a lot of credibility with me when they started trying to slander their opponents with the word "denier'
Those on the side of evolution apply the same term to creationists. Do you therefore disbelieve evolution too? Or are you willing to accept, maybe, that labels people use have nothing to do with scientific credibility? Accusations of tribalism aside, is it really a secret even to someone "not heavily immersed in the science" that the scientific literature overwhelmingly supports anthropogenic global warming?
Demographers expect the world population to stabilize by approximately mid-century. Sure, population growth until then will increase CO2 emissions. But it won't increase them nearly as much as previously poor populations industrializing and dramatically ramping up their energy consumption. Rising energy demand in currently developing nations, not rising population, is the real problem.
Fusion is almost totally irrelevant to climate change, if you consider the time lags involved to (1) continue research to the point that cost-efficient techniques are discovered, (2) develop workable test reactors, and (3) scale them up and deploy them globally on a scale that would represent a significant fraction of the world's energy supply. Realistically that would take you to nearly the end of this century, when we'd already have experienced a large amount of the climate change we're currently hoping to avert. (And will continue to experience, given the long effective lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere.)
Hansen does strongly encourage people to do things.
In fact, all of his talks and most of his essays and letters to the public and policymakers end with exhorting people to do things, including the very essay we're discussing here.
Most commonly these call for a tax-and-dividend policy, moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that don't capture and sequester CO2, etc.
But they don't count because they're not nuclear power and therefore are inferior solutions, right?
Attaching a cost to pollution is meaningless. You either reduce (in absolute terms) by a certain fixed amount or you don't. Nature doesn't care about your greenbacks.
Nature doesn't, but humans, who are the ones who have to actually do the reducing, do. An arguably effective way for them to do that is for it to be in their financial best interest to do so.
The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does
Who said anything about emissions trading? That's not the only way to make emissions have a cost. Hansen himself favors a tax-and-dividend plan.
The problem with JWST isn't just NASA mismanagement. It's also Congress dribbling out inadequate funds to just finish the project, which makes completion costs spiral as they have to keep capabilities idle, therefore providing Congress with further justification to withhold funds.
The "current IPCC report" 2007 (Fourth) explicitly did not consider sea level rise and gave _lower_ numbers than the Third
If the AR4 report didn't consider sea level rise, how did it give any numbers at all, let alone lower numbers?
I think what you meant to say is that it didn't explicitly consider sea level rise from fast ice sheet dynamics. It did consider thermometric sea level rise, as well as sea level rise from glaciers and some estimates of "slow" ice sheet dynamics.
Climate models are based on thermodynamics and don't ignore entropy; they're not all simple energy balance models. It is true, however, that not as much attention is given to the numerics of correctly tracking entropy as to other aspects of the numerics.
Likewise, climate models are based on fluid dynamics but don't assume all scales are the same; see sub-grid scale parameterizations (e.g., of turbulent ocean eddies in models that are too coarse to resolve them).
There's something seriously, seriously wrong with you if you'd kill someone over an incident like this. Get some perspective, man. Maybe the resulting decades in prison for murder would teach you some, while someone else raises your child.
I can promise you right now if anyone ever did that to my daughter they wouldn't be breathing for long after. TSA, cop, a judge, The Pope, The Queen, I don't really care who it is they would be dead before they hit the ground.
Where's the +5, Funny mod?
That boast would last about 3 seconds until the TSA subdued you for attacking their agents. Of course, you yourself would be unarmed after having just gone through security to board your plane. But I'm sure you could kill them all with your bare hands before they could draw their weapons, Mr. Internet Tough Guy.
Nobody said anything about sudden. The article talks about a process occurring over billions of years, involving an extra planet that either fell into the Sun, was ejected from the Solar System, or collided with another planet (like Jupiter). If all this happened billions of years ago, I can't see how we could possibly have any evidence of it today. (That's a problem with the testability of this theory.) It's actually quite easy, in a chaotic solar system, for orbits to gradually change over billions of years. Nothing really dramatic has to happen. (For a related example of how easy it is to cause dramatic orbit changes with very small inputs of energy, see the Interplanetary Transport Network.)
The surface of the Earth is not substantially heated by its interior. The heat received by the Sun is orders of magnitude more important (with greenhouse gases adding another ~10% to that).
Large orbit changes don't necessarily require "massive amounts of energy" in a chaotic system.
Yes, that's the paradox: the early Earth was warmer than it "should" have been, given what we (think we) know about solar output, greenhouse gases, etc. at the time.
The one where you claimed that the surface humidity record over North America falsifies the water vapor feedback, when the water vapor feedback actually depends on the global water vapor content integrated over the entire atmospheric column.
Ok, I'm done here. If you can't even admit that you made a mistake and didn't bother to read or contemplate the blog post you posted as "support" for your claims, and in fact was contradicted by the very skeptic who WUWT claimed was supported by that paper, you're simply dishonest. And you're clearly ignoring scientific evidence in favor of your prejudices (witness trotting out that blog post a second time after it was refuted). I'm not wasting my time replying to more of these obtuse posts.
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That's an empty claim, because no existing technology can meet the need.
Look, this is stupid. I didn't say anything about "meeting the need" (presumably replacing fossil fuels altogether). We are going to have SOME non-fossil energy technologies, and ALL of them can be scaled up TO SOME EXTENT. The magnitude of that extent is irrelevant to my argument, which is that fusion power will play essentially no role in whatever energy technologies we end up deploying this century. Increasing solar power by x% (even if x=1% or something trivial) is still vastly more feasible - in costs and timescales - than increasing fusion power by the equivalent amount of energy.
You're missing my point. My point is, no matter what your target is for non-fossil energy sources, that target will be more quickly and cheaply met by anything but fusion.
Existing technology will ramp up to widespread deployment faster than technology that doesn't exist yet, I can tell you that.
Your solutions are about changing people's lifestyles. People, including me, will tell you to fuck off and die.
That's hilarious.
If you really cared about nuclear power, you'd advocate a carbon pricing scheme just like James Hansen does. That would make nuclear power more competitive with fossil fuels, because they're being effectively subsidized by the market distortion which ignores their negative economic impacts on the environment.
For that matter, if you really cared about freedom and not forcing decisions on people, you'd advocate pricing carbon so the market would be aware of its real costs, and could therefore adjust the energy sector accordingly. This could be by ramping up nuclear power, or solar, or decreasing fossil energy consumption, or increasing efficiency, or whatever makes the most economic sense.
Advocating a particular technology is "picking winners", an anti-market approach. Why do you hate capitalism?
We can't realistically hurry it up in any useful way. It would take decades just to deploy on a wide scale even if was available now and made economic sense. It's not. If you want to embark on a crash program, better to ramp up an existing technology that is already in deployment.
Fusion could have a long term payoff in terms of energy production, and could be worthwhile on those grounds alone. I'm just saying it won't have much payoff in terms of climate mitigation.
All of that is paranoid nonsense. Correcting the market distortions introduced by negative externalities by pricing them is a market solution that has been advocated by mainstream economists for nearly a century. I mean really, it's practically Economics 101.
I have to say that the pro-warming side lost a lot of credibility with me when they started trying to slander their opponents with the word "denier'
Those on the side of evolution apply the same term to creationists. Do you therefore disbelieve evolution too? Or are you willing to accept, maybe, that labels people use have nothing to do with scientific credibility? Accusations of tribalism aside, is it really a secret even to someone "not heavily immersed in the science" that the scientific literature overwhelmingly supports anthropogenic global warming?
Demographers expect the world population to stabilize by approximately mid-century. Sure, population growth until then will increase CO2 emissions. But it won't increase them nearly as much as previously poor populations industrializing and dramatically ramping up their energy consumption. Rising energy demand in currently developing nations, not rising population, is the real problem.
Fusion is almost totally irrelevant to climate change, if you consider the time lags involved to (1) continue research to the point that cost-efficient techniques are discovered, (2) develop workable test reactors, and (3) scale them up and deploy them globally on a scale that would represent a significant fraction of the world's energy supply. Realistically that would take you to nearly the end of this century, when we'd already have experienced a large amount of the climate change we're currently hoping to avert. (And will continue to experience, given the long effective lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere.)
Hansen does strongly encourage people to do things.
In fact, all of his talks and most of his essays and letters to the public and policymakers end with exhorting people to do things, including the very essay we're discussing here.
Most commonly these call for a tax-and-dividend policy, moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that don't capture and sequester CO2, etc.
But they don't count because they're not nuclear power and therefore are inferior solutions, right?
Attaching a cost to pollution is meaningless. You either reduce (in absolute terms) by a certain fixed amount or you don't. Nature doesn't care about your greenbacks.
Nature doesn't, but humans, who are the ones who have to actually do the reducing, do. An arguably effective way for them to do that is for it to be in their financial best interest to do so.
The only thing an economic system of carbon emissions trading does
Who said anything about emissions trading? That's not the only way to make emissions have a cost. Hansen himself favors a tax-and-dividend plan.
Although maybe that's what you meant by "micro-management"?
The problem with JWST isn't just NASA mismanagement. It's also Congress dribbling out inadequate funds to just finish the project, which makes completion costs spiral as they have to keep capabilities idle, therefore providing Congress with further justification to withhold funds.
Have you checked the numbers on your cost-benefit analysis? Are you sure it's not 1,000,000,000,000,000,eleventygazillion reasons not to do this?
Cast Detect Evil, Sense Motive, and Discern Lies on the potentially corrupted files.
The "current IPCC report" 2007 (Fourth) explicitly did not consider sea level rise and gave _lower_ numbers than the Third
If the AR4 report didn't consider sea level rise, how did it give any numbers at all, let alone lower numbers?
I think what you meant to say is that it didn't explicitly consider sea level rise from fast ice sheet dynamics. It did consider thermometric sea level rise, as well as sea level rise from glaciers and some estimates of "slow" ice sheet dynamics.
Climate models are based on thermodynamics and don't ignore entropy; they're not all simple energy balance models. It is true, however, that not as much attention is given to the numerics of correctly tracking entropy as to other aspects of the numerics.
Likewise, climate models are based on fluid dynamics but don't assume all scales are the same; see sub-grid scale parameterizations (e.g., of turbulent ocean eddies in models that are too coarse to resolve them).
There's something seriously, seriously wrong with you if you'd kill someone over an incident like this. Get some perspective, man. Maybe the resulting decades in prison for murder would teach you some, while someone else raises your child.
I can promise you right now if anyone ever did that to my daughter they wouldn't be breathing for long after. TSA, cop, a judge, The Pope, The Queen, I don't really care who it is they would be dead before they hit the ground.
Where's the +5, Funny mod?
That boast would last about 3 seconds until the TSA subdued you for attacking their agents. Of course, you yourself would be unarmed after having just gone through security to board your plane. But I'm sure you could kill them all with your bare hands before they could draw their weapons, Mr. Internet Tough Guy.
Nobody said anything about sudden. The article talks about a process occurring over billions of years, involving an extra planet that either fell into the Sun, was ejected from the Solar System, or collided with another planet (like Jupiter). If all this happened billions of years ago, I can't see how we could possibly have any evidence of it today. (That's a problem with the testability of this theory.) It's actually quite easy, in a chaotic solar system, for orbits to gradually change over billions of years. Nothing really dramatic has to happen. (For a related example of how easy it is to cause dramatic orbit changes with very small inputs of energy, see the Interplanetary Transport Network.)
The surface of the Earth is not substantially heated by its interior. The heat received by the Sun is orders of magnitude more important (with greenhouse gases adding another ~10% to that).
Large orbit changes don't necessarily require "massive amounts of energy" in a chaotic system.
Yes, that's the paradox: the early Earth was warmer than it "should" have been, given what we (think we) know about solar output, greenhouse gases, etc. at the time.
Right. So it's kind of misleading to mention dark matter in this context. This "quasiparticle" is not dark matter.
Talking about H2O vs. CO2 levels?
The one where you claimed that the surface humidity record over North America falsifies the water vapor feedback, when the water vapor feedback actually depends on the global water vapor content integrated over the entire atmospheric column.
Ok, I'm done here. If you can't even admit that you made a mistake and didn't bother to read or contemplate the blog post you posted as "support" for your claims, and in fact was contradicted by the very skeptic who WUWT claimed was supported by that paper, you're simply dishonest. And you're clearly ignoring scientific evidence in favor of your prejudices (witness trotting out that blog post a second time after it was refuted). I'm not wasting my time replying to more of these obtuse posts.