Actually, they are honest scientific dissenters. At issue isn't whether or not there is a greenhouse effect -- it is true that only nut-jobs try to claim that there isn't. It is that the warming expected from a doubling of CO_2 per se is not likely to be catastrophic. To make it catastrophic, its effects are multiplied by a presumed positive climate sensitivity that is multifactorial and impossible to measure, and that no two global climate models set the same way to hindcast some carefully selected portion of the historical temperature record. The sensitivity then amplifies the (rather weak) additional warming caused by the CO_2 by a factor of 3 to 5 and you finally get the desired "catastrophe" that justifies spending trillions of dollars to avert it, taking steps that even the proponents admit will not, in fact, avert it. A catastrophe that has to in the end cost trillions of dollars or it isn't worth averting it in the first place.
The problem is that the global climate models suck at hindcasting outside of their fit region because they omit major variables (such as solar state) that almost certainly contribute as much to the climate variability as modulation of the CO_2 per se does. The GCMs also suck at forecasting. Compare the forecast temperatures from any of the early IPCC reports to the temperatures outside today, and you will observe an increasing divergence. The UAH lower troposphere temperature has been stable to slightly decreasing for well over a decade at this point and is actually bouncing by a tenth of a degree C around its 32 year average month to month at this very moment. Arctic sea ice is back to its 30 year average. Antarctic sea ice is actually above its 30 year average (so sea ice in general is both net surplus and on a positive trend). None of this makes any sense at all in terms of a model based on greenhouse gases with huge climate sensitivity, but it makes a great deal of sense if one considers variables omitted in the GCMs, such as solar state.
The Earth is in the middle -- well, honestly at the very beginning of -- an ice age. One likely to last roughly 300 million years. We do not have a very good understanding of why this is the case -- there are major competing hypotheses and some of them involve things like helium burning episodes in the core of the Sun where we have a very hard time "seeing" them and where in any event the timescale of variation is enormous, or the passage of the solar system through galactic regions with variable mass content, again on timescales and at density scales almost impossible to measure. Note well that I'm not talking about the "modulation" of the ice age with brief interglacial episodes -- those episodes are correlated to be sure with orbital periods (although not particularly well or consistently correlated) -- I'm talking about why the Pliestocene itself began.
It is also a simple fact that in the last 15 years, the Earth's albedo has increased by roughly 7% while the water content of the stratosphere has gone down by roughly 10%. If you want an even more interesting true fact, the albedo decreased sharply in the late 60s -- in consonance with an arguably extreme solar maximum -- and remained low for precisely the period where the earth was supposedly experiencing runaway greenhouse warming, and went down almost exactly when that warming seems to have gone away. For example and references:
This article is a bit specious. The effects of an increased bond albedo -- especially a daytime albedo which is what "planetshine" directly measures -- are perfectly simple to understand. If you visit:
These days I brew my own beer and ale, all carbonated naturally in the bottle. Nothing but barley, hops, yeast and water, and because each bottle is unfiltered and contains live yeast, I get a dose of B-complex vitamins, and traces of chromium and selenium in every glass. I control the alcohol content and the fractional ratio of dextrose (fermented to alcohol) and dextrins (complex sugars the yeast do not eat and which contribute body and residual sweetness to the final beer). Hops contain flavonoids (pigmentary antioxidants) -- in particular xanthohumol, a molecule with known anti-cancer effects -- and have a long history of use in herbal medicines where they seem to have weak estrogenic effects. I make bread that contains the spent barley malt -- at this point almost pure roughage, as its starch content has been extracted and converted via natural enzymes in the malted grain itself into dextrose and dextrins in the mashing process -- that is some of the best bread you'll ever eat. I drink 1 to 3 of these little gems a day, over the course of six hours in the evening, with a meal. I'm 6' 2" and mass 100 kg and never am even approximately "intoxicated" during this process.
Food, drink, medicine? In the middle ages monk-brewed beer was considered "liquid bread" -- which it more or less was -- a way of transforming barley grain and water that was chock full of demons (e coli, v cholera, and many other parasites and diseases) into something safe to drink that would "keep", preserving both much of the calorie content and excellent flavor.
The fact that it was relaxing and -- in moderation -- a source of goodwill and joy was just a clear sign of a beneficial god.
Not in moderation, well, it isn't healthful to eat just about anything save in moderation. Too much fat, bad. Too much carbohydrate, bad. Vegetables to the complete exclusion of protein, bad. Protein to the exclusion of roughage and carbohydrates, bad. Too much salt, bad. Too little salt, bad. No fruit at all, bad. A steady diet of nothing but fruit, bad.
Finally, it is important to remember the following true fact about life. It ends. Furthermore, it gets to where it totally sucks (usually) before it ends, if you live long enough. My beer-swilling grandmother lived into her 90s and spent her last five years utterly demented. My cocktail-swilling (and in her youth, cigarette smoking) aunt outlived both of her sisters, stroked out and demented both. The trick, then, is to live a full and happy life enjoying the many fruits of the earth, then die all at once, like the One Hoss Shay, ideally before becoming demented. Sadly, it only rarely works out just precisely this way, but one can hope.
I think that you aren't giving the possibility of positive reaction mechanisms enough credit. Humans have co-evolved with alcohol for at least 6 to 10 thousand years. Over the overwhelming bulk of that time, if you did not drink alcohol your life was ugly, nasty, brutish, parasite ridden, and short. There is an interesting program on Netflix you might want to watch entitled "How Beer Saved the World" -- tongue in cheek but not really. It's really only been safe to drink the water for less than 100 years, in some levels of wealthy and scientifically advanced society, in countries where it is safe to drink the water, which isn't most countries even now, presuming you think drinking halogenated water is "safe". I grew up in India, and used to drink beer on the road when we travelled at age seven or eight, because it was one of precisely three safe options once you ran out of boiled water or iodine tablets. Tea (boiled water, no milk). Coca Cola -- because even if you dropped a cockroach into Coke as it was bottled, you'd just eat/drink down an acid-pickled cockroach and be perfectly fine. And beer. Golden Eagle beer, to be specific, is the earliest beer I can recall tasting. Back then they didn't have bottled water for sale.
For the most part the body metabolizes alcohol in moderation harmlessly. It isn't particularly directly toxic to the liver (although fermentation adjucts may be), it's just that the liver tends to get fat, just as it does (as you observe) if you eat enough carbs or the wrong sugars and have metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes. Alcohol acts as a mild blood thinner -- not unlike aspirin, but not as strong -- and hence may be directly beneficial at moderate levels for precisely the same reasons that aspirin is (and aspirin has its own toxicity and side effect issues, although they are rare in adults). As you note, it is a fairly harmless relaxant. The Mayo clinic lists it -- with warnings -- as being "possibly good for" reducing risk of heart disease, dying of a heart attack, risk of strokes (especially ischemic strokes), lowers your risk of gallstones (my grandmother was prescribed one beer a day, which she drank very religiously and dutifully being the wife of a Methodist Minister who did not hold with drinking, for this very reason, way back in the 1960s, as an alternative to taking a wad of horrendous-sized pills), and diabetes. Their guideline is one drink for women and two for men, but of course this depends on body size. Women are at greater risk then men (relative to any benefits) because of their higher risk of breast cancer, BTW.
As for statistical studies, they are how one proves that prayer and astrology do not work. You got that one backwards, thought I'd help you out. You're thinking of "anecdotal evidence", not double blind placebo controlled statistical studies. Even in physics (where I'm a physicist) correlation may not be causality but it is often all one has until one maybe eventually formulates a theory that might explain it, and that theory has as its ultimate foundation what? Evidence in the form of statistical correlation, of course. What else is there?
With that said, given the mass of Bayesian priors (a.k.a. "laws of nature" and the like) we have arrived at that are reasonably statistically sound, I totally agree that one should look for reaction mechanisms and explanations, but don't forget what they are explaining -- the statistically sound results obtained from the data. On a really good day, you come up with both the mechanism and the data and they are consistent and the mechanism predicts other things as well and then you get your Nobel prize and everything. Other days you are up against multifactorial effects and sparse data and trying to make sound inferences of cause is, well, "challenging" even though the statistical correspondence itself may be as sound as you like.
Actually there are a number of studies out that quite clearly demonstrate that alcohol in moderate doses is good for you, in the specific sense that moderate drinkers experience less morbidity and mortality from all causes than either teetotalers or full-blown alcoholics. The "moderate" range appears to be 1-3 drinks a day, depending on your body mass and personal chemistry, but curiously, the Mediterranean study showed that at least elderly drinkers outlive nondrinkers (on average) completely blind to the amount they consume.
My wife is an MD and I have read the studies myself (although I'm too lazy to look up non-paywalled versions of them to repost here). Naturally, YMMV, and people with hemachromatosis or who have or have had hepatitis or who have other problems with alcohol (e.g. social problems, alcoholism) should probably not drink, but for most people a couple of beers or glasses of wine a day is, as has been known since the middle ages if not before, generally beneficial to health, not detrimental.
There really is an interesting question about whether or not radiation is a "no safe exposure" sort of thing, along with chlorinated hydrocarbons and all of the other things that can cause oxidative or other damage to DNA. There is substantial evidence that your best defense against most cancers is a strong immune system, and (like many biological systems in the body) your immune system is a use it or lose it sort of proposition. Even unrelated stresses like contracting a cold may exercise the immune system to have some cancer preventing benefit in the long run compared to somebody that is never exposed to the cold virus or other common viruses or diseases. And yet there is equally strong evidence that too much of a bad thing is really bad.
So is there an optimum between the body never experiencing enough oxidative damage to build up an immunological anticancer defense and experiencing so much that you overwhelm it and get cancer anyway? A very tough experiment to perform in a world where there is no such thing as no exposure to radiation -- the galaxy, the sun, the earth, our very bones are radioactive.
Nobody with any sense would pay 8 times more for this for no possible benefit. Natural gas has never been cheaper. NC has a surplus of energy and remarkably low energy prices already, and sensible conservation measures, such as installing high efficiency air conditioners, are already lowering consumption (and prices) further still. If Apple shareholders had any sense, they would sue the company for pissing away their money on political grandstanding. It isn't even about carbon -- I'm sitting about 15 miles away from Shearon-Harris, a nuclear plant that makes all sorts of energy without burning any carbon at all, and I'm almost certain they could tap right into its nice carbon-free electricity. It is about political correctness, bullshit, and the CAGW mythology that is contradicted by the merest passing glance at the 5 million year climate record. 5 million years ago the Earth was roughly 2 C warmer than it is today, CO_2 levels were in excess of what they are expected to go to by the end of the century in the worst case "anthropogenic" scenario, and there not only was no runaway warming associated with high climate sensitivity, the Earth's temperature was gradually depressing (for reasons no one understands) to eventually start the Pliestocene, the current Ice Age. Planetary Ice Ages historically last some 300 million years, and interglacials tend to be brief and unstable. The Holocene was roughly 1 full degree C warmer than it is today at the beginning, and has been gradually cooling ever since -- the Little Ice Age was the coldest century in the entire Holocene.
If CO_2 did stabilize the Holocene and prevent the otherwise inevitable return to glaciation, it would be the best thing for the planet that one could imagine. But it probably won't. The Earth's bond albedo has increased by 7% over the last 15 years -- no one knows why, but the direct evidence has been confirmed two ways that it has done so. The physics of an increase in bond albedo and its effect on global average temperatures is a no-brainer -- increasing bond albedo from roughly 0.30 to roughly 0.32 corresponds to an expected drop of at least 2 K in global average temperature from a simple plug-in to the greybody temperature formula associated with blackbody radiation. That is roughly three times the entire temperature increase observed over the 20th century.
Global average temperatures have been stable within noise for roughly 12 years now, and the three-month average lower troposphere temperature anomaly (compared to the 32 year running average) for the first quarter of 2012 was -- wait for it -- within a hair of 0 K. Measured temperatures are diverging strongly from the high-sensitivity predictions of basically all the GCMs as of 15 years ago, almost perfectly in step with the increase in albedo. The albedo was -- coincidentally or not -- anomalously low in the 80s and 90s. At the moment, although it is admittedly cherrypicking of a sort, global average temperatures are decreasing compared to an apparent peak associated with the 1998 ENSO. But without picking anything at all, satellite-based lower troposphere temperatures are nearly trendless over the entire timespan of their existence.
So spending $4.00 per KW-hour to "prevent a disaster" that there isn't a shred of evidence that the Earth's climate system is capable of supporting given five million years of thermometric data when we are in the unstable warm phase of a global glacial bistable cold period is simply insane. But not to the many people that profit from it, at our expense.
This issue isn't resolvable by Apple, it is resolvable with a true heads-up display and voice control interface that actually works. The technology for the former is long since there -- it just needs to be implemented. The technology for the latter is there but sucks. All we need is a car that understands you when you say "find 3218 Oak Lane and show me how to get there". What we've got is Garmin or the Prius navigator and silly keyboarding displays that you can't use while driving and that are a true pain to navigate all by themselves.
A shame, really -- none of this is all that difficult to design, and we have plenty of cycles, enough to implement quite sophisticated interfaces. But even iPods don't understand me when I say "Play `The Soft Parade' album, you moron" to them.
Truly tragic. We will perfect the touchscreen interface and have near-universal pad-based computing and -- just like that -- it will all be obsolete when some bright lad or lady realizes that it is so very much simpler to tell something what to do than to key it in on integrated pad keyboards with "keys" the size of pencil erasers drawn on a touch screen, maybe.
And then, on to a true neural interface. Why should I have to even say anything? Why not just think it?
Yeah, then there is the pre-existing CO_2 content of the ocean -- two orders of magnitude more than there is in the entire atmosphere, the fact that Ph is a log scale, the fact that the ocean buffers its Ph various ways and gradually removes CO_2 and carbon altogether, and a few other things like that. Ocean chemistry is a bit complex to be reduced to a sound bite although I'm sure it is all "settled science".
The real problem with the top article is that it is idiotic quite outside of any consideration of CO_2 (which is in itself major league moronic, since the early Earth was presumably rather volcanic with a big old moon at roughly half the distance from the Earth that it is now raising crustal tides of some 8 feet a day -- that would be tides lifting the surface of the Earth, not the possibly not-yet existent oceans -- and causing all sorts of violent aerosol outgasing of pretty much any sort of greenhouse gas. Europa may have liquid oceans underneath its ice crust from a similar sort of heating now. This sort of action is plausible, involves things we already know occurred and requires no new physics. For an alternative hypothesis to be reasonable (in comparison) it needs to have some sort of actual computational support -- a theoretical basis that works out when one runs the numbers. I'm not seeing it, outside of "and then a miracle happened..."
Mars has a greenhouse effect and an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide, and it is even farther from the sun. This isn't science, it is making up a "problem" that cursory examination of only three planets refutes from the beginning and then inventing an implausible solution.
But hey, it got posted on/., putting it in direct competition with the National Enquirer, the Globe, the Examiner, and all of the other pulps I like to look at while waiting in line at Wal Mart.
Mining what on the moon that we can't get far more cheaply here? Not to mention the minor problem of finding whatever it is that you think that is there to be mined that is sufficiently valuable. Even with Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" linear accelerators -- which no sane Earth government would ever allow to be built, mind you, thanks to Heinlein -- fully driven by local solar power, the cost per gram of pretty much anything mined on the moon and shipped back to earth is likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the same thing or stuff mined here. By the time solar power is developed enough to make this feasible there, it will also enable exotic mining technology (like seawater extraction or mining the 70% of the earth's surface that happens to be under water) to be done here and still be cheaper than messing with supporting an artificial ecosystem (even the most abbreviated ecosystem capable of doing the job) 386,000 km away at the wrong end of a mountain of gravitational energy.
Once upon a time it was suggested that a space station would be fundable the same way -- use zero gravity to grow exotic crystal substrates for semiconductors or superconductors, use abundant sunlight to smelt metals, and so on. However the sad truth is that isn't that difficult to do these things down here, and it is always going to be far, far cheaper. There are things one can do better in orbit than one can on the ground, and we are doing nearly all of them already -- monitor weather, facilitate communications, study the stars, work out technology that might eventually open up the planets to us -- but making things at a profit so far isn't even something that one can dimly foresee in the distant future. Only if something rare and enormously valuable is discovered that really truly can only be made, or found, in space, on the moon, in the asteroid belts, is that likely to change. Magnetic monopoles, dilithium crystals, superheavy element 184 (stable, supercatalyst), I dunno.
In the meantime, there is no point in trying to "sell" space colonization as if it is going to be directly beneficial or profitable. It may well be beneficial (for example, it has been suggested that it may keep humans alive through a collapse of civilization on Earth), although we cannot really see how or why it is going to be more beneficial or profitable (beyond a certain point) than (say) investing the money in building a stable, rational world civilization first and then tackling the problem later as a very long term project. This is a legitimate concern -- like global warming, the "cure" for the perceived problem may end up costing 10 or 50 times as much as the problem itself would, even if the problem ends up being as bad as worst case scenarios that are largely overheated imagination come true -- and reasonable people might choose to spend more down here and less up there until we work a few major historical imperatives out.
This is the sort of thing that people don't always see. Some things are really, really expensive to do now, but are going to be far cheaper in 20, 40, 60 years. We are still working on various key gateway technologies that are IMO essential both for space exploration itself and to create a global economic base for supporting it. Solar, one of the key technologies to solving any perceived "carbon-based fuel" problem, is unprofitable without a substantial subsidy today, but its cost follows a Moore's Law and it is fairly predictable that in 1 to 2 decades it will undercut carbon-based fuel costs sufficient to solve that problem then without draconian and horribly expensive measures now. Thermonuclear fusion seems as though it is a key technology for any sort of space exploration, and nobody has any clue as to how long it will be (if ever) before it matures. Inexpensive high density energy storage (batteries, if you like) is a key gateway technology for space. In fact, nearly all of the technologies that would let us support a carbon-fuel-fr
Better rechargable batteries are not that unlikely. Zinc-air batteries have your large factor, and are only blocked by dendritic formation that happens in the recharge cycle, limiting the number of charge-discharges they can go through. But this is precisely the sort of thing clever chemistry and/or engineering can eventually overcome, and there are a couple of companies out there either working hard on it or (possibly) already in possession of all or part of the solution and actively testing and developing an engineering and manufacturing cycle. A zinc-air battery with no memory effect, mass-producable at modest cost, would solve many problems -- cheap, long range electric cars, storage for intermittent renewable energy sources (PV solar generated by day and delivered by night), laptops that run for 24 hours on a charge and can be recharged for years.
Obviously there is a substantial pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow, so you have people very interested in pursuing it. No guarantees, of course, but it is hardly inconceivable that within the decade somebody will figure out an assembly that gives you the energy density of zinc-air with the necessary number of recharging cycles before the need to rebuild the battery. Lead-acid batteries have the same problem (and tend to work for at most a handful of years before they have to be rebuilt) and their lifetime and reliability has been greatly increased in my lifetime.
With that said, it is still difficult to beat good old gasoline in terms of energy density. 37 kw-hours per gallon, IIRC -- enough energy in a 10 gallon tank to push a car hundreds of miles or run an entire house for a day or more, even paying a hefty penalty in thermodynamic efficiency. What one really wants is a process that takes air and water in on one side and expels octane and oxygen on the other side, using CO_2 extracted from the air. Or fuel-grade oil, "diesel". Plants do the latter already, and people are certainly working on it:
I have a lot of confidence that all of these obstacles will be overcome in a decadal time frame. The wild card is commercial nuclear fusion -- that one is game, set and match, and establishes human civilization for longer than it will take for us to evolve into something other than human. But we can get there without it (and probably will) within the next 30 years regardless. There is plenty of sunlight, huge amounts of unused land, and raw materials in abundance and eventually we'll work out economical generation of energy that doesn't burn relatively scarce and valuable (for other purposes) biomolecules left over from long, long ago.
Actually, I wanted to design a tee shirt that says "Fly Naked, Help Fight Terrorism" but it didn't make it through the consistency check. Tattooing it on seems a bit too permanent...
Using this scale, it should be possible to absolutely positively and without question prove telekinesis if any such ability exists in humans. If telekinesis isn't capable of consistently exerting the force required to lift a single lousy proton, it isn't worth worrying about. Even if we are more conservative and insist that TK be capable of consistently exerting a whole femtonewton of force (the weight of a rather large number of protons, to be sure, but certain to be within the resolution of the device where weight of a proton is likely to be out there at the edge of resolution:-) it still isn't worth worrying about. A single "make the scale move" experiment with a statistically significant number of randomly selected humans can put absolute bounds on both prevalence and strength of any hypothesized TK ability, and when we fail to find it (as I rather suspect will be the case given the lack of any plausible physical mechanism for the asserted effect) maybe we can put a dagger once and for all through the heart of the idea, or at least come up with a gold-standard test for anyone who asserts that they have the ability.
It sounds like oil is coming up against an economic barrier, though. While oil is highly profitable companies have a tendency to expand to fill their margins, and after years of operation at a given level of profitability belt tightening beyond a certain point no longer is feasible. If oil companies "ramp production" and crash the price of oil, they no longer can sell the increased production -- indeed, it is this that causes the price reduction, having more oil around than people want/need to buy. The end result is that the oil companies themselves make a lot less money at any production level, and risk going out of business themselves (or at least, getting by at far lower levels of profitability).
The difficulty for them is that there are a number of competing energy sources that are being developed that they simply won't be able to drive out of business (assuming that they could -- I actually doubt that they can do so as easily as you describe). Electric is starting to appear for real, with actual charging stations popping up in places where people park cars for the day (there are several on Duke's campus, as I discovered the other night by walking by a cluster, to my surprise). Biofuels are being actively developed (for better or worse -- there are and long have been people running their diesels on spent cooking oil, and then there are the many avenues for producing both methane and alcohols. Electricity can make hydrogen, hydrogen can power fuel cells or be burned directly to run cars. Alcohols actually have an energy density at least comparable to gasoline. Making gasoline out of coal, or directly synthesizing it other ways. Oil companies stand at risk from all of the above.
I'm guessing that the larger obstacle to making gasoline out of coal is political correctness. The Federal Government could at any time block the ability of oil companies to "put conversion plants out of business" by subsidizing the industry in an indexed way or by taxing oil in an indexed way, in either case according to a schedule that guaranteed amortized payoff of the construction investment. There are reasons to do this, given the tight coupling of gasoline prices as an expense to the health of the economy and to national security -- we have a lot of coal in the US and this would very likely make us self-sufficient in gasoline resources for at least 100 if not 100s of years, whether or not the dubious proposition of "peak oil" is or ever will be reached. Oil companies do suffer from the rule that it will gradually become ever more expensive to recover new oil, as we have at least plucked the low hanging fruit from this tree.
But coal and carbon are currently demonized by the CAGW doomsayers, making this sort of subsidy political suicide, at least for now. However, that may well change in the future. Even without subsidy, a war in Iran might well provide the stimulus to not only build such plants, but to do so rapidly, at least if the war lasted longer than the 2 to 6 weeks it probably will.
Truly excellent point. Also, one could cover deserts with panels and get them to literally drip gasoline. If one assumes a gallon of gasoline per 4x4 meter grid square (16 m^2 of collector), then a square kilometer of collectors would produce 250x250 = 62500 gallons of gasoline a day. 100 km x 100 km would produce 6.25 \times 10^8 gallons a day, or about 2 gallons per US citizen. A comparatively small patch of e.g. Arizona or New Mexico could make the US entirely self-sufficient in gasoline and do so in a renewable way that recycles all of the carbon, no net impact on CO_2 (if anybody cares).
Whether or not this is precisely correct, clearly it is within a factor of two or so of the size of the collector space needed, the right order (within the assumptions). Nor does it need to be all done at one place, or at one time.
But this is indeed building dream castles unless/until somebody comes up with such a converter (that also has to be cheap and scalable, not based on scarce materials and/or expensive).
Shame on you! True warmistas know that it isn't enough to just assert AGW, because the evidence suggests that the anthropogenic component of the observed global warming since the Little Ice Age (which was, incidentally, the coldest period the Earth experienced in the entire Holocene and hence neither it nor the Dalton minimum that occurred around the time thermometers came to be relatively commonplace and accurate are the best points to use as a baseline, unless that baseline was created by Michael Mann) could be as little as 0.3 K, once one accounts for the considerable natural variability of the climate and the grand solar maximum of the 20th century. Therefore they append the word Catastrophic. Mere AGW isn't scary enough, it has to be Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. AGW leading to the melting of the polar icecaps (which are currently within a standard deviation of their long term average, so the polar bears are safe, don't worry). AGW leading to rising seas that flood the coastlines (in spite of the fact that there is damn-all evidence of any such thing as catastrophically rising seas). AGW leading to droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, in spite of no evidence of increases in any of them. Terrifying AGW. AGW that will convince people that it is worth paying any price in higher taxes, carbon taxes, higher energy prices, reduced productivity and so on to avoid it because the consequences that are described are more horrific than the substantial human suffering caused by the misdirected wealth in the meantime.
Everybody sensible that at least some anthropogenic global warming has occurred, and will continue to occur as CO_2 doubles, although (as noted) even tiny increases in bond albedo more than cancels it all out, especially since a lot of the late 20th century increase in temperature was due to a minimum in bond albedo, not CO_2. However, there is no evidence that the warming observed or reasonable projections of the warming for the rest of the century will exceed perhaps a degree C. There has been no warming observed, for example, for roughly the last 13 years, and the 33 year baseline UAH lower troposphere anomaly for both January and February were negative, -0.1 C. This is by far the most reliable measure of global average temperature, being the result of unbiased sampling of the entire globe and not subject to the kind of tweaking that is constantly being applied to e.g. HADCRUT or GISS and that has the effect, strangely enough, of always making past temperatures cooler as they adjust them to exaggerate the relative warmth of the present. Hard to do that with satellite data, easy to do with ground thermometry when nobody really knows what you are doing to adjust it anyway and besides, you control the adjustments and your entire professional career and reputation depend on it getting warmer.
Which, currently, it is not. It's getting to be a real embarrassment for the warmist crowd, so they have to point at how warm the eastern US has been this spring while quietly ignoring the fact that the entire pacific, the pacific northwest, and most of north asia was anomalously cold (and has a hell of a lot more area). We're currently out there at very close to 2 standard deviations underneath the most conservative (lowest) of the IPCC projections, global temperature wise, with no real sign of the resumption of warming in sight.
This isn't really surprising to anyone that looks over the physical theory underlying all of this. Warmists claim "alarming" amounts of positive feedback that multiply expected warming from CO_2 by as much as 3 to 5. The evidence has already positively rejected the more extreme of these claims, and the centroid of current claims is steadily moving down as the climate continues to stubbornly refuse to get warmer. The current solar cycle is the lowest in roughly 130 years, and the next one is expected by my solar physics friends to be even lower, quite possibly Maunde
Sure, let me pile right in. It's already happening, except for the little problem called "evidence", where the evidence is that it is not, in fact, already happening.
Sadly, I confound your predictions of personality type. I'm if anything moderately left of center. I don't care much for bombing people of any color. I dislike multinational corporations and view them as a threat to civil liberties as they often become politically powerful enough to function as shadow governments and are very definitely corrupting influences. I have zero rich friends, and while I don't favor excessive regulation, I don't favor zero regulation either. I believe in applying things like "common sense" and "reason" to decisions of whether or not to regulate somebody, some company, some activity, not "dogmatic assertion of socialist/capitalist/communist/humanist principles".
Equally sadly, I'm not railing against "the science". I am a scientist -- a physicist. Good scientists are generally skeptical ones, and take the time to look at all of the evidence and not just carefully cherrypicked slices of it.
Naturally, you would like to preserve the illusion that all scientists "believe in" CAGW (a horrible misappropriation of religious terminology that is alas foundational to "the cause" propounded by such as Hansen, Jones, and Mann). But the truth is that they don't, and it is also the truth that there is nothing wrong with this. Climate science is anything but settled. For example, over the last 15 years the Earth's bond albedo has increased by roughly 6% compared to what it was at its minimum during the grand solar maximum of the latter 20th century. If one actually looks at the blackbody radiation formulae that are the foundation of the Earth's energy balance and hence mean temperature (to the extent that such an idea makes sense in a non-equilibrium open system) this increase corresponds to an expected decrease in the Earth's mean temperature of roughly 2K. That exceeds the total warming observed from the Dalton minimum, if not the LIA.
This is not only sound physics, it is simple physics, physics that kicks in before the GHE, as it is a direct modulator of insolation that raises the greybody temperature from which the GHE proceeds. You can your very own self google up the NASA papers that report this interesting fact.
Agreed. I'd be a lot more impressed if they can build an entire catalytic converter, perhaps using templated nanoscale catalysts, that take hot CO_2 and H2_O in on one end, use either sunlight or electricity as a free energy source, and spit pure octane out the other side. That one might be able to figure out well enough to where one could engineer large scale electroconversion, production of ethanol or octane (ideally the latter) on an industrial scale. If it can work efficiently with natural CO_2 levels in the air, so much the better.
Of course they can synthesize gasoline out of e.g. coal now -- I recall perhaps the Nazis doing this in WW II? -- but I think the process is still uneconomical compared to pumping and refining oil. I'd really like a rooftop collector that takes a gallon or two of water, atmospheric CO_2, and spits out a couple of gallons of pure gasoline in an normal day of sunshine. At 37 kW-hours per gallon, this wouldn't be terribly easy, actually (or rather, it would require a pretty big roof:-) but that's precisely why it is hard to beat gasoline as a fuel. A 5 kW rooftop collector, an 8 hour day, nearly perfect efficiency would make just one lousy gallon of gasoline. But that's more than I USE in a typical day, and at $4/gallon it would be $1200+ return per year...
Teach me, Obi-wan. Provide me with an objective third party analysis of the cash flow for Shearon-Harris that demonstrates how my tax dollars are being sucked into subsidizing it any more than they are (say) being sucked into subsidizing the oil industry or any of the other energy producing industries, all of which (as public utilities) get a variety of sweetheart deals to locate plants here or provide power there. But seriously, I am happy to learn. Just not learn from sarcasm and an assertion that there is some sort of global conspiracy to line the pockets of companies for building nuclear reactors. Back in the 50's yeah, when we were building all of our enormous nuclear arsenal decisions were made (such as dumping Thorium in favor of Uranium) that made nuclear power generation an easy way for the government to get subsidized plutonium as a byproduct. But even then, nuclear power was about making money for investors.
So please, back up your assertions of conspiracy and major government subsidies (compared, in all fairness, to those available throughout the industry) with non-bullshit numbers from believable sources, or I'm afraid I'll have to just believe the Wikipedia pages that has government reports that list the comparative fully levelized costs of electrical power made in various ways, nuclear in particular (assuming new, current construction). At least they list their sources. Of course, being a conspiracy I'm certain they are all lying, but I'm still very curious as to how you know the Truth, and just where this Truth is to be found.
Wow, so all those companies that build nuclear power plants, they must be run by really stupid people who like to lose money! I never knew. I thought Shearon-Harris (about 15 miles from where I'm sitting in NC) was profitable, but now I see that it is a loss leader or something. Thanks for opening my eyes!
I should say that hydroelectric ties with nuclear for (both) plants built a long time ago. There is almost no new nuclear construction, but I agree that levelized costs for new nuclear are higher (hopefully because they are spending more making them safe). Current levelized costs are also inflated for new coal and gas because of the "need" (for better or worse) for carbon scrubbers and so on to meet new emissions standards.
Otherwise hydro still has an advantage over nearly anything except perhaps NG in new construction. No fuel, established, straightforward technology and engineering, low operations and maintenance.
However, this just emphasizes the point I was trying to make, which is that hydro isn't stupid (where it works), it is actually brilliant -- almost the cheapest possible power. Another day we can debate the relative merits of nuclear, and whether new nuclear costs would diminish if anyone were to start to actually build new nuclear plants in the US at a rate of more than 4 at a time on a good year. Suffice it to say that cost estimates are highly volatile and have varied by as much as a factor of two in the last six or seven years (depending on who is doing the estimates and what their motivation and alignment is).
This volatility (part of which is indeed related to uncertainties in fuel price and long term supply) is actually something that further favors fuel-free electricity (or, in nuclear, the development of Thorium based plants). Much-maligned onshore wind ranks pretty high in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source. But look for levelized cost of PV to drop as the technology advances, both the up-front capital cost, fixed O&M (currently absurdly high compared to what it will become), and transmission costs. A drop in total cost by a factor of 2 over the next decade (quite plausible given Moore's Law for the actual cells plus economies of scale realized with larger scale implementation) makes it competitive with everything, especially if one allows for the gradual increase in fixed (fuel) O&M for most generation methods. A second factor of 2 over the following decade will make PV cheaper than everything but -- perhaps -- hydro.
IMO -- gazing into a cracked crystal ball, perhaps -- by the mid 2020's we will see a strong run on PV solar construction, sooner if certain key problems (such as power storage in advanced new batteries or a quantum leap in constant cost efficiency or a quantum drop in constant efficiency cost) are solved. I have a lot of faith in the science and engineering here -- it's just a matter of time before they figure out solar cells that cost $0.25/watt instead of $2.25/watt (which is roughly their current cost at consumer retail, although around half of this in volume). There is also a lot of room to drop the cost of manufacture and installation of plant-ready units.
A lot of fun to speculate about (and eventually in) actually...
In general I agree with your point, but in fact hydroelectric ties with nuclear for currently having the lowest cost per delivered watt of power of all the extant methods of power generation. Wind is, as you point out, a dead end except for (possibly) solar updraft that is really a variant of solar, not a hillside of windmills. Solar PV has a Moore's Law that appears applicable, which predicts that by the end of this decade it will likely be break even compared to e.g. coal in amortized cost per delivered watt, without subsidy, and thereafter will become ever more economically profitable on a comparative basis.
Tragically, nobody wants to look at nuclear, especially new generation nuclear that is far safer or thorium that is both safer and not subject to nuclear arms proliferation concerns. Fusion is still on a distant horizon, but if/when it is realized everything else goes away.
With the possible exception of gasoline. Like it or not, it is difficult to imagine any other way of storing 35 kW-hours in the volume occupied by one gallon of gasoline, in a reasonably stable and safe way. Even if fusion is perfected, solar becomes secondary universal and coal goes away, we'll probably end up synthesizing gasoline (or an equally energy dense equivalent) simply because of that.
BTW, not all dams are evil, nor are their reservoirs. I'd guess most of them are more beneficial than not. But either way, that can be decided on a case by case basis -- it isn't reasonable to say "building dams is always bad" as people have built dams without worrying about generating power just to regulate flooding or facilitate irrigation or cheap transportation. Beavers build dams in the wild -- sometimes they are "good", sometimes humans go and tear them down as "bad" -- depending on where they are and what results from the dams.
Sure, the Darwin award went to somebody that went absurdly out of his way to circumvent the normal resistance of his skin, although I've gotten a hell of a kick messing with 12V car batteries in a rainstorm with just a bit of dissolved corrosion on the poles and my fingers to help get through the skin.
And also agreed -- the problem with superconductors is that it isn't enough "just" to get zero resistance at room temperature, you need it to remain a superconductor under the kind of loads you intend once you get there. But we are building a fantasy world in the first place with RTSs in the first place, so I'm free to choose the furniture.
Besides, if we could build a RTS cheaply, then (again depending on its specific physics) that are likely many ways to make an end-run around current limits (although possibly not with DC). For example, building large waveguides with superconducting walls and beaming the energy end to end with large resonant masers. It's difficult even to speculate about the engineering, though, without a concrete material with specific properties to speculate about. In all probability, if we do make "room temperature" with superconductors, the superconductivity we see when we get there will be too limited for most uses. But perhaps not. That's the fun of it -- the science fiction speculation:-)
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Actually, they are honest scientific dissenters. At issue isn't whether or not there is a greenhouse effect -- it is true that only nut-jobs try to claim that there isn't. It is that the warming expected from a doubling of CO_2 per se is not likely to be catastrophic. To make it catastrophic, its effects are multiplied by a presumed positive climate sensitivity that is multifactorial and impossible to measure, and that no two global climate models set the same way to hindcast some carefully selected portion of the historical temperature record. The sensitivity then amplifies the (rather weak) additional warming caused by the CO_2 by a factor of 3 to 5 and you finally get the desired "catastrophe" that justifies spending trillions of dollars to avert it, taking steps that even the proponents admit will not, in fact, avert it. A catastrophe that has to in the end cost trillions of dollars or it isn't worth averting it in the first place.
The problem is that the global climate models suck at hindcasting outside of their fit region because they omit major variables (such as solar state) that almost certainly contribute as much to the climate variability as modulation of the CO_2 per se does. The GCMs also suck at forecasting. Compare the forecast temperatures from any of the early IPCC reports to the temperatures outside today, and you will observe an increasing divergence. The UAH lower troposphere temperature has been stable to slightly decreasing for well over a decade at this point and is actually bouncing by a tenth of a degree C around its 32 year average month to month at this very moment. Arctic sea ice is back to its 30 year average. Antarctic sea ice is actually above its 30 year average (so sea ice in general is both net surplus and on a positive trend). None of this makes any sense at all in terms of a model based on greenhouse gases with huge climate sensitivity, but it makes a great deal of sense if one considers variables omitted in the GCMs, such as solar state.
The Earth is in the middle -- well, honestly at the very beginning of -- an ice age. One likely to last roughly 300 million years. We do not have a very good understanding of why this is the case -- there are major competing hypotheses and some of them involve things like helium burning episodes in the core of the Sun where we have a very hard time "seeing" them and where in any event the timescale of variation is enormous, or the passage of the solar system through galactic regions with variable mass content, again on timescales and at density scales almost impossible to measure. Note well that I'm not talking about the "modulation" of the ice age with brief interglacial episodes -- those episodes are correlated to be sure with orbital periods (although not particularly well or consistently correlated) -- I'm talking about why the Pliestocene itself began.
It is also a simple fact that in the last 15 years, the Earth's albedo has increased by roughly 7% while the water content of the stratosphere has gone down by roughly 10%. If you want an even more interesting true fact, the albedo decreased sharply in the late 60s -- in consonance with an arguably extreme solar maximum -- and remained low for precisely the period where the earth was supposedly experiencing runaway greenhouse warming, and went down almost exactly when that warming seems to have gone away. For example and references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetshine
This article is a bit specious. The effects of an increased bond albedo -- especially a daytime albedo which is what "planetshine" directly measures -- are perfectly simple to understand. If you visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law
You will discover a simple formula for the Earth's expected "greybody temperature". You will also learn that:
The Earth
These days I brew my own beer and ale, all carbonated naturally in the bottle. Nothing but barley, hops, yeast and water, and because each bottle is unfiltered and contains live yeast, I get a dose of B-complex vitamins, and traces of chromium and selenium in every glass. I control the alcohol content and the fractional ratio of dextrose (fermented to alcohol) and dextrins (complex sugars the yeast do not eat and which contribute body and residual sweetness to the final beer). Hops contain flavonoids (pigmentary antioxidants) -- in particular xanthohumol, a molecule with known anti-cancer effects -- and have a long history of use in herbal medicines where they seem to have weak estrogenic effects. I make bread that contains the spent barley malt -- at this point almost pure roughage, as its starch content has been extracted and converted via natural enzymes in the malted grain itself into dextrose and dextrins in the mashing process -- that is some of the best bread you'll ever eat. I drink 1 to 3 of these little gems a day, over the course of six hours in the evening, with a meal. I'm 6' 2" and mass 100 kg and never am even approximately "intoxicated" during this process.
Food, drink, medicine? In the middle ages monk-brewed beer was considered "liquid bread" -- which it more or less was -- a way of transforming barley grain and water that was chock full of demons (e coli, v cholera, and many other parasites and diseases) into something safe to drink that would "keep", preserving both much of the calorie content and excellent flavor.
The fact that it was relaxing and -- in moderation -- a source of goodwill and joy was just a clear sign of a beneficial god.
Not in moderation, well, it isn't healthful to eat just about anything save in moderation. Too much fat, bad. Too much carbohydrate, bad. Vegetables to the complete exclusion of protein, bad. Protein to the exclusion of roughage and carbohydrates, bad. Too much salt, bad. Too little salt, bad. No fruit at all, bad. A steady diet of nothing but fruit, bad.
Finally, it is important to remember the following true fact about life. It ends. Furthermore, it gets to where it totally sucks (usually) before it ends, if you live long enough. My beer-swilling grandmother lived into her 90s and spent her last five years utterly demented. My cocktail-swilling (and in her youth, cigarette smoking) aunt outlived both of her sisters, stroked out and demented both. The trick, then, is to live a full and happy life enjoying the many fruits of the earth, then die all at once, like the One Hoss Shay, ideally before becoming demented. Sadly, it only rarely works out just precisely this way, but one can hope.
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I think that you aren't giving the possibility of positive reaction mechanisms enough credit. Humans have co-evolved with alcohol for at least 6 to 10 thousand years. Over the overwhelming bulk of that time, if you did not drink alcohol your life was ugly, nasty, brutish, parasite ridden, and short. There is an interesting program on Netflix you might want to watch entitled "How Beer Saved the World" -- tongue in cheek but not really. It's really only been safe to drink the water for less than 100 years, in some levels of wealthy and scientifically advanced society, in countries where it is safe to drink the water, which isn't most countries even now, presuming you think drinking halogenated water is "safe". I grew up in India, and used to drink beer on the road when we travelled at age seven or eight, because it was one of precisely three safe options once you ran out of boiled water or iodine tablets. Tea (boiled water, no milk). Coca Cola -- because even if you dropped a cockroach into Coke as it was bottled, you'd just eat/drink down an acid-pickled cockroach and be perfectly fine. And beer. Golden Eagle beer, to be specific, is the earliest beer I can recall tasting. Back then they didn't have bottled water for sale.
For the most part the body metabolizes alcohol in moderation harmlessly. It isn't particularly directly toxic to the liver (although fermentation adjucts may be), it's just that the liver tends to get fat, just as it does (as you observe) if you eat enough carbs or the wrong sugars and have metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes. Alcohol acts as a mild blood thinner -- not unlike aspirin, but not as strong -- and hence may be directly beneficial at moderate levels for precisely the same reasons that aspirin is (and aspirin has its own toxicity and side effect issues, although they are rare in adults). As you note, it is a fairly harmless relaxant. The Mayo clinic lists it -- with warnings -- as being "possibly good for" reducing risk of heart disease, dying of a heart attack, risk of strokes (especially ischemic strokes), lowers your risk of gallstones (my grandmother was prescribed one beer a day, which she drank very religiously and dutifully being the wife of a Methodist Minister who did not hold with drinking, for this very reason, way back in the 1960s, as an alternative to taking a wad of horrendous-sized pills), and diabetes. Their guideline is one drink for women and two for men, but of course this depends on body size. Women are at greater risk then men (relative to any benefits) because of their higher risk of breast cancer, BTW.
As for statistical studies, they are how one proves that prayer and astrology do not work. You got that one backwards, thought I'd help you out. You're thinking of "anecdotal evidence", not double blind placebo controlled statistical studies. Even in physics (where I'm a physicist) correlation may not be causality but it is often all one has until one maybe eventually formulates a theory that might explain it, and that theory has as its ultimate foundation what? Evidence in the form of statistical correlation, of course. What else is there?
With that said, given the mass of Bayesian priors (a.k.a. "laws of nature" and the like) we have arrived at that are reasonably statistically sound, I totally agree that one should look for reaction mechanisms and explanations, but don't forget what they are explaining -- the statistically sound results obtained from the data. On a really good day, you come up with both the mechanism and the data and they are consistent and the mechanism predicts other things as well and then you get your Nobel prize and everything. Other days you are up against multifactorial effects and sparse data and trying to make sound inferences of cause is, well, "challenging" even though the statistical correspondence itself may be as sound as you like.
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Actually there are a number of studies out that quite clearly demonstrate that alcohol in moderate doses is good for you, in the specific sense that moderate drinkers experience less morbidity and mortality from all causes than either teetotalers or full-blown alcoholics. The "moderate" range appears to be 1-3 drinks a day, depending on your body mass and personal chemistry, but curiously, the Mediterranean study showed that at least elderly drinkers outlive nondrinkers (on average) completely blind to the amount they consume.
My wife is an MD and I have read the studies myself (although I'm too lazy to look up non-paywalled versions of them to repost here). Naturally, YMMV, and people with hemachromatosis or who have or have had hepatitis or who have other problems with alcohol (e.g. social problems, alcoholism) should probably not drink, but for most people a couple of beers or glasses of wine a day is, as has been known since the middle ages if not before, generally beneficial to health, not detrimental.
There really is an interesting question about whether or not radiation is a "no safe exposure" sort of thing, along with chlorinated hydrocarbons and all of the other things that can cause oxidative or other damage to DNA. There is substantial evidence that your best defense against most cancers is a strong immune system, and (like many biological systems in the body) your immune system is a use it or lose it sort of proposition. Even unrelated stresses like contracting a cold may exercise the immune system to have some cancer preventing benefit in the long run compared to somebody that is never exposed to the cold virus or other common viruses or diseases. And yet there is equally strong evidence that too much of a bad thing is really bad.
So is there an optimum between the body never experiencing enough oxidative damage to build up an immunological anticancer defense and experiencing so much that you overwhelm it and get cancer anyway? A very tough experiment to perform in a world where there is no such thing as no exposure to radiation -- the galaxy, the sun, the earth, our very bones are radioactive.
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Nobody with any sense would pay 8 times more for this for no possible benefit. Natural gas has never been cheaper. NC has a surplus of energy and remarkably low energy prices already, and sensible conservation measures, such as installing high efficiency air conditioners, are already lowering consumption (and prices) further still. If Apple shareholders had any sense, they would sue the company for pissing away their money on political grandstanding. It isn't even about carbon -- I'm sitting about 15 miles away from Shearon-Harris, a nuclear plant that makes all sorts of energy without burning any carbon at all, and I'm almost certain they could tap right into its nice carbon-free electricity. It is about political correctness, bullshit, and the CAGW mythology that is contradicted by the merest passing glance at the 5 million year climate record. 5 million years ago the Earth was roughly 2 C warmer than it is today, CO_2 levels were in excess of what they are expected to go to by the end of the century in the worst case "anthropogenic" scenario, and there not only was no runaway warming associated with high climate sensitivity, the Earth's temperature was gradually depressing (for reasons no one understands) to eventually start the Pliestocene, the current Ice Age. Planetary Ice Ages historically last some 300 million years, and interglacials tend to be brief and unstable. The Holocene was roughly 1 full degree C warmer than it is today at the beginning, and has been gradually cooling ever since -- the Little Ice Age was the coldest century in the entire Holocene.
If CO_2 did stabilize the Holocene and prevent the otherwise inevitable return to glaciation, it would be the best thing for the planet that one could imagine. But it probably won't. The Earth's bond albedo has increased by 7% over the last 15 years -- no one knows why, but the direct evidence has been confirmed two ways that it has done so. The physics of an increase in bond albedo and its effect on global average temperatures is a no-brainer -- increasing bond albedo from roughly 0.30 to roughly 0.32 corresponds to an expected drop of at least 2 K in global average temperature from a simple plug-in to the greybody temperature formula associated with blackbody radiation. That is roughly three times the entire temperature increase observed over the 20th century.
Global average temperatures have been stable within noise for roughly 12 years now, and the three-month average lower troposphere temperature anomaly (compared to the 32 year running average) for the first quarter of 2012 was -- wait for it -- within a hair of 0 K. Measured temperatures are diverging strongly from the high-sensitivity predictions of basically all the GCMs as of 15 years ago, almost perfectly in step with the increase in albedo. The albedo was -- coincidentally or not -- anomalously low in the 80s and 90s. At the moment, although it is admittedly cherrypicking of a sort, global average temperatures are decreasing compared to an apparent peak associated with the 1998 ENSO. But without picking anything at all, satellite-based lower troposphere temperatures are nearly trendless over the entire timespan of their existence.
So spending $4.00 per KW-hour to "prevent a disaster" that there isn't a shred of evidence that the Earth's climate system is capable of supporting given five million years of thermometric data when we are in the unstable warm phase of a global glacial bistable cold period is simply insane. But not to the many people that profit from it, at our expense.
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This issue isn't resolvable by Apple, it is resolvable with a true heads-up display and voice control interface that actually works. The technology for the former is long since there -- it just needs to be implemented. The technology for the latter is there but sucks. All we need is a car that understands you when you say "find 3218 Oak Lane and show me how to get there". What we've got is Garmin or the Prius navigator and silly keyboarding displays that you can't use while driving and that are a true pain to navigate all by themselves. A shame, really -- none of this is all that difficult to design, and we have plenty of cycles, enough to implement quite sophisticated interfaces. But even iPods don't understand me when I say "Play `The Soft Parade' album, you moron" to them.
Truly tragic. We will perfect the touchscreen interface and have near-universal pad-based computing and -- just like that -- it will all be obsolete when some bright lad or lady realizes that it is so very much simpler to tell something what to do than to key it in on integrated pad keyboards with "keys" the size of pencil erasers drawn on a touch screen, maybe.
And then, on to a true neural interface. Why should I have to even say anything? Why not just think it?
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Yeah, then there is the pre-existing CO_2 content of the ocean -- two orders of magnitude more than there is in the entire atmosphere, the fact that Ph is a log scale, the fact that the ocean buffers its Ph various ways and gradually removes CO_2 and carbon altogether, and a few other things like that. Ocean chemistry is a bit complex to be reduced to a sound bite although I'm sure it is all "settled science".
/., putting it in direct competition with the National Enquirer, the Globe, the Examiner, and all of the other pulps I like to look at while waiting in line at Wal Mart.
The real problem with the top article is that it is idiotic quite outside of any consideration of CO_2 (which is in itself major league moronic, since the early Earth was presumably rather volcanic with a big old moon at roughly half the distance from the Earth that it is now raising crustal tides of some 8 feet a day -- that would be tides lifting the surface of the Earth, not the possibly not-yet existent oceans -- and causing all sorts of violent aerosol outgasing of pretty much any sort of greenhouse gas. Europa may have liquid oceans underneath its ice crust from a similar sort of heating now. This sort of action is plausible, involves things we already know occurred and requires no new physics. For an alternative hypothesis to be reasonable (in comparison) it needs to have some sort of actual computational support -- a theoretical basis that works out when one runs the numbers. I'm not seeing it, outside of "and then a miracle happened..."
Mars has a greenhouse effect and an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide, and it is even farther from the sun. This isn't science, it is making up a "problem" that cursory examination of only three planets refutes from the beginning and then inventing an implausible solution.
But hey, it got posted on
Next, Bigfoot Returns! News at 11.
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Oh Lordy, for some mod points. Of course then I'd have to decide, +1 for funny, +1 for informative, +1 for insightful...
I'll hold it down. Get your gun.
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Mining what on the moon that we can't get far more cheaply here? Not to mention the minor problem of finding whatever it is that you think that is there to be mined that is sufficiently valuable. Even with Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" linear accelerators -- which no sane Earth government would ever allow to be built, mind you, thanks to Heinlein -- fully driven by local solar power, the cost per gram of pretty much anything mined on the moon and shipped back to earth is likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the same thing or stuff mined here. By the time solar power is developed enough to make this feasible there, it will also enable exotic mining technology (like seawater extraction or mining the 70% of the earth's surface that happens to be under water) to be done here and still be cheaper than messing with supporting an artificial ecosystem (even the most abbreviated ecosystem capable of doing the job) 386,000 km away at the wrong end of a mountain of gravitational energy.
Once upon a time it was suggested that a space station would be fundable the same way -- use zero gravity to grow exotic crystal substrates for semiconductors or superconductors, use abundant sunlight to smelt metals, and so on. However the sad truth is that isn't that difficult to do these things down here, and it is always going to be far, far cheaper. There are things one can do better in orbit than one can on the ground, and we are doing nearly all of them already -- monitor weather, facilitate communications, study the stars, work out technology that might eventually open up the planets to us -- but making things at a profit so far isn't even something that one can dimly foresee in the distant future. Only if something rare and enormously valuable is discovered that really truly can only be made, or found, in space, on the moon, in the asteroid belts, is that likely to change. Magnetic monopoles, dilithium crystals, superheavy element 184 (stable, supercatalyst), I dunno.
In the meantime, there is no point in trying to "sell" space colonization as if it is going to be directly beneficial or profitable. It may well be beneficial (for example, it has been suggested that it may keep humans alive through a collapse of civilization on Earth), although we cannot really see how or why it is going to be more beneficial or profitable (beyond a certain point) than (say) investing the money in building a stable, rational world civilization first and then tackling the problem later as a very long term project. This is a legitimate concern -- like global warming, the "cure" for the perceived problem may end up costing 10 or 50 times as much as the problem itself would, even if the problem ends up being as bad as worst case scenarios that are largely overheated imagination come true -- and reasonable people might choose to spend more down here and less up there until we work a few major historical imperatives out.
This is the sort of thing that people don't always see. Some things are really, really expensive to do now, but are going to be far cheaper in 20, 40, 60 years. We are still working on various key gateway technologies that are IMO essential both for space exploration itself and to create a global economic base for supporting it. Solar, one of the key technologies to solving any perceived "carbon-based fuel" problem, is unprofitable without a substantial subsidy today, but its cost follows a Moore's Law and it is fairly predictable that in 1 to 2 decades it will undercut carbon-based fuel costs sufficient to solve that problem then without draconian and horribly expensive measures now. Thermonuclear fusion seems as though it is a key technology for any sort of space exploration, and nobody has any clue as to how long it will be (if ever) before it matures. Inexpensive high density energy storage (batteries, if you like) is a key gateway technology for space. In fact, nearly all of the technologies that would let us support a carbon-fuel-fr
Better rechargable batteries are not that unlikely. Zinc-air batteries have your large factor, and are only blocked by dendritic formation that happens in the recharge cycle, limiting the number of charge-discharges they can go through. But this is precisely the sort of thing clever chemistry and/or engineering can eventually overcome, and there are a couple of companies out there either working hard on it or (possibly) already in possession of all or part of the solution and actively testing and developing an engineering and manufacturing cycle. A zinc-air battery with no memory effect, mass-producable at modest cost, would solve many problems -- cheap, long range electric cars, storage for intermittent renewable energy sources (PV solar generated by day and delivered by night), laptops that run for 24 hours on a charge and can be recharged for years.
Obviously there is a substantial pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow, so you have people very interested in pursuing it. No guarantees, of course, but it is hardly inconceivable that within the decade somebody will figure out an assembly that gives you the energy density of zinc-air with the necessary number of recharging cycles before the need to rebuild the battery. Lead-acid batteries have the same problem (and tend to work for at most a handful of years before they have to be rebuilt) and their lifetime and reliability has been greatly increased in my lifetime.
With that said, it is still difficult to beat good old gasoline in terms of energy density. 37 kw-hours per gallon, IIRC -- enough energy in a 10 gallon tank to push a car hundreds of miles or run an entire house for a day or more, even paying a hefty penalty in thermodynamic efficiency. What one really wants is a process that takes air and water in on one side and expels octane and oxygen on the other side, using CO_2 extracted from the air. Or fuel-grade oil, "diesel". Plants do the latter already, and people are certainly working on it:
http://spg.ucsd.edu/algae/pdf/Mayfield_UCSD%20biofuels%201-29.pdf
I have a lot of confidence that all of these obstacles will be overcome in a decadal time frame. The wild card is commercial nuclear fusion -- that one is game, set and match, and establishes human civilization for longer than it will take for us to evolve into something other than human. But we can get there without it (and probably will) within the next 30 years regardless. There is plenty of sunlight, huge amounts of unused land, and raw materials in abundance and eventually we'll work out economical generation of energy that doesn't burn relatively scarce and valuable (for other purposes) biomolecules left over from long, long ago.
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Actually, I wanted to design a tee shirt that says "Fly Naked, Help Fight Terrorism" but it didn't make it through the consistency check. Tattooing it on seems a bit too permanent...
Using this scale, it should be possible to absolutely positively and without question prove telekinesis if any such ability exists in humans. If telekinesis isn't capable of consistently exerting the force required to lift a single lousy proton, it isn't worth worrying about. Even if we are more conservative and insist that TK be capable of consistently exerting a whole femtonewton of force (the weight of a rather large number of protons, to be sure, but certain to be within the resolution of the device where weight of a proton is likely to be out there at the edge of resolution:-) it still isn't worth worrying about. A single "make the scale move" experiment with a statistically significant number of randomly selected humans can put absolute bounds on both prevalence and strength of any hypothesized TK ability, and when we fail to find it (as I rather suspect will be the case given the lack of any plausible physical mechanism for the asserted effect) maybe we can put a dagger once and for all through the heart of the idea, or at least come up with a gold-standard test for anyone who asserts that they have the ability.
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It sounds like oil is coming up against an economic barrier, though. While oil is highly profitable companies have a tendency to expand to fill their margins, and after years of operation at a given level of profitability belt tightening beyond a certain point no longer is feasible. If oil companies "ramp production" and crash the price of oil, they no longer can sell the increased production -- indeed, it is this that causes the price reduction, having more oil around than people want/need to buy. The end result is that the oil companies themselves make a lot less money at any production level, and risk going out of business themselves (or at least, getting by at far lower levels of profitability). The difficulty for them is that there are a number of competing energy sources that are being developed that they simply won't be able to drive out of business (assuming that they could -- I actually doubt that they can do so as easily as you describe). Electric is starting to appear for real, with actual charging stations popping up in places where people park cars for the day (there are several on Duke's campus, as I discovered the other night by walking by a cluster, to my surprise). Biofuels are being actively developed (for better or worse -- there are and long have been people running their diesels on spent cooking oil, and then there are the many avenues for producing both methane and alcohols. Electricity can make hydrogen, hydrogen can power fuel cells or be burned directly to run cars. Alcohols actually have an energy density at least comparable to gasoline. Making gasoline out of coal, or directly synthesizing it other ways. Oil companies stand at risk from all of the above.
I'm guessing that the larger obstacle to making gasoline out of coal is political correctness. The Federal Government could at any time block the ability of oil companies to "put conversion plants out of business" by subsidizing the industry in an indexed way or by taxing oil in an indexed way, in either case according to a schedule that guaranteed amortized payoff of the construction investment. There are reasons to do this, given the tight coupling of gasoline prices as an expense to the health of the economy and to national security -- we have a lot of coal in the US and this would very likely make us self-sufficient in gasoline resources for at least 100 if not 100s of years, whether or not the dubious proposition of "peak oil" is or ever will be reached. Oil companies do suffer from the rule that it will gradually become ever more expensive to recover new oil, as we have at least plucked the low hanging fruit from this tree.
But coal and carbon are currently demonized by the CAGW doomsayers, making this sort of subsidy political suicide, at least for now. However, that may well change in the future. Even without subsidy, a war in Iran might well provide the stimulus to not only build such plants, but to do so rapidly, at least if the war lasted longer than the 2 to 6 weeks it probably will.
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Truly excellent point. Also, one could cover deserts with panels and get them to literally drip gasoline. If one assumes a gallon of gasoline per 4x4 meter grid square (16 m^2 of collector), then a square kilometer of collectors would produce 250x250 = 62500 gallons of gasoline a day. 100 km x 100 km would produce 6.25 \times 10^8 gallons a day, or about 2 gallons per US citizen. A comparatively small patch of e.g. Arizona or New Mexico could make the US entirely self-sufficient in gasoline and do so in a renewable way that recycles all of the carbon, no net impact on CO_2 (if anybody cares).
Whether or not this is precisely correct, clearly it is within a factor of two or so of the size of the collector space needed, the right order (within the assumptions). Nor does it need to be all done at one place, or at one time.
But this is indeed building dream castles unless/until somebody comes up with such a converter (that also has to be cheap and scalable, not based on scarce materials and/or expensive).
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Shame on you! True warmistas know that it isn't enough to just assert AGW, because the evidence suggests that the anthropogenic component of the observed global warming since the Little Ice Age (which was, incidentally, the coldest period the Earth experienced in the entire Holocene and hence neither it nor the Dalton minimum that occurred around the time thermometers came to be relatively commonplace and accurate are the best points to use as a baseline, unless that baseline was created by Michael Mann) could be as little as 0.3 K, once one accounts for the considerable natural variability of the climate and the grand solar maximum of the 20th century. Therefore they append the word Catastrophic . Mere AGW isn't scary enough, it has to be Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. AGW leading to the melting of the polar icecaps (which are currently within a standard deviation of their long term average, so the polar bears are safe, don't worry). AGW leading to rising seas that flood the coastlines (in spite of the fact that there is damn-all evidence of any such thing as catastrophically rising seas). AGW leading to droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, in spite of no evidence of increases in any of them. Terrifying AGW. AGW that will convince people that it is worth paying any price in higher taxes, carbon taxes, higher energy prices, reduced productivity and so on to avoid it because the consequences that are described are more horrific than the substantial human suffering caused by the misdirected wealth in the meantime.
Everybody sensible that at least some anthropogenic global warming has occurred, and will continue to occur as CO_2 doubles, although (as noted) even tiny increases in bond albedo more than cancels it all out, especially since a lot of the late 20th century increase in temperature was due to a minimum in bond albedo, not CO_2. However, there is no evidence that the warming observed or reasonable projections of the warming for the rest of the century will exceed perhaps a degree C. There has been no warming observed, for example, for roughly the last 13 years, and the 33 year baseline UAH lower troposphere anomaly for both January and February were negative, -0.1 C. This is by far the most reliable measure of global average temperature, being the result of unbiased sampling of the entire globe and not subject to the kind of tweaking that is constantly being applied to e.g. HADCRUT or GISS and that has the effect, strangely enough, of always making past temperatures cooler as they adjust them to exaggerate the relative warmth of the present. Hard to do that with satellite data, easy to do with ground thermometry when nobody really knows what you are doing to adjust it anyway and besides, you control the adjustments and your entire professional career and reputation depend on it getting warmer.
Which, currently, it is not. It's getting to be a real embarrassment for the warmist crowd, so they have to point at how warm the eastern US has been this spring while quietly ignoring the fact that the entire pacific, the pacific northwest, and most of north asia was anomalously cold (and has a hell of a lot more area). We're currently out there at very close to 2 standard deviations underneath the most conservative (lowest) of the IPCC projections, global temperature wise, with no real sign of the resumption of warming in sight.
This isn't really surprising to anyone that looks over the physical theory underlying all of this. Warmists claim "alarming" amounts of positive feedback that multiply expected warming from CO_2 by as much as 3 to 5. The evidence has already positively rejected the more extreme of these claims, and the centroid of current claims is steadily moving down as the climate continues to stubbornly refuse to get warmer. The current solar cycle is the lowest in roughly 130 years, and the next one is expected by my solar physics friends to be even lower, quite possibly Maunde
Sure, let me pile right in. It's already happening, except for the little problem called "evidence", where the evidence is that it is not, in fact, already happening.
Sadly, I confound your predictions of personality type. I'm if anything moderately left of center. I don't care much for bombing people of any color. I dislike multinational corporations and view them as a threat to civil liberties as they often become politically powerful enough to function as shadow governments and are very definitely corrupting influences. I have zero rich friends, and while I don't favor excessive regulation, I don't favor zero regulation either. I believe in applying things like "common sense" and "reason" to decisions of whether or not to regulate somebody, some company, some activity, not "dogmatic assertion of socialist/capitalist/communist/humanist principles".
Equally sadly, I'm not railing against "the science". I am a scientist -- a physicist. Good scientists are generally skeptical ones, and take the time to look at all of the evidence and not just carefully cherrypicked slices of it.
Naturally, you would like to preserve the illusion that all scientists "believe in" CAGW (a horrible misappropriation of religious terminology that is alas foundational to "the cause" propounded by such as Hansen, Jones, and Mann). But the truth is that they don't, and it is also the truth that there is nothing wrong with this. Climate science is anything but settled. For example, over the last 15 years the Earth's bond albedo has increased by roughly 6% compared to what it was at its minimum during the grand solar maximum of the latter 20th century. If one actually looks at the blackbody radiation formulae that are the foundation of the Earth's energy balance and hence mean temperature (to the extent that such an idea makes sense in a non-equilibrium open system) this increase corresponds to an expected decrease in the Earth's mean temperature of roughly 2K. That exceeds the total warming observed from the Dalton minimum, if not the LIA.
This is not only sound physics, it is simple physics, physics that kicks in before the GHE, as it is a direct modulator of insolation that raises the greybody temperature from which the GHE proceeds. You can your very own self google up the NASA papers that report this interesting fact.
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Agreed. I'd be a lot more impressed if they can build an entire catalytic converter, perhaps using templated nanoscale catalysts, that take hot CO_2 and H2_O in on one end, use either sunlight or electricity as a free energy source, and spit pure octane out the other side. That one might be able to figure out well enough to where one could engineer large scale electroconversion, production of ethanol or octane (ideally the latter) on an industrial scale. If it can work efficiently with natural CO_2 levels in the air, so much the better.
Of course they can synthesize gasoline out of e.g. coal now -- I recall perhaps the Nazis doing this in WW II? -- but I think the process is still uneconomical compared to pumping and refining oil. I'd really like a rooftop collector that takes a gallon or two of water, atmospheric CO_2, and spits out a couple of gallons of pure gasoline in an normal day of sunshine. At 37 kW-hours per gallon, this wouldn't be terribly easy, actually (or rather, it would require a pretty big roof:-) but that's precisely why it is hard to beat gasoline as a fuel. A 5 kW rooftop collector, an 8 hour day, nearly perfect efficiency would make just one lousy gallon of gasoline. But that's more than I USE in a typical day, and at $4/gallon it would be $1200+ return per year...
Teach me, Obi-wan. Provide me with an objective third party analysis of the cash flow for Shearon-Harris that demonstrates how my tax dollars are being sucked into subsidizing it any more than they are (say) being sucked into subsidizing the oil industry or any of the other energy producing industries, all of which (as public utilities) get a variety of sweetheart deals to locate plants here or provide power there. But seriously, I am happy to learn. Just not learn from sarcasm and an assertion that there is some sort of global conspiracy to line the pockets of companies for building nuclear reactors. Back in the 50's yeah, when we were building all of our enormous nuclear arsenal decisions were made (such as dumping Thorium in favor of Uranium) that made nuclear power generation an easy way for the government to get subsidized plutonium as a byproduct. But even then, nuclear power was about making money for investors.
So please, back up your assertions of conspiracy and major government subsidies (compared, in all fairness, to those available throughout the industry) with non-bullshit numbers from believable sources, or I'm afraid I'll have to just believe the Wikipedia pages that has government reports that list the comparative fully levelized costs of electrical power made in various ways, nuclear in particular (assuming new, current construction). At least they list their sources. Of course, being a conspiracy I'm certain they are all lying, but I'm still very curious as to how you know the Truth, and just where this Truth is to be found.
Ignorantly yours (but awaiting objective third-party non-bullshit Enlightenment),
rgb
And first post too! Impressive!
Only if you can come up with the acronym: Satellite Heavy Asteroid Removal and Kill System.
Wow, so all those companies that build nuclear power plants, they must be run by really stupid people who like to lose money! I never knew. I thought Shearon-Harris (about 15 miles from where I'm sitting in NC) was profitable, but now I see that it is a loss leader or something. Thanks for opening my eyes!
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I should say that hydroelectric ties with nuclear for (both) plants built a long time ago. There is almost no new nuclear construction, but I agree that levelized costs for new nuclear are higher (hopefully because they are spending more making them safe). Current levelized costs are also inflated for new coal and gas because of the "need" (for better or worse) for carbon scrubbers and so on to meet new emissions standards.
Otherwise hydro still has an advantage over nearly anything except perhaps NG in new construction. No fuel, established, straightforward technology and engineering, low operations and maintenance.
However, this just emphasizes the point I was trying to make, which is that hydro isn't stupid (where it works), it is actually brilliant -- almost the cheapest possible power. Another day we can debate the relative merits of nuclear, and whether new nuclear costs would diminish if anyone were to start to actually build new nuclear plants in the US at a rate of more than 4 at a time on a good year. Suffice it to say that cost estimates are highly volatile and have varied by as much as a factor of two in the last six or seven years (depending on who is doing the estimates and what their motivation and alignment is).
This volatility (part of which is indeed related to uncertainties in fuel price and long term supply) is actually something that further favors fuel-free electricity (or, in nuclear, the development of Thorium based plants). Much-maligned onshore wind ranks pretty high in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source. But look for levelized cost of PV to drop as the technology advances, both the up-front capital cost, fixed O&M (currently absurdly high compared to what it will become), and transmission costs. A drop in total cost by a factor of 2 over the next decade (quite plausible given Moore's Law for the actual cells plus economies of scale realized with larger scale implementation) makes it competitive with everything, especially if one allows for the gradual increase in fixed (fuel) O&M for most generation methods. A second factor of 2 over the following decade will make PV cheaper than everything but -- perhaps -- hydro.
IMO -- gazing into a cracked crystal ball, perhaps -- by the mid 2020's we will see a strong run on PV solar construction, sooner if certain key problems (such as power storage in advanced new batteries or a quantum leap in constant cost efficiency or a quantum drop in constant efficiency cost) are solved. I have a lot of faith in the science and engineering here -- it's just a matter of time before they figure out solar cells that cost $0.25/watt instead of $2.25/watt (which is roughly their current cost at consumer retail, although around half of this in volume). There is also a lot of room to drop the cost of manufacture and installation of plant-ready units.
A lot of fun to speculate about (and eventually in) actually...
rgb
In general I agree with your point, but in fact hydroelectric ties with nuclear for currently having the lowest cost per delivered watt of power of all the extant methods of power generation. Wind is, as you point out, a dead end except for (possibly) solar updraft that is really a variant of solar, not a hillside of windmills. Solar PV has a Moore's Law that appears applicable, which predicts that by the end of this decade it will likely be break even compared to e.g. coal in amortized cost per delivered watt, without subsidy, and thereafter will become ever more economically profitable on a comparative basis.
Tragically, nobody wants to look at nuclear, especially new generation nuclear that is far safer or thorium that is both safer and not subject to nuclear arms proliferation concerns. Fusion is still on a distant horizon, but if/when it is realized everything else goes away.
With the possible exception of gasoline. Like it or not, it is difficult to imagine any other way of storing 35 kW-hours in the volume occupied by one gallon of gasoline, in a reasonably stable and safe way. Even if fusion is perfected, solar becomes secondary universal and coal goes away, we'll probably end up synthesizing gasoline (or an equally energy dense equivalent) simply because of that.
BTW, not all dams are evil, nor are their reservoirs. I'd guess most of them are more beneficial than not. But either way, that can be decided on a case by case basis -- it isn't reasonable to say "building dams is always bad" as people have built dams without worrying about generating power just to regulate flooding or facilitate irrigation or cheap transportation. Beavers build dams in the wild -- sometimes they are "good", sometimes humans go and tear them down as "bad" -- depending on where they are and what results from the dams.
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Actually a very "cool" idea. Larry Niven used it in his Ringworld series, but it isn't the worse for it.
Sure, the Darwin award went to somebody that went absurdly out of his way to circumvent the normal resistance of his skin, although I've gotten a hell of a kick messing with 12V car batteries in a rainstorm with just a bit of dissolved corrosion on the poles and my fingers to help get through the skin.
And also agreed -- the problem with superconductors is that it isn't enough "just" to get zero resistance at room temperature, you need it to remain a superconductor under the kind of loads you intend once you get there. But we are building a fantasy world in the first place with RTSs in the first place, so I'm free to choose the furniture.
Besides, if we could build a RTS cheaply, then (again depending on its specific physics) that are likely many ways to make an end-run around current limits (although possibly not with DC). For example, building large waveguides with superconducting walls and beaming the energy end to end with large resonant masers. It's difficult even to speculate about the engineering, though, without a concrete material with specific properties to speculate about. In all probability, if we do make "room temperature" with superconductors, the superconductivity we see when we get there will be too limited for most uses. But perhaps not. That's the fun of it -- the science fiction speculation:-)
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