Not sure where you get your data from. Every source I see says that polysilicon was far and away the driving factor behind solar panel cost (http://costofsolar.com/management/uploads/2013/12/solar-pv-cost-trend.png). Only recently did other factors supplant polysilicon costs as a primary cost driver:
And lowering poly cost was, of course, one of the many technical achievements of the old DOE program.
"According to Deutsche Bank, the total costs for leading Chinese modules have fallen from $1.31 a watt in 2011 to around $0.50/W in 2014,
I suppose that last little bit is important, too, although the drop from a dollar a watt to fifty cents a watt is not nearly as important as the drop from seventy-five dollars a watt to a few dollars a watt. At either fifty cents a watt or a dollar a watt, installation costs dominate over panel purchase cost.
Here's a graph of solar cost from 1977, about when the ERDA program started: https://www.sunrun.com/sites/d...
That drop from 1.31 to 0.50 you talk about is the tiny little bit at the end. You can see it if you kinda squint.
primarily due to cost reductions in processing, polysilicon and an improvement in conversion efficiencies. The company also believes that further price reductions will occur in response to improvements in scale and operating efficiencies. Polysilicon used to be the major cost component in solar pricing but now only represents 10 to 11 cents per watt."
The fact that you don't seem to know about the decades-long ERDA and DOE programs doesn't mean that they didn't exist. I suppose you can call this the best kind of government program-- the kind where, at the end, the people making panels say "I did it all myself! The market works!"
One for I don't give a shit - like a Reddit account and every other dipshit website that requires a login so that they can use their registered users for advertising and revenue - and that's why I will never register for Slashdot.
I don't get it-- why don't you use your "I don't give a shit" account password, here, too, if you use it on Reddit?
Right on the number, wrong on the "not all of them recoverable". That number is the "proven reserves" of coal.
I gave the total recoverable number simply to give some perspective on the IPCC prediction of 1000 ppm under their high emission scenario. That prediction requires extrapolating 20th century carbon emission growth until 2100, which is economically utterly implausible, no matter how many additional reserves we discover.
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," according to Niels Bohr.
However, they don't label this a prediction, they label this as "here is the high emissions scenario." The question "what happens if current trends continue" seems like a reasonable thing to ask. If I were looking for something to call their prediction, I'd look at the middle of their many scenarios, not the most extreme one.
But, by the way, why should "current trends continue" be "economically utterly implausible"? It's not economically implausible now, why does it suddenly switch to being implausible?
Bottom line, however, is that the comment subject is accurate: "Runaway effect? Nope" is right on the mark. "Slow but real increase in temperature over a time scale of a century" is more like it
No, the bottom line is that people keep misrepresenting IPCC predictions as being "established science", when they are a mix of a core of "basic science", and (I quote you) "feedback loops that are much more complex and less understood",
As you pointed out very clearly in your previous post, the current IPCC best estimate of climate sensitivity, 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees per doubling, is pretty much identical to the one-dimensional constant-humidity model of Manabe and Wetherald. The only "feedback loop" is the assumption of constant humidity, which I don't think is particularly "complex and less understood."
predictions about poorly understood "effects of government action", and economic forecasts that assume that by 2100 we extract and burn the equivalent of all known fossil fuel reserves.
There needs to be a name for this logical fallacy; it's similar to strawman, but not quite identical. Basically, you took a whole array of different scenarios put forth by IPCC to look at the effect of all sorts of different possible things that could happen, you took the most extreme one, and you say "look at their prediction! It is absurd!". That wasn't their "prediction". That was their analysis "here is the result if this one particular scenario takes place."
On top of that misrepresentation comes even more fear mongering by famous scientists warning of runaway greenhouse effects (examples of which I quoted).
The one famous scientist you quoted was Stephen Hawking. He's not a climate scientist. He has said all sorts of silly things, among them that we should be afraid of aliens, AI, robots and nuclear war. What Stephen Hawking is afraid of is not really terribly relevant to climate science; if you want to know about climate, I'd listen to climate scientists.
The "slow but real increase" that you refer to and that basic physics tells us about is of sufficiently small magnitude not to warrant concern or intervention
That's a judgement call. I don't even disagree. I'm annoyed at people attacking the science beca
Look, stop waving your hands and read the literature. The "basic physics" model is described by Manabe and Wetherald (1967), a widely accepted and respected paper. It models both water and carbon dioxide and calculates that every doubling of carbon in the atmosphere leads to a 2C increase in global average temperatures, i.e., a logarithmic dependence.
Right. That logarithmic dependence is what the earlier comments in this thread labelled "saturation". The effect doesn't actually saturate, but additional increases have very much less effect per amount added (2.4 degrees C per doubling, for the constant-humidity model of Manabe and Wetherald, turns out to be within the error bars of the current IPCC "best estimate" of 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees C per doubling. Remarkably good job by Manabe and Wetherald over fifty years ago!)
It's consistent with measurements so far. When you extrapolate that to 1000 ppm, that means a temperature increase of about 2.6C. Of course, 1000 ppm is not realistically achievable even if we wanted to reach it. I believe there is 3x10^12 t of CO2 in the atmosphere
Looks about right.
and about 1x10^12 t of known fossil fuel reserves (not all of them recoverable;
Right on the number, wrong on the "not all of them recoverable". That number is the "proven reserves" of coal. Proven reserves are by definition extractable with today's technology; if they weren't believed to be extractable, they wouldn't be counted as reserves. (oil and natural gas add some to that, but not all that much-- there's a lot more coal known than oil and natural gas. Here's a link. https://knoema.com/smsfgud/bp-...)
The wild card, however, is that proven reserves refers to coal that's already been found and geologically mapped. (That's the "proven" part).
Here's a start, though, for an estimate of how much fossil fuel there is that we haven't found and mapped, if you like basic physics. According to what we know about planetary atmospheres, all of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere was produce by reduction of carbon dioxide. So, somewhere below the surface or sequestered in biomass, there's enough carbon to convert all of the oxygen in the atmosphere back into carbon dioxide.
I leave it to you to convert carbon to CO2).
multiply by 44/12. Carbon dioxide is 27% carbon by mass.
So, that's what basic physics tells us: if we even could burn all of our fossil fuels, global average temperatures would go up maybe 2.6C,
Again: all of the proven reserves. The amount of proven reserves increases as more geological prospecting is done. (Here's a nice graph of how the proven oil reserves changs with time: http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-co... . Coal has a much shallower slope, though, since coal is less valuable than oil.)
and most of that increase occurs at high latitudes.
Careful there. That number is average over the surface. What you mean to say is "with more increase at high latitudes".
Pardon me for not panicking.
Panicking is unnecessary. It is nice, however, to understand the basic science.
You're welcome to propose more complex models, but if you assert that people should believe those more complex models because they are "basic physics", you are misrepresenting them.
No, more complex models give you some error bars, but the basic constant-humidity model is pretty close to the current best guess.
You're misattributing decreases in carbon emission growth to governmen
Nice article, but it doesn't really mention all the work done by government sponsored programs to develop low-cost solar array technology in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.
And exactly how much solar adoption did 3 decades of spending cause?
All of it.
The current low-cost solar array technology is entirely the grandchildren of the technologies developed in the LSSA (Low-cost Silicon Solar Array) program, starting in 1975. Originally managed by JPL for the Energy Research And Development administration (ERDA), later transitioned to be renamed Flat Plate Solar Array under the Department of Energy, and then later moved to NREL.
Hillary's election was basically certain based on the data available.
Actually, it wasn't "basically certain"-- the best analysis, by fivethirtyeight, based on the polling numbers and error margins gave her roughly 70% chance of winning. Here's the thing: one time in four, a 25% chance happens.
The polls turned out to be a bad tool.
If you paid attention to the error margins, the polls weren't as bad as they look in retrospect. Basically, Hillary's margin of victory was roughly equal to the error margin in the polls. People just ignored that-- they only looked at the final number, not the error
That doesn't make reporting on those polls biased. It just makes them incorrect.
There was a bias in reporting, though-- reporters took the polls and listened to the ones that agreed most with their preconceptions, and ignore the margins of error.
I'm not sure you know how investigations work. That's how they begin. You nail them on the easy to prove stuff to get them to talk about the rest.
That may be how they work. But the post I was replying to said "Trump indictments", not "indictments of co-conspirators that might someday get people to talk and lead to others, arguably including Trump."
There are no Trump indictments. Saying "Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real," -- well, in fact they're not real. They don't exist.
Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real, sorry snowflake.
Uh, there is no Trump indictment.
There was an indictment of some people who worked on Trump's campaign-- most notably his former campaign manager. But the indictment was for stuff that they did before that-- 2008 to 2014, to be specific.
"There is no such thing as an objective highlight."
The article makes a bold assertion that WikiTribune is not objective, but fails to support the assertion with evidence.
The quote here is an input assumption: the writer starts out with the assumption that any highlights can't be objective, and from that assumption decides that therefore the WikiTribune must be biased.
That's probably true. But the article doesn't make the case.
Corporate power depends entirely on the government enforcement of their artificial rights. For example, no monopoly could exist without a government protecting it from competitors entering the market.
Good lord, learn a little bit of economics beyond that bare-bones summary you got in high school social-studies class, please.
Even Adam Smith knew better than that, and he wrote his book 240 years ago.
Some monopolies can be made by government enforcement, but by no means all. Economies of scale, for example, create natural monopolies: a smaller entity can't compete against a larger one if the cost of production is dominated by an expensive factory and the marginal cost per unit is small. (Note that in the decreasing cost to scale case, free-markets aren't even Pareto efficient!)
And, even WITHOUT economies of scale, large corporations use their power to drive small competitors out of business by selling at a loss until the less-well-funded entities go bankrupt (they then make their money back after they have driven everybody else out and can charge monopoly prices).
Nice article, but it doesn't really mention all the work done by government sponsored programs to develop low-cost solar array technology in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.
False understanding of economics. If $5 that you spend means that 10,000,000 people each save 0.005 cents (for a total savings of $500), then no, the solution wouldn't be "already widely implemented"-- even if you are one of those 10,000,000 people.
You continue to fabricate data.
Nope. I did, however, to continuing to discuss the hypothetical case that the previous poster set forth.
Hypothetical cases get used a lot. I assume you skipped mathematics classes, where they're called "word problems." (They were called "story problems" when I was a kid-- shows how old I am.)
I'm sorry you can't deal with story problems. Not my fault, though; I blame your math teacher.
In any case: take an economics course. You'll learn something.
And all without any laws or government intervention.
Yeah, anonymous coward above actually has it right (for a change): there were tremendous government incentives and government development programs and government demonstration projects that, over the course of decades, led to today's low-cost solar panels.
This just may end up being the poster-child example of the one time that government actions were done right.
No, renewables do not "save $500 in other ways" for every "$5/year added to a bill". If they did, they would already be widely adopted.
False understanding of economics. If $5 that you spend means that 10,000,000 people each save 0.005 cents (for a total savings of $500), then no, the solution wouldn't be "already widely implemented"-- even if you are one of those 10,000,000 people.
That's the generic problem when a cost is something that can be attributed to specific individuals, but the savings are distributed. You should have learned that in basic economics 101.
The parent comment really shows how awful the discussion, and especially the modding, has become here. Kendall, who has long been one of the most positive contributors to this site, is downmodded and punished for making a sensible, high-quality comment.
To the contrary; the parent comment shows how good the discussion, and the moderation, is. Kendall made a strawman assertion, one of the well-known logical fallacies (demolishing a position that nobody had asserted in the first place), and got called out for it, with several of the responders pointing out his fallacy in detail.
Unfortunately there isn't a "-1, strawman argument" moderation (there should be), but nevertheless, his argument didn't stand up, and he was quite correctly criticized for it.
When you attack somebody for asking questions, you aren't doing science. You're doing religion.
It's not so much attacking people for asking questions, it's people getting annoyed and frustrated at anonymous cowards making assertions and raising objections that have been answered over and over and over and over again. The people doing this aren't actually asking questions, because they don't actually care about getting answers.
The greenhouse effect is established science. Its basic physics than can be demonstrated in a laboratory. Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere makes the greenhouse effect stronger.
True, but the effects are diminishing with increasing concentrations. That's because CO2 acts like an optical filter, and most of the radiation is already absorbed.
Yes, the effect is logarithmic. This has been known since Arrhenius calculated it in 1896 [ref]. And it is incorporated into every single greenhouse model that is run.
It's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect-- about 1 degree C so far-- is so vastly smaller than the natural greenhouse effect, about 33 degrees C.[ref].
Really. This is already part of the science. You're not telling us anything that the scientists aren't already incorporating into their models.
So, if that basic physics was all there was to the science, we clearly wouldn't have to worry about carbon emissions at all.
That's not true. Again: all of the current models already incorporate the effect you notice.
In order to conclude that there is any significant danger from greenhouse gases, you have to run climate models that make various assumptions about positive feedback loops;
The main feedback effect is known as "constant humidity." If you want to turn this feedback off, you need to come up with a mechanism that decreases the humidity as the temperature rises. I'm not saying that such a model is impossible... but it's hard to come up with a realistic mechanism.
those feedback loops are not "basic physics",
They most certainly are.
can't be "demonstrated in a laboratory",
Humidity can't be measured in a laboratory? I beg to differ.
and are largely speculative and unproven at this point.
They are not.
You also have to assume that there are no additional negative feedback loops to counteract the effects, again something we don't know.
People have been searching for such a negative feedback loop for several decades. So far all of the ones proposed have been disproven by measurements.
Uh, you do know that people measure the properties of the atmosphere, right? And that climate models are baselined against measured values?
It's dishonest for you and others to conflate the basic physics of the greenhouse effect with the speculative models involving assumptions about feedback that are used to argue for the need to reduce carbon emissions.
Except for the most part these aren't speculative models. They're well-tested models that are checked against measurements. And, there are many thousands of models run-- by independent groups on all five continents-- and cross-checked against each other to see which effects dominate. That's why the climate study outputs have error bars, because one of the things we do know is how much we don't know.
Yes, that's right: the actual science includes error bars. That's one of the ways you can tell the science from the speculation, like yours.
The way you can tell CO2 doesn't have the effect on the climate the fear-mongers want you to think it does, is that as CO2 continues to climb climate changes do not track with CO2 increases,
The very first numerical integration of the greenhouse effect incorporating real-world IR aborption and convective/radiative heat transfer, Manabe and Wetherald 1967, predicted a 2.4C temperature rise per doubling. (The same as the current IPCC estimate: "in the range 2 to 4.5 C, with a most likely value of about 3 C.") Since then the CO2 has risen by a factor of 1.25 (from 322 ppm to 404 ppm), and the temperature by 0.98 degrees C. Looking at the correlation, yes the temperature has very well tracked with CO2-- the temperature is actually slightly higher than predicted (applying Arrhenius' logarithmic relationship)-- but well within error bars.
So, basically: you're wrong. Temperature does track CO2 increases.
much less exhibit any kind of runaway effect which is the whole reason you were supposed to fear CO2 to begin with.
Citation needed. What "runaway"?
CO2's effect has been demonstrated conclusively.
Really, in what way? How do you "demonstrate" the whole planet will warm into an unstoppable Venus like unlivable atmosphere? Because that's why we were told to fear CO2.
Strawman.. I suppose somebody, somewhere, some time might have talked about a scenario where Earth warms to Venus temperatures, but I don't know who and I've never heard that argument put forth. Actual scientists talk about: 3 degrees per doubling. How has it been "demonstrated conclusively"? Well, by measurements, for one.
Meanwhile in real life even though CO2 increases exponentially, we see only the same slow warming trend we have been seeing for a while.
Yes: carbon dioxide is increasing and the temperature is warming in the exact amount predicted. Your point is?
Even the IPCC now forecasts MAYBE 2C warming over 100 years.
And, remarkably, the IPCC hasn't changed that prediction at all. The 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report estimated that equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling lay between 1.5 and 4.5 C, with a "best guess in the light of current knowledge" of 2.5 C. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report stated: "Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5 C to 4.5 C (high confidence)".
Your comment subject is "Re:Runaway effect? Nope." That's correct. Nope. It's not happening, because it wasn't predicted in the first place. That's a strawman.
Insofar as he understands anything, he knows the desires of political hacks who will use this for massive control of the economy so they can get huge kickbacks to ease off a bit.
Ooh, libertarian-tainted conspiracy thinkings! The global illuminati/socialist/masonic/Rothschild conspiracy is making its bid for global control, and they're using solar power as their tool! Everybody organize to stop it!
Follow the money.
OK. The fossil fuel industry is a trillion dollar a year industry. Everything else is trivial compared to that number. Money followed: the fossil fuel industry is driving everything.
We should no more be throwing brakes on the economy
OK. To not brake the economy, the best thing to do would be to go rapidly into new energy technologies, which are economic growth areas, and quit supporting antique fossil-fuel plants that haven't been updates since Ford was in office.
than people in 1900 should have to "help" us today...leaving us with 1970 level tech (if that) in 2017.
Coal power is 1920s decade technology. Wind is 1990s decade technology. Low cost solar is 2000s decade technology. High capacity battery night storage is 2010 decade technology. If you're worried about 1970 level tech, that was fossil fuel, allright.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure where you get your data from. Every source I see says that polysilicon was far and away the driving factor behind solar panel cost (http://costofsolar.com/management/uploads/2013/12/solar-pv-cost-trend.png). Only recently did other factors supplant polysilicon costs as a primary cost driver:
And lowering poly cost was, of course, one of the many technical achievements of the old DOE program.
https://interestingengineering...
I suppose that last little bit is important, too, although the drop from a dollar a watt to fifty cents a watt is not nearly as important as the drop from seventy-five dollars a watt to a few dollars a watt. At either fifty cents a watt or a dollar a watt, installation costs dominate over panel purchase cost.
Here's a graph of solar cost from 1977, about when the ERDA program started: https://www.sunrun.com/sites/d... That drop from 1.31 to 0.50 you talk about is the tiny little bit at the end. You can see it if you kinda squint.
The fact that you don't seem to know about the decades-long ERDA and DOE programs doesn't mean that they didn't exist. I suppose you can call this the best kind of government program-- the kind where, at the end, the people making panels say "I did it all myself! The market works!"
I remember for years the phrase was "mathematically a bumblebee can't fly".
Well, that myth that theoretically a bumble bee can't fly is mostly a myth, you know.
Here's a longer explanation of where the myth comes from: http://www.abc.net.au/science/...
One for I don't give a shit - like a Reddit account and every other dipshit website that requires a login so that they can use their registered users for advertising and revenue - and that's why I will never register for Slashdot.
I don't get it-- why don't you use your "I don't give a shit" account password, here, too, if you use it on Reddit?
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," according to Niels Bohr.
However, they don't label this a prediction, they label this as "here is the high emissions scenario." The question "what happens if current trends continue" seems like a reasonable thing to ask. If I were looking for something to call their prediction, I'd look at the middle of their many scenarios, not the most extreme one.
But, by the way, why should "current trends continue" be "economically utterly implausible"? It's not economically implausible now, why does it suddenly switch to being implausible?
No, the bottom line is that people keep misrepresenting IPCC predictions as being "established science", when they are a mix of a core of "basic science", and (I quote you) "feedback loops that are much more complex and less understood",
As you pointed out very clearly in your previous post, the current IPCC best estimate of climate sensitivity, 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees per doubling, is pretty much identical to the one-dimensional constant-humidity model of Manabe and Wetherald. The only "feedback loop" is the assumption of constant humidity, which I don't think is particularly "complex and less understood."
predictions about poorly understood "effects of government action", and economic forecasts that assume that by 2100 we extract and burn the equivalent of all known fossil fuel reserves.
There needs to be a name for this logical fallacy; it's similar to strawman, but not quite identical. Basically, you took a whole array of different scenarios put forth by IPCC to look at the effect of all sorts of different possible things that could happen, you took the most extreme one, and you say "look at their prediction! It is absurd!". That wasn't their "prediction". That was their analysis "here is the result if this one particular scenario takes place."
On top of that misrepresentation comes even more fear mongering by famous scientists warning of runaway greenhouse effects (examples of which I quoted).
The one famous scientist you quoted was Stephen Hawking. He's not a climate scientist. He has said all sorts of silly things, among them that we should be afraid of aliens, AI, robots and nuclear war. What Stephen Hawking is afraid of is not really terribly relevant to climate science; if you want to know about climate, I'd listen to climate scientists.
The "slow but real increase" that you refer to and that basic physics tells us about is of sufficiently small magnitude not to warrant concern or intervention
That's a judgement call. I don't even disagree. I'm annoyed at people attacking the science beca
Look, stop waving your hands and read the literature. The "basic physics" model is described by Manabe and Wetherald (1967), a widely accepted and respected paper. It models both water and carbon dioxide and calculates that every doubling of carbon in the atmosphere leads to a 2C increase in global average temperatures, i.e., a logarithmic dependence.
Right. That logarithmic dependence is what the earlier comments in this thread labelled "saturation". The effect doesn't actually saturate, but additional increases have very much less effect per amount added (2.4 degrees C per doubling, for the constant-humidity model of Manabe and Wetherald, turns out to be within the error bars of the current IPCC "best estimate" of 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees C per doubling. Remarkably good job by Manabe and Wetherald over fifty years ago!)
It's consistent with measurements so far. When you extrapolate that to 1000 ppm, that means a temperature increase of about 2.6C. Of course, 1000 ppm is not realistically achievable even if we wanted to reach it. I believe there is 3x10^12 t of CO2 in the atmosphere
Looks about right.
and about 1x10^12 t of known fossil fuel reserves (not all of them recoverable;
Right on the number, wrong on the "not all of them recoverable". That number is the "proven reserves" of coal. Proven reserves are by definition extractable with today's technology; if they weren't believed to be extractable, they wouldn't be counted as reserves. (oil and natural gas add some to that, but not all that much-- there's a lot more coal known than oil and natural gas. Here's a link. https://knoema.com/smsfgud/bp-...)
The wild card, however, is that proven reserves refers to coal that's already been found and geologically mapped. (That's the "proven" part).
Here's a start, though, for an estimate of how much fossil fuel there is that we haven't found and mapped, if you like basic physics. According to what we know about planetary atmospheres, all of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere was produce by reduction of carbon dioxide. So, somewhere below the surface or sequestered in biomass, there's enough carbon to convert all of the oxygen in the atmosphere back into carbon dioxide.
I leave it to you to convert carbon to CO2).
multiply by 44/12. Carbon dioxide is 27% carbon by mass.
So, that's what basic physics tells us: if we even could burn all of our fossil fuels, global average temperatures would go up maybe 2.6C,
Again: all of the proven reserves. The amount of proven reserves increases as more geological prospecting is done. (Here's a nice graph of how the proven oil reserves changs with time: http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-co... . Coal has a much shallower slope, though, since coal is less valuable than oil.)
and most of that increase occurs at high latitudes.
Careful there. That number is average over the surface. What you mean to say is "with more increase at high latitudes".
Pardon me for not panicking.
Panicking is unnecessary. It is nice, however, to understand the basic science.
You're welcome to propose more complex models, but if you assert that people should believe those more complex models because they are "basic physics", you are misrepresenting them.
No, more complex models give you some error bars, but the basic constant-humidity model is pretty close to the current best guess.
You're misattributing decreases in carbon emission growth to governmen
And exactly how much solar adoption did 3 decades of spending cause?
All of it.
The current low-cost solar array technology is entirely the grandchildren of the technologies developed in the LSSA (Low-cost Silicon Solar Array) program, starting in 1975. Originally managed by JPL for the Energy Research And Development administration (ERDA), later transitioned to be renamed Flat Plate Solar Array under the Department of Energy, and then later moved to NREL.
Here's another report of the same Google problem, including Google's response: "A mysterious message is locking Google Docs users out of their files"
Hillary's election was basically certain based on the data available.
Actually, it wasn't "basically certain"-- the best analysis, by fivethirtyeight, based on the polling numbers and error margins gave her roughly 70% chance of winning. Here's the thing: one time in four, a 25% chance happens.
The polls turned out to be a bad tool.
If you paid attention to the error margins, the polls weren't as bad as they look in retrospect. Basically, Hillary's margin of victory was roughly equal to the error margin in the polls. People just ignored that-- they only looked at the final number, not the error
That doesn't make reporting on those polls biased. It just makes them incorrect.
There was a bias in reporting, though-- reporters took the polls and listened to the ones that agreed most with their preconceptions, and ignore the margins of error.
I'm not sure you know how investigations work. That's how they begin. You nail them on the easy to prove stuff to get them to talk about the rest.
That may be how they work. But the post I was replying to said "Trump indictments", not "indictments of co-conspirators that might someday get people to talk and lead to others, arguably including Trump."
There are no Trump indictments. Saying "Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real," -- well, in fact they're not real. They don't exist.
Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real, sorry snowflake.
Uh, there is no Trump indictment.
There was an indictment of some people who worked on Trump's campaign-- most notably his former campaign manager. But the indictment was for stuff that they did before that-- 2008 to 2014, to be specific.
You need to start reading an unbiased news source. Try this one: http://www.politifact.com/trut...
"There is no such thing as an objective highlight."
The article makes a bold assertion that WikiTribune is not objective, but fails to support the assertion with evidence.
The quote here is an input assumption: the writer starts out with the assumption that any highlights can't be objective, and from that assumption decides that therefore the WikiTribune must be biased.
That's probably true. But the article doesn't make the case.
Corporate power depends entirely on the government enforcement of their artificial rights. For example, no monopoly could exist without a government protecting it from competitors entering the market.
Good lord, learn a little bit of economics beyond that bare-bones summary you got in high school social-studies class, please. Even Adam Smith knew better than that, and he wrote his book 240 years ago.
Some monopolies can be made by government enforcement, but by no means all. Economies of scale, for example, create natural monopolies: a smaller entity can't compete against a larger one if the cost of production is dominated by an expensive factory and the marginal cost per unit is small. (Note that in the decreasing cost to scale case, free-markets aren't even Pareto efficient!)
And, even WITHOUT economies of scale, large corporations use their power to drive small competitors out of business by selling at a loss until the less-well-funded entities go bankrupt (they then make their money back after they have driven everybody else out and can charge monopoly prices).
I.e., you continue to fabricate data.
I bought my last car from a friend.
You're telling me I FABRICATED my car?? Personally?
No.
Nice article, but it doesn't really mention all the work done by government sponsored programs to develop low-cost solar array technology in the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s.
You continue to fabricate data.
Nope. I did, however, to continuing to discuss the hypothetical case that the previous poster set forth.
Hypothetical cases get used a lot. I assume you skipped mathematics classes, where they're called "word problems." (They were called "story problems" when I was a kid-- shows how old I am.)
I'm sorry you can't deal with story problems. Not my fault, though; I blame your math teacher.
In any case: take an economics course. You'll learn something.
When someone talks about The CO2 Apocalypse, and out of the other side of their mouth chants "No Nukes Shut 'em All Down Now"...
Strawman argument. Who are those people?
Certainly none of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or these http://www.independent.co.uk/n... or these http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/...
And all without any laws or government intervention.
Yeah, anonymous coward above actually has it right (for a change): there were tremendous government incentives and government development programs and government demonstration projects that, over the course of decades, led to today's low-cost solar panels.
This just may end up being the poster-child example of the one time that government actions were done right.
No, renewables do not "save $500 in other ways" for every "$5/year added to a bill". If they did, they would already be widely adopted.
False understanding of economics. If $5 that you spend means that 10,000,000 people each save 0.005 cents (for a total savings of $500), then no, the solution wouldn't be "already widely implemented"-- even if you are one of those 10,000,000 people.
That's the generic problem when a cost is something that can be attributed to specific individuals, but the savings are distributed. You should have learned that in basic economics 101.
If you really want to limit CO2 output, you need to find a better way to make concrete, or outlaw portland cement.
Yes, people are in fact looking at that: http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or....
Cement is only about 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, though, so at the moment it's not the driver. ( http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2... )
People are looking at alternatives: https://phys.org/news/2015-09-...
Climate Change is a Threat... But apparently not enough of a threat to convince the anti-nukes to abandon their irrational fears.
To the contrary: it is indeed enough of a threat to make the anti-nukes abandon their irrational fears. Pay attention.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nuclear-power-is-the-greenest-option-say-top-scientists-9955997.html
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/nuclear-power-renewables-climate-change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pro-nuclear_environmentalists
http://www.ecomodernism.org/readings/2015/6/17/why-a-green-future-needs-nuclear-power
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/
http://grist.org/news/more-nukes-james-hansen-leads-call-for-safer-nuclear-power-to-save-climate/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-must-make-a-comeback-for-climate-s-sake/
The parent comment really shows how awful the discussion, and especially the modding, has become here. Kendall, who has long been one of the most positive contributors to this site, is downmodded and punished for making a sensible, high-quality comment.
To the contrary; the parent comment shows how good the discussion, and the moderation, is. Kendall made a strawman assertion, one of the well-known logical fallacies (demolishing a position that nobody had asserted in the first place), and got called out for it, with several of the responders pointing out his fallacy in detail.
Unfortunately there isn't a "-1, strawman argument" moderation (there should be), but nevertheless, his argument didn't stand up, and he was quite correctly criticized for it.
When you attack somebody for asking questions, you aren't doing science. You're doing religion.
It's not so much attacking people for asking questions, it's people getting annoyed and frustrated at anonymous cowards making assertions and raising objections that have been answered over and over and over and over again. The people doing this aren't actually asking questions, because they don't actually care about getting answers.
True, but the effects are diminishing with increasing concentrations. That's because CO2 acts like an optical filter, and most of the radiation is already absorbed.
Yes, the effect is logarithmic. This has been known since Arrhenius calculated it in 1896 [ref]. And it is incorporated into every single greenhouse model that is run.
It's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect-- about 1 degree C so far-- is so vastly smaller than the natural greenhouse effect, about 33 degrees C.[ref].
Really. This is already part of the science. You're not telling us anything that the scientists aren't already incorporating into their models.
So, if that basic physics was all there was to the science, we clearly wouldn't have to worry about carbon emissions at all.
That's not true. Again: all of the current models already incorporate the effect you notice.
In order to conclude that there is any significant danger from greenhouse gases, you have to run climate models that make various assumptions about positive feedback loops;
The main feedback effect is known as "constant humidity." If you want to turn this feedback off, you need to come up with a mechanism that decreases the humidity as the temperature rises. I'm not saying that such a model is impossible... but it's hard to come up with a realistic mechanism.
those feedback loops are not "basic physics",
They most certainly are.
can't be "demonstrated in a laboratory",
Humidity can't be measured in a laboratory? I beg to differ.
and are largely speculative and unproven at this point.
They are not.
You also have to assume that there are no additional negative feedback loops to counteract the effects, again something we don't know.
People have been searching for such a negative feedback loop for several decades. So far all of the ones proposed have been disproven by measurements.
Uh, you do know that people measure the properties of the atmosphere, right? And that climate models are baselined against measured values?
It's dishonest for you and others to conflate the basic physics of the greenhouse effect with the speculative models involving assumptions about feedback that are used to argue for the need to reduce carbon emissions.
Except for the most part these aren't speculative models. They're well-tested models that are checked against measurements. And, there are many thousands of models run-- by independent groups on all five continents-- and cross-checked against each other to see which effects dominate. That's why the climate study outputs have error bars, because one of the things we do know is how much we don't know.
Yes, that's right: the actual science includes error bars. That's one of the ways you can tell the science from the speculation, like yours.
The way you can tell CO2 doesn't have the effect on the climate the fear-mongers want you to think it does, is that as CO2 continues to climb climate changes do not track with CO2 increases,
The very first numerical integration of the greenhouse effect incorporating real-world IR aborption and convective/radiative heat transfer, Manabe and Wetherald 1967, predicted a 2.4C temperature rise per doubling. (The same as the current IPCC estimate: "in the range 2 to 4.5 C, with a most likely value of about 3 C.") Since then the CO2 has risen by a factor of 1.25 (from 322 ppm to 404 ppm), and the temperature by 0.98 degrees C. Looking at the correlation, yes the temperature has very well tracked with CO2-- the temperature is actually slightly higher than predicted (applying Arrhenius' logarithmic relationship)-- but well within error bars.
So, basically: you're wrong. Temperature does track CO2 increases.
much less exhibit any kind of runaway effect which is the whole reason you were supposed to fear CO2 to begin with.
Citation needed. What "runaway"?
CO2's effect has been demonstrated conclusively.
Really, in what way? How do you "demonstrate" the whole planet will warm into an unstoppable Venus like unlivable atmosphere? Because that's why we were told to fear CO2.
Strawman.. I suppose somebody, somewhere, some time might have talked about a scenario where Earth warms to Venus temperatures, but I don't know who and I've never heard that argument put forth. Actual scientists talk about: 3 degrees per doubling. How has it been "demonstrated conclusively"? Well, by measurements, for one.
Meanwhile in real life even though CO2 increases exponentially, we see only the same slow warming trend we have been seeing for a while.
Yes: carbon dioxide is increasing and the temperature is warming in the exact amount predicted. Your point is?
Even the IPCC now forecasts MAYBE 2C warming over 100 years.
And, remarkably, the IPCC hasn't changed that prediction at all. The 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report estimated that equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling lay between 1.5 and 4.5 C, with a "best guess in the light of current knowledge" of 2.5 C. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report stated: "Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5 C to 4.5 C (high confidence)".
Your comment subject is "Re:Runaway effect? Nope." That's correct. Nope. It's not happening, because it wasn't predicted in the first place. That's a strawman.
Insofar as he understands anything, he knows the desires of political hacks who will use this for massive control of the economy so they can get huge kickbacks to ease off a bit.
Ooh, libertarian-tainted conspiracy thinkings! The global illuminati/socialist/masonic/Rothschild conspiracy is making its bid for global control, and they're using solar power as their tool! Everybody organize to stop it!
Follow the money.
OK. The fossil fuel industry is a trillion dollar a year industry. Everything else is trivial compared to that number. Money followed: the fossil fuel industry is driving everything.
We should no more be throwing brakes on the economy
OK. To not brake the economy, the best thing to do would be to go rapidly into new energy technologies, which are economic growth areas, and quit supporting antique fossil-fuel plants that haven't been updates since Ford was in office.
than people in 1900 should have to "help" us today...leaving us with 1970 level tech (if that) in 2017.
Coal power is 1920s decade technology. Wind is 1990s decade technology. Low cost solar is 2000s decade technology. High capacity battery night storage is 2010 decade technology. If you're worried about 1970 level tech, that was fossil fuel, allright.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How about "moderation -1 stupid" instead?