I said Europe, not Germany. If you pick out individual EU members, then compare them to the best individual US states.
No states in the USA have been military dictatorships or under communism within living memory, so I think comparing with North Western European nations is fair.
I think it also depends on which bits are socialised, which bits not. Some have good 'bang for the buck' in terms of a safety net that encourages people to take risks and promotes business creation. If you can start a business which might be tough going for the first two years without needing to first raise capital to cover your medical costs for those two years, it may encourage you to do so. I don't know if the fear of failure and the lack of safety net makes it more likely for a new business to survive - I haven't seen figures. To be fair, I am not sure what the business creation rate is in Denmark or the USA either, but you'd need to look wider than just two countries, as the cultures are also different, and Danes might prefer to snuggle up in warm slippers with hot chocolate at home rather than start a new tech business.
It didn't work so well in Greece as Greece is poorer, and suffered from massive under investment in infrastructure up until the 90s, and then tried to correct that by borrowing lots, which then blew up during the credit crunch.
Most progressives I've met seem pretty happy with technological progress. It seems to be more conservatives that dream of nuns cycling through the mist to evensong, internet be damned.
If the US is supposed to lead on renewable energies, the last thing it should do is saddle its economy with the kind of stifling regulations that European nations impose.
Growth rates in EU nations which have been expanding renewable energy the most have been higher than average, so there doesn't seem to be much evidence on that sort of gross, macroeconomic scale for stifling. A full analysis would analyse it in more detail, though, so you may or may not be right. It doesn't seem entirely convincing, though, as an initial stance.
Furthermore, US carbon emissions have been dropping faster than European carbon emissions.
I took a look at that. Here I will unashamedly use per capita figures to remove any effect of population change: Germany 1995: 10.6, 2013: 9.2. USA 1995: 19.3, 2013: 16.4, so that's 13% for Germany, 15% for the USA. So for those two countries you are correct, but it's pretty close. For the UK 9.3 to 7.1, or 24%, France 5.9 and 5.0 (16%). But for the EU as a whole, it has gone from 7.2 to 8.6 tons, but the definition of the EU has changed, so I am not sure to what extent that has affected figures, but on the whole of the EU you may indeed be correct, but for European nations as a whole, maybe not. It surprised me that it had gone up overall in the EU. This is where looking at the embedded carbon of goods and services traded would probably make for a better analysis. I know this has been done for some countries, but whether there are robust figures for trends, I don't know, but I will see if I can find more information. You may well have a point that places like Germany have reduced emissions through moving of industry. Some of the production may have been moved to the far east, which might also be true for the USA, but with that not being captured within its borders. Looking at Mexico, per capita emissions remained pretty much static from 1995 to 2013, so it might be that US industry outsourced there may well have been relatively energy efficient, so that might give the USA an advantage I would not have expected overall, from trade with Mexico.
I will see if I can find any figures for per capita emissions that include products and service imports and exports. It may lend weight to your case, in terms of the overall rate-of-change in the USA.
In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average.
Then I apologise wholeheartedly for my failure of reading comprehension.
And your evidence you can simply find yourself, next time you feel hot get big enough bucket of water that you can put both feet into it and try it yourself.
It does indeed feel good. It doesn't mean it's effective. What you want to do to cool the body down is to promote evaporative cooling. The amount of evaporative cooling you get from dunking your feet in cold water is minimal, but may trick your body into thinking that it is cooler than it is (wrong signals to the hypothalamus), and reduce sweating and thus reduce evaporative cooling over the whole body (which is bigger than the feet) and be counter productive. This is what I mean about 'common sense' sometimes being nothing of the sort, and evidence trumping this. I am trying to track down a link for you, and I will post that later if I find one, but most of the hits for my current search terms on Google are just pulling up tabloid newspaper articles telling you to not sit in the sun and drink water, which really is common sense that is also actually true.
per-capita measures of carbon emissions are meaningless. Looks like you agree.
If you thought that, you are mistaken. My point is that they are not meaningless, but there are simplistic and complete calculations that can be made. My other point was to correct your assertion that the USA is particularly carbon-efficient, as by the simplistic measures it is not, and the more complete measures are unlikely to change that. If you have figures which are different, then I'd love to know (and that's a genuine interest, not a rhetorical point).
Of course, ultimately the planet only cares about the total.
What's the "embedded carbon" in a movie? In a bank transaction?
People have tried to determine that.
Most of the carbon these days isn't embedded in physical products.
The major areas are light, heat, motive force for vehicles, products, an other. Other is at the end of that spectrum. It's estimated that all computer server use accounts for around 2% of all energy expended.
The numbers we can compare are carbon intensity under various assignments of economic activity between countries. But even there, it's unclear why anybody should care.
If you care about your country being efficient, and not damaging the planet more than necessary for a given standard of living, then you should care.
What I was hinting that is, in the UK, I haven't heard of any coal plants or other thermal plants, which use cooling towers in the UK, closing down over the summer. So that suggests that cooling towers seem to have been doing reasonably well, as there haven't been any power cuts. Granted, in the UK air con is less common (my workplace has it, though) and the nights are light, and people have been spending more time outside burning things ('BBQ' is apparently what it is called), so perhaps demand has been sufficiently low that coal plants have been throttled back somewhat. I've heard that wind has been relatively thin. I suppose I could go and look up the figures, as the National Grid provides a lot of live and historical output figures.
German manufacturers have moved a lot of carbon intensive and environmentally harmful production to other countries (including, ironically, solar cells). Similarly for energy generation.
Germany is one of the largest exporters of industrial output per capita by value, possibly the largest, so it is still impressive, and the USA also outsources carbon-intensive industry. To be fair, you have a point in that some from Germany has been outsourced to Poland, which although it has a relatively low carbon output per capita, has low carbon intensity compared to Germany or the USA (about 1/3). In that sense it's a bit like the USA and Mexico which also has a pretty low carbon footprint per capita, but low GDP per capita, so poor carbon intensity. In that sense it reflects under investment in both countries in a historical sense.
Where there has been better investment (USA, Germany, France, UK, Japan, etc) then carbon intensity is much better. If you compare nations that have broadly been in 'The West' for 50 years, then most (e.g. those on the list above) score over $4000/ton CO2e per capita, but the USA currently scores around $3500, so is about 10% worse. It was nearer 20% worse than Germany is now 20 years ago (inflation adjusted), and Germany was only (from memory) 10% worse then than now. All Western nations are improving both their carbon efficiency and overall output, at least.
Where it does get tricky, though, is determining to what extent the embedded carbon of imports affects things. Some reports suggest that on that basis the UK, for example, is ultimately responsible for more CO2 output than 20 years ago, but this may be true of most European nations. Certainly for Denmark (lowest internal carbon footprint on the planet) needs to have the carbon cost of imports included to have a fair comparison. Perhaps exports should be deducted from the footprint and added to that of receiving nations. The calculations get complex, though, but it might be fair. It would mean, though, that the carbon footprint of China, per capita, might look much lower than now, due to the level of exports. It would also mean that the carbon efficiency of many nations would end up being tied to those from which their imports come.
The primary cause of the higher per capita carbon emissions is simply the higher per capita GDP of the US. We're just talking about secondary effects now, and they are related to the size of different sectors in the economy, import/export, climate, transportation, population, etc. The point is not that one country is more virtuous than the other, the point is that these are things you can't easily change.
Your contention was that the USA was more carbon efficient. I pointed out that this was incorrect. You are changing the subject. If the USA was an carbon efficient with respect to GDP as Germany, its emissions would be lower with the same GDP. Whilst it is true that nations with higher GDP per capita tend to have higher emissions, the country with the lowest emissions on the planet in terms of within its borders has almost as high a GDP per capita as the USA. Granted, it is a small nation, so it outsources more of its carbon-intenstive consumption outside its borders, but it does indicate the USA could be doing better. And the USA is an inventive nation, with many great achievements under its belt, so there's no particular reason it could not do better, and it would be great to see, not just for the planet, but because it would be good for the USA to be leading on such an important area of technology even more than it is already.
The biggest problem is that the average person born after 1950 is simply put: super dumb
On what basis do you suggest this? Do you have any citations?,/p>
The only "extreme" we have at the moment is that the "heat wave" covers all Europe
And other countries, as apparently places like Korea have had hot temperatures, apparently.
The easy way to handle heat like that is old school: a foot bath with cold water. Or if you really are that touched by a little bit of heat, a cold water (ice?) filled towel on your forehead, or putting your arms into cold water.
Poor advice as those will make you feel cooler, but won't significantly increase the rate at which you cool, as the feet or head are pretty small areas of the body overall. Don't come back with the nonsense about how you lose a huge amount of heat through the head in winter, as you pretty much lose it in proportion to the surface area of the head.
100 years ago that was common sense!
I prefer to use things that are evidence-based, as many things that were common sense 100 years ago (smoking helps with a sore throat, for example) have turned out to be really bad ideas.
They want to minimise the amount of coding required, hence reducing the file systems supported. Adding checks seems to undermine what Dropbox's guiding principle is likely to be, so checking for this seems unlikely.
There are many sorts of neural networks. Using FP for weights isn't necessarily required, although it's certainly simpler to program backprop that way than try to use integer mathematics. Backprop isn't the only form of neural network available, although to some extent it depends on how you define neural network.
As I understand it (relative who worked in the sector, as my work related to the energy sector was only with regard to large wind turbines) is that domestic wind is mostly not worth it due to shadowing from other buildings, unless you live on a hill, but that ground source heat pumps can be viable. If you place a large insulated block under ground you can dump heat into it in summer, draw it out in winter, but it's a huge cost and disruption, not least to the environment.
This was one of the issues in 2003, although I suspect the high death toll amongst the older population was due to most people not having air conditioning, rather than insufficient power to run it, plus older people tend not to be as able to sense or regulate body temperature so may try to do too much and not sense the danger signs.
Ideally newer homes should have high levels on insulation, and possibly a section of high thermal mass that can regulate temperatures year round. It's not necessarily expensive in terms of materials, but it does mean designing with respect to the locality, and ensuring future developments don't do things like alter solar gain.
In terms of energy, a mix of baseload, renewable that generally tracks demand, and peaking is likely to be required. It's not going to be cheap, as redundancy is required. It would be simpler to use just nuclear, coal and gas, we're it not for climate change.
100W, not 1000. And it's only a threat to life in rivers if they live in them, and even given the propensity to build on floodplains, that isn't really happening.
Denmark has a lower DIRECT per capita carbon emissions rate than any nation in Africa. What the full footprint of a Dane is including goods and services from outside Denmark is I don't know for sure, but the EU average is around 6 tons, so maybe 3? The African average is somewhat under 1, but averaging out Europe and Africa would be about the same as Denmark, although it would be an increase in total, as the population of Africa is larger. It would not be enough, but perhaps it might just be achievable if we are lucky.
Well, if the population doubled, and emissions per capita in China fell by 60% it would mean lower total emissions, so yes, it would be better for the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I said Europe, not Germany. If you pick out individual EU members, then compare them to the best individual US states.
No states in the USA have been military dictatorships or under communism within living memory, so I think comparing with North Western European nations is fair.
In terms of biological diversity and suitability for primates and humans, up to 1000 ppm is clearly fine
Rate of change matters. It's not fine.
he US is pretty average among Western nations in that regard.
Average seems a low target to aim for.
Poor work ethic
Greeks tend to work longer hours than Danes, though, and it has been true for decades.
I think it also depends on which bits are socialised, which bits not. Some have good 'bang for the buck' in terms of a safety net that encourages people to take risks and promotes business creation. If you can start a business which might be tough going for the first two years without needing to first raise capital to cover your medical costs for those two years, it may encourage you to do so. I don't know if the fear of failure and the lack of safety net makes it more likely for a new business to survive - I haven't seen figures. To be fair, I am not sure what the business creation rate is in Denmark or the USA either, but you'd need to look wider than just two countries, as the cultures are also different, and Danes might prefer to snuggle up in warm slippers with hot chocolate at home rather than start a new tech business.
It didn't work so well in Greece as Greece is poorer, and suffered from massive under investment in infrastructure up until the 90s, and then tried to correct that by borrowing lots, which then blew up during the credit crunch.
Most progressives I've met seem pretty happy with technological progress. It seems to be more conservatives that dream of nuns cycling through the mist to evensong, internet be damned.
You might not want it, but Danes keep voting for it, and seem to be very happy in general. It seems to work for them.
If the US is supposed to lead on renewable energies, the last thing it should do is saddle its economy with the kind of stifling regulations that European nations impose.
Growth rates in EU nations which have been expanding renewable energy the most have been higher than average, so there doesn't seem to be much evidence on that sort of gross, macroeconomic scale for stifling. A full analysis would analyse it in more detail, though, so you may or may not be right. It doesn't seem entirely convincing, though, as an initial stance.
Furthermore, US carbon emissions have been dropping faster than European carbon emissions.
I took a look at that. Here I will unashamedly use per capita figures to remove any effect of population change: Germany 1995: 10.6, 2013: 9.2. USA 1995: 19.3, 2013: 16.4, so that's 13% for Germany, 15% for the USA. So for those two countries you are correct, but it's pretty close. For the UK 9.3 to 7.1, or 24%, France 5.9 and 5.0 (16%). But for the EU as a whole, it has gone from 7.2 to 8.6 tons, but the definition of the EU has changed, so I am not sure to what extent that has affected figures, but on the whole of the EU you may indeed be correct, but for European nations as a whole, maybe not. It surprised me that it had gone up overall in the EU. This is where looking at the embedded carbon of goods and services traded would probably make for a better analysis. I know this has been done for some countries, but whether there are robust figures for trends, I don't know, but I will see if I can find more information. You may well have a point that places like Germany have reduced emissions through moving of industry. Some of the production may have been moved to the far east, which might also be true for the USA, but with that not being captured within its borders. Looking at Mexico, per capita emissions remained pretty much static from 1995 to 2013, so it might be that US industry outsourced there may well have been relatively energy efficient, so that might give the USA an advantage I would not have expected overall, from trade with Mexico.
I will see if I can find any figures for per capita emissions that include products and service imports and exports. It may lend weight to your case, in terms of the overall rate-of-change in the USA.
I said no such thing. What I said is:
In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average.
Then I apologise wholeheartedly for my failure of reading comprehension.
And your evidence you can simply find yourself, next time you feel hot get big enough bucket of water that you can put both feet into it and try it yourself.
It does indeed feel good. It doesn't mean it's effective. What you want to do to cool the body down is to promote evaporative cooling. The amount of evaporative cooling you get from dunking your feet in cold water is minimal, but may trick your body into thinking that it is cooler than it is (wrong signals to the hypothalamus), and reduce sweating and thus reduce evaporative cooling over the whole body (which is bigger than the feet) and be counter productive. This is what I mean about 'common sense' sometimes being nothing of the sort, and evidence trumping this. I am trying to track down a link for you, and I will post that later if I find one, but most of the hits for my current search terms on Google are just pulling up tabloid newspaper articles telling you to not sit in the sun and drink water, which really is common sense that is also actually true.
per-capita measures of carbon emissions are meaningless. Looks like you agree.
If you thought that, you are mistaken. My point is that they are not meaningless, but there are simplistic and complete calculations that can be made. My other point was to correct your assertion that the USA is particularly carbon-efficient, as by the simplistic measures it is not, and the more complete measures are unlikely to change that. If you have figures which are different, then I'd love to know (and that's a genuine interest, not a rhetorical point).
Of course, ultimately the planet only cares about the total.
What's the "embedded carbon" in a movie? In a bank transaction?
People have tried to determine that.
Most of the carbon these days isn't embedded in physical products.
The major areas are light, heat, motive force for vehicles, products, an other. Other is at the end of that spectrum. It's estimated that all computer server use accounts for around 2% of all energy expended.
The numbers we can compare are carbon intensity under various assignments of economic activity between countries. But even there, it's unclear why anybody should care.
If you care about your country being efficient, and not damaging the planet more than necessary for a given standard of living, then you should care.
What I was hinting that is, in the UK, I haven't heard of any coal plants or other thermal plants, which use cooling towers in the UK, closing down over the summer. So that suggests that cooling towers seem to have been doing reasonably well, as there haven't been any power cuts. Granted, in the UK air con is less common (my workplace has it, though) and the nights are light, and people have been spending more time outside burning things ('BBQ' is apparently what it is called), so perhaps demand has been sufficiently low that coal plants have been throttled back somewhat. I've heard that wind has been relatively thin. I suppose I could go and look up the figures, as the National Grid provides a lot of live and historical output figures.
German manufacturers have moved a lot of carbon intensive and environmentally harmful production to other countries (including, ironically, solar cells). Similarly for energy generation.
Germany is one of the largest exporters of industrial output per capita by value, possibly the largest, so it is still impressive, and the USA also outsources carbon-intensive industry. To be fair, you have a point in that some from Germany has been outsourced to Poland, which although it has a relatively low carbon output per capita, has low carbon intensity compared to Germany or the USA (about 1/3). In that sense it's a bit like the USA and Mexico which also has a pretty low carbon footprint per capita, but low GDP per capita, so poor carbon intensity. In that sense it reflects under investment in both countries in a historical sense.
Where there has been better investment (USA, Germany, France, UK, Japan, etc) then carbon intensity is much better. If you compare nations that have broadly been in 'The West' for 50 years, then most (e.g. those on the list above) score over $4000/ton CO2e per capita, but the USA currently scores around $3500, so is about 10% worse. It was nearer 20% worse than Germany is now 20 years ago (inflation adjusted), and Germany was only (from memory) 10% worse then than now. All Western nations are improving both their carbon efficiency and overall output, at least.
Where it does get tricky, though, is determining to what extent the embedded carbon of imports affects things. Some reports suggest that on that basis the UK, for example, is ultimately responsible for more CO2 output than 20 years ago, but this may be true of most European nations. Certainly for Denmark (lowest internal carbon footprint on the planet) needs to have the carbon cost of imports included to have a fair comparison. Perhaps exports should be deducted from the footprint and added to that of receiving nations. The calculations get complex, though, but it might be fair. It would mean, though, that the carbon footprint of China, per capita, might look much lower than now, due to the level of exports. It would also mean that the carbon efficiency of many nations would end up being tied to those from which their imports come.
The primary cause of the higher per capita carbon emissions is simply the higher per capita GDP of the US. We're just talking about secondary effects now, and they are related to the size of different sectors in the economy, import/export, climate, transportation, population, etc. The point is not that one country is more virtuous than the other, the point is that these are things you can't easily change.
Your contention was that the USA was more carbon efficient. I pointed out that this was incorrect. You are changing the subject. If the USA was an carbon efficient with respect to GDP as Germany, its emissions would be lower with the same GDP. Whilst it is true that nations with higher GDP per capita tend to have higher emissions, the country with the lowest emissions on the planet in terms of within its borders has almost as high a GDP per capita as the USA. Granted, it is a small nation, so it outsources more of its carbon-intenstive consumption outside its borders, but it does indicate the USA could be doing better. And the USA is an inventive nation, with many great achievements under its belt, so there's no particular reason it could not do better, and it would be great to see, not just for the planet, but because it would be good for the USA to be leading on such an important area of technology even more than it is already.
The biggest problem is that the average person born after 1950 is simply put: super dumb
On what basis do you suggest this? Do you have any citations?,/p>
The only "extreme" we have at the moment is that the "heat wave" covers all Europe
And other countries, as apparently places like Korea have had hot temperatures, apparently.
The easy way to handle heat like that is old school: a foot bath with cold water. Or if you really are that touched by a little bit of heat, a cold water (ice?) filled towel on your forehead, or putting your arms into cold water.
Poor advice as those will make you feel cooler, but won't significantly increase the rate at which you cool, as the feet or head are pretty small areas of the body overall. Don't come back with the nonsense about how you lose a huge amount of heat through the head in winter, as you pretty much lose it in proportion to the surface area of the head.
100 years ago that was common sense!
I prefer to use things that are evidence-based, as many things that were common sense 100 years ago (smoking helps with a sore throat, for example) have turned out to be really bad ideas.
They want to minimise the amount of coding required, hence reducing the file systems supported. Adding checks seems to undermine what Dropbox's guiding principle is likely to be, so checking for this seems unlikely.
There are many sorts of neural networks. Using FP for weights isn't necessarily required, although it's certainly simpler to program backprop that way than try to use integer mathematics. Backprop isn't the only form of neural network available, although to some extent it depends on how you define neural network.
Cooling towers are used in many plants, nuclear and coal, and seem to work.
As I understand it (relative who worked in the sector, as my work related to the energy sector was only with regard to large wind turbines) is that domestic wind is mostly not worth it due to shadowing from other buildings, unless you live on a hill, but that ground source heat pumps can be viable. If you place a large insulated block under ground you can dump heat into it in summer, draw it out in winter, but it's a huge cost and disruption, not least to the environment.
Grrr... Formatting
This was one of the issues in 2003, although I suspect the high death toll amongst the older population was due to most people not having air conditioning, rather than insufficient power to run it, plus older people tend not to be as able to sense or regulate body temperature so may try to do too much and not sense the danger signs. Ideally newer homes should have high levels on insulation, and possibly a section of high thermal mass that can regulate temperatures year round. It's not necessarily expensive in terms of materials, but it does mean designing with respect to the locality, and ensuring future developments don't do things like alter solar gain. In terms of energy, a mix of baseload, renewable that generally tracks demand, and peaking is likely to be required. It's not going to be cheap, as redundancy is required. It would be simpler to use just nuclear, coal and gas, we're it not for climate change.
100W, not 1000. And it's only a threat to life in rivers if they live in them, and even given the propensity to build on floodplains, that isn't really happening.
Consumer goods are a large part of the US economy, and services a large part of European one's.
Denmark has a lower DIRECT per capita carbon emissions rate than any nation in Africa. What the full footprint of a Dane is including goods and services from outside Denmark is I don't know for sure, but the EU average is around 6 tons, so maybe 3? The African average is somewhat under 1, but averaging out Europe and Africa would be about the same as Denmark, although it would be an increase in total, as the population of Africa is larger. It would not be enough, but perhaps it might just be achievable if we are lucky.
Well, if the population doubled, and emissions per capita in China fell by 60% it would mean lower total emissions, so yes, it would be better for the world.