I see they're increasing the error bar to a factor of three in temperature sensitivity of CO2 doubling. That's not the right direction to be heading, if you want to modify the behavior of billions of people.
If climatology deals only with time scales on the order of 30 years, then it isn't the right science for studying AGW, glacial periods, and other long term "climate" changes. I agree with the previous poster, 30 years is too short.
The thing that bugs me here is that whatever justifications presented here for modifying human behavior and activity need to be pretty damn solid and accurate. For example, if the panel's conclusions overstate the impact of CO2 by a factor of four, then no change need be made until humanity has used up the 4 trillion tons of carbon and started on further sources. We know that the current error in carbon sensitivity estimates are at least a factor of two.
Merely, engaging in a public ritual of agreement is not good enough.
No. No one forced you to eat that fish, take the metro, or walk home at night. But the individual mandate does attempt to force you to have a peculiar sort of health insurance. And willy nilly increasing our dependencies on each other doesn't work, if the other parties don't deliver or you can't afford to participate even with subsidies.
They still have flooding and water shortage issues. But flooding is something you can get mostly right by proper site selection (you still have to worry that there are dependencies outside your control such as the power company putting your substation in a flood-prone area).
Water shortages aren't usually considered a data center problem, but if you're doing something like using water-based cooling towers to remove heat, that can impact your business.
But having said that, these are issues that California has as well and at least to the same extent. So it might not be kitten safe, but it probably is safer than California.
What are wooden stakes supposed to do to zombies? I have yet to see a zombie movie where wooden stakes were more effective than wooden baseball bats. Maybe his zombies were some sort of proto-vampire?
Part of what they consider subsidies are taxation systems that aren't "efficient". What does that mean?
For the calculation of post-tax subsidies, the benchmark price includes an adjustment for efficient taxation
(t*>0) to reflect both revenue needs and a correction for negative consumption externalities:
Post-tax subsidy = (Pw + t*) â" Pc,
where Pw and Pc are defined as above. Therefore, when there is a pre-tax subsidy the post-tax subsidy is
equal to the efficient tax plus the pre-tax subsidy. When there is no pre-tax subsidy, the post-tax subsidy is
equal to the difference between efficient and actual taxation.
I gather the idea is that "efficient taxes" contain no economic distortion. Say if a government collects 25% of the country's GDP as taxes, then the efficient tax on fossil fuels would somehow be 25% of the GDP contribution of those fossil fuels whatever that would be. But it could also mean 25% of the raw cost of fossil fuels, which would go a long way to explaining why they think they have so much in subsidies which no one else happens to have.
Ah, the kookery never ends. You could be sitting on a raft on a planet covered with water
Why can't you accept that science is evidence-based? I will accept some level of evidence, but not consensus or half-baked research and modeling.
Just outline what evidence you require to convince you that average global temperatures are on the rise and that all or most of it is directly caused by burning fossil fuels.
I agree that there is some degree of increase in global warming though not the second part that "all or most" is due to burning fossil fuels or other human-caused activity. Nor the current claim, that this resultant global warming is serious enough to warrant changes in our behavior.
I wish to see a demonstration that climatology can accurately predict future climate given solar activity and future greenhouse emission levels. So far that is lacking.
I'd also wish to see more scientific attitudes in the field and less of this false certainty.
As an aside, I like how you like to employ colorful adjectives to describe the amount of public money at stake to suggest a financial motive for perpetrating a global warming hoax, but at the same time your ignore the TRILLIONS of dollars at stake as a motive for denying global warming.
There are trillions at stake either way. For example, the EU recently has proposed to spend 200 billion Euro over six years (20% of its budget) on climate-related activities. Its member nations are already spending considerable sums.
Further, no one has yet to explain why if fossil fuel backers are so wealthy and working so hard to spread disinformation on climate change, that they're being outspent propaganda-wise by at least an order of magnitude by the side favoring the climate change argument.
For another example of the money involved, the EU is (or perhaps was) proposing to spend 20% of its budget on "climate-related actions". That looks to be 200 billion Euro over six years. I think it's foolish to speak of money while ignoring who is spending it.
The vast majority of that money comes from industries with a publicly well-known, vested interest in denying global warming.
Again, show me this alleged money. I see empty assertions. But when I look at actual visible budgets, the World Wildlife Fund, a group promoting climate change theory, by itself receives more in public funds than the entire "climate deniers" cottage industry.
A comparison of the two links shows that billionaires have supposedly donated $120 million to the cause of climate denying over ten years while the WWF received $41 million in public funding just last year.
Greenpeace apparently received $2.2 billion (though not in public funding) over the same time period that billionaires were kicking out $120 million.
And from right wing think tanks with bottomless pockets that fund studies trying to disprove AGW and still are forced to conclude by the evidence they gather that it is quite likely occurring.
Didn't happen. Read up on it. Yes, there was such a study and yes, the Koch brothers were funding it. But right wing think tanks with bottomless pockets weren't involved.
T'he thing that is apparently so easy to forget is that there are far bigger corporations (though not corporations as are usually considered on Slashdot) out there than Big Oil and other fossil fuel businesses. For example, the European Union is one such with a captive market of almost 400 million people and backed by the power of a few dozen developed world countries, all themselves powerful corporations in their own right. Similarly, there's the United States which again has a captive market of roughly 340 million people.
These deep pocketed organizations which employ tens of millions of people and have budgets, which can range into the trillions of dollars, can easily outspend the entire fossil fuel industry. And my take in the climate change debate is that they have done so.
No, you would have the same number of "climate change induced" extreme weather events
No, I think there would be a decline because I think this is a case of observation bias. If there is less damage from this sort of extreme weather, then there would be less opportunity and incentive to blame it on "climate change".
You would have less damage over time, as after the first such event, the people who need insurance to rebuild are wiped out financially, leaving just the people who can afford to rebuild and/or build to withstand said events.
This would be true whether or not the extreme weather was climate change induced or not.
There's another indication in support of my claims. If there's so much money involved on the fossil fuel side, why is the debate so one-sided in funding for the other side?
It's interesting how badly people mischaracterize the certainty around climatology. Renormalizing your data in a slightly different way doesn't make the Earth not round, for example. Climatology is not a mature science and you are a fool for thinking otherwise.
The physics of CO2 infra red absorbsion are well defined
Then why is there a factor of two error bar (which might grow with the latest IPCC report) from lowest to highest estimate for the sensitivity of global temperature to CO2 concentrations? That small niche of well defined properties is embedded in a vastly complicated system which we don't have similar certainty about.
He said that even when the first two events are taken into consideration, there is something quantifiable happening, that makes the industry tend to believe that warming is taking place, and probably man has a hand in it.
Sure it does. How much did he talk about the role of below cost public flood insurance? That's the third "event".
For example, suppose I can afford to burn $10k on insurance for my dream cottage on the beach and it gets washed away once every ten years. If insurance is priced exactly so that the expected cost of the insurance matches the price I pay, then I can afford to insure $100k of cottage. If insurance is priced exactly half as much, then I can afford $200k of cottage.
That increase in amount is reflected every time the cottage gets washed away. The event generates an additional $100k of damages because I have more expensive property there than if I had to pay amounts commensurate with the risk.
My take is that when you get to high risk territory, risk mitigation and how much it is subsidized becomes the deciding factor in how valuable the land and what's on it is. My take is that if the US just dropped federal flood insurance, you'd see a considerable drop in "climate change induced" extreme weather events and of course, damage from such events.
Also, it takes more than 2 data points to even extrapolate for exponential growth.
Then it's a good thing there's more than two data points there. But let's consider your assertion. One can take the log of the value part of the two data points (which are value-time pairs). Your XKCD link already showed the scientifically dubious but very feasible approach of extrapolating a line from two data points. Exponentiating back to the original values yields an exponential curve.
Hence, you just extrapolated an exponential curve from two points.
Do the math. Wikipedia claims half a trillion in fossil fuel subsidies versus almost 90 billion just in renewable energy subsidies in 2011. That's not an order of magnitude, much less several orders. And I mentioned a number of other big business sectors than just renewable energy.
Most of the fossil fuel subsidies are provided by oil producer nations such as OPEC memberes and Russia. Not everyone can get the subsidies and rent seeking opportunities that state-owned Gazprom or Saudi Aramco have. For example, at least 40 billion was due to Saudi Arabia alone (it's domestic oil consumption subsidy (which incidentally is significant enough to impair production!) and subsidies for oil-based electricity and water desalinization). I see that Gazprom had around $5 billion per year just in subsidies to former Soviet republic members. Venezuela has similar consumption subsidies kicking in about $4 billion a year currently.
In comparison, those renewable energy and other subsidies are ripe for the taking and not previously claimed by a state actor. And there's no reason a business can't claim both fossil fuel subsidies and climate change-related subsidies. It's not that hard.
It may also be that US federal flood insurance is a profitable boondoggle for parts of the insurance industry. In that case, redirecting blame for their profits on climate change rather than fat public subsidies may allow the gravy train to run longer than it otherwise would.
Who are you saying is profiting from flood damage?
Builders and real estate investors for example. Someone builds a house on the beach. A hurricane washes it away. The cheap flood insurance pays most of the cost of replacing that house. The builders get plenty of money from rebuilding expensive real estate. And the value of flood-prone land goes up in value, benefiting the investor who happens to hold it.
taking bribes from the shadowy international group of scientists
There's big money in climate change. Even Big Oil got on board. I see it as much a conspiracy as a bunch of pigs fighting for a place at the feeding trough.
so that they'll use climate data even though intentionally using inaccurate information would be very bad for their business.
Where's the evidence that the insurers were corrupting their business practices? Just because someone decided to pay lip service to climate change doesn't mean anything about how they provide insurance or estimate risks.
For me, it boils down to a simple observation. Where's the money? It's not in ranting against bad public insurance policies.
What's the waste? It's not like there are physical laws keeping technology developments in finance from spreading to other fields that you happen to value. The thing people don't get is that stuff like HFT makes a society more diverse and funds a lot of R&D that would otherwise go wanting.
He's extrapolating from more than two data points and there's a crude model that explains what's going on. Sure, I don't see anything staying exponential forever, but why think that the trend is going to break right now rather than 50 years from now?
One the one hand they dramatically reduce the bid-ask spread for low-volume trades. But is that really all that economically beneficial?
So how economically beneficial do they really need to be here?
On the other hand, they prey on large trades that mutual funds must place to rebalance their holdings.
In other words, they prey on large traders with poor trading practices. That's economic value right there.
This probably hurts the average investor quite a lot.
So what? The average investor shouldn't be doing stuff that HFT can exploit.
Some claim that they increase liquidity and reduce volatility.
Well, they can serve as high frequency market makers and that's one of the benefits of having those guys. You've pretty much nailed the primary advantages of HFT.
There are several other things to consider. They do a lot of interesting research. And they test every computer trader involved and the market system itself.
The idea that "the market sorts itself out" is easily debunked when looking at the differences between theory and practice of economics.
Have you actually done this activity in question and have you compared it to any other means of attempting to do the same sort of thing? I have and my take is that markets work pretty well for what they do - enabling the trade of various goods and services and establishing a commonly accepted valuation for those goods and services. And they are better at that process than any method that doesn't involve markets.
even tracking the market reveals more about how people feel than it will about the actual cost/value of commodities.
That's an interesting feeling you have there. It tells me however, that you've probably never attempted to determine the value of goods on a liquid market. After all, if commodities are priced on peoples' feelings rather than actual cost/value, then someone can make a killing by being the rare rational investor/speculator.
With all the public money sloshing around in various climate change-related sectors like renewable energy, carbon emission credits, public transportation, and climate change reparations, there's plenty with which to bribe various insurance entities.
Note this blurb:
But even in the short term, Muir-Woodâ(TM)s team has determined, the risk of a variety of disasters seems to have already shifted. âoeThe first model in which we changed our perspective is on U.S. Atlantic hurricanes. Basically, after the 2004 and 2005 seasons, we determined that it was unsafe to simply assume that historical averages still applied,â he says. âoeWeâ(TM)ve since seen that todayâ(TM)s activity has changed in other particular areas as wellâ"with extreme rainfall events, such as the recent flooding in Boulder, Colorado, and with heat waves in certain parts of the world.â
Sure, we can blame that on climate change, it is the fad after all. But here, the big ignored factor is public flood insurance - something they don't mention at all. If you subsidize the building and repair of stuff in flood-prone areas, then more stuff gets built there and you get more flood damage. It's a straightforward case of moral hazard. And note all the flooding damage they bother to mention is in the US.
The hand wringing that the idea behind Moore's Law will ever end is just silly.
There are two physical constraints Moore's law can't get around. For a volume of a fixed surface area, you are limited to how much information you can pack in there before a black hole forms. Second, a change of state, say flip a bit of memory, generates at a certain amount of heat. As a result, Moore's law will end.
Slashdot Mirror
I see they're increasing the error bar to a factor of three in temperature sensitivity of CO2 doubling. That's not the right direction to be heading, if you want to modify the behavior of billions of people.
If climatology deals only with time scales on the order of 30 years, then it isn't the right science for studying AGW, glacial periods, and other long term "climate" changes. I agree with the previous poster, 30 years is too short.
The thing that bugs me here is that whatever justifications presented here for modifying human behavior and activity need to be pretty damn solid and accurate. For example, if the panel's conclusions overstate the impact of CO2 by a factor of four, then no change need be made until humanity has used up the 4 trillion tons of carbon and started on further sources. We know that the current error in carbon sensitivity estimates are at least a factor of two.
Merely, engaging in a public ritual of agreement is not good enough.
Government by the people, for the people, right?
No. No one forced you to eat that fish, take the metro, or walk home at night. But the individual mandate does attempt to force you to have a peculiar sort of health insurance. And willy nilly increasing our dependencies on each other doesn't work, if the other parties don't deliver or you can't afford to participate even with subsidies.
They still have flooding and water shortage issues. But flooding is something you can get mostly right by proper site selection (you still have to worry that there are dependencies outside your control such as the power company putting your substation in a flood-prone area).
Water shortages aren't usually considered a data center problem, but if you're doing something like using water-based cooling towers to remove heat, that can impact your business.
But having said that, these are issues that California has as well and at least to the same extent. So it might not be kitten safe, but it probably is safer than California.
What are wooden stakes supposed to do to zombies? I have yet to see a zombie movie where wooden stakes were more effective than wooden baseball bats. Maybe his zombies were some sort of proto-vampire?
For the calculation of post-tax subsidies, the benchmark price includes an adjustment for efficient taxation (t*>0) to reflect both revenue needs and a correction for negative consumption externalities:
Post-tax subsidy = (Pw + t*) â" Pc,
where Pw and Pc are defined as above. Therefore, when there is a pre-tax subsidy the post-tax subsidy is equal to the efficient tax plus the pre-tax subsidy. When there is no pre-tax subsidy, the post-tax subsidy is equal to the difference between efficient and actual taxation.
I gather the idea is that "efficient taxes" contain no economic distortion. Say if a government collects 25% of the country's GDP as taxes, then the efficient tax on fossil fuels would somehow be 25% of the GDP contribution of those fossil fuels whatever that would be. But it could also mean 25% of the raw cost of fossil fuels, which would go a long way to explaining why they think they have so much in subsidies which no one else happens to have.
Ah, the kookery never ends. You could be sitting on a raft on a planet covered with water
Why can't you accept that science is evidence-based? I will accept some level of evidence, but not consensus or half-baked research and modeling.
Just outline what evidence you require to convince you that average global temperatures are on the rise and that all or most of it is directly caused by burning fossil fuels.
I agree that there is some degree of increase in global warming though not the second part that "all or most" is due to burning fossil fuels or other human-caused activity. Nor the current claim, that this resultant global warming is serious enough to warrant changes in our behavior.
I wish to see a demonstration that climatology can accurately predict future climate given solar activity and future greenhouse emission levels. So far that is lacking.
I'd also wish to see more scientific attitudes in the field and less of this false certainty.
As an aside, I like how you like to employ colorful adjectives to describe the amount of public money at stake to suggest a financial motive for perpetrating a global warming hoax, but at the same time your ignore the TRILLIONS of dollars at stake as a motive for denying global warming.
There are trillions at stake either way. For example, the EU recently has proposed to spend 200 billion Euro over six years (20% of its budget) on climate-related activities. Its member nations are already spending considerable sums.
Further, no one has yet to explain why if fossil fuel backers are so wealthy and working so hard to spread disinformation on climate change, that they're being outspent propaganda-wise by at least an order of magnitude by the side favoring the climate change argument.
For another example of the money involved, the EU is (or perhaps was) proposing to spend 20% of its budget on "climate-related actions". That looks to be 200 billion Euro over six years. I think it's foolish to speak of money while ignoring who is spending it.
The vast majority of that money comes from industries with a publicly well-known, vested interest in denying global warming.
Again, show me this alleged money. I see empty assertions. But when I look at actual visible budgets, the World Wildlife Fund, a group promoting climate change theory, by itself receives more in public funds than the entire "climate deniers" cottage industry.
A comparison of the two links shows that billionaires have supposedly donated $120 million to the cause of climate denying over ten years while the WWF received $41 million in public funding just last year.
Greenpeace apparently received $2.2 billion (though not in public funding) over the same time period that billionaires were kicking out $120 million.
And from right wing think tanks with bottomless pockets that fund studies trying to disprove AGW and still are forced to conclude by the evidence they gather that it is quite likely occurring.
Didn't happen. Read up on it. Yes, there was such a study and yes, the Koch brothers were funding it. But right wing think tanks with bottomless pockets weren't involved.
T'he thing that is apparently so easy to forget is that there are far bigger corporations (though not corporations as are usually considered on Slashdot) out there than Big Oil and other fossil fuel businesses. For example, the European Union is one such with a captive market of almost 400 million people and backed by the power of a few dozen developed world countries, all themselves powerful corporations in their own right. Similarly, there's the United States which again has a captive market of roughly 340 million people.
These deep pocketed organizations which employ tens of millions of people and have budgets, which can range into the trillions of dollars, can easily outspend the entire fossil fuel industry. And my take in the climate change debate is that they have done so.
No, you would have the same number of "climate change induced" extreme weather events
No, I think there would be a decline because I think this is a case of observation bias. If there is less damage from this sort of extreme weather, then there would be less opportunity and incentive to blame it on "climate change".
You would have less damage over time, as after the first such event, the people who need insurance to rebuild are wiped out financially, leaving just the people who can afford to rebuild and/or build to withstand said events.
This would be true whether or not the extreme weather was climate change induced or not.
If the underlying equation is exp(ct), c=arbitrary, t=time, 2 points suffice to determine a (real-valued, unique) c.
There we go.
There's another indication in support of my claims. If there's so much money involved on the fossil fuel side, why is the debate so one-sided in funding for the other side?
The physics of CO2 infra red absorbsion are well defined
Then why is there a factor of two error bar (which might grow with the latest IPCC report) from lowest to highest estimate for the sensitivity of global temperature to CO2 concentrations? That small niche of well defined properties is embedded in a vastly complicated system which we don't have similar certainty about.
He said that even when the first two events are taken into consideration, there is something quantifiable happening, that makes the industry tend to believe that warming is taking place, and probably man has a hand in it.
Sure it does. How much did he talk about the role of below cost public flood insurance? That's the third "event".
For example, suppose I can afford to burn $10k on insurance for my dream cottage on the beach and it gets washed away once every ten years. If insurance is priced exactly so that the expected cost of the insurance matches the price I pay, then I can afford to insure $100k of cottage. If insurance is priced exactly half as much, then I can afford $200k of cottage.
That increase in amount is reflected every time the cottage gets washed away. The event generates an additional $100k of damages because I have more expensive property there than if I had to pay amounts commensurate with the risk.
My take is that when you get to high risk territory, risk mitigation and how much it is subsidized becomes the deciding factor in how valuable the land and what's on it is. My take is that if the US just dropped federal flood insurance, you'd see a considerable drop in "climate change induced" extreme weather events and of course, damage from such events.
Also, it takes more than 2 data points to even extrapolate for exponential growth.
Then it's a good thing there's more than two data points there. But let's consider your assertion. One can take the log of the value part of the two data points (which are value-time pairs). Your XKCD link already showed the scientifically dubious but very feasible approach of extrapolating a line from two data points. Exponentiating back to the original values yields an exponential curve.
Hence, you just extrapolated an exponential curve from two points.
There is magnitudes more money on the other side.
Do the math. Wikipedia claims half a trillion in fossil fuel subsidies versus almost 90 billion just in renewable energy subsidies in 2011. That's not an order of magnitude, much less several orders. And I mentioned a number of other big business sectors than just renewable energy.
Most of the fossil fuel subsidies are provided by oil producer nations such as OPEC memberes and Russia. Not everyone can get the subsidies and rent seeking opportunities that state-owned Gazprom or Saudi Aramco have. For example, at least 40 billion was due to Saudi Arabia alone (it's domestic oil consumption subsidy (which incidentally is significant enough to impair production!) and subsidies for oil-based electricity and water desalinization). I see that Gazprom had around $5 billion per year just in subsidies to former Soviet republic members. Venezuela has similar consumption subsidies kicking in about $4 billion a year currently.
In comparison, those renewable energy and other subsidies are ripe for the taking and not previously claimed by a state actor. And there's no reason a business can't claim both fossil fuel subsidies and climate change-related subsidies. It's not that hard.
It may also be that US federal flood insurance is a profitable boondoggle for parts of the insurance industry. In that case, redirecting blame for their profits on climate change rather than fat public subsidies may allow the gravy train to run longer than it otherwise would.
Who are you saying is profiting from flood damage?
Builders and real estate investors for example. Someone builds a house on the beach. A hurricane washes it away. The cheap flood insurance pays most of the cost of replacing that house. The builders get plenty of money from rebuilding expensive real estate. And the value of flood-prone land goes up in value, benefiting the investor who happens to hold it.
taking bribes from the shadowy international group of scientists
There's big money in climate change. Even Big Oil got on board. I see it as much a conspiracy as a bunch of pigs fighting for a place at the feeding trough.
so that they'll use climate data even though intentionally using inaccurate information would be very bad for their business.
Where's the evidence that the insurers were corrupting their business practices? Just because someone decided to pay lip service to climate change doesn't mean anything about how they provide insurance or estimate risks.
For me, it boils down to a simple observation. Where's the money? It's not in ranting against bad public insurance policies.
What's the waste? It's not like there are physical laws keeping technology developments in finance from spreading to other fields that you happen to value. The thing people don't get is that stuff like HFT makes a society more diverse and funds a lot of R&D that would otherwise go wanting.
He's extrapolating from more than two data points and there's a crude model that explains what's going on. Sure, I don't see anything staying exponential forever, but why think that the trend is going to break right now rather than 50 years from now?
One the one hand they dramatically reduce the bid-ask spread for low-volume trades. But is that really all that economically beneficial?
So how economically beneficial do they really need to be here?
On the other hand, they prey on large trades that mutual funds must place to rebalance their holdings.
In other words, they prey on large traders with poor trading practices. That's economic value right there.
This probably hurts the average investor quite a lot.
So what? The average investor shouldn't be doing stuff that HFT can exploit.
Some claim that they increase liquidity and reduce volatility.
Well, they can serve as high frequency market makers and that's one of the benefits of having those guys. You've pretty much nailed the primary advantages of HFT.
There are several other things to consider. They do a lot of interesting research. And they test every computer trader involved and the market system itself.
The idea that "the market sorts itself out" is easily debunked when looking at the differences between theory and practice of economics.
Have you actually done this activity in question and have you compared it to any other means of attempting to do the same sort of thing? I have and my take is that markets work pretty well for what they do - enabling the trade of various goods and services and establishing a commonly accepted valuation for those goods and services. And they are better at that process than any method that doesn't involve markets.
even tracking the market reveals more about how people feel than it will about the actual cost/value of commodities.
That's an interesting feeling you have there. It tells me however, that you've probably never attempted to determine the value of goods on a liquid market. After all, if commodities are priced on peoples' feelings rather than actual cost/value, then someone can make a killing by being the rare rational investor/speculator.
Note this blurb:
But even in the short term, Muir-Woodâ(TM)s team has determined, the risk of a variety of disasters seems to have already shifted. âoeThe first model in which we changed our perspective is on U.S. Atlantic hurricanes. Basically, after the 2004 and 2005 seasons, we determined that it was unsafe to simply assume that historical averages still applied,â he says. âoeWeâ(TM)ve since seen that todayâ(TM)s activity has changed in other particular areas as wellâ"with extreme rainfall events, such as the recent flooding in Boulder, Colorado, and with heat waves in certain parts of the world.â
Sure, we can blame that on climate change, it is the fad after all. But here, the big ignored factor is public flood insurance - something they don't mention at all. If you subsidize the building and repair of stuff in flood-prone areas, then more stuff gets built there and you get more flood damage. It's a straightforward case of moral hazard. And note all the flooding damage they bother to mention is in the US.
The hand wringing that the idea behind Moore's Law will ever end is just silly.
There are two physical constraints Moore's law can't get around. For a volume of a fixed surface area, you are limited to how much information you can pack in there before a black hole forms. Second, a change of state, say flip a bit of memory, generates at a certain amount of heat. As a result, Moore's law will end.