I think you're being quite passionate, which is not the same as quite reasonable:-) But I'll bite:
Weather is not climate. Weather is chaotic. It's disingenious(sp?) to then draw a parallel to saying climate is also chaotic because it's "like weather".
For example; do you believe that coming december to februari in New York it will be colder on average than past june to august? REALLY? How can you possibly be so sure about that prediction if they still can't reliably predict the path of a storm past 3-5 days?
You put up straw men about binary thinking but if you read the 2007 IPCC AR4 synthesis report (please try; it's quite clearly written really) then in chapter 2 "causes of change" on p. 39 you'll find table 2.4 "radiative forcing components".
Under that table is the text
Most of the observed increase in global average tempera-
tures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the
observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.8
This is an advance since the TAR's conclusion that "most
of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to
have been due to the increase in GHG concentrations" (Fig-
ure 2.5). {WGI 9.4, SPM}
(emphasis mine). The bolded text "very likely" in this context means:
after the scientists had their say, in 2007 the governments of China, USA, Saudi Arabia, Kazachstan etc. adopted a consensus phrase that was politically acceptable to most powerful countries, which contains the words "very likely" which if you look at p. 5 of the PDF (it says p.27) par. 5 means "between 90% and 95% sure".
THAT's NOT BINARY THINKING, it's called an "error bar". And you may call 90-95% certainty a "long leap" but I think that's irresponsibly naïve.
The reason why I got worked up enough to try to respond to your post, though, is your comment:
But I AM NOT going to allow anyone to wreck the global economy to achieve this.
Can you give us any clues why you think that making industrial processes and house insulation a bit more efficient, and investing in energy sources that don't require limited fuel, is the same as "wrecking the global economy", because I really don't know what you're talking about here. I mean I don't see where you're coming from; what makes you think that. Please remember:
You exist
I exist
Our planet (resources and climate) exists
"The global economy" however is a meme, a construct in your mind. There is no global economy. There is only people trying to make their livelihood. When they find out that a certain way to do this is no longer attractive to them, they try to adapt and switch to try and eke out an existance in a new, and different way. Just like when Silvio Berlusconi quit his job as a "love-boat" crooner or Foday Sankoh quit his job as a wedding photographer. But I digress..
Anyway, making sure that you're well-informed on the global issues ensures that you're better prepared for transitions both outside and inside your society, surely we'll agree on that?
I think that the reason that denialist propaganda works is that people are not good at long-term thinking and long-term planning. "We're having it so hard already, we can't spare the money to invest in our future so we'll just wait here until events catch up with us." That way people are easily convinced that any change which involves short-term hardship is unacceptable and must be avoided. Another vote for the status quo.
A story by the aptly named prof. Tom Murphy that almost made me physically sick was put on the OilDrum recently about the politics of it all: The Energy Trap (read it and weep).
Yet I believe that we have to move on and keep working because screaming that we're all doomed isn't going to help anyone:-( and calling you uninformed isn't going to help anyone either:-(
Only 74999999 more scandalous wastes of money like this to go, and you can pay off the U.S.A. national debt!
(15 trillion / 200 thousand)
Better work fast though.. if you save 20 000 times as much money per day (4 giga U.S. $), you may actually stay ahead of getting into more debt.
P.S. my joke was going to be 14 trillion, but I saw that in the mean time it has become 15 trillion.
Douglas Hofstadter once wrote something about "innumeracy" I believe.
Or at least build a factory for the oxydator (liquid O2) on the moon and launch the kerosene or hydrazine fuel from earth. The Oxygen atoms are the heaviest so to launch those fuel tanks from a surface with 0.16 g gravity would save a lot of the tanker launch costs. Could be almost half as cheap as launching both together from the 1 g Earth gravity well like in the propellant depot study.
You'd need to build the lO2 tanker rockets on the moon, though:-(
I also think Harry Potter is a masterpiece, but sadly lack the words to explain properly why.
<vague_handwaving>
J.K. Rowling succeeded in conveying concepts about the interplay between interpersonal loyalty and obedience to society's yoke (which got a LOT heavier as the series progressed) which are difficult to describe in any shorter form.
And if you can't write it in a shorter form then it's a masterpiece:-)
<extra_hyperbole>
This could well be the only vaccine to budding fascism now that western civilization is in decline. No one else seems to see it coming:-( Too few kids nowadays have listened to the stories of their grandparents under Nazi occupation, I think.
</extra_hyperbole>
</vague_handwaving>
Kinda like Terry Pratchett developed his witches and watchmen of the Discworld to convey ideas so large they make you cry. Well, me at least. E.g. "The Fifth Elephant": I'm quite sure I didn't even understand that one. It's about love, isn't it?
Both authors clearly love humanity, and they clearly love story-telling. It shows.
P.S. To add insult to injury, I also think "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is a masterpiece because of the dialogues. I do get ridiculed for it, but that's OK:-)
Speaking of which, where's the flattr button on that Debian Administrator's Handbook donation page.
Or to say it in Dutch: "alle kleine beetjes helpen"; "elke dag een draadje is een hemdsmouw in het jaar".
Well Bushehr sounds more manly and dangerous than "don't mess with us or we'll make our phallic Vestas V90-3MW fall 100 m across the border onto your head".
So how is this an advantage for nuclear? Because nuclear's power generation is so concentrated, it's much easier to enforce stricter building codes, maintenance schedules, and inspections for the same amount of energy generated. Instead of amassing a small army to monitor 10,000 wind turbines being built, inspected, and maintained over 1000 km^2 of land, you can have a dozen inspectors do the same at a single nuclear plant. The statistics bear this out [nextbigfuture.com]. Historically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Safer than coal, safer than solar, safer than hydro, safer than wind.
Interesting..
<cynicism>
So you're saying:
nuclear power is concentrated which makes it an excellent target for foreign military strike (read about Osirak) and for terrorists (read about the liquid Sodium in the Superphénix fast breeder in the Seventies; this current discussion about breeder reactors is not new)
wind power provides a small army of regional jobs
wind power is distributed so provides regional independence from the central government (think: if Libya depended on 1 nuclear plant for all electricity and Gadaffi had that one heavily guarded)
</cynicism>
I think you're on to some interesting political points there!
That IAEA post contains the text "Overall, the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious." and is three months old.
Maybe we'll now see it updated in a few days with those new results TEPCO measured on 2011-09-07, from your second link.
Any information about bioaccumulation of the Cesium and Strontium in fish from the east coast of Japan?
BTW I haven't read anything reported about Sr-90 measurements anywhere. Do you know if that is because it is just not produced by the Fukushima reactors?
With people, its just a complex mathematical model, people are after all, just chemical reactions.
I think that's actually a really important point: in this our 21st century, if we don't adapt to a socio-economic model based on transition from exponential growth fueled by dead dinosaurs to maximum extractable energy (EROEI, Energy returned on energy invested) from sunshine(*) upon our one planet, we're screwed.
And I don't think the 18th and 19th century economists like Smith and Marx were on to this thought (I fear Malthus got it spot on).
The reason is that Earth is a closed thermodynamic system for all practical intents and purposes except for the influx of sunshine, a bit of geothermal energy in places, a bit of fissible heavy metals, and maybe a bit tidal energy from the Moon.
Sorry if this comes over a bit like a confused ramble, it wasn't meant that way, but I'm tired.
Then don't bother reading Marx, or any other philosopher.
Excuse me, but I once tried to read Das Kapital, and it bored me to tears.
With a lot of effort I can try to read the works of philosophers that use big letters, common words, and have pretty pictures interspersed
(e.g. I could read Also Sprach Zarathustra by Nietzsche in the original German, even if it isn't upside-down).
But the extremely tedious economic lecture of Marx is really difficult to get through (unless you're an economist I suppose).
Ask Slashdot: pointers to texts that elucidate Marx' 19th century theories and are easy to read by the 21st century populace who
There might be a complication in a few centuries that the International Court of Justice, which normally does this kind of non-war arbitration about land ownership between nations, is based in The Hague which is on the coast in the Netherlands; looks like it is in the dunes so it's probably a few meters above sea level:-)
I think you'd have to start with building a small compact factory for tiny amorphous Silicon solar cells, and launching that.
With respect to resources I once found an old NASA report about moon mining but I think it was behind a paywall.
Hydrogen and Boron are difficult to get on the Moon so they'd need to be imported, especially if you'd start from silane as precursor for thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells. Oxygen is plentiful though.
There was an ambitious project to do something like this in the Sahara, called the Desertec project. I think it's a brilliant plan but it's probably delayed by the revolutions in Tunisia Libya and Egypt.
From the picture I'm guessing big radiative heatsinks will be used.
Then they may as well build big cheap, crude, amorphous Silicon solar cells in situ.
Is anybody working on a robotic solar cell factory? Silicon (elmt. 14) is much more abundant than Uranium (elmt. 92).
And you can always build humongous NaS (a bit more rare) batteries for the lunar night as long as you make B.A.S.E electrolyte from the abundant Al2O3.
All these comments from people who assume we have to bring all resources to the Moon... I find it quite astonishing, sorry... If you go out fishing, do you bring your own water as well as your own fishing rod?
I suspect that to understand general relativity you also need a text on tensors, e.g. Schaum's outline of tensor calculus. Probably many physics textbooks have enough about tensors as well but I wouldn't know;
It was all a little beyond me; a friend once tried to explain to me the metric tensor but I couldn't get it in my thick head:-(
Steps to take: if that wikipedia article is gobbledygook, go read Schaum first (you probably don't need to understand the whole book but you need the tensor notation at least). If you can't read Schaum, brush up on you linear algebra first.
bra-ket notation is very well written down "dumbed down" for chemists instead of mathematicians and physicists:-) in Szabo and Ostlund's "Modern Quantum Chemistry: Introduction to Advanced Electronic Structure Theory"
But you need to have a background in high-school level linear algebra first, i.e. you need to know how to work with a simple n-dimensional orthogonal basis set of vectors, otherwise Szabo and Ostlund is probably too difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Ben Elton, is that you??
Weather is not climate. Weather is chaotic. It's disingenious(sp?) to then draw a parallel to saying climate is also chaotic because it's "like weather".
For example; do you believe that coming december to februari in New York it will be colder on average than past june to august? REALLY? How can you possibly be so sure about that prediction if they still can't reliably predict the path of a storm past 3-5 days?
You put up straw men about binary thinking but if you read the 2007 IPCC AR4 synthesis report (please try; it's quite clearly written really) then in chapter 2 "causes of change" on p. 39 you'll find table 2.4 "radiative forcing components".
Under that table is the text
(emphasis mine). The bolded text "very likely" in this context means: after the scientists had their say, in 2007 the governments of China, USA, Saudi Arabia, Kazachstan etc. adopted a consensus phrase that was politically acceptable to most powerful countries, which contains the words "very likely" which if you look at p. 5 of the PDF (it says p.27) par. 5 means "between 90% and 95% sure".
THAT's NOT BINARY THINKING, it's called an "error bar". And you may call 90-95% certainty a "long leap" but I think that's irresponsibly naïve.
The reason why I got worked up enough to try to respond to your post, though, is your comment:
Can you give us any clues why you think that making industrial processes and house insulation a bit more efficient, and investing in energy sources that don't require limited fuel, is the same as "wrecking the global economy", because I really don't know what you're talking about here. I mean I don't see where you're coming from; what makes you think that. Please remember:
Anyway, making sure that you're well-informed on the global issues ensures that you're better prepared for transitions both outside and inside your society, surely we'll agree on that?
:-( and calling you uninformed isn't going to help anyone either :-(
I think that the reason that denialist propaganda works is that people are not good at long-term thinking and long-term planning. "We're having it so hard already, we can't spare the money to invest in our future so we'll just wait here until events catch up with us." That way people are easily convinced that any change which involves short-term hardship is unacceptable and must be avoided. Another vote for the status quo.
A story by the aptly named prof. Tom Murphy that almost made me physically sick was put on the OilDrum recently about the politics of it all: The Energy Trap (read it and weep).
Yet I believe that we have to move on and keep working because screaming that we're all doomed isn't going to help anyone
Absolutely! They even made the story into a film!
Only 74999999 more scandalous wastes of money like this to go, and you can pay off the U.S.A. national debt!
(15 trillion / 200 thousand)
Better work fast though.. if you save 20 000 times as much money per day (4 giga U.S. $), you may actually stay ahead of getting into more debt.
P.S. my joke was going to be 14 trillion, but I saw that in the mean time it has become 15 trillion.
Douglas Hofstadter once wrote something about "innumeracy" I believe.
Or at least build a factory for the oxydator (liquid O2) on the moon and launch the kerosene or hydrazine fuel from earth. The Oxygen atoms are the heaviest so to launch those fuel tanks from a surface with 0.16 g gravity would save a lot of the tanker launch costs. Could be almost half as cheap as launching both together from the 1 g Earth gravity well like in the propellant depot study. :-(
You'd need to build the lO2 tanker rockets on the moon, though
I'm guessing you're looking for the Pareto distribution probability density function which indeed sounds a lot more posh.
BTW: Its parameter \alpha is related to the Gini coëfficient.
Engineers like Leon Cartwright, of course! ;-)
I also think Harry Potter is a masterpiece, but sadly lack the words to explain properly why.
:-)
:-( Too few kids nowadays have listened to the stories of their grandparents under Nazi occupation, I think.
:-)
<vague_handwaving>
J.K. Rowling succeeded in conveying concepts about the interplay between interpersonal loyalty and obedience to society's yoke (which got a LOT heavier as the series progressed) which are difficult to describe in any shorter form.
And if you can't write it in a shorter form then it's a masterpiece
<extra_hyperbole>
This could well be the only vaccine to budding fascism now that western civilization is in decline. No one else seems to see it coming
</extra_hyperbole>
</vague_handwaving>
Kinda like Terry Pratchett developed his witches and watchmen of the Discworld to convey ideas so large they make you cry. Well, me at least. E.g. "The Fifth Elephant": I'm quite sure I didn't even understand that one. It's about love, isn't it?
Both authors clearly love humanity, and they clearly love story-telling. It shows.
P.S. To add insult to injury, I also think "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is a masterpiece because of the dialogues. I do get ridiculed for it, but that's OK
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok
Speaking of which, where's the flattr button on that Debian Administrator's Handbook donation page.
Or to say it in Dutch: "alle kleine beetjes helpen"; "elke dag een draadje is een hemdsmouw in het jaar".
Well Bushehr sounds more manly and dangerous than "don't mess with us or we'll make our phallic Vestas V90-3MW fall 100 m across the border onto your head".
Interesting..
<cynicism>
So you're saying:
</cynicism>
I think you're on to some interesting political points there!
Well.. actually...
Have you ever heard of the history of the "Campo Vaccino" (cow field) in Rome?
Prime source of marble for your fireplace and bathroom!
That IAEA post contains the text "Overall, the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains very serious." and is three months old.
Maybe we'll now see it updated in a few days with those new results TEPCO measured on 2011-09-07, from your second link.
Any information about bioaccumulation of the Cesium and Strontium in fish from the east coast of Japan?
BTW I haven't read anything reported about Sr-90 measurements anywhere. Do you know if that is because it is just not produced by the Fukushima reactors?
The most recent IAEA update (http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html) seems to be from 2011-06-02.
That reminds me of the following from decades ago:
;-)
On you linux system, install
apt-get install fortune fortunes
and type
fortune -m Hyperion
I think that's actually a really important point: in this our 21st century, if we don't adapt to a socio-economic model based on transition from exponential growth fueled by dead dinosaurs to maximum extractable energy (EROEI, Energy returned on energy invested) from sunshine(*) upon our one planet, we're screwed.
And I don't think the 18th and 19th century economists like Smith and Marx were on to this thought (I fear Malthus got it spot on).
The reason is that Earth is a closed thermodynamic system for all practical intents and purposes except for the influx of sunshine, a bit of geothermal energy in places, a bit of fissible heavy metals, and maybe a bit tidal energy from the Moon.
Sorry if this comes over a bit like a confused ramble, it wasn't meant that way, but I'm tired.
For a funny and much more sensible story on this, read: Galactic-scale energy: Part 1
(*) for "energy from sunshine" read: renewable energy sources such as solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, wind, biogas
Excuse me, but I once tried to read Das Kapital, and it bored me to tears.
With a lot of effort I can try to read the works of philosophers that use big letters, common words, and have pretty pictures interspersed (e.g. I could read Also Sprach Zarathustra by Nietzsche in the original German, even if it isn't upside-down).
But the extremely tedious economic lecture of Marx is really difficult to get through (unless you're an economist I suppose).
Ask Slashdot: pointers to texts that elucidate Marx' 19th century theories and are easy to read by the 21st century populace who
wait..
sorry thought I just saw a Wookieee
There might be a complication in a few centuries that the International Court of Justice, which normally does this kind of non-war arbitration about land ownership between nations, is based in The Hague which is on the coast in the Netherlands; looks like it is in the dunes so it's probably a few meters above sea level :-)
If you buy a second-hand washing machine, you often have a crumpled and yellowing but still valid guarantee document accompanying it.
I can just imagine reselling that anti-Tivoised set-top box with the source code DVD sellotaped to it. No problems then.
I think you'd have to start with building a small compact factory for tiny amorphous Silicon solar cells, and launching that.
With respect to resources I once found an old NASA report about moon mining but I think it was behind a paywall.
Hydrogen and Boron are difficult to get on the Moon so they'd need to be imported, especially if you'd start from silane as precursor for thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells. Oxygen is plentiful though.
There was an ambitious project to do something like this in the Sahara, called the Desertec project. I think it's a brilliant plan but it's probably delayed by the revolutions in Tunisia Libya and Egypt.
whooosh
Then they may as well build big cheap, crude, amorphous Silicon solar cells in situ.
Is anybody working on a robotic solar cell factory? Silicon (elmt. 14) is much more abundant than Uranium (elmt. 92).
And you can always build humongous NaS (a bit more rare) batteries for the lunar night as long as you make B.A.S.E electrolyte from the abundant Al2O3.
All these comments from people who assume we have to bring all resources to the Moon... I find it quite astonishing, sorry... If you go out fishing, do you bring your own water as well as your own fishing rod?
I suspect that to understand general relativity you also need a text on tensors, e.g. Schaum's outline of tensor calculus. Probably many physics textbooks have enough about tensors as well but I wouldn't know; :-(
It was all a little beyond me; a friend once tried to explain to me the metric tensor but I couldn't get it in my thick head
Steps to take: if that wikipedia article is gobbledygook, go read Schaum first (you probably don't need to understand the whole book but you need the tensor notation at least). If you can't read Schaum, brush up on you linear algebra first.
bra-ket notation is very well written down "dumbed down" for chemists instead of mathematicians and physicists :-) in Szabo and Ostlund's "Modern Quantum Chemistry: Introduction to Advanced Electronic Structure Theory"
But you need to have a background in high-school level linear algebra first, i.e. you need to know how to work with a simple n-dimensional orthogonal basis set of vectors, otherwise Szabo and Ostlund is probably too difficult.
I