First of all, probably unlike you, I actually have a degree in physics, with minors in math and chemistry. The math associated with thermodynamics is among the most complex that mankind attempts. The real world is almost never linear and straightforward. The "basic greenhouse effect" is laughably simplified compared to what actually happens in the atmosphere. If your assertion were true, the fossil record going back hundreds of millions of years would show CO2 and temperatures in lockstep. It does not. Not even close. What you are saying is that there exists a massive non-linear partial differential equation that determines how hot it will be tomorrow, and the only driving factor we need concern ourselves with is the concentration of a trace gas that responds to the same wavelengths of radiation as water vapor. Only you can't show me the equation and want me to take your assertion on faith. This does not even pass the laugh test.
I'd suggest you don't try to pull academic rank on me - for all you know, I could be a dog. Nothing of what you said supports your original statement, namely that our idea that CO2 causes higher temperature is based on correlation. It's not. It's based on theory, and we now find that the observations correlate well (if not perfectly) with the theory. I don't know why you get the idea I would claim that "the fossil record going back hundreds of millions of years would show CO2 and temperatures in lockstep" - no-where have I said or suggested that. By that argument I could claim that "bullets never kill people, otherwise there would be no dead before the invention of guns". Especially over hundreds of millions of years we have a thinks like different continental configurations, differences in Earth orbit, and even an significant increase in the luminosity of the sun, all of which contribute their own long-term trends. That said, we do find a general correlation between warmer temperatures and CO2 in the geological record - again, not a perfect one, but, as you say, the world is complex. "The math associated with thermodynamics is among the most complex that mankind attempts. The real world is almost never linear and straightforward" - and yet, we send people to prison based on the speed with wich a body cools and the path a bullet takes. We never have perfect information, but that does not mean that we do not have good information.
Not the point.
Point: it's never changed this fast, and it's our fault.
Actually, your point is half false, and half irrelevant.
Greenland ice core records show that the planet has, in relatively recent history (geologically), seen much faster temperature changes. Up to a 7C rise in 40 years, IIRC, and without any obvious cause. That's the false part.
Greenland ice core records show changes in the temperature in, well, Greenland, and really only in some very few spots we sample in Greenland. "The planet" is about 235 times larger than Greenland (by surface area), To visualise this:
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppgpppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
pppppppppp
Can you even spot Greenland (the "g")? I find it somewhat interesting that the same people who complain about insufficient coverage with weather stations or proxy samples used in the standard climate and temperature reconstructions that show global warming are happy to make wild suggestions about climate based on very few and limited samples if those support their denial. As e.g. "Pluto is warming! It's the sun!" - based on two (2) very indirect measurements of local density of Pluto's atmosphere during transits of Pluto in front of stars. No, not measurements of temperature, just of local atmospheric density...
Does that mean we are all going to die if we don't elect more democrats?
Not the point. You don't get to ignore reality because it has implications that seem inconvenient to some political positions, and or some entrenched interests. There are plenty of free market approaches to manage pollution, as long as you are willing to grow out of the inane assumption that a) the capacity of the world is infinite and b) you have a natural right to dump your pollution onto the rest of us.
Their "theory" seems to be that if it is indeed getting hotter (note there is no consensus on this point), the only possible explanation is CO2 from human activity.
Counterfactual nonsense. Arrhenius gave a first theoretical treatment back around 1896, and a reasonable quantitative analysis in 1908, long before we could measure an effect. The basic physical mechanisms are well understood and can be and have been demonstrated in the laboratory. Of course, Earth is a large and complex system, so there are confounding factors. But the claim that the idea of causation is due to the observed correlation is plain wrong. The basic greenhouse effect and first-order feedbacks (e.g. ice/albedo and absolute humidity) can be described and modelled very well, mostly from first principles. If you think there is no causal effect, you would need to explain why basic physics is wrong. Yes, birds fly, and humans can organise a room. The first does not disprove gravity, and the second does not disprove the second law of thermodynamics....
So who read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, the minister or the terrorist? Do they also boot into Paranoid Linux and call the communication system Xnet? Or would that be PlayNet now?
Vice president of a company that sells a solution to an alleged problem states that the alleged problem really is a really bad problem, citing an amusing anecdote as a hook and a study in which the company that sells the solution claims that the alleged problem really is a problem. A cynic might have some questions...
If someone openly renounces their American citizenship in a propaganda video made by/with/for terrorists, and are only still a citizen because they won't fill out the paperwork to formally renounce it... Yeah, the military can kill 'em and I won't be sorry.
That's called "giving aid and comfort to America's enemies" and his own video is/was prima facie proof of it.
Emacs org mode can do notes perfectly, comes with selective archiving, and you can even schedule tasks and even record what time you spend on what. It's free form, exports to plenty of useful formats, the table mode is plain genius, and, of course, it's Emacs.
Was there an era where buying playboy was considered conservative and respectable?
We need a new time form for things that people now claim were ok back then;-). I suspect than may now 50ish man will have bought Playboy 30 years ago, but only now realise that everyone did, and thus may be less prudish about it.
Who knows. But a few or even a few hundred idiots are not a substantial threat to Europe. CNN just published this graph, showing that the risk for Americans to be killed by firearm in the US is more than two orders of magnitude greater than the risk of an American being killed by terrorism (home or abroad). And if you exclude 9/11, it's more than three orders of magnitude. If the US can survive the NRA, then Europe can survive a couple of other fanatics.
I hope Sir Isaac knows the difference between energy and momentum, given that he more or less invented the later concept. Momentum is conserved. Thus, the light bullet has to go a lot faster that the heavy gun. Energy is 1/2mv**2, so the lighter bullet carries a much larger amount of the energy than the heavier gun. The new widget necessarily has to convert some of that energy into heat when the bullet merges with the ball, but the combined gizmo will still carry a lot more energy than the gun (but only 1/5th of the original energy of the bullet - it's speed is 1/5th, thus the combined mass has to be 5 times the bullet weight due to conservation of momentum)).
Except that during the period of leftist revolutions all over the world AI doggedly pursued and questioned the actions pro-Western government armies while having a written policy of not criticizing the guerrilla actions. This asymmetric prosecution of human right crimes was only changed after the end of the cold war.
If most of earth's animal species die off, as long as the food chain is preserved for the plants/animals that directly benefit us, then most people will not care.
The "food chain" is actually a complex food web, and the more we prune it back, the less resilient it becomes. If it actually turns into a chain, we are one broken link away from disaster. That is one of the reason why diversity is good. Another is that plants and animals provide an enormous amounts of services, many of which we don't even understand. We know about mangroves protecting coasts and filtering water, trees reducing soil erosion and landslides, earthworms improving soil quality, legumes (or rather their symbiotic Rhizobia) providing nitrogen fixation, and most plants photosynthesising to provide us with oxygen and most of the biosphere with complex carbohydrates. But we are far away from a full understanding - we couldn't even keep Biosphere 2 running for a few years.
In this situation, allowing the biosphere to degrade is like a man cutting firewood from the frame of his house - sure, maybe that one piece is not crucial.
The owner is objecting to the user redistributing the file which is apparently subject to a license. In this instance GitHub (in USA) needs to apply their own laws in making the determination of fair use or exemption but I think the DMCA notice will stand - unless I'm misinformed there is no exclusion to DMCA for academic purposes as there is in India's safe harbour provisions.
The web site does not get to make its own determination, unless it want to lose the protection of the DMCA. The only way to keep it up is for the user in question to file a counter notice. In that case it become an issue between the user and the (alleged) copyright owner.
Publishing on the internet does NOT extinguish your copyright. The author (web page owner) legally requires permission from the (slimeball) corporation to publish their copyrighted material. The author might be able to sue for impersonation (they pretended the stuff they served was from the author), and they (corp) might be liable for defamation (they served up adds on his website without consent and made it look like he (author) was doing it), but they most certainly have the right to block him publishing their code.
Making something available on the public net is generally considered to provide the user with an implied license to download and read the document. It does not extinguish copyright (i.e. you cannot freely copy it), but you sure can download it. Otherwise each website access would be a copyright violation. This principle is well established. Moreover, of course, in this case, publishing is fair use for commentary. Distribution of the code to expose their practices is not in competition with the companies' use (which is, after all, freely distributing the code). It is inconvenient for the companies to have their unethical and almost certainly illegal practices in the limelight, but keeping dirty secrets is not something protected by copyright.
1) They get a third of the number of foreign students that the United States attracts
2) German universities tend to be a "no-frill" affair, with large auditoriums, limited to no athletics programs, and none of the social life seen in American campuses, Most students tend to study locally, so generally there are no dorms. They are more comparable with American state colleges. This isn't a bad thing, in my opinion, but those who go to college hoping for the experience of the "college life" will be disappointed if they go to Germany.
"Large auditoriums" is true for popular (or required) undergrad courses in popular programs, but is not generally true for graduate courses. Students at major universities are expected to be independent and get less counselling and support than in the US system. But that is much less true for Universities of Applied Science and Cooperative Universities, which typically have much smaller classes and more direct contact between lecturers and students.
"no athletics" is wrong, most have quite good, but much less flashy programs.
"none of the social life" - that's not true at all. It's different, but there is plenty of it. And of course there are dorms, as well as shared flats. Take a look at Kommune 1 for some history...
I love Germany, but I don't know of any German beers that are all that good. They certainly have the reputation but the reality has always been disappointing.
The unusual quality that might irritate people used to Bud Light is called "taste", and is usually considered a good thing in beers.
Whatever we do there are risks, and start yeah, but start what? What if climate change is actually a fairly low risk in the grand scheme of things and meanwhile lack of cheap (coal fired) electricity is holding back Africa, and the underdevelopment of infrastructure, is making one of those global epidemics more likely? Something which could decimate humanity in a few years? Why is climate change touted as THE MOST IMPORTANT issue? When that's just a wild speculation about risk?
Which do you start?
We might, say, start by collecting an international body of experts and ask them to look into the issue. Maybe they could periodically write reports, maybe on the physical science side of the issue, but also on the impacts of the physical changes. Just a weird idea, of course, but if we had started early enough, we might have had a first overview by 1990! And if we don't quite trust those experts, we could e.g. ask some national science academies to evaluate the issue.If they all violently agree, we might start to consider actions.
As for Africa: Sure, Africa has done so well in the age of "burn it like there is no tomorrow", so continuing in the same direction is obviously the right thing to do. Or maybe this is the most cynical propaganda meme I've yet encountered.
[...] And decades later they realised their model was totally wrong. THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. Of course, people only act when they think they know the answer. Of course, decades of expertise can go into that answer. And it can still easily be wrong. To think otherwise is just overconfidence in a world of complex systems. More fool you.
You might want to look at Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. Science can never give us philosophical certainty, and many scientific theories are incomplete (i.e. "wrong" in the strict sense). But that does not mean that all are equally wrong, or wrong enough to be useless. Newton was superseded by Einstein, but is still good enough for nearly all practical purposes.
All the warmers really care about is feeling good about themselves, which is it doesn't matter to them that their agenda is increased poverty. The 22000 children that already die every single day due to poverty doesn't matter. Thats 80 million per decade. 800 million children dead in the next century due to poverty if something isnt done.
And of course all those poor nations and their people have done so very well during the last century of unrestricted carbon extraction and burning. "We must keep burning fossil fuels for the poor children" - I've heard that argument before, and it's either dishonest or stupid at a level that I find hard to fathom. Developing nations don't need more oil, they need a fairer economic system.
So when will all of this destruction and devastation actually happen?
The next prediction was that the ozone layer would be almost completely depleted by 2002. It didn't happen.
Then we were told global warming would spiral out of control by 2011. It didn't happen.
Apart from the fact that you "distinct memory" seem to be highly selective and not quite reliable, this seems to be a very weird example. Yes, we were destroying the Ozone layer with (primarily) CFCs. Scientists were warning that things would get worse if nothing was done about it. But for once, the world did something. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol banned most releases of CFCs worldwide. And about now we can see the Ozone hole slowly recovering. This is not a failed prediction, it's an example of regulation working and predictions coming true.
...renewables are going to have their work cut out for themselves just supplying a majority percentage of the power for national electricty grids. I'm not sure where they think the extra renewable power to do this will come from.
Actually, depending on the process efficiency (the article claims 70%), this is a great complement to renewables. Whenever there is a surplus of renewable energy (and we do have this situation now regularly in Germany, not a country particularly blessed with sunshine), it can be turned into storable fuel. This makes larger capacities more economical, and in a pinch you could even use the fuel to power diesel generators when there is a lull in the renewable supply.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, probably unlike you, I actually have a degree in physics, with minors in math and chemistry. The math associated with thermodynamics is among the most complex that mankind attempts. The real world is almost never linear and straightforward. The "basic greenhouse effect" is laughably simplified compared to what actually happens in the atmosphere. If your assertion were true, the fossil record going back hundreds of millions of years would show CO2 and temperatures in lockstep. It does not. Not even close. What you are saying is that there exists a massive non-linear partial differential equation that determines how hot it will be tomorrow, and the only driving factor we need concern ourselves with is the concentration of a trace gas that responds to the same wavelengths of radiation as water vapor. Only you can't show me the equation and want me to take your assertion on faith. This does not even pass the laugh test.
I'd suggest you don't try to pull academic rank on me - for all you know, I could be a dog. Nothing of what you said supports your original statement, namely that our idea that CO2 causes higher temperature is based on correlation. It's not. It's based on theory, and we now find that the observations correlate well (if not perfectly) with the theory. I don't know why you get the idea I would claim that "the fossil record going back hundreds of millions of years would show CO2 and temperatures in lockstep" - no-where have I said or suggested that. By that argument I could claim that "bullets never kill people, otherwise there would be no dead before the invention of guns". Especially over hundreds of millions of years we have a thinks like different continental configurations, differences in Earth orbit, and even an significant increase in the luminosity of the sun, all of which contribute their own long-term trends. That said, we do find a general correlation between warmer temperatures and CO2 in the geological record - again, not a perfect one, but, as you say, the world is complex. "The math associated with thermodynamics is among the most complex that mankind attempts. The real world is almost never linear and straightforward" - and yet, we send people to prison based on the speed with wich a body cools and the path a bullet takes. We never have perfect information, but that does not mean that we do not have good information.
Not the point. Point: it's never changed this fast, and it's our fault.
Actually, your point is half false, and half irrelevant.
Greenland ice core records show that the planet has, in relatively recent history (geologically), seen much faster temperature changes. Up to a 7C rise in 40 years, IIRC, and without any obvious cause. That's the false part.
Greenland ice core records show changes in the temperature in, well, Greenland, and really only in some very few spots we sample in Greenland. "The planet" is about 235 times larger than Greenland (by surface area), To visualise this:
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppgpppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppp
pppppppppp
Can you even spot Greenland (the "g")? I find it somewhat interesting that the same people who complain about insufficient coverage with weather stations or proxy samples used in the standard climate and temperature reconstructions that show global warming are happy to make wild suggestions about climate based on very few and limited samples if those support their denial. As e.g. "Pluto is warming! It's the sun!" - based on two (2) very indirect measurements of local density of Pluto's atmosphere during transits of Pluto in front of stars. No, not measurements of temperature, just of local atmospheric density...
Does that mean we are all going to die if we don't elect more democrats?
Not the point. You don't get to ignore reality because it has implications that seem inconvenient to some political positions, and or some entrenched interests. There are plenty of free market approaches to manage pollution, as long as you are willing to grow out of the inane assumption that a) the capacity of the world is infinite and b) you have a natural right to dump your pollution onto the rest of us.
"You can believe every single major american scientific society, or you can believe the senator with the snowball"
Their "theory" seems to be that if it is indeed getting hotter (note there is no consensus on this point), the only possible explanation is CO2 from human activity.
Counterfactual nonsense. Arrhenius gave a first theoretical treatment back around 1896, and a reasonable quantitative analysis in 1908, long before we could measure an effect. The basic physical mechanisms are well understood and can be and have been demonstrated in the laboratory. Of course, Earth is a large and complex system, so there are confounding factors. But the claim that the idea of causation is due to the observed correlation is plain wrong. The basic greenhouse effect and first-order feedbacks (e.g. ice/albedo and absolute humidity) can be described and modelled very well, mostly from first principles. If you think there is no causal effect, you would need to explain why basic physics is wrong. Yes, birds fly, and humans can organise a room. The first does not disprove gravity, and the second does not disprove the second law of thermodynamics....
So who read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, the minister or the terrorist? Do they also boot into Paranoid Linux and call the communication system Xnet? Or would that be PlayNet now?
It's good enough and has everything I need. Tcsh (preferred) or bash (in a pinch) inside it.
Vice president of a company that sells a solution to an alleged problem states that the alleged problem really is a really bad problem, citing an amusing anecdote as a hook and a study in which the company that sells the solution claims that the alleged problem really is a problem. A cynic might have some questions...
If someone openly renounces their American citizenship in a propaganda video made by/with/for terrorists, and are only still a citizen because they won't fill out the paperwork to formally renounce it... Yeah, the military can kill 'em and I won't be sorry.
That's called "giving aid and comfort to America's enemies" and his own video is/was prima facie proof of it.
"No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".
It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Global warming(and cooling) have been going on for millions if not billions of years. So what's all the hubub bub.
People have died since there are people. Why should we try to solve this particular murder?
Emacs org mode can do notes perfectly, comes with selective archiving, and you can even schedule tasks and even record what time you spend on what. It's free form, exports to plenty of useful formats, the table mode is plain genius, and, of course, it's Emacs.
Was there an era where buying playboy was considered conservative and respectable?
We need a new time form for things that people now claim were ok back then ;-). I suspect than may now 50ish man will have bought Playboy 30 years ago, but only now realise that everyone did, and thus may be less prudish about it.
Who knows. But a few or even a few hundred idiots are not a substantial threat to Europe. CNN just published this graph, showing that the risk for Americans to be killed by firearm in the US is more than two orders of magnitude greater than the risk of an American being killed by terrorism (home or abroad). And if you exclude 9/11, it's more than three orders of magnitude. If the US can survive the NRA, then Europe can survive a couple of other fanatics.
I hope Sir Isaac knows the difference between energy and momentum, given that he more or less invented the later concept. Momentum is conserved. Thus, the light bullet has to go a lot faster that the heavy gun. Energy is 1/2mv**2, so the lighter bullet carries a much larger amount of the energy than the heavier gun. The new widget necessarily has to convert some of that energy into heat when the bullet merges with the ball, but the combined gizmo will still carry a lot more energy than the gun (but only 1/5th of the original energy of the bullet - it's speed is 1/5th, thus the combined mass has to be 5 times the bullet weight due to conservation of momentum)).
Except that during the period of leftist revolutions all over the world AI doggedly pursued and questioned the actions pro-Western government armies while having a written policy of not criticizing the guerrilla actions. This asymmetric prosecution of human right crimes was only changed after the end of the cold war.
[citation needed]
If most of earth's animal species die off, as long as the food chain is preserved for the plants/animals that directly benefit us, then most people will not care.
The "food chain" is actually a complex food web, and the more we prune it back, the less resilient it becomes. If it actually turns into a chain, we are one broken link away from disaster. That is one of the reason why diversity is good. Another is that plants and animals provide an enormous amounts of services, many of which we don't even understand. We know about mangroves protecting coasts and filtering water, trees reducing soil erosion and landslides, earthworms improving soil quality, legumes (or rather their symbiotic Rhizobia) providing nitrogen fixation, and most plants photosynthesising to provide us with oxygen and most of the biosphere with complex carbohydrates. But we are far away from a full understanding - we couldn't even keep Biosphere 2 running for a few years.
In this situation, allowing the biosphere to degrade is like a man cutting firewood from the frame of his house - sure, maybe that one piece is not crucial.
The owner is objecting to the user redistributing the file which is apparently subject to a license. In this instance GitHub (in USA) needs to apply their own laws in making the determination of fair use or exemption but I think the DMCA notice will stand - unless I'm misinformed there is no exclusion to DMCA for academic purposes as there is in India's safe harbour provisions.
The web site does not get to make its own determination, unless it want to lose the protection of the DMCA. The only way to keep it up is for the user in question to file a counter notice. In that case it become an issue between the user and the (alleged) copyright owner.
Publishing on the internet does NOT extinguish your copyright. The author (web page owner) legally requires permission from the (slimeball) corporation to publish their copyrighted material. The author might be able to sue for impersonation (they pretended the stuff they served was from the author), and they (corp) might be liable for defamation (they served up adds on his website without consent and made it look like he (author) was doing it), but they most certainly have the right to block him publishing their code.
Making something available on the public net is generally considered to provide the user with an implied license to download and read the document. It does not extinguish copyright (i.e. you cannot freely copy it), but you sure can download it. Otherwise each website access would be a copyright violation. This principle is well established. Moreover, of course, in this case, publishing is fair use for commentary. Distribution of the code to expose their practices is not in competition with the companies' use (which is, after all, freely distributing the code). It is inconvenient for the companies to have their unethical and almost certainly illegal practices in the limelight, but keeping dirty secrets is not something protected by copyright.
They can afford it because:
1) They get a third of the number of foreign students that the United States attracts
2) German universities tend to be a "no-frill" affair, with large auditoriums, limited to no athletics programs, and none of the social life seen in American campuses, Most students tend to study locally, so generally there are no dorms. They are more comparable with American state colleges. This isn't a bad thing, in my opinion, but those who go to college hoping for the experience of the "college life" will be disappointed if they go to Germany.
I love Germany, but I don't know of any German beers that are all that good. They certainly have the reputation but the reality has always been disappointing.
The unusual quality that might irritate people used to Bud Light is called "taste", and is usually considered a good thing in beers.
Whatever we do there are risks, and start yeah, but start what? What if climate change is actually a fairly low risk in the grand scheme of things and meanwhile lack of cheap (coal fired) electricity is holding back Africa, and the underdevelopment of infrastructure, is making one of those global epidemics more likely? Something which could decimate humanity in a few years? Why is climate change touted as THE MOST IMPORTANT issue? When that's just a wild speculation about risk?
Which do you start?
We might, say, start by collecting an international body of experts and ask them to look into the issue. Maybe they could periodically write reports, maybe on the physical science side of the issue, but also on the impacts of the physical changes. Just a weird idea, of course, but if we had started early enough, we might have had a first overview by 1990! And if we don't quite trust those experts, we could e.g. ask some national science academies to evaluate the issue.If they all violently agree, we might start to consider actions.
As for Africa: Sure, Africa has done so well in the age of "burn it like there is no tomorrow", so continuing in the same direction is obviously the right thing to do. Or maybe this is the most cynical propaganda meme I've yet encountered.
[...] And decades later they realised their model was totally wrong. THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. Of course, people only act when they think they know the answer. Of course, decades of expertise can go into that answer. And it can still easily be wrong. To think otherwise is just overconfidence in a world of complex systems. More fool you.
You might want to look at Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. Science can never give us philosophical certainty, and many scientific theories are incomplete (i.e. "wrong" in the strict sense). But that does not mean that all are equally wrong, or wrong enough to be useless. Newton was superseded by Einstein, but is still good enough for nearly all practical purposes.
All the warmers really care about is feeling good about themselves, which is it doesn't matter to them that their agenda is increased poverty. The 22000 children that already die every single day due to poverty doesn't matter. Thats 80 million per decade. 800 million children dead in the next century due to poverty if something isnt done.
And of course all those poor nations and their people have done so very well during the last century of unrestricted carbon extraction and burning. "We must keep burning fossil fuels for the poor children" - I've heard that argument before, and it's either dishonest or stupid at a level that I find hard to fathom. Developing nations don't need more oil, they need a fairer economic system.
So when will all of this destruction and devastation actually happen?
The next prediction was that the ozone layer would be almost completely depleted by 2002. It didn't happen.
Then we were told global warming would spiral out of control by 2011. It didn't happen.
Apart from the fact that you "distinct memory" seem to be highly selective and not quite reliable, this seems to be a very weird example. Yes, we were destroying the Ozone layer with (primarily) CFCs. Scientists were warning that things would get worse if nothing was done about it. But for once, the world did something. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol banned most releases of CFCs worldwide. And about now we can see the Ozone hole slowly recovering. This is not a failed prediction, it's an example of regulation working and predictions coming true.
...renewables are going to have their work cut out for themselves just supplying a majority percentage of the power for national electricty grids. I'm not sure where they think the extra renewable power to do this will come from.
Actually, depending on the process efficiency (the article claims 70%), this is a great complement to renewables. Whenever there is a surplus of renewable energy (and we do have this situation now regularly in Germany, not a country particularly blessed with sunshine), it can be turned into storable fuel. This makes larger capacities more economical, and in a pinch you could even use the fuel to power diesel generators when there is a lull in the renewable supply.