(December 31, 2022 at 3:13 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(December 31, 2022 at 9:30 am)Jehanne Wrote: Such was certainly Captain Kirk's mentality; Captain Picard, on the other hand, was a bit more practical.

I would not say the picard mentality is practical, more like foolishly quixotic.l

his concept of nobility ensures the future will be depleted in those with similar sentiments, and comparatively enriched in those with the opposite sentiment

You can always blame things on Rick Berman.

(December 31, 2022 at 8:10 am)Jehanne Wrote: Sagan has been dead now for almost 30 years, and controlled nuclear fusion has, ostensibly, happened just one time, in 2021, and the researchers have failed to reproduce their results.  What happens if nuclear fusion is never realized?  We will go on burning fossil fuels until either they are all gone, or, we've destroyed ourselves.

I consistently find that everything is, ironically, binary with you.  One and zero.  All or nothing.  In reality, the price of fossil fuels will rise as they become scarce, which will signal the market to invest in alternatives long before they are completely gone.  By the same token, if we can't find all the resources we need in our niche our population will decline to reach equilibrium with the resources we do have.  So everything is sliding around and you need to solve the problem with a hella complicated differential equation and not some straight-line extrapolation everyone else likes to throw out there.

(December 31, 2022 at 3:25 pm)LinuxGal Wrote:

(December 31, 2022 at 8:10 am)Jehanne Wrote: Sagan has been dead now for almost 30 years, and controlled nuclear fusion has, ostensibly, happened just one time, in 2021, and the researchers have failed to reproduce their results.  What happens if nuclear fusion is never realized?  We will go on burning fossil fuels until either they are all gone, or, we've destroyed ourselves.

I consistently find that everything is, ironically, binary with you.  One and zero.  All or nothing.  In reality, the price of fossil fuels will rise as they become scarce, which will signal the market to invest in alternatives long before they are completely gone.  By the same token, if we can't find all the resources we need in our niche our population will decline to reach equilibrium with the resources we do have.  So everything is sliding around and you need to solve the problem with a hella complicated differential equation and not some straight-line extrapolation everyone else likes to throw out there.

You're pounding on open doors when you claim that fossil fuels ("ancient sunlight") is finite.  But, who, say in 1995 would have predicted this:


As you know, Marion King Hubbert forecasted a normal ("bell-shaped") curve in his 1956 presentation to American Petroleum Institute, predicting that US peak oil production would occur in 1970 or thereabouts.

And, so, who's to say how much fossil fuel reserves are out there waiting to be discovered??  But, hey, let the free market decide things! I am willing to go down that road in lieu of being accused of obtuseness by trusting the A6 models with all of their sets of partial differential equations and all.

(December 31, 2022 at 12:47 am)Jehanne Wrote:

Objectivist Wrote: I think today's environmental problems will be solved by tomorrow's technology because who wants to live in a dirty, polluted environment?  That is they will be solved if we don't destroy the world's economy by prematurely ending oil and gas use.

I hope that you are right, but, what if you are not?  Let's say that Humanity's quest for energy sources in the form of nuclear fusion is an exercise in futility, and while theoretically possible, is yet impossible to implement with any engineering, present or future.

If we burn all the fossil fuels that can be burned, will life on our World cease to be, other than, perhaps, extremophile bacteria?  And, is such a nightmarish scenario worth the risk?

I hope I am too, but I don't think that all life on the planet will end because we are burning fossil fuel for another 20 to 50 years.  Scientists in California just announced a major breakthrough in fusion but I understand that they have sort of walked that back a little.  I think the theory is sound and now there are major engineering hurdles to solve but I think we will get there, but not if we destroy the worlds economy with green energy boondoggles.  Solar and wind sound great but they are orders of magnitude less efficient.  I think there is a lot of room for improvement and that these technologies have a place but not as the main source barring any major breakthroughs which could very well happen.  

What I do know is that if we try to switch to less efficient and dense power sources many, many people will die because our current population is built on oil and gas for the most part.  We need to be finding much more energy dense sources and nuclear is that in spades.  

If you look at the most developed countries with relatively good economies you find that they are much cleaner and the people are more environmentally conscious.  I am.  I recycle, I don't use poisons on my property to control weeds, I ride my bike a lot to get groceries, and carry my packages daily to the post office six miles away.  I conserve water.  

I've been to third world countries and there's no comparison.  They are filthy, they don't know how to take care of human waste.  They use DDT.  When I was in Cancun there were no mosquitoes and it's because they use DDT.  Brazil was even worse.  They just run a pipe from their houses and dump their sewage right into creeks and rivers.  There are mountains of trash everywhere.  When people are poor they will cut down all the valuable rainforest trees.  How can you blame them for cutting down an ancient Mahogany tree that's worth thousands of dollars to them when they are just trying to feed their families?  That's another thing, as a woodworker I refuse to use tropical woods even if people want me to.  

If you want a clean environment then people need to be free to produce and trade and create wealth to invest in research and development of new technologies.   There is an even greater threat to humanity and the environment that no one is talking about.  It's far more dangerous than nuclear weapons and Asteroid strikes and pandemics combined and that's the extreme bubble in the global bond markets that appears to be popping.  When that goes billions could die and the rest could strip the land of anything that they can eat.  look at what's happening in Europe right now with electricity prices soaring because they are switching to wind and solar.  They are all freezing if the news can be believed and they are going out into the forest to get wood to burn.  

That's my unexpert opinion anyway.  And my final thought about climate change is that humans have already survived massive shifts in the climate in the past and without all this modern technology that we have.  The climate is always changing.  It's either getting warmer or colder and given the vast amount of people that need to eat, we'd better hope it's warming rather than cooling.  I've read that the Earth is getting greener as a result of rising CO2.  Personally, I'm convinced that the whole global warming, now climate change since there hasn't been much warming since 2000, is the modern version of original sin.   As Dr. Ferris in Atlas Shrugged said, "there's no way to rule innocent men.  If you teach men that looking at flowers is evil and they believe you then you've got them and you can get them to do all sorts of things to relieve them of their guilt" and if there aren't enough criminals to crack down on, one must create them.  One must pass so many laws that it's impossible to live without breaking them.  

Consider the words of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead, one of the vilest villains in the history of literature:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jguJM3TIehI

That's what I think the whole global warming thing is really about, not that there is not global warming or climate change.  There always has been and always will be.  If CO2 is really a problem, there is a simple and cheap solution.  Figure out how many extra tons of carbon dioxide we are creating and plant a sufficient number of trees to absorb it.  Problem solved.  I'm doing my part.  I'm creating a permaculture food forest on my land.

So a bunch of ill-informed climate change denialism so I'll simply say 

Climate change is happening, It's man-made, it's preventable, and no it will not end well for humanity or the planet in general and no renewable energy is more efficient than fossil fuels, and none of Europe's energy woes are not because they switched to renewables. Also, DDT was rightly banned due to causing pesticide resistance in mosquitoes which lead to all kinds of problems, and deforesting the Amazon is not a solution to poverty and it will have dire consequences for the rest of the planet. Technology and planting trees will not solve this issue changing our economy and the way we live will. The Fountainhead is a garbage book written by a cultist hack to promote a garbage pseudo-philosophy. You have no clue what you are talking about.

As I said, I believe the A6 models.  Not only are they doing an excellent job predicting climate on this World, they are doing a good job predicting the climate on other worlds. 

I worked, professionally, in Statistical Process Control for over 10 years for Verizon, using Minitab as my principle analysis tool.  I remember when I did a simple timeseries plot on the NASA GISS world temperature dataset in the late 90s, which is located here:

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/table...s+dSST.txt

The results were shocking, and I will never forget my first sight of them -- a "sea of red" above the 3-sigma UCL, with Minitab flagging all the Shewhart tests for non-random (or, "special cause") variation.  But, yes, it was a longitudinal chart, and, as we all know, correlation does not prove causation.

Still, the signal persists and has since I first saw it 25 years ago.  Here is the NSIDC data for the Arctic sea ice extent:


And, the Antarctic:

These recent results are, of course, completely anecdotal, but, nevertheless, they are completely consistent with the decadal trends seen here in recent times.  Eventually, due to albedo, the trend is almost certainly going to accelerate.

My most important observation to climate skeptics is not to confound heat with temperature -- you are more likely to burn your mouth on the cheese as opposed to the crust, even though both are at the same temperature in your (hopefully) fully cooked pizza.

@LinuxGal
We'll be dead or near-to before fossil fuels become scarce, largely as a consequence of their use. The invisible hand of the free market isn't going to help us with this one, even if we would let it..which we obviously won't when it comes to fossil fuels. They've already lost their market advantage to alternatives - and yet...

@Objectivist
Planting trees is always a great idea - especially if they're food bearing.  If we planted a few countries worth of trees, however, that would only be a small part of a comprehensive solution to agw.  We need to severely curtail our use of fossil fuels, and our reliance on them (for quite some time now) means that this reduction will touch every part of our lives in some way.  From where we work, to how we build our houses, to what we eat. So, rather than say the problem is solved, we should call it what it is. A good start....if we ever get around to starting that.

Fighting climate change is seriously as simple as planting more trees? Okay, here’s a little math problem for you.

In 2018 alone, humanity emitted 37 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressa...63f0b1c6e5
A gigaton is 2 trillion pounds.
A tree captures, on average, 48 pounds of CO2 per year. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/...we-breathe

1) How many trees would it take to offset the carbon emissions of humanity for the year of 2018 alone?
2) Do you see why this isn’t a realistic solution, given the answer to A?

You'd probably end up realizing more gain from the land use and regulatory policies required to plant and protect that many trees than you would the trees themselves.

We'd have to do alot to make the trees job eaiser, for sure. 20% of us emissions are related to housing. So...time to rebuild -all- of our houses...and hey, sounds like an incredible job creating project to me.