@Thalassokrator bro..people probably pay you a lot of your time to work on som and you give your knowlegde for free here? gg
@Noflaps said in #50:
> so do you
No, but you are free to read it that Malthusian-obviously-flawed way, if you want.
> so do you
No, but you are free to read it that Malthusian-obviously-flawed way, if you want.
@OctoPinky, just to be clear (as political spokespersons love to say) "so do you ... ?" was asked as a question. A rhetorical question, in fact, since I assumed that you would agree with me that vastly increasing the population of North America would NOT be a good thing for the environment.
Even though it WOULD likely give us smaller per-capita measurements for energy and food use.
You see my point, right? Per-capita readings, while often quite useful, are NOT all there is to it.
And, by the way, what people "pledge" to do doesn't always reveal the future. You know that, too, right?
Actions, like building new coal plants, instead of something much less impactful, speak louder than pledges, I mean words. You know how many decades a typical coal-burning power plant lasts, right? Well, maybe you don't. But it's not too hard to make a decent guess.
Even though it WOULD likely give us smaller per-capita measurements for energy and food use.
You see my point, right? Per-capita readings, while often quite useful, are NOT all there is to it.
And, by the way, what people "pledge" to do doesn't always reveal the future. You know that, too, right?
Actions, like building new coal plants, instead of something much less impactful, speak louder than pledges, I mean words. You know how many decades a typical coal-burning power plant lasts, right? Well, maybe you don't. But it's not too hard to make a decent guess.
@Noflaps said in #38:
> I'm not trying to pretend that climate change is a hoax, or that we need not continue to work on the problem.
Oh, very well!
Then in #48 you continue:
> By the way, to all concerned, beware of relying too much upon calculations that themselves appear to rely on oddly precise measurements of sea level increase for years long past -- like, say, 1945 -- before laser measurement and manmade orbital objects. Precision of that sort, from such early years, might sometimes be based upon wishful thinking, cheerfully speculative mathematics, or a desire not to disappoint others whom we respect. Like peers, youtubers or delightful professors.
>
> Indeed, I fear that sometimes measurements even from more recent years may sometimes be a bit suspect! Or should I say "viewed with excess enthusiasm."
So which is it?
First you say that you don't believe (anthropogenic?) climate change to be a hoax.
And a few posts down the line you revert to "old data is dubious data", "scientists are pretending that the GMSL in the 19th century can be determined to the same degree of accuracy as today's GMSL", "it's all based on wishful thinking and peer pressure" and "even today's measurements are dubious" (not direct quotes, I'm only paraphrasing what you seem to imply, correct me if I'm misrepresenting you).
Of course you assert – no, to be fair you merely express concern about – all of this without providing the slightest amount of evidence.
You don't seem to trust climate scientists at all. This much is apparent from your use of terms like "speculative mathematics", whatever that's supposed to be. You probably mean predictive mathematical models used to describe nature (which can hardly be construed as speculative).
Mathematical models can describe nature to varying degrees of accuracy (every known law of physics is such a model). This accuracy can be objectively assessed, for instance by comparing the model's predictions to observational data. It can be quantified by various means, for example – and I'm greatly simplifying entire fields of study like statistics and data science here – by calculating the differences between the predicted value and the observed value (this difference is called a 'residual' or more casually a 'cost'). Then you can improve the accuracy of your model's fit by minimizing a certain (there are many suitable functions) cost function that takes the residuals as inputs and spits out, say, a measure of something like an "average cost" as an output. You can use an iterative process to easily find the lowest "average cost" (at least locally, finding a global minimum of the cost function is a lot harder in general and there are many other intricacies like avoiding overfitting). Thereby improving your model's predictions.
When a model fits observational data well (and is neither overfitted nor under-fitted) it can be used to extrapolate beyond the fitted data and will produce reasonable predictions. That's one way you can estimate the global mean sea level (GMSL) prior to satellite data. You can also combine satellite data with tide gauge data. The exact methodology is quite involved, but you can have a look here if you're interested:
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1#Sec2 (Church et al., 2011)
Take particular note of section '2.3 The Analysis Approach' in which the nitty-gritty mathematical details of their model's cost function and the way they discretised our planet's oceans are described.
A more recent paper that might be worth a look:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5468634/ (Dangendorf et al., 2017)
Notice in particular that you were talking moonshine in #48 when you said:
> Precision of that sort, from such early years [pre 1945], might sometimes be based upon wishful thinking, cheerfully speculative mathematics, or a desire not to disappoint others whom we respect. Like peers, youtubers or delightful professors.
The area surrounding the GMSL reconstruction shaded in grey in Fig. 1. of Dangendorf et al., 2017 represents the 1σ error (i.e. the statistical uncertainty given by the standard deviation σ) of the reconstructed GMSL. You'll agree that it noticeably widens the further into the past you look (as would naïvely be expected). The same is true for the light blue and red dashed areas in Fig. 5. of Church et al., 2011 which again represent the 1 standard deviation errors. They too greatly increase the further back in time one reconstructs the GMSL.
That's because climate scientists don't "rely on oddly precise measurements [...] for years long past" as you imply. They are very much aware of the increased statistical uncertainty, know where it comes from, can quantify it and transparently communicate it. As is good practice in science.
By the way, it primarily comes from the limited number of tide gauges in the 19th century, most of which were located in the northern hemisphere. It's a misconception that old measurements or old measurement devices were somehow per se less accurate than modern ones. That's not at all true in all cases. Analogue mercury thermometers are virtually identical in accuracy to modern digital thermometers. Let's return to statistical uncertainties in the two studies though:
The standard deviation is not only displayed in the figures though. It's also used for subsequent calculations using different techniques quantifying the propagation of uncertainty. That's where those statistical uncertainties all over the paper come from. As in the little numbers that appear after the "plus or minus" sign, for example:
> For 1993–2009 and after correcting for glacial isostatic adjustment, the estimated rate of rise is 3.2 ± 0.4 mm [per] year from the satellite data and 2.8 ± 0.8 mm [per] year from the in situ data. [...]
Church et al., 2011: Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century
Intricacies and caveats are also discussed at length on pages 334-340 of
www.cambridge.org/core/books/ocean-and-cryosphere-in-a-changing-climate/sea-level-rise-and-implications-for-lowlying-islands-coasts-and-communities/5D756335C9C3A6DDFAE0219073349E8D
2022 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate
> I'm not trying to pretend that climate change is a hoax, or that we need not continue to work on the problem.
Oh, very well!
Then in #48 you continue:
> By the way, to all concerned, beware of relying too much upon calculations that themselves appear to rely on oddly precise measurements of sea level increase for years long past -- like, say, 1945 -- before laser measurement and manmade orbital objects. Precision of that sort, from such early years, might sometimes be based upon wishful thinking, cheerfully speculative mathematics, or a desire not to disappoint others whom we respect. Like peers, youtubers or delightful professors.
>
> Indeed, I fear that sometimes measurements even from more recent years may sometimes be a bit suspect! Or should I say "viewed with excess enthusiasm."
So which is it?
First you say that you don't believe (anthropogenic?) climate change to be a hoax.
And a few posts down the line you revert to "old data is dubious data", "scientists are pretending that the GMSL in the 19th century can be determined to the same degree of accuracy as today's GMSL", "it's all based on wishful thinking and peer pressure" and "even today's measurements are dubious" (not direct quotes, I'm only paraphrasing what you seem to imply, correct me if I'm misrepresenting you).
Of course you assert – no, to be fair you merely express concern about – all of this without providing the slightest amount of evidence.
You don't seem to trust climate scientists at all. This much is apparent from your use of terms like "speculative mathematics", whatever that's supposed to be. You probably mean predictive mathematical models used to describe nature (which can hardly be construed as speculative).
Mathematical models can describe nature to varying degrees of accuracy (every known law of physics is such a model). This accuracy can be objectively assessed, for instance by comparing the model's predictions to observational data. It can be quantified by various means, for example – and I'm greatly simplifying entire fields of study like statistics and data science here – by calculating the differences between the predicted value and the observed value (this difference is called a 'residual' or more casually a 'cost'). Then you can improve the accuracy of your model's fit by minimizing a certain (there are many suitable functions) cost function that takes the residuals as inputs and spits out, say, a measure of something like an "average cost" as an output. You can use an iterative process to easily find the lowest "average cost" (at least locally, finding a global minimum of the cost function is a lot harder in general and there are many other intricacies like avoiding overfitting). Thereby improving your model's predictions.
When a model fits observational data well (and is neither overfitted nor under-fitted) it can be used to extrapolate beyond the fitted data and will produce reasonable predictions. That's one way you can estimate the global mean sea level (GMSL) prior to satellite data. You can also combine satellite data with tide gauge data. The exact methodology is quite involved, but you can have a look here if you're interested:
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-011-9119-1#Sec2 (Church et al., 2011)
Take particular note of section '2.3 The Analysis Approach' in which the nitty-gritty mathematical details of their model's cost function and the way they discretised our planet's oceans are described.
A more recent paper that might be worth a look:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5468634/ (Dangendorf et al., 2017)
Notice in particular that you were talking moonshine in #48 when you said:
> Precision of that sort, from such early years [pre 1945], might sometimes be based upon wishful thinking, cheerfully speculative mathematics, or a desire not to disappoint others whom we respect. Like peers, youtubers or delightful professors.
The area surrounding the GMSL reconstruction shaded in grey in Fig. 1. of Dangendorf et al., 2017 represents the 1σ error (i.e. the statistical uncertainty given by the standard deviation σ) of the reconstructed GMSL. You'll agree that it noticeably widens the further into the past you look (as would naïvely be expected). The same is true for the light blue and red dashed areas in Fig. 5. of Church et al., 2011 which again represent the 1 standard deviation errors. They too greatly increase the further back in time one reconstructs the GMSL.
That's because climate scientists don't "rely on oddly precise measurements [...] for years long past" as you imply. They are very much aware of the increased statistical uncertainty, know where it comes from, can quantify it and transparently communicate it. As is good practice in science.
By the way, it primarily comes from the limited number of tide gauges in the 19th century, most of which were located in the northern hemisphere. It's a misconception that old measurements or old measurement devices were somehow per se less accurate than modern ones. That's not at all true in all cases. Analogue mercury thermometers are virtually identical in accuracy to modern digital thermometers. Let's return to statistical uncertainties in the two studies though:
The standard deviation is not only displayed in the figures though. It's also used for subsequent calculations using different techniques quantifying the propagation of uncertainty. That's where those statistical uncertainties all over the paper come from. As in the little numbers that appear after the "plus or minus" sign, for example:
> For 1993–2009 and after correcting for glacial isostatic adjustment, the estimated rate of rise is 3.2 ± 0.4 mm [per] year from the satellite data and 2.8 ± 0.8 mm [per] year from the in situ data. [...]
Church et al., 2011: Sea-Level Rise from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century
Intricacies and caveats are also discussed at length on pages 334-340 of
www.cambridge.org/core/books/ocean-and-cryosphere-in-a-changing-climate/sea-level-rise-and-implications-for-lowlying-islands-coasts-and-communities/5D756335C9C3A6DDFAE0219073349E8D
2022 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate
Sweet talking me won't change the fact that a tenth-millimeter-per-year sea-level change precision in 1945.5 (boy, howdy, that's a year and a half!) is as suspect as Joe Biden's ability to run up stairs or Trump's humility!
And my ready willingness to accept that climate does indeed change does not ipso facto require me to accept every piece of "data" and wasteful, massive expenditure that we get offered like an apple in a nice garden in the Fertile Crescent!
My point is this, and I assert that it should be everybody's point, but too often is not: we cannot hurl out babies with bathwater. At least not until those babies have grown into a sturdy young men and women, and we can hurl them into someplace nice.
If we were to make fossil fuels disappear tomorrow, civilization would collapse. If we were to make fossil fuels disappear five or even ten years from now, I believe you'd find civilization would just as surely collapse.
We could immediately face the worst crisis that humankind has faced since the last ice age. When the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you have to react in real time to keep cities and their systems (like hospitals) lit, heated and moving.
And dreams about "what could be" are still dreams at present and for the intermediate term. Natural gas -- a wonderful fuel that can be turned on quickly -- is, by contrast, quite real and in vast supply. And without it you would face real and immediate -- not eventual and speculative -- misery.
There seems to be a large group of people, all schooled (either formally or by social media and other forms of peer pressure) to gleefully accept things like unrealistic precision in measurement in 1945 -- a year when we were lucky to land within a block when bombing from high altitude.
And what conclusions do many of such people rush to reach? Lately, calls for decisions that can destroy whole industries, hurt, perhaps cripple, the economy of Western Civilization, end whole nations and bring relative prosperity to those who pledge their goodness while quietly building coal plants that will likely last for many decades. Perhaps it's a coincidence.
Instead of accepting every anxiety-filled prediction, what we SHOULD do is pretty much what we are actually doing. Continue to build energetically toward an ever-greener future at a responsible pace while taking care that we can ACTUALLY still eat, see at night, and get around. And not make grandparents shiver or get heat exhaustion.
And the people who are letting us do those things are generally expert, experienced, practical, informed, hard-working, and not throwing things at paintings to get media coverage.
Fossil fuels will not be used forever. But those who think they can disappear in a few years if we throw enough soup at paintings are simply wrong. China (unlike America, it appears) builds its coal-burning plants for a reason. And you can't just ignore it and say "well, they pledge to be green!"
Don't concentrate only on what you want to believe, gentlemen and ladies. I don't. I'm all in favor of recognizing that the climate is changing. And I favor the sort of common-sense adaptations that are actually being made by large numbers of informed, diligent regulators, engineers and businesspersons who know far more than those who too often scream at them.
Look out your window when you are driving cross-country (while you still can). There are huge numbers of windmills and vast fields of solar panels. They're real. But they cannot do enough by themselves now and for quite a while longer. Sorry, but when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing you cannot just gesture at the problem with an article or media presentation about what "could be possible in the future."
If we act precipitously based on fashion or fear or politics, a much more easily predicted catastrophe can befall us. And wishful thinking, screaming, reflexively agreeing with pretty celebrities and soup-throwing won't change that.
And my ready willingness to accept that climate does indeed change does not ipso facto require me to accept every piece of "data" and wasteful, massive expenditure that we get offered like an apple in a nice garden in the Fertile Crescent!
My point is this, and I assert that it should be everybody's point, but too often is not: we cannot hurl out babies with bathwater. At least not until those babies have grown into a sturdy young men and women, and we can hurl them into someplace nice.
If we were to make fossil fuels disappear tomorrow, civilization would collapse. If we were to make fossil fuels disappear five or even ten years from now, I believe you'd find civilization would just as surely collapse.
We could immediately face the worst crisis that humankind has faced since the last ice age. When the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you have to react in real time to keep cities and their systems (like hospitals) lit, heated and moving.
And dreams about "what could be" are still dreams at present and for the intermediate term. Natural gas -- a wonderful fuel that can be turned on quickly -- is, by contrast, quite real and in vast supply. And without it you would face real and immediate -- not eventual and speculative -- misery.
There seems to be a large group of people, all schooled (either formally or by social media and other forms of peer pressure) to gleefully accept things like unrealistic precision in measurement in 1945 -- a year when we were lucky to land within a block when bombing from high altitude.
And what conclusions do many of such people rush to reach? Lately, calls for decisions that can destroy whole industries, hurt, perhaps cripple, the economy of Western Civilization, end whole nations and bring relative prosperity to those who pledge their goodness while quietly building coal plants that will likely last for many decades. Perhaps it's a coincidence.
Instead of accepting every anxiety-filled prediction, what we SHOULD do is pretty much what we are actually doing. Continue to build energetically toward an ever-greener future at a responsible pace while taking care that we can ACTUALLY still eat, see at night, and get around. And not make grandparents shiver or get heat exhaustion.
And the people who are letting us do those things are generally expert, experienced, practical, informed, hard-working, and not throwing things at paintings to get media coverage.
Fossil fuels will not be used forever. But those who think they can disappear in a few years if we throw enough soup at paintings are simply wrong. China (unlike America, it appears) builds its coal-burning plants for a reason. And you can't just ignore it and say "well, they pledge to be green!"
Don't concentrate only on what you want to believe, gentlemen and ladies. I don't. I'm all in favor of recognizing that the climate is changing. And I favor the sort of common-sense adaptations that are actually being made by large numbers of informed, diligent regulators, engineers and businesspersons who know far more than those who too often scream at them.
Look out your window when you are driving cross-country (while you still can). There are huge numbers of windmills and vast fields of solar panels. They're real. But they cannot do enough by themselves now and for quite a while longer. Sorry, but when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing you cannot just gesture at the problem with an article or media presentation about what "could be possible in the future."
If we act precipitously based on fashion or fear or politics, a much more easily predicted catastrophe can befall us. And wishful thinking, screaming, reflexively agreeing with pretty celebrities and soup-throwing won't change that.
<Comment deleted by user>
@Noflaps said in #55:
> Sweet talking me won't change the fact that a tenth-millimeter-per-year sea-level change precision in 1945.5 (boy, howdy, that's a year and a half!) is as suspect as Joe Biden's ability to run up stairs or Trump's humility!
I'm not sweet talking you as should be evident from the fact that I'm not trying to get you (personally) to do anything. As I've said, individual consumers do not play a negligible part, but they don't play a major part either. Bringing a hand knitted reusable shopping bag won't hurt, but it won't help much either when there are no little to no policies aimed at reducing the emissions of energy generation, heat, transportation, manufacturing and buildings (the big five sources of CO2 emissions).
Regarding the "fact" of the suspiciousness of a "tenth-millimeter-per-year sea-level change precision in 1945.5" you are very, very confused. And please don't take this the wrong way, I understand the confusion as I was once as confused as you are now. I had the exact same misconception! Let me explain:
You get the figure of 1945.5 from my back of the envelope calculation of acceleration in post #44. It's the midpoint of a time interval over which the velocity was averaged. For the sake of my quick and dirty, very, very rough estimation of the acceleration in #44 I treated it as if it was the instantaneous velocity at the midpoint of the time interval (the half year comes from calculating the arithmetic mean). When of course it isn't!
The true instantaneous velocity on hour 12 of day 182 of 1945 cannot be determined after the fact (there aren't enough data points). But the average velocity (averaged over a significant time period of several years) CAN in fact be determined comparatively precisely (by linear regression to the data points of which there are many over an extended time span). Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough.
Here's what I wrote in #44:
> What follows is a VERY ROUGH back of the envelope calculation [...]:
> I'll ESTIMATE the acceleration as follows. Take the midpoint (arithmetic mean) of the given time frames over which the velocity was AVERAGED as the instantaneous moment at which the velocity was measured:
> For the time frame between 1901 and 1990 the midpoint lies at t1 = (1/2)*(1901 + 1990) = 1945.5.
Emphasis retrospectively added by me.
Please be aware that what I do in my posts does not in any way constitute a scientific treatment of the matter. For that I referred you to the scientific papers by Church et al. (2011) and Dangendorf et al. (2017) also cited in the IPCC report (among many other papers on the matter). I did so in #54, where I already explained that climate scientists don't "rely on oddly precise measurements [...] for years long past". And pointed to the 1σ error noticeably widening the further you reconstruct into the past (see Figure 5. of Church et al., 2011). In simple terms: The model becomes less and less confident in its prediction of the reconstructed GMSL the further in predicts into the past. As would be naïvely expected.
Notice that the standard deviation in Fig. 5. of Church et al. (2011) has grown to about ±20 mm in 1900 and to ±28 mm in 1860. And that's only the 1σ error (read: "one sigma error"), meaning that there's still a chance of about 31.73% (assuming normally distributed errors) that the true value lies outside of that region (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68–95–99.7_rule). For those versed in statistics, I'm glossing over some intricacies for the sake of simplicity.
Also note that this is not the measurement uncertainty of the tide gauges at that time, but rather the uncertainty of the model. The uncertainty of the tide gauges is of course baked into the model via propagation of uncertainties. But so are the much lower uncertainties of the later satellite altimeters. They are mathematically combined (with different weights) to give you the uncertainty of the model.
The 2 σ error (4.55% chance of the true value lying outside) of the model would extend to ±40 mm in 1900 and to ±56 mm in 1860. Hardly a precision of a tenth of a millimeter. But that wasn't your claim! I know it wasn't, but trust me I didn't show you the model uncertainty in 1900 for no reason.
Your claim was that a tenth of a millimeter precision in the "sea level CHANGE" (emphasis added by me) is suspect. I claim that it isn't suspicious at all and here's why:
www.desmos.com/calculator/b2ivu4dydw?lang=en
Compare this desmos graph (own work) to Fig. 5. of Church et al. (2011). The paper asserts the following in its abstract:
"The linear trend from 1900 to 2009 is 1.7 ± 0.2 mm [per] year [...]"
The reason the error of the slope of such a linear trend is so small (two tenths of a millimeter) is that it's the average velocity over 109 years (rounded to 110 in my desmos graph). Using the slider for the slope m you can quickly build an intuition how that can be.
The slope is given in "mm PER YEAR" and that's important. If you average over 100 years or so and one point of the trend line is essentially fixed (i.e. the current GMSL in 2010, measured very precisely using satellite altimetry, for the purposes of illustration the error of the satellite measurement is neglected in the desmos graph), the error sigma_m (σ_m) of the slope shouldn't be much greater that a hundredth of the error of the data point that's furthest from the fixed point. In this case being the data point in the year 1900.
Otherwise your linear trend line (or more precisely the trend lines with slope m ± σ_m) is going to miss the error bar of that furthest data point by a mile. And what do we find?
(110 yr)*(σ_m) = 22 mm ≈ σ_1900 ≈ 20 mm
Very much in the same order of magnitude. So no, a precision of a tenth of a millimeter for the average rate of sea level change (averaged over ≈ 100 years) is not only not suspicious, it is to be expected!
Of course I have to emphasise that my desmos graph does not constitute the way linear regression (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression) is done. It's not scientific, it's just a visualisation aid for your convenience. Any inaccuracies are solely explained by my sloppy way of reading off the values from Fig. 5. of Church et al. (2011) and me basically disregarding the behaviour of the GMSL between 1900 and 2009 entirely (for simplicity's sake I only used the starting point and the end point). Linear regression would of course consider the many data points (alongside their respective errors) between 1900 and 2009 as well!
I'm pretty certain the paper actually used linear regression to find a better linear trend line (slope 1.7±0.2 mm/yr instead of desmos's super rough estimate of 1.64 mm/yr because of the visible acceleration of the sea level change in the latter half of the 20th century). Even if they didn't spell it out since linear regression is a such a standard technique in science.
As I said at the beginning the first time I had to do linear regression, I had the very same misconception you had!
I was baffled at first when the error on the slope of the line came out much smaller than the errors of the individual data points. I had to carefully think it through for some time before I realized what I attempted to explain above. Slight variations in the slope cause large variations in y-value much further down the line. Say you have 1000 data points (evenly spaced between x=1 and x=1000) following a roughly linear trend (let's say the true trend is something like y = 2*x, but your data points are randomly distributed around that true trend) and their y-error is σ_y ≈ ±50. Then the slope m of the line cannot also have error ±50. Why not?
Well otherwise you'd get the line of best fit as, say, y = 1.9*x between your 1 standard deviation bounds of
y_lower = - 48.1*x
and
y_upper = 51.9*x.
That's obviously nonsense, the data points are clearly increasing, so negative slopes make no sense at all and a slope of m_upper = +51.9 is also way too steep (it would predict a value of y_upper = 51,900 at x = 1000, when the actual data point is located at a mere y = 2037 at x = 1000). Linear regression will rather spit out something like y = (1.96 ± 0.05)*x + (0.03 ± 0.01), which is more reasonable. Recommended reading:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_function_(calculus)#Slope
> If we were to make fossil fuels disappear tomorrow, civilization would collapse. If we were to make fossil fuels disappear five or even ten years from now, I believe you'd find civilization would just as surely collapse.
I've addressed this point several times by now. Not once have I demanded an immediate disappearance of all fossil fuels. Nor have I given you a time frame of 5 to 10 years. You are simply making this up.
My demand is "make the transition as quick as is reasonably feasible" and my assertion is "we are currently not nearly acting at the pace we need to, nor at the pace we can reasonably act, we are acting much slower". And by we I mean humanity as a whole. Playing the blame game won't help here.
You find it hard to argue these points so instead you misrepresent (as I can infer from your insistence on doing so even after several clarifications by me) my position and pretend as if I wanted an immediate (and total) end (or one in 5-10 years) to all fossil fuels. Then you can claim victory by pointing out that that would be very bad indeed (essentially all world trade across the sea is currently diesel driven). That's the textbook definition of a straw man fallacy (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).
It's like we are two surgeons about to perform surgery on a wounded patient that has a bullet lodged in one of their arteries (and is slowly bleeding out internally). Obviously this is an analogy (and not devoid of slight hyperbole):
I say: "This patient is slowly bleeding out internally. We need to perform the surgery – removing most of the bullet – as quickly as reasonably possible in order to secure the greatest chance of unimpaired health and survival for our patient! They were brought to the ER 30 minutes ago and have remained there, we need to pick up the pace!"
Meanwhile you keep insisting:
"My ready willingness to accept that the patient does indeed bleed internally does not ipso facto require me to accept that we need to dislodge the entire bullet at once five seconds from now without even clamping the artery first! If we don't clamp the artery before dislodging the bullet, the bullet stops acting as a temporary bandaid for the ruptured artery and the patient will very quickly bleed out and die."
I respond: "Yeah, I get it. That wasn't what I was proposing." And go on to propose a reasonable surgical plan that goes into detail about how we are going to get most of the bullet out without rupturing additional vessels, how we stop the bleeding etc. All supported by heaps of medical case studies demonstrating the efficacy, cost effectiveness and availability of the required technology.
And you keep on saying: "But we can't rip out the entire bullet at once five seconds from now."
Yeah. That was never the plan. The plan was to get the patient from the ER to the surgical suite. And to perform a necessary surgery as safely and as quickly as possible.
I'm a bit disappointed because this started as a cordial and respectful discussion. I acknowledge my share of the blame (and regret formulations like "talking moonshine" in #54) for the deterioration of the discussion.
> And dreams about "what could be" are still dreams at present and for the intermediate term.
What year is it? 1990? You feign ignorance about renewable energy sources I already listed and pretend as if they were but pipe dreams of a distant future. They are not: ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
Here's a short (and incomplete) list of non fossil fuels (and energy infrastructure), most of which are technologies available today:
- pumped-storage hydroelectricity, can be turned on and off quickly, has existed for decades
- nuclear energy, can supply the base load, has existed for decades
- bioenergy, can supply the base load, can be turned on and off quickly, has existed for decades
- wind energy, already very cheap, has existed for decades
- solar energy, already very cheap, has existed for decades
- concentrated solar thermal (which heats salts to hundreds of ºF meaning they continue to provide energy even in the dark), already exists
- high altitude airborne wind energy (high altitude winds are steadier, more persistent and have higher velocity), can probably contribute to the base load and be turned on and off quickly, perhaps the least developed technology on this list
- energy storage as hydrogen or in batteries, can be turned on and off quickly, already exists (but still has room for improvement)
- fusion energy, not yet feasible, will probably take another 50 years until it is, promising to be overall amazing, could supply the base load and be turned on and off quickly, certainly the only speculative "dream" technology on this list
> There seems to be a large group of people, all schooled (either formally or by social media and other forms of peer pressure) to gleefully accept things like unrealistic precision in measurement in 1945 -- a year when we were lucky to land within a block when bombing from high altitude.
The only thing unrealistic about that were your own expectations. As I have shown above. Just because something doesn't conform to your intuitive expectation it doesn't mean that it is necessarily wrong or suspicious. Human intuition (mine included) is very often wrong. I had the same intuitive misconception once.
I also can't help but notice that you frame education per se in terms of "peer pressure".
> And what conclusions do many of such people rush to reach? Lately, calls for decisions that can destroy whole industries, hurt, perhaps cripple, the economy of Western Civilization, end whole nations and bring relative prosperity to those who pledge their goodness while quietly building coal plants that will likely last for many decades. Perhaps it's a coincidence.
So you're worried that "Western Civilization" will fall behind China because the West might choose to expand renewable energies (too quickly) that are demonstrably cheeper than fossil fuels (and still getting cheeper)? See the ourworldindata source above. I doubt cheaper electricity will hamper the economy.
> Instead of accepting every anxiety-filled prediction, what we SHOULD do is pretty much what we are actually doing. Continue to build energetically toward an ever-greener future at a responsible pace while taking care that we can ACTUALLY still eat, see at night, and get around. And not make grandparents shiver or get heat exhaustion.
I agree about finding a responsible pace. But I contend that the patient is still in the ER right now. If you allow the further use of my earlier analogy. We're not yet moving at the pace we could move. And should move.
So I strongly disagree with the claim that we are actually already building energetically toward an ever-greener future at a responsible pace. The current pace is irresponsibly slow. At this rate the patient will suffer unnecessarily on their longwinded way from the ER to the operating suite (i.e. Earth's atmosphere will very likely suffer a temperature increase of more than 2ºC by the end of the century).
There's very good evidence to support this stance:
unfccc.int/news/climate-commitments-not-on-track-to-meet-paris-agreement-goals-as-ndc-synthesis-report-is-published
or this (and the scientific paper published in 'nature' cited therein):
www.npr.org/2023/10/30/1208241783/its-unlikely-but-not-impossible-to-limit-global-warming-to-1-5-celsius-study-fin
Could you please refer me to the evidence that shows humanity is well on track? And will meet the target of the Paris agreement?
Not that this target is some "cliff, where humanity is safe on this side of it and doomed on the other.", as the NPR article rightly points out. But every tenth of a degree matters. Remember this is average temperature we're talking about here.
The heat capacity of the atmosphere is on the order of 10^21 J/K (assuming an isobaric volumetric heat capacity of 0.001297 J/(K*cm^3) and a tropospheric height of 11 km equivalent to a volume of 5.62×10^24 m^3). So a tenth of a degree increase in temperature means adding 10^20 Joules of energy to the system. That's the energy equivalent of more than 400 Tsar Bombas (the most powerful thermonuclear device ever created or tested). A full degree correspondingly is like thousands (more than 4000) of Tsar Bombas of energy. The corresponding numbers are 1600 and 16,000 castle bravo detonations, in case you're American.
Need I emphasise the nature of this rough ball park calculation again? I'm only looking at the order of magnitude here to give you an idea, this isn't serious climatology.
That's what people who say "1ºC warming doesn't even sound noticeable" miss. It's an awful lot of added heat energy that's permanently bound up in the atmospheric system and consequently causes much more extreme weather events, like hurricanes, tornados, localised heat waves and the like. Confer any of the recent IPCC reports.
> Don't concentrate only on what you want to believe, gentlemen and ladies. I don't. [...]
Are sure about that?
> Look out your window when you are driving cross-country (while you still can).
Am I the fear monger? Who says you cannot drive cross-country in the future? Nobody.
> There are huge numbers of windmills and vast fields of solar panels. They're real. But they cannot do enough by themselves now and for quite a while longer. Sorry, but when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing you cannot just gesture at the problem with an article or media presentation about what "could be possible in the future."
And where exactly have I done that? I specifically didn't just gesture at the problem and pointed to some pipe dream technology that doesn't exist. Read my post #44. Or this post.
This is still a massive straw-man instead of the gotcha you believe it to be.
> If we act precipitously based on fashion or fear or politics, a much more easily predicted catastrophe can befall us. And wishful thinking, screaming, reflexively agreeing with pretty celebrities and soup-throwing won't change that.
Yes, if anything this exchange proves that I'm a wishful thinker who has no idea of what's actually going on, I am unable to cite reliable sources in support of my positions, I'm screaming, tears running down my cheeks, probably just a hysterical teenage girl, I'm reflexively agreeing with pretty celebrities like the Beatles or James Hansen (have you ever seen a more attractive bod?) and I'm burying this entire thread in tomato soup because I cannot come up with any more arguments!
> Sweet talking me won't change the fact that a tenth-millimeter-per-year sea-level change precision in 1945.5 (boy, howdy, that's a year and a half!) is as suspect as Joe Biden's ability to run up stairs or Trump's humility!
I'm not sweet talking you as should be evident from the fact that I'm not trying to get you (personally) to do anything. As I've said, individual consumers do not play a negligible part, but they don't play a major part either. Bringing a hand knitted reusable shopping bag won't hurt, but it won't help much either when there are no little to no policies aimed at reducing the emissions of energy generation, heat, transportation, manufacturing and buildings (the big five sources of CO2 emissions).
Regarding the "fact" of the suspiciousness of a "tenth-millimeter-per-year sea-level change precision in 1945.5" you are very, very confused. And please don't take this the wrong way, I understand the confusion as I was once as confused as you are now. I had the exact same misconception! Let me explain:
You get the figure of 1945.5 from my back of the envelope calculation of acceleration in post #44. It's the midpoint of a time interval over which the velocity was averaged. For the sake of my quick and dirty, very, very rough estimation of the acceleration in #44 I treated it as if it was the instantaneous velocity at the midpoint of the time interval (the half year comes from calculating the arithmetic mean). When of course it isn't!
The true instantaneous velocity on hour 12 of day 182 of 1945 cannot be determined after the fact (there aren't enough data points). But the average velocity (averaged over a significant time period of several years) CAN in fact be determined comparatively precisely (by linear regression to the data points of which there are many over an extended time span). Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough.
Here's what I wrote in #44:
> What follows is a VERY ROUGH back of the envelope calculation [...]:
> I'll ESTIMATE the acceleration as follows. Take the midpoint (arithmetic mean) of the given time frames over which the velocity was AVERAGED as the instantaneous moment at which the velocity was measured:
> For the time frame between 1901 and 1990 the midpoint lies at t1 = (1/2)*(1901 + 1990) = 1945.5.
Emphasis retrospectively added by me.
Please be aware that what I do in my posts does not in any way constitute a scientific treatment of the matter. For that I referred you to the scientific papers by Church et al. (2011) and Dangendorf et al. (2017) also cited in the IPCC report (among many other papers on the matter). I did so in #54, where I already explained that climate scientists don't "rely on oddly precise measurements [...] for years long past". And pointed to the 1σ error noticeably widening the further you reconstruct into the past (see Figure 5. of Church et al., 2011). In simple terms: The model becomes less and less confident in its prediction of the reconstructed GMSL the further in predicts into the past. As would be naïvely expected.
Notice that the standard deviation in Fig. 5. of Church et al. (2011) has grown to about ±20 mm in 1900 and to ±28 mm in 1860. And that's only the 1σ error (read: "one sigma error"), meaning that there's still a chance of about 31.73% (assuming normally distributed errors) that the true value lies outside of that region (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68–95–99.7_rule). For those versed in statistics, I'm glossing over some intricacies for the sake of simplicity.
Also note that this is not the measurement uncertainty of the tide gauges at that time, but rather the uncertainty of the model. The uncertainty of the tide gauges is of course baked into the model via propagation of uncertainties. But so are the much lower uncertainties of the later satellite altimeters. They are mathematically combined (with different weights) to give you the uncertainty of the model.
The 2 σ error (4.55% chance of the true value lying outside) of the model would extend to ±40 mm in 1900 and to ±56 mm in 1860. Hardly a precision of a tenth of a millimeter. But that wasn't your claim! I know it wasn't, but trust me I didn't show you the model uncertainty in 1900 for no reason.
Your claim was that a tenth of a millimeter precision in the "sea level CHANGE" (emphasis added by me) is suspect. I claim that it isn't suspicious at all and here's why:
www.desmos.com/calculator/b2ivu4dydw?lang=en
Compare this desmos graph (own work) to Fig. 5. of Church et al. (2011). The paper asserts the following in its abstract:
"The linear trend from 1900 to 2009 is 1.7 ± 0.2 mm [per] year [...]"
The reason the error of the slope of such a linear trend is so small (two tenths of a millimeter) is that it's the average velocity over 109 years (rounded to 110 in my desmos graph). Using the slider for the slope m you can quickly build an intuition how that can be.
The slope is given in "mm PER YEAR" and that's important. If you average over 100 years or so and one point of the trend line is essentially fixed (i.e. the current GMSL in 2010, measured very precisely using satellite altimetry, for the purposes of illustration the error of the satellite measurement is neglected in the desmos graph), the error sigma_m (σ_m) of the slope shouldn't be much greater that a hundredth of the error of the data point that's furthest from the fixed point. In this case being the data point in the year 1900.
Otherwise your linear trend line (or more precisely the trend lines with slope m ± σ_m) is going to miss the error bar of that furthest data point by a mile. And what do we find?
(110 yr)*(σ_m) = 22 mm ≈ σ_1900 ≈ 20 mm
Very much in the same order of magnitude. So no, a precision of a tenth of a millimeter for the average rate of sea level change (averaged over ≈ 100 years) is not only not suspicious, it is to be expected!
Of course I have to emphasise that my desmos graph does not constitute the way linear regression (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression) is done. It's not scientific, it's just a visualisation aid for your convenience. Any inaccuracies are solely explained by my sloppy way of reading off the values from Fig. 5. of Church et al. (2011) and me basically disregarding the behaviour of the GMSL between 1900 and 2009 entirely (for simplicity's sake I only used the starting point and the end point). Linear regression would of course consider the many data points (alongside their respective errors) between 1900 and 2009 as well!
I'm pretty certain the paper actually used linear regression to find a better linear trend line (slope 1.7±0.2 mm/yr instead of desmos's super rough estimate of 1.64 mm/yr because of the visible acceleration of the sea level change in the latter half of the 20th century). Even if they didn't spell it out since linear regression is a such a standard technique in science.
As I said at the beginning the first time I had to do linear regression, I had the very same misconception you had!
I was baffled at first when the error on the slope of the line came out much smaller than the errors of the individual data points. I had to carefully think it through for some time before I realized what I attempted to explain above. Slight variations in the slope cause large variations in y-value much further down the line. Say you have 1000 data points (evenly spaced between x=1 and x=1000) following a roughly linear trend (let's say the true trend is something like y = 2*x, but your data points are randomly distributed around that true trend) and their y-error is σ_y ≈ ±50. Then the slope m of the line cannot also have error ±50. Why not?
Well otherwise you'd get the line of best fit as, say, y = 1.9*x between your 1 standard deviation bounds of
y_lower = - 48.1*x
and
y_upper = 51.9*x.
That's obviously nonsense, the data points are clearly increasing, so negative slopes make no sense at all and a slope of m_upper = +51.9 is also way too steep (it would predict a value of y_upper = 51,900 at x = 1000, when the actual data point is located at a mere y = 2037 at x = 1000). Linear regression will rather spit out something like y = (1.96 ± 0.05)*x + (0.03 ± 0.01), which is more reasonable. Recommended reading:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_function_(calculus)#Slope
> If we were to make fossil fuels disappear tomorrow, civilization would collapse. If we were to make fossil fuels disappear five or even ten years from now, I believe you'd find civilization would just as surely collapse.
I've addressed this point several times by now. Not once have I demanded an immediate disappearance of all fossil fuels. Nor have I given you a time frame of 5 to 10 years. You are simply making this up.
My demand is "make the transition as quick as is reasonably feasible" and my assertion is "we are currently not nearly acting at the pace we need to, nor at the pace we can reasonably act, we are acting much slower". And by we I mean humanity as a whole. Playing the blame game won't help here.
You find it hard to argue these points so instead you misrepresent (as I can infer from your insistence on doing so even after several clarifications by me) my position and pretend as if I wanted an immediate (and total) end (or one in 5-10 years) to all fossil fuels. Then you can claim victory by pointing out that that would be very bad indeed (essentially all world trade across the sea is currently diesel driven). That's the textbook definition of a straw man fallacy (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).
It's like we are two surgeons about to perform surgery on a wounded patient that has a bullet lodged in one of their arteries (and is slowly bleeding out internally). Obviously this is an analogy (and not devoid of slight hyperbole):
I say: "This patient is slowly bleeding out internally. We need to perform the surgery – removing most of the bullet – as quickly as reasonably possible in order to secure the greatest chance of unimpaired health and survival for our patient! They were brought to the ER 30 minutes ago and have remained there, we need to pick up the pace!"
Meanwhile you keep insisting:
"My ready willingness to accept that the patient does indeed bleed internally does not ipso facto require me to accept that we need to dislodge the entire bullet at once five seconds from now without even clamping the artery first! If we don't clamp the artery before dislodging the bullet, the bullet stops acting as a temporary bandaid for the ruptured artery and the patient will very quickly bleed out and die."
I respond: "Yeah, I get it. That wasn't what I was proposing." And go on to propose a reasonable surgical plan that goes into detail about how we are going to get most of the bullet out without rupturing additional vessels, how we stop the bleeding etc. All supported by heaps of medical case studies demonstrating the efficacy, cost effectiveness and availability of the required technology.
And you keep on saying: "But we can't rip out the entire bullet at once five seconds from now."
Yeah. That was never the plan. The plan was to get the patient from the ER to the surgical suite. And to perform a necessary surgery as safely and as quickly as possible.
I'm a bit disappointed because this started as a cordial and respectful discussion. I acknowledge my share of the blame (and regret formulations like "talking moonshine" in #54) for the deterioration of the discussion.
> And dreams about "what could be" are still dreams at present and for the intermediate term.
What year is it? 1990? You feign ignorance about renewable energy sources I already listed and pretend as if they were but pipe dreams of a distant future. They are not: ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
Here's a short (and incomplete) list of non fossil fuels (and energy infrastructure), most of which are technologies available today:
- pumped-storage hydroelectricity, can be turned on and off quickly, has existed for decades
- nuclear energy, can supply the base load, has existed for decades
- bioenergy, can supply the base load, can be turned on and off quickly, has existed for decades
- wind energy, already very cheap, has existed for decades
- solar energy, already very cheap, has existed for decades
- concentrated solar thermal (which heats salts to hundreds of ºF meaning they continue to provide energy even in the dark), already exists
- high altitude airborne wind energy (high altitude winds are steadier, more persistent and have higher velocity), can probably contribute to the base load and be turned on and off quickly, perhaps the least developed technology on this list
- energy storage as hydrogen or in batteries, can be turned on and off quickly, already exists (but still has room for improvement)
- fusion energy, not yet feasible, will probably take another 50 years until it is, promising to be overall amazing, could supply the base load and be turned on and off quickly, certainly the only speculative "dream" technology on this list
> There seems to be a large group of people, all schooled (either formally or by social media and other forms of peer pressure) to gleefully accept things like unrealistic precision in measurement in 1945 -- a year when we were lucky to land within a block when bombing from high altitude.
The only thing unrealistic about that were your own expectations. As I have shown above. Just because something doesn't conform to your intuitive expectation it doesn't mean that it is necessarily wrong or suspicious. Human intuition (mine included) is very often wrong. I had the same intuitive misconception once.
I also can't help but notice that you frame education per se in terms of "peer pressure".
> And what conclusions do many of such people rush to reach? Lately, calls for decisions that can destroy whole industries, hurt, perhaps cripple, the economy of Western Civilization, end whole nations and bring relative prosperity to those who pledge their goodness while quietly building coal plants that will likely last for many decades. Perhaps it's a coincidence.
So you're worried that "Western Civilization" will fall behind China because the West might choose to expand renewable energies (too quickly) that are demonstrably cheeper than fossil fuels (and still getting cheeper)? See the ourworldindata source above. I doubt cheaper electricity will hamper the economy.
> Instead of accepting every anxiety-filled prediction, what we SHOULD do is pretty much what we are actually doing. Continue to build energetically toward an ever-greener future at a responsible pace while taking care that we can ACTUALLY still eat, see at night, and get around. And not make grandparents shiver or get heat exhaustion.
I agree about finding a responsible pace. But I contend that the patient is still in the ER right now. If you allow the further use of my earlier analogy. We're not yet moving at the pace we could move. And should move.
So I strongly disagree with the claim that we are actually already building energetically toward an ever-greener future at a responsible pace. The current pace is irresponsibly slow. At this rate the patient will suffer unnecessarily on their longwinded way from the ER to the operating suite (i.e. Earth's atmosphere will very likely suffer a temperature increase of more than 2ºC by the end of the century).
There's very good evidence to support this stance:
unfccc.int/news/climate-commitments-not-on-track-to-meet-paris-agreement-goals-as-ndc-synthesis-report-is-published
or this (and the scientific paper published in 'nature' cited therein):
www.npr.org/2023/10/30/1208241783/its-unlikely-but-not-impossible-to-limit-global-warming-to-1-5-celsius-study-fin
Could you please refer me to the evidence that shows humanity is well on track? And will meet the target of the Paris agreement?
Not that this target is some "cliff, where humanity is safe on this side of it and doomed on the other.", as the NPR article rightly points out. But every tenth of a degree matters. Remember this is average temperature we're talking about here.
The heat capacity of the atmosphere is on the order of 10^21 J/K (assuming an isobaric volumetric heat capacity of 0.001297 J/(K*cm^3) and a tropospheric height of 11 km equivalent to a volume of 5.62×10^24 m^3). So a tenth of a degree increase in temperature means adding 10^20 Joules of energy to the system. That's the energy equivalent of more than 400 Tsar Bombas (the most powerful thermonuclear device ever created or tested). A full degree correspondingly is like thousands (more than 4000) of Tsar Bombas of energy. The corresponding numbers are 1600 and 16,000 castle bravo detonations, in case you're American.
Need I emphasise the nature of this rough ball park calculation again? I'm only looking at the order of magnitude here to give you an idea, this isn't serious climatology.
That's what people who say "1ºC warming doesn't even sound noticeable" miss. It's an awful lot of added heat energy that's permanently bound up in the atmospheric system and consequently causes much more extreme weather events, like hurricanes, tornados, localised heat waves and the like. Confer any of the recent IPCC reports.
> Don't concentrate only on what you want to believe, gentlemen and ladies. I don't. [...]
Are sure about that?
> Look out your window when you are driving cross-country (while you still can).
Am I the fear monger? Who says you cannot drive cross-country in the future? Nobody.
> There are huge numbers of windmills and vast fields of solar panels. They're real. But they cannot do enough by themselves now and for quite a while longer. Sorry, but when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing you cannot just gesture at the problem with an article or media presentation about what "could be possible in the future."
And where exactly have I done that? I specifically didn't just gesture at the problem and pointed to some pipe dream technology that doesn't exist. Read my post #44. Or this post.
This is still a massive straw-man instead of the gotcha you believe it to be.
> If we act precipitously based on fashion or fear or politics, a much more easily predicted catastrophe can befall us. And wishful thinking, screaming, reflexively agreeing with pretty celebrities and soup-throwing won't change that.
Yes, if anything this exchange proves that I'm a wishful thinker who has no idea of what's actually going on, I am unable to cite reliable sources in support of my positions, I'm screaming, tears running down my cheeks, probably just a hysterical teenage girl, I'm reflexively agreeing with pretty celebrities like the Beatles or James Hansen (have you ever seen a more attractive bod?) and I'm burying this entire thread in tomato soup because I cannot come up with any more arguments!
Your last paragraph takes everything personally, @Thalassokrator . It shouldn't.
And I don't reflexively look down upon "teenagers" of either sex.
You don't think we're moving "fast enough." You're certainly entitled to your views.
But why not attend some actual utility rate hearings, and otherwise look in depth into the nuts and bolts of what's actually being done in your own state or country. The people ACTUALLY tasked with powering cities, and with regulating those people, are generally far from foolish and uninformed. You apparently think you could do better. But maybe there are complicating factors that you don't understand: is that possible?
People can die and countries can be destroyed by decisions that take into account only one problem and not all of them.
And I don't reflexively look down upon "teenagers" of either sex.
You don't think we're moving "fast enough." You're certainly entitled to your views.
But why not attend some actual utility rate hearings, and otherwise look in depth into the nuts and bolts of what's actually being done in your own state or country. The people ACTUALLY tasked with powering cities, and with regulating those people, are generally far from foolish and uninformed. You apparently think you could do better. But maybe there are complicating factors that you don't understand: is that possible?
People can die and countries can be destroyed by decisions that take into account only one problem and not all of them.
@Noflaps said in #58:
> Your last paragraph takes everything personally, Thalassokrator . It shouldn't.
That might be true and I debated omitting it! However it's the only paragraph that does. One small paragraph of measured sarcasm certainly isn't too much, is it? I thought it comparatively funny, but who am I to know? I'm a flawed human! And certainly not a gifted comedian ;-)
> And I don't reflexively look down upon "teenagers" of either sex.
I'm glad to hear it! :-)
> You don't think we're moving "fast enough." You're certainly entitled to your views.
I am. They are well supported, aren't they? Again, if we actually are moving fast enough, please provide a source, I'd be very interested in learning about it!
> But why not attend some actual utility rate hearings, and otherwise look in depth into the nuts and bolts of what's actually being done in your own state or country. The people ACTUALLY tasked with powering cities, and with regulating those people, are generally far from foolish and uninformed. You apparently think you could do better. But maybe there are complicating factors that you don't understand: is that possible?
How do you know I do not attend such hearings? And even if I didn't, should that preclude me from commenting on the work that is being done? Or rather quote others (like the United Nations) doing so?
I don't doubt the earnestness and diligent hard work of electrical engineers, electrical power engineers, industrial engineers, civil engineers, hydraulic engineers, architects, electrical grid planners, logistics experts, heaps of applied mathematicians, city planners, power plant operators, etc. around the world. They are certainly doing a great job and no, obviously I'm not more qualified than them and cannot do better than them. Our world is way too complex for a single person being qualified to do everything. There are certainly a great many things I don't understand! But instead of socratic questioning, how about you tell me one thing (or more than one) that I don't understand. One thing (or a bunch) that blows my whole argument out of the water and shows that what I'm asking for (a reasonable pace of the transition that's greater than it is now) is not even remotely possible?
The problem these hard-working people face is the lack of budget, the lack of governmental subsidies and regulations. Or in some cases the existence of nonsensical, harmful regulations (like minimum parking requirements, single family home zoning to name but a few examples). Some of these are already being addressed, while others are not.
It can be objectively assessed whether or not the work of these hardworking people, or rather that of the policy makers and politicians that (largely) hamper it (or at least do not sufficiently facilitate it), is already enough to meet agreed upon climate targets like the Paris agreement. And so far, it doesn't look like it is enough (cf. post #57). Not because these people have been lazy or foolish or uninformed. But because that's the best they could do with the regulations and policies in place thus far.
You cannot build a wind turbine if there's a law that says you can't do it there. You cannot build medium-density housing where there's a zoning law prohibiting it (basically everywhere in the US). You cannot build mixed-use walkable neighborhoods when mixed use is explicitly prohibited and walkability is implicitly discouraged by low-density housing. You cannot remove unnecessary parking lots (or only build a reasonable number of them) when there's a law that says you must build a certain number determined by guesswork in the 1960s. And again, I wish I was making this up, but I am not.
You can be the most informed and hardworking civil engineer or city planner or electrical power engineer, if there are laws preventing you from doing so, you cannot perform your very best. You can only perform the best you can with the regulations and policies in place thus far.
Likewise, when subsidies for renewables are low (or subsidies for fossil fuels and fossil fuel powered heating are still in place), you cannot expect them to grow quickly. I could go on but I won't.
The patient has been in the ER for 3-4 decades now. And politicians and policy makers worldwide just keep delaying meaningful action. This wouldn't have been an emergency surgery if they started in the 1990s. But they didn't (well, a whopping 36 countries actually complied with their commitments in the 1992 Kyoto protocol, China and USA not among them, both of whom didn't ratify the Kyoto protocol).
> People can die and countries can be destroyed by decisions that take into account only one problem and not all of them.
You keep repeating that. But you haven't told me what you actually mean by that. Do you mean electrical grid stability? The supply of the base load? Please be specific. I already told you in my last posts that there are ways to mitigate and address these problems. That fossil fuels are not the only ones that can be used to supply the base load for example. You don't address that specifically.
Instead you vaguely point out "problems" and affirm the importance of looking at all problems instead of a singular problem. Implicitly implying that I only look at one problem disregarding all considerations of practical feasibility and potential consequences (loss of jobs in the fossil fuel sector, while a great many jobs are created in the renewable energy sector) and knock-on effects (like additional warming caused by the reduction of aerosols that follows a decline in fossil fuel use).
I clearly don't look at one problem alone. But please specifically point out what I missed.
> Your last paragraph takes everything personally, Thalassokrator . It shouldn't.
That might be true and I debated omitting it! However it's the only paragraph that does. One small paragraph of measured sarcasm certainly isn't too much, is it? I thought it comparatively funny, but who am I to know? I'm a flawed human! And certainly not a gifted comedian ;-)
> And I don't reflexively look down upon "teenagers" of either sex.
I'm glad to hear it! :-)
> You don't think we're moving "fast enough." You're certainly entitled to your views.
I am. They are well supported, aren't they? Again, if we actually are moving fast enough, please provide a source, I'd be very interested in learning about it!
> But why not attend some actual utility rate hearings, and otherwise look in depth into the nuts and bolts of what's actually being done in your own state or country. The people ACTUALLY tasked with powering cities, and with regulating those people, are generally far from foolish and uninformed. You apparently think you could do better. But maybe there are complicating factors that you don't understand: is that possible?
How do you know I do not attend such hearings? And even if I didn't, should that preclude me from commenting on the work that is being done? Or rather quote others (like the United Nations) doing so?
I don't doubt the earnestness and diligent hard work of electrical engineers, electrical power engineers, industrial engineers, civil engineers, hydraulic engineers, architects, electrical grid planners, logistics experts, heaps of applied mathematicians, city planners, power plant operators, etc. around the world. They are certainly doing a great job and no, obviously I'm not more qualified than them and cannot do better than them. Our world is way too complex for a single person being qualified to do everything. There are certainly a great many things I don't understand! But instead of socratic questioning, how about you tell me one thing (or more than one) that I don't understand. One thing (or a bunch) that blows my whole argument out of the water and shows that what I'm asking for (a reasonable pace of the transition that's greater than it is now) is not even remotely possible?
The problem these hard-working people face is the lack of budget, the lack of governmental subsidies and regulations. Or in some cases the existence of nonsensical, harmful regulations (like minimum parking requirements, single family home zoning to name but a few examples). Some of these are already being addressed, while others are not.
It can be objectively assessed whether or not the work of these hardworking people, or rather that of the policy makers and politicians that (largely) hamper it (or at least do not sufficiently facilitate it), is already enough to meet agreed upon climate targets like the Paris agreement. And so far, it doesn't look like it is enough (cf. post #57). Not because these people have been lazy or foolish or uninformed. But because that's the best they could do with the regulations and policies in place thus far.
You cannot build a wind turbine if there's a law that says you can't do it there. You cannot build medium-density housing where there's a zoning law prohibiting it (basically everywhere in the US). You cannot build mixed-use walkable neighborhoods when mixed use is explicitly prohibited and walkability is implicitly discouraged by low-density housing. You cannot remove unnecessary parking lots (or only build a reasonable number of them) when there's a law that says you must build a certain number determined by guesswork in the 1960s. And again, I wish I was making this up, but I am not.
You can be the most informed and hardworking civil engineer or city planner or electrical power engineer, if there are laws preventing you from doing so, you cannot perform your very best. You can only perform the best you can with the regulations and policies in place thus far.
Likewise, when subsidies for renewables are low (or subsidies for fossil fuels and fossil fuel powered heating are still in place), you cannot expect them to grow quickly. I could go on but I won't.
The patient has been in the ER for 3-4 decades now. And politicians and policy makers worldwide just keep delaying meaningful action. This wouldn't have been an emergency surgery if they started in the 1990s. But they didn't (well, a whopping 36 countries actually complied with their commitments in the 1992 Kyoto protocol, China and USA not among them, both of whom didn't ratify the Kyoto protocol).
> People can die and countries can be destroyed by decisions that take into account only one problem and not all of them.
You keep repeating that. But you haven't told me what you actually mean by that. Do you mean electrical grid stability? The supply of the base load? Please be specific. I already told you in my last posts that there are ways to mitigate and address these problems. That fossil fuels are not the only ones that can be used to supply the base load for example. You don't address that specifically.
Instead you vaguely point out "problems" and affirm the importance of looking at all problems instead of a singular problem. Implicitly implying that I only look at one problem disregarding all considerations of practical feasibility and potential consequences (loss of jobs in the fossil fuel sector, while a great many jobs are created in the renewable energy sector) and knock-on effects (like additional warming caused by the reduction of aerosols that follows a decline in fossil fuel use).
I clearly don't look at one problem alone. But please specifically point out what I missed.
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