1. Germany, when they shut down their nukes in 2011, restarted the old coal burners using US coal, and dirtied their skies.
2. The German government has just began firing up their uranium burners. 3. 25% renewables sound like a great start, but this focuses attention on the remaining 75% Here's a new article just out from New Scientist speaking to AGW. New Scientist is a solid supporter of AGW finding and research. Read it carefully, because its interesting and informs our arguments on the forum. No wonder we are fighting. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25272-less-gloopy-oceans-will-slow-climate-change.html#.UzBIaaPD-dI -----Original Message----- From: Platonist Guitar Cowboy <multiplecit...@gmail.com> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Sat, Mar 22, 2014 9:44 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote: 2014-03-21 17:59 GMT+01:00 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com>: On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote: 2014-03-21 17:19 GMT+01:00 John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com>: On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:50 AM, Quentin Anciaux <allco...@gmail.com> wrote: The thing I most want to know about RCP4.5 is what RCP stands for, Google seems to think it's "Rich Client Platform" but that doesn't sound quite right. It must be pretty obscure, Wikipedia has never heard of RCP either. For your information, that means "Regional Climate Prediction" I'm pretty sure it's not "Russian Communist Party" but are you sure it's not "Representative Concentration Pathways"? I'm pretty sure you must be dumb as dumb if you really think this... As I see we are in a thread talking about climate... This thread seems to be mostly about politics. To be fair, John seems to be in the minority here in wanting to discuss this from a scientific and technological perspective. He raises a number of points that I have raised myself in previous discussions. Instead of focusing on such issues, pop culture distractions (Fox News etc.) and political tribalism seem to get all of the attention. The thing is that I don't know much in climate and I prefer to let persons in the field handle that, by default I would believe them in these matters, they have more knowledge than me on these. I agree, and it would take years of study for a non-expert to be able to have an informed opinion. But scientists are humans, and unfortunately we have seen over and over again that they can fall prey to group think, confirmation bias and other -- very human -- tendencies. One contemporary exemple is nutrition science -- more and more, we are seeing that the consensus here was pseudo-scientific and influenced by lobbies. The food pyramid probably killed more than cigarettes. In the case of climate science, there are a number of red flags. For me, the major ones are: - claims of 100% consensus: never a sign of serious, rigorous science; True for media. But non-100% consensus on trends and models, even given disagreements about particularities, scopes, use of models etc. point to simple commonsense notion of not polluting the sphere you live on. - claims of certainty over the behaviour of a highly complex system -> I don't have to be a climatologist to raise my eyebrows at this; Behavior and market dominantly presuppose however: absolute certainty that it doesn't matter. That this sparks hyperbolic reaction in non rigorous contexts is natural. - scientists using emotional, loaded terms like "deniers"; - so many models that any correct predictions don't appear to have statistical significance; - retroactive cherry picking of models; - there doesn't seem to be any amount of falsification that will lead the mainstream of the field to reconsider their hypothesis; Again, I admit I may be completely wrong. But there are red flags. You can only run with best accessible models and levels, so anybody can be wrong. Given the vast overlap of so many systems and models interacting, producing shocks and spikes, I'll bet you can only do worse by accelerating all kinds of imbalance, pollutions, pacific garbage islands and all the side effects of multiplying, accelerating cherry picked natural/chemical processes for the whims of the free individual and his market. Ok, I'm not a climate scientist, but I still bet the above is stupid. :-) I do not believe in conspiracy either... I don't understand this position. In human history, conspiracies seems to be a very frequent event. Recently we learned of a vast conspiracy by western governments to implement total surveillance. Here I see another red flag -- the ridicule surrounding any suggestion of conspiracy seems to benefit precisely the ones in power. Conspiracy is too strong and particular for self-serving idiocy we practice globally in this regard. Sure, dominant idiots/interests will work together; but there is no intricate plan beyond rather obvious self serving dominance and gain I can parse. and all the comments about the "all or nothing" are complete BS... I don't see any point why we couldn't transition slowly to more sustainable source of energy... I hope we do. Unless you are suggesting we do it by coercion. I witnessed the industry and economy of my home country (Portugal), being destroyed by a state-enforced transition to wind power. Meanwhile, more and more people are falling below the poverty line while not even the middle class can afford to remain warm in winter (energy is too expensive because 80% of the energy bill subsidises the wind mills). Yes, we have to learn to adjust and adapt to this kind of problem and the question is how to minimize such effect. But this isn't a problem of climate science if we're clear that market priorities and current market state frames this problem. Fossil fuel interests etc. should effin pay for the energy bills and warmth of people in Portugal in this sense as cleanup compensation for the trillions they have made on our backs. I don't see here in europe the kind of group anouncing doomsday and having a discourse like spudboy is saying... what he believe is just that beliefs... not facts. The green parties in europe certainly don't advocate such policies... and certainly not in my country (belgium) can't talk much for other countries, but they seems to be more or less the same views... No one is advocating to transition tomorrow (as in tomorrow tomorrow) to a full solar power (or other) and shut down all nuclear power plants... Germany is scaling down its nuclear energy production and plans to shut down all of it's nucler power plants in the next two decades. This is due to political pressure from the green party amongst others. Meanwhile, it is reactivating coal power plants (renewable sources are just not enough) and air pollution in Berlin is already measurably higher. Yes, but Germany is at least at 25% renewable energy today from 5% around 2000, and technically still on course with targeting 80% by 2050. Lignite coal is polluting and the problem is more complex than you illustrate: wrong incentive structure of CO2 certificate system makes it too cheap to pollute => if politicians raise this, then people are angry politically for higher price of renewables. Again, the market shoots itself in the foot like an addict and needs help. Plus green activists often don't see logic of counter-intuitive things like expanding grid and storage capacity, making it more flexible for spikes and troughs of transitioning hybridized system. Or "wind mills and renewable energies yes, but no in my backyard" and idiocy of local politics/personalities/feuds. To confuse these kinds of complexities, I sketch crudely here, and concluding "I'm not sure this works", is not convincing to me. In Portugal, the green party will oppose any means of producing energy on principle, be it renewable or not. These are the cases I know. Similar to the idiocy I just described in Germany. they are even people (green or not) considering the LFTR reactor we were talking about... climate and policies arount the mitigation of the global warming are not binary... either we do everything or nothing.... even if we were really doomed, that's not a reason not to try to mitigate things... even slowly, slow extinction seems better than dying tomorrow... and starting today even if today we thing we're doomed, doesn't mean tomorrow (and because we started today) we won't find a solution escaping this predicted doom... so I can't agree with an argument saying we should do nothing just because new form of energy production cannot currently totally replace the current form of production. So, instead of forcing us to do things, why not encourage us to invest in renewable energy tech companies? If the tech is viable, it will generate a lot of revenue. No need to force anyone to do anything. Do you think that capitalists prefer oil money to other types of money? No, but they think short term. You're right incentive structure of regulation plays a key role. If you can't even get investors (because the tech is not viable yet), then this might be a good indication that doing it by coercion will only serious human problems. Doing it slow will only lead to misery slower. Here you presuppose rational investors in rational market, which I can't. Tapering off carefully is the only viable option if the drug is short term material idiocy of minority of overly dominant interests. See both Portugal and Germany indeed. But this assumes that you make a bet that multiplying poisonous/toxic outputs is unwise given the already complex, volatile, and intertwined state of this blue sphere. If there is a chance to be a toxic force; I'd like that minimized please. I think the label "denier" is thus plausible, not in derogatory but in positional sense, because the inaction against current market trends to keep merrily polluting, assumes absolute certainty that that chance equals 0. This raises a huge red flag on fundamental level that overrules quibbling on some models to me. "Where is the 100% foolproof evidence for that?", I'd like to hear. But sure, I may be just as wrong. But for now I bet on certain winds nonetheless. PGC Telmo. Quentin - Given the number of climate models and the fact that the majority of them failed to predict the climate of the last decade, how confident can we be in further predictions? - With current technology, how much would we have to shrink the global energy budget to transition to sustainable sources? What would the human impact of that be? This is too serious an issue for wishful thinking. Theres 7 billion of us and counting. We need hard numbers here, that take into account the energy investment necessary to bootstrap the renewable sources, their efficiency and so on. - What is the probability that a climate catastrophe awaits us vs. the probability that an abrupt attempt to convert to sustainable sources would create a human catastrophe itself? - Given that environmentalists are claiming that it might even be too late to advert disaster, why aren't we seriously considering geoengineering approaches, as the one proposed by Nathan Myhrvold, which can be easily and cheaply tested and turned off at any moment? Also this: http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/328841/why-germanys-nuclear-phase-out-leading-more-coal-burning Telmo. using google correctly and not as an asshole... you would have found what you were looking for (if you genuinely were looking for it... but you weren't, you were trolling as usual). So blabla as usual... no point arguing with you. Wikipedia lists 21 possible meanings of the acronym "RCP" and that's the only one that has anything at all to do with the environment. Wikipedia has never heard of "Regional Climate Prediction". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCP > (And I didn't know it before doing the search) Who did? > 0.5 second of searching on google... and the great John was unable to do it And still is. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. 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