interesting thing about renewable energy

Ha, that's only a 36 ct, you'd a lot more than that.

I wonder if that is covered under the Obama Plan ?

Jamie

Reply to
Maynard A. Philbrook Jr.
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I'm sure that that is the story that you'd like us to believe. It doesn't fit your posting style.

So do it. Of course we'd have to deduce that it was you from your posting style, which has gotten you confused with AlwaysWrong before now.

It's a more plausible hypothesis than you want to admit, and your counter evidence isn't exactly robust.

I can get my points across without heavy use of four-letter words, which does involve a better grasp of civility than you can claim.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

This is an opinion, rather than a provable fact.

Many of them imposed by the defects of US society.

rations in WWII (and eschew obesity to this day).

The UK had a healthier diet - on average - during WW2 because rationing meant that the poor got a better diet than they'd been used to.

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makes the point - supported by a lot of evidence - that Japan's good health statistics are due in large part to the fact that it's one of the most equal advanced industrial countries on the planet.

This doesn't show up in the Gini indices, but it's clear from the slightly less simple-minded metrics used in "The Spirit Level", who find the Japanese about as egalitarian as the Scandinavians, albeit via a completely different mechanism.

The US and Portugal come out as the least equal of the advanced industrial countries (not that Portugal is all that advanced or industrial). Portugal still comes out a bit ahead of the USA on life expectancy - 78.59 years, as opposed to 77.97 - probably because they slightly less prone to obesity, but they don't do well.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Have you seen this one? It looks bad for renewables.

-Bill

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Reply to
Bill Bowden

He should have done - it's chunk of denialist rubbish that John Larkin posted to start the thread.

An implausible claim, unsupported by any evidence or any link to any evidence.

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presents a rather different story. I heard Jenny Riesz giving the presentation, and answering questions afterwards, and she did deem to know what she was talking about.

Interesting that neodynium has to be "made" rather than mined.

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"Although neodymium is classed as a "rare earth", it is a fairly common element, no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust."

Obviously it's nowhere near as abundant as iron - which the idiot denialist also asserts we are going to need impossibly huge amounts of.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Yep, I saw it. Cute, but I'd have to see the figures to trust it.

Which, truthfully, who cares? Society will fix it one way or another. Counting angels on the head of a pin won't.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

I hope you're kidding. That's got more holes and circular assumptions than a NASCAR on Swiss cheese. It's juvenile.

It's easy to prove all-renewables is feasible without all that--just do it. Set up a closed system--a community anywhere--and do it.

Saves a lot of pablum.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

Of course it's provable--just add up what people died from to tally the effect. It's just tedious.

It's kind of useless to quote life expectancy comparisons without knowing why the people died.

That's why it's the idiot's proxy for a nation's health system.

Oh blather. If I drive a rusty car to the shop and never changed the oil, is it the shop's fault the car fell apart early?

Is Australian society more defective for your seriously worse-than-US life expectancy of Australia's under-classes?

That's just fat-headed thinking. Free people make choices, and non-free people fare worse. And sometimes there's just nothing you can do--nature is nature.

Equality=causation? Puhleeze. Japan's a status-conscious nervous wreck.

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Their magic formula for equality has been two decades of 'stimulus' depression. (Arigato, Krugman-sama!)

Equated to longevity? Suppose Japan were 13% black, or 13% Australian aboriginal? For whatever reason, genetic or lifestyle, they don't live as long. We have lots, they have none.

Caloric restriction extends life dramatically and reliably across the entire range of species from worms to apes--that's a far more plausible explanation.

Applies to the Dutch, too--their heart disease rate plummeted during the WWII starvation.

Drivel. They dredged for a correlation they liked then gushed a tale of causation.

If you don't know *why* the two countries' people statistically die and at what ages, *how* is it you feel so free to interpret their LE stats or impute a particular causation?

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

ntation, and answering questions afterwards, and she did deem to know what she was talking about.

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It was intended for a regular audience - engineers in general rather than s pecialists.

If you could identify a few of the weak points, it might be useful. Perhaps not all that useful - you do tend to be remarkably incredulous about polit ically inconvenient facts.

t.

It's easy to see that all-renewables is feasible on a small scale - there a re enough pilot plants around to prove the point

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is rather small scale - each of the three models is good for about 165 Gwh per year - and the molten salt heat storage tanks only store about 7.5 hour s worth of bridging generation, but the first unit has been running since 2

009.

Because they are small they are expensive per kilowatt hour, and the therma l time constant of the heat storage tanks is rather shorter than it would b e for larger tanks.

Building more tiny proof of principle systems would be a waste of time.

The climate change denial crowd want to keep on making money out of selling fossil carbon for fuel as long as they can, so time wasting distractions s uit their game plan perfectly. It's less good for our prospect of keeping t he global temperature rise below 2C, but that doesn't worry you, because yo u either don't understand the physics, or have decided that right-wing poli tical principles trump physical reality.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

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You shouldn't need to see the figures to work out that there aren't any.

Anybody who talks about "mammoth amounts of energy" "vast renewables farms" and "nothing ever attempted by the human race" comes from advertising, not engineering.

Equating demand for iron (steel) concrete and glass with demand for copper and neodynium isn't counting angels on the head of pin - it's half-witted i gnorance.

If we wants lots of conducting metal we won't use copper, but aluminium. Th e neodynium in neodynium-iron-boron magnets is 28.25% of the weight of the magnet, and neodynium is about as common as copper, though we haven't been digging it up for as long, so it's probably going to be easier to find.

Society's attempt to "fix the problem" is currently being crippled by peopl e with money who want to make more money by putting off fixing it. You seem to have lined up with the irresponsible clowns with money.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

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The figures aren't wildly different between advanced industrial countries

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The only one of the top ten US causes of death that also features in your l ist of excuses is "accident" which causes 5.02% of deaths in the US. Since it is the leading cause of death from ages 1-44 is does have a disproportio nate effect on life expectancy.

The Australian figures aren't directly comparable, which is why your claim falls at the first hurdle.

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The lists that do mention accidents separate "moving vehicle accidents" fro m accidents as whole, and show them as causing only half the death rate - a bout 2.3%. There aren't enough other accidental deaths for them to get list ed. Suicide does show up - which it doesn't on the US lists, probably becau se US medical people have the old-fashioned habit of lying about it to spar e the relatives.

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No. It's one of the few pieces of health evidence where international compa risons are possible. Every population registration system records how old p eople are when they die, and makes the information generally available.

They don't always record the cause of death either accurately - suicide is often disguised - or in a way that makes international comparisons meaningf ul, but the age at death tends to be pretty reliable.

You don't like it because it makes the US look bad.

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Not a close analogy. If you drive your car in a way that makes it likely th at you will wipe it off in an accident, it doesn't make sense to spend too much money on maintenance.

If you eat fast food, and too much of it, and smoke, no amount of expensive US health care is going to let you live as long as skinny Japanese (averag ed over the population).

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How well do the US under-classes do? You can find the figures for the Austr alian aboriginal population because the country - as whole - is working to make them better. What are the comparable figures for the native American p opulation? You haven't quoted them, which suggests that they aren't even re corded.

is > nature.

Cuba isn't usually described as "free" and it does only marginally worse (7

9.4 years) than the USA (79.8). Michael Moore's "Sicko" did go into the dif ferences.

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So is the US, but the US lies about suicides to "spare the relatives".

Actually, their magic formula for equality seems to be not paying their bos ses ridiculously more than the people the bosses supervise.

You might find Krugman's analysis of why Japan got into trouble in the 1990 's - and how it might get out of it - worth reading, but then again he rec ognises evidence that you insist on ignoring.

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1.6% of the Japanese population are resident foreign nationals, with 0.5% C hineses and 0.42% South Koreans as the biggest fractions. The Ainu are the survivors of the original inhabitants of the country, and while there aren' t many of them, "none" isn't accurate.

Your 13% black aren't very black. Culturally, they are a lot more closely i ntegrated into American society than Australian aborigines, and you haven't bothered to dig out any statistics that show them living all that much sho rter lives than the rest of your population. You are using them as an excus e, not an explanation.

Sadly, you have to do it just right to avoid killing the patient.

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If you starve people, they die. If elderly people have a BMI under 25 - the top of the recommended range for regular adults - they are more likely to die than elderly people in the range 25-30.

They died of other diseases before heart disease could kill them.

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Read the book. It was written by a pair of medical epidemiologists, and the y don't make that kind of mistake.

t

Read "The Spirit Level". My cousin the statistician gets into that kind of stuff. To quote Andrew Lang, you use statistics as a drunk uses lamp-posts, more for support than illumination. In fact you do worse, making claims abo ut statistics that you can't find in order to try and ignore the message th at obvious in the statistics which are available.

The major causes of death in advanced industrial countries are heart diseas e, cancer, and cerebro-vascular disorders - essentially strokes, in that or der.

Of course, if your heart disorder puts you into atrial fibrillation, and yo ur doctor doesn't go to the trouble of putting you on an anti-coagulants an d keeping your clotting time long enough (which is tricky with wafarin - as I experienced in the Netherlands - though the recently available dabigatra n takes less management) you'll die of a blood clot lodged in the brain or the lungs, and get listed a dying of a stroke or a respiratory disorder.

The obvious explanation of why Americans tend to die younger is that some o f them get distinctly sub-standard medical care in their declining years.

You want to suggest that some other explanation would be better, but you do n't want to go to the trouble of digging out the statistics that might make your claim remotely plausible.

American may be different, but you should be getting busy making it less di fferent, rather than claiming that God made God's own country just right .. .

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Is that right? I sort of like to change mine after they start standing on their own! :)

Jamie

Reply to
Maynard A. Philbrook Jr.

So, how do you explain this bit of denialist rubbish?

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"He told the committee: "When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an ice age occurred 450 million years ago when carbon dioxide was

10 times higher than today."

Moore also noted that "The increase in temperature between 1910 and 1940 was virtually identical to the increase between 1970 and 2000. Yet the IPCC does not attribute the increase from 1910-1942 human influence." Why then, he asks, "does the IPCC believe that a virtually identical increase in temperature after 1950 is caused mainly by human influence, when it has no explanation for nearly identical increase from 1910 to 1940?"

Moore emphasized that there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species. On the other hand, there is ample reason to believe that a sharp cooling of the climate would bring disastrous results for human civilization."

-Bill

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Reply to
Bill Bowden

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I don't have to. It's more denialist rubbish.

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Actually the IPCC does attribute some of the warming from 1910 to 1940 to h uman influence - the atmospheric CO2 level was rising then too, if not as f ast - and the warming from 1910 to 1940 wasn't "virtually identical" to the warming from 1970 to 2000, but about 20% smaller.

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Moore is out of his mind. You only need to look at the Younger Dryas - a 13

00 year period with the Gulf Stream turned off, apparently caused by the sh arp temperature rise at the end of the last ice age

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to get a feel for the unfortunate potential local consequences of a rise in the average global temperature. The most currently obvious effect of globa l warming is more "extreme weather" events. When we finally get around to p rovoking the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to start sliding off i nto the ocean in large chunks - as the Canadian ice sheet did at the end of the last ice age (possibly causing the the Younger Dryas), Moore may get a n opportunity to repent his silly claim (which is straight denialist propag anda, as evidenced by the fact that John Larkin makes it here every six mon ths or so).

Trying to refute obvious denialist propaganda by proceeding to quote more o f it isn't entirely clever.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Here is the part you should be quoting! "As the Obama administration and Senate Democrats feverishly stoke up hellfire and brimstone global warming alarm". My God! Doesn't the Obama administration know enough to leave the hellfire and brimstone alone? Things are bad enough as it is...

No wonder the conservatives are in an uproar.

--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

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"Hellfire and brimstone" are the kind of dramatic colour you get to expect in denialist propaganda. They haven't got a rational message to sell, so th ey lay the emotion on thick.

The sheer irrelevance of the comment about the effect of "a sharp cooling of the climate" does take some beating.

It might have been vaguely relevant if some current deluded scientist had p redicted it. In the 1960s there were a few fairly deluded scientists who di d suggest that next ice age should be due any time now, but now that the gl obal warming circus has got people looking hard at what goes on during the switches between ice ages and interglacials it's become evident that our in terglacial was always going to be a long one - even before we started diggi ng up significant amounts of fossil carbon and burning it for fuel. Destroy ing the arctic ice cover may be enough to make the current interglacial ver y long indeed - if we manage to shrink the antarctic ice sheet as well we c ould make it even longer.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

It's interesting to compare the denialist spin The Register put on the stor y with the way The IEEE Spectrum presented the same basic information.

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?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=112014

It's fairly clear that the Google engineers took it as basic that any compe titive renewable electricity generating scheme had to produce electricity m ore cheaply than current generating plants do.

This does ignore the obvious point that current fossil-carbon-burning gener ating plants don't pay anything to be allowed to dump CO2 into the atmosphe re - though it's obvious to everybody except denialists that this is imposi ng a cost on the rest of the world, and a cost that's becoming larger as gl obal warming gets worse.

They also don't seem to have taken account of the fact that fossil carbon i s a finite resource. We've already dug up the easily extracted reserves of fossil carbon, and every successive ton of carbon is going to be harder to dig out and correspondingly progressively more expensive.

They also don't seem to have realised that large scale thermal solar genera ting plants can store enough energy - as hot molten salt in big and well-in sulated tanks - to provide "dispatchable" power.

Jenny Riesz - when talking about 100% renewable power for Australia

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made the point that while large scale thermal solar was more expensive per kilowatt-hour than photovoltaic generation, the fact that it was dispatchab le, and available overnight, made it an essential - if minor - part of the mix.

Australia does have quite a lot of hydroelectric power, which is very dispa tchable, but not enough of it do do anything like the whole job.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

sentation, and answering questions afterwards, and she did deem to know wha t she was talking about.

han

specialists.

ps not all that useful - you do tend to be remarkably incredulous about pol itically inconvenient facts.

There's no point. Gulls who believe that level of nonsense are beyond rescu e.

it.

are enough pilot plants around to prove the point

h per year - and the molten salt heat storage tanks only store about 7.5 ho urs worth of bridging generation, but the first unit has been running since 2009.

mal time constant of the heat storage tanks is rather shorter than it would be for larger tanks.

So build a bigger one. If it makes sense, make it. I'm all for it, but where I am we've barely seen the sun for six weeks. It wouldn't work.

ng fossil carbon for fuel as long as they can, so time wasting distractions suit their game plan perfectly. It's less good for our prospect of keeping the global temperature rise below 2C, but that doesn't worry you, because you either don't understand the physics, or have decided that right-wing po litical principles trump physical reality.

That's lame. If it makes so much sense and only is only stopped because horrible righties oppose it, why don't the self-appointed do-goodie oppressives do it and make a mint?

Even leftist conspiracy theory holds that people want to make money, period . If sunbeams accomplish that, they'd be all over it.

It's actually a good thing if people want to make money. That means they want to make something people want, at an attractive price enough to buy it .

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

On Mon, 24 Nov 2014 08:26:57 -0800 (PST), snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com Gave us:

Even Jonathan Livingston?

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

e:

resentation, and answering questions afterwards, and she did deem to know w hat she was talking about.

than

an specialists.

haps not all that useful - you do tend to be remarkably incredulous about p olitically inconvenient facts.

cue.

That does describe your attitude to anthropogenic global warming - you've f allen for the denialist propaganda and don't show any sing of the capacity for critical thinking required to peel off the flim-flam.

do

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Gwh per year - and the molten salt heat storage tanks only store about 7.5 hours worth of bridging generation, but the first unit has been running sin ce 2009.

ermal time constant of the heat storage tanks is rather shorter than it wou ld be for larger tanks.

Which is why nobody would built it there.

ling fossil carbon for fuel as long as they can, so time wasting distractio ns suit their game plan perfectly. It's less good for our prospect of keepi ng the global temperature rise below 2C, but that doesn't worry you, becaus e you either don't understand the physics, or have decided that right-wing political principles trump physical reality.

They won't make a mint. The non-denialist version of the story in The Regis ter

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makes it clear that the Google guys gave up because they couldn't see any w ay of undercutting fossil-carbon-generators.

What they couldn't do anything about was the fact that dumping CO2 directly into the atmosphere for free is a significant subsidy for fossil-carbon bu rning generators. Everybody except denialists realises that this imposes si gnificant - and rapidly rising - costs on everybody, which should be recove red by a levy per ton of fossil carbon burnt on every generating station ar ound the world.

This is eventually going to happen, but not until the situation has qot a w hole lot worse - so obviously bad that even blinkered right-wing ideologues like you are going to be forced to see sense.

od. If sunbeams accomplish that, they'd be all over it.

So far, it doesn't make enough money. Break-even isn't that far away, but t he cheapest solar generator don't deliver dispatchable power. Thermal solar with molten salt heat storage does, but it costs more per kilowatt hours.

it.

Sadly, they are perfectly happy to trash the planet in the process. Fisherm en can be relied on to catch as many fish as possible now, even when they k now that this is at the expense of being able to catch enough fish to make a living next year.

When the government moves in to regulate catches to sustainable level the f ishermen get very upset. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" suggests that this kind of behaviour is what you can mostly expect from elites - anywhere, an y time.

The Chinese elite is showing some sense. They've had enough recent experien ce of drought and starvation to start in on avoiding a predictable disaster . The US elite is more deeply into making money, and more used to evading t he consequences of irresponsible behaviour.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

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