OT: "Science" on the other side of the pond

My energy costs are a small fraction of my income, not enough to worry about. A couple of billion people are not so lucky. It's a moral issue: lack of access to energy, and inefficiency, kill people.

The average person in the USA uses about a kilowatt of power, which is a heap more than our muscles can provide. Hauling wood and water by hand along dirt paths is not as much fun as, say, driving the kids to to Disneyland

If we help them get food, education, transportation, energy, and they elect to have fewer kids, that's hardly condemning them to anything.

It seems that when childhood mortality rates go down, people are, sensibly, willing to invest more resources into fewer kids. That sounds pretty good to me: more healthy happy kids, fewer dead ones.

People can elect to have as many kids as they like. Providing them with energy, food, and schools is not genocide.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Right. If we do run out of oil and gas (we keep finding more!) as the price creeps up we'll adjust in various ways. Meanwhile, fossil fuels transform the world in good ways.

And that CO2 makes the plants green and happy.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Oil and natural gas will crash, this century, regardless of 'finding more'. Unless your progeny die young, they'll be doing without. Yep, that's gonna be an adjustment. But, there's no evidence it'll be a creep instead of a cataclysm.

CO2 will change the atmospheric chemistry, and acidify the oceans. There's firm data to show that upswing in CO2 in the atmosphere does NOT result in any comparable response of plants absorbing the stuff. Plant growth has lots of limits, including sunlight and time-at-temperature for photosynthesis, and we don't know which species will benefit or suffer due to our polluting burn habits. Uncertainty kills.

Not crash; the price will creep up.

What, one Tuesday afternoon all the wells will run dry simultaneously?

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On Monday the oil futures market is closed due to 'massive default', on Tuesday exports from Canada are shut down 'to meet domestic needs'. On Thursday Saudi Arabia declines US dollar bids in favor of the more-stable rupee. It's two Tuesdays later that the last wells run dry.

Any world-economy shift that's fast compared to a nuclear plant plan/build/license delay, will be cataclysmic. That's what economists call 'adjustment'.

I think the implication was "less than perfectly efficient". Nobody minds t hat our present scheme for converting sunlight to electricity involves trul y spectacular inefficiencies - the original biomass grew up to billions of years ago, and very little of it got turned into the coal and oil we dig up today.

Sun light is free. The land you have to cover with sun-light capturing rqui pment isn't, nor is that equipment, so efficiency matters, but you are then competing with growing biomass on agricultural land, and providing the wat er to let it grow, so the competition isn't offering a particularly efficie nt process either.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Actually, it didn't. Any element heavier than iron is a by-product or a sup ernova, and the synthesis of the heavier elements all takes place as the st ar explodes. It takes a while for a supernova to evolve to the point of exp loding, but the process of creating the uranium is remarkably quick.

They were the only way of lifting billions of people out poverty and and hu nger a few decades ago. Solar and wind power now offer pretty much the same possibilities, without the risk of driving anthropogenic global warming to the point where it will dump everybody into poverty and misery.

Sadly, anthropogenic global warming isn't any kind of wild conjecture but a well certified reality. You lack the scientific training to appreciate the evidence - and are in fact so gullible that you have swallowed the deniali st propaganda line, hook, line and sinker - but if we had the time to put y ou through the education that you skipped at Tulane, even you would be able to appreciate the evidence.

The profoundly immoral position is that taken by the fossil carbon extracti on industry, which has spent a lot of money lying to suckers like you, in o rder to be able to keep on extracting fossil carbon and selling it as fuel for a few more years.

This is already exposing millions adults and children to misery - larger an d more powerful cyclone and typhoons have already done a lot of damage - an d the business as usual trajectory is going to expose many more to more ext reme weather, droughts and flooding.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Extreme greenies don't have cars. They'd have to ride their bicycles off cl iffs.

In reality, of course, even extreme greenies don't propose mass genocide - the Murdoch press may distort some of their sillier proposals to make them look genocidal, and John Larkin is gullible enough to fall for that kind of propaganda - but that kind of policy wouldn't be something that you'd talk about in public, even if you were silly enough to find it attractive.

In 2006 George Monbiot's "Heat" pointed out that what we needed to do was t o reduce everybody's carbon footprint to 0.5 ton of CO2 per year, and he sp elled out what that involved. The only real problem was international air-t ravel.

In the long term we might replace hydrocarbon fueled jet aircraft with liqu id ammonia or liquid hydrogen fueled aircraft, but the energy density of th ese fuels is rather lower than that of kerosene, and the new aircraft would end up looking a lot more bulbous, which involves quite a lot of expensive redesign.

Genocide is one of the many trivial solutions that any fool can come up wit h, but only a fool would take seriously.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Al Gore and DiCaprio can do more to reduce CO2 by flying around and encoura ging lots of people to act than they can by sitting at home and minimising their personal CO2 emission. When I worked out my personal contribution to climate Armageddon, it turned out that I could delay it by about a millisec ond.

The only approach that's going to work involves getting society as a whole to invest in replacing our entire electricity generation system with renewa ble system of substantially larger capacity - big enough to not only power our refrigerators and air-conditioning systems, but also electric cars for everybody.

That's a spectacular capital investment - amongst other things - and requir es a lot of advocacy to get it to happen, A whole lot more than when Al Gor e made "An Inconveninet Truth" because the fossil carbon extraction industr y found that his truth was inconvneient for their bottom line, and spent qu ite a lot on counter-advocacy.

But we can't afford to keep on using fossil fuels to provide those services - and if we try your kids are going to end up less well fed, less well emp loyed and with less access to fine wines than they would have been if we'd paid more attention to the consequences of more CO2 in the atmosphere.

Encouraging third world countries to modernise in exactly the same way we d id is rather silly - we've already used up most of the easily accessible fo ssil carbon, so wind power is now cheaper than power generated by burning f ossil carbon, and solar power is on track to become cheaper real soon now.

Persuading third world countries to compete for their "fair" share of a dim inishing resource is anything but sensible.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

I don't drive much, and my wife would resent it if I took our car and drove it over a cliff. If I could arrange that krw was at the bottom of the clif f, I might make the argument that social utility demanded that I improved t he world by removing him from it, but krw is such a splendid horrible examp le of the irrational right-winger that I 'd probably get strong counter-arg uments from the preservation-of-diversity people - krw isn't much more repu lsive than the Californian condor, and - at least around here - pretty much unique in his lack of appreciation of what constitutes "evidence" and "pro of".

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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To get a carbon tax passed, you would have to get all the countries in the G20 to support such a tax. So I have grave doubts that a carbon tax will e ver be passed. But if all the countries in the G20 are in agreement on a c arbon tax, then it is probably the right thing to have a carbon tax.

Dan

He has said, here, that he will do nothing to reduce his own personal CO2 generation.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

O and his wife flew to Hawaii, on the same day, on separate Air Force

747s.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   laser drivers and controllers 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

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The costs of energy represent 8% of the US GNP. It's a even smaller proport ion of the GNP for less industrialised societies.

If the US went over to renewable energy tomorrow, it would double the propo rtion of the GNP expended on energy to 16%, which translates to an 8% hit o n productivity - roughly what the GFC took out of the growth of the US econ omy over the years of the Great Recession (which wasn't actually a recessio n , technically speaking, as the economy was growing, if rather more slowly than it should have).

Third world countries would do better if they had access to more energy. Ge tting them to compete with the first world for access to the dwindling stoc ks of fossil carbon isn't a winning strategy.

Sure. But you could get that kilowatt from wind turbines and solar generato rs without reducing anybody to penury. It's not a choice between burning fo ssil carbon and muscle power.

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That's not the way it usually works. Secondary education for women makes th em aware that contraceptive techniques exist, and can work for them. It als o improves infant mortality rates. Family size in developing countries tend s to a number that gives a 90% chance of having a son survived to become an adult. Better infant survival rates pretty much guarantee lower rates of p opulation growth - you need fewer spare kids for insurance.

The Chinese "one child" approach was an aberration - nobody else was silly enough to upset their citizens with such a draconian regulation.

And if you do it, they'll elect to have fewer kids, of their own free will.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Consistency? So, your moral concern for all those billions of hungry and poor has you doing what, specifically, *today*?

And, on the off chance that all those scientists actually *are* right, what measures are you taking so those poor hungry souls won't have an *increased* burden if The World decides something

*must* be done about it? Perhaps advocate for all the developed nations (whatever THAT means) to cut their net emissions to *zero* so the underdeveloped nations can FREELY BURN the remaining fossil fuels -- in order to get themselves to a morally justified healthier and wealthier state?

Of course, you may truly believe in the "moral" argument (backeed up with evidence of other actions on your part to "go the extra mile" for those poor souls.

Or, it could be you just want to rationalize keeping your lifestyle exactly as it is... not having to spend more for fuel, conserve, kick the can down the road to your offspring, etc.

Hmmm... Occam's Razor?

[I have no intention of convincing you otherwise. Merely showing folks reading over our shoulders how "consistent" your espoused beliefs are (or aren't!)]

Exactly. ...and wants the population reduced. Like all socialists, he's a hypocrit.

Since the most I could do - on my own - would delay climate Armageddon by about a millisecond, reducing my own carbon footprint would be a quixotic gesture.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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But at least I can spell hypocrite, and know what the word means. I can't r ecall saying that I want the population reduced - though a krw-free world w ould probably be a nicer place.

Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another. I've said that we should b e injecting less CO2 into the atmosphere, but I've also said that the only effective way of getting this to happen is through good old-fashioned socia list collective action.

If we dump our coal-burning power station and a build renewable generating stations - solar and wind-powered - big enough to replace them several time s over and dump our fossil-fueled cars and trucks and replace them with ele ctric vehicles - we'd be able to reduce our CO2 emissions to a point which seriously slow down anthropogenic global warming.

Anything short of that is quixotic gesture politics. Krw and John Larkin mi ght like me to go in for that kind of silly gesture, but my lack of enthusi asm for complying with their fatuous suggestion doesn't make me a hypocrite - sane would seem to be a more appropriate adjective.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

There are practical applications, and there will probably be more.

When I first got involved with ink-jet printing, the only practical application was printing the address labels on "Life " magazine wrappers. Technology does make progress.

That would have been a methanol-burning fuel cells. I thought that Motorola had a product but it doesn't show up in the Wikipedia article

and the first reference to it that Google comes up with is dated 2006.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney