Comments

  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    ↪James Riley


    This is a philosophy forum, maybe reformulate your statement the first time. Obviously "all" is a big difference with "some".

    But my main issue is the scapegoating anti-vaxxers. Lot's of policy failures throughout this pandemic worth discussing, but society has been given a cathartic "other" to blame and to hate.

    Where I have issue is the total hypocrisy. Western governments are not "pro-science" or they'd do something about climate change. They are pro-science when it benefits the largest corporations that care about the issue and pro-something-else or like you know we can't actually like you know "do anything" when the science doesn't benefit the largest corporations that care about the issue.

    The current wave in the US was completely predictable, with or without vaccines, and there are other policies that could have been implemented since 2020 that would be a good idea anyways, regardless of how well the vaccines work, how many people take them, or what percentage of the population is needed for "heard immunity" if the vaccines would even accomplish that, which they don't (or even if they worked at all, which wasn't a given when vaccine development started; so, was an insane risk-management decision to not competently prepare for more waves ... actually learn something from the first wave).

    But again, my basic point is that this issue is obviously not on the same level as "the earth is flat" or "the universe is 6000 years old" which no one here is debating.
  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    ↪James Riley


    Again, totally delusional.

    World succeeded in containing SARS 1; now, even if that was impossible in this case; which who knows, if sane policies weren't implemented to find out: it was still the only chance to actually avoid "all the grief". Vaccines only became available after many people already died, so, how would vaccines avoid that grief?

    Avoiding "all" or even close to all, would have only been possible with containment: maybe fast and competent response in China (which did suppress the virus when they did implement containment ... after infecting the rest of the world) was obviously the best chance.

    I remember a time on this very forum when we were concerned about the fact China obviously censored their scientists trying to warn the rest of the world ... and also may have killed the one's that got the word out; which, is obviously far inferior to China getting the word out themselves and acting on an obvious health emergency proactively.

    I remember a time when some participants still with us argued what happened in China wouldn't happen in the West for [insert delusions] and not any "science" that could be recognized.

    After that, could essentially shutting down world plane travel have succeeded in containing the virus? Maybe not, but it would have bought plenty of time to optimize policy response strategies and mitigate plenty of grief even if containment did ultimately fail. Rather, we supercharged the spread of the pandemic around the world; no one who studied this question would tell you that was a good idea. And, world plane travel got shut down anyways, so it there was only anti-science delusion behind trying to delay that comeuppance.
  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    I'm afraid you may be right. Too bad. I can't imagine all the grief that could have been avoided. — James Riley

    This is a completely ill informed position.

    There was a chance to avoid the pandemic, via containment (which I advocated strongly for at the start of the pandemic on this very forum), which successfully contained SARS 1 the first time (difference; SARS came out of a poor place no one hesitated restricting flights / quarantining everyone); but that would have been bad for airplane stocks (as people, especially politicians, do hesitate to restrict flights from China).

    Vaccines would never have avoided "all the grief"; even the above containment would have been a lot of grief for people who get it anyway and are in quarantine as well as hundreds of millions of people who would have had travel plans disrupted.

    Of course, failing containment, vaccines can help, but it's a complete exaggeration to put all the blame on anti-vaxxers.

    Notice how, since this blame game could start, talk of holding people accountable for not containing the pandemic (following far clearer science and "expert" opinion; this exact problem, and what to do about it, has been studied and modeled for decades) has all but disappeared. Funny how governments aren't carrying out any introspection as to why they were "anti-science" at the start of the pandemic when they feared a stock dip in a few sectors more than millions of people dying.

    Likewise, experts also pointed out at the start of vaccine development that there's a large portion of the public that won't take them, so depending entirely on vaccines is a policy made to fail (and also leaves the developing world hanging), compared to policies (preparing for another wave, increasing global health capacity, nutrition, etc. that would benefit everyone and also mitigate both vaccine reliance failing, and even if vaccines succeed, mitigate the fact it's totally certain a percentage of people people wont' take them).

    Governments went with the only policy that hands over billions to corporations ... and put essentially zero investment into basic health measures and increasing health capacity. For instance, a small percentage of what's been spent on the pandemic could have solved world hunger, which requires no waiting for any "science development" and would have mitigated the effects of the pandemic in the third world as well as being morally justifiable anyways.
  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    No, it isn’t. You have no right to harm others. — Xtrix

    Well, that's the issue isn't it.

    A medical procedure is by definition harmful; so, what's your right to force / coerce people to have it?

    Furthermore, limiting the power of the state (which I in no way share the extremism of libertarians about ... and, would also say their idea of immutable rigid market "principles" are extreme state power that they are in denial about), is for the purposes of limiting the harm the state can do.

    Limiting state power has obvious costs. In exchange for not giving the state power that could easily be abused (people needing "papers" to participate in normal society), there are costs to that.

    Not forced any more than school and work vaccinations have been forced, for decades in fact. — Xtrix

    Not where I live: due to it being a forced medical procedure. Which you may disagree with, but the fact entire countries do actually implement a moratorium on forced / coerced medical procedures should be enough to support my claim there's legitimate debate on this issue ... whereas no country implements a "flat earth" based geologic and space institution.

    There are countries that didn't even have a legally enforceable mask mandate, only a recommendation, because enforcing that by law would be unconstitutional. It's not even a medical procedure, so if that was their position on masks obviously forced / coerced vaccination is essentially no-doubt unconstitutional.

    But, even so, in places where it is as you say, the alternative "home schooling" is not at the same level as carrying papers to simply exist in society.

    Internal vaccine "passports" is clearly a step much further than has existed before. In pre-pandemic times, if this issue was brought up, it was entirely accepted that the consequence of not having forced / coerced medical procedures is that the government can't do that even when it would be a good social outcome in that case. Otherwise, the moratorium on forced medical procedures and "informed consent" based medicine is ... only until we don't want to, then we'll force you for sure.
  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    I agree to this, this is barely a kind of "ethical" question. — Ansiktsburk

    Well, it wasn't just the Nazi's that carried out forced medical procedures for the "good" of society. Everyone was doing it -- it's completely compatible with the Hippocratic oath if it is "good" for the patient -- it's just the Nazi's took it next level. And we still do it today to the mentally ill all the time, just with large efforts to avoid doing so, danger to others and "themselves", only option etc.

    We could also imagine a scenario that is so severe, forced medical procedures seems reasonable even to me.

    So, I wouldn't say it's barely even a question, and, I think it's also clear some medical ethicists, medical professionals and politicians (people who are supposed to have an ethical expertise and opinion on this) argue it is ethical to have vaccine internal passports.

    Certainly there is an argument to be had ... which is argument currently happening.

    But, to tie into my first comment on the thread, the fact there's clearly a legitimate debate (clearly well motivated to be concerned about giving governments the power to inject what they decide is necessary into everyone, and everyone needing their "papers" to prove it; and I know plenty of doctors who are against it, which isn't unusual where I live because it's the government's policy as well not to force/coerce vaccinations) on this issue, underlines the point the epistimic comparison to flat earth theory (which no one here is arguing about) is pretty substantial.
  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    If people don’t want to vaccines, fine— then isolate yourself. You have no right to spread the virus to others — to the vaccinated out unvaccinated. — Xtrix

    This seems an incredibly naive belief, and it is not a consensus in the medical ethics community. Many countries have not implemented any sort of vaccine passport, precisely because it is in stark contradiction with forced medical procedures, of which it is a foundation of modern medical ethics not to do, so much so that it is put into laws that are very difficult to change, essentially constitutional (and many medical ethecists say shouldn't be changed).

    And domestic vaccine passports are not the same thing as needing a vaccine to travel to a different country (where you are a guest and are not "forced" to go to) nor for participation in a relatively minor set of professions (you are not "forced" to have that profession).

    Forcing everyone to undergo a medical procedure by making life practically impossible without it, is obviously a controversial thing in medical ethics. Nazi's thought they were "improving society" too; and, that institutions can go disastrously wrong (if not today, then maybe tomorrow) is the foundation of the moratorium on forced medical procedures in favour of "informed-consent" based medicine.
  • Anti-Vaxxers, Creationists, 9/11 Truthers, Climate Deniers, Flat-Earthers
    I'm not exactly sure where the debate is now, but I think it is worth mentioning that it is somewhat disingenuous -- and, I would say falling for some propaganda -- to make all the beliefs equivalent.

    For instance, "flat earth", was clearly started (or then fueled on the net when it became known about) as a joke, clearly engineers and physicists making up alternative explanations if the world is flat. Of course, any idea that "gets out there" some people are actually going to believe, but the quantity of such people is minuscule. The only reason the media took interest in this topic is to associate flat earth with other groups they don't like.

    If we compare the amount of evidence the world is flat, to the amount of evidence confirming the US government, or elements thereof, enabled or even planned 9/11, or then the amount of evidence provided by that government of who's really to blame, it's simply comparable. Believe what you want to believe, but there are no simple backyard experiments and pretty direct logical consequence of many known facts, that Bin Laden did 9/11. There's no epistemic equivalence, not even remotely close between the "earth is spherical" and "Bin Laden orchestrated 9/11". It's certainly physically possible some project, by nature clandestine, was "really" orchestrated by some even more clandestine and shadowy group. Likewise, "vaccines do more harm then good" is far easier to support than "the world is flat".

    So, there is simply no equivalence in terms of weight of evidence for the various claims listed.

    However, there is also important differences in motivation. We know powerful oil interests funded climate denialism in bad faith, and, even it many then "really believe it", many are willful participants in the bold face lies know they are simply lying to favour different values (such their individual short term economic interest) than engaging in honest political belief. "9/11 Truthers" and "anti-vaxxers" and "creationists" (although certainly many bad faith actors profit off these) are not beliefs that were essentially astroturffed into existence, but are fueled by legitimate belief systems and concerns.

    I myself am a "creationist", just not that the earth is 6000 years old, but created sometime at or before the Big Bang and in a way that makes logical sense (physical laws, evolution etc.). Whether athesist, agnositic or theist, I think we'd mostly agree on this forum these are legitimate belief systems that can be defended, and can all be made compatible with basic science.

    But again, the perpetuation of this belief I would say is mostly bad faith actors in the US, to create a a schism between science and easily manipulated Christians. And again, the idea the earth is 6000 years old, and not billions of years old, is vast difference with the belief elements of the US intelligence service did 9/11 or vaccines do more harm than good.

    Not that I am trying to resolve any of these issues (both what is "actually true" and the "true reasons" it is true), but I think it isn't intellectually honest to posit as equivalent beliefs with vastly different plausibility (believing there was some even more nefarious and clandestine scheme behind 9/11 does not require disbelieving / rewriting nearly the entirety of contemporary science as does believing the earth is flat or 6000 years old or evolution doesn't happen).

    Likewise, the sociological drivers motivating and sustaining these beliefs and whether proponents are good faith or bad are also very different, and this is not a "belief group" characteristic but can only be evaluated on an individual / institutional basis. Bad faith actors can also be motivated for a variety of reasons -- from political or financial power, social validation in their "in group", or to just trolling on the internet for self-amusement.

    For instance, someone who is bad faith, is always a mistake to engage with assuming they are good faith (it's simply a false assumption that can bring no good); engagement with someone who is bad faith is a political act (would be, for instance, for the purposes of exposing that party as a liar and discredit them, or otherwise frustrate their efforts, waste their time, or other tactical and strategic advantage extraneous to the intellectual debate), not a "truth seeking" act between, fundamentally, two good faith people trying to find and agree on the truth.
  • Dating and code talk.
    Although dating and relationships doesn't feature prominently here on philosophy forum, or I think we'd agree in philosophy circles in general, I think that's a shame.

    Relationships and sexuality are a pretty central part of the human condition. Maybe a whole category could be dedicated to it. By actively, or simply by omission, somewhat avoiding the topic, I think it signals to people that "philosophers" and we who "discuss philosophy" are aloof from the real lives of people.

    Of course, many more profound issues of politics and justice and morality get discussed everyday here, which I would say, whatever the "right answers" happen to be, is a precondition for a being a "good person" which is in turn a precondition for having moral merit enough to be worthy a "good relationship".

    However, although this is the logical sequence, it would be delusional to expect most people, in which I include even myself, to take things in this order. The "human" order of things is in general total chaos, starting with the relationship part and facing all the issues (not only all the ethical ones, but also purely practical aspects of navigating relationship, and of course the actual love, affection, sex and all the emotions that go along with intense human drama) at the same time.

    In this case I agree with essentially all the other posters that it's pointless to try to "figure out" someone's intentions and situation after a single meeting. It can sometimes take me up to two meetings to understand someone better than they understand themselves and predict most, if not all, of their actions and statements and spiritual path in life, such as their next challenges and travails and where exactly they are likely to stagnate in their understanding of the world and their place within it and simply no longer be able to review their core beliefs necessary to improve their understanding any further. One meeting is usually just not enough.

    Most people are kind and polite if they aren't provoked to be otherwise, so, that a first meeting felt that it went well doesn't really inform anything at all. Who knows the reasons, and "trying to find out" is not polite nor kind. A person who feels they owe you an explanation for something will volunteer that explanation. The only situation where you can push for or even "demand" an explanation is if the laws involved in some way (they may have stolen from you, or your rights as an employee maybe infringed, etc.). There is, alas, no love police to enforce justice in these scenarios (at least not in the West).

    Although I think there's a lot to talk about, as mentioned above we could have an entire category (in particular of interest to me would be the political aspects; as, modern relationship dissatisfaction is most clearly related to economic conditions: forming and maintaining stable relationships simply requires stable economic means as a prerequisite; if forming a romantic relationship is to "build something together" the followup question to that is obviously "build something with what?"; and indeed, I would argue the break down of the means of the lower classes to form long lasting relationships is not only a part, but indeed the central part, of both the isolationism capitalism fosters and requires for it's stability) ... in this particular case: build confidence.

    It is not that confidence is some magical quality that manipulates people. Rather, confidence is simply being comfortable with your own beliefs and actions. Confidence can of course be used to manipulate people (con artists are not called literally "confidence men" for nothing), but they are not the same thing. Confidence is simply the manifestation of being comfortable with your own identity. It is not that this in itself will "attract people" in a general sense, rather, it will unattractate people who do not like that identity but also attract very strongly the people that do like that identity. Romantic relationships are "intense" and therefore require a "intense attraction" to start; the trope about the "nice guys" not getting girls essentially conveys the idea that they are insecure and bland and expect a minimum of social etiquette to attract someone to a high risk, high emotional investment, low probability of long term success enterprise.
  • Why are ordinary computers bad in recognizing patterns while neural network AI and the brain are not
    As
    ↪khaled
    points out, current AI are algorithms run on normal computers. Specialized AI devices exist, but they run the same algorithms as a normal computer can, just the hardware is optimized to do the math an AI algorithm usually needs.

    So with that distinction, the question is between these AI (machine learning) algorithms, our brains and "normal programming".

    We can understand "normal programming" as code that is static: the programmer writes the code, and that's it; it then executes and does it's thing. Any updates to the code, the programmer needs go in and write those updates.

    Machine learning algorithms have the same "static" phase of code development above to create the framework, but then the "recognition" algorithm (that will do the pattern spotting) is "trained" on the data (things with their associated labels the algorithm is supposed to spot more generally) which basically means the algorithm is changed (by another algorithm) to be better and better with more and more data (if the data is good).

    However, the premise of your question is also wrong, normal programming on normal computers can spot plenty of patterns better than us.

    In any sort of structured data, where data points maybe related by mathematical functions, a normal computer with normal algorithms is going to do a better job at spotting patterns for a wide range of patterns and data sets (data sets can simply be unfeasible large to go through, even if the patterns are simple) better than us just looking at the raw data.

    A super simple example, a spreadsheet is going to be able to spot the pattern of "the sum of these entries" much faster and more accurately than just sitting there and looking at the list of entries.

    Another example, if you're looking at the raw data of all phone calls in a country, spotting any useful pattern will be exceedingly difficult. However, normal computers with normal algorithms can spot all sorts of useful patterns you maybe interested in.

    Likewise, if you're trying to find the pattern of "normal text" that is encrypted, just looking at the encrypted text is unlikely to help, but totally normal computer algorithms exist that can find such patterns (if there's a weakness in the encryption somewhere).

    So, in terms of pattern recognition in general, there are some things we're good at and some things a normal computer algorithm is good at and some things a AI machine learning algorithm is good at (again, AI algorithms can be applied to large datasets we cannot feasibly do anything with).

    Why we're good at the pattern recognition we're good at, has the simple answer of literally billions years of evolution (maybe longer in the pan spermia hypothesis is true).

    Why computers are not better than us at absolutely everything, one answer is that computers are built by us, so inherit our weaknesses. Another answer is that billions of years of evolution may have created some optimum algorithms in its domain that can never be beat (when our energy consumption if factored in, even more so if compare to a device that must consume raw chemical energy and convert it to electricity, we can still vastly out compete computers and robots on many tasks; indeed, it would be interesting to see a competition with our best chess and go players on the same source of energy over the course of the match; which is easy to simulate by just constraining the electricity to work with, but could be fun student project or something to build a whole device that runs on food and plays chess). Another more technical answer is that computers do not actually have abstractions; everything is just a variable, and all variables in the computer are the same "thing", just a string of binary. So, simply calling a variable "a tree" does not create these sort of abstractions in the computer itself; the binary that encodes "tree" means nothing special to the computer and the binary that stores the memory location of whatever the value for the variable "tree" has, means nothing special to the computer (it's only us that have the idea the variable "tree" corresponds to representing our abstract notion of tree); so, in this view, it's not a surprise that the more try to depart from simple number crunching and get computers to solve abstract problems (such as write the next Harry Potter), the more it becomes fitting square pegs in round holes (where the pegs are larger than the holes, just so we're clear on that; otherwise, I've used this trick plenty of times, works like a charm; of course, you can't fit larger pegs into smaller holes anyways, even if they're both round, so the expression should really focus on the size and not shape). What "stuff" are our abstractions made of, we don't really know, so it's a bit expected we have a hard time recreating something we don't even understand to begin with.
  • Is Climatology Science?
    This document only cites 6 references, 4 of which are the authors’ own, and of these 2 are not actually published. Therefore I would not regard this document as having any scientific credibility. — From rebuttal paper Bano posted
  • Is Climatology Science?
    To make a long story short: if a bath is filled with apple juice, adding orange juice to it will increase the volume of liquid in the bath ... even if it's mostly apply juice.

    I don't have time right now to go through these papers, but the basic claim is simply false.

    The theory of human created green house gases increasing global temperatures predates computer models by about a hundred years.

    The experimental evidence for the theory that the globe will warm, is the globe warming.

    The second experimental evidence is the geologic record.

    The basic theory that supports these things is analytic equations, not computer models.

    The idea water is "ignored" by climate scientists is ridiculous.

    The basic theory is that water saturation in the atmosphere is proportional to the temperature of the atmosphere. When industrialization begins, there is a steady state of average humidity; it won't change by itself the steady-state that started in the beginning of the Holocene (why would it, if none of the factors affecting it are changing?).

    However, when you add another source of heat (insulation if you prefer) , like CO2 trapping more heat, then this increases the temperature and drives the humidity higher, increasing the temperature even more, until a new steady state is reached.

    The basic argument that "clouds" happen to exactly compensate the new heating (which is already a bit contradictory idea, as without heating there'd be no change to the humidity saturation patterns, and so no reason for more clouds), is not a good "bet" to justify business as usual, is because of the geologic record. There's pretty high variability in climate, not some steady line for hundreds of thousands of years which would support the idea of very strong buffering and negative-feedback loops that we're unlikely to break out of.

    Changing the global composition of the atmosphere with atoms and molecules we know to have affects, is simply an unacceptable risk to take.

    There is no need for some absolute certainty, absolute understanding of the clouds in a future climate we haven't created yet, it's basic risk management principles.
  • Madness is rolling over Afghanistan
    ↪hairy belly


    No, no, no, you don't understand.

    It's a time for "soul searching", intentions were pure, nothing was predictable in advance, zero reasons to have plausible audits of anything at anytime during these 20 years; serious organizations don't do audits, they soul search after the mission fails in every possible way in the most spectacular fashion.
  • Madness is rolling over Afghanistan
    It's great that people notice this, as you have. This is truly the West's world order collapsing. Many people don't see it. — ssu

    Unfortunately I don't have enough time, right now, to continue in the climate change and other debates.

    But I'm wondering how you square this statement with your view that "Western capitalism" and, in your very next post, NATO and US imperialism, are on the whole good things.

    Now, please reflect: is your argument "well, could be worse" (sure, NAZI's could have been worse and used their nerve agents all over the place; you need to get to literally satan to have a "bad as it gets"), or is your argument that despite environmental and social catastrophes the system is still somehow "good" and has no fundamental flaws.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    And it seems like most western countries are at that place. I do not see the situation is "something our lifestyle" has produced, capitalism or whatever. — Ansiktsburk

    How does this make any sense?

    What has produced the pollution, if not capitalism (as is practiced today and since the industrial revolution)? and if not the lifestyles industrial capitalist growth has enabled?

    Where is the cause, if not these things?

    I come from a poor family, most scandinavians were around 1900, and the society has given my family a much better life, which I cannot for my life see as a bad thing. I would say that people being angry on "capitalism", should do some genealogy. — Ansiktsburk

    Yes, capitalism creates winners and losers, and the winners tend to like their winnings.

    However, regardless of social issues related to your statement, if the system isn't sustainable then who cares about standards of living meanwhile. It's like a captain that doesn't prepare a voyage where resources run out half way through and everyone starves to death, does it matter if the passengers were comfortable for the first part of the journey; does that excuse the second half of the journey being a tortuous hell?

    And that, a tortuous hell, is what most passengers on earth are going to experience if today's capitalist system (whatever version of capitalism you want to call it) continues unsustainably.

    If billions or more people starve to death (what necessarily goes with a globally unsustainable system), are you really willing to say "well, me and my Scandinavian family have had it pretty darn good; so, I think it was a good system that brought us here".

    Of course, you can argue that the system is sustainable, that the climate and other biodiversity alarmists are wrong, but you recognize yourself that argument doesn't really work.

    So, that being the case, you are basically saying "yes, the system isn't sustainable and we are moving towards the disasters all major credible environmental institutions are predicting ... but, it was good for my family for a bit, so I can't put the that into question".

    It seems to me your family is a pretty small subset of the entire planet with all its inhabitants and life forms.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    I'll respond to you later about the last part of your post. — ssu

    In the meantime, here is another interview with a credible scientist.



    Saying all the same points.

    Also, if anyone on the forum has pre-ripped genes ... you're fucking terrible people.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    For people who don't want to spend effort doing basic web searches about this topic before debating it.

    Here's a presentation by a credible scientist on the issue of collapse and climate change:

  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Moving is a bad term here. — ssu

    It's a perfectly good term, and makes the point that if the entire climate isn't destabilized, and there's "elsewhere" to go to, then previous civilizations have not been fragile in this sense, which seems to me pretty major.

    It also seems to me pretty trivial that moving one's civilization somewhere else will require conquering that place first. It's only us that calls the Byzantine empire by that name, they called themselves Roman.

    Feudalism I would argue was not "moving Roman civilization" to the country side, but the collapse of the Western Roman civilization.

    For instance, most of the written classics of the Roman, and the preceding Greek, civilization that we now have, were preserved by Muslims, and then re-introduced to Europe. The monastic tradition I would argue is people trying to preserve what they can from a collapsed civilization. To argue feudalism was Roman civilization "moving" to the countryside is nonsensical. Feudalism was a response of people to the collapse of Roman civilization.

    Otherwise, I don't really see what your arguing ... other than running out of grain and so on precipitated the collapse of the Western Roman empire, which I think historians would agree played a part.

    What I'm arguing is that to solve these problems take more than 20 years and yes, long term changes in population growth do matter. — ssu

    Then maybe read up on the topic. The carbon budgets we have to work with (to avoid civilization ending climate "discontinuities", as they are called) are on decade time scales, in which de-population via falling birth rates has no meaningful consequence.

    They simply are so subtle that those focusing just on the present day don't notice their effects. And it's not just technological advancement, but also the market mechanism which also is an important factor here. — ssu

    What's subtle about the world going from 1 billion to 8 billion in a single human life time?

    I have no idea what you're talking about i terms of technology advance and market mechanism in this context.

    So in your view in 20 years there is a catastrophy, a collapse? — ssu

    The carbon budgets we have to work with, to stay under 2 degrees Celsius (and not a guarantee, just a reasonable chance) are exhausted in about 20 years at present consumption rate.

    Carbon_budget_eng.png

    Emission budget and necessary emission reduction pathways to meet the two-degree target agreed in Paris Agreement without negative emissions, depending on the emission peak — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_budget

    Now, if we started really major actions now, and overran the carbon budget on our way to zero emissions (but we do make it there), then another major effort could be spent growing massive amounts of trees every year and sequester that carbon back underground, as well as other geoengineering schemes to "nudge" systems a bit -- in a race against the lag time of the climate system. (This is by no means a "clever risk" to take; it is far less riskier and far less costly to not emit the carbon in the first place: for, even if we emit less there's the risk the carbon budget was miscalculated and it's still not enough, so we need to do the geoengineering and we'll thank our lucky stars we played it as safe as we did; and 2, it's simply expensive and causes more ecologic damage to sequester compared to reasonable short-term actions to decarbonize, as well as stop deforesting the amazon, stop over fishing, stop so much meat eating, etc..)

    So, I would agree there is some flexibility, but only if we were actually on track to zero emissions; currently we are not, not even close to being on track. Just pie in the sky denialist thinking.

    Continuing business as usual and just blowing by the carbon budgets (just as we simply blew by the Kyoto targets), will be a state of inevitable collapse.

    Collapse won't happen in 20 years "to the day", but would be a process of unrelenting droughts, floods, fires, leading to crop failures, political upheaval, and both civil and inter-nation wars.

    It is this next 20 years where we can have the biggest impact on how events unfold and preserve our civilization and most people alive today with a ok probability. Just like the last 20 years would have been even easier ... and 20 years before that when we actually first understood this problem in all the essential aspects.

    Our global society seems pretty stable, but only because we currently have enough to eat for everyone ... that matters politically (the people we don't give enough to eat, but could, such as those starving in Yemen, don't matter to our global political system, otherwise they could use that leverage to get more food; but that's far from being everyone in the Yemenize category).

    Once food goes from "enough" to "not-enough" on a global scale, and even once many people die, and the warming and droughts and fires don't stop, so it just happens again and again to those left over each time, both coherent global action and maintaining our present infrastructure will be more and more difficult.

    There is only so much disruption and challenges our system (as with previous systems) can take. Critical supply chains (such as your Egyptian grain example) start to unravel and our technological infrastructure will start to be defunct.

    Armies (running out of food) won't simply sit around and starve to death, so the habitable places that remain will face relentless invasion and piracy with dwindling weapons systems that can no longer be renewed without the present global technological manufacturing platform. What happens to these people is anyone's guess, but I'm very certain they would view our current civilization as "collapsed" and "in ruins".

    This is the basic process of collapse.

    It is avoidable with radical actions now, not "subtle changes to population growth" over a century or two.

    Democracy has it's faults, but it's still the thing I believe in. It has some safety valves built into it, if only the citizens would apply them. The alternatives usually don't have them. Radical technological transformation, yes. Radical political transformation, be careful just what you wish for. — ssu

    You obviously didn't read my previous post which I literally say "as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs" is effective democracy.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    And the civilizations you are referring to? Seems to me the civilizations in history were far more fragile to collapse. — ssu

    Doing things like changing the global climate makes our civilization far, far more fragile.

    Other civilizations always had the chance to at least move somewhere else. For instance, Roman civilization did effectively move to Byzantine and survived for another 1000 years.

    We have no where to go.

    (Oligarchs are trying to change that, but I don't think on behalf of "we".)

    Also, I don't get how this view squares with your view that population is the problem. If we're not fragile, why would population be a problem?

    Population growth is the natural reason for economic growth and demand growth. If populations are stable or decreasing, that is a huge issue on this issue. You don't have only decrease in use because of technological advancement, but also due to demand decrease. That is a huge issue. Besides, earlier population growth was seen as the primary reason for doom, starting from Malthus, which isn't something unimportant now.

    Japan has a decreasing population. Notice what has happened to it's need of energy:     — ssu

    I disagree with your disagreement.

    As I explained, I am not arguing a large population is not a pre-condition for our currently large resource consumption.

    If there was only 1 person on earth, our present environmental problems would not be here.

    Neither am I arguing that simply depopulating the world wouldn't solve the environmental crisis. If however many people are needed, volunteered themselves for extermination: problem solved!

    The problem is that people don't volunteer (even those advocating depopulation, I never see volunteer for it).

    It's easy to accomplish depopulation through environmental collapse, massive droughts and crop failures, but environmental collapse is what we are trying to avoid.

    In other-words, depopulation is simply not realistic.

    Depopulation through lowing the birth rate is not a solution. We need to solve our environmental problems in the coming decades, but it would be centuries to lower substantially the population through birth rates.

    You are arguing in a hypothetical realm divorced from reality. If we actually lived in this hypothetical realm where the consequences were centuries out, then just lowering the birth rate would be an option worth discussing.

    On the time scales imposed by the actual reality we live in, depopulation would be required in the next couple of decades; and the only feasible way to do that is through environmental collapse: the problem we are trying to avoid. Otherwise, people try to survive and try to help other people survive, no one volunteers themselves for depopulation.

    However, our technological systems and infrastructure and level of affluence can be radically changed in mere decades. It requires high level of effort, but it is feasible.

    Depopulation is a mental crutch of the apathetic. It's a way of both simultaneously viewing oneself as a "tough realist" while accomplishing nothing at all and denying reality.

    The tough realist position (that includes effective actions) is not depopulation, but radical transformation of our political system (which, as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs) to implement feasible solutions to our problems, on the span of decades and not whimsical imaginings of centuries that have no relevance to the present.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    If the choice was between destroying capitalism or destroying earth, given the time frame we’d have no shot. Capitalism — the form we have — will stay around a while longer, and so there has to be alternatives. — Xtrix

    You maybe confusing the sum total of our institutions with "capitalism". For instance, democratic institutions are not really "capitalism". You can have democratically elected politicians that implement a state or otherwise socialists economy. Indeed, you can have a nominal "communist party" that oversees a capitalists economy, as we have in China.

    So, although I agree we cannot overhaul the entire political and economic system, a real solution to the climate crisis is now simply impossible through any semblance of the free market "acting by itself". It requires massive government intervention, which pro-capitalists, will cry "socialism" about (unless it benefits them of course, then they say it's just common sense).

    Western society is a mix of capitalism and socialist / collectivist institutions.

    Although I would agree that our capitalist components dominate our socialist components (socialist institutions, including elected political bodies, de facto serve at the leisure of our oligarchs, and only insofar as it is good for capitalism ... and the "really important things" like central banks and multi-national corporations are kept in direct oligarchal control, far from the dirty, filthy, putrid, weak and pathetic hands of elected representatives).

    Though I cannot speak for @ChatteringMonkey, the concept that capitalism must be overthrown to solve the climate crisis, I would agree with, but not mean to say literally all our institutions (including the market) must be rebuilt from scratch, but rather our oligarchs must be deposed by democracy.

    This may require a Nuremberg style trial and hanging of our oligarchs, which may seem fantasy now, but as the damage and pains become greater and larger, accountability for ecocide on par with the accountability (no sane person argues against) for the Nazi genocide, is entirely reasonable, and a an important expression of the intrinsic violent nature of politics, in order to move with de facto new institutions of power that can credibly say they are now in some sort of real control, and not the oligarchs (because they've been publicly hanged).

    Obviously, this foundational aspect of our political institutions can go to far, such as the Terror of the French revolution, but I think Nuremberg was a reasonable thing; as the bodies pile up, I predict more and more people will agree with this sentiment.

    Now, hanging our oligarchs would clearly be seen as a deep transition of power, but does not mean getting rid of all our institutions.

    What matters is who controls our institutions.

    Capitalism is an ideology which explicitly wants the rich to run the show. For instance, "how to prevent poor people from making laws", is the central question of the founding fathers of the United States. Democracy was needed to take power from the King of England (and pay less taxes and become more rich), since a revolution for a new American King simply would simply make no sense (and, the oligarchs would not have been able to agree on a new King even if they wanted to). Democracy was a very conscious compromise, carefully crafted to ensure poor people and slaves had no effective power. Of course, it was not fated to remain that way, and America has seen periods of effective democracy (certainly more effective than previous times or then today), but that is the ideology of capitalism.

    The idea that democratic institutions should effectively "flex" control over the market (force internalization of costs), effectively stop the transformation of control of capital into political power (whether through a long list of laws interfering with money in politics, or just preventing too much capital accumulation in the first place and appropriating the capital of anyone that "succeeds" in that quest regardless), effectively provide critical goods and services to society through "collectivist" institutions where the market clearly fails to do so, as well as simply not allow poverty, are all in clear contradiction to capitalist ideology.

    "Capitalists" who take credit for the success of "collectivist institutions" as capitalism "working", while simultaneously claiming "taxes are theft", and the creation of more such institutions is socialism, blah, blah, blah, are just idiotic hypocrites.

    The central features (i.e. the dominant features that actually decide how our societies are organized) are that people can accumulate unlimited amounts of capital and this control of capital can be effectively be transformed into political power (the places where this is not the case, are small political islands with essentially no influence over global affairs).

    Where this accumulation of, and transformation of capital to political power is "without friction", the system is fully "capitalist", and where there is a lot of friction to this process (such as Scandinavia), then democratic institutions start to dominate the organization of society (using markets insofar as they produce, at least perceived, "good" for most people, using the socialism of free money and services when the market clearly doesn't provide the goods, and constraining the market when it can work fine, but with a bunch of rules to discourage negative forms of competition, such as damaging externalities), are socialist ideas, of one brand or another (and "capitalists" do not hesitate to identify those ideas as socialism; there's no good counter argument to such accusations, because it's true; it's socialists and communists and anarchists that proposed and fought for things like free education, minimum wages, free health care, safe working conditions, and so on, not "capitalists"; for capitalists to take credit for such socialists victories to make the argument it's capitalism and the market that has provided all good things anywhere, is just stupid).

    The 90s saw the environmental movement make the faustian bargain with our oligarchs, based on the idea of "fix the climate within capitalism; because overthrowing the oligarchs seems, so, so hard, and it's so, so much easier to take oligarch money and such oligarch dick; and they seem like such nice people too!". Oligarchs did feign sympathy and did provide money (strings attached of course), but what are they doing now? Trying to go to space and look out for number 1, as they always can be counted on to do.

    For, it was believed that even the oligarchs needed a planet and would agree with evidence and rational based reasoning of how to prevent planetary catastrophe, and would accept some loss of capital and power, to themselves or fellow oligarchs. Two decades later the oligarchs have literally popped out of their yachts, bunkers and New Zealand compounds (they were hiding in to avoid Corona), yelled "wrong, bitches!" and blasted off to space (what they called space anyways; certainly, a good first step to becoming swashbuckling, intrepid galactic explorers), to thunderous applause in the media no less.

    Getting rid of the oligarchs -- which may require a good perfectly fair and legal Nuremburg style hanging -- is the key issue. Doing so does not mean a radically different society; if you go to countries with little oligarchic control, they do not look so different in terms of the nominal names of the institutions they have, but they are very different.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    It’s difficult to provide proofs for things like global tipping points. — Punshhh

    I definitely agree in a formal sense of "proof". However, tipping points are a general characteristic of complex systems we can pretty much always safely infer will be present in any such system.

    There is mathematical work on this I saw a few years ago, I'll try to find, trying to quantify mathematically what is meant by tipping point and what conditions are necessary for tipping points to exist.

    One interesting result of this work is that in systems with internal variables (things as they are) and external variables (things we can observe) tipping points can be triggered without any way to know based on the external variables (there is nothing that can track the actual tipping point, but it will only be inferrable in the future, that it happened at some point, in retrospect).

    And this aligns well with our intuition. For instance, if we take people as complex systems, they do unpredictable things all the time (or then expected actions but at unpredictable times) and presumably hit tipping points that lead to such actions, but we can't really tell when exactly tipping points were. For instance, we may know someone unhappy at their work and expect them to quit at some point, and maybe many times something happens that seems "the last straw" but it isn't, but finally there is a last straw, that we didn't even see happening, and the person quits. An even more stark example is someone who is unhappy at their work, but is not expressive about it, and we don't suspect a thing, but someday they quit, and we can, in retrospect, assume some tipping point was reached that lead to the "radical simplification" of the work situation (at least temporarily).

    But basically, all complex systems (we tend to encounter) respond to too much stress by simplifying (not getting more complex; a bit of stress may do that, but at some point there is a threshold that leads to simplification).

    All this to say, and I'm sure you agree, that it's best not to push towards such thresholds on a global scale to see what happens.

    What we can be relatively certain is that "pushing harder" on the climate isn't going to paradoxically make things better in any scenario, but we should stop pushing, hope for the best, and plan for both "radical simplification" as well as "keeping it together somewhat".
  • (mathematical) sets of beliefs
    That doesn't matter; I just need to have a means of selecting beliefs from a set. Whether that set is finite or infinite doesn't matter, and whether they express quantities or can be false doesn't matter either; all that matters is that the belief is held and can lead to people making choices. — ToothyMaw

    It seems to me beliefs can be just words, and it seems pretty accurate that people make choices based on words in reality (that's as good a description as we can actually make; although "brain states" I would certainly agree affect decisions, it's not clear whether, apart from words, they do so by something we call beliefs; i.e. emotions certainly affect both beliefs and decisions, but it doesn't seem a given that they are themselves beliefs -- although, we can certainly have beliefs about our and others emotions).

    But, if you just want beliefs to be in some reasonably constructed sets, then letters and words clearly can makeup sets, and it seems a very reasonable premise that people really do make decisions based on words (though, not exclusively; so, if this isn't a requirement, it's certainly a starting point).
  • (mathematical) sets of beliefs
    That is all very interesting stuff. Never would have thought of postulating a consciousness field (but of course I'm not a physicist; I don't know how such things work). — ToothyMaw

    There's nothing mysterious to it. We know we can explore space, and we know "stuff" exists in space (otherwise we wouldn't know space exists of course). So, for every kind of stuff, we can postulate a field that covers space with that value of this stuff at any point.

    By "stuff" is meant an observable phenomenon of some sort.

    We can encounter elephants and postulate an "elephant field" which would tell us at each point of space if an elephant exists there or not.

    Of course, if more general fields (such as that describe gravity, particles, etc.) can completely account for other fields (like our elephant field), then, although we can still have an elephant field to describe our elephant problems if we want, we would not say it is fundamental, even if maybe otherwise still useful (the typical example is temperature, which is reducible to particle motion, but nevertheless useful to work with fields representing temperature at different points in space, say the simulation of a part in a machine).

    However, if a field isn't reducible to other fundamental fields, then it must be also fundamental. For instance, the Higgs field is assumed to exist because the other fields simply don't give rise to mass without postulating this other separate field.

    A consciousness field seems to me the intellectually honest starting point, only after showing it is reducible to more fundamental fields (such as the elephant field, insofar as we're talking about elephants as collection of particles and not their conscious experience) can we say it is maybe a useful accounting of some aspects of reality (elephant field, temperature field, consciousness field), but not representing anything fundamentally physical.
  • (mathematical) sets of beliefs
    I don't think saying that beliefs can be represented as groups of words gets us out of the hole. Similar ideas can be expressed with different words, but small differences in wording can change the meaning significantly. — T Clark

    That's why I said in the same post:

    The problems would arise if you want to say different sets of words actually represent the same belief ("God exists" is the same belief as "Supreme being exists"). But this would be more of a linguistics problem than a set problem, and maybe you can simply work around it to make your greater project. — boethius

    However, it depends what one wants to do with these sets of beliefs. If one's argument simply requires beliefs can form sets, then the word approach seems to me fine.
  • (mathematical) sets of beliefs
    Since we do not have any way, even in principle, to reduce consciousness to particles, the intellectually rigorous way is, presuming there is a phenomenon of consciousness (at least in my own case), is to postulate a consciousness field (that's what physicists do when they encounter new phenomenon that's not a prediction of the fields they already have: they add another one).

    Now that we have postulated this consciousness field we can go ahead and say it somehow describes consciousness at different points in space, interacts with the other fields (of course, which way the causation goes is another question), and call it a day until someone invents a device that measures this consciousness field.

    The lack of such a device is a problem for further development of the theory, but at least no made-up postulates without justification have been adopted. Of course, maybe such devices do exist after all, and we call them brains.
  • (mathematical) sets of beliefs
    ↪ToothyMaw


    This is the mind-body problem. It's been discussed for thousands of years.

    Presumably (if other people are conscious, which we / I don't know) beliefs are associated with their brains (definitely seems to be the case), but that does not prove the subject experience is somehow "in" those brain states (as a collection of particles).

    No equations governing particles in any of our laws of physics, in any arrangement whatever, predicts consciousness.

    To say particle interaction "causes consciousness" is to say some particle description we can write down describes to us consciousness; that you can give me some paper with some descriptions of particles and, after review (even very lengthy) I (or any other diligent reviewer) would say "ah yes, these particles / field equations / whathave you, would be conscious in this description if such initial conditions, as clearly described here, were put into motion.

    We do not have such a theory of physics. It is not even clear such a theory is even in principle possible.
  • (mathematical) sets of beliefs
    On the subject of brain states, we cannot simply assume brain states represent belief (as a subjective "thing" of some sort), as, if we're being rigorous which I assume is the purpose here, we have no proof of brains being conscious to begin with. Although, I also agree with
    ↪ToothyMaw
    criticism of the brain states approach (which would simply reduce to "very different brain states that nevertheless mean what I say they mean; i.e. different brain states represent the same belief, as long as we have -- totally different -- reasons for saying so, such as the words approach below").

    For the general question of the OP, I think the more fruitful approach is to represent beliefs as "set's of words" made up of "sets of letters", and those easily form sets. So, insofar as beliefs can be represented with words, then they can be easily put into sets.

    The problems would arise if you want to say different sets of words actually represent the same belief ("God exists" is the same belief as "Supreme being exists"). But this would be more of a linguistics problem than a set problem, and maybe you can simply work around it to make your greater project.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    These tipping points are already breached. We’ve recently had 30+ centigrade heatwaves in all permafrost regions. They are melting rapidly, there is enough methane there to accelerate climate change beyond what we can mitigate. Even if we had zero carbon production now this methane would more than compensate for the reduction. It’s acceleration and a rollercoaster ride from now on, whatever we do. — Punshhh

    This is definitely being close to being the case, and maybe the tipping points are breached and a "runaway" process that is unstoppable is already underway.

    However, I'm not completely certain. The scenarios I'm contrasting is zero emissions today.

    Without further carbon dioxide, methane and black particles from humans, maybe the North stabilizes, and not all the permafrost melts.

    Of course, zero emissions today is not happening, but the basic point I'm making is that from one tipping point to the next maybe further human emissions is required to get things "over the edge", or, then, maybe, and once we tip one (like ocean ice in the arctic) all the others will fall like dominoes.

    My overall point is that we'er not certain, but we can be pretty certain that continued emissions will make things worse, ensure tipping over more dominoes and also driving the system even hotter even after all the dominoes are tipped (as there's still more green house gases at the end of the process).

    If things are already dire, then we'd be working to make things "a bit less bad" for survivors.

    If things aren't so dire right now (many tipping points could be avoided if we stopped emissions now), then there's even more to save in terms of people and ecosystems.

    For, it does take time for ice to melt, especially Greenland and antarctic, and the thermal inertia of the oceans that buffers a bit, and there's also (if emissions are brought to zero) geo-engineering that could work in that context.

    Though I'm sure you agree, a point I'd like to emphasize as much as possible, that Geoengineering only makes sense after zero emissions.

    You seed some ice now, it will have a bit of a cooling effect, but if we continue to warm the planet anyways, it will just melt anyways accomplishing nothing.

    Grow a bunch of forests now, it will sequester some carbon and make those ecosystems more resilient (if we're talking actual forest and not mono-crops) ... but, they'll just burn anyways, sooner or later, if we keep warming the planet releasing all that CO2 back.

    Adding reflective aerosols to the atmosphere doesn't stop ocean acidification and other problems (even if it "worked no issues", which it won't, continuing business as usual we'd just consume other non-renewable resources and collapse our civilization another way, as
    ↪James Riley
    mentions) and needs to be continuous and more and more extreme intervention the more we continue to add green house gases (making a chaotic climate changes anyways, leading to crop failures that way). And, as soon as civilization is disrupted enough to stop the program, by wars or what-have-you, then all that warming is going to happen even faster and even more disruptively.

    However, if we actually stopped emissions, then growing large amount of forests wouldn't all burn, and so sequester carbon and attract rain to those areas, both things making those ecosystems more resilient.

    Likewise, seeding ice or building a ship drone network to keep ice in the arctic can help stabilize or even reverse the libido losses (submersible drones that attach to icebergs and deploy sea anchors, or the attach to real anchors with chains brought relatively close to the surface for this purpose, which could be then attached horizontally to each other, forming a large chain network all the way around the arctic that drones can go around attaching ice too). A lot of ice is lost due to floating south. Of course, if we warm the arctic enough that ice doesn't stay anyways, just melts in situ, there's no point of my immensely cool drone chain network.

    Maybe some very short term, localized and strategic uses of reflective aerosols could stop catastrophic melting scenarios (those 30C over Greenland days).

    So, there is still uncertainty and also geoengineering options, which are total insanity as a way to compensate emissions, but we may have time to deploy, considering the inertia of the system, and in the context of getting to zero emissions, I think it stands to reason cautious geoengineering could stop those other tipping points.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Above all, in 2020 we saw the lowest population growth in the World since at least 1950 with 1,05%. Just in 2012 the growth rate was 1,2%. It may be that some of us (those younger) will witness peak human population. — ssu

    I don't think population matters much.

    Of course, it's easiest to imagine just having less people would lower our impact, than to imagine some actually sustainable system.

    However, in the equation of Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence; it's the technology and affluence that can be changed significantly in relatively short periods of time (without the catastrophe we are trying to avoid).
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    1) I blame the media.

    The journalists pick up the most damning forecast (from a variety) and run with the worst possible early outcome.     — ssu

    I wouldn't say this is true. Also, if we're blaming the journalists, journalist in turn blame the collapse of paid journalism due to the internet (and no policies put in place for value-extraction of search engines and aggregators to pay for what they're using to make profits).

    In the 90s, before the media collapse, I think communication was pretty good, and there was lot's of discussion and "in depth" reporting, denialists existed but were easily defeated (as they new forms of media entirely dedicated to propaganda, such as Fox News, didn't exist yet), and all this culminated in the Kyoto Protocol, which was supposed to be the "Montreal Protocol" protocol moment for the climate, and was sold as such.

    2) Then I blame that some issues have been overcome. DDT has been banned. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has been working: Since the ban on halocarbons, the ozone layer has slowly been recovering and the data shows a trend in decreasing area of the ozone hole – subject to annual variations. It has even closed sometime. We have already hit peak conventional oil production and oil production hasn't grown for some time. — ssu

    As mentioned above, Kyoto Protocol could have actually worked (been made better to begin with, or then actually followed), but it wasn't. So, although I agree we definitely can make these international agreements that effectively deal with pollution, so far we haven't for green house gases.

    Yes, we've peaked in conventional "sweet" crude, but we've gone all in for things like tar sands and fracking and haven't even phased out coal globally. The Amazon turning from a sink to a source of greenhouse gas emissions also means that we need to cut the difference to be at the same "spot" of net-emission when the Amazon was still a sink.

    We are starting to saturate other buffers as well (a cold ocean can dissolve CO2 pretty well, but a warmer ocean may start to emit the CO2 it previously absorbed).

    3) And finally, I think that the society can cope with even more problems. We can have this economy limping with the pandemic limitations for years. We can not travel as much as before. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost in the tourism sector and flights have basically halved. We can change our behavior and never ever shake each others hands. Who needs so much travel? The fact is that our societies can endure radical changes. Thanks to the pandemic, carbon emissions have fallen at the most rapid rate since WW2. Primary energy consumption fell by 4.5% in 2020, the largest decline since 1945, yet solar Wind, solar and hydroelectricity all grew despite of this plummeting demand. — ssu

    Sure, if you're arguing we can do something, no objections from me. The question is are we doing something, and fast enough.

    Once systems get overwhelmed, they collapse. Has happened to previous civilizations, can happen to ours.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    People tend to be myopic, it's hard motivate them with something that is gradual and in the longterm. If some accident happens they typically do want to jump into action. — ChatteringMonkey

    True in a sense, and, in a general sense as well the fundamental cause of the problem of climate change (or any human caused problem) is "human weaknesses" of one sort or another.

    At the same time, it's not inevitable. People can be lazy, but can also be disciplined; society's as well. Indeed, in a longer view, many societies seem to be very far sighted, building large defensive structures that might see use in the next centuries.

    It's easy to link social problems to social vices, just as for the individual, but this simply begs the question of why such vices developed in the first place.

    There's the denialists definitely, but not so much in Europe indeed. I also do think green parties, and the left in general, have been bad strategically in selling their ideas to the public... to much finger pointing blame game, and to little constructive motivating vision put forward. — ChatteringMonkey

    I completely agree here. Why the movement doesn't have "more and better people" is one question (that may not have any definitive answer, just more and more historical context further and further back in time). However, what is clear is that the movement that does exist makes terrible decisions and is ineffective, even with the resources they have.

    Though I agree with you point here in one sense, I think the fundamental (at least intellectual) problem is the exact opposite and not enough "finger pointing" to avoid (uncomfortable) critical debate around ethical and political theory questions.

    It has been dragging for a long time, and for someone invested in the topic as long as you have been I get that this doesn't exactly fill you with optimism, but I think once things start moving, they might move a lot faster than one thinks. I don't think the conversion to renewables is a linear process. — ChatteringMonkey

    I also had this theory while starting 20 years ago, and I do still believe the transition can be very rapid. However, it's too late to prevent catastrophe's, which are already happening.

    For instance, 20 years ago, mass coral bleaching of, in particular, the great barrier reef but also reefs in general, was one of those unthinkable, terrible "apocalyptic signs" that we want to work hard to avoid.

    The apocalypse comes and goes.

    So yes, for exactly the reasons you describe, that were true 20 years ago in the 90s, and, as @Benkei points out, obviously true even for a 7 year old in the 80s, and also true in the 70s and 60s to all those dirty hippies, we can avoid "worse outcomes". However, the current outcome is already pretty bad, the climate catastrophe is already triggered, it's simply a question of how bad it will get.

    Since effects are baked in 20 years (overcoming the ocean thermal buffer) after actually getting to 0 emissions, the affects are already bad now, we are no where close to zero emissions, therefore, the effects are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

    And even the IPPC now concludes climate change is irreversible. So we are going "somewhere" new, and the nature of a system as complex as the whole world is that no one can know exactly where.

    That the effects could be extremely bad -- that hitting a tipping point in arctic ocean ice, which may trigger tipping points with permafrost, forest ecocystems, land-based ice, and the system can accelerate and dominate human emissions (i.e. further human emissions become irrelevant) etc. -- is the reason to not run this experiment in the first place.

    That maybe things aren't so bad, or then we should do our best for the survivors anyways (preserve as many seeds, and knowledge, and minimize our damage on the way out; i.e. clean up a bit when our party ends, before leaving unceremoniously), are all reasons to do what is morally justified, regardless of one's level of optimism or pessimism on the eventual outcome. That there is a chance of extinction means, by definition, there is also a chance of not-extinction.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    This does make a lot of sense, the models are only a rough approximation of an underlying reality afterall. We kindof know the rough ballpark of where, how and when things will go wrong, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about the specifics, and about what the interaction are between the moving parts. Nevertheless better save than sorry, I agree. — ChatteringMonkey

    Yes, even before computer models were even possible, it had already been worked out that the earth would warm due to the amounts of pollution involved, and that even 1 degree of warming would be significant risk.

    Computer models don't inform much more than this baseline analytic result worked out in the 70s.

    They confirm this analytic result in demonstrating all sorts of catastrophic scenarios, but it's more of narrative than decision making value. In the 70s, the scientists that worked out the 1 degree of warming risk threshold, maybe couldn't tell a story about it other than they didn't know what would happen but the risk of experimenting on the entire globe isn't reasonable to take.

    Computer models can provide stories ... but there are lot's of models, each model can be run thousands of times with different results, so it's still the same conclusion that the risk of running to the experiment to confirm which computer model got it "best" isn't reasonable to take.

    These kind of long term, high impact/uncertain probability risks are difficult to sell politically I suppose, because you do know the impact of the policy measures on your constituency typically. — ChatteringMonkey

    This is correct for most politicians, at any given time.

    But the real question is why there isn't wide spread awareness and powerful movements, or then why the movements that do exist have so far failed. The denialist industry was and still is well funded, but it's not really a given they would win, and they've only really "won" in the US; here in Europe there's not really much climate denialism, but the policies are weak sauce; the "concerned" politicians of Europe never get together and do anything of significance.

    I'm honestly not sure; it's not like the information is in secret books that an institution will systematically burn both the books and anyone possessing them. "Truth" seems to have gotten out far worse obstacles.

    Things do seem to be picking up traction now, technologically, economically and politically. — ChatteringMonkey

    Although I hope so, and I've been working in the field for 20 years, I am more pessimistic as you may have gotten.

    It's been long predicted (by the people that do objective analysis) that once we start to feel the problems, it maybe too late.

    First, 20 years of further warming is always inevitable, even if emissions suddenly stopped (which they obviously won't); so, even if we stopped now it would get worse for 20 years before stabilizing.

    Second, actually "stopping" actually means stopping: no net emissions from mankind. A lot of journalists put the goal posts at stopping growth in emissions as what we need to do, and so write articles about not growing emissions "as much as expected" as some sort of victory and that with all the solar and wind and stuff we're getting close to zero growth (leading the reader to believe that's the goal, if we're getting close to it in an optimistic sense and the article doesn't mention any other metric).

    However, all human caused net emission adds carbon to the atmosphere and increases warming. To actually stop warming we need to get net emissions to zero.

    The size of this task is absolutely massive.

    Therefore, all honest analysis I have seen by people (whatever their background) who have "gone deep" into the issue and clearly understand the subject matter and make coherent arguments, have all, over decades, come to the conclusion that business as usual until the affects are clearly felt, is basically too late. If we started feeling the affects and we were already down to 5% current levels of emissions, that would be one thing, but if we haven't even reversed growth in emissions, we are so far from the target it's simply not fathomable such a large change could happen in a decade or two.

    These large infrastructure changes are 50 to 100 year time scales ... so, had we started in the 70s in a serious way we'd be probably net zero emissions by now, and had we started "more seriously" in the 90s, we'd be feeling some of the affects as we currently are, but less, and we'd be "on our way" to avoiding total catastrophe.

    Not only are we now basically "screwed", as the infrastructure changes we need simply can't happen over night, but, an easy corollary of this prediction is that once we start feeling the affects, it disrupts economic systems taking away capital and "social energy" that could otherwise be directed towards the problem. Supply chains, financial systems, political tensions, all become disrupted, leading to a less stable world, less able to deal with the underlying problem.

    An easy example is trains. A very large portion of transport (car, truck and plane) can be moved onto trains and trams, running on electricity, which, even powered by fossil fuels, is still far more energy efficient and can be burned far cleaner (it's much easier to control particle and other emissions from a power plant than millions of cars).

    In terms of blank-page engineering, it's really easy to design an efficient train-tram-metro transportation based system that can displace a significant amount of emissions, even if still powered by fossil!

    But it's a 2 birds with 1 stone situation, because transitioning an electric train based system powered by fossil fuels to being powered by sustainable electricity requires no changes to the transportation system. So, emissions for the transport are already lower, and it's easy to transition the system to low emissions by simply adding low-emissions electricity to the grid.

    However, if you take such a blank-page engineering design and then overlay it on the current transport system and work out the costs and time to go from one to the other, the values are very large.

    Assuming politics is not an issue, that there's "the will", it still involves a decade of simply planning and then multiple decades of building such a system and then a solid decade to transition to using the new system efficiently, for a country like the US (all while needing to maintain the previous system in the interim). Countries with truly robust rail networks have literally 2 centuries of continuous rail development, not only of the rail but also of organizing society in a way that's efficient for rail (many Europeans don't have a car; because they can easily move to places where they don't need a car, because things have been designed over centuries for people without cars), and it's actually ambitious to try to do likewise in a half century, with few technically possible ways of going much faster.

    Hence, the electric car! Which still takes a lot of energy to make, needs new infrastructure ... and doesn't solve the truck or plane problem at all (whereas trains can move containers, and high-speed trains can also move people far faster than cars and so realistically compete with plane journeys in terms of time, especially when airports are outside of the city center and boarding times are long and weight restrictions exist and so on, and there's more space on the train, and it's much cheaper, especially if the plane's needed to internalize the real costs of the pollution).

    Therefore, if we reach a point where infrastructure cannot be realistically changed, it won't be changed, but if it is not sustainable, neither will it be sustained.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    But purely based on those models we're going from on stable state to another right? That's what crossing those tipping points does, even if we stop emmissions, temperature keeps rising. — ChatteringMonkey

    There's lot of variations possible, it's not an inevitable process from one point to another.

    For instance, a lot of ice melting is driven by black particles from burning fossil fuels. So, if we stopped burning fossil fuels and made sure what we do burn is done super cleanly, then maybe Greenland doesn't melt, antarctic doesn't melt, there's still snow in the arctic in winter.

    In other words, ice-free summer arctic ocean may have a lot of snow covering meta-stable states associated with it. For, once we get an ice-free arctic ocean summer ... there's no more summer arctic ocean ice to melt, so that particular feedback process stops.

    The arctic is currently in a climate regime transition to an summer-ocean-ice-free state, but this does not inevitably trigger all the other tipping points possible (this has little to do with the Amazon right now). Meta-stable transition is one subsystem at a time; some subsystems maybe strongly or weakly coupled, and we don't really know, and it could even be going from one climate subsystem transition to the next always requires human help of more emissions.

    For example, another big tipping point would be shutting down the thermohaline current, which has been proven to be slowing, but, as far as I know, still seems unlikely in more scenarios ... but not impossible. The process that drives slowing down this current is fresh water melting into the arctic (that is not salty and so doesn't do the haline part of the process). So, the more we slow down ice melt, the less likely we are to hit this tipping point (which maybe difficult to trigger anyways, and really needs a "good go" at it to have a good chance).

    Turning the Amazon into a carbon source rather than carbon sink (bad for the climate for obvious reasons), seems more to do with just normal capitalism driven deforestation, and not a climate change effect (such as snow melting at the poles; though, climate change doesn't help the Amazon). Snow-less ecosystems in the tropics could be not so affected by climate change, if we stopped destroying them directly and severely weakening them: as it stands, our direct destruction of these ecosystems in conjunction with a bit of climate change can tip them into transitioning to savanna type ecosystems.

    In short, currently, we are going towards a snow-less summer arctic ocean; changes in ocean snow cover is the most rapid systems change (as warm water melts ice quickly). As far as I know, climate change could be more-or-less stabilized around this new meta-stable state (if we did massive, global action now). Other tipping points are not "inevitably" triggered by a ice-free arctic ocean summer.

    There's also geo-engineering. Maybe with human intervention, we could "seed back" arctic winter ice that then survives summer. However, all such schemes only make sense if we actually stop the cause of more warming, otherwise it's a massive cost that doesn't actually solve anything (adds a tiny bit of delay, but not really, as more warming will eventually melt that "human caused ice" anyways; it's only useful if more warming actually stops, and "nudging" things back towards more ice therefore long term trend setting, not the fashion of the week).

    On-land ice melt is a lot longer process, and preventing Greenland and the Antarctic from significant melting, would be a big difference. We know from the geologic record that glaciers can experience catastrophic melting, but it's not known the exact details; so again, less heating, less likely we are to trigger such events (even if it's already "likely", there's always a chance that action in combination of the luck of natural cycles still achieves a less likely result; however, especially with the antarctic, it's unlikely we could actually melt it all, only some parts that actually sit below the water line are at good chance of melting, and so more heating can make a big difference of what actually melts, and how fast; likewise for Greenland, if we stopped black particles and more heating, maybe it's melt rate stabilizes).

    Land-ice, the shear volume of the ocean and time to heat it up, ecosystems that have not yet been completely destroyed for cattle and palm oil, etc. are all buffers in the system that have longer response times than ocean-ice.

    The sooner we arrest green-house emissions, the less likely we are to saturate these buffers, the more time we have to try to get carbon out of the atmosphere and promote ice forming and staying over winter (in a slow and stable way, instead of some last-ditch effort fast and reckless way such as pumping reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere), and the more stable our ecosystems are throughout the changes, meaning less likely wars and so on will intervene to make things even more chaotic.

    However, this is no longer the 90s. Severely problematic ocean rise is going to happen, severe climate disruptions are already happening and will get worse, crop failures, large scale famines. We do, however, currently have a choice of "how bad". "Survival" could mean 100 000 people in small communities around the poles, or, something more-or-less similar to our current civilization (based on solar energy, distributed, very different, but something we can "imagine" as "pretty good transformation" of current lifestyles around the world) and a world with more-or-less the current ecosystems (rather than basically the apocalypse with a totally unrecognizable world for those 100 000 survivors).
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    ↪ChatteringMonkey


    Well, it's never a guarantee, less fast you're going the more likely to survive.

    However, in this analogy, the height is not yet guaranteed to be fatal. Right now it's comparable to just likely breaking a bone, nothing too "serious" (if we did everything we could do engineering wise to stop green house emissions, stop burning the Aamazon etc.).

    However, although catastrophe is already "baked in", as I've mentioned by any standard of "catastrophe", there's really big variations. There's also natural variations that can work in our favour or not.

    However, the biggest thing is that implementing the best sustainable system we can, sooner rather than later, stabilizes global society, making nuclear wars and AI warfare less likely.

    For instance, converting all our mono-crop land to forest gardens would increase food yield but also be far more resilient, as trees are not only more resilient to droughts but protect the soil with shade and transpire more water into the atmosphere (making rain more likely) (and of course diverse plants are less risk than a single plant; basic "risk management" economists happily apply to investing ... but somehow a single plant species, and not only a single species but genetic copies, on huge areas is "economic").

    However, it takes some decades to grow trees, decades we currently have. So, if we did that, we'd still have a lot of disruptions, but things would probably be "ok" (of course, there's still risk of the tipping points being severe anyways, but it's no a guarantee, so lowering the risk is still the coherent choice).

    If forest gardens are so efficient, why don't we currently do so to make money?

    Because they are efficient at making food in terms of energy input, but are not profitable in terms of labour input (low skilled labour to pick fruit from mono-crop orchards is high ... so imagine the cost of high skilled labour to manage a little ecosystems). Forest gardens do not "drive profits", through unsustainable extraction of soil wealth (it is more profitable to run machines over mono-crops while degrading the land ... then just move to other land using those profits, than make a sustainable system). However, if one says "hmm, well, maybe if we want a sustainable system we don't actually want unsustainable mono-crop plantations, with unsustainable mineral and fossil inputs (something like 9 calories of fossil energy are required to grow 1 calorie of food in the current system)", then the analysis changes, and highly skilled labour is not "profitable" but is super energy efficient, if those people happen to live there and like living in a forest garden and doing high skilled work over long periods of time because it's their home and source of food. Such people would still need energy of course, but solar technology solves that.

    This is the sort of system that is "efficient", but it basically means ending capitalism as is currently practiced, in which the purpose is the running of personal vehicles.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    But what are you actually saying about what the models predict? — ChatteringMonkey

    Well, numerical models of complex systems don't really make "predictions" in the usual scientific sense (such as predicting the position of a star behind the sun during an eclipse is a "prediction", falsefying the theory if it doesn't happen).

    Numerical models of complex systems basically inform us about risk.

    For instance, that the earth will warm if we emit green house gases, is a prediction, made over hundred and twenty years ago using pretty basic analytical (in the math sense of on paper solutions) methods, following experiments on gases to understand their basic atmospheric properties.

    However, having zero clue how this would impact the earth's ecological system, the discover of the global warming theory concluded this warming would actually be a good thing, helping pants grow and boost agriculture.

    Had the globe not actually warmed, then this would have refuted the theory.

    Numerical models come in to inform risk, but, even then, they are viewed as inferior to extrapolation from retrospective geological data. As soon as there is retrospective data, for instance data about galaxy types and sizes, the modelers can't be trusted anyways, as they obviously tweak their models to show what we see.

    In other words, the models of relevance are simply basic extrapolation of climate history.

    Where numerical models come in is informing more detailed risk analysis. For instance, there's no geological data on how past climate change affects city infrastructure, because cities didn't exist back then, so, you can (and people do) build models to try to evaluate infrastructure risks (like the recent damn and levy busting in Germany).

    However, we don't actually need these models to know the risks are ridiculously high and we shouldn't change the climate. The basic thing is climate sensitivity, which we already know because of the ice ages: that very subtle changes caused by very slowly changing orbital characteristics (with basically no material being added or taken away from the earths surface bio-physical systems) can bring and take away massive glaciers kilometres thick over a significant area of the globe.

    So, if slow and subtle orbital changes can cause such a big change, the risk that a really massive and sudden change (adding billions of tons of material to the earth's surface processes, every year! for over a century!!!) is simply extreme madness.

    The non conservative models show stable states and tipping points, the holocene stable state we are leaving, and a new one we're heading to, several degrees higher (the anthropocene stable state let's say)? — ChatteringMonkey

    Yes, basically this is correct. The earth has two meta-stable climate regimes, climatologists call the "hot-box" and the "cold-box". The cold box has ice at both polls and wild swings in ice-cover due to orbital changes. The "hot box" doesn't have ice at both polls and is much hotter. This is driven by the physics of snow, that it melts quickly passed a threshold (the aptly names melting point); i.e. the difference between rain and snow can be a few degrees, not some linear proportional change, such as at 20 C we get 90% rain and 10% now, at 0% we get a 50-50 mix, and then at -20 C we get 90% snow and 10% rain.

    If there was land at both polls, we'd be essentially locked into a cold box state, very difficult to break out of.

    If there were free oceans at both polls, we'd be for sure in a hot box state.

    With land at one poll, and a constrained ocean surrounded by land at the other poll (making heat exchange with warmer oceans not so efficient), gives us the recent cold-box, but only insofar as an ice cap covers the North poll. It's "pretty stable", lasting millions of years, but it's no where near as stable compared to a situation where land simply covered the whole North poll connecting Canada to Russia.

    - Is the implication then not that only reducing greenhouse gas-levels on a large scale, to maybe get back to holocene stable state, would have a tangible effect on climate, because anything less will just end us in the anthropocene stable state anyway? — ChatteringMonkey

    If you're going to jump out of a building, it's still better to jump from a lower floor.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Also, for people who think environmental "alarmists" have been saying the crisis is massive for decades ... but it never happens.

    An analogy would be if an engineer on the Titanic pointed out the risk of hitting an iceburg in a couple of days to a few days, and people dismissed this as alarmism.

    Then, the next day pointed out the same as a big risk tomorrow, and then people not only dismissed this as alarmism but ridiculed it as the exact same alarmism said yesterday and it didn't happen!!

    Then with the iceburg literally approaching a day and a few hours later, people laughing at how the prediction didn't come true, as a couple days already passed!

    Finally, after the iceburg is hit and the ship is obviously sinking, people say "idiot! we'll just innovate out of this problem; how'd we build the ship in the first place and make it go super fast if not for innovation".

    That's pretty much the climate debate since decades.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Recharge rate is not an issue where there is conduction through rock, from a higher temperature energy source. Rock is a good conductor of heat. Any energy you take out of heated rock will immediately be replaced from the higher temperature region adjacent. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Heat always moves from hotter to cooler regions, and passes easily through stone. — counterpunch

    This is simply not true. On the scale of literal insulation being a good insulator and a heat pipe being a good heat conductor, rock is closer the insulation side. Energy flows from hot to cold, but it takes time.

    Indeed, the reason you need to drill to the depths you're talking about it because the rock is insulating pretty well. If you drill to those depths and extract heat from a small volume, it will indeed recharge pretty fast, but the larger the volume the slower it will recharge.

    The volume of rock you need to power something significant (like a continent) is completely massive. To justify the capital equipment of the power station, not to mention the hydrogen production and storage and transport terminals you've been talking about, the amount of power needs to be "worth it".

    Which is why, as
    ↪Benkei
    has posted, many wells fail even in super sweet spot regions such as Geysers that is "the most developed", 15 wells produce 725 MW. An average of 49 MW per well.

    That's just not a lot of energy. If heat just "instantly" recharged the rock at 700 C, you wouldn't limit your generation capacity to 49MW per well, you'd just "let her rip" and have nuclear gigawatt power station sized pipes. The reason, once you have a well, you can't just circulate as much water as you want to get as much energy as you want with the rock heat recovering "instantly", is because it's not instant. You're energy extraction must be equal to the recharge rate of the rock volume you're extracting energy from, otherwise the heat source cools to a point you can no longer generate power. Indeed, many geothermal stations end up running at a fraction of their original design capacity, because the recharge calculations were wrong.

    The volume of rock will cool as energy is extracted from it, but will only heat up proportional to the surface area below (and to the sides somewhat, but doesn't change the proportionality here).

    When you have these sorts of volume to surface area proportionality constraints, the solution is to have a small volume to keep that proportion low; hence stations are in the single or double digit MW range and not the GW range.

    Another way to look at it is the heat gradient from the core to the surface. The earth is efficient at trapping all that heat: i.e. the opposite of being efficient at bringing it to the surface; we can make it more efficient by drilling down there and circulating water, but once we do that for a large volume we are constrained again by general heat gradient context of the surrounding rock.

    Solar energy does not have this problem, but the energy extraction is a surface area (PV or hot water panels, mirror for solar concentrates, or just windows to heat buildings) and the "recharge" rate is proportional to the surface.

    That the energy is spread out over the globe just means it's its own distribution network and we don't need that capital cost.

    However, I am not arguing that solar energy will prevent the the climate change catastrophe. I am arguing that it could have, if fossil costs were internalized in the 70s - 80s - 90s, but now it is too late to avoid major tipping points.

    The Amazon being a carbon source now, instead of a carbon sink, is a major such tipping points (I remember being discussed literally decades ago as a "oh shit moment" we should try to avoid). Likewise, that temperature records have been recently broken by several degrees, is also evidence of the climate breaking out of the meta-stable Holocene epoch, but the entire Quaternary geologic period, and is currently in an unstable region that will move rapidly towards a new metastable point several degrees hotter than present.

    The IPPC models are wrong, on the conservative side, but it was known that they were wrong on the conservative side. The "surprise" is only that the wishful thinking that making conservative models provides a sense of security, turns out to be completely stupid.

    However, decades ago to the present some climate modelers worked on realistic models (sometimes the same modelers that work on IPPC models too, and pointed out the things missing that make them conservative), which have always been terrifying in terms of the risk indication (numerical models of complex systems and things that haven't happened yet, only inform risk, never actually predict what will happen).

    So, I'm not arguing solar energy can now arrest or reverse the climate crisis, only that it could have easily do so in an economically feasible way if the costs of fossil were internalized (whereas your magma technology could not have done likewise), and, even today, a massive proliferation of solar technology (and adapting society to use solar energy efficiently) would mitigate the crisis, but that is a political problem that is less and less feasible as the world is disrupted more and more by climate change and derivative affects.

    So yes, billions of people are likely to perish, and it is definitely murder by the West in both a collective sense of apathy and specific sense on the part of the denialist industry, but that is not a "solution" proposed by us environmentalists pointing it out, it's just largely inevitable at this point.

    Certainly, if you could prove magma energy to work, or even be "worth a shot", some billions should be spent finding that out and then a few 10s of trillion building your system if you turn out to be right.

    Likewise, some billions should be spent on solar energy to discover the same, and some 10s of trillions spent converting the world to solar (in both installation of solar energy, and converting infrastructure to efficiently use it, with more local production using local energy, removing the large energy costs of both transport and large transport infrastructure).

    Neither of these scenarios are happening, and spending trillions on bailing out the banks (i.e. corruption) from the consequences of their own corruption, in combination with the costs of more bailouts of the system in general due to the pandemic, and costs bailing out the system due to the affects of climate change, will likely lead to the kinds of economic dislocations that make large scale global investments no longer possible.

    But the reason no alternative to fossil is being developed in a serious way (a way that would actually reverse carbon emissions) is political, not technological nor economic (we have the technology, and, as the world is discovering, eating the costs of climate change head on is not "economic bravery and realism" but complete idiocy).

    As a note, water is an excellent mover of heat via convection, and if heat conduction to rock was instant as you say, then it would efficiently re-heat any hot water that's down there.

    You can also look at the physics and economics of heat storage for power. They exist (such as for solar thermal energy), but for relatively short periods of time, because the material volumes required are simply massive. You'll also note that things like molten salt are used that efficiently transfer heat by convection, and if you work out just having a big cube of rock heated from below, it's not an efficient system (which would be analogous to having a a large cube of rock below the surface heated from further below that).

    As an aside, the solution to the intermittence of solar energy is to simply match energy consumption to the energy availability as much as possible, which brings the problem down to a manageable level.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    There really isn't though, and herein lies the point. We'd have to cover an area of 225,000 square miles with solar panels to meet current global energy demand. Sunlight is spread over a large area, and we cannot physically gather energy from the entire surface of the earth. But we could extract enough magma energy to meet and exceed current global energy demand because magma is a concentrated, high grade source of clean energy, and there's a lot of it. — counterpunch

    You keep repeating this number as if it's some sort of problem for solar energy.

    Your 225 000 square miles is about 580 000 square kilometres.

    Surface area of earth is 510 000 000 square kilometres.

    Assuming your value is correct, it is not really a problem; it is a thousand times less than the surface of the earth. We occupy (and degrade) far more land with mono-crop agriculture than we would need with solar energy.

    Solar energy devices can be placed on roofs, over roads (or replace roads that we no longer need), placed over plants that require shade, and other duel use purposes, and so the "land cost" can be close to zero in this regard.

    Furthermore, by reducing and reversing large scale infrastructure (that not only occupies a lot of land in itself, such as those 20 lane highways, but also divides the ecosystem making it less efficient), would actually be a net-positive in terms of land bio efficiency (the ecosystems being the primary value of land).

    Whether you are right, (you are not right) or wrong - we are close to an impasse of direct and repeated contradiction. I can't explain why again, because I tried twice. Then again, they say third time's a charm. — counterpunch

    Do some calculations then, of the volume of rock/magma you need at 700 C to power the world.

    I can assure you it's a huge volume of rock, and, once it's cooled (the energy extracted from it) it will recharge very slowly, either through the heat diffusion from below or the slow recharge of magma chambers. The volcanoes we have aren't taps that can be opened to release indefinite magma flows.

    This the basic problem of all sources of geothermal energy.

    There are "sweet spots" where the recharge rate is pretty good, like iceland, but it is no where good enough to power all of the UK, not to mention Europe.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Drilling 10,000 m deep geothermal wells
    15 September 2010     — counterpunch

    I have been reading these sorts of press releases for over 20 years.

    "Moon landing" and "we just need to technology to harvest it".

    People have even literally made press releases of harvesting the moon's orbital energy, and of course mining it for stuff ... if we only had the technology.

    There's actually plenty of energy sources "we really have enough of": Quasars, stars in general, zero point energy.

    The point of these press releases is to get some grants. Scientists are always like "peer review, evidence, skepticism" ... except when it comes to grant applications and the press releases that provide plausible reasoning (on part with any creationist) for spending public money on their project.

    Meanwhile, solar energy, the energy source humanity has mostly used for it's entire history (to grow crops, trees, grow plankton for fish, and also heat most buildings most of the year), and has been pointed to as the obvious better source of energy than fossil with easily demonstrated calculations that don't change, has proven itself cost-effective (even against fossil fuels with subsidies and basically no "polluter pays" principles), and it wouldn't be all that complicated to replace fossil with solar energy on a global scale (indeed, the savings would be enormous, as all the various costs of the pollution are very real and paid somewhere, sometime, by somebody; indeed, all of us), not "if only we had the technology to harvest it"; we have the technology now.

    The problem is not now, nor has ever been, a technological one. Had the "polluter pays" principle as
    ↪James Riley
    has been referring to, been implemented; our climate change problem would not exist, and, by definition, it would not have cost us any money (as what the polluter is paying are real costs to the economy; so, making the polluter pay, by definition, doesn't harm the economy: just moves it in a more efficient direction of technologies with low real-costs, rather than simply low production production costs).
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    What processes? In what way optimal? I also said previously, geothermal refers to a great many technologies. You've taken a problem with one form of geothermal and applied it incorrectly to the technology I propose, so that's just wrong. — counterpunch

    The problems I describe are inherent to the geothermal energy source, they apply to all implementations of geothermal energy.

    For instance, all solar energy technologies won't work in a dark cave, for reasons to do with the characteristics of solar energy source, not the technology.

    Petroleum is a refined product. — counterpunch

    Really?

    Petroleum, also called crude oil, is a fossil fuel. Like coal and natural gas, petroleum was formed from the remains of ancient marine organisms, such as plants, algae, and bacteria. — literally the first search engine result for the word 'petroleum'

    All these processes imply energy costs. These are physical facts, but are not valid criticisms against hydrogen; if fossil fuels are even less efficient by the same measure. — counterpunch

    Yes, my point is that petroleum pays that energy cost. So, if it is "on hand" (such as high quality, close to the surface, oil fields), then it easily pays the energy cost of it's transport.

    Hydrogen is never "on hand" in a similar way, and so the situation is no analogous.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Not feasible, why? You're not suggesting are you, that the energy is not there? There is an unimaginably massive amount of energy in the earth's interior. That so, it's a matter of the right technological approach to extracting that energy; and I agree that existing technological approaches are sub-optimal. — counterpunch

    It's not about "sub optimal", it's about needing to drill a lot of pipe, and then cooling that volume of rock, which doesn't recharge at the same rate of depletion, requiring more drilling.

    These processes are pretty close to optimal. There are basic physical limits to the efficiency of cleaving and lifting rock out of the ground, of heat engines. There's not some "drilling breakthrough" anyone is proposing to happen ... except for Elon Musk but that was walked back to "it's cheaper to drill smaller diameters! so we'll do that".

    You mean, like the transport infrastructure for coal, oil and gas? We manage to get that from A to B somehow, and I explained how I intend to distribute magma energy in the previous post. I said: — counterpunch

    We manage to get that from A to B by burning a lot of coal, oil and gas in both building up massive infrastructures and also to run them.

    Why make the same point again? — counterpunch

    Your point of shipping around petroleum (using petroleum) is not analogous to shipping around hydrogen.

    First, technically, hydrogen is a lot more challenging (need to compress and freeze it, and much more difficult to store even compared other gases).

    More importantly, hydrogen is not a cheap source of energy like petroleum (insofar as it's still in easy accessible locations in forms easy to process). Petroleum pays the energy cost itself to transport it as well as build the infrastructure. If you have a bunch of petroleum, you can always "get it somewhere" on the globe to sell it (the only wrinkle is if plenty other people have plenty petroleum too, so the margins are thin; solution: promote an insanely inefficient economy that wastes energy wantonly and also make both implicit and explicit cartels to control the price; both to extract profit sometimes with high prices as well as disrupt competing industries with super low prices sometimes).

    Hydrogen needs to be made, which costs energy, as it's not a source, and that energy cost and the cost of infrastructure can easily exceed the costs of other sources of energy that are available at the location you want to sell in (like the sun shining there, or the wind blowing there, and just way cheaper than buying magma-to-hydrogen energy ). Hydrogen doesn't "pay" the energy cost to make and move it. Why your system doesn't exist, but solar and wind systems do; but they are most efficient locally, as, if you don't need to move energy, there's only an energy cost to doing so with no benefit (distributed system also has less, or no, systemic failure points, could be robust against Carington events, etc. etc.).
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