The reason I posted the Dyson quote is because people are fed the notion that people who disagree with the IPCC output are a just uneducated kooks. All of the things you have mentioned such as sea-ice melt have been refuted by people with expertise in the area.
In fact, there is no sea-ice melt. Sea ice is currently within a fraction of its 30 year average and probably higher than in 1940. Warmists like to start their graph from 1979 because ice extent was high from a multi-year cold period. But military satellite images from prior to that show that the ice extent was lower than today.
Greenland has been gaining ice mass in recent years and polar bear populations are robust and healthier than they have been in decades after over-hunting diminished them. But you would never know this by reading the newspaper reports put out by the propagandists which are manufactured nonsense.
There is no such thing as a climate scientist. Climate research involves a number of disciplines with specialized knowledge. Nobody is an expert in all of the areas but a small group of activist scientists have put themselves forward as the authorities but in fact none of them are distinguished in any way or the best authorities in their areas. What they have done is created a small group involved in a process of pal-review which they call peer-review by which they try to exclude the opinions and works of people not part of their group. And they have the impimatur of the IPCC, the corrupt spawn of a corrupt United Nations which gives them their patina of credibility and authority.
Honest scientists involved with the IPCC in the early years quit in disgust when political operatives manipulated the the official output that disregarded their conclusions and now all you have left at the IPCC are activist scientists or activists period and the political operatives.
Snydeman, what you are doing is the same thing the warmists do all the time. Their favorite tactic is name-calling and ridicule to try to diminish and demean their critics. That’s what you do when your science is weak.
OK!
What kind of solutions do you have in mind?
Talk about an arguement for a redundant home heating source such as a wood burning stove!!
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Thousands of Minnesotans endured the coldest night in a generation without power. Xcel Energy says equipment failures on power poles is leading to outages all over the metro Tuesday evening, which started at about 5:40 p.m. At the peak of the outage, about 8,000 residents were affected in the Twin Cities metro area. As of 11 p.m., less than 600 customers people were still without power. The Anzalone family said their Bloomington neighborhood went dark around dinner time. Like many in the metro, they were bundled up and reading by candelight, hoping they didn’t have to leave their house. They say the latest update for power returning is 3 a.m. Wednesday.Temperatures tonight are expected to be near -50 F. (not sure if this included wind chill?) The map USPS Suspends Minnesota Mail Deliveries Due To Polar Vortex
Green intentional community with delayed marriage/sex for the young, and those who have at least one 18-yr-old child voluntarily giving up medical care for the old, as part of an intentional population reduction.
1/2 acre of private garden, 1/4 acre of public per dwelling. Can be leased but not sold from the unit, but sale of unit resets the lease.
Public/private garden & farmette (Lithuanian soda design) and at the center, IC’s built as green concrete ziggarats (hey, I like the basalt reinforcement; it looks cheaper and more durable than steel: 4x more expensive per pound, 1/8 the weight), with private housing to the outside, public areas inside; minimal private space. Shared buses of regular schedule to the city, most things that people want with sharable access. Rentals fund purchases, of the things that are most in need, as failed requests… Full cycling; if a green option will suffice then use it by preference; if it won’t, then require a delay before going to non-green option.
And all fees fund the spread of the plan, so that eventually it is the best option around, and people move into it.
Well, solutions is a huge subject. Lets be serious, I’m a layman and, as far as I know, so are both of you (old guy and Grover). Given that, any list I come up with will be incomplete and surely not as encompassing as the pros could produce.
That said, it seems to me we need to break it down to what will provide the most bang for the buck in the short term and then look at longer term solutions. Since the overwhelming number 1 problem is atmospheric CO2, reversing the build up should be first priority. Incentives are always big considerations in modifying public behavior. We should probably start out with carbon fees as that would disincentivize burning more fossil fuels. Use those revenues to subsidize the public to reduce personal, commercial and industrial use of fossil fuels. Also, cut current tax breaks for fossil fuel producers. That’s a negative incentive, but a necessary one. Why should they profit from aggravating the problem?
Also, there should be a crash program of R&D for clean energy. The region I live in is currently undergoing large scale build up of solar and wind producers. We aren’t unique in that respect. Many other areas are doing the same as the technology gets cheaper and fossil fuels get more expensive. That trend seems to be inevitable to me.
As someone mentioned above, intermittency must be overcome for these sources to be real long term solutions. Locally, Tesla is building a “gigafactory” to build solar roofing tiles. Elsewhere Musk is building gigafactories to make latest technology batteries and electric cars. Developing battery technology is a must on both industrial and personal scales.
Of course, solar and wind aren’t the only clean energy sources. There are also geothermal, hydro and tidal power, all of which are developing fairly rapidly.
But, perhaps the biggest energy saver is efficiency. I read somewhere recently that US energy efficiency is somewhere around 20%. To me thats a reflection of the wasteful nature of our development over the last couple centuries. Efficiency needs to be integrated into every development or building project we undertake.
Of course, all of this is just the beginning. Longer term we need to incorporate many of the values presented here at PP.
This is just a quick gloss. Deeper dives will take time that I don’t have at the moment. But, what’s the alternative? Do nothing? If climate change is as dangerous as science tells us it is (I don’t think there is any real debate here), we have two choices. Do nothing and watch the world disintegrate around us, or do the best we can to create a liveable and positive future. To me that’s an easy choice.
I’d like to open a discussion on any and all points. Please don’t think that I am “shooting down”, but rater proposing problems for answers.
– regarding carbon taxes.
Is that the powerful shift the costs to the week, and never impact their own destruction. That simply destroys the weak. Then, when things are desperate, they go to war – which maximizes environmental degradation.
So carbon taxes are out as an actual solution. Regardless, because it isn’t a solution, I agree it will be done. I just don’t think it’ll help anything. It’s actually a way to concentrate assets so that the powerful will have more to spend on their destruction.
—regarding green energy
If you’re willing to go offshore, I’d think wave energy would be as effective as anything. Simple design: giant boat with balloon wheels on axle that is allowed to go up and down, but with a piston and seawater is pressure ballanced to equalize pressure on all wheels. Use as many wheels as you want. Now as they go up and down, the axles pull on a chain that drives a racheted drive shaft. The ratcheted driveshaft drives a generator, which charges batteries, but also drives electric motors on said balloon wheels. Simple design can go out, harvest wave energy, come back, and deliver charged batteries. Ideal application for robotics, if you can do it; until then, you can collect and sell green energy, changing out peoples’ batteries for a fee.
— regarding efficiency
The biggest enemy of efficiency in our nation is probably suburbanism, and that is driven by crime, which in turn is driven by a badly off-center system. One aspect of efficiency, then, is that we need to discuss how to address the off-centeredness that drives the destruction that drives the suburbanism. In other words, we can’t live and work together because WE can’t.
No.
Rector
You can absolutely get your usages down in the suburbs, I have done it and so have others. Transport is big but solvable. It is a culture shift, people do not need to move. If we culturally interacted with our neighbors in the suburbs, traded goods and services with our neighbors in the suburbs, it cuts down transport ALOT. People right now do not see a need to do so, and htey do not want to be different. Someone last week hit the nail on the head saying Embarassment IS the biggest deal. Most non-essential car trips in the suburbs are done to go to the grocery store DAILY ( there are building codes that disallow corner stores, this is solvable and cheap to solve !) and to drive the children to activities. Obviously they can do things in the neighborhood, if all or most kids are also in the neighborhood ! So, a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. I would wager that these non-essential trips, at least in this area, are about as many trips as the commute to work. A cultural shift does not need a bunvh of taxes and money, it needs leadership
it posted twice
I’m passionate about technology. I’m very interested, and always have been.
Two of the primal and most loved Greek myths are to do with the creation of mankind. It starts with the creation of the Gods - what Hesiod called the Theogonie; the birth of the Gods - but then, our champion the Titan Prometheus made human beings in clay; the spit of Zeus, and the breath of Athena gave them life.
But Zeus refused us to have fire.
The fire I think means both literal fire - to allow us to become bronze age man, to create weapons, and to cook meat and to frighten the fierce animals, and to become the strongest physically and technically.
Also, the internal fire, of self conciousness and creativity - the divine fire.
Zeus didn’t want us to have it.
Prometheus stole fire from heaven, gave it to man, and Zeus was so angry that he punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountainside - he was immortal Prometheus - every day his liver was torn out by an eagle; and it grew back, and every day it was torn out; for perpetuity, until he was rescued by Herakles.
The other punishment was that Zeus and the other Gods created Pandora - the “All Gifted”, that is what Pan Dora means - and sent her down as the first woman; she had everything.
But, he also gave her this jar, that sometimes is called a box.
Pandora came to Earth and was told she shouldn’t look into the jar - she was beautiful, she had everything - all the gifts of all the Gods were given to her.
But she had this curiosity, and she opened the jar - and I’m sure you all know the story - out flew hardship, lies, disseat, murder, pestilance - all the ills of the world, and the golden age was over.
She slammed the lid back on, and one little fairy was left inside.
Elpis.
Hope.
Now that’s fine. That seems like an interesting story - it’s an interpretation. But actually, if you think about it at the present - firstly the Prometheus story - as soon as mankind shook off the chains of religion and the church, we became incredibly interested in the Prometheus story. Because, it suddenly said, we don’t have to bow down and apologise to a God.
Gods have to apologise to us. For denying us our independence, our sense of ourselves, and our fire.
And so, Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound - the poem. Beethoven wrote the Prometheus Overture, all within five years of each other - the height of the enlightenment, if you like - and the beginning of the Romantic era.
Now, I’m going to put that to one side, and I’m going to go back to 1989, when I became fascinated by this extraordinary new development in which you could network computers to a network of networks, which was starting to be called the in-ter-net - there was no web - there was no graphical application, it was all text based - but I was really excited by it.
As it grew, I became more and more excited. I thought that this is the biggest and most exciting bringing together of human beings in the history of our planet. It is the all gifted. It will give us freedom of access to knowledge. We will share things - art - politics - boundaries will be dissolved - we will learn to love each other - we’ll all be brothers, like in Beethoven’s Ninth.
It will be fantastic.
Social media came.
The Arab Spring.
I thought there would be no more tribalism.
No more hatred.
No more racism.
This would be wonderful.
But what happened?
The lid opened.
Out came Trolls.
Out came abusers.
Out came racists and tribalists and insulter’s; the worst kind of humanity.
It was an exact replay of Pandoras Box.
I thought it so interesting that the Greeks had this understanding.
That when we have something that seems perfect, there is no possibility but that it also contains its opposite.
I guarantee you - whether you like to think it or not - that although we know through Darwin and science and genes - that we were not created by an inteligent designer. In a hundred years time, we can guarantee there will be sapient creatures - sapient beings on this earth - that have been inteligently designed.
You can call them robots. You can call them compounds of augmented biology and artificial inteligence, but they will exist.
The first person to live to be two hundred years old has already been born.
The future is enormous. It has never been more existenially transformative.
My question is this : -
When the Prometheus who makes the first really impressive piece of robotic A.I. - like Frankenstein, but like Prometheus back in the Greek myth - they will have a question.
Do we give it fire?
Do we give these creatures, self-knowledge, self-consciousness; an autonomy that is greater than any other machine has ever had, and will be similar to ours?
In other words, shall we be Zeus, and deny them fire - because we’re afraid of them - because they will destroy us - because the Greeks and the human beings did destroy the Gods; they nolonger needed them.
I think it is very possible we will create a race of sapient beings who will not need us.
We will be redundant …
Finn
If the goal is to reduce carbons emissions to zero as soon as possible, a limited nuclear war combined with a highly lethal pandemic disease such as Ebola might be a good place to start. The marine ecosystem is probably still toast for every thing other then jellyfish but if it is possible for large areas of several depopulated continents to reforest themselves resequestering carbon, perhaps the planet won’t get too crazy hot. The surviving several hundred million people , the most physically, mentally and emotionally fit 10% or so of the current population should probably do quite well once the dust settles.
Humanity has survived worse and the archeological evidence suggests the people are capable of amazing things without modern technology, industrialization or even wheels.
The big bugga boo seems to be wrapping ones head around the idea that the transition from where we are now and where we are going is totally inevitabe, that it will be unimaginably horrific, and that the huge majority of us will not survive it.
That all being said, I will continue to see to my preps, to love, honor and cherish people, the plant and the Goddess and the God to the best of my ability and to stay in the game for as long as possible.
Blessed Be,
John G
Mathematical modeling illusions
The global climate scare – and policies resulting from it – are based on models that do not work
Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris
For the past three decades, human-caused global warming alarmists have tried to frighten the public with stories of doom and gloom. They tell us the end of the world as we know it is nigh because of carbon dioxide emitted into the air by burning fossil fuels.
They are exercising precisely what journalist H. L. Mencken described early in the last century: “The whole point of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The dangerous human-caused climate change scare may well be the best hobgoblin ever conceived. It has half the world clamoring to be led to safety from a threat for which there is not a shred of meaningful physical evidence that climate fluctuations and weather events we are experiencing today are different from, or worse than, what our near and distant ancestors had to deal with – or are human-caused.
Many of the statements issued to support these fear-mongering claims are presented in the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, a 1,656-page report released in late November. But none of their claims have any basis in real world observations. All that supports them are mathematical equations presented as accurate, reliable models of Earth’s climate.
It is important to properly understand these models, since they are the only basis for the climate scare.
Before we construct buildings or airplanes, we make physical, small-scale models and test them against stresses and performance that will be required of them when they are actually built. When dealing with systems that are largely (or entirely) beyond our control – such as climate – we try to describe them with mathematical equations. By altering the values of the variables in these equations, we can see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing, the very best use of mathematical models.
The six most important climate variables
(CO2 is not mentioned)
However, today’s climate models account for only a handful of the hundreds of variables that are known to affect Earth’s climate, and many of the values inserted for the variables they do use are little more than guesses. Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Laboratory lists the six most important variables in any climate model:
- Sun-Earth orbital dynamics and their relative positions and motions with respect to other planets in the solar system;
- Charged particles output from the Sun (solar wind) and modulation of the incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy at large;
- How clouds influence climate, both blocking some incoming rays/heat and trapping some of the warmth;
- Distribution of sunlight intercepted in the atmosphere and near the Earth’s surface;
- The way in which the oceans and land masses store, affect and distribute incoming solar energy;
- How the biosphere reacts to all these various climate drivers.
Soon concludes that, even if the equations to describe these interactive systems were known and properly included in computer models (they are not), it would still not be possible to compute future climate states in any meaningful way. This is because it would take longer for even the world’s most advanced super-computers to calculate future climate than it would take for the climate to unfold in the real world.
So we could compute the climate (or Earth’s multiple sub-climates) for 40 years from now, but it would take more than 40 years for the models to make that computation.
Although governments have funded more than one hundred efforts to model the climate for the better part of three decades, with the exception of one Russian model which was fully “tuned” to and accidentally matched observational data, not one accurately “predicted” (hindcasted) the known past. Their average prediction is now a full 1 degree F above what satellites and weather balloons actually measured.
Models fail at the simple test of telling us what has already happened
In his February 2, 2016 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology, University of Alabama-Huntsville climatologist Dr. John Christy compared the results of atmospheric temperatures as depicted by the average of 102 climate models with observations from satellites and balloon measurements. He concluded: “These models failed at the simple test of telling us ‘what’ has already happened, and thus would not be in a position to give us a confident answer to ‘what’ may happen in the future and ‘why.’ As such, they would be of highly questionable value in determining policy that should depend on a very confident understanding of how the climate system works.”
Official predictions of global warming overstated threefold
Similarly, when Christopher Monckton tested the IPCC approach in a paper published by the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, he convincingly demonstrated that official predictions of global warming had been overstated threefold. (Monckton holds several awards for his climate work.)
The paper has been downloaded 12 times more often than any other paper in the entire 60-year archive of that distinguished journal. Monckton’s team of eminent climate scientists is now putting the final touches on a paper proving definitively that – instead of the officially-predicted 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.5 F) warming for every doubling of CO2 levels – there will be only 1.1 degrees C of warming. At a vital point in their calculations, climatologists had neglected to take account of the fact that the Sun is shining!
All problems can be viewed as having five stages: observation, modeling, prediction, verification and validation. Apollo team meteorologist Tom Wysmuller explains: “Verification involves seeing if predictions actually happen, and validation checks to see if the prediction is something other than random correlation. Recent CO2 rise correlating with industrial age warming is an example on point that came to mind.”
As Science and Environmental Policy Project president Ken Haapala notes, “the global climate models relied upon by the IPCC [the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the USGCRP [United States Global Change Research Program] have not been verified and validated.”
An important reason to discount climate models is their lack of testing against historical data. If one enters the correct data for a 1920 Model A, automotive modeling software used to develop a 2020 Ferrari should predict the performance of a 1920 Model A with reasonable accuracy. And it will.
Magic 8 Ball game
But no climate models relied on by the IPCC (or any other model, for that matter) has applied the initial conditions of 1900 and forecast the Dust Bowl of the 1930s – never mind an accurate prediction of the climate in 2000 or 2015. Given the complete lack of testable results, we must conclude that these models have more in common with the “Magic 8 Ball” game than with any scientifically based process.
While one of the most active areas for mathematical modeling is the stock market, no one has ever predicted it accurately. For many years, the Wall Street Journal chose five eminent economic analysts to select a stock they were sure would rise in the following month. The Journal then had a chimpanzee throw five darts at a wall covered with that day’s stock market results. A month later, they determined who preformed better at choosing winners: the analysts or the chimpanzee. The chimp usually won.
For these and other reasons, until recently, most people were never foolish enough to make decisions based on predictions derived from equations that supposedly describe how nature or the economy works.
Yet today’s computer modelers claim they can model the climate – which involves far more variables than the economy or stock market – and do so decades or even a century into the future. They then tell governments to make trillion-dollar policy decisions that will impact every aspect of our lives, based on the outputs of their models. Incredibly, the United Nations and governments around the world are complying with this demand. We are crazy to continue letting them get away with it.
He likes making new tech, he likes his companies to succeed, he likes to be seen as an expert. I have heard of no actual changes in his homelife and consumption that would show that he REALY thinks it is that important — there is no leadership from him anymore than any of our other celbrities and politicians. In fact, he does the opposite !
The idea of global jet-setting on a private plane can’t help but be viewed as hypocritical for a man often heralded as a "crusader for renewable energy". The Washington Post dryly notes that a few days after Musk called fossil fuels "the dumbest experiment in human history," his plane burned through thousands of pounds of jet fuel flying 300 miles from Los Angeles to Oakland on its way to take him to a competitive video gaming event.
Musk also tweeted “We know we’ll run out of dead dinosaurs to mine for fuel & have to use sustainable energy eventually. So why not go renewable now & avoid increasing risk of climate catastrophe?” - on the same day his jet flew over Mexico for a personal trip.https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-30/150000-miles-elon-musks-2018-private-jet-log-defines-renewable-energy-saviors
A great overview of how it started and why it continues
Old man – perhaps climate change itself , is too narrow, and too polarizing, simply put - logically (as they site endlessly indicates), can we have Infinite Growth on a finite planet?, can we grow anything end less exponentially?, are there limits,to growth? Are there ecological boundaries? Etc, etc…or is business/life as usual?, that our actions, individual or collective have no effect?
Charles Eisensteins new book frames this climate debate better then I…
Climate -The New Story
https://charleseisenstein.org/books/climate-a-new-story/
Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction
With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our “fight” mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier’s point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. The rivers, forests, and creatures of the natural and material world are sacred and valuable in their own right, not simply for carbon credits or preventing the extinction of one species versus another. After all, when you ask someone why they first became an environmentalist, they’re likely to point to the river they played in, the ocean they visited, the wild animals they observed, or the trees they climbed when they were a kid. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the earth. Freeing ourselves from a war mentality and seeing the bigger picture of how everything from prison reform to saving the whales can contribute to our planetary ecological health, we resist reflexive postures of solution and blame and reach toward the deep place where commitment lives.