Trump and AGW

guess you guys missed the parts about how people had to decide between heating their house or eating. alternative power killing people <Mod Edit>

 

Blame the oil companies....AGW is not doing that

 

<Reply to Deleted>

 

That is fine - the rest of the world is moving to solar and if you pull out of the market that means more for US!!!

 

And if you pull out of the oil market, the more for us. In the meantime, once you create cheap solar, we can steal the technology.

 

You would have to outbid China to make it cheaper. And that is the point we have to invent our way out of economic ruin when it comes to competing with countries like China. Energy efficiency is the newest and biggest market in the world. Turn your back on that and you will find yourself with a tanked economy

 

China exports its solar to the developed countries of the west which stupidly reduce their economic growth whilst China grows at ~ 6% in a bad year. China is laughing at us. Solar and wind are tanking the economies of western Europe and in combination with ridiculous fossil fuel policies has been doing so for decades. The Trump administration will finally end the madness in the US by developing the fossil fuel resources of the US resulting in wealth creation and jobs and with no effect on air quality, water quality, or global average temperature.

 

AGW advovcates make energy more expensive by advocating the building of outrageously expensive intermittent power sources which need backup sources for when their intermittent sources fail thus doubling and tripling the price of electricity. Then when people freeze to death because they cannot afford to heat their homes they blame the cheap fossil fuel. Does the hypocrisy and lies never end ?

does not matter here in the USA anyway, let the UK and Australia turn their countries into economic wastelands by raising thier energy prices to satisfy the politicians who are just getting fatter and fatter off the peoples backs , we have dodged the bullet here

 

This post is insane. Is Trump a Wizard? China is choking on its own waste. We should feel sorry for them. They sacrifice the health of their own people in order to make inferior products to dump on worldwide markets. What a class act.

 

Letting solar have a free ride on electric company's peer grid is a subsidy and proves solar can not stand on its own to feet. On the population issue you gave me your answer in another thread. Your excuse for bringing more carbon producers into a world you claim we are impacting negatively with our carbon was that one of your kids might be the next Einstein and save us from ourselves. I was hoping for a more intelligent and rational answer from someone else but so far it's not looking promising.

 

Invention costs money. econmic ruin is going with what is cheapest, which is why India will coal their way to modernity.

 

Trump is a supply sider. And will bring 4% economic growth to the US economy as did Reagan. He will improve the economic efficiency of the US economy and negotiate the removal of the import restrictions that China has on US imports to them. China has ~ 1 billion people living on ~ $2000 per year. They cannot afford a trade war with the US. This is not wizardry.

 

China has not decreased its population nearly fast enough, and has increased its rate of industrialization. Africa is even worse.

Face it, whether or not humans are contributing to climate change, it is hard to deny that the force of the industrialization process is destructive of the natural world. Deforestation, ever growing landfills, strip mining, urban sprawl--they are just the surface.

Who would have thought that nuclear power plants are that much worse (environmentally) than nuclear weapons? People could live safely at ground zero in Hiroshima & Nagasaki after fewer years than near Chernobyl; it has been almost six years since the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, and that still is not even contained.

Until the worldwide infant mortality rate goes back up to 50% (by age 3) and the average life expectancy goes back down to 45 or 50, only the deluded will think they can solve the problem by lining Al Gore's pockets or funding Elon Musk's projects.

People who think cultural and social advances can help humanity be less environmentally destructive do not understand how we came to be so destructive.

People who think that some technological advance can fix this, clearly do not understand how humans came to be so enormously destructive.

None of the solutions for the myriad human-caused environmental problems are pretty, and all of them require insanely high mortality rates.

 

But an alarmist having children is NOT the height of hypocrisy.

The height of hypocrisy is an AGW alarmist who has kids AND uses an electrical device to spread the alarm, discuss the alarm, or complain about anyone who is not alarmed.

 

That is why the manned Mars mission is a worthwhile NASA program; it will spur the development of ultra-efficient technologies, including batteries, solar-electric generation, insulation, etc..

Any tech developed by NASA would all be US public domain, and would fuel small and large domestic industry growth.

 

It is rational to be optimistic. It is also rational to put the welfare of human beings ahead of any perceived environmental impact. And it is rational to believe (as has always been the case) that technology advances and capitalism will steadily improve the global standard of living and the human condition. Humans can and do screw things up but the trajectory of human societal development is always upward. ("The Rational Optimist - How Prosperity Evolves" - Matt Ridley - 2011).

 

I love this passage. It is a rich touchstone for discussion.

First, even economists know that past performance does not predict future results. As much to the point, when "recent" performance is largely based on credit, both economic and environmental, it is not hard to recognize that many of the recent improvements that have yet to be invoiced will cost a lot, even if they are not more than we can afford.

Second, in this quote, Mr. Ridley frames his measure of progress in terms of those things created by technological progress. His exact words are pertinent to the discussion.

There is a big difference between standard of living and quality of life. Standard of living only includes tangibles and measurables. Consider a declawed, neutered cat that lives its entire life in a one-bedroom apartment. This cat is fed high nutrient cat food twice a day every day of its life, never gets sick, is safe from most dangers, and lives triple the lifespan expected in the wild. That is easily measured as an improved standard of living compared to that animal's undomesticated ancestors.

On the other hand, quality of life includes intangibles like beauty, freedom, excitement, victory, and meaning. This cat is a predator that never gets to hunt or kill, an animal whose natural range is ten square miles, but whose entire life is lived indoors in 800 square feet. It has been literally and figuratively castrated, and then imprisoned. It has thoughts, feelings, instincts, drives and desires, the pursuit of most of which are rendered impossible by its circumstances. Our cat with the high standard of living actually has a rather poor quality of life.

It is not difficult to compare agricultural, industrial, and technological societies with more primitive subsistence strategies like hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist. As subsistence strategies become more complex, there is a rise in most of what constitutes standard of living, (food production, disease control, physical comforts, material entertainments, life span). There is also a corresponding dissipation of leisure time, decrease in connection with the natural world, and wholesale loss of direct association with production of the things that make the physical substance of one's own life. This can be rationally characterized as a decrease in what constitutes quality of life.

Ask an Indian if he thinks life on the res represents an "upward trajectory" of human societal development.

Third, much of the problem is psychosocial, and is aptly captured in the concept of the human condition. While Mr. Ridley may not have meant the term in the more philosophical sense, it illuminates the discussion. Many people oversimplify the term to mean that we know we are going to die, but in the liberal arts, it encompasses the contradictions at the core all of human life. The human condition is the distinctly human awareness that all of what we want and love is intrinsically and inextricably connected to and dependent upon all of what we fear and hate. It rears its head in the way quality of life is often at odds with standard of living, in the fact that security is antithetical to freedom, in the unlovely fact that the pristine and natural cannot coexist with the production of the material comforts that define modern society and technological progress.

The historical wave of technological/societal "progress" is partly spurred by a particular brand of discontent, and leaves the identical brand of discontent in its wake. For example, modern Appalachian farmers have living standards that would be the envy of farmers in previous ages, yet they are often examples of modern American poverty, subject to all the attendant dissatisfaction with their current state.

Mr. Ridley can write as much as he likes about rational optimism, but whether that optimism is well-founded depends entirely on which measure of the welfare of human beings matters most to whoever happens to be deciding at that moment.

 

this thread has taken an interesting turn, interesting read here on energy and developing countries

http://business.financialpost.com/f...suffer-by-western-anti-fossil-fuel-hypocrites

even more interesting is the fact that many of the leaders of advanced countries want to force their own citizens into paying for expensive intermittent energy sources which need to be backed up by fossil fuel sources for the times the intermittent sources cannot power the grid

I hope in the next four years we can spend 1/4 of the money developing new and alternative energy sources and ways to adapt to the natural changes in our climate rather than spending billions on useless computer models which tell us nothing

 

Who has spent billions on computer models? Where do you get this stuff?

- - - Updated - - -

I know of no scientific agency on the planet that recommends zero population growth or not using any electrical devices. Where do you get these extremist positions?

 

do you ever think before posting ? Each model running costs in the hundreds of millions. Then take that and multiply by the number of models. Money better spent on useful things like cancer research or a finding a inexpensive catalyst for hydrogen fuel cells, or maybe getting inexpensive fossil fuel to third world countries so they too can sit in their air conditioning and use cheap energy to access the internet like you do. Or maybe just have electric lights and refrigeration for their food


Over lunch today I quizzed some of the experts here at IPSL in Paris, and they thought that 1,000 person-years (50 persons per year for 20 years) was a better estimate of the actual model development effort. This seems reasonable – it means that only 1/4 of the research at my 200 person research institute directly contributes to model development, the rest is science that uses the model but isn’t essential for developing it. So, that brings the salary figure down to $150 million. I’ve probably got to do the same conversion for the supercomputing facilities – let’s say about 1/4 of the supercomputing capacity is reserved for model development and testing. That also feels about right: 5-10% of the capacity is reserved for test processes (e.g. the ones that run automatically every day to do the automated build-and-test process), and a further 10%-20% might be used for validation runs on development versions of the model.
That brings the grand total down to $350 million.
Now, it has been done for less than this. For example, the Canadian Climate Centre, CCCma, has a modeling team one tenth this size, although they do share a lot of code with the Canadian Meteorological Service. And their model isn’t as full-featured as some of the other GCMs (it also has a much smaller user base). As with other software projects, the costs don’t scale linearly with functionality: a team of 5 software developers can achieve much more than 1/10th of what a team of 50 can (cf The Mythical Man Month). Oh, and the computing costs won’t come down much at all – the CCCma model is no more efficient than other models. So we’re still likely to be above the $100 million mark.


http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/09/whats-the-pricetag-on-a-global-climate-model/

 

And you think this is all for AGW? That we should shut down those facilities? You're not serious are you? Lol

 

First you said that billions are not spent on modeling so I proved you wrong . Now you say I am still wrong but offer no evidence to the contrary. If you want to say I am wrong explain why and provide some evidence. That's the way adults have conversations. I don't enjoy grade school playground debates

 

I was not stating a position, just acknowledging contradictions inherent wanting one's cake and eating it, all the while screaming that others must do without cake because of climate change. There is this great cultural development called humor. We use it to test how reasonable various propositions are. We also use it to comment on unreasonable propositions, or to make peace with the pain of unhappy, but reasonable propositions.
I apologize if my joke was not obvious.
I accept your apology if you are one of the alarmists about whom I was joking. (Yes, I AM still joking.)

Personally, based on the evidence I conclude the following.

• There have been much warmer periods than the present.
• There have been periods with higher concentrations of greenhouse gases than the present.
• There have not always been photosynthetic carbon processors, and there were very long periods with fewer than there are at present.
• Humans are much more fragile than the planet's ability to reach homeostasis.
• The climate changes constantly, so there is no reason to believe people are behind it, other than unfounded anthropocentrism and strong tendencies toward opportunistic profiteering.

Human beings are stupid animals, even more so as a group than as individuals. Everyone would probably be happier if we just accepted that regardless of what the problem is, or how bad it is, we won't actually try to solve it if the solution includes any sacrifice or ugliness.

 

Well every science agency on the planet that takes a stand on this issue disagrees. But we do have your opinion. LOL

- - - Updated - - -

You are free to leave if you do not like this debate. My point is that money will be spent anyway.