536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)(sciencemag.org) |
536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)(sciencemag.org) |
> Summer temperatures drop by 1.5°C to 2.5°C
While I now understand that it means a drop of roughly 2°C plus or minus 0.5°C, my initial reading was that the temperature dropped from 4°C (in the previous Summer) to 2.5°C (in Summer of 536).
Is the meaning of "a drop by A to B" always to be inferred from context?
For your interpretation: "drop by X, to Y"
For author's intention: "drop by X-Y"
It took a few reads and an internal debate over whether European summer temperatures could possibly have been 4°C in the 6th century to understand what the author meant.
Yikes! What can we do to make sure that doesn't happen again? Oh, right, nevermind.
The fact that the book won awards from NYT, Royal Society of Literature, BBC, and many other publications and is well-reviewed, yet Wikipedia only lists negative feedback in the Reception section indicates to me that there must be bias in the Wikipedia article. I don't see any other answer for why more than half of the article is just listing criticism that doesn't seem to be reflected across the broader industry.
Again I haven't read the book and don't really care about the subject matter either way, but the Wikipedia does not seem to hide its bias.
The page in incognito: https://i.imgur.com/EHhGjJ9.png
The page with uBlock, sticky elements removed, and the sidebar removed: https://i.imgur.com/mNJFMyj.png
> Americas on the other hand lays on the north-south plane, Isthmus of Panama is narrow to pass through, variances in climate and terrain greatly limited communication and commerce between north and south.
It should be noted that there is rather little evidence of technologies spreading along the main East-West axis of Eurasia (particularly Neolithic technologies), while there is far more evidence of such technology spreading along the North-South axis of the Americas. For example, pottery may well have spread from its invention in the Amazon Rainforest across the Caribbean to Mesoamerica and the Southeast US; corn did spread from its initial domestication Mesoamerica to both the US (where it largely supplanted preexisting domesticants) and down into the Andes (where it supplemented the existing potato crops); and metallurgy spread from its Andean origins along the Pacific coast to Western Mexico and the Southwest US.
Most of the tribe's stories were passed down verbally, rather than written down.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...
"An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script."
It also says:
"The Florentine Codex, compiled 1545-1590 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún includes a history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Mexica viewpoint"
Besides eruptions, many other scarier events can cause huge shifts on the planet's thermal equilibrium including our current state of global warming or many other unknown events (like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas [1] "only" ~13k years ago which is theorized to have been either a mega eruption, impact event or stellar supernova).
It's pretty scary and definitely not something that we're at all prepared even with all our technology so we're basically in a permanent state of risk of complete reset which is guaranteed to happen eventually. Sadly it's not something most of us spend too much time thinking or preparing for. I guess this is largely because we live very short lives and that make these kind of events appear much "larger than life" so they go mostly ignored except for some underfunded science departments or the occasional billionaire. To me this is the main reason that going multiplanetary or space habitat based is basically the only way to escape this inevitable doom even though that is also a huge barrier to overcome on so many levels.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%...
Effectively the time when it is useful is "when we don't have cheaper alternatives yet". We still should strive to make renewables and storage the cheaper option though.
To get really pedantic our 20th century understanding of power and energy are exactly backwards colloquially from what is really provided. Power is energy over time. The "power" infastructure was actually largely an energy infastructure with the exception of say hydro electric dams - you can only burn fuel once no matter how clever your ability to extract it. Meanwhile "renewable energy" provides power over its period of existence.
There will plenty of metals on the surface. Use the wood to melt iron. Use iron to make saws. Use saws to cut trees into beams and planks. Use beams and planks to build windmills. Use windmills to generate power and electricity. Etc.
Using coal and oil we went through the part from using mills for power to where we are now in about 250 years. On the one hand, if knowledge is retained, that can be sped up. On the other hand, it will be a lot harder to go through that process without coal and oil.
I would guess the net effect will be that it will take longer, as one of the effects of not having coal and oil will be lower yields in agriculture and, hence, a much smaller world population that also has to make a bigger effort to produce food.
Not just that, but there's no way to sustain the level of human development (and population) we currently have without continuing to feed the energy beast. Our daily burn rate on oil/gas/coal is so profoundly high, and growing, that a) nothing can fill the gap; and b) it can't be shut down without condemning further development (esp. in Africa, India and China). Two disconnected factoids to illustrate the level of dependency and consumption we have today: without ammonia synthesis from fossil fuel, worldwide organic fertilizer stock could sustain only about 4bln people - globally; China in-serviced more cement (which requires fossil fuels) in like five years than the US did in the last 100 years.
To reduce carbon output, you need to switch coal use to natural gas where possible. That's the best near term solution right now - isolate coal and oil consumption to the industries that really need them - e.g. transportation, manufacturing - and work on alternative sources of electric generation, i.e. hydro where available, nuclear where not, unless some miracle net-positive and reliable electric generation method becomes available in the meantime.
Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
It would almost be reasonable to say "They are effectively draining our planetary rainy day fund and spending it on cocaine".. whoever they are. The ones with cocaine mustaches presumably.
EDIT: Someone paid a lot of money to make this not an "our" choice but instead a "their" choice. If you feel like this is something you have any real control over, I urge you to change things.
Eyjafjallajökull was only VEI-4.
Now, one can argue about how Eyjafjallajökull caused ashfall in most of Europe, while Pinatubo is in the Philippines, but given the extent of ashfall from Pinatubo ..
EDIT (forgot link): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_eruption_of_Mount_Pinatub...
I disagree with this. Leaving the Earth doesn't remove random acts of doom from happening, and in fact, they are more lethal in unfamiliar and hostile environments.
If we do not figure out how to handle such black swan events on our home planet, we have no chance of handling them in space or on other planets.
Granted, this doesn't cover bigger black swan events like gamma ray bursts, where the entire solar system is screwed, but it'll at least help with Earthside apocalypse.
The fact that we couldn't handle it is indeed incriminating against our abilities as a species, but as they say, perfect is the enemy of good.
It would probably also require a change of culture, away from treating information as property and/or trade secrets in favour of open-hardware with shared designs. Designs would be shared and manufacturing decentralised, to improve robustness.
Putting people on Mars, and then other solar systems: Backups
A massive global famine could kill a billion humans or more. But if the 1 in 10 of us (likely the poorest, most vulnerable people) died, would civilization end? I don't think so.
However, if that leads to all out nuclear war, then we have two enormous correlated shocks to the system. Maybe even that wouldn't be enough, but some number of such shocks could push us over the brink.
Just like an economic meltdown or a plane crash, it's never one thing that goes wrong, it's a sequence of failures.
My understanding is that the current leading theory is a drastic shift in outflow of Lake Agassiz (an expanded version of Lake Manitoba in Canada).
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/1/40/F1.large.jpg
[1] https://capeia-usercontent.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2019/07/...
I'm thinking this way because of our current situation with the corona virus. Initially people were all into doing everything to protect themselves but as time goes in, we kind of get used to living our lives around the existence of the pandemic and the videos of people dropping dead in china aren't going around anymore.
After COVID-19 shut down supply chains, there were some problematic delays, but seems like we quickly recovered. If the entire planet's crops were wiped out, we're all just SOL if we don't get canned goods in time? If we had 12 months notice, could we as a planet get it together? 6 months? 3 months?
Is there forecasting for volcanoes? (looks like yes: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/forecast.html) How often do geologists cry wolf?
If you haven't listened to it, the one on the Siege of 717 deserves it's own bowl of popcorn - super super entertaining.
I loved the original The History of Rome podcast that goes through to the fall of the West, but I think I've come to prefer this one even more.
The first few episodes require a little patience as the author gets his footing - but it pays off. Awesome podcast.
> 536 Icelandic volcano erupts, dimming the sun for 18 months
I’m not aware of any evidence that the 536 eruption happened in Iceland. Ash has been found in both Antarctica and Greenland indicating that the eruption was probably much closer to the equator[1].
> 541–543 The “Justinian” bubonic plague spreads through the Mediterranean, killing 35%–55% of the population and speeding the collapse of the eastern Roman Empire.
The Roman empire stood for another 9 centuries after the Justinian plague. I was under the impression that Justinian the Great had overextended the empire in the sixth century so it naturally shrunk to a more manageable size.
1: https://kvennabladid.is/2018/11/20/ekkert-bendir-til-ad-risa... (Icelandic)
Fascination aside, this is another one of those sobering reminders that whatever I spend my time on as an engineer might be worth absolutely nothing in the near-term, and that's a bit frustrating. What could I be doing to help engineer a better world for future generations? How do I optimize my individual talents so I can achieve the most impact in my lifetime? How do I find the right team of other humans to work toward this? Convince others or myself that it's a worthy cause? (I could care less about legacy or personal comforts/gains - I just want to help humanity move forward, not maintain it)
God help us all.
Humans are stupid. We think that because we survived the Cold War, that it won't happen. ...but if you read the history - it very nearly did happen a couple of times. ...it's only a matter of time.
"The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640."
Imagine the kind of horror and suffering that a century of global economic stagnation inflicts on generations of people.
What's.......our intended process for dealing with this?
Are there any technical solutions for dispersing ash from the atmosphere?
I know this is a stupidly naive question to some degree - how do you prevent acts of god, but I am curious if someone has thought about it.
Whether it might be uni- or multilateral is also interesting, given the possibly serious effects on e.g. agriculture in "downstream" geographic regions. It's not much of a stretch to imagine it kicking off some kind of war.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/solar-geo...
More seriously though, I think there are better and more economical ways to combat global climate warming.
Hastening its collapse several centuries later?
So few human institutions have lasted 917 years, it's hard to compare this claim to anything. It's a little bit like arguing that the sack of Rome in 390 BC was a mere precursor to the one that took place in 410 later, or like arguing Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance helped hasten along the Italian Renaissance.
We need geoengineering now. If a volcanic eruption occurs and blocks out a significant portion of light, we need a way to compensate for it(solar mirroring/concentration?), or eliminate the particulates.
Considering when the ERE "fell", the plague did a pretty poor job of hastening it's collapse, no?
> The Plague of Justinian (541–549 AD)
> The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire..[was] in 555 under Justinian the Great, at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
> It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.
The article indicates that the plague killed 35%–55% of the population.
Eg. After this period, in the early 600's, Slavic tribes migrated south, all the way to Greece/Egean sea, but eventually were pushed back to current/modern areas....
So, these events contributed heavily to even modern borders and some events....
I know, there are some weird post-modernist movement to say 'dark ages were not that bad', but indeed, these were some of the darkest/harshest time in our recorded history....
The volcano being in Iceland, could explain on why Britain was one of the harshest hit areas by the dark ages....
I'm still inclined to believe that this is just nowadays optics. The life was very harsh in general for pretty much all but recent history. There were a lot of life risk vectors all around and the capacity to do something about that was modest at most. For us looking back only the major events stand out -- the pandemics like the black death, the major depopulating military campaigns like that of the Mongols, or the climate altering events. People died of diseases, wars, famine, or whatnot all the time though. Not just a few here and there like we see nowadays, but community-wide wipe-outs, with survivors having no-one-they-knew left alive. I doubt that for them it made much difference that the faced calamities were limited only to their region or were world spanning, or that the cause for the latest bane was this or that out-of-control event.
slightly orthogonal to this, but the original motivation behind the 'dark ages' label was that for large parts of europe there are very few written records for the 5-7th centuries. e.g., we know practically nothing what happened in 5th century england because the only written source -- gildas -- is mostly concerned with pontificating about sinful behaviour in artful ways. even some actual people he mentions in passing get biblically coded nicknames so we have to make wild guesses who's he referring to. and that's our only source for pretty much a century.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/12/02/maybe-first-plague...
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-%E2%80%98Justinian...
I dunno, sounds like 541 was the worst year to be alive. That year also had a second volcano eruption according to the article.
One of my favorite sites for tracking Volcanic eruptions is: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/volcano_news.html . It provides real-time updates on volcano advisories.
I would say we're still very susceptible to a supervolcano eruption. There is no stopping that level of force. It can dramatically shift the climate for years, if not decades. And it would be catastrophic for crop production. I suspect we would need to move a large portion of our crop production into greenhouses and growhouses in order to survive that level of event.
The bigger problem is the lack of any economic or physical contingency planning. There was some medical planning of a sort for a pandemic, but there seems to be no economic planning of any kind for catastrophes.
National governments seem to have improvised economic solutions to COVID with varying degrees of competence and success.
This is negligent and inept. Catastrophes are more or less guaranteed, and there should at least be some thought given to making sure that the first thing that falls apart isn't the national economy.
On the other hand...
Getting food to eat was never a problem at any point. And today, reliably getting meat, chicken, dairy, paper products even if not exactly what you want, most baking supplies, etc. is pretty much a non-problem.
The initial shock has past, and consumer product makers have had plenty of time to do whatever they were going to do.
"Recovery" is a word that sets up certain expectations. It seems to me that what happened during the first half of this year is more usefully considered "change".
Huh, so that is why Google Maps keeps asking me whether TP was in stock every time I go the store - I did not realize there were still actual shortages on that elsewhere, I thought it was just a couple of days of panicing in March and that Google was just being weird / behind the times.
FWIW, I haven't noticed such disruptions here (Finland) since March, so it probably varies a lot regionally.
So it presumably has something to do with how US supply chains work compared to, say, Europe rather than being solely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
I understand that this is/was not the case across the country, and I have been a bit baffled about that. (Although I do recognize the supply chains to restaurants and to corporations (TP) and to grocery stores are not the same and don't easily switch on a dime. But, we have meat and yogurt and eggs and milk on the shelves, but some friends in Connecticut or NYC, for example, say that they do not. And I can not understand why.
On a less likely and more extreme level, Yellowstone has erupted 3 times over the past 2.1 million years [2] and there are other known supervolcanos [3] on Earth.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyjafjallajökull
[1]: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=F33DA79F872937C22C8...
Except that Constantinople had essentially continuous government dating from the 300s AD until it was sacked by the army of the 4th Crusade in 1204, whereas the Holy Roman Empire's first emperor--Charlemagne--was crowned in 800 AD, some 324 years after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West. The Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne was, as you imply, an entirely different beast from the original Roman Empire.
Finland!
The Roman Empire was home to many different ethnicities and was ruled at various times by different ethnicities. Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, etc.
Even the Ottomans considered their empire a continuation of the Roman Empire – one of the Sultan's title's was "Caesar of Rome". So you can add Turks to that list too.
The Justinian expansion was untenable. If you look at it on the map - there are strong enemies on literally all sides. It was a desperate but hopeless attempt to regain the Western Empire.
The plague made it worse - but was hardly the catalyst. ...and the East Roman Empire was far more than a city state for a majority of the remaining NINE centuries.
but there is not yet a smoking hill in Iceland identified for these events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...
See compare this to the 1783 Laki eruption which caused similar weather events. Unlike 535, the weather events from the Laki eruption were limited to the Northern hemisphere.
It is much more likely that this eruption happened close to the equator, where evidence erode much quicker and the ash has an easier time effecting the two hemispheres.
I'm pretty sure everything that's happened is his fault.
Read up on Yellowstone, for example -- AFAIK it's "due for a big one" but it blows up so infrequently and so catastrophically that there's no real plan other than "maybe think about not living in North America."
But hey, volcanic ash is a coolant for the climate -- a few well-placed eruptions could do some good, on a global scale (sorry about the locals)...
>Although fascinating, the new findings do not imply increased geologic hazards at Yellowstone, and certainly do not increase the chances of a 'supereruption' in the near future. Contrary to some media reports, Yellowstone is not 'overdue' for a supereruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera#Volcanoes
www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2014/01/reactions-yellowstone-supervolcano-study-ranged-hysteria-ho-hum24449
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/yellowstone-overdue-eruption-when-...
Same as other existential threats like asteroids. Spend a relative pittance on monitoring, not much else.
in the event of something like this, having the supplies to just weather the fallout would be best. a years worth of supplies on-hand would be a good start.
That may be, but the set of things that humans can prevent gets larger over time. For example, 100 years ago, an asteroid hitting the earth would be an act of God we could do nothing about, but today it is at least within the realm of possibility that we could observe a large asteroid on a collision course and send in a spacecraft or missile to divert it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance
humans are really bad at conceptualizing the risk from such events. we are also overdue for another major solar geo storm (ie. like the carrington event).
Seems like the dispersal of the ash is the problem, and you'd want to be collecting it.
The extent of the USA's preparedness, from the federal agency in charge handling Emergencies, is a website with a bullet point list of what you should have in a first aid kit in your house:
I'm being only partially facetious. There are of course multiple agencies at the federal, state, county, and local level with their own plans and processes in place for this kind of thing.
But! We can look to the past for what would happen.
Katrina taught us that the US federal government doesn't have the resources, means, or disposition to rescue people from disaster zones. It also taught us that as an individual or family, the best thing you can do is take evacuation warnings very seriously, and be ready to be able to provide for yourself and your family for the short and long term. So, ready.gov build a kit, and stuff it full of cash while you're at it. Keep the cars gassed up.
Katrina also taught us that the US government will choose to enforce "property rights" before it will ensure people in disaster zones have shelter, water, or food. You could flip from one channel with a helicopter view of people waving for help on a roof, and another channel would be showing National Guard soldiers with rifles chasing off "looters." Hm.
The COVID pandemic also taught us that partisans and capitalists are motivated to prioritize the wellbeing of the stock market over humans lives - all the more reason to prepare to protect yourself and family rather than count on the Gov coming to your aid.
I'm not saying the homesteaders and preppers aren't a little crazy, but I'm also not saying they don't have the right idea...
The population of New Orleans alone is 1.5 million, so 1‰ of the population died.
That's a pretty small number, and tells me that society coped just fine.
Crop failures caused by volcanic eruptions, which kill 50% of the world population, is a far bigger issue. It is also something mankind will recover from in a couple of generations.
In fact, we never really have. Initially, only free, white landowners could even vote!
Edit: ah, found yet another “thing you can’t say on HN,” I suppose. :) Talk about lack of TP in stores: +6. Talk about how our “representatives” don’t represent most of us: -2
My plans to stock up on survival supplies and buy a little bug out property in a remote spot have gone from "wouldn't that be neat?" to "maybe it is time to set some money aside and start building up a savings for this" pretty quickly.
IMO that's the main issue with those hoarders. You can hoard as much as you can, but local gang will expropriate everything.
So may be it's better to stock guns and bullets...
But, if they were being logically consistent, anyone arguing for a 12 month supply of rice and beans should also have:
- Headed for a place in the hills/woods
- Stocked up on guns and ammo however unpopular an opinion that might be in certain circles
- A generator and gasoline
- Lots of large containers of water
- Seeds/tools/etc.
The list goes on. It's one thing to guard against short-term disruption to supply chains. It's another to basically guard against civilizational collapse. And if you just hoard 12 months of rice and beans in your suburban, much less urban, apartment, you're way overdoing it for the former and not preparing at all for the latter.
So there's a very significant annual cost to maintaining that perpetual one year supply of necessaries.
Probably could slim down and live off half that. Or 500 cal/day for adults with more for the kids. It is survival situation after all.
we've even brought a lot of them closer to the surface, refined them, and alloyed them!
In many places it was rather recently that sanitation was on par or better than in Rome (but of course, not everywhere in the Roman Empire the standards were as high as in the capital).
When writing Why the West Rules for Now Ian Morris attempted to quantify the overall level of social development in the Western and Eastern cores in a very detailed way. (It used to be available online as a sort of appendix but I don't immediately see it.) In any case, you see this decline in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire that wasn't reversed for many centuries.
This simply isn't true and depends on a number of factors. greenhouses can fairly easily maintain 2-30 degrees above the outside temperature. furthermore, the temperature drop described in the article was 1-2 degrees below average.
The only country i know of that has enough glasshouses to feed a significant chunk of its population is the netherlands.
Now, if you want to talk about how we have zillions of brands of TP, but they’re all made by the same handful of companies (illusion of choice), I might argue that’s a failure mode of capitalism.
#ShitYouCantSayOnHN
They're totally removing the need for ballistic missiles. These are armageddon weapons because they can be launched without detection, delivered across the world in tens of minutes, and target enemy nuclear silos before they can even launch.
It reminds me of the Hunt For Red October. They're made to start a war.
I mean, it's not like it's due in a decade, but it is every 650,000-700,000 years, and it's been... 630,000 years.
Supervolcanoes are a phenomenon entirely different than human history has encountered. Krakatoa is a very small fraction of the ejecta of a supervolcano eruption.
This seems like a thing that people are suddenly saying a lot on HN.
Why can't you talk about lack of TP in stores? Where? I thought that was over a few months ago?
On 8 October 1912, the island of Lemnos became part of Greece after being captured from the Ottoman Empire. Peter Charanis, born on the island in 1908 and later a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University, recounts when the island was occupied and Greek soldiers stationed themselves in the public squares.
Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of them asked.
‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied.
‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ a soldier retorted.
‘‘No, we are Romans."
An identity that had at that point endured for more than 2,600 years. There is nothing that compares to Rome.
In EU/EEA there are are bank regulations specifying that banks may operate on a common market under supervision of regulating body where the bank is registered. As Landsbanki UK was branch office and not subsidiary company, it falled under Iceland regulation.
These regulations also require that there is a deposit guarantee scheme for protection of depositors up to 100k EUR, based on country where bank is registered.
So when Landsbanki crashed, all its depositors were entitled to deposit guarantee from Iceland deposit guarantee scheme. But this system cannot handle crash of such size. After that, Iceland government decided to reimburse icelandic depositors, but not offshore depositors (although both have the same claims after icelanding deposit guarantee system, the local ones have political power).
To avoid political windfall, UK (and AFAIK also Dutch) government decides to reimburse their local depositors and get reparation from Iceland based on Iceland government's failure of setup proper deposit guarantee scheme / sufficient regulation, which was condition for allowing its banks access to UK/EU banking market.
a. Icelandic government failed in allowing a bank registered in the country to venture in a scheme that scales to such high amounts, given they need to guarantee their failure.
b. The EU/EEA failed in not taking in account the size of the host country economy.
c. The UK failed in not challenging this private venture at the EU/EEA level while it was happening. As they should have known Iceland was not equipped to dealing with a potential failure. The UK should have warned it's citizens as well.
d. The EU/EEA fail in not holding the people responsible for the damage caused by owners of private banks. Both Iceland and the UK share this failure since they can seek reparations on a national level.
Note that none of these failures are the fault of the UK nor the Icelandic taxpayers. Focusing the following court cases on those was a mistake. Sheltering the obvious villain of this disaster was another mistake. Allowing that villain to carry on and not pay any damage is ludicrous.
I was always told if something is too good to be true, it usually is.
Not only did lots of regular people put their money in this bank, a lot of public authorities did too, and the desposit protection doesn't really help Kent council (which lost £50m), or TFL (£40m), or whatever.
UK governments gambled, with big promises, and lost.
The technology developed to live on the moon may allow it to be rapidly deployed on Earth, saving a large number of people, but if that technology doesn't exist then you're stuck
Yelowstone blows up unexpectedly - orbital rescue forces do a quick drop, help rescue survivors in the immediate area. Later on food supplies from orbital/Lunar farms help cover food shortages and teraforming techniques can be used to fixup the biosphere.
I haven't heard of push notifications or whatever it is asking for feedback on in-store items.
The most common questions nowadays seem to be about wheelchair access, wheelchair-accessible parking, and whether the business accepts cards (which is another weird one for Finland - who doesn't accept cards here?).
For restaurants, they may ask whether there is takeout, lunch, vegetarian options, whether the place is romantic, etc.
(And of course you can turn the questions off, but I kinda like answering them.)
ie - Inland.
Even if all that happened, underground bases would be protected, as would above-ground or in-space habitats that happened to be protected either by the mass of the body they're on by virtue of 'facing away' from the GRB; or by virtue of being behind another body (e.g. Jupiter, the sun, some body they are orbitting) relative to the GRB. With space habitats, they may also be protected by virtue of already needing some level of protection against cosmic radiation; but that's highly speculative.
A GRB also wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would do a lot of damage to its ecosystems, but the Earth would be relatively safe again not terribly long after the event, even without human intervention. If we had the technology to colonize space, we could definitely recolonize the Earth, even in a worst case scenario where the entire ecosystem collapses.
But that's not the same thing as saying we have good reason to think an eruption is not close.
The link in fact says that predictions of an eruption are based on numerology and nobody knows.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/iceland-volcano-p... (see e.g. the photos from 5.11.10)
http://lisa.lbhi.is/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=2747
https://www.vegagerdin.is/Vefur2.nsf/Files/Ahrif_eldgossins_...
The larger eruption in 1783 killed over half of livestock, and a quarter of the human population in the ensuing famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki
Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materials that does the lions share of pollution. You could replace all manufacturing with a combonation of nuclear power and reneables, and youd hardly change the price of the final product.
So that seems to imply to me that ordinary people (in the rich countries) shouldn't be underestimated from an environmental perspective, and because our morality is pro-consumer it reinforces waste. I don't think that's brainwashing by the rich, I think that's just how people are, in Western society at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&list=WL&index=5&...
EDIT: I mean, you guys are downvoting these comments, and I'm sorry to tell you things you don't want to hear, but would prefer that you respond with contrary information rather than downvoting. Happy to alter my views and engage in information sharing.
Nuclear requires a lot of dereg and testing that will be decades out if we start today. This assumes the barriers of popular rejection can be overcome. China might pull it off, but I don't see the US radiating enthusiasm for it. But yeah, since few places on earth can take advantage of hydro, I don't see any long-term alternative to nuclear.
it was a bit unsettling to see how much stuff was out of stock in the first few weeks of the crisis and wonder whether that was going to get better or worse. now the greatest hardship I face is having to settle for my second favorite brand of eggs sometimes. overall, I'm surprised at how resilient our system has turned out to be. despite the federal government totally dropping the ball, the individual states have more or less taken appropriate steps to handle their particular circumstances. I suspect we may be reopening a little early, but only time will tell.
also as an aside, there are certainly some positions that are very unpopular on HN. but if you post stuff like "#ShitYouCantSayOnHN", you will definitely get downvoted.
But, we are both fortunate to still have jobs, and places to store a small stockpile of these things. I literally was able to turn a spare closet into a dry pantry by putting a wire shelving unit in there. We still have basically a lifetime supply of rice, and a nice selection of staple canned goods, just in case things go further south. We were not real particular about brands. We have access to Amazon and Costco. We will be fine.
This was nowhere near Soviet bread line status. In the Soviet Union, perhaps you had to stand in line for bread, but, at least there was bread. Here, we let some people go without bread, because they're drug addicts, mentally unstable, or just don't want to have religion pushed on them.
I'm sure this also falls into #ShitYouCantSayOnHN, and I don't care about the downvotes. I know you can't say anything against the free market or capitalism and expect to win any points here. That mildly annoys me, but I'd rather have my gray comment out there for other people to see, and sacrifice a couple of fake internet points to do it. I win enough points back in technical discussions that I'm in no danger of losing my downvoting, flagging, or vouching capabilities, so it literally does not matter to me; I've net gained 12 points just today. I'd rather draw the lightning rod to myself so people can see how rabid free-market capitalists don't even bother to argue a point, instead mashing that down arrow.
People dismiss socialist perspectives here without even comment, which is sad. They don't even give the ideas the consideration that those who claim socialists are all economically illiterate 14 year olds in their mothers' basements do. They ignore that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and other prominent intellectuals espouse socialist philosophies.
Honestly, I'd be pleased to get downvotes, if there was any actual discussion, but that's appararently verboten here.
Soviets could not emigrate, they were prisoners in their own country.
As far as I know Einstein & Hawking political views aren't in line with what Soviet Russia was, nor pretended to be.
Which "socialist perspective" do you appreciate?
Please stop. this is outright demonstrably false by every account.
It's a nice reminder that someone with a lot of intelligence and dare I say talent in one area can be so wrong in another.
But seriously dude, please educate yourself on the history of socialism and how it's totally and completely failed everywhere it was tried from Germany to Colombia to Sweden it's never worked and every attempt has either resulted in a civil war, a world war, or just years of economic pain to walk it back.
A more equal society would probably have a greater chance of enacting Pigouvian taxes anyway because political power and economic power would be less intertwined.
Coal is a different thing. That said, I think that it's not necessary to have very cheap coal and oil energy to have technological advances.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/04/facts-fracking-chemical-di...
Where I live is a perfect microcosm of this - in the summer, we get ample power from our solar array, but in the winter, when it can be dark and raining for weeks on end, it doesn’t come close - so I’m building out hydro and wind, as when it rains, a stream appears that we can harness, and the wind blows.
The same applies to renewables at grid scale - overdependence on a single source is absolutely risky, which is why most renewable energy efforts involve quite a bit of diversification.
“It can't work if you do it that way" is a pretty bad argument if nobody actually does it that way. Maybe you are accidentally misrepresenting reality in order to support your world view here, but if not please go somewhere else, where facts don't matter.
As others mentioned: every nation that does renewables is looking into robust energy mixes and this (at least in industrial nations) includes catastrophic scenarios as well).
Supervolcanos, nuclear war and meteor impacts are probably the most likely of all and could be survived by offworld colonies. And while these could still leave a lot of humans on Earth, the biggest issue is that there is a big possibility for them to evolve into full blown ice ages that could potentially last for millennia which would pretty much guarantee extinction since the initial phase would most likely also destroy a large portion of infrastructure and human knowledge.
> And supernovas and rogue AIs can wipe out both.
I'm not a scientist but I think that supernovas and solar flares could maybe be detected with enough advance to possibly make sophisticated enough space colonies time their orbital movement to get in cover behind large bodies and any non-earth planetary colonies would already have to be mostly prepared for life under radiation shielding and zero atmosphere so the damage would probably be less than for everything on Earth's surface.
Rogue AIs, assuming we're the ones building them, I feel are the least of our problems although I may be wrong of course. Viruses are also a possibility but could also be largely mitigated with multiple pockets of humanity spread by enough distance.
> But in terms of of overcoming catastrophies you're better of donating to groups like Allfed or AI safety or arms control groups.
I don't agree since it shouldn't be an either-or situation. We should strive to keep our marble safe and blue for as long as possible but preemptively prepare for any of these well known existential risks.
Looking for an advance blast wave of neutrinos gives us about 3 hours of lead time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperNova_Early_Warning_System
If I understand correctly, SARS-CoV-2 hit some "sweet spot" being rather sneaky and rather dangerous at the same time, but is nowhere near top sneakiness across all viruses.
We're gonna want a multi-week airlock to be allowed into the Moon & Mars habitats.
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison?
If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I don't know enough to make that comparison.
Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.
Seph-reed posted: >Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.
This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
If there was no sun at all, do you think the temperatures would only drop 1-3° as mentioned in the article?
That's why yesterday there were 3,787 new cases in TX and 803 in NY.
But NY is reopening and cases are going up, so maybe things will change.
I don't know about the rest of Texas, but the mayor here pretty much shut it down.
Surely data are the aggregate set of anecdotes, but while I see a lot of spot anecdotes, I don't see much data.
However, I just saw packets of yeast for sale again. That was the last thing that I had trouble finding.
But take my observations with a grain of salt, because part of my response (and maybe others) to COVID is that I haven't felt like shopping around much; I mostly just go to one store and make do with what's there.
The key parameters in a nuclear build are:
1) the construction time (impacted by regulatory regimes)
2) the cost of capital (interest rate of tying up money)
3) an uncertainty factor about getting shut down (impacted by regulatory regimes)
In China, 1&2 are 3-4 years and 2% respectively. In the US they are 8-9 years, 15% and maybe 50% chance you'll be shut down before you can finish. [0]
The nuclear plant has a strike price twice as high as the offshore wind.
I don't think I have ever spent time going through comment or tweet histories, but I understand that that is a thing. (Sounds like a dull hobby)
In fact I’m getting this from the source. My own family lived there for most of their lives. Only left in the late 80s.
You appear to be somehow even more uninformed than they are. In no sense of the word has socialism been "tried" in these countries. FARC were Marxist guerillas and never came close to seizing power, and social democrats aren't democratic socialists aren't DDR-style socialists.
Makes sense. I never drive or shop, so I am kind of used to people bringing me off-brand stuff. And I buy in bulk, so I am already set regardless, but I am told by friends that the shelves are full (sometimes they even send pictures!)
Maybe we are lucky that so much is semi-locally sourced.
The majority of people in every place where media is tightly controlled will believe what parents, teachers, papers and TV tell them. North Koreans have a positive view of Kim Jong Il, mainland Chinese have a positive view of Mao. That doesn't mean that either of them weren't objectively horrible in terms of competent leadership or morality.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is altogether more practical and economical than doing so with a combination of new nuclear and renewables. This wasn't true even ten years ago, but the costs of renewables have fallen so fast that it's now the case. At the same time, the supposed "Nuclear Renaissance" was revealed to be an illusion. Nuclear is now a dead technology walking. And renewables (and associated technologies like batteries and electrolyzers) continue to show cost declines at a rate nuclear could only dream of.
BTW, summarize the argument in the video. I don't waste my time watching video links.
If I've misunderstood this somewhere, I would love to learn more.
Going forward, even France is having a very hard time building reactors, and is finding renewables are cheaper. This is one reason why France's nuclear industry is in such trouble.
Germany deliberately pushed renewables in order to send them down their experience curves. This was spectacularly successful, but it has come at a high price to their consumers, who are still paying that down. The rest of us have reaped the benefit of far lower renewable costs.
Also underrepresented are his comments on just how unrealistic the assumptions are in the models calling for temperature reduction, specifically about the implications for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. Reducing energy consumption (whether through bans or price hikes) has a known humanitarian impact in present terms. The idea that you can convince your poor neighbor that he doesn't really need to eat better or have access to more resources is a tricky problem.
pfdietz, I think the case is made quite plainly in his presentation that renewables cannot catch up to much less displace ("100%") fossil fuels anytime in the near future. If you don't see that in the sum of what he presents in the notes, I'd encourage you to watch the source material to hear him say it, sector by sector. It's full of real data from a guy that's been studying energy use in human civilization for many decades.
This link has some of the same info in PDF form: http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/JPM.2019.pd...
Smil has argued that energy transitions happen only slowly, but I think he's being misled because the current rate of cost decline in renewables is unprecedented in its speed, as is the willingness of increasing numbers of countries to impose CO2 taxes or the equivalent.
"There is zero chance of 100% replacement of fossil fuels with renewables. Zero. Without a Thanos solution."
is utter nonsense. I mean, it's as if you're asking me what's wrong with a statement that the Earth is flat.
Proposed new offshore wind farms cost £40/MWh, operational from 2023/2024
Nuclear was the answer 15 years ago. It's not now.
Battery storage is possibly going to fit in there, but it doesn't do it yet.
Tidal, ground source, gravity/momentum/compression/latent-heat storage solutions, some of these might do.
I think we need at least one more cycle of Nuclear power plants.
Perhaps then we'll have workable fission.
Sods law will say if you don't invest in nuclear, you'll be using a lot more CCGT because storage or large-geography interconnects won't be there
But if you do invest, you'll end up being stuck with something costing far more than commodity renewables+storage
We have "workable fission" now, it's just very expensive. Workable fusion is always a generation away.
And you're right about regulatory pressure being a big motivator.
It does feel like Tokamak will never arrive. An acquaintance did their doctorate last year on modelling some aspect of the containment; they didn't seem hopeful.
If you go to https://model.energy/ and optimize such systems in various places, using real weather data, you find nuclear (called "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced options) get optimized to 0%. It's just too expensive. That site uses plausible cost numbers, except electrolysers are already cheaper than their target cost for 2030.
Developing societies such as Africa, India and China are increasing their consumption for the next few decades at least, radically accelerating the demand for hydrocarbons. India expects a quintupling of coal use in the next 4 decades. Airline miles will quintuple in much shorter period of time (like ten-twenty years). There is no shortage of hydrocarbons to naturally limit these demands. Politically there is no way to restrain newly developing nations. Technologically there is no net-positive energy generation source that competes on a density basis with fossil fuels. Again, the numbers tell the story.
I sincerely appreciate your frustration and hope for something different/better, but you need to come up with contrary data to argue these points. A hope in technical improvements year-over-year is all you've pointed to, and the trendline of capacity and efficiency improvements doesn't back that up. Further cost paid for a solar panel is not a benchmark. Energy intensity of its emplacement to bring it online is what its output needs to be balanced against. Its output, limited by useful life and useful operating hours really hamstrings its total lifecycle cost after the fossil fuel intense journey it takes.
That renewables are still a fairly small percentage of global energy demand is a good thing. It means that these experience effects still have room to kick in. Extrapolating the demonstrated experience curve gives that resistive heat from PV will be cheaper than heat from burning any form of fossil fuel, by the time PV has expanded fully.
The investment required to go 100% renewable will be many trillions of dollars. But the world GDP is $87 trillion, and the world spends about 10% of that on energy each year. There is enormous capacity to invest in energy infrastructure -- which is good, because enormous investment will be needed, regardless of what that infrastructure is.
Certainly they must be competitive in terms of energy density otherwise how can they substantially displace another energy source? Today renewable tech is not energy dense enough.
> Once renewables are sufficiently cheap
..cheap in total lifecycle cost (not end user cost of panel), carbon negative and sufficiently energy dense (transportable at light weight/low volume relative to stored energy)
> it's just building more of them.
For all of this, please remember we're talking global scale for electricity generation (<30% of fossil fuel use today), plus transportation, and manufacturing, not just electric use at my house or even a small country.
Straight cost - you mention taxes and regulation. This implies regulatory disincentives to produce and consume fossil fuels. It's relevant to note that at no time in recorded human history have humans backed off the consumption of an energy source unless a better replacement (more dense) was found. We nearly deforested the US east coast and almost killed off a whale species until coal came along and saved both (true story). Now we couldn't go back if we wanted to because civilization assumes a certain amount of energy input. Reducing it would have huge humanitarian impacts. Stabilizing it would be good, but this unfairly puts a huge burden on developing regions who would likely not tolerate it anyway.
Technology improvement - Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery. That's the gap it needs to make up at 5% efficiency gain per year (many orders of magnitude). It's beyond optimistic to say that would be covered any time soon barring a miracle (the track record shows that Moore's law doesn't apply to solar cells and batteries).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...
Even if you doubled the rate of efficiency improvements to 10% annualized, it's still an unrealistically wide gap to make up in my lifetime at least.
Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology. And/or you have to assume some global-scale rational decision making (or force) to reduce consumption voluntarily (or involuntarily :/), in contrast with the whole of historic human behavior regarding energy consumption. Seems like there's a lot of hope involved there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan#/media/File:Ja...
Japan, one of the most technologically developed place in the world, cannot use renewables when they shut down nuclear. Instead they turn back to coal.
I'm not saying renewables are always inferior - e.g., California would be a perfect place for solar. But in every story I've heard of, when nuclear power is turned off fossil fuels pick up the slack.
First, 2011 is nine years ago. Utility scale solar has declined in cost by a factor of about 5 in the last decade. Decisions made even then do not say anything about how solar would compete today. Wind has also declined considerably in cost in that decade, although not as steeply.
Second, the argument I was making was that renewables beat new nuclear. I wasn't arguing that renewables beat fossil fuels unencumbered by CO2 charges, or even necessarily existing nuclear plants in which the construction and financing costs are sunk. So your observation is irrelevant to the claim I made.
I have to wonder why you guys never notice that the anti-renewables arguments you make are such non sequiturs. Myself, if I found defending my position required I resort to bogus logic, would reevaluate whether what I believed was actually true.
Now that nuclear power is fallen out of favor, they went back to fossil fuels, instead of renewables, because it's cheaper for them.
So apparently the advances in renewables didn't just make renewables cheaper: it also made nuclear more expensive than fossil fuels!
Or, maybe, nuclear is now considered "more expensive" largely thanks to the huge negative PR.
Also, I always assumed the lower renewable costs have come from economies of scale due mainly to China exploding it's energy production (which renewables makes a decent chunk of)
We have plenty of examples of humans forgoing technologies that turned out to have downsides. And it's a near universal truth that dire warnings were given about these restrictions, warnings that turned out to be vastly overblown. Technology does step up to the plate when market incentives are in place.
> Look in the graph below at where diesel is relative to a Li-Ion battery.
Li-ion batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel for fossil fuels to be displaced. Some applications don't require that energy density. We are already seeing battery electric buses, for example. In other cases something other than batteries can be used, for example hydrogen. In the worst case, net zero CO2 diesel can be made synthetically, using energy from renewables (and carbon from either CO2 capture or biomass; use of biomass would be limited to these edge cases.)
We are already at the point technically where a great deal of fossil fuel for transportation would be displaced if transport paid the true cost of CO2 emission.
> Fundamentally, for your position to be true you have to assume a miraculous leap forward in technology.
No, the roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing. That is the biggest obstacle.
I didn't say technologies, I said energy sources.
> batteries do not have to become as energy dense as diesel
We need a storage mechanism that allows the energy gained from renewable sources to power things without interruption.
Two examples illustrate the problem today - for renewables to power a cargo ship the battery load-out required to move that loaded container ship would materially reduce its cargo capacity because it's wasting so much space and mass on literally tons of batteries. Compare the capacity, speed, and installed power of MV Yara Birkeland (electric container ship) to the OOCL Hong Kong (diesel powered cargo ship) for an idea. Another example is Tokyo suffering a predictable 3-day cyclone every year, where 27 million people need 22 gigawatts of electricity. Imagine the battery array needed for that (with its inherent cost, maintenance, limited lifespan and acres of space in a space-constrained land). So these are two easy examples of why storage density needs to increase by orders of magnitude to meet the bar you set of 100% replacement.
It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet and the track record of an annualized 5% efficiency improvement for storage tech (which is generous but imagine even doubling it to 10%) per year won't catch up in our lifetimes. The math speaks for itself.
> roadblock is not technology, it's proper carbon pricing
If it were just pricing, it presumes that I have equivalent systems to implement and I just need to pay a premium for one vs the other. But that's not the case as illustrated in the examples above (and there are many, many more - airplanes, continuous smelting) where the existing energy storage tech doesn't work. So technology is an enormous roadblock.
As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
So limiting fossil fuel usage in a situation where there is no suitable replacement as described above, ultimately means you need to tell some guy in India that he can't have an air conditioner and some family in Africa that their agriculture development programs need to take a hit for lack of synthesized ammonia. This is a very unequal proposition. Alternatively, you can preserve that growth rate in the developing world and tell people in the developed world that they need to rewind their lifestyles in all ways (housing, vehicle mass, etc) to the early 1960's, which is when the US last had a consumption rate at the level needed to impact global warming. This is probably the preferable solution, but how tenable do you think either of these propositions really are?
There are undeniable humanitarian costs - not just monetary costs - to reducing fossil fuel use today when there are no (at scale) suitable replacements.
There have only been a handful of energy sources, so this argument is lame. I'll also note that it's an example of "nothing can happen for the first time".
> It won't be Li-Ion, it has to be something else, but that "something else" doesn't exist yet
Hydrogen. Ammonia. Synthetic hydrocarbons (which I explicitly listed). These are demonstrated technologies.
It's a common canard that anti-renewable polemics make to represent batteries as the only storage option. And you've continued to make this argument even after I listed alternatives earlier.
When you make an argument that no solution is possible, it puts the responsibility ON YOU to rule out not just batteries, but every conceivable solution and combination of solutions. You can't just adopt a lazy attitude of lousy engineering to make your case.
> As to carbon pricing - carbon pricing regimes require world-wide cooperation. IF you can get that, it effectively means limiting fossil fuel usage, right? Otherwise why are we doing it?
It will likely involve carbon tariffs. If some country refuses to control CO2 emission, trade with that country will be blocked. This will coerce the holdouts.
Your attitude there also smacks of fatal defeatism. What is your alternative, burning fossil fuels until we have a replay of the end-Triassic greenhouse mass extinction?
A matter of fact isn't an argument, it just is. It's usefulness here is that IF your solution depends on humans doing something for the first time ever in not just recorded history but also in the entire archeological record, it's a big assumption to be weaving into a proposal and weakens (but granted does not make impossible) the idea that you may be on the right track in assuming it will happen now. It's like the famous "How to draw an owl" meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Are miracles possible? Sure. Should you bet on it in your planning? No.
> Hydrogen, ammonia
Both of these require fossil fuels to synthesize in quantities to meet today's needs, let alone new at-scale quantities. Hydrogen certainly may be better than burning coal or even natural gas, but it still would require fossil fuels. The amount of organically sourced ammonia we have on the planet _in total_ is only sufficient to support crops for ~4 bln people globally. There is no solution right now to synthesize enough ammonia at scale without hydrocarbons.
> [embargoes] will coerce the holdouts
We'll not get a chance to test this, but as a thought exercise let's consider how well embargoes work today. Then consider who the embargoes will be placed on from a justice perspective or from an effectiveness perspective. You are either advocating a form of colonialism in the developing world or telling your French neighbor to pay way more for heating, cooking, driving, etc. Both these things have taken place in isolation, and both had bad outcomes. Scaling it up doesn't make a good outcome any more likely.
> What's your alternative?
Rational thinking isn't defeatism - it's application _is_ the solution.
I would gently ask - very gently and politely as I would a friend - that you to re-read your initial response to my statement. You said it was "utter nonsense" and equated it to saying the earth was flat. I'm sure you can appreciate now with more data how the critique is actually the reverse. Your response to my points assumes a miraculous technological development at an indeterminant future date whose likelihood is not supported by existing efficiency improvement data. It disregards the voraciousness with which the planet is consuming fossil fuels today, the future burden forecasted by developing economies, and the insufficiency of current technologies to scale.
I empathize with your sense of hope and am similarly shocked at the risk we face as a species, but people typically do two things in the face of this shock that are equally irrational: deny global warming or believe the solution for energy transition is easy.
Bill Gates said in a talk at Stanford a few months ago that the "easy" people are a bigger barrier to decarb progress than the deniers. I don't know if I would agree in the ranking (or care), but agree that neither are helpful. The problem is enormously difficult (as befitting a planetary emergency). My view of solutions is informed the same way as my assessment of current energy use is. Seek knowledge, be rational, be very skeptical, watch out for the hucksters, support what's left over.
