The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[Hersbird]

I thought the lounge didn't allow political discussion. This is 500+pages of pure politics. It's also religious to many as well.

My thoughts, we will use oil, coal, and natural gas until they are depleted or extremely difficult to extract. Then we will go nuclear powered. Other forms of energy will remain similar in their contributions as a percentage. They will improve and grow but never to meet ever increasing demand. This all will take 100 years.

[redpoint5]

The topic of climate change is political in nature because what to do about it involves subjective values and a large heaping of scientific uncertainty and virtually limitless variables to contend with. There's nothing to talk about if it's limited to just the observed facts, except some even contend the facts themselves aren't always represented accurately.

The discussion has been remarkably civil, with no accusations of a person or group being Hitler.

[Hersbird]

Fact: The existence of facts is greatly overstated.

[redpoint5]

See, now you get the appeal of talking philosophy/religion here :P

All statements of fact must be grounded in unprovable "givens". Logic itself is unprovably logical, since you can't define a term with itself.

[freebeard]

I thought the lounge didn't allow political discussion. This is 500+pages of pure politics. It's also religious to many as well.

You just now noticed? The Lounge is like a refuge from the social media jungle. We're nice here.

My thoughts, we will use oil, coal, and natural gas until they are depleted or extremely difficult to extract. Then we will go nuclear powered. Other forms of energy will remain similar in their contributions as a percentage. They will improve and grow but never to meet ever increasing demand. This all will take 100 years.

No we're there now. It's not the 1970s anymore.

In Episode 473, Scott Adams has suggested that to break the impasse with North Korea we offer to help them convert from a nuclear weapons program to a 4th Gen nuclear experimental testbed.

They get an "offramp" for their weapons program that they shouldn't need anymore, and we get one less adversary and a way around the legal restrictions on doing it on our own soil.

My thoughts: Adversarial Generative AI could find the 'least work' path to reducing demand.

[All Darc]

A lot of energy it's require to manufacture a typical solar panel, and it's so much that a panel in general takes almost 5 years to produce the energy that was used to manufacture it.
Maybe this explains partially why China needs coal power plants so much despite solar energy price had became atractive.

[oil pan 4]

Allegedly it only takes around 40kwh to make a 200 to 250w panel which is only about 1 gallon of diesel fuel worth of energy.
Even if there was something lost in translation and just the solar cells by them selves took 40kwh to make that's still really good.

I hear that "solar panels will never make more energy than it took to make them" well a 220w panel should make at least 7 megawatt hours over a 20 year life.

[redpoint5]

Very roughly the cost to make the panel is somewhat in proportion to the energy required to make them. In other words, if the payback period is 5 years, I assume it takes about that much energy (5 years of solar production) to recoup the energy required to produce them, factoring in all the inverters, equipment needed to install the panels, including the energy required to make the vehicles of the workers that drove to install everything.

The energy required to make the panels themselves also needs to factor in the mining equipment that obtained the raw materials, and all of the energy along the way to get to a final product.

[freebeard]

https://www.britannica.com/technology/solar-pond

Solar ponds are low cost but high maintenance. A layer of brine at the bottom of a hemispherical excavation, else a clear plastic membrane, is about all it takes.

It's only heat but you can do a lot with that.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

Yes. Thank goodness for 1.5 speed.
.
Is the hedgerow growing better just because the soil hadn't been tilled when there was a fence there? Or because it had never been in production so all of it's Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium was still laying there from it's own compost?
.
People can't eat grass
.

It could be as simple as the hedge concentrating rainwater close to its trunk,allowing deep watering there,and some associated benefit specifically to that,in comparison to diffuse watering away from the hedge.
Annual decomposition of leaf litter.
Also,birds alighting on the hedge may defecate, thereby adding fertilizer unavailable to the adjoining vegetation.
Aeolean nutrients captured from settling dust may also be concentrated near the hedge trunk,better reaching a taproot perhaps.
Lot's of variables which would need to be monitored.