The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[oil pan 4]

He doesn't do a whole lot of the computer stuff.
He says they hire a stupid programmer and pays them $10 an hour to bang out code all day and he gets the math and numbers right and then they fire the programmer when done with them.

[freebeard]

I'm sure they get excellent code for $10/hr. That's the peril of contract work.

[sendler]

A focused effort by modern societies can accomplish amazing things. Witness the sudden build up and transformation for World War II by the USA. Which cost 4.1 Trillion over four years in adjusted dollars and was financed with a 94% top income tax bracket creating a de facto maximum income of $2 million adjusted/ year. Which generally remained in place until the mid 1950's. And from personal accumulated wealth by selling government issued war bonds that promised a return after the war. Price controls and rationing coupons for food and resources were instituted. Each car was allowed 3 gallons of gas per week unless it had an official use. Media and movies were redirected to develop content to promote the cause. Resource heavy entertainment with the modern day equivalents such as NASCAR and Disney Land would be generally curtailed. Full employment with overtime hours and good pay provided recovery to a middle class which was still lagging from the great depression fifteen years earlier.
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87% of the worlds primary energy consumption is still from fossil carbon and the share actually increased last year due to cheap fracked gas. And the total energy consumption is increasing exponentially due to continued exponential growth of the World economy as they are still correlated at nearly 1:1. As is the consumption of nonrenewable resources such as Phosphorous for fertilizer and Copper for motor windings. To totally rebuild and replace all infrastructure, industrial processes, and machinery, that is not electric, and replace all primary energy generation with wind, solar and storage, and build out all of the transmission to carry the 5 fold increase in electricity, will require a similar War On Climate and War On Resource Depletion effort. Times 10. At least. 40 years of austerity and focus and $40 trillion just for the USA, to pull it off. Maybe twice that in time and money. And it must be a world wide commitment with $200 trillion to invest. And a world wide commitment to prevent the rich from just relocating their assets to the cheapest tax rate country spurring a race to the bottom. As we are already seeing.
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But we must commit soon while we still have the cheap liquid fuel to build the massive projects that we will need and quit squandering our seed corn. "Do not eat the seed corn."

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by slowmover

“Science” will find the results it is paid to find. Who funds, and who publishes, are the pertinent questions. Adjustments are only a matter of re-phrasing questions to fit an agenda.

Huh? You're right that money is important - but virtually ALL the money involved in this - is pushing the DENIAL of science.

[redneck]

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Follow the (Climate Change) Money

https://www.heritage.org/environment...e-change-money




>

[sendler]

"the recently-emerged De growth movement advances the basic, fifty year old, ”limits to growth” case which has now accumulated a huge supporting literature. Its core point is that there is too much production and consumption going on, that this is the main cause of global problems, that eventually we must have stable or zero-growth economies, and that GDP must be reduced. For many years there has been debate between these two general world-views, that is, between those arguing that there are bio-physical-social limits to growth and those who believe that technical advance can solve any problems growth causes. This is a debate between those who believe that “tech-fixes” can solve the problems without radical change from a system committed to affluence and growth, and those who argue that only radical change to a very different, post consumer-capitalist society can solve the big problems." "in general if production, sales and GDP increase, then resource use and ecological impact increase. They emphasise that there are not good reasons to expect this to change or absolute decoupling to be achieved in future; in fact the trends are getting worse. This aligns with the fact that there has been a long term decline in productivity growth rates."
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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2...i-and-parenti/

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by sendler

"the recently-emerged De growth movement advances the basic, fifty year old, ”limits to growth” case which has now accumulated a huge supporting literature. Its core point is that there is too much production and consumption going on, that this is the main cause of global problems, that eventually we must have stable or zero-growth economies, and that GDP must be reduced. For many years there has been debate between these two general world-views, that is, between those arguing that there are bio-physical-social limits to growth and those who believe that technical advance can solve any problems growth causes. This is a debate between those who believe that “tech-fixes” can solve the problems without radical change from a system committed to affluence and growth, and those who argue that only radical change to a very different, post consumer-capitalist society can solve the big problems." "in general if production, sales and GDP increase, then resource use and ecological impact increase. They emphasise that there are not good reasons to expect this to change or absolute decoupling to be achieved in future; in fact the trends are getting worse. This aligns with the fact that there has been a long term decline in productivity growth rates."
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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2...i-and-parenti/

Two things can be true at the same time; that rates of any change are unsustainable, and that technology will continue to solve many problems.

Moore's law is broken, and the rate of improving computing power/efficiency has slowed significantly. It was never sustainable because no rate is ever sustainable in anything, especially ones with doubling factors with short timeframes.

There's reason to believe economic stagnation and technological progress will slow, but then we can never predict breakthroughs. If automation/robotics gets extremely good, the cost of labor will drop to nearly nothing, which means the cost of physical goods will drop to nearly nothing. That would put a huge burden on resource consumption, but then we could leverage automation to recycle and find other areas to improve efficiency. Or, we could have a breakthrough with fusion power, or even innovative fusion power that drops the price of electricity so low that nobody would dream of burning fossil fuels for energy.

Those are 2 areas that I expect within my lifetime there will be great advances; that automation will drastically reduce prices of nearly everything and improve efficiency, and that electricity will be so plentiful and cheap that we can expend more of it to efficiently manage our natural resources.

[freebeard]

Digg.com
CAN TREES POWER YOUR HOME?
xkcd’s Randall Munroe Presents The Best And Worst Ways To Power Your House With Renewable Energy

...from it's own footprint. The 'money shot' is at 4:30

• biomass .038 kilowatts
• solar 25 kilowatts
• wind 19 kilowatts

[sendler]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Those are 2 areas that I expect within my lifetime there will be great advances; that automation will drastically reduce prices [to the point of being almost free] of nearly everything and improve efficiency, and that [fusion] electricity will be so plentiful and cheap that we can expend more of it to efficiently manage our natural resources.

So I guess I wouldn't be fair if I didn't also label this ridiculous.
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Fusion. The energy source of the future. And always will be.
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"The most serious difficulty concerns the very high energy neutrons released in the deuterium-tritium (D-T) reaction. These uncharged nuclear particles damage the reactor structure and make it radioactive. A chain of undesirable effects ensures that any reactor employing D-T fusion will be a large, complex, expensive, and unreliable source of power."
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"But the scientific goal turns out to be an engineering albatross. From the engineering point of view, we should have started from the answer and worked backward."
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"Producing net power from fusion is a valid scientific goal, but generating electricity commercially is an engineering problem. The requirement is to develop a power source significantly better than those that exist today,
and D-T fusion cannot provide that solution. Even if the fusion program produces a reactor, no one will want it."
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"Fusion will almost certainly have a lower power density than fission and
therefore will require a larger plant to produce the same output. Suppose a fusion plant had to be ten times as big and therefore likely ten
times as costly — as a present-day fission plant to produce the same amount of power. Given the already intolerable costs of building fission plants, that would hardly be economically feasible."
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"Temperatures within the fusion reactor will range from the highest produced on earth (within the plasma) to practically the lowest possible (within the magnets). The entire structure will be bombarded with neutrons that induce radiation and cause serious damage to materials. Problems associated with the inflammable lithium must be managed. Advanced materials will have to endure tremendous stress from temperature extremes and damaging neutrons. The magnetic fields will exert forces equivalent to those seen only in very high pressure chemical reactors and specialized laboratory equipment. All in all, the engineering will be extremely complex."
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http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/...eview_1983.pdf

[oil pan 4]

Where I work we use a ton of automation.
We just make a little more money than those who do the same with little to no automation.
The auto industry uses a lot of automation, car prices have increased 4x since 1980. They use a lot more now compared to 1980.

The same thing was said about fission power and hydroelectric power. It would be almost too cheap to meter.
HA!