I finally had time to watch. I do recommend although the second half gets kinda dodgy and seems to be a bit of a hatchet job. Rather a bummer, I must say, but it's an eye-opener for sure, about what passes for "green energy".
Food is energy. It's the gasoline we use to power our bodies.Rob Lister wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 7:49 amThat was a worthy article, but I have issues with the passivity of the last para; the conclusion, so to speak.Anaxagoras wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 6:02 amNational Review review's Michael Moore's new movie:
https://news.yahoo.com/michael-moore-em ... 42176.html
Emphasis mine.Ideas have consequences. If the idea is accepted that the world faces a fundamental crisis of overpopulation, there will be men of action prepared to do something about it. Compared with the havoc they inflict, green-energy swindles will be the least of our problems.
Accepted by whom? What will they do? Havoc how?
There is no doubt in my mind that overpopulation is a crisis and that letting that crisis self-regulate to its own solution is begging for a bigger crisis, so I want that havoc to which he refers better defined.
The movie's premise--or the reviewer's interpretation of it--is a strawman. Virgin forests are not being devastated for the production of energy to any meaningful extent, they're being harvested for their lumber and stripped to grow food; there aren't enough caves to go around and one can't eat a tree.
To the extent AGW is a problem, it is trivially solved: 90% nuclear, 20% NG, 20% wind*.
To the extent overpopulation is a problem, I have no solution that won't stack corpses like cordwood from horizon to horizon.
* From an engineering standpoint, ideally you want 150% so private solar will suffice for the shortfall so long as the utilities are not forced into buying what they don't need, much less paying retail for it.
They have been convinced. Ergo the most productive and contributory segments of world society reproduce at non-sustainable levels whereas the uneducated and poor reproduce like bunnies.Anaxagoras wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 10:59 am
I believe there is a humane solution to overpopulation though. Family planning and feminism. Not all women need to be baby-making factories. They can have careers instead. (Better than straight up murdering people. Just convince them to not reproduce, and provide the contraceptives that help.)
I guess I am forever optimistic. Solving waste issues seems like more of an innovation and organizational issue. That is no small matter at all, but it is very different in character than an inevitable population growth that overwhelms any possible solution. To underscore why I don't think population is a losing battle:Rob Lister wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 10:43 amI think it is very true, but nowhere close to enough. Even at only 7.5 billion, we're already swimming in our own filth, and we're making more a hell of a lot faster than we're cleaning it up.
Maybe not 'us' personally ... and therein might lie the problem: the folks most adept to solving the issue (money, resources) don't really live or even see the issue (our side of the fence is very green).
But like I said, I have no solution. Other than a nuclear one. The bad nuclear, in this case.
That is the successful modernization that gnome spoke of. But in my mind ...Anaxagoras wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 10:59 amJust convince them to not reproduce, and provide the contraceptives that help.)
...it is the self-regulation I spoke of before. Way too little, way too late. I won't--and maybe you either--live long enough to see the problem come to fruition, so there is that bright side.Lister wrote:There is no doubt in my mind that overpopulation is a crisis and that letting that crisis self-regulate to its own solution is begging for a bigger crisis
Didn't milton friedman say any virtuous effort will get taken over by industrialists?Anaxagoras wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 10:59 amFood is energy. It's the gasoline we use to power our bodies.Rob Lister wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 7:49 amThat was a worthy article, but I have issues with the passivity of the last para; the conclusion, so to speak.Anaxagoras wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 6:02 amNational Review review's Michael Moore's new movie:
https://news.yahoo.com/michael-moore-em ... 42176.html
Emphasis mine.Ideas have consequences. If the idea is accepted that the world faces a fundamental crisis of overpopulation, there will be men of action prepared to do something about it. Compared with the havoc they inflict, green-energy swindles will be the least of our problems.
Accepted by whom? What will they do? Havoc how?
There is no doubt in my mind that overpopulation is a crisis and that letting that crisis self-regulate to its own solution is begging for a bigger crisis, so I want that havoc to which he refers better defined.
The movie's premise--or the reviewer's interpretation of it--is a strawman. Virgin forests are not being devastated for the production of energy to any meaningful extent, they're being harvested for their lumber and stripped to grow food; there aren't enough caves to go around and one can't eat a tree.
To the extent AGW is a problem, it is trivially solved: 90% nuclear, 20% NG, 20% wind*.
To the extent overpopulation is a problem, I have no solution that won't stack corpses like cordwood from horizon to horizon.
* From an engineering standpoint, ideally you want 150% so private solar will suffice for the shortfall so long as the utilities are not forced into buying what they don't need, much less paying retail for it.
I believe there is a humane solution to overpopulation though. Family planning and feminism. Not all women need to be baby-making factories. They can have careers instead. (Better than straight up murdering people. Just convince them to not reproduce, and provide the contraceptives that help.)
I remember that one.gnome wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 5:44 pmIn "Gateway" by Frederick Pohl, a near-future scenario (that is, near-future at the time of the book's 1977 authorship, which probably means 1996 or something) has the need for food on Earth so great that fossil fuels, oil especially, are being converted directly into synthetic food. The narrator snarks on how people used to waste it by sticking it into vehicles and burning it up.
From the shores of the Persian Gulf to the foothills of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental mountains, hot weather is reaching levels humans can’t endure. An analysis of 4 decades of data from thousands of weather stations shows that a handful of hot spots around the globe are experiencing a potentially lethal mix of heat and humidity—something most of these places weren’t expected to experience until midcentury.
“Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” says Colin Raymond, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the study.
Hot weather is already lethal. A 2003 heat wave, for example, killed more than 70,000 people in Europe, when outdoor temperatures reached more than 40°C. But it’s not just the heat that kills. Humidity is deadly when it prevents the evaporation of sweat—a remarkably efficient way for the human body to cool itself. To measure the effects of heat plus humidity, scientists use wet bulb temperatures—the lowest temperature to which air can be cooled via evaporation.
At wet bulb temperatures above 35°C, researchers estimate that even fit people will overheat and potentially die within 6 hours. Although that temperature might seem low, it equates to almost 45°C at 50% humidity, and what it would feel like 71°C using the U.S. National Weather Service heat index. In the heat wave that ravaged Europe, wet bulb temperatures hit 28°C.
Climate change will likely make these conditions more common in places such as southwest Asia, India, and China, researchers say. But their models estimate temperatures for relatively large swaths of land. Likewise, analyses of past weather data assess conditions over grids of more than 700 square kilometers, potentially missing localized spikes.
Raymond wondered whether that might obscure specific hot spots where geography and weather are already conspiring to create intolerable conditions. To find out, he and his colleagues combed through 39 years of hourly data from weather stations on six continents, dating back to 1979.
They discovered a handful of individual spots—including shorelines along the Persian Gulf and river valleys in India and Pakistan—had crossed the 35°C wet bulb threshold, though only for an hour or two at a time. And in 2017, wet bulb conditions topped 30°C 1000 times—more than double the number in 1979, they write today in Science Advances.
Weather stations in several other places stood out. They include Mexican towns near the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California, and the coastal city of San Francisco in Venezuela. Areas in the Caribbean, West Africa, and southern China also had extreme readings. Weather stations in these places recorded approximately 1000 incidents registering at 31°C, while the wet bulb temperature broke 33°C about 80 times, according to the researchers.
You say that, but you're not running for office.
"If I turn in a sicko, will I get a reward?"