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The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

climate.gov

331–340 of 349 posts

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#331
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work. Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support your claim.

Or at least obfuscate and mask your claim the same way the Trump administration has learned: “many are saying that most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work” “and how many of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work?” “there is waste and fraud with people silent quitting or refusing to go back to work”

Yep, it's really transparent and I really hate how so many communities and platforms turn a blind eye to it.

It's not a productive comment, it doesn't invite discussion, it doesn't add useful information.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#332
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.gov sources being disreputable is not new. My generation grew up with the food pyramid. The silver lining is that understanding of this disrepute is nearing universality.

The food pyramid is notable because it was so wrong for so long, which is very unusual. Most gov agency science is actually quite good .

I still like the basic idea. I'd push carbs and dairy further up, which naturally brings vegetables down.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the poorly written article actually says. They are launching one baloon a day instead of two. You might think the article is being intentionally misleading with working like, "NWS issued a public information statement announcing that is is temporarily suspending the frequency of weather balloon launches at some of Weather Forecast Offices".

50% reduction in the number of observations is a big deal.

is it? It is unclear that two measurements a day vs one measurement a day is going to make a meaningful difference.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why acknowledgment of climate change would lead to nuclear over solar/wind.

Because solar and wind are extremely inefficient and dangerous when compared with nuclear. Nuclear and enhanced geothermal are both closing in on their dream forms (fusion and supercritical fluids), and are already sufficient as they are. It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much sp…

Can you elaborate why you think nuclear is more efficient and safer than solar and wind? As far as I'm aware, the opposite is true: Nuclear energy is far more expensive than e.g. solar, for which costs continue to go down. While I understand that nuclear reactors are safe (if handled correctly), history has proven that freak accidents can and do happen. Also, waste storage mustn't be ignored either. How are solar and wind more dangerous?

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#336
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the people advancing those claims also think they have a lot to gain, too. Those claims are hard to evaluate because humans are famously subjective and prone to misattribution, which is why we invented the scientific method. Every high-quality investigation has been unable to find support for them.

This is why many people don't trust "The Science". It's the positivist materialist institutionalist gaslighting. If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited. Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who have…

>Don't believe your lying eyes or ears.

This as a sarcastic rallying cry of conspiracy theorists has always amused me.

You ARE aware of visual and auditory illusions right? Or the various ways your brain outright lies to you in order to save a few calories worth of thinking?

How much of your vision is real? Do you know? Can you prove it?

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m here to say that the cuts to the NSF, NIH, DoE (both energy and education) and IRS are not overhyped at all; if anything they are badly underhyped. What is overhyped is the actual “savings” that they are producing with all of this.

What would you cut? I don’t know what I would, but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now. I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stabil…

>but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

No you don't know that, because it is outright wrong.

We could hold this level of debt for decades and safely reduce it over a long time frame. Plenty of other countries have done that plenty of other times. Christ, most of Europe only just got done paying us off for WW2!

Indeed, we had almost no debt at the turn of the millennium, after Congress during Clinton's admin cut a bunch of stuff after significant PUBLIC DEBATE, but Bush got us into multiple outright false wars to drop bombs in the desert for two decades and now all of a sudden the republicans are concerned about fiscal responsibility?

Fuck right off.

> At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK

That's literally what they are doing. The proposed budget is just more tax cuts for billionaires. Stop being so goddamned gullible.

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though - Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.

Herr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.

> some town in Germany

The Polish city of Gdańsk, of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was also born there at the time. [1]

> He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.

Nope. It was neither about the temperatures in Gdańsk, nor about the temperature of his wife, btw. ;) [2]

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because solar and wind are extremely inefficient and dangerous when compared with nuclear. Nuclear and enhanced geothermal are both closing in on their dream forms (fusion and supercritical fluids), and are already sufficient as they are. It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much sp…

Gave you an upvote not because I necessarily agree, but to counter the downvotes. I agree that it’s clear we need more nuclear, but could you explain why solar and wind are dangerous compared to nuclear? Did you mean that all the attention on solar and wind, which can’t be scaled fast enough and must be paired with grid storage, has screwed us when it comes to addressing climate change? Also, calling solar and wind i…

Appreciated.

When I say more dangerous, it’s just a pretty simple calculation - per watt of energy, how many people have been injured/killed when producing energy via a given source. Coal is incredibly dangerous, as is gas by this metric. Nuclear is far and above the safest when calculating in this specific way.

Solar and wind are inefficient, by my definition, because they require large portions of land and cannot run with highly predictable outputs at all times. As a result, you need other solutions to complete the story - larger farms, more farms, large batteries, grids that easily transfer energy long distances, etc.

Nuclear is able to sidestep all of those problems, especially with the relatively recent advent of small modular reactors (SMRs).

Re: The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

#340
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The orders of magnitude are different here. Replacing something that becomes a huge problem within two hundred years with something that (potentially) becomes a problem in a few thousand years -- really is better than spending valuable time on developing an "ideal" solution

Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem, and if it does, just how large (time, space, populations, ecosystems) of a problem it will be.

This certainly is incorrect. Used up fuel can be re-enriched. This isn’t a problem we ever need to solve, because by the time it’s an issue, the waste will have become a viable market product again.
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