21–30 of 36 posts
It's a meme at this point for successful physicists to go crazy at a certain advanced age and rant on fields they dont know much about. Eg. Linus Pauling and vitamin C, Roger Penrose and consciousness, this.
Heretics are sometimes right, but not every time. Few know that Manabe’s 1972 paper proposed a solution of reducing insolation to offset a doubling in carbon dioxide levels. And that could still work, but like the solution of carbon sequestration in topsoil, probably will not be done in time before tipping points are irreversibly triggered. Dyson believed that, like Hari Seldon in the Foundation series, suppressing d…
To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Improving the atmosphere by improving the soil, a virtuous circle. We can measure global warming mitigation by tons of biomass c…
"we only" need to do that, huh? > Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the…
Food insecurity and going to the moon are both technically solved problems, but we cannot secure food for everyone nor are we currently capable of landing on the moon because we cannot solve the social-financial problems that would make them happen. The engineer's disease is biased against social understanding as well as seeing social problems as legitimate[real] problems.
But to levy them upon data extrapolated without correlation is where science falls short. You can surmise the corroboration between soil, ice, and methane samples as well as biological data from the eons; but piecing together a picture is more akin to believing the extremely faint stars you see in the night sky - are still there.
We tend to believe what is in front of us not realizing that change is happening all around us, every moment, every microsecond. Nothing ever stays the same. This is true of climate change as it is humans.
The debate on what to do about change and how much humans have potentially and/or are contributing is an entirely different discussion. With technology perhaps we'll coalesce. It is otherwise far more likely that the planet and the cosmos could make it so we can't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%, it reads like 'I found a clever flaw and followed it up with an unrigorous conclusion because I was blinded by my cleverness'. His conclusion that oh the soil can recapture carbon also reminded me of generally smart & accomplished but non-expert people online these days that lean on unrealistic tech solutions they just heard about as being an adequate mitigation for climate change. 'Oh just have ships burn bunk…
I think your last point is really important. Once you accept that climate scientists are right, you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions and the things you’ll be doing less, not to mention all of the fun ecosystem and disease implications. It’s sooooooo much easier just to hope that the multi-billion dollar campaign saying business as usual will be fine is right, becau…
Been there
Done that.
Driving my car. That is it. I do need to get an electric car for taking the dog (and me) to the beech, then I am done.
* The vast majority of my food is local
* My clothes are natural fibres
* My electricity is > 80% from renewables.
The real problem is not lifestyle, it is systemic. I think it is bad form to blame people, who unlike me, have no way out of burning fossils. If we stop burning fossils, for most of us, our lives will get better, not worse.
Some very rich people will be less rich. That is the real problem
It is naive of humans to believe we can accurately model something we cannot measure against. Until a time machine enables someone to vastly scale back climate data, we have a huge missing gap and continually rely on the short term models for association, whereby those models are a collaboration of data collected over roughly 400 years. The last 250 are better statistically and the last 50 are exceptionally accurate.…
Those in applied math are pretty clear about what can and can't be modelled.
The majority of people I've met understand that almost nothing is stationary, the planet moves about the sun which moves about a galactic core which in turn moves through the universe all the while as molecules vibrate within various forms of matter.
None of which negates the AGW position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your last point is really important. Once you accept that climate scientists are right, you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions and the things you’ll be doing less, not to mention all of the fun ecosystem and disease implications. It’s sooooooo much easier just to hope that the multi-billion dollar campaign saying business as usual will be fine is right, becau…
> you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions Been there Done that. Driving my car. That is it. I do need to get an electric car for taking the dog (and me) to the beech, then I am done. * The vast majority of my food is local * My clothes are natural fibres * My electricity is > 80% from renewables. The real problem is not lifestyle, it is systemic. I think it is bad for…
Entire generations were sold on those being middle class ambitions, and we don’t have a viable path where that’s sustainable. That doesn’t mean we live in abject misery, but most of it is something which most adults were told was a sign of how much better we have it than our predecessors so it feels like failure.
It is naive of humans to believe we can accurately model something we cannot measure against. Until a time machine enables someone to vastly scale back climate data, we have a huge missing gap and continually rely on the short term models for association, whereby those models are a collaboration of data collected over roughly 400 years. The last 250 are better statistically and the last 50 are exceptionally accurate.…
It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey. Those in applied math are pretty clear about what can and can't be modelled. The majority of people I've met understand that almost nothing is stationary, the planet moves about the sun which moves about a galactic core which in turn moves through the universe all the while as molecules vibrate within various forms of matter. None of which negates the AGW positio…
The second part implies that while certainly many in academia and beyond are fully aware of our constant change, we tend to lend society a belief that time stands still. Same as it ever was, the moon follows the sun, the north star is essentially stationary. These types of conventional take generally wreak havoc in large scales.
And if we naive humans know anything worth knowing at all, we certainly know our perception of large scales lacks in enormous context.
It's a meme at this point for successful physicists to go crazy at a certain advanced age and rant on fields they dont know much about. Eg. Linus Pauling and vitamin C, Roger Penrose and consciousness, this.
Even has "climate models aren't reductionist enough".