Live data from Hacker News

“Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

resilience.org

71–80 of 86 posts

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#71
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with nuclear is the slow iteration speed and extreme cost of failure. Those are not good properties if you want to push technology forward quickly. The great thing about solar and wind is that we can iterate very quickly and catastrophic failure costs are nearly non-existent. Nuclear still has great potential but the costs are just too high (and maybe they should be).

Anyone who argue against nuclear while failing to acknowledge the issues of solar and wind, which are 10 times more problematic, can't be truthful. Unless we enter a _major_ era of degrowth there is no way we'll get out of fossil fuels without nuclear.

What are the 10x more problematic issues with solar and wind?

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“As it is” is always temporary. Optimists change “what is”. Not all are going to succeed but some are and thats what moves us forward :)

"As it is" in this case is not static to time. It includes dynamics, values, relationships, and heuristics of evolution. What I find hard to understand is that you pit realism as the antonym of optimsim . The correct antonym is pessimism . Both optimism and pessimism are biases . Realism is the absense of bias.

I don't pit it as an antonym. I am simply responding to your claim that it's realism that moves things forward :)

Realists are navigators, optimists are starters, pessimists are never-starters :)

You need bias to move things forward.

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#73
post #69
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atmospheric scientist here, currently non-practicing. You’re making the same mistake that climate denialists make, but in reverse. We actually know a great deal about climate feedback mechanisms now. We know the residence time of SO2 in the upper atmosphere. We know how to calculate the change in solar flux as a result. We can model what will happen — we know this because our past climate models did well with the unc…

I'll admit, I'm also skeptical about our ability to manage climate by pumping even more into the atmosphere. The CO2 models have been very accurate, but doubling the number of variables more-than-doubles the complexity. SO2, for example, is even more acidic than CO2, so we'd risk helping the temperature while making the oceans worse. SO2's instability is somewhat reassuring, and I'm willing to consider a plan, especi…

Not sure what you mean by doubling the variables. Climate models have to take as input levels of all sorts of greenhouse gasses: CFCs, methane, water, and CO2. And land use change, which changes albedo and CO2 and water. And aerosol emissions, which are often point sources, which vary from light reflective particles to black carbon on snow. And also feedback mechanisms like deglaciation and sea ice change and three different cloud feedbacks. And change in aviation as a direct creator of clouds.

The amount of geoengineering we are already doing is massive and multivariate. If you don’t believe we can handle one more variable of a well known aerosol’s effect in our models, then you should consider disbelieving all climate models.

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#74
post #73
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit, I'm also skeptical about our ability to manage climate by pumping even more into the atmosphere. The CO2 models have been very accurate, but doubling the number of variables more-than-doubles the complexity. SO2, for example, is even more acidic than CO2, so we'd risk helping the temperature while making the oceans worse. SO2's instability is somewhat reassuring, and I'm willing to consider a plan, especi…

Not sure what you mean by doubling the variables. Climate models have to take as input levels of all sorts of greenhouse gasses: CFCs, methane, water, and CO2. And land use change, which changes albedo and CO2 and water. And aerosol emissions, which are often point sources, which vary from light reflective particles to black carbon on snow. And also feedback mechanisms like deglaciation and sea ice change and three d…

Here's another way to put it: The "zero dimensional" model of CO2 is incredibly straightforward. You add CO2, temperature goes up. It's trivial and undeniable, and all by itself tracks fairly well with the observed warming.

Better modeling adds precision, and has been even more accurate, but is difficult for the non-expert to evaluate. It should be easy to trust its track record, but without that positive gut feeling I get from "We've been burning fossil fuels and it would be bizarre if the temperature didn't go up".

So I'm able to base my confidence in the models on a simpler model that I do understand. It's easy to accept that the existing additions (CFCs, methane, ocean currents, land, ice, etc) are valid (especially since they also track the data so well). But SO2 would be a brand-new variable, so I don't have as good an intuition.

I know it's not brand-new. As with CO2, the basic physics of SO2 are well understood, we've observed natural experiments with SO2 emission several times. It's definitely promising.

But I really want to see a full plan in place and become comfortable with it before we begin to rely on it. Because otherwise, having watched people deny that trivial, obvious stuff for ideological reasons, I expect them to seize on geoengineering as "stage 6 denialism": "It's real, it's our fault, it's not good, reducing CO2 would help, it's not too late... but only because somebody will dump SO2 into the atmosphere and so we should start all the coal factories up again".

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As it is" in this case is not static to time. It includes dynamics, values, relationships, and heuristics of evolution. What I find hard to understand is that you pit realism as the antonym of optimsim . The correct antonym is pessimism . Both optimism and pessimism are biases . Realism is the absense of bias.

I don't pit it as an antonym. I am simply responding to your claim that it's realism that moves things forward :) Realists are navigators, optimists are starters, pessimists are never-starters :) You need bias to move things forward.

The word you're looking for isn't "optimism", it's "hope".

That's perseverence without denial.

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#76
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who argue against nuclear while failing to acknowledge the issues of solar and wind, which are 10 times more problematic, can't be truthful. Unless we enter a _major_ era of degrowth there is no way we'll get out of fossil fuels without nuclear.

What are the 10x more problematic issues with solar and wind?

Briefly: solar and wind energy requires sun or wind and tons of space relative to fossil/nuclear. Not every place has those.

"A reality check on renewables" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0W1ZZYIV8o

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#77

Well hello Mr. Malthus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climat…

The limits to various forms of energy are well-known. It's a bit more than I can describe in an HN comment, though Tom "Do the Math" Murphy has a good guide, index to his posts here: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/ Heinberg himself has written of them in earlier books and articles. Essentially humans have access to the fluxes of solar, geothermal, and tidal energy, and the stores of fossil fuels, nuclear fissi…

"wave power (the latter is effectively nil) "

~30 terawatts, about double the electrical consumption of the whole planet, is effectively nil?

" [tidal is] slightly more viable than wave energy"

Why do you say this?

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't pit it as an antonym. I am simply responding to your claim that it's realism that moves things forward :) Realists are navigators, optimists are starters, pessimists are never-starters :) You need bias to move things forward.

The word you're looking for isn't "optimism", it's "hope". That's perseverence without denial.

no optimist have hope, you cant be a hope. I am perfectly aware of the words i use :)

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word you're looking for isn't "optimism", it's "hope". That's perseverence without denial.

no optimist have hope, you cant be a hope. I am perfectly aware of the words i use :)

The word describing someone having hope is hopeful.

Re: “Energy in the Future”: a time capsule of energy concerns from 1953

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no optimist have hope, you cant be a hope. I am perfectly aware of the words i use :)

The word describing someone having hope is hopeful .

Yes thats still not the same as a A realist, A pessimist or AN optimist.
Post reply on HN