By women of color do you mean African Americans? Soul food is notoriously unhealthy and probably why Black Women are the most obese demographic in America. Changing diet would absolutely be necessary, though the deeper problem is their surrounding cultural norms.
Climate is the premier example of a non-linear chaotic system, as evoked with the butterfly effect and unreliability of weather forecasts more than a week out. Making predictions of the far future state of chaotic systems is obviously going to have wide error bars. In just the past couple thousand years there has been significant climate change with little ice ages and warm periods. Notably, the colder climates have generally been far more destructive to civilization than the warm periods.
A sober approach would weigh the pros and cons of climate change and cost benefit analyses of the various mitigation strategies. Climate alarmists advocate degrowth in the extreme, or spending many trillions on intermittent energy sources and impractical energy storage systems. This would obviously reduce human well-being as energy consumption per capita is tightly correlated with standards of living. The costs of climate change are still unknown, and it could very well be the case that higher CO2 levels do not increase global temperatures to catastrophic levels, as evident with life thriving during the Carboniferous Era. Increasing CO2 levels would also be beneficial due to the CO2 fertilization effect, effectively greening the Earth, while also increasing agricultural yields as observed in greenhouses. And if temperatures rise too much then stratospheric aerosol injection is always an option. Calcium carbonate could be a good alternative to sulfur dioxide since it doesn't react with ozone, and cooling the Earth is estimated to cost only a few billion a year.
Obviously energy independence and ecological preservation should still be pursued for their own sake. Yet we should be careful of succumbing to hysteria and malinvestment.
Are global climate trends a non-linear, chaotic system the way short term local weather is? If not this sounds intentionally misleading.
I don't like to feed the trolls usually but I found it entertaining to see you mix and match a "be reasonable" tone with bonkers suggestions and irresponsible "just buy your way out of it later" proposals. In particular I laughed out loud when you handwaved away catastrophic temperature changes because we could try to intentionally change the climate by injecting aerosols. I guess that unpredictable, chaotic system is totally predictable when it supports the (in)action you prefer?
> And if temperatures rise too much then stratospheric aerosol injection is always an option.
I also find it interesting that climate change has taken the role of eschatology for an increasingly secular society, and I say this as an atheist. The industrial revolution acts as original sin, mother nature will give us her final judgment, we must all atone by buying climate pledge products from Amazon, etc. Western secular liberals don't realize how religious they actually are.
We've observed the immediate effects of stratospheric aerosols in living history, as with volcanic eruptions and forest fires reducing temperatures significantly. We don't know their long term effects, though most aerosols only stay suspended in the atmosphere for a limited time. CO2 is a much less powerful greenhouse gas in absolute magnitude than aerosols are anti-greenhouse gases, so we don't need long range modelling to understand they can cool the Earth in the short term.
My point is that mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection would be far more effective in the worst case climate scenarios than trying to spend many trillions on direct air capture of CO2, intermittent energy sources, grid scale batteries, punitive regulations, etc. I also find it interesting that all the elites seem to relish in the climate change narrative, they bring Greta Thunberg to admonish them, they fly their private jets to the conferences, still own their beach front properties. Revealed preferences would suggest they don't actually believe it to be that big an issue, and that it's more likely yet another scheme for increasing their power and extracting wealth from the public.
There will always billions in losses from something, especially when global wealth is estimated to be around 450 trillion. The Dust Bowl was a disastrous incident of climate change, yet it didn't occur because of CO2. The damage caused by the California Wildfires are just as much a function of expanding developments into forests, immediately putting out small fires leading to the accumulation of fuel over time, and opposition to controlled burns. Property damage and deaths from flooding are mostly a function of population growth in the developing world, without sufficient corresponding investment in water management infrastructure.
Regarding the solution, stratospheric aerosol injection would be the most immediate and effective solution to rising temperatures. It's been estimated that current increases in CO2 have a radiative forcing effect of about 2 watts per square meter, compared to the total solar irradiance of 1361 W/m2. If CO2 levels doubled to 800 ppm then it's estimated this would have a radiative forcing effect of 6 W/m2. This scenario would require mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection to reduce solar irradiance by about 0.4%. In the context of plant growth this reduction in sunlight would be negligible given that photosynthesis is only 1 to 2% efficient. If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% due to the CO2 fertilization effect at 800ppm.
I'd be curious to see the science on enhanced plant growth; my understanding is that the benefits of increased CO2 fade very quickly. I believe we can already see plant pores evolving to be smaller as they were in previous times when the Earth had greater CO2 levels.
About the only thing that gives me hope is SRM, but it's a half-assed solution at best. A world with 800ppm CO2 and a dimmed sun via aerosols is not the Earth that I was born to; it is probably not possible to fully understand the affects.
There is no perfect solution. One of the benefits of stratospheric aerosols is that they only stay suspended for 10 years or so, reducing the risk of long term effects. They are also an exceptionally cheap strategy, on the order of a few billion a year to cool the entire Earth. Compare that with the many trillions needed to just get to carbon neutral, while significantly reducing economic growth and living standards.
The world we were born into will not exist in any scenario. As they saying goes, you never step in the same river twice. CO2 emissions show no sign of decreasing, especially as China, India and Africa continue developing. Furthermore, we are on the cusp of AGI within the next decade or so, which will radically change reality far more than the Earth possibly getting a bit warmer in a 100 years or so. The IPCC does not even predict major cataclysm, and expects only sea level rise of a couple feet in the worst case scenario.
Seems plausible at least, and you are of course correct about the world; the CO2 level of the atmosphere when I was born was well below 400 and we'll not see that again as long as I live. That's what I tell those who respond viscerally to the idea of messing about with the atmosphere purposefully - we are already altering it regardless.
And then we have to do it again, and again, and again; once you grab that tiger's tail, there is no letting go. In the meantime, sense of urgency abated, we would most likely keep on burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, locking ourselves further into the loop.
It is a terrible idea which will almost certainly happen.
Entropy is inexorable and must always be resisted. Humans need to drink water and eat food, again, and again, and again. Unimaginable amounts of time, effort, and resources are spent every day maintaining civilization. If we build out solar panels, we will have to replace them in 20 years. There is no free lunch.
We don't know how bad the climate will be at 800 ppm. 300 millions years ago, during the Carboniferous era, there were vast forests and very high CO2 levels, around 1000 to 5000 ppm. If the Earth gets too hot we will simply do stratospheric aerosol injection. If climate change turns out to be overhyped, then we get the CO2 fertilization boost for free, win-win.
Regardless, the real solution is next level energy production from advanced fission, deep geothermal, and ultimately fusion power. With a vast surplus of energy we could do wildly impractical things like filter sea water for gold, and of course extract extremely diffuse gases from the atmosphere. Renewable energies are very low energy density, and more akin to farming from a physics perspective. They make sense in certain situations, but are not reliable for powering an advanced industrial civilization.
I also suspect people's intuitions are out of perspective in terms of time scales. It seems likely AGI will arise within the next 20 years. Climate change is nothing compared to the singularity and rise of superintelligence.
Calcium carbonate aerosols are proposed as a good alternative to sulfur dioxide since they are basic and do not react with ozone. Calcium carbonate is used an additive to soils to reduce acidity and is used by organisms to construct bone tissues. Furthermore, these aerosols would be extremely diffuse. It's estimated that we'd need 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year to reduce temperatures by 1 degree centrigrade. Assuming we need 10 million tons of calcium carbonate that eventually descends to the Earth, that would come out to be 0.0196g per square meter. Effectively negligible, and may even be beneficial for areas that have slightly acidic rains.
> If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50%
If that’s true, there should be global evidence of this happening already- are you aware of any publications confirming this effect?
You say accelerated growth like it’d be a good thing, but I don’t think we should wish for it or expect that to mitigate any damage… getting to the point of doubled CO2 would probably be extremely bad. If CO2 levels doubled, we’d for sure lose significant amount of our ice sheets, and some coastal cities along with it. Some of that is already happening anyway, but tripling the radiative effect will make it go much faster and much farther. As it stands, any increase in plant growth isn’t in any way making up for the rate we’re cutting down and paving over all the plants, and it’s not clear that 10 to 50% accelerated plant growth would make up for it either… even assuming that accelerated plant growth actually leads to more plants and a greater volume of oxygen cycle, and not just earlier blooms.
"From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25."
Interesting observation: Trillions of dollars have been spent to date on emission reduction with many incurring a consequent lowering of quality of life. Some would say this is inevitable but better to survive than the alternative. To date (as far as I can tell) there has been no discernible reduction in the rate of increase in CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa station. When will this paramount metric relate to measures taken? Any guesses?
"The beneficial impacts of carbon dioxide on plants may also be limited, said co-author Dr. Philippe Ciais, associate director of the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Gif-suv-Yvette, France. “Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time."
The beneficial effects of increased CO2 will also be more than counteracted by other problems as the world temperature rises, such as greater heat stress and lower soil moisture.
> Trillions of dollars have been spent to date on emission reduction with many incurring a consequent lowering of quality of life
It's cheaper to avoid the warming in the first place rather than deal with the consequences, so complaining about the cost is a false economy.
> To date (as far as I can tell) there has been no discernible reduction in the rate of increase in CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa station
It's possible that we've reached peak CO2 emissions:
Are you suggesting that trying to reduce CO2 isn’t worth it? What alternative are you proposing? What lowering of quality of life are you referring to? How do you know what Mauna Loa would have measured without the efforts to date? And what is the expected delay between CO2 reduction and effect?
The users of BTC also pay for that electricity consumption, and value is derived from having a ledger that is not controlled by any government. Building out clean energy sources is the real solution like nuclear, deep geothermal, solar, wind, etc.
POS has it's own issues with requiring massive investments to even participate which just further rewards already rich participants more because those are the only people who can afford to lock up nearly 100k in USD to get rewards under POS.
Until we have >100% renewable all the time all the extra energy used by BTC only causes more CO2 positive sources to produce energy, if miners weren't using that electricity we'd be closer to full renewable energy today already.
The actual value of the existence for the sake of having an alternative 'currency' is also highly suspect to me as the deflationary endgame of BTC is very bad for people hwo are day to day spending most of their income. Deflation is great if you got in early and have large reserves you can sit on but for most people who would earn and spend in BTC mostly deflation is terrible. There's good reasons we moved away from the gold standard which BTC tries to recreate in digital form.
Current nuclear fission reactors can safely and reliably supply all our electricity needs. France rapidly built out their nuclear fleet in response to the 1973 oil crisis, achieving more than 70% of their electricity generation within 20 years. If the political will is there, it can be done.
The problem is that Western elites are corrupt and incompetent. They foolishly outsourced their manufacturing to a rival nation, which is now the rising superpower. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors and spent hundreds of billions on solar, while their manufacturing sector implodes from high electricity prices.
Corporate elites are increasingly extractive as exemplified by rising wealth gap, housing / healthcare / education costs, enshittification of internet platforms, etc. Any narrative which justifies price increases is gleefully propagated by the media hegemons. Climate change is used to markup prices on everything so consumers can feel self-righteous paying through the nose. Yet none of this will make a difference. China, India, and Africa will continue burning the cheapest fuels available to support their development.
Exactly. In San Diego the peak electricity price is $0.75/kWH, the highest in the continental USA. There is literally a functional nuclear reactor sitting idle a few miles north at San Onofre, and NIMBYs oppose nearly everything all new construction and upzoning.
California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.
A nuclear plant will earn money based on wholesale prices, not retail prices, and certainly not one-time peak retail prices. Wholesale prices are much lower. Note that for much of the day it's around $0.04/kWh. Batteries will reduce the evening peak.
One party rule is almost never a good thing over the long run as politicians tend to become more self-serving and corrupt the longer they don't have to worry about being held accountable to voters. Instead they worry more about being accountable to their party leaders and funders who try to maintain the status-quo. Not sure the duopoly we have in the USA is preferable compared to say a robust democracy with smaller parties forming coalitions.
Take 30-60 minutes and read up on ranked choice voting, if you aren't familiar. I talk to a lot of people about it and the idea that we can vote any other way seems foreign to most.
It won't instantly change the world, but it will allow people to vote their true conscience vs. strategic voting, and allows smaller parties a chance at real power.
> The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.
Seattle voted the two progressives on city council out (and Sawant retired) some time ago, homelessness has gone nowhere but worse since then. Like clockwork, we're adding another ~1000 street homeless/year.
As it turns out, the opposite-of-progressives don't have a solution for it either. Which isn't surprising, since they've held most of the council seats and the mayor's office for decades, it's just that now they don't have a progressive boogieman to blame for their failures. Meanwhile, Broadway and Pike and Denny and Pine look worse than they ever have, and so do the streets surrounding them.
It's almost like homelessness is an emergent property of a housing shortage.
What is the current composition of the city council? Are any of the members actually conservative, or just not-progressive? Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
The council shifted hard-right last election, and Bruce Harrell (former council chairman and career politician who has blamed everyone but himself for the city's failures in years past) has a full slate supporting him.
The slate's politics seems to be pro-out-of-state-business/landlord/police, anti-density, anti-pedestrian, anti-homeless NIMBYism. Politically positioned as the common-sense solution to the insane progressive politics that have been ruining the city.
The metrics aren't exactly on their side. SPD continues to be an incredible combination of overpaid, unaccountable, incapable of hiring, useless, and actively dangerous to the public, the homeless numbers keep growing, rents and cost of living are rising, and the council is doing everything it can to stonewall the state's efforts to solving the housing crisis in the city.
> Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
It might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of highly paid people moving into an area which didn't build enough housing units to support them, thus displacing tens of thousands of people out of the margins and onto the street.
It probably didn't have as much to do with (a loud) minority of progressives that were on the council as we've been told.
I've only got a child's grasp of free market economics (and of musical chairs), but this seems to be the most predictable outcome of that sort of thing. When the number of people in an area exceeds the number of beds, some of those people will eventually be sleeping in tents.
The idea that the homeless are residents who have now been displaced is a misnomer, especially in Seattle. Seattle has abundant housing and welfare choices and very loose enforcement of any laws. Up north you can get a govt provided tiny home with high speed internet, if one were to choose to leave the streets.
Seattle has five-year waiting lists[1] for low-income housing, and practically no housing options for someone who is actually broke and homeless, even if they don't have an addiction.
It has some shelters, but shelters aren't housing. A shelter is a place you can (sometimes) sleep, it's not a place you can live in. And it doesn't have 9,000 empty shelter beds, to house all the street homeless, either.
You know where has abundant housing? NYC. A city with 10 times the population, but half the street homeless. Because the rest are housed. (A foreign concept to this city.)
It is in New York, and NYC doesn't look like shit thanks to it.
But sure, I guess you like seeing thousands of street homeless all day, every day.[1] Because that's what you'd get, even if they were all sheltered (which Seattle won't do, either).
P.S. It damn well is the public's responsibility when public policies create the housing crisis.
[1] Which certainly put you in opposition to the expressed preferences of this entire city.
Please name someone who is remotely close to Ronald Reagan's politics and who is in charge in California. The left is in charge. They have a supermajority.
Nixon loved big government -- two of the federal programs most despised -- the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and Title which guaranteed equal educational opportunities for women. Nixon increased Social Security Benefits, proposed making more people eligible for welfare, and offered a plan for universal health care. Nixon's Detente sought to scale back or arms race with the Soviets. Nixon was quite liberal by current standards.
Corporations conspiring to kill not just one but several undesirable employees is very rare. Actually, I don't really know of any other example.
And here it also doesn't make any sense; the cat is out of the bag, there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck. Killing anyone doesn't really make much difference.
"Surely it can't be coincidence", "corporations conspire", and vague references to "military industrial complex" are exceedingly poor arguments – actually they're not really arguments at all because you can say that sort of thing about almost anything.
> there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck
We know about the results, when doors blow off and tires fall off. You don’t need a whistleblower to tell you that.
We know less about what’s happening internally. I think the relevant information is the extent to which Boeing knew about problems and what they did with that information.
That's literally what both of these guys already made public at different times about different facilities. Is there reason to think they had additional information that they just decided not to share?
> And here it also doesn't make any sense; the cat is out of the bag, there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck
Executives are the ones that have motivations, not the abstract entity of Corporation.
'Cat out of the bag' would be 'we have specific evidence that allows us to prosecute a specific executive for criminal negligence or manslaughter'. That would be why you might kill someone, to save your own skin.
'Cat out of the bag' would be 'we have specific evidence that allows us to prosecute a specific executive for criminal negligence or manslaughter'. That would be why you might kill someone, to save your own skin.
Is there any reason to believe that either one of these men had any such evidence and had thus far not shared it?
Yes, things seen in Netflix never happen in this pure and innocent world.
Presidents are not assasinated, blackmail doesn't happen, whistleblowers are not hunted, persecuted and murders, union leaders aren't targetted, hush money are never involved, corporations don't lie and cover up crimes, the head of FBI never kept tabs on politicians and public figures for blackmail, prior-presidents never pay hush money to hookers or do shady business dealings, running-presidents and their sons never get bribed to promote business deals or cover up corruption, and nice sinecures on corporate boards never await ex-presidents and prominent politicians who catered to those corporations during their time in office.
No you don't know of any other companies doing this. Nobody does. And in a few years, nobody will even remember this either. Whistle blowers, or witnesses, against powerful interests have this habit of constantly dying in really exceptional circumstances. And there's never any proof available that it was anything other than just extremely rare events, happening constantly, and in a very small population of people. Go figure.
The reason groups want to get rid of whistle blowers is two-fold. The first is to try to prevent on record testimony. But the second is to intimidate other whistle blowers. If you see some funkiness, even the sort leading to deaths, going on at Boeing right now, you're going to be thinking long and hard about these 'mysterious deaths.'
There is almost certainly no crime these whistleblowers are going to uncover that is worse than ordering a hit. Besides, I can't think of any crime more likely to fail, be a sting, or have monstrous blowback.
The reality is that the top brass are NEVER held accountable for the kind of mistakes Boeing has been making. Even when it leads to deaths, the worst one of these guys can expect is to resign with only a 15 million dollar parachute.
I often use ChatGPT4 for technical info. It's easier then scrolling through pages whet it works. But.. the accuracy is inconsistent, to put it mildly. Sometimes it gets stuck on wrong idea.
Interesting how far LLMs can get? Looks like we are close to scale-up limit. It's technically difficult to get bigger models. The way to go probably is to add assisting sub-modules. Examples would be web search, have it already. Database of facts, similar to search. Compilers, image analyzers, etc. With this approach LLM is only responsible for generic decisions and doesn't need to be that big. No need to memorize all data. Even logic can be partially outsourced to sub-module.
China certainly would win from America going into civil war.
It would be wise for American elites to focus on fixing the causes of unrest, but instead they use corporate media to blame the people for their distrust of the establishment.
Interestingly, the same corporate media pushed the narrative that the George Floyd riots were about police brutality. This is only true in a facile sense, the video was the catalyst. The major causes were intense psychological stress from unprecedented lockdowns, economic implosion, and incessant fear of the virus. In a form of ideological judo they redirected all the anger and angst that had been building up towards a scapegoat. A classic trick rulers use on the ruled.
That particular plot point is about denying all solar energy to the machines. Needless to say it's a fictional movie and more serious calculations should motivate our analyses.
It's been estimated that current increases in CO2 have a radiative forcing effect of about 2 watts per square meter, compared to the total solar irradiance of 1361 W/m2. If CO2 levels doubled to 800 ppm then it's estimated this would have a radiative forcing effect of 6 W/m2. This scenario would require mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection to reduce solar irradiance by about 0.4%. In the context of plant growth this reduction in sunlight would be negligible given that photosynthesis is only 1 to 2% efficient. If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% due to the CO2 fertilization effect at 800ppm.
The alternatives consist of completely replacing all energy infrastructure, which will cost trillions of dollars and significantly reduce economic growth. We can already see the negative effects of these policies in Europe, such as Germany which irrationally shut down their nuclear reactors, pushed the deployment of solar, while ultimately relying on Russian natural gas. They now burn more coal than they did before, and risk deindustrializing due to high energy costs. This is an epic strategic blunder since China, India, and Africa will continue burning hydrocarbons irrespective of the West's economic self-sabotage.
There's also no realistic way to extract the amount of CO2 that's been emitted into the atmosphere. Simple thermodynamics would have us expend far more energy than we cumulatively gained from burning hydrocarbons since the industrial revolution to extract such an extremely diffuse gas from the atmosphere.
