At this point they are probably not bad, but all models have error bars.
That being said, we are just as likely to get it wrong on the optimistic side as on the pessimistic side.
I was totally converted on the cause of CO2 by Elon Musk's framing of the question (paraphrasing):
We have one planet that is naturally hospitable to human life and capable of sustaining it on large scale. Is it really a good idea to do an uncontrolled experiment in which we dump massive amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and hope it turns out okay? Maybe we'll get lucky and maybe we won't, but it seems like a crazy gamble.
It also frames it in a cost/benefit analysis where risk is figured as cost. If there were no alternative to fossil fuels then maybe it would be worth the risk, but with today's technology that is not the case. We have numerous alternatives, many of which are becoming price competitive.
> Could you, or someone, help me and contrast Musk's framing with the more traditional framing?
He is highlighting how foolish and headlong we have collectively been to simply assume that 'everything will be ok' while continuing to utilize the same wasteful habits with reckless abandon.
It's written with a clear tinge of irony, but essentially it is saying we're playing Russian Roulette with a nearly loaded gun with the only place we know this Solar System that is capable of maintaining Life, and a beautiful biodiverese one at that.
> Thanks I appreciate it. And how would you characterize/summarize the traditional framing?
Characterization: Apt.
Summary: It's written with a clear tinge of irony, but essentially it is saying we're playing Russian Roulette with a nearly loaded gun with the only place we know in this Solar System that is capable of maintaining Life, and a beautiful biodiverese one at that.
My opinion: Is that Humanity must re-structure it's value system in order to survive on this planet; for some the notion of reducing consumption is akin to death, but the idea of doing nothing and greenwashing (much like Tesla's business model to sell affluent people EVs alone will save the planet) is not enough as ecological collapse and extreme weather as result of climate change is happening before our eyes.
I read a few of your posts on cryptocurrency, and one of the reasons I as an environmentalist support Bitcoin is mainly because its is mainly using and thus incentivizing more renewable energy sources to be built.
It's hard to explain but I could intuit this tech had this potential if it were to live up to it's potential when I started to take it seriously ~10 years ago--this was even before the whole wasteful energy FUD as it was mainly done by solo miners with GPUs.
Alongside this was my time spent in sustainable, and regenerative Agriculture (biodynamic) with a major focus on hemp as a carbon sequestration solution to offset climate change as well as working in solar projects.
I'm not trying to sell you on the token, but merely explaining how all the moving parts work in tandem to create a viable solution to a much needed problem: people seldom consider the wasteful nature of the legacy banking system, but this can and should be included wen confronting the reality of the current state of affairs.
> Summary: It's written with a clear tinge of irony, but essentially it is saying we're playing Russian Roulette with a nearly loaded gun with the only place we know in this Solar System that is capable of maintaining Life, and a beautiful biodiverese one at that.
Thanks - and feel free to ignore if this is getting too tedious, but I feel like I may not be asking my question correctly, as the answer seems to be the same thing.
I'm starting from an inability to hear the key difference between Musk's framing of climate change and the traditional framing of climate change that is presented. To me what Musk said sounds no different that what I normally hear. Now since a number of people are saying that Musk's framing resonated with them while the traditional one didn't, I'm looking to understand how it differs from the traditional one.
And I appreciate your replies, but I keep seeing a summary of what Musk said (which is accurate and is also how I read it), but nothing on how people hear the traditional framing of climate change. To me the traditional framing is something like: "We only have one planet, let's stop destroying it before it's too late." To my ears those are essentially the same thing. Clearly I'm missing the difference, and I'm looking to hear how someone hears the traditional framing. And then specifically what about the traditional framing is missing.
I'm looking for a compare and contrast between A and B. And I do appreciate your replies, but unless I'm missing something, they seem like two summaries of A and no discussion of B. And not how B is different from A. Which is what I'm trying to parse out.
----------
Regarding crypto I do understand your thinking that it has potential to be beneficial. And clearly it's something you've spent a lot of time thinking about. The two concerns I have are this:
Crypto does have a high demand and growing demand for energy. That is mainly renewables. But to me,
The second part, is that the novel part of the ecosystem to me are programmatic contracts primarily. A distributed database second. 95% of the benefits of crypto for larger society boil down to programmatic contracts once you strip out the hype (and any speculation / get rich quick aspects). [To be very clear bitcoin price appreciation in itself is not a net benefit for society. But it is something that entices people to purchase and spread crypto which has properties that are a net benefit for society.]
If someone started from a goal of wanting smart contracts and possibly a distributed db they could come up with something significantly more energy efficient than crypto coin.
But back to the first part which is my primary concern and I ask you as someone who does care about this. I'm assuming the reason you want to swap to renewables is because it will produce a lot of solar and provide us with a renewable energy surplus. Clearly this would be a benefit to humanity. The question I ask you, is that Bitcoin (for example) and many others all scale with difficulty. Meaning the more energy available, the more power people will use for mining.
We will never have an energy surplus for the remaining future because any additional energy we add will now immediately be used for crypto to increase its difficulty. Solar could be an order of magnitude cheaper tomorrow, and as a result, people will just by 10x as much as they buy today. We won't get almost any surplus value from that hypothetical 10x surplus/improvement. Crypto will be an energy sink for society from now going forward. Do you see anything to contradict that? Because to me that is one of the largest flaws with the approach to crypto.
> I'm looking for a compare and contrast between A and B. And I do appreciate your replies, but unless I'm missing something, they seem like two summaries of A and no discussion of B. And not how B is different from A. Which is what I'm trying to parse out.
Influencer effect, I suppose?
Really, it's as you said: it's no different than what has been said by others. I supposed the caveat being that Elon is the darling of the tech World, particularly in the startup World with desires to replicate his success.
I mean even Al Gore was saying the same thing if you think about it, albeit with the typical limousine liberal behaviour where he was flying all over the World in his private jet (like Elon, btw) talking about the perils of Climate Change, or as it was referred to back then: Global Warming.
> Crypto does have a high demand and growing demand for energy. That is mainly renewables. But to me,
Was there a part to this that segues into the following part as I feel that was critical to what was followed wasn't entirely substantiated?
While I do not want to speak on behalf of anything other than Bitcoin, it must be said lot of cryptocurrencies are not based on a PoW system, but rather a PoS system, that doesn't require intense mining process that many of BTC's detractors point toward. Moreover, I think what is missing here is that the end (creating more renewable energy thus lessening the dependence of fossil fuels) is just being incentivized by the means (mining Bitcoin). We can sit here and debate if that's the best way, but I've been dissapointed with the Energy landscape for so long that I'll take the win how ever I can get it, and Bitcoin has and will likely continue to do so as it's no become institutional and mainstream.
I'm not advocating for a surplus since practical storage is not here just yet, check my recent post on why as CA has had to turn off it's solar production in Sept 21' because of a skweed economic disincentive, because the energy created could have been used for mining which then could be coupled with heat capturing processes to yield other desirable but energy intensive practices: greenhouse warming, nursing incubating, aqua culture etc... which would help make it carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative.
All of these things have been undertaken in some capacity in the BTC space, but clearly not enough since most of it was mined in China for most of it's history, I'm just saying that as it relocates to the West where it's more likely to occur is a net benefit.
Smart contracts are a 3 hour conversation for me: I spent time at a Megacorp as a dev and consultant being forced to use ETH and solidity when LN and RTSK are now far more capable of doing anything it could do on the most secure network.
And even as an advocate, I think it's only part of net benefit of Bitcoin's network: people simply don't seem to see the value of having an immutable pubic ledger that is backed by he most secure network man has ever devised yet.
Then you only understood a part of what he was trying to say, because CO2 is a necessary precursor for plant life and can be mitigated with rather effective methods which we fail to do at scale; what is a more critical green house gas (there are others like) is Methane, which is a natural byproduct from decomposing organic matter and has been sequestered and utilized for decades but due to short term thinking have been either allowed to dissipate into the atmosphere, or simply burned off as the costs to bring to market have been untenable.
Reducing consumption habits on all levels, applying more sustainable approaches to what must be consumed and the re-utilization of previous waste materials is the real take away here because short of that it doesn't make a difference to simply focus on C02. Which seems to be where most have been focused on, and despite being a fan of Tesla, and simply pivoting from one dirty industry to a slightly less dirty one is simply not enough--it's a step in the right direction but not a standalone solution.
Sidenote: There are more trees now in N. Hemisphere than there was 100 years ago [0], and with a superficial understanding of ecosystems the C02 levels were a non-trivial contributor for the plant life to do so alongside stricter regulation.
A friend who works in climate modeling recently told me that the best models currently in use pretty much all agree about the next few years, but they seriously diverge after a couple of decades because that's when the emergent effects we're worried about are predicted to show up. I'd caution against projecting the "We were right!" stance to the general public, since it breeds skepticism when some of the models inevitably turn out to be inaccurate. I think this kind of underreporting-of-uncertainty was the source of a lot of public distrust during COVID. The right approach to modeling -- creating multiple models and combining them to get mean and uncertainty estimates -- is what the modelers are doing, but I think it's important to do more nuanced reporting on what makes a climate model "correct" or "useful."
Unfortunately, ever since I discovered that the temperature record is itself the output of modelling, I can no longer have much confidence in climatologists asserting that they can or have successfully predicted temperatures. That's a neat trick if you're managing to predict actual observations or actual historical data. If what you're predicting is data that will soon have a new version issued to bring it in line with the predictions, that's much less impressive. Editing your data is meant to be taboo in science because once you open that Pandora's box it can rapidly lead to nonsensical outcomes, regardless of how well intentioned the 'fixes' might be. But climatology opened that box.
I only know one guy who's written in depth about this, Tony Heller. Here's one example article but click through the titles at the top and there are others. At some point I downloaded the raw data tables from a NASA (or was it NOAA? I forget) FTP site and re-ran one of his analyses, which was valid, so that increased my confidence in the graphs he presents.
He shows the data has been heavily altered in various ways. Sometimes he shows it by finding and downloading "raw" data tables and graphing them over the top of the publicly released graphs. Sometimes by searching newspaper or web archives for old temperature graphs and showing that the historical data in modern graphs has been altered vs what was once being published.
Very occasionally other people notice this too. Retraction Watch is a blog that normally just writes about retracted scientific papers but here they noticed that July was reported as the hottest on record, but that the same government agency had previously reported another record breaking temperature that was higher than July's:
How is it possible for a temperature to "break records" when it is lower than previously reported temperatures? NOAA explains:
"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values. These factors, together, mean that calculations from the past may be superseded by the most recent data and can affect the numbers reported in the monthly climate reports."
This is normal for climatology. When a new month's data is added they don't just append it to the prior data tables. They re-calculate every temperature in the dataset using the latest modelling software. Climatology, as a science, cannot actually tell us "how hot was it on this day 10 years ago" because there are many different answers.
This is already a terrible, terrible problem for their credibility. But the worst thing of all is that these adjustments are so large that they materially change the entire shape of the 20th century temperature history. Decades ago, global temperature graphs showed a long period of declines starting around WW2. Hence why global cooling was such a big topic in the 60s (incidentally, Heller's site shows ample archival evidence that this was indeed mainstream climatology back then). But if you look at modern temperature graphs, you cannot see any such decline. It's been erased from the historical record.
15 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 45.7 ms ] threadThat being said, we are just as likely to get it wrong on the optimistic side as on the pessimistic side.
I was totally converted on the cause of CO2 by Elon Musk's framing of the question (paraphrasing):
We have one planet that is naturally hospitable to human life and capable of sustaining it on large scale. Is it really a good idea to do an uncontrolled experiment in which we dump massive amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and hope it turns out okay? Maybe we'll get lucky and maybe we won't, but it seems like a crazy gamble.
For me it is about insurance and avoiding a possible catastrophic outcome.
That makes it a risk we are not required to take.
Could you, or someone, help me and contrast Musk's framing with the more traditional framing?
He is highlighting how foolish and headlong we have collectively been to simply assume that 'everything will be ok' while continuing to utilize the same wasteful habits with reckless abandon.
It's written with a clear tinge of irony, but essentially it is saying we're playing Russian Roulette with a nearly loaded gun with the only place we know this Solar System that is capable of maintaining Life, and a beautiful biodiverese one at that.
Characterization: Apt.
Summary: It's written with a clear tinge of irony, but essentially it is saying we're playing Russian Roulette with a nearly loaded gun with the only place we know in this Solar System that is capable of maintaining Life, and a beautiful biodiverese one at that.
My opinion: Is that Humanity must re-structure it's value system in order to survive on this planet; for some the notion of reducing consumption is akin to death, but the idea of doing nothing and greenwashing (much like Tesla's business model to sell affluent people EVs alone will save the planet) is not enough as ecological collapse and extreme weather as result of climate change is happening before our eyes.
I read a few of your posts on cryptocurrency, and one of the reasons I as an environmentalist support Bitcoin is mainly because its is mainly using and thus incentivizing more renewable energy sources to be built.
It's hard to explain but I could intuit this tech had this potential if it were to live up to it's potential when I started to take it seriously ~10 years ago--this was even before the whole wasteful energy FUD as it was mainly done by solo miners with GPUs.
Alongside this was my time spent in sustainable, and regenerative Agriculture (biodynamic) with a major focus on hemp as a carbon sequestration solution to offset climate change as well as working in solar projects.
I'm not trying to sell you on the token, but merely explaining how all the moving parts work in tandem to create a viable solution to a much needed problem: people seldom consider the wasteful nature of the legacy banking system, but this can and should be included wen confronting the reality of the current state of affairs.
Thanks - and feel free to ignore if this is getting too tedious, but I feel like I may not be asking my question correctly, as the answer seems to be the same thing.
I'm starting from an inability to hear the key difference between Musk's framing of climate change and the traditional framing of climate change that is presented. To me what Musk said sounds no different that what I normally hear. Now since a number of people are saying that Musk's framing resonated with them while the traditional one didn't, I'm looking to understand how it differs from the traditional one.
And I appreciate your replies, but I keep seeing a summary of what Musk said (which is accurate and is also how I read it), but nothing on how people hear the traditional framing of climate change. To me the traditional framing is something like: "We only have one planet, let's stop destroying it before it's too late." To my ears those are essentially the same thing. Clearly I'm missing the difference, and I'm looking to hear how someone hears the traditional framing. And then specifically what about the traditional framing is missing.
I'm looking for a compare and contrast between A and B. And I do appreciate your replies, but unless I'm missing something, they seem like two summaries of A and no discussion of B. And not how B is different from A. Which is what I'm trying to parse out.
----------
Regarding crypto I do understand your thinking that it has potential to be beneficial. And clearly it's something you've spent a lot of time thinking about. The two concerns I have are this:
Crypto does have a high demand and growing demand for energy. That is mainly renewables. But to me,
The second part, is that the novel part of the ecosystem to me are programmatic contracts primarily. A distributed database second. 95% of the benefits of crypto for larger society boil down to programmatic contracts once you strip out the hype (and any speculation / get rich quick aspects). [To be very clear bitcoin price appreciation in itself is not a net benefit for society. But it is something that entices people to purchase and spread crypto which has properties that are a net benefit for society.]
If someone started from a goal of wanting smart contracts and possibly a distributed db they could come up with something significantly more energy efficient than crypto coin.
But back to the first part which is my primary concern and I ask you as someone who does care about this. I'm assuming the reason you want to swap to renewables is because it will produce a lot of solar and provide us with a renewable energy surplus. Clearly this would be a benefit to humanity. The question I ask you, is that Bitcoin (for example) and many others all scale with difficulty. Meaning the more energy available, the more power people will use for mining.
We will never have an energy surplus for the remaining future because any additional energy we add will now immediately be used for crypto to increase its difficulty. Solar could be an order of magnitude cheaper tomorrow, and as a result, people will just by 10x as much as they buy today. We won't get almost any surplus value from that hypothetical 10x surplus/improvement. Crypto will be an energy sink for society from now going forward. Do you see anything to contradict that? Because to me that is one of the largest flaws with the approach to crypto.
Influencer effect, I suppose?
Really, it's as you said: it's no different than what has been said by others. I supposed the caveat being that Elon is the darling of the tech World, particularly in the startup World with desires to replicate his success.
I mean even Al Gore was saying the same thing if you think about it, albeit with the typical limousine liberal behaviour where he was flying all over the World in his private jet (like Elon, btw) talking about the perils of Climate Change, or as it was referred to back then: Global Warming.
> Crypto does have a high demand and growing demand for energy. That is mainly renewables. But to me,
Was there a part to this that segues into the following part as I feel that was critical to what was followed wasn't entirely substantiated?
While I do not want to speak on behalf of anything other than Bitcoin, it must be said lot of cryptocurrencies are not based on a PoW system, but rather a PoS system, that doesn't require intense mining process that many of BTC's detractors point toward. Moreover, I think what is missing here is that the end (creating more renewable energy thus lessening the dependence of fossil fuels) is just being incentivized by the means (mining Bitcoin). We can sit here and debate if that's the best way, but I've been dissapointed with the Energy landscape for so long that I'll take the win how ever I can get it, and Bitcoin has and will likely continue to do so as it's no become institutional and mainstream.
I'm not advocating for a surplus since practical storage is not here just yet, check my recent post on why as CA has had to turn off it's solar production in Sept 21' because of a skweed economic disincentive, because the energy created could have been used for mining which then could be coupled with heat capturing processes to yield other desirable but energy intensive practices: greenhouse warming, nursing incubating, aqua culture etc... which would help make it carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative.
All of these things have been undertaken in some capacity in the BTC space, but clearly not enough since most of it was mined in China for most of it's history, I'm just saying that as it relocates to the West where it's more likely to occur is a net benefit.
Smart contracts are a 3 hour conversation for me: I spent time at a Megacorp as a dev and consultant being forced to use ETH and solidity when LN and RTSK are now far more capable of doing anything it could do on the most secure network.
And even as an advocate, I think it's only part of net benefit of Bitcoin's network: people simply don't seem to see the value of having an immutable pubic ledger that is backed by he most secure network man has ever devised yet.
We'll get there.
Then you only understood a part of what he was trying to say, because CO2 is a necessary precursor for plant life and can be mitigated with rather effective methods which we fail to do at scale; what is a more critical green house gas (there are others like) is Methane, which is a natural byproduct from decomposing organic matter and has been sequestered and utilized for decades but due to short term thinking have been either allowed to dissipate into the atmosphere, or simply burned off as the costs to bring to market have been untenable.
Reducing consumption habits on all levels, applying more sustainable approaches to what must be consumed and the re-utilization of previous waste materials is the real take away here because short of that it doesn't make a difference to simply focus on C02. Which seems to be where most have been focused on, and despite being a fan of Tesla, and simply pivoting from one dirty industry to a slightly less dirty one is simply not enough--it's a step in the right direction but not a standalone solution.
Sidenote: There are more trees now in N. Hemisphere than there was 100 years ago [0], and with a superficial understanding of ecosystems the C02 levels were a non-trivial contributor for the plant life to do so alongside stricter regulation.
0: https://www.gotreequotes.com/how-many-trees-in-world/
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-tempera...
He shows the data has been heavily altered in various ways. Sometimes he shows it by finding and downloading "raw" data tables and graphing them over the top of the publicly released graphs. Sometimes by searching newspaper or web archives for old temperature graphs and showing that the historical data in modern graphs has been altered vs what was once being published.
Very occasionally other people notice this too. Retraction Watch is a blog that normally just writes about retracted scientific papers but here they noticed that July was reported as the hottest on record, but that the same government agency had previously reported another record breaking temperature that was higher than July's:
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
How is it possible for a temperature to "break records" when it is lower than previously reported temperatures? NOAA explains:
"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values. These factors, together, mean that calculations from the past may be superseded by the most recent data and can affect the numbers reported in the monthly climate reports."
This is normal for climatology. When a new month's data is added they don't just append it to the prior data tables. They re-calculate every temperature in the dataset using the latest modelling software. Climatology, as a science, cannot actually tell us "how hot was it on this day 10 years ago" because there are many different answers.
This is already a terrible, terrible problem for their credibility. But the worst thing of all is that these adjustments are so large that they materially change the entire shape of the 20th century temperature history. Decades ago, global temperature graphs showed a long period of declines starting around WW2. Hence why global cooling was such a big topic in the 60s (incidentally, Heller's site shows ample archival evidence that this was indeed mainstream climatology back then). But if you look at modern temperature graphs, you cannot see any such decline. It's been erased from the historical record.