Wow, read Gaia (1979) in my teens, soon after it came out, triggered I think by a Horizon programme (BBC science series, still going-ish). Definitely made an impression.
Likewise. Lovelock shaped my approach to science as he was an independent worker in his field and that resonated with me when I read for my own science degree. I find Gaia compelling and beautiful. Sad day. BBC documentary;
I find the debate over nuclear energy an interesting topic. From the information and evidence provided by the Environmentalists for Nuclear [1], from which Loelock was a member, I find it hard to understand why there's still so much opposition to nuclear energy. I'm not sure if I'm missing something (I'm open minded for valid arguments/evidence on either side) or if it's just that lobby and disinformation campaigns to preserve the status quo in favor of fossil fuel companies are really effective in turning the masses against nuclear energy (which would be very sad with respect to our potential to evolve as a civilization).
I think it's mostly down to Chernobyl and the cold war. Speaking to people in their 60's (anecdotally) they seem to overestimate the risks of nuclear power and underestimate climate change. This is probably because there's such strong visual evidence for problems with the former.
I'd also say that fossil fuels are very simple to understand; burn thing, generate power. Nuclear is much more 'magic'. And I don't doubt that the fossil fuel lobby is drastically larger than the nuclear power one, just so much more money in it
I think one basic argument against nuclear is that it can't produce energy as cheaply as renewables (and nuclear energy is getting more expensive while renewables are getting cheaper).
If we had decided to invest heavily in nuclear 20 years ago, we might not be in the mess we're in now, but it's probably too late for nuclear to help now. Look at Flamanville unit 3, for example. They started building it in 2007, and it still isn't producing power (in fact just this year they announced more delays to its start date).
Even if we abandoned all concerns about where they were built, and started building a load of them today, they probably wouldn't all be ready until after 2040 because there probably isn't enough spare capacity in skilled nuclear engineers to parallelise their production. By that time, batteries and power-to-gas could be cheaply supplying reliable energy to a grid that's over-provisioned with renewables, without having to worry about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years or proliferation risks.
Except we have been saying the same thing for 20-30 years. And when you actually look at the costs of wind/solar (although maybe solar thermal might be useful, but for various reasons its been abandoned) they aren't as cheap as the cost to install them because they have external costs which never get accounted for. Starting with the fact that the cheapest way to build them is to build a KW of wind/solar and match it with a KW of natural gas.
When you start looking at overbuilding them to supply some kind of energy storage, or to meet even their nameplate capacity 100% of the time on average they suddenly become a lot more expensive. I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies of how much it actually costs to build a KW of energy using particular technologies in various countries, and it turns out that those numbers, can be summarized as: Nuke plants are expensive because we want them to be, they aren't as expensive in countries (South Korea, China, etc) where random people don't (or cant) sue to stop construction even when the reactors are the exact same technology being proposed in the US/Europe (because they parent company doing the design and construction is frequently US/European)
Followed by, wind farm's aren't cheap, and the prices only go up when you start talking about offshore and on the tops of mountain ranges.
So, its no surprise that people who just want cheap energy will continue to pick carbon sources.
Some people look at this differently, There are fundamental laws around energy density which tend to inform the economics (aka dig a ton a uranium and process it, or dig 10T to extract Neodymium, Lithium, etc and then built something that has 1/1000000th the energy density).
So, one can claim wind/solar are cheaper and getting cheaper, but its like comparing apples to oranges, there is a reason places like TX, which have a world leading level of wind installed, also have some of the dirtiest power around.
Sorta the computer equivalent of building ones datacenter around the raw price/perf of a given CPU/SoC, while ignoring every other variable. Then wondering why the HW ends up costing more per unit perf (cause maybe the motherboards cost more) and why the energy bill is eating your lunch (cause the cores are running at some extreme clock rate, and burning power).
Finally, to summarize, you simply cannot hand wave the largest problem with wind/solar away, which is the fact that they are not on demand dispatchable. To get reliable power of of them easily adds a good 10x cost multiplier or more if your not willing to use a carbon source as a backup. So, basically standing around yelling wind and solar, is the same as asking for more carbon. And using wind+solar+NG is cleaner than just NG along, but it actually costs just as much as Nukes built in countries without regulatory bodies setup to stop the construction of Nuke plants. Despite the fact that even plants built 50 years ago are the safest form of energy production in existence (safer than wind for sure) when measured by deaths per MWh.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme811/node/682 “Minus field losses, the typical average overall efficiency of solar trough thermal plants is around 15-20%”. Your first sentence has an implicit contradiction! PV has efficiency of say 20%. I get that you are thinking about thermal storage, but the only sensible argument is overall economic costs, which you seem to be explicitly arguing against.
> I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies
If you have links explaining your position, I think always add them.
I strongly suspect you are mistaken in your reasoning about why you are getting downvoted. I’m not sure how to help you correctly guess why people downvote (sometimes their reasons are opaque), but I can tell you my own in this case:
I think your core point is interesting. However overall your comment across to me as waffling and mixing in opinionated misinformation and fact. Perhaps make one major point, with a modicum of supporting information. Avoid random tangents. Your comment here in particular appears to me to be mish-mashing implicit economic arguments with other issues.
Less efficient yes in absolute production, but solves the majority of the storage problem. Which is a huge problem, one that most people are ignoring, and many of the storage solutions lower PV efficiency as much or more.
Here are a couple links from my comment history, the first is a comparison of KW costs, and the second is an overview of what the Chinese are doing.
I've repeatedly posted hard facts on this board and few people bother to do much research at all, overwhelmingly posting puff pieces and data which is obviously wrong (aka nameplate install/$, average capacity factors (because average doesn't tell you the worse case, which is required for a reliable grid)) and a bunch of other things that get hand waved away by "renewable" supporters, like the fact that in most places with a lot of "renewables" its actually 50+ year old hydro and not wind/solar providing the energy. Or that places with a lot of wind/solar are basically green washing their natural gas usage (like Germans are suddenly discovering).
edit: And to be clear, did you down vote the parent comment too, which states as fact something that is provably wrong (that nukes are more expensive than wind/solar, note the vox article which points out they were cheaper than natural gas plants at one point.), but commonly accepted, or did you let your own personal bias decide the misinformation he was repeating sounded correct?
"A total of 97.4% of gross energy consumption came from renewables, a rise of 8% on the year before."
"Of the Scottish Government’s renewable electricity target for 2015-2020, onshore wind accounted for 60.3% of the total, offshore wind 10.7%, and renewable hydro 18.1%, with other sources making up 8.3%."
> And when you actually look at the costs of wind/solar (although maybe solar thermal might be useful, but for various reasons its been abandoned) they aren't as cheap as the cost to install them because they have external costs which never get accounted for.
They do get accounted for. One can explicitly account for them by running simulations, using actual weather data, to see how much of those external things would be needed.
If you do that, you discover nuclear isn't going to be cheaper in most places now. That natural gas is currently being used to fill in around renewables does not challenge this point.
Please provide data. I live in TX, I see how much it costs, and I see what happens when the wind is blowing at 8% of nameplate.
TX for all the shit ERCOT gets, is very open (a google search will give you a bunch of data dashboards), very unregulated and capitalist driven power grid.
The weather is incredibly hard to predict and no one wants to take worse case projections against wind, because they don't look pretty. Instead in the case of ERCOT when the weather isn't cooperative, we get calls to conserve, and when that fails rolling blackouts. And we also get financial destabilization which leads the reliable operators to skip out on maintenance and things like weatherization.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(current natural gas price at the Henry Hub is $8.67/MMBtu, which is $5.70/MMBtu in 2005 dollars)
Note that the current tightness in ERCOT is tailor-made for solar. The recent weeks' daily demand peaks would be squashed by additional PV capacity, and no storage would be required.
It defaults to using 2030 projections for cost data, but that's ok because any new NPP effort started today likely would not be online before 2030, if then.
That's another problem with nuclear: it's competing against the renewables and storage of the next 40 years, not those of today. Going with nuclear (in addition to being optimistic about the cost of new nuclear) is making a bet that those stop decreasing in cost, and soon.
What the experts with skin in the game think can be seen by where the markets are allocating investment. It's into renewables, not into nuclear. From the point of view of the hardnosed financiers nuclear is a loser, and losers don't get money, they get shown the door. And yet, there's still this weird tech bro fixation with nuclear, for no reason that's grounded in reality.
Note, that while solar will probably do fine as long as its cutting off that peak 3-5PM time-frame, it falls off faster than the wind picks up (in general) and the NG plants then peak.
Move around in the year a bit, then flip to daily average.
See that, those are massive swings. One either overbuilds by a large factor, or one comes up with a storage mechanism to de-carbonize that. I'm betting given the political climate in TX the smart money is assuming that will never happen. So, the smart money would bet on just enough renewables to catch those peaks, and then fill in the rest with NG. Should that fail due to rising costs, there are coal plants.
PS: Texas has 4 reactors seen in that graph, producing ~4.7GW of power, which before the NG gas boom were regularly producing some of the cheapest power in the state. They are also some of the most recently constructed reactors in the US comming online in the early 1990s after 15 year construction cycles filled with lawsuits, and redesigns and every excuse in the book (STP actually had 3 different general contractors IIRC) to keep them from coming online, largely by environmentalists. If the remaining 4 reactors at the two sites and just two more sites with similar generation capacity were created it would more than wipe out the baseload carbon in the state leaving the NG plants only spinning up when the renewables failed. In the grand scheme of texas energy production, it would be a drop in the bucket of plant costs, even if they were constructed at the costs of the existing plants. If they could be constructed at the costs of reactors in the 1960's (aka less than NG plants) those price equations would flip on their heads. No one in their right mind would be building renewable energy sources, but because of politics and people who get in the way of Nuke plants, no one in their right mind will bet against gas.
What do you mean, old and extrapolated data? The ERCOT dashboard is giving today's data. The price spikes the last few weeks have been during the day. And the prices have been well above the levelized cost of solar.
I understand there is a large amount of solar in the pipeline in Texas. It's a no-brainer at this point.
Yes, Texas has reactors. Sunk costs are sunk. It would make no sense to build more, which is what that Exelon quote was saying. Really, it makes no sense to start a new reactor build anywhere in the US. All the AP 1000 efforts aside from Vogtle 3/4 have been terminated.
I was replacing your model with actual data... Not suggesting the link I gave you was old data. The important thing to note is the shape and peaks of the renewable data. You can grow those curves but you can't really change their shape much. Solar is going to be offline by 9PM 100% of the time, and when the wind doesn't blow for a week at a time, and rolling blackouts start people will question why their bills are going up, and the reliability is going down.
Anyway, I'm sure solar will be built, and the graph will look similar to the past 15 years of retail pricing.. AKA the solar will suppress the energy investment in other things until it fails catastrophically and retail customers are left holding the bills for all those NG plants that were quietly going out of business until the "black swan" event gave them some breathing room while simultaneously killing a few hundred more Texans and jumping the utility rates up again to pay for all the deferred maintenance on the generators of last resort.
Bottom line, while presumably installing a lot of really cheap energy Texas energy costs were going up, a little less than double if you factor in inflation.
Which makes sense, if you add the cost of the wind+NG, someone has to pay the bill for building surplus supply, and now we are going to have solar too, so best case a ~3x peak energy overbuild, while simultaneously not having enough to cover actual peak load when the weather doesn't cooperate.
So same as always, some smart investor will make off with a bunch of money from the solar plants, the carbon emissions might decrease slightly, still leaving us with one of the dirtiest energy generation mixes, and likely 3x higher energy bills than just using natural gas 100% of the time.
A winning formula for sure. Unless of course someone actually invents a battery technology that is cheaper than NG plants and can literally store the 10's of TW's required to bridge those black swan weather events that seem to be happening more and more frequently as we continue pumping CO2 in the atmosphere while playing around the edges with wind/solar.
Are you trying to say building more solar is a bad idea, and building more of something else would be better? What would that be, specifically?
Texas needs a bunch of solar, a bit of battery, that would cover peaks due to air conditioning. More insulation specified in residential building codes wouldn't hurt.
Once most Texans have EVs that charge with solar, and plug in at night and feed to the grid, the solution is even more obvious.
edit: As I post it, there is a prime example of how people wave away transmission issues when talking about green energy. The wind farms on the coast near MX have a negative price (-11 to -33) while most of the state is sitting at ~90, and there is a problem in the west/central part of the state where its $180.
I believe retail customers are not being exposed to those spikes. Correct me if I'm wrong?
Solar can be placed almost anywhere in Texas, and in particular can be placed near where demand is expected. Transmission costs for it should be less than for large central power plants.
You wouldn't build a solar farm particularly close to any of the major TX cities which sprawl for long distances because the land is worth more than the solar panels.
A 10MW+ solar installation costs > $100,000/acre. You can find land within 200 miles of the major cities of Texas for far less than that (and probably much closer than 200 miles). Or you can go far to the west to get land at maybe $1000/acre, but then transmission cost goes up.
If land cost ever were a serious constraint on solar, solar would have become so cheap that it would already have destroyed all the competition.
Why aren’t you a fan of the Gaia Theory? It isn’t really much of a theory. The Earth adapts to our foolishness and outsized impact. It will survive in some condition or another even if life as we know it is extinct.
This right here is where I get tripped up. Let's imagine we find out that Mars has no life, and we start mining it in the future. Would it also be fair to say that "Mars adapts" to that? If so, what does "adapt" really mean here? Does a rock adapt to being broken up?
So I figure you mean life on the Earth (as we know it, or not). Adapt in the sense of evolution. Living systems adapt by replicating, varying, and having some of the variations being selected against, among other mechanisms. If the Earth is a single meta-organism or something like that, it has never been selected against, has never replicated, and has a population of one. How much of ordinary biology translates to an organism that strange?
I guess it often seems like a metaphor being conflated with a theory, to me.
In the Gaia book, Lovelock talks at length about all these challenges that life on earth has met. All these chances the earth had to become lifeless and barren, or at least barren of intelligent life.
When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle).
It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming.
I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.
From an interview I read a couple of years ago, this part stuck out (paraphrased, from memory).
The interviewer asked something like "Are you optimistic about human survival?" and Lovelock's reply was, roughly - "Oh yes, I am optimistic. I mean, there might be a bottleneck of the population down to a few thousands, but long term we will survive".
Surely “humans” are very unlikely to survive long term precisely because of evolution. Intelligent life probably will. But it might need to reboot from closer to the soup again.
If you've never seen Dana Meadows videos on complex ecological system
theory [1] you are missing a huge insight into modernity.
When you have massive interlocking systems of convection, atmospheric
thermodynamics, tectonics, ocean currents and winds, all in concert
through feedback loops, regulators, non-linear compression and
expansion functions, multipliers, hysteresis and tipping points, you
don't need to ascribe sentience, evolution or even biology to see the
sum as "living".
Push here. it reacts there.
In the simplest analysis, overpopulation of "too successful" species
leads to pandemics that wipe them out. Hardly a stretched metaphor.
RIP James Lovelock. A true radical centrist, he was not the New Age person people mistakenly believed him and Gaia theory to be (e.g. he was a proponent of nuclear energy), but equally he was an enemy of many conservative scientists.
"Gaia" is often seen as a really unfortunate name for an actually well-thought out scientific theory. However, this was exactly Lovelock's point and why he decided to go with a name like that. He and Lynn Margulis WANTED to highlight and stand against the cultural biases of science as an institution.
Though it should be noted there's growing scientific support for the theory regardless
This guy is one of those iconoclastic fellows who people partially agree with on one point, and completely disagree with on another. It's pretty hard to reconcile nuclear energy with the idea that the planet self-regulates since nuclear energy screws most of those self-regulatory mechanisms up and seems to require vast sums of time to undo.
Wildlife wise the area around Chernobyl isn't doing that bad after one of the worst nuclear disaster we could imagine. For longer lived lifeforms like humans it's much more problematic, but shorter lived creatures experience less decay events and are less effected. The hottest nuclides decay in the range of decades. The long lived stuff decays much more slowly, hence is less dangerous.
Fascinating that his Gaia hypothesis came after his research with Royal Dutch Shell. It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere.
This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed.
He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.
What's wild to me is how consistently science has chosen to be politically palatable rather than come off as "alarmist".
Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect
That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality.
It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives
If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy?
I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. The opposite of that gives us institutions that are continually disseminating lies, in the process undermining trust in institutions.
Truth doesn't get "invited to conversations". It is always part of it, and the choice is just spoken or unspoken.
> If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system.
That is a terrifying sentence. It can be used to justify anything while denying accountability. There's always the possibility (probability) that you are wrong about what is "the truth."
I completely agree with you but I don't really think it's relevant to this situation. The situation is not a decision between 2 different possible truths. It's a decision to sweep something under the rug. Something that we know will have an effect, we just don't know the magnitude of it. When faced with ambiguity we should take a best guess (even if it's a "conservative" guess) not ignore everything because its more politically convenient
Right, that's why empiricism and the scientific method are so important. This is in the context of scientists being "invited to participate in the conversation or not", eh?
"face truth" is not exactly "anything". The desired outcome is - which is pretty damn obvious from the context here - that the system will need to face up to truth.
And I'm certainly not sure how any of this denies accountability.
Maybe you're just projecting a little bit much into a single sentence?
But so is the situation under discussion. When you have the choice between getting silenced for the truth, or keeping quiet about a disaster, the people putting you in this dilemma aren't doing so by using tools of reason or debate - but with tools of power and terror.
> If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation
or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to
have a hope of influencing policy?
An interesting bind is called "The Critics' Dilemma", best understood
through a (Chinese) story.
One day some farmers see an invading army coming over the hill. They
rush into the city to tell the emperor. "Emperor, a huge army is
approaching, we're surely doomed!" Not wanting to have the whole city
panic the emperor has the men executed to silence them. Invaders enter
the city and slaughter all the imperial soldiers.
Many years later two farmers are watching the horizon when they see an
army gathering. "Quickly, let's warn the citizens" says
one. "No. Remember the story of what happened to our grandfathers."
says the other. So they return to the city and tell the emperor, "We
saw a few bandits gathered by the woods". The emperors soldiers go to
confront them and are all killed, The city is raided again.
The dilemma is "Tell them too much and they will deny you out of fear.
Tell them too little and they will be unprepared."
This applies, along with the Cassandra effect, right to the heart of
all intelligent critique. People are happy to die from ignorance so
long as you don't upset them with cognitive dissonance. Later, when
they are in imminent peril, they'll blame you for not speaking up
sooner.
Not if the distant outposts have already succumbed to the advancing army…and all of those who came in from the field to warn the Emperor have previously been silenced.
It's a short parable, of course it doesn't stand up to pedantic nitpicking.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn't a tightly tuned narrative either - why wouldn't they just put a more reliable shepherd boy out with the sheep after the first couple of lies? But that's hardly the point of a parable/fable.
I'd hardly call the fundamentals of organization pedantic nitpicking. It's not much of a country if they can't figure out whether or not a huge enemy army is on their territory. I'd say the only way this situation could ever be remotely possible was is if the country was in the final stages of collapse.
Assuming that permafrost is going not only be a major contributor to greenhouse gases, but also trigger a runaway reaction is the alarmism. They're not being politically palatable, they're making predictions based on the data that we have and being honest.
There's an asteroid headed for earth. It's going to kill us all. We need to drop everything, including our effort on climate change, to redirect it. I can't actually find the asteroid, but should we still follow through with my demands?
Do you understand how the example you just gave is exactly the opposite of the actual scenario I tried to paint.
My ENTIRE point is that it's a continuum. It's not a binary thing. The point is that there's gonna be an impact and it's gonna be somewhere between 2.35 and 6.25 of impact on some arbitrary scale I just made up. Why would we act as if it's 0 when we could at LEAST act as if it's 2.35??
Your scenario is exactly the opposite of this and a really unhelpful metaphor
Where does the lower bound of 2.35 come from? When you state this lower bound you are saying that we know with certainty that at least this much impact will happen. We lack that data so there's no lower bound, or rather the lower bound is zero. You could falsely claim a lower bound, but that erodes the credibility of the environmental movement.
I've wonder if that's as damning as it sounds, though. Knowing something is a problem, and even knowing how to theoretically solve it, still doesn't mean you have the power to change it. Fighting systems is hard, even for a government that might happen to be a supermajority sometimes.
Also "knowing" and actually knowing are different things.
There had been research done as far back as that which came to the conclusion that it causes climate change. But that doesn't mean that the governing body at that time was aware of the research and if so, really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating.
I know that the research was done on the behalf of the government, but that doesn't mean that everyone governing/deciding on these issues had access to/were aware of the results.
> really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating.
Particularly in a period of time, the '60s/'70s, where a lot of things were happening and lots of stuff was shouted in the street as "inevitable" (the proletariat rising, the age of Aquarius, the arrival of aliens, or even good ol' biblical apocalypse...).
I'm not sure I'd say those documents suggest "a pretty complete understanding" by any means, and on their own would hardly constitute convincing proof of the need to start reducing emissions. But we definitely did have that by the 80s, and 40 years later we're still not taking it seriously.
I find it tragic how common this rhetoric exists, where one says we should take something seriously immediately after downplaying the issue with a crippling "[no] convincing evidence" clause.
Managing world-ending risk, the bar for conviction simply oughn't be so high.
How convinced of the inevitability of a home invasion must one be to lock their doors & get an alarm or a gun?
I'm sure you're right that the commenter meant Cassandra but one might also argue that Persephone's curse, that newly increased periodic temperature swings will sometimes turn the earth barren and useless to us, is relevant to the conversation.
In a place called 'Furnace Creek Ranch'. Makes you wonder about the name.
Really, it was quite clear that the original comment wasn't talking about a delta of 50 C and it is quite clear that 50 C outside of say Death Valley isn't normal.
So the Arkansas record was set in 1936. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter if Arkansas ever beats that record, but rather what happens if it hits 48C five days per year.
(I say that as my hometown recently beat it’s highest ever record by approx 1C.)
OK, looking at the timst4's other comments, I see the phrase "... before wet bulb temperatures reach 50C". So I'll believe that 50C in the post I replied to is not meant to be an increase, but a level. But it seems that "wet bulb" got omitted here. That explains the illogic of saying we'll soon see 50C when that has occurred at numerous times and places in the past. 50C web bulb temperatures would much more unusual. (I'm not sure if they've ever occurred or not.)
But there's no reason to think people are going to commonly experience 50C wet bulb temperatures. That's far beyond anything predicted by conventional science.
Averaged out globally that might be the case, but any one location might experience temperature spikes like that. Consider the Pacific Northwest “heat dome” that we got last summer, featuring temperatures 10-20C above normal. They indeed maxed out out at 50C in the village of Lytton, BC, which burned to the ground as a result.
also that report is four years old now. the AR6 data revised the ranges up but didn't re-do all the visuals so I don't have a new jpg to link to. also observed reality has trended warmer/sooner than predicted.
That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable.
(My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)
"Uninhabitable" could take many forms. Imagine that by 2050, summer temps in Europe and N America sometimes hit 50C, and in the likes of Middle East, N Africa, Pakistan/India etc they hit 60C. This doesn't seem far-fetched given that Seattle had 42C last year, UK 40C this year, Pakistan has had 50C, and the trend appears to be accelerating. So in the 60C places there'd be complete wipe-outs of population if people tried to stay living there, in the 50C places there'd still be mass deaths. But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. Unless humankind develops very fast, some carbon capture tech that immediately rids us off this excess CO2, and/or some major advances are made in agriculture to respond to the change in temperature, it seems to me that much of the earth could become effectively uninhabitable.
Air-conditioning is a thing in well-off hot places and for well-off people in poorer countries. But not for poorer people in poorer countries. Given how many in the world don't even have enough to eat, right now, I struggle to see how they'd acquire air-conditioning in the foreseeable future. And if they did, that'd need a massive increase in electricity generation and supply infrastructure. I don't see how that would easily happen. There are indeed some low tech means to deal with high temps, but its not enough, is it? We're literally playing with fire here. Just my 2p ...... (as for GDP I don't know much about the effect of climate change on that, but would imagine GDP is gonna be the least of people's worries if the temp is 50-60C )
The New York Times has a nice obituary on his life.[1] There are two things that I would like to celebrate from his lifetime of innovation.
The Gaia Theory is a beautiful framework to understand humanity's outsized impact on the Earth and all of its lifeforms from fungi to insects to the trees and the critters who spend a lifetime in their canopies. The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. It doesn't matter if you are the most cynical technologist or an optimist trying to change what you can -- that theory puts us in our place; we are so minuscule against the backdrop of planet, the solar system, the universe. Lovelock noticed that disproportionality a lot sooner than most.
The other important discovery he made was electron capture detector, which is a device capable of detecting man-made toxic chemicals in the wild. When I read Silent Spring and the testament to the frightening effects of DDT, it changed my life. Without that invention, Silent Spring might not have been written. Absolutely transformative for me.
> The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't.
Lovelock himself was less sanguine. According to the Guardian's obituary, Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
> "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
Having read many of his books, these are two different things. Biosphere is about 4 billion years old, so the last 1% is still 40 million years. This is inevitable, as the Sun grows warmer, eventually planet Earth gets too warm for life as well. But this death-in-40-million-years timescale is unrelated to human action.
This sounds like a bold claim. Everything that I'd read before predicted about ~1 billion years before the surface of earth is functionally dead - 600 million years before there's not enough carbon for trees, and by at about billion years from now we'd be looking at extinction of eukaryotic life, the beginnings of runaway evaporation of the oceans etc.
40 million years is small enough period on a geological (or solar!) timescale that I would think it would be a lot more obvious if we were already living in the end times.
Slight tangent: even with the 600 million year scale, it's somewhat scary to think that we are living much closer to the end of the earth than it's beginning. And also closer to the end of life on earth than to its beginning.
I suspect, if humanity survives even for another 1,000 years, we will be advanced enough to consider moving earth further out. It would take enormous efforts and expenditures of energy, but we'd also have millions of years to do it.
I've read about some speculative mechanism we could use. Eg move earth by its magnetic field, or move earth via carefully tugging on the moon etc.
The funny thing is while we're towards the tail end of life on earth in general, we're pretty much smack-bang in the middle of what we'd consider complex life. Multicellular plants are about a billion years old, and the entire kingdom of Animalia (including all vertabtrates, arthropods, molluscs, worms, etc) only crop up in the fossil record about 600 million years ago.
The preceding two billion years were basically nothing but single celled organisms, phytoplankton, and simple eukaryots. Those guys will probably still survive us, but not for as long as they preceded us.
Yes definitely he made waves and did interviews when it came out in 2019 and was very interested in how Artificial Intelligence could end up solving so many of the worlds problems -- forget the Anthropocene already here comes the Novacene and it's going to be amazing!
I have never understood what the central point of the Gaia hypothesis is. Wikipedia summarizes as:
“… living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”
How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The planet became somewhat uninhabitable for many organisms of that era, but it also unlocked a whole new generation of oxygen-using organisms. Is that supposed to be an example of perpetuating conditions for life on the planet?
Life, and its environment, affect each other in a complex two-way flow of influence. Yes, OK, that seems evident, but what about this is self-regulating? Surely the history of the planet is replete with mass extinctions and changing conditions that really don’t seem to be part of any greater system than natural selection and the buildup/drawdown of biogenic minerals.
Where is the homeostasis? Everything is changing, all the time.
I actually don’t have much of an issue with the New Age version of the theory. We are indeed all in this together. But this is the version of the theory which Gaia proponents have typically insisted they are not pushing.
Yes, and 'rich' here means: anybody that will have the capability to migrate. If you're from a country around the equator and not at the top of the foodchain you will likely end up in big trouble and the developed and highly militarized countries will be able to make some kind of play.
But assuming coastlines will shift and some zones will become entirely un-inhabitable the sentiment may well become one in which the French revolution will be re-enacted, but on a much larger scale.
> How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory?
The ancient war between anaerobic and aerobic factions is not over. Humans are a sophisticated biological weapon designed by the anaerobes to trigger the "clathrate gun" and return Earth to a non-oxygen-rich regime.
It's a very clever plan. We work faster than the aerobes can react, in geological/evolutionary time were are an explosion.
> what about this is self-regulating?
The answer to that question is in Lovelock's book. If you don't want to read the whole thing you can start with Daisyworld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
> Where is the homeostasis?
Oxygen levels. The first clue that led to the Gaia Hypothesis was, IIRC, that the atmosphere of the Earth is not in chemical equilibrium.
> What does the theory allow us to predict?
Well, for one thing, if we find a planet that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere that it might have life on it.
Organisms modify their immediate microenvironment to their benefit. Lovelock points out that these modification mechanisms can regulate the planet-scale macroenvironment, as well.
I so wish that someone released a new modernised version of sim earth. I remember spending countless hours to create intelligent water life for example. It is really such a great game, even though I found it very difficult as a teenager (I don't think I ever created intelligent life).
See also the "Medea Hypothesis" which proposes that organisms are generally suicidal at a population scale, destroying themselves and their own environment if left unconstrained.
Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis".
The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.
There are more ways to overshoot or undershoot than there are to be critically damped. Population level tends to be an overshooting system which then collapses back to equilibrium. Doesn't bode too well for us when you look at human population growth over the last century. The troubling part is the scale; even a loss of 10% of the population would be the largest wholesale loss of life in human history. Over a century, that's not a huge deal, but over a decade, it would be a disaster the likes of which we've never experienced.
It's been a long time since I read it, but in my youth I read one of his Gaia books. possibly not the first, since it had a long "rebuttal" part and also included stuff on endosymbiosis (which I believe came slightly later).
It did address these sort of questions at length. I remember one of the concrete predictions was that Mars was completely lifeless. Since life begets conditions for more life according to the theory, if there ever was significant life on Mars it would have kicked off the extreme makeover process that we see on Earth. Not necessarily exactly the same of course, but just like it's extremely apparent from space that there's life on Earth, so it would be on Mars.
And he made that prediction (according to the book, according to my memory!) before the Viking sondes.
It was a bold prediction. They hoped to find life. You find evidence of life even in the driest, coldest, harshest places on Earth, and even deep into the Earth's crust, so why wouldn't there at least be some primitive archaea-like organisms in Martian soil? But they still haven't found any, fifty years, 18 orbiters and ten landings later.
Despite everything else he accomplished in his quite storied professional career as one of the last independent scientists... Including his work on the Viking mars landers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock
To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The whole story is worth a watch since Tom Scott does an admirable job of explaining how he went digging up a weird fact expecting to debunk it only to wind up recording an amazing interview with James Lovelock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y but if you’re impatient the interview with lovelock about cryopreserved hamsters and his "microwave" starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y#t=5m42s
> His family confirmed the death in a statement on Twitter, saying that until six months ago he “was still able to walk along the coast near his home in Dorset and take part in interviews, but his health deteriorated after a bad fall earlier this year.”
Another death from elder falling, like Freeman Dyson.
Falls are the beginning of the end for many elderly people. I think devising ways to avoid falls, or at least make them less serious, is a quite underrated line of research and a remaining low-hanging fruit for life extension.
We're losing people who have no true replacement and James Lovelock is one of those people. According to the wikipedia article he was pro nuclear and fracking as an environmentalist. I think largely natural gas and fracking is a relative success where regulation are followed and cost cutting does not occur. Some of the capability learned and gained in that area can be applied for a lot of useful things in the future.
>Retreat, in his view, means it's time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future.
We definitely need to consider moving towards sustainability much more quickly. CO2 burden related to climate and daily life should be looked at. Something needs to happen to save the bayou around New Orleans.
To prevent habitat loss. Like the mangroves in Florida it can help resist sea level rise and from that the city and shipping lanes itself. There is also an entire local economy supported by it. You have tourism, sustainable living, and ecological science being done.
He thought New Orleans is a goner and it honestly it might be. We can learn a lot of things regarding erosion and climate impacts from the wetlands of the area. In return we can help others resist other climate impacts.
I'll support saving wetlands anywhere due to how useful they are. In the past we have viewed them as useless in other areas of the country and subsequently destroyed them.
By coincidence, I listened to this 2012 biographical interview only a few days ago. This is a good summary of his life's work. He was unbelievably lucid at age 94, and more recently.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h666h
I met had the good fortune to work environs his son, Andrew, when I was around 18. He introduced me (unintentionally) to his father's work, for which I was very grateful.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadLiterally yesterday... small world I guess. He seemed like such an amazing person.
https://youtu.be/QqwZJDEZ9Ng
May he rest in peace.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear
I'd also say that fossil fuels are very simple to understand; burn thing, generate power. Nuclear is much more 'magic'. And I don't doubt that the fossil fuel lobby is drastically larger than the nuclear power one, just so much more money in it
If we had decided to invest heavily in nuclear 20 years ago, we might not be in the mess we're in now, but it's probably too late for nuclear to help now. Look at Flamanville unit 3, for example. They started building it in 2007, and it still isn't producing power (in fact just this year they announced more delays to its start date).
Even if we abandoned all concerns about where they were built, and started building a load of them today, they probably wouldn't all be ready until after 2040 because there probably isn't enough spare capacity in skilled nuclear engineers to parallelise their production. By that time, batteries and power-to-gas could be cheaply supplying reliable energy to a grid that's over-provisioned with renewables, without having to worry about storing radioactive waste for thousands of years or proliferation risks.
When you start looking at overbuilding them to supply some kind of energy storage, or to meet even their nameplate capacity 100% of the time on average they suddenly become a lot more expensive. I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies of how much it actually costs to build a KW of energy using particular technologies in various countries, and it turns out that those numbers, can be summarized as: Nuke plants are expensive because we want them to be, they aren't as expensive in countries (South Korea, China, etc) where random people don't (or cant) sue to stop construction even when the reactors are the exact same technology being proposed in the US/Europe (because they parent company doing the design and construction is frequently US/European)
Followed by, wind farm's aren't cheap, and the prices only go up when you start talking about offshore and on the tops of mountain ranges.
So, its no surprise that people who just want cheap energy will continue to pick carbon sources.
Some people look at this differently, There are fundamental laws around energy density which tend to inform the economics (aka dig a ton a uranium and process it, or dig 10T to extract Neodymium, Lithium, etc and then built something that has 1/1000000th the energy density).
So, one can claim wind/solar are cheaper and getting cheaper, but its like comparing apples to oranges, there is a reason places like TX, which have a world leading level of wind installed, also have some of the dirtiest power around.
Sorta the computer equivalent of building ones datacenter around the raw price/perf of a given CPU/SoC, while ignoring every other variable. Then wondering why the HW ends up costing more per unit perf (cause maybe the motherboards cost more) and why the energy bill is eating your lunch (cause the cores are running at some extreme clock rate, and burning power).
Finally, to summarize, you simply cannot hand wave the largest problem with wind/solar away, which is the fact that they are not on demand dispatchable. To get reliable power of of them easily adds a good 10x cost multiplier or more if your not willing to use a carbon source as a backup. So, basically standing around yelling wind and solar, is the same as asking for more carbon. And using wind+solar+NG is cleaner than just NG along, but it actually costs just as much as Nukes built in countries without regulatory bodies setup to stop the construction of Nuke plants. Despite the fact that even plants built 50 years ago are the safest form of energy production in existence (safer than wind for sure) when measured by deaths per MWh.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme811/node/682 “Minus field losses, the typical average overall efficiency of solar trough thermal plants is around 15-20%”. Your first sentence has an implicit contradiction! PV has efficiency of say 20%. I get that you are thinking about thermal storage, but the only sensible argument is overall economic costs, which you seem to be explicitly arguing against.
> I posted elsewhere (and was downvoted) for posting one of the many studies
If you have links explaining your position, I think always add them.
I strongly suspect you are mistaken in your reasoning about why you are getting downvoted. I’m not sure how to help you correctly guess why people downvote (sometimes their reasons are opaque), but I can tell you my own in this case:
I think your core point is interesting. However overall your comment across to me as waffling and mixing in opinionated misinformation and fact. Perhaps make one major point, with a modicum of supporting information. Avoid random tangents. Your comment here in particular appears to me to be mish-mashing implicit economic arguments with other issues.
Here are a couple links from my comment history, the first is a comparison of KW costs, and the second is an overview of what the Chinese are doing.
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u... https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
I've repeatedly posted hard facts on this board and few people bother to do much research at all, overwhelmingly posting puff pieces and data which is obviously wrong (aka nameplate install/$, average capacity factors (because average doesn't tell you the worse case, which is required for a reliable grid)) and a bunch of other things that get hand waved away by "renewable" supporters, like the fact that in most places with a lot of "renewables" its actually 50+ year old hydro and not wind/solar providing the energy. Or that places with a lot of wind/solar are basically green washing their natural gas usage (like Germans are suddenly discovering).
edit: And to be clear, did you down vote the parent comment too, which states as fact something that is provably wrong (that nukes are more expensive than wind/solar, note the vox article which points out they were cheaper than natural gas plants at one point.), but commonly accepted, or did you let your own personal bias decide the misinformation he was repeating sounded correct?
We have. Which is why we started building out solar and wind 30 years ago. And now we're at 90% renewable and haven't used coal for 6 years.
But that's us, not you. How's the nuclear approach going? Built anything yet?
I know! I know! Pick me!
>...that isn't majority Hydro?
oh... never mind
"A total of 97.4% of gross energy consumption came from renewables, a rise of 8% on the year before."
"Of the Scottish Government’s renewable electricity target for 2015-2020, onshore wind accounted for 60.3% of the total, offshore wind 10.7%, and renewable hydro 18.1%, with other sources making up 8.3%."
https://www.thenational.scot/news/19499830.scotland-top-thre...
https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publ...
And they have a lot of pumped storage hydro...
They do get accounted for. One can explicitly account for them by running simulations, using actual weather data, to see how much of those external things would be needed.
If you do that, you discover nuclear isn't going to be cheaper in most places now. That natural gas is currently being used to fill in around renewables does not challenge this point.
TX for all the shit ERCOT gets, is very open (a google search will give you a bunch of data dashboards), very unregulated and capitalist driven power grid.
The weather is incredibly hard to predict and no one wants to take worse case projections against wind, because they don't look pretty. Instead in the case of ERCOT when the weather isn't cooperative, we get calls to conserve, and when that fails rolling blackouts. And we also get financial destabilization which leads the reliable operators to skip out on maintenance and things like weatherization.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(current natural gas price at the Henry Hub is $8.67/MMBtu, which is $5.70/MMBtu in 2005 dollars)
Note that the current tightness in ERCOT is tailor-made for solar. The recent weeks' daily demand peaks would be squashed by additional PV capacity, and no storage would be required.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
The modeling I was talking about can be found here.
https://model.energy/
It defaults to using 2030 projections for cost data, but that's ok because any new NPP effort started today likely would not be online before 2030, if then.
That's another problem with nuclear: it's competing against the renewables and storage of the next 40 years, not those of today. Going with nuclear (in addition to being optimistic about the cost of new nuclear) is making a bet that those stop decreasing in cost, and soon.
What the experts with skin in the game think can be seen by where the markets are allocating investment. It's into renewables, not into nuclear. From the point of view of the hardnosed financiers nuclear is a loser, and losers don't get money, they get shown the door. And yet, there's still this weird tech bro fixation with nuclear, for no reason that's grounded in reality.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
Select generation by energy source.
Note, that while solar will probably do fine as long as its cutting off that peak 3-5PM time-frame, it falls off faster than the wind picks up (in general) and the NG plants then peak.
Move around in the year a bit, then flip to daily average.
See that, those are massive swings. One either overbuilds by a large factor, or one comes up with a storage mechanism to de-carbonize that. I'm betting given the political climate in TX the smart money is assuming that will never happen. So, the smart money would bet on just enough renewables to catch those peaks, and then fill in the rest with NG. Should that fail due to rising costs, there are coal plants.
PS: Texas has 4 reactors seen in that graph, producing ~4.7GW of power, which before the NG gas boom were regularly producing some of the cheapest power in the state. They are also some of the most recently constructed reactors in the US comming online in the early 1990s after 15 year construction cycles filled with lawsuits, and redesigns and every excuse in the book (STP actually had 3 different general contractors IIRC) to keep them from coming online, largely by environmentalists. If the remaining 4 reactors at the two sites and just two more sites with similar generation capacity were created it would more than wipe out the baseload carbon in the state leaving the NG plants only spinning up when the renewables failed. In the grand scheme of texas energy production, it would be a drop in the bucket of plant costs, even if they were constructed at the costs of the existing plants. If they could be constructed at the costs of reactors in the 1960's (aka less than NG plants) those price equations would flip on their heads. No one in their right mind would be building renewable energy sources, but because of politics and people who get in the way of Nuke plants, no one in their right mind will bet against gas.
I understand there is a large amount of solar in the pipeline in Texas. It's a no-brainer at this point.
Yes, Texas has reactors. Sunk costs are sunk. It would make no sense to build more, which is what that Exelon quote was saying. Really, it makes no sense to start a new reactor build anywhere in the US. All the AP 1000 efforts aside from Vogtle 3/4 have been terminated.
Anyway, I'm sure solar will be built, and the graph will look similar to the past 15 years of retail pricing.. AKA the solar will suppress the energy investment in other things until it fails catastrophically and retail customers are left holding the bills for all those NG plants that were quietly going out of business until the "black swan" event gave them some breathing room while simultaneously killing a few hundred more Texans and jumping the utility rates up again to pay for all the deferred maintenance on the generators of last resort.
https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/resources/historical...
Bottom line, while presumably installing a lot of really cheap energy Texas energy costs were going up, a little less than double if you factor in inflation.
Which makes sense, if you add the cost of the wind+NG, someone has to pay the bill for building surplus supply, and now we are going to have solar too, so best case a ~3x peak energy overbuild, while simultaneously not having enough to cover actual peak load when the weather doesn't cooperate.
So same as always, some smart investor will make off with a bunch of money from the solar plants, the carbon emissions might decrease slightly, still leaving us with one of the dirtiest energy generation mixes, and likely 3x higher energy bills than just using natural gas 100% of the time.
A winning formula for sure. Unless of course someone actually invents a battery technology that is cheaper than NG plants and can literally store the 10's of TW's required to bridge those black swan weather events that seem to be happening more and more frequently as we continue pumping CO2 in the atmosphere while playing around the edges with wind/solar.
Texas needs a bunch of solar, a bit of battery, that would cover peaks due to air conditioning. More insulation specified in residential building codes wouldn't hurt.
Once most Texans have EVs that charge with solar, and plug in at night and feed to the grid, the solution is even more obvious.
https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices
edit: As I post it, there is a prime example of how people wave away transmission issues when talking about green energy. The wind farms on the coast near MX have a negative price (-11 to -33) while most of the state is sitting at ~90, and there is a problem in the west/central part of the state where its $180.
Solar can be placed almost anywhere in Texas, and in particular can be placed near where demand is expected. Transmission costs for it should be less than for large central power plants.
If land cost ever were a serious constraint on solar, solar would have become so cheap that it would already have destroyed all the competition.
This right here is where I get tripped up. Let's imagine we find out that Mars has no life, and we start mining it in the future. Would it also be fair to say that "Mars adapts" to that? If so, what does "adapt" really mean here? Does a rock adapt to being broken up?
So I figure you mean life on the Earth (as we know it, or not). Adapt in the sense of evolution. Living systems adapt by replicating, varying, and having some of the variations being selected against, among other mechanisms. If the Earth is a single meta-organism or something like that, it has never been selected against, has never replicated, and has a population of one. How much of ordinary biology translates to an organism that strange?
I guess it often seems like a metaphor being conflated with a theory, to me.
When I read it, I came to a conclusion that's very different from Lovelock's. I saw in it the answer to the Fermi paradox: The world keeps throwing challenges at life, and sooner or later life fails to address them, and dies out. We're only here to talk about it because we are among the lucky few who got this far (the anthropic principle).
It's a pretty depressing conclusion, because we are no more likely to meet the next challenge successfully, just because we lucked out in the past. And there will be a next one, that's essentially the message of the Gaia book, the challenges just keep coming.
I can understand that people prefer instead to delude themselves with magical thinking about a benevolent earth-organism.
> Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
https://archive.ph/I3dog
The interviewer asked something like "Are you optimistic about human survival?" and Lovelock's reply was, roughly - "Oh yes, I am optimistic. I mean, there might be a bottleneck of the population down to a few thousands, but long term we will survive".
Talk about the large-scale view.
When you have massive interlocking systems of convection, atmospheric thermodynamics, tectonics, ocean currents and winds, all in concert through feedback loops, regulators, non-linear compression and expansion functions, multipliers, hysteresis and tipping points, you don't need to ascribe sentience, evolution or even biology to see the sum as "living".
Push here. it reacts there.
In the simplest analysis, overpopulation of "too successful" species leads to pandemics that wipe them out. Hardly a stretched metaphor.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc
Though it should be noted there's growing scientific support for the theory regardless
https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one...
Unless you are human.
I love the stories of children of adversity that rise to greatness.
His father was illiterate. his mother, while educated, worked at a pickle factory. Quick, name the nearest pickle factory to your village!
---
The Gaia Revelation is something that Humans should be throwing every resource at
This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed.
He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.
Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect
That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality.
It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives
I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. The opposite of that gives us institutions that are continually disseminating lies, in the process undermining trust in institutions.
Truth doesn't get "invited to conversations". It is always part of it, and the choice is just spoken or unspoken.
That is a terrifying sentence. It can be used to justify anything while denying accountability. There's always the possibility (probability) that you are wrong about what is "the truth."
The "best guess" was clearly not taken here
And I'm certainly not sure how any of this denies accountability.
Maybe you're just projecting a little bit much into a single sentence?
It is.
But so is the situation under discussion. When you have the choice between getting silenced for the truth, or keeping quiet about a disaster, the people putting you in this dilemma aren't doing so by using tools of reason or debate - but with tools of power and terror.
An interesting bind is called "The Critics' Dilemma", best understood through a (Chinese) story.
One day some farmers see an invading army coming over the hill. They rush into the city to tell the emperor. "Emperor, a huge army is approaching, we're surely doomed!" Not wanting to have the whole city panic the emperor has the men executed to silence them. Invaders enter the city and slaughter all the imperial soldiers.
Many years later two farmers are watching the horizon when they see an army gathering. "Quickly, let's warn the citizens" says one. "No. Remember the story of what happened to our grandfathers." says the other. So they return to the city and tell the emperor, "We saw a few bandits gathered by the woods". The emperors soldiers go to confront them and are all killed, The city is raided again.
The dilemma is "Tell them too much and they will deny you out of fear. Tell them too little and they will be unprepared."
This applies, along with the Cassandra effect, right to the heart of all intelligent critique. People are happy to die from ignorance so long as you don't upset them with cognitive dissonance. Later, when they are in imminent peril, they'll blame you for not speaking up sooner.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn't a tightly tuned narrative either - why wouldn't they just put a more reliable shepherd boy out with the sheep after the first couple of lies? But that's hardly the point of a parable/fable.
Frogs and scorpions can’t have chats either but the point remains sound.
Wasn't it intentional euphemism in this case, however?
#2 The conservative position: it's going to have an effect
#3 The radical position that goes completely against any existing science: it won't have any effect
Why choose #3?
My ENTIRE point is that it's a continuum. It's not a binary thing. The point is that there's gonna be an impact and it's gonna be somewhere between 2.35 and 6.25 of impact on some arbitrary scale I just made up. Why would we act as if it's 0 when we could at LEAST act as if it's 2.35??
Your scenario is exactly the opposite of this and a really unhelpful metaphor
For those who don't know, the US government had a pretty complete understanding of the issue in the 60s.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Re...
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...
There had been research done as far back as that which came to the conclusion that it causes climate change. But that doesn't mean that the governing body at that time was aware of the research and if so, really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating.
I know that the research was done on the behalf of the government, but that doesn't mean that everyone governing/deciding on these issues had access to/were aware of the results.
Particularly in a period of time, the '60s/'70s, where a lot of things were happening and lots of stuff was shouted in the street as "inevitable" (the proletariat rising, the age of Aquarius, the arrival of aliens, or even good ol' biblical apocalypse...).
Not that average temps will increase by 50C. That would be silly.
Really, it was quite clear that the original comment wasn't talking about a delta of 50 C and it is quite clear that 50 C outside of say Death Valley isn't normal.
Did you not hear about the heatwave in Europe last week? 50C is coming to places that have never had temps that high.
(I say that as my hometown recently beat it’s highest ever record by approx 1C.)
But there's no reason to think people are going to commonly experience 50C wet bulb temperatures. That's far beyond anything predicted by conventional science.
50 degrees C of warming?
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/figu...
also that report is four years old now. the AR6 data revised the ranges up but didn't re-do all the visuals so I don't have a new jpg to link to. also observed reality has trended warmer/sooner than predicted.
Huh? Since when are we heading towards an uninhabitable world?
Yes, climate change is real. But it's not going to make the world uninhabitable.
The best estimates are that climate change would cut between 5-20% of global GDP. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... or https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-ec... (Keep in mind that the latter is an article from the NYT reporting on an analysis by an insurer. The NYT isn't exactly a climate change denier.)
That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable.
(My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)
There's also other lower-tech means for dealing with temporary extreme temperatures.
> But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. [...]
We'd expect all of these to show up as a drop in GDP, wouldn't we? Eg you can clearly see the wars in Syria or Ukraine show up in their GDP figures.
Please correct the Wikipedia article I linked to, if you have better impact-of-climate-change on GDP forecasts than what's currently on there.
The Gaia Theory is a beautiful framework to understand humanity's outsized impact on the Earth and all of its lifeforms from fungi to insects to the trees and the critters who spend a lifetime in their canopies. The Earth will survive the spasmodic calamity of our species, even if we don't. It doesn't matter if you are the most cynical technologist or an optimist trying to change what you can -- that theory puts us in our place; we are so minuscule against the backdrop of planet, the solar system, the universe. Lovelock noticed that disproportionality a lot sooner than most.
The other important discovery he made was electron capture detector, which is a device capable of detecting man-made toxic chemicals in the wild. When I read Silent Spring and the testament to the frightening effects of DDT, it changed my life. Without that invention, Silent Spring might not have been written. Absolutely transformative for me.
1-https://archive.ph/bQFAt
Wikipedia pages usually aren't as good for HN submission as more specific in-depth articles, and you're right, this is a nice one.
Lovelock himself was less sanguine. According to the Guardian's obituary, Lovelock "has warned that the biosphere is dying due to human action. He said two years ago that the biosphere is in the last 1% of its life."
https://archive.ph/I3dog
It's the humans that are screwed.
There will be less of us, but we'll live on.
Having read many of his books, these are two different things. Biosphere is about 4 billion years old, so the last 1% is still 40 million years. This is inevitable, as the Sun grows warmer, eventually planet Earth gets too warm for life as well. But this death-in-40-million-years timescale is unrelated to human action.
This sounds like a bold claim. Everything that I'd read before predicted about ~1 billion years before the surface of earth is functionally dead - 600 million years before there's not enough carbon for trees, and by at about billion years from now we'd be looking at extinction of eukaryotic life, the beginnings of runaway evaporation of the oceans etc.
40 million years is small enough period on a geological (or solar!) timescale that I would think it would be a lot more obvious if we were already living in the end times.
I suspect, if humanity survives even for another 1,000 years, we will be advanced enough to consider moving earth further out. It would take enormous efforts and expenditures of energy, but we'd also have millions of years to do it.
I've read about some speculative mechanism we could use. Eg move earth by its magnetic field, or move earth via carefully tugging on the moon etc.
The preceding two billion years were basically nothing but single celled organisms, phytoplankton, and simple eukaryots. Those guys will probably still survive us, but not for as long as they preceded us.
Another way to say the same is that nano-technology is ancient on earth, but macro-machinery is new.
My favouritely named era of life on earth is the Boring Billion.
“… living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”
How should we understand something like the Great Oxygenation Event in the light of this theory? The planet became somewhat uninhabitable for many organisms of that era, but it also unlocked a whole new generation of oxygen-using organisms. Is that supposed to be an example of perpetuating conditions for life on the planet?
Life, and its environment, affect each other in a complex two-way flow of influence. Yes, OK, that seems evident, but what about this is self-regulating? Surely the history of the planet is replete with mass extinctions and changing conditions that really don’t seem to be part of any greater system than natural selection and the buildup/drawdown of biogenic minerals.
Where is the homeostasis? Everything is changing, all the time.
What does the theory allow us to predict?
And, keep your stick on the ice.
But the rich people WILL have an easier time of it.
But assuming coastlines will shift and some zones will become entirely un-inhabitable the sentiment may well become one in which the French revolution will be re-enacted, but on a much larger scale.
The ancient war between anaerobic and aerobic factions is not over. Humans are a sophisticated biological weapon designed by the anaerobes to trigger the "clathrate gun" and return Earth to a non-oxygen-rich regime.
It's a very clever plan. We work faster than the aerobes can react, in geological/evolutionary time were are an explosion.
> what about this is self-regulating?
The answer to that question is in Lovelock's book. If you don't want to read the whole thing you can start with Daisyworld: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
> Where is the homeostasis?
Oxygen levels. The first clue that led to the Gaia Hypothesis was, IIRC, that the atmosphere of the Earth is not in chemical equilibrium.
> What does the theory allow us to predict?
Well, for one thing, if we find a planet that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere that it might have life on it.
Daisyworld is a very simple thought example, but also a computer simulation, of emergent planetary homeostasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisyworld
Organisms modify their immediate microenvironment to their benefit. Lovelock points out that these modification mechanisms can regulate the planet-scale macroenvironment, as well.
This link[1] runs at the time of posting.
[1] https://www.myabandonware.com/game/simearth-the-living-plane...
Life's historical record alternates between extinction events and long periods of species-building. So in some ways we can see the Gaia and Medea tendencies as an cyclic pattern but not quite "homeostasis".
The important part is that "life begets life" but occasionally takes it away too. We tend to assume that complex life forms like mammals are inevitable but it's quite amazing we exist at all really, considering the thousands of other species and complex ecological support systems we require to survive. Break down that web of life and the earth would be dominated by bacteria and slime mold.
It did address these sort of questions at length. I remember one of the concrete predictions was that Mars was completely lifeless. Since life begets conditions for more life according to the theory, if there ever was significant life on Mars it would have kicked off the extreme makeover process that we see on Earth. Not necessarily exactly the same of course, but just like it's extremely apparent from space that there's life on Earth, so it would be on Mars.
And he made that prediction (according to the book, according to my memory!) before the Viking sondes.
It was a bold prediction. They hoped to find life. You find evidence of life even in the driest, coldest, harshest places on Earth, and even deep into the Earth's crust, so why wouldn't there at least be some primitive archaea-like organisms in Martian soil? But they still haven't found any, fifty years, 18 orbiters and ten landings later.
She even traveled to the UK, last century, as a sort of "pilgrimage," and met with him.
To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The whole story is worth a watch since Tom Scott does an admirable job of explaining how he went digging up a weird fact expecting to debunk it only to wind up recording an amazing interview with James Lovelock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y but if you’re impatient the interview with lovelock about cryopreserved hamsters and his "microwave" starts here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y#t=5m42s
Another death from elder falling, like Freeman Dyson.
>Retreat, in his view, means it's time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future.
We definitely need to consider moving towards sustainability much more quickly. CO2 burden related to climate and daily life should be looked at. Something needs to happen to save the bayou around New Orleans.
Why? (Genuine question interested in your answer)
He thought New Orleans is a goner and it honestly it might be. We can learn a lot of things regarding erosion and climate impacts from the wetlands of the area. In return we can help others resist other climate impacts.
I'll support saving wetlands anywhere due to how useful they are. In the past we have viewed them as useless in other areas of the country and subsequently destroyed them.
https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/why-are-wetlands-important