Suppose the prestigious journal Nature published an analysis of mine that they knew many people would disagree with. How would you feel if Nature then ran accompanying commentaries for and against my analysis, including another Senior Fellow from the Center for American Progress raving about how important and brilliant it was? You'd probably think that was kind of lame of them.
Now suppose the Nature article never mentioned that I was a CAP Senior Fellow or that my mysterious admirer was, too. No way, you say. No way a journal like Nature would ever do that. That would be like The New York Times asking a CAP Fellow to review my book and not mentioning the connection. Few things could be more inappropriate for a major publication. I have one word for you: "way!"
Yes, amazingly, Nature did just that -- twice! -- with the Pielke et al. piece I previously debunked. Here you can read the Pielke piece, "Dangerous Assumptions" [PDF]. Note Pielke is identified at the end simply as "Roger Pielke Jr is in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0488, USA."
Online, Nature has an article ($ub. req'd) on the Pielke et al. piece in which we are told:
"The paper is a bombshell," says Marty Hoffert, former chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University. "It explodes the idea that sufficient technology exists to solve the climate and energy problem, and that global warming can be dealt with by market incentives."
[I like Marty, but in fact the Pielke paper provides no evidence whatsoever to refute the two notions that "sufficient technology exists to solve the climate and energy problem, and that global warming can be dealt with by market incentives." It doesn't address those issues at all.]
In print, Nature has yet another news article on Pielke et al. [so much coverage for so little substance] optimistically titled "Are the IPCC scenarios 'unachievable'?" (available here [PDF]). On the second page, we again hear ever-so-unexpected praise from Hoffert:
Marty Hoffert, former chair of the Department of Applied Science, New York University:
"This analysis is long overdue. We're under a delusion that we will solve the problem of climate change casually. But what we have -- cap-and-trade systems and the like -- is plainly insufficient. We need a massive engineering effort, the size of the Manhattan Project."
[Note to Hoffert: A few people may have that delusion -- such as Senator McCain and his advisors -- but certainly not readers of this blog. And the engineering effort we need is much closer in size to all of World War II -- the Manhattan project is puny. Hoffert should know that.]
But guess what? Hoffert and Pielke are both Fellows at the Breakthrough Institute (as you can see here). Gosh, Hoffert thinks Pielke's stuff is great. Who would have ever guessed? And what is the Breakthrough Institute? Why it's the brainchild of everybody's favorite technology-breakthrough lovers, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. [Note to Shellenberger and Nordhaus: Your love of technology breakthroughs appears to be unrequited.]
So shame on Nature for quoting Hoffert in praise of Pielke in the first place and double shame for not letting readers know they work at the same place -- a place that happens to be dedicated to promoting the very (mistaken) idea at the center of Pielke's piece (namely that "enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels").
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:36 pm
02 Apr 2008
Was it to get industry to fund their Breakthrough Institute?
I thought I smelled a corpoRAT in their propaganda.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 6:10 pm
02 Apr 2008
But I did find some actual information in this interview with Hoffert:
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/04/post_1.shtml
Lindsay Meisel: "How feasible is space solar power? What role can it play in the solution?"
Hoffert: "I think it's a promising source of energy, but not the first thing we should do. In the long term, we need solar energy or nuclear fusion, because we're going to use up all the fossil fuels."
Space solar, ridiculous. Fusion, pie in the sky. We will destroy the human friendly climate long before fossil fuels run out. We need solar because of that.
Hoffert: "The problem with solar is how to match supply and demand - that requires transmission and storage on massive scale by technologies that we don't really have."
Completely false. Excel is building out a 1000 home smart grid in Colorado right now. Studies of only eight wind farms, that Gar has cited here, have proven that very little storage is actually needed. Smart grid technology stores energy as low temperature heat or cold in buildings and appliances.
A distributed smart grid actually reduces the need for transmission so much that the present grid has 5 times the capacity needed. Conservation with geo heat exchange heating/cooling alone can vastly reduce power demand.
Hoffert on china building coal plants: "The only thing we can do is to try to offer them an alternative, and right now we don't have one. We don't have anything cost effective."
Complete nonsense. Wind is cheaper than coal, so is solar furnace technology. Both are well proven and seeing large investment.
Even the more expensive solar PV has just gone to cogeneration. In a recent solar building competition the winning team used something they called PVT (photo voltaic temperature) which i have called solar cogeneration for the klast few years. Generating electricity and heat from the same solar panels.
With a 10 cent per kwh subsidy, diverted from fossil, nuclear, and agribizz fuel farming subsidies, solar cogeneration on a home or business will pay off in a few short years.
Farm biogas will do the same, and it produces a storable energy source for smart grid backup. Used with solid oxide fuel cell/turbines (70% efficient and in use at several breweries right now, running off biogas from waste)as distributed generation it makes the grid immune to the widespread power blackouts of centralized grids.
Furthermore biogas digestion also produces organic fertilizer that replaces fossil fertilizer, revives chemically dead soil as a carbon sink, and prevent fertilizer and manure run off that produces huge amounts of methane, a very potent GHG (21 times worse than cO2). mechanized organic agriculture has all these sources of gHG savings together as well as producing clean backup power for the grid. germany is investing heavily in a smart grid with wind, solar, and biogas.
Maybe these "Breakthrough" fellers ought to read this blog? Just a suggestion. We have all the technology we need, give us 10 cents per kwh and it will be done in the next 20 years. Maybe in the nick of time? That ice is melting very fast!
I have to agree cap and trade is a disaster waiting for hedge funds to happen. But a subsidy diversion? now that will work, you will see a wW 2 like production effort driven by a gold rush into alternative energy.
Oh yeah and don't forget plugin hybrids, a nice design is now available from Audi. And Toyota has a plugin hybrid hypercar in the works.
Oh and I forgot wave and ocean and river current power generation too.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:32 pm
02 Apr 2008
It's not happening
We're not causing it
Maybe it will be a good thing
Well we can't solve it (yet), so don't try
^^^^^^^^^^ We are here
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apsmith Posted 1:23 am
03 Apr 2008
He's an old-style liberal too, wants to save the world from poverty and all that. Which is why in the studies he's done they always tend to favor higher world GDP growth rates than you might expect.
But I think the key issue Joe, between what you and Marty are advocating for, is the time-scale you each feel is relevant. There is a lot we can do now, with present technology. I believe there's more we can do than Marty sometimes says. But when you look all the way to the year 2100, there is a real gap between what it seems we can do with present and likely evolutionary technology, and what we need.
Your fear is that looking to the distant needs will detract from the effort to do the best to deploy the technologies we can now. Marty's fear is that the emphasis on present deployment will neglect the need for advanced alternatives that we really do need 50 years down the road. In my view, both are needed - let's do it all. How's that for solving the conflict? :-)
And on Nature's "shame" here - I very much doubt Schellenberger's "Breakthrough Institute" actually has given money to Pielke, Hoffert, or any other of their "fellows" - you could do some investigating of their finances if you felt it was a real issue. It sounds much more like an honorary designation than anything else; in the modern era we seem to receive a plethora of associations (I'm a "guest researcher" at Brookhaven National Lab for instance) that really mean less and less regarding who we are or how much weight our opinions should be given...
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katakanadian Posted 1:25 am
03 Apr 2008
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:02 am
03 Apr 2008
The fatal flaw in their reasoning is that we will all continue to live in suburban McMansions, drive SUVs, heat and power our homes with fossil fuels.
Our family has reduced oil emissions 80% with a Prius and hybrid electric bike in an urban environment, saving money and improving lifestyles all with one stone (real easy to do when you swap from a Subaru Legacy and Jeep Cherokee).
Hybrid Solar Home designs would cut our residential emissions from natural gas and electricity 80% as well.
Instead of picking up visitors at the airport, they will soon arrive downtown via light rail, five minutes from our house ...
Our main problem is that our present political system puts one too many imbeciles into office and has no real system of informed debate. Senate hearings are dog and pony shows. Most politicians get what they know from our lame lay media, just like the citizens they represent and they are just as ignorant.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 2:20 am
03 Apr 2008
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/03/solar_e ...
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 3:22 am
03 Apr 2008
As is typical for us in this part of the country, we have heating oil -- by necessity, or rather by unbreakable habit, not choice. And because Michael and I live on the ground floor, above wherever the oil is supposed to go, when there is a fuel delivery, we get a lot of the fumes. Even in the middle of winter, we need to open windows and run fans. Plus, of course I am fearful for the health of Little White Dog, whose respiration rate is much faster than ours.
Amazing,
you engineers are way over my head; but wasn't there a sci-fi story (maybe more than one) in which reflecting panels were erected around a star, so that the collected energy could power a technological civilization on a planet orbiting the star?
I do not think it was Isaac Asimov's Trantor, the capital of the Galactic Empire, completely paved over, with a maximum population of something like 45 billion. But I could be wrong.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:45 am
03 Apr 2008
The microwave laser beam would fry the water vapor and atmosphere on the way down and any brids or aircraft that got in it's path. These schemes are pure sci-fi alright. that's ok, as long as it's admitted.
For an actual scientist to entertain them as a practical idea for anytime in the next 20 years, the time we have to reverse gHG climate disaster is problematic.
It is like a creation "scientist" aguing against evolution. it makes his opinion worthless and suspect on other topics as well.
Either Hoffert is lying or self delusional or both. It's understandable, cashing checks from mass media or big energy bizz to pay the mortgage is an activity that often results in seemingly insane statements by otherwise rational humans.
It creates conflicts on the perception level, with stress inducing memory loss about the obvious contradictions. This memory loss often enhanced with prescription stress relievers in conjunction with ethanol, hehey.
Oh, check out my google search of the future sci-fi notion involving solar satelites that collect solar radiation to accelerate a stream of tachyons from the future past the speed of light in order to send them back..to the present.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/3/29/ ...
Google search the future? A time loop destroys cause and effect reality as we know it, and only the extrasensory creatures who operate in multiple dimensions survive. We must follow the dogs and dolphins into the zen gate.. hehey.
Think about it, what value would money have if everyone knew tomorow's stock quotes or lottery numbers? Really FREEE markets!
Only those who live in symbiotic harmony with nature not dependent on the cause and effect reality of money and markets could withstand the collective cognitive shock. Aum.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 4:07 am
03 Apr 2008
<<
Think about it, what value would money have if everyone knew tomorow's stock quotes or lottery numbers? Really FREEE markets!
>>
Here I am, busily trying to figure out Socrates' arguments in Plato's "Phaedo" on why philosophy is the preparation for death, and you have to go throw in this suggestion that the value of money is relative! And relative to knowledge, yet!!! Yipes! : )
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:11 am
03 Apr 2008
Is the limiting factor on technological civilizations the survival of the implimentation of time shift devices that allow information search of the future? It would be devestating for a linear minded cause and effect oriented species.
Is there anyone out there, hello. Uncle Leo?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 4:53 am
03 Apr 2008
Why the hell do we need to have an advanced degree in mathematics, and another in physics, in order to understand the basic constitution of the universe, even as presented in simple terms? Why are these ideas not available to all generally educated and thoughtful people? E.g., why should it be so damn hard to answer the question, What happens when you get to the edge of the universe? Is there an "edge" at all? If so, what lies beyond it? If not, well, so, how the hell does it keep going on and on?
(I have momentarily forgotten the second great problem. So I will substitute:)
Did Sagan and Drake and their friends assume that the Star Trek writers were basically right, and that all intelligent species anywhere in the universe would be "humanoid"? (A barbaric hybrid: "Anthropoid" would be much more acceptable.) As for Star Trek's "universal translator," rendering everybody's speech in contemporary American English, that was already there in the oldest work in a European language, Homer's Iliad (ca. 750), when Asians and Europeans can converse easily with one another in Homeric Greek.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 5:06 am
03 Apr 2008
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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apsmith Posted 5:38 am
03 Apr 2008
Now greenhouse gases are tricky to understand, but the important thing to note is that they essentially add a thermal incoming energy component that almost triples the incoming solar amount, so there's something like 150,000 TW coming from that greenhouse blanket that keeps us warm now. By increasing CO2 levels, we are adding an additional multiplier to that 150,000 TW; doubling CO2 corresponds to an increase of perhaps 6% in that number, so we're talking about something close to 10,000 TW of difference in energy input to Earth's surface, between a CO2-doubled planet and the way it used to be.
So the actual energy we use - 15 TW now, 30 TW perhaps next century, is truly miniscule compared to the increase in greenhouse warming energy; adding that much from space solar arrays will do nothing to Earth's climate. Of course another few centuries of exponential growth might get us into worrisome territory again, but I think we'll be able to handle it at that point...
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Russ Posted 6:00 am
03 Apr 2008
1.If the universe is expanding at the speed of light (I THINK that's correct, but I'm not 100% sure), which speed man can never reach, then the very concept "edge of the universe" is meaningless from our frame of reference.
2.The fact that there is indeed only this brief sliver of space-time which is congenial to our variety of life is proof that there is no cosmic "purpose" to man's existence, and that man is not special at all in the big scheme of things. The universe is majestically cold, unfeeling, uncaring. Only man can give himself purpose. If this knowledge is coupled with the modesty which should accompany it, we can perhaps realize that we can find purpose in a more holistic, simplified, soulful, symbiotic relationship with the planet and our fellow species. And we could liberate ourselves from the death march of materialism, hedonism, "growth", and greed.
3.I read somewhere that intelligent life, while not necessarily having to be anthropoid, probably must share a few traits with us. Some form of sight, or an analogous sense, seems necessary. The sense organs will probably be close to the brain, to facilitate the quickest communication. It'll probably need some appendage capable of manipulating tools.
It's been said, if homonids hadn't risen to "intelligence" power, or if we eradicate ourselves while there's still time, perhaps cephalopods have the potential to develop sentient intelligence.
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JMG Posted 6:52 am
03 Apr 2008
Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:41 pm
03 Apr 2008
But will there be in the future? Check "Google Future".
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 4:20 pm
03 Apr 2008
OK, thanks for your suggestion, and I shall look up your West Coast writer KC Cole. But I have already read things by Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and others, so I am not quite sure why Cole should formally change anything within this teensy brain of mine.
You see, your reference to "physics for poets" points to my problem: Why should the universe, with regard to its basic constitution, have to be simplified for people who are not physicists specializing in cosmology? Why should I need to have the universe dumbed down for me?
Well, leave me out of that. As should be apparent, I myself am extremely dumb, and hardly representative of non-cosmologists and non-physicists and non-mathematicians. But I dare say the poet-laureate of the US, Charles Simic, a very learned and thoughtful man, would not necessarily be able to proceed further than I beyond KC Cole's "physics for poets" text -- and that strikes me as weird and disturbing.
Russ,
thanks very much for your elegant, complex reply. It was kind of you to take the time to help along my staggering little thoughts.
I have indeed read to the effect that "edge" of the universe does not make sense: Only within the universe, which happens to be expanding since the Big Bang, does space exist; there is no space outside of the universe. But that seems so counter-intuitive, doesn't it. The notion of "expanding," for example, is hard to grasp, if we do not have a sense of expansion relative to something outside.
I greatly admire what you have to say in response to my questions 2 and 3, especially on the potential that we have to "liberate ourselves from the death march" of materialism, etc. I definitely share your beliefs on those matters.
And, I agree, cephalopods most certainly should not be underestimated!
Amazing, old pal,
IMHO, it is you who make this blog great, don't you know? I have learned so much from you. Please keep telling us about the future, and encouraging things especially -- I have so little faith that anything good can come of it.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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amazingdrx Posted 12:50 am
04 Apr 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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kmp Posted 2:37 am
04 Apr 2008
Interesting experiment - would the predictions make the outcome more likely (self-fulfilling prophecy) or less likely (forewarned is forearmed). I guess my answer depends on how optimisitic I am feeling about humanity on that day.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:18 pm
04 Apr 2008
The original thought experiment envisioned powerful lasers angled to create a vortex of particles. As in a black hole the tachyons caught in the vortex would exceed the speed of light, emerging from the vortex in the past.
And sending an internet encoded stream of tachyons through the vortex would send internet signals from the future back to our present time.
So theoretically a google search query, complete with date, entered now, would then be cached and when that date came around the query would then be entered in google, the results then sent back through the tachyon stream to the present, appearing instantly just like google works now.
Of course the search reply would need to be sent to the satelite orbiting the sun, at that future date, then back to earth, taking a few minutes either way. It takes the light from the sun 9 minutes to get here.
The reason for the solar radiation is that it would take titanic forces to create the vortex, that was the problem with the physicist's original time vortex thought experiment. no lasers powerful enough could be built with the meager energy resources existing here on earth.
With plenty of gamma rays (protons) reflected to create a vortex, available in limitless quantities near the sun (not so close as to vaporize the satelite/device), a vortex of with sufficient acceleration should be possible. But what to make the device out of, that won't just vaporize?
Molecular engineering is most likely the answer, materials built up from the nano level with DNA? Like bucky balls, but intentionally designed.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 4:06 pm
04 Apr 2008
There was some transfer of technological information in "Peggy Sue Got Married" (remember the sweet, nerdy guy who becomes a millionaire?), and in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (Scotty as the brilliant Scottish inventor). But that sort of application of time travel strikes me as silly; short-sighted, in fact.
The situation of Chris Marker's classic "La Jete'e," remade as "Twelve Monkeys," is much more respectable.
No comment on the "Terminator" movies, which I have never seen, and do not expect I shall want to supply that void in my knowledge.
Time travel, or communication through time, is yet another issue related to the extreme exclusive specialization of cosmology. Professionally, I deal with a mythological tradition that accepts Fate: through the curtain of the Present, a true path extends, with a definite, undeniably real course. So, the parents of the baby Oedipus are told by the god Apollo's oracle at Delphi that he will grow up to murder his father, and have sex with his mother: and those things do indeed happen, in spite of the parents's efforts to make them impossible. Ideally, I should know what cosmologists know, about time, and the history of the universe; but those things are out of my grasp. I sense that the future tense is a fraud, and that beyond the curtain of the Present, there is nothing; or rather, there is anything. But I do not know how to say those things sensibly.
Actually, Chris Marker had a fine Greek sense of fate, and of irony. By contrast, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox in "Back to the Future") made that story pathetically uninteresting, by not allowing himself to be seduced by his mother. In story-telling, whenever we hear somebody say something to the effect of, "Whatever you do, do not dare to open that door!," we know that the story is incomplete, is not really a story, unless someone opens the door.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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