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Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by Vaughan Pratt

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<i>I thought asteroids impacts are a way more realistic C problem than CAGW.</i> I thought terrorists detonating a nuclear device in a major city before 2065 is a way more realistic problem than a major asteroid impact in that time frame.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by justinwonder

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by mosomoso

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Even the sane Lynas assumes a knowledge of what’s around the corner based on those lying things called trends. The Club of Rome got the future wrong but now some other Club is going to get it right? Because its mental frames are not stuck in the 70s but in the 2010s? So nukes might have stopped billions of tonnes of CO2. Hey, us humans got something for that CO2! By all means get out and lobby as hard for nukes as you lobbied against them in the 80s…but leave the lights on, guys. Sorry about over-populating, but can’t help making life hard for typhoid and cholera bugs.

We’ve had a whole century of deadly elites to show that benevolent collectivism will go on to mangle the natural world as surely as it will mangle humans. There is no “we” in the collective. And there is no “Anthropocene”: one good blow from the Yellowstone Caldera would do away with that illusion.

What’s real and dangerous are aspiring ayatollahs like Clive Hamilton at a time when scientific curiosity about the natural world is wilting in the face of fad and dogma. The New York Times has been promoting the latest collectivist guff for a century. Revkin’s reflections on an Ecomodernist Manifesto are part of a long and proud (or should I say tedious and stuck-up) journalistic tradition. Every awful philosophy has its sexiness and plausibility in its time, and the Times will be there to retail it.

Better just enjoy this brief little geological epoch and its very temporary flora and fauna. Put a few bucks in the hat for Conservation to show appreciation. When I go into the scrub or down to the sea my ill-focused and unscientific mind hardly understands anything observed…but even I know it’s all a flux and always has been a flux.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by genghiscunn

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Good post as usual, moso. But I’d like to allay your fears that post modernism might preclude the erection of bamboo-supported structures. Indeed, a friend of mine built many in Nepal post-Earthquake.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by ristvan

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AK, you personify the problems. Have any plausible solutions?
No matter how good concentrated solar efficiency might become ( a speculative example you use) without storage it is irrelevant at night.
You like out of box thinking. Me, I like to know about the box. Cause whatever Ma Nature provides has to be ‘shipped inside her boxes’.
Not outside them.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by andyhce

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“Capitalism devalues all future life with its emphasis on quarterly earnings.”

That aspect of capitalism, as far as it is actually exists, is very largely influenced by central governments tax systems and their drive to take as much of all created wealth as possible, as rapidly as possible, without totally killing the cash cow.

And what is this god-awful nonsense about being required to created a WordPress site in order to post a comment on this blog?

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by beththeserf

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Like Plato’s ‘Noble Lie,’ there never was a Golden
Age . For maybe 40, 000 years the standard of living
for the average family in Europe, Africa, Asia improved
little. It wasn’t much fun bein’ a peasant and bein’ a
serf likely worse. In Germany and Switzerland in the
Little Ice Age, twenty five peasant revolts were recorded.

Life in the past centered on the daily struggle ter gather
or produce sufficient food jest ter stay alive. Soup, gruel
or grain porridge were the daily fare fer most and famines
were a constant threat.

The last food shortage in Europe, discounting political
action like war, was in Finland and Sweden in 1866 -68.
Here’s a list of past famines, though not all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by mosomoso

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I’ve managed to build a moso curtain rail. It wasn’t really building, I guess.


Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by Geoff Sherrington

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Several surgeon friends have described to me over the years, the feeling of making that first scalpel cut into a living person. There are some who still cannot bring themselves to do it, so they might go to other branches of medicine. Apart from the incisions part of surgical training, there are other experiences and routines to be learned until proficiency can be demonstrated by examination. After passing the formal requitements, the surgeon is then allowed by society to do things to other people that would put amateur or non-surgeon enthusiasts into jail for some time. Ethics are a part of the training.
Several environmental activist friends have described to me over the years, their emotions on first setting fire to material dragged together for a street barricade. Some baulked at seeing other people burned and never returned to the custom. Now here is the big difference. Environmental activists, after the first physical act of defiance, have been known to proceed to do a number of things, unapproved by society in general, that would send them to jail if caught. Some have been caught. Society approves of surgeons more than it approves of activists. People are not so stupid that they do not know which of the two is most likely to be helpful to them in the future.
The story of the surgeon and the activist differs mostly in respect of one factor, public approval. The formal Certificates seen framed on the walls of surgeons’ rooms have no equivalent in the rooms of activists – unless they counterfeit them or tear them from comics.
It has long been a private thesis of mine that people get into activism because they have realised that they lack an ingredient that is needed before they can be famous and respected. Perhaps they could not make the first incision. Infamous and non-respectable, at the opposite end of the spectrum of humankinds’ good to other humans, their second possible prize, remains appealing enough for them. Ethics is not a large part of the program.
The paths that individuals take to satisfy their closeness to nature is not a matter for public affairs, like the national budget or the road safety rules. Governments long ago made a huge error by providing funding for the non-surgeon types – do surgeons get public funding in your country? Do activists?
There are certain types of work that some people are permitted to perform; and there are far too many people doing tasks that society has not permitted them. Society should not enable them. It should not encourage them.
A (minor) example is the new word “Anthropocene.” It has been tradition that eras and epochs are recognised and defined and named by Geologists.
We should not use the word unless/until it passes the usual geology filter. Naming of eras was a geological idea originally, so far as I know, because it was useful to other geologists, just as much medical terminology is shorthand between surgeons to help them. There is no case for the recent period to be given that name, or any formal name, by a motley, unknown group that has not yet passed the equivalent of the exam of the first scalpel cut into a live body and which can show no benefit to society by its adoption.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by Vaughan Pratt

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@DLH: <i>You are saying in essence that that Isaac Newtons laws of motion and gravity are non-scientific because Newton wrote more on Revelation than he did on Physics.</i> This parallel would be more convincing if it included an example of a proponent of ID who (a) had contributed even a tenth as much to either science or mathematics as Newton and (b) was not dedicated to tearing down long-established science in order to replace it with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy#Movement_and_strategy" rel="nofollow">ID founded on John 1:1 as a scientific concept</a>. (Those proposing to debate this further here might do worse than to first familiarize themselves with that article's talk page.)

Comment on Intermittent grid storage by The Patent Nonsense of ‘Storing’ Wind Power Smashed – STOP THESE THINGS

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[…] It is very unlikely that any grid storage solution (other than PHS where feasible) could ever practically cover the intermittency of high penetration utility scale wind and solar. Utility voices (like RWE and E.ON) charged with making electricity grids work seamlessly and reliably despite ever increasing renewable intermittency burdens are only starting to be heard. Those voices are very negative. It may not be until some grid goes dark because of intermittency (as increasingly uneconomic flexed conventional generation is shut in Germany and UK) that the general public will understand. Germany, UK, and California seem determined to run this unfortunate experiment for the rest of us. One or more appear likely to succeed soon in experimentally proving the grid instability ‘blackout’ hypothesis. The question is mainly when, not if. Climate Etc. […]

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by beththeserf

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What does ‘working towards decoupling humankind’s
material needs from nature,’ mean?

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by Frederick Colbourne

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Sorry, but the term “Anthropocene” strikes me as hubris, excessive human pride. The Greek tragedies still have a lot to teach us: Nemesis appears chiefly as the avenger of crime and the punisher of hubris. Sooner or later the Holocene will end and that will be our Nemesis.

(A theme appropriate for the Pope when discussing our role as stewards of Planet Earth.)

Even the status of the Holocene as an “epoch” seems to me to reflect more the ignorance of geologists prior to Agassiz than the views of modern geologists.

As an epoch, the Holocene has the same status as the Pleistocene Epoch. Which is nonsense, because we know now that the Holocene is just one of many interglacials during the 1.6 million years or so of the Pleistocene, an interglacial that may last longer than the Eemian, perhaps as long as MIS-11 (400,000 years or so ago) when sea level rose more than 20 meters (65 feet) higher than now.

Hubris? Just plain ignorance? Or foolishness?

If the Holocene were renamed the Anthropocene this would fit the notion that Man has become Godlike through technology. Another reason the Pope’s encyclical missed the mark.

Comment on Risk assessment: What is the plausible ‘worst scenario’ for climate change? by HAS

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Vaughan Pratt

“Admittedly the RCP8.5 scenario doesn’t come with a variance, but as long as one assumes it is not zero and the distribution is normal and centered on RCP8.5 itself, then under the assumption of RCP8.5 as the likely business-as-usual scenario it is reasonable to divide the event space evenly on each side of RCP8.5. With that assumption there is a 50-50 chance of exceeding 936 ppmv, the value of RCP8.5 in 2100.”

The RCP scenarios are projections (i.e. simply a product of their assumptions) not forecasts. To speak of its variance is meaningless, it has none.

If any of its assumptions are violated it ceases to be an accurate projection, but as I’ve noted elsewhere if you do choose to assume all the assumptions are true regardless you can have ham and eggs.

Unfortunately the interesting questions for those looking forward to breakfast are: “Do we have ham?” and “Do we have eggs?”

In this case if the underlying process isn’t exponential then the future won’t be an exponential extrapolation.

The RCP8.5 projection/scenario isn’t occurring. So far it looks much more like the RCP4.5 & 6.0 scenarios. The assumptions behind RCP8.5 aren’t valid.

The eggs are missing.

“RCP8.5 as the “business-as-usual” scenario is 468 in 2035 and 936 in 2100, thereby doubling in 65 years.”

RCP8.5 is not a “business-as-usual” scenario. I’ve noted elsewhere on this thread it is self-described as “the upper bound of the RCPs” and “a relatively conservative business as usual case” and AR5 WG1 nowhere describes it as “business-as-usual”.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by cerescokid

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Just say perceived present value and everyone is happy.


Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by Jeff Norman

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Wagathon believes he has the right to impose the entire text of someone else’s long winded opinion on misguided liberals who feel their rights rule, into Judith’s blog.

Oh the irony.

Comment on Risk assessment: What is the plausible ‘worst scenario’ for climate change? by Jeff Norman

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More importantly, Venus does not have a large satellite moon.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by cerescokid

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$80 lb mushrooms. Reminds me of my aunt walking out her door and in a liitle while coming back with gobs of them. No flavor is better than those mushrooms fried in butter. The price people pay for things that other people enjoy for nothing. Wow . A wonderful life.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by cerescokid

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jim2
At times I have considered whether or not they are sore losers and it is just sour grapes. Not to get into the psychobabble too much, but when I hear this kind of thing from friends it makes me wonder.

Comment on Eco – (post) modernism by ulriclyons

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They are all insane. Increased CO2 is a climatic net benefit, the only climate problem there ever was or will be is from solar minima and ice ages.

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