Topic: Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. - page 120. (Read 636443 times)

...
edit: speaking of which, have you ever heard of "cold fusion"? i'm just diggin some stuff around the internet but i'd appreciate your inputs on it.
also, i heard scientists working on "duplicating" the sun somehow to investigate new energy streams.. this is scary.  

Coal is worse than nuclear power, even including the history of nuclear accidents.

IIRC, quite a lot more radioactive material is put into the atmosphere from coal than from nuclear...until the nuclear plant has an accident at that is.  Unfortunately such an event sometimes makes the surrounding land unsuitable for human habitation.

I'm not sure if that figure includes the processing required to mine and refine nuclear fuel, deal with the nuclear waste, etc but I would expect that coal continues to lead the race by some margin one way or another.  Another issue is that different elements and isotopes are more and less dangerous due to their half-lives, bio-availability, etc.

That said, so what?  Even if coal puts radioactive material into the atmosphere that in and of itself does not constitute a reason to be alarmed.  One would have to look at the numbers.  The number of person-years increase by having access to affordable energy from coal outweighs the decrease from cancer due to the excess radiation by a giant margin I am sure, and especially so in the developing world.  Of course this is not necessarily a good thing to someone who thinks there are already to many people and wishes the human population to decrease, and that sentiment is hardly unusual in some circles.

I did a brief search to see if I was remembering things about right.  Seems so:  http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-plants-release-more-radiation-than-nuclear-power-plants

IIRC, quite a lot more radioactive material is put into the atmosphere from coal than from nuclear...until the nuclear plant has an accident at that is.  Unfortunately such an event sometimes makes the surrounding land unsuitable for human habitation.

I'm not sure if that figure includes the processing required to mine and refine nuclear fuel, deal with the nuclear waste, etc but I would expect that coal continues to lead the race by some margin one way or another.  Another issue is that different elements and isotopes are more and less dangerous due to their half-lives, bio-availability, etc.

That said, so what?  Even if coal puts radioactive material into the atmosphere that in and of itself does not constitute a reason to be alarmed.  One would have to look at the numbers.  The number of person-years increase by having access to affordable energy from coal outweighs the decrease from cancer due to the excess radiation by a giant margin I am sure, and especially so in the developing world.  Of course this is not necessarily a good thing to someone who thinks there are already to many people and wishes the human population to decrease, and that sentiment is hardly unusual in some circles.

I did a brief search to see if I was remembering things about right.  Seems so:  http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-plants-release-more-radiation-than-nuclear-power-plants

ah no, i was not talking about coal plants. just the radiations amongst them rich nuclear plants. toxic wastes et al.

Nuclear radiation comes from burning coal? Wasn´t aware of that. I guess it can be possible. Is that something meaningful at all anyway?

you forgot nuclear mother-of-all radiations.

Yes, contrary to what we would like, the use of coal worldwide is increasing more than all other energy sources combined (!) – much faster than renewables – and even faster than natural gas, the number two growing source. .......

Yes, and all the attention is on those evil greenhouse gases from all that coal and about none obviously on the goody goody healthy stuff like Sulfur dioxide, Nitrogen oxides,  soot, Mercury and Arsenic.

Can We Give Everyone A Smart Phone And Still Stop Global Warming?

Maybe, but it’s going to be impossible without using all the low-carbon energy sources we have available. Information and communication technologies require a lot of power.

The world’s population is rapidly gaining access to the internet via smartphones and various new devices. According to Greenpeace, global mobile data increased by over 60% in 2014 alone, and is expected to maintain this level of growth for the next several years. The human online population topped 3 billion in 2014, but should exceed 7 billion by 2020.

Along with this increase, comes a parallel increase in online’s carbon footprint. Most of our electricity still comes from fossil fuel, and the developing world is increasing the use of coal faster than ever.

Yes, contrary to what we would like, the use of coal worldwide is increasing more than all other energy sources combined (!) – much faster than renewables – and even faster than natural gas, the number two growing source. .......

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and more zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/06/01/can-we-give-everyone-a-smart-phone-and-still-stop-global-warming/

I am shocked, shocked I am, and humiliated.  That my errors would be shown so very fast and easily.  Yet it remains for me to seek redemption by helping.

I suggest a combined climate and tax model as the next step, one which would tax based on the adjusted temperatures, and which would forecast accurately into the future, accuracy of forecasts being judged by closeness to adjusted numbers.  These important aspects of our lives would be handled by Government Adjusters, who in their professional capacity had acquired the knowledge and skill to tweak. 

We couldn't just have any old twit or twat tweaking the tweaks.

Now that "they"ve succeeded in taxing the air you breathe how's the sunlight tax coming along?

Why are you such racist? Is it because planet earth has a blue skin? Do you want mother earth to have a Red Skin like mars? Those 55 computer models create jobs for a lot of people. Why do you want those jobs to be taken away by oversea workers, killing the economy? Don't you love your fellow citizen more than them? A lot of adjusted maths went into creating a perfect hockey stick curve, proving it is time to stop the madness of wrong thinkers. We need to share the wealth but also the misery we created to mother earth. Our joy of life kills mother earth. We need to make mother earth happy again, and bluer than ever. With a rejuvenating skin. The 55 computer models are the Nivea cream of planet earth. Why are you breathing the air mother earth gives you without a just compensation to her? A tax to help compensate all those hard working people on those 55 computer models needs to be created.

Our 56th computer model is working on a tax solution right now....

 

Interesting article.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565

For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box's average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted ("tuned," in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.

One part of this entire process that is worth mentioning is the use of "ensembles" of computer models.  For example, the recent IPCC reports use an "ensemble of 55 models."

Now, is that better, or worse?  Is that like picking 55 Republicans, to get a "True" feeling for what a Republican is?  Because obviously that would give the power of picking the results to the person picking the 55.

And why would some sort of "ensemble" be better than a single, correct model, anyway?   Or if they are all wrong, is it okay to average the wrongness?

I'm not surprised by this.  To me it is a reflection of underlying human psychological and political features.  I'll explain.

All higher vertebrates (including humans) are born with an innate sense of dependency.  With maturation this wears off.  It must do so necessarily to allow the adult creature to exist in it's environment.  As with any other feature, the extent to which such behavior occurs varies from individual to individual.

Social creatures (e.g., wolves, many primates including humans, etc) have evolved to have this maturation process become more partial than solitary creatures such as felines.  As a side note, the process of domesticating a creature involves selecting individuals who are on the outer bounds of normal and selectively breading them.  Domestic animals tend to thus be animals who are immature in some ways throughout their life.

Humans, as social creatures, are normally programmed to have an emotional dependence on a 'higher power'.  This can be a group leader or a God or a government.  Indeed, a key element of leadership is to understand this feature of those to be led.  Certainly governments recognize this and leverage it.  More totalitarian governments discourage our ban religion with the expectation that the innate psychological dispositions of the masses will shift to the state.

So, called 'agnostics' are not so much non-believers as they are people direct their dependence toward the state.  Thus, it is unsurprising that they will be more prone to support efforts driven by the state apparatus.

Environmental issues are not generally a focus of traditional religious organizations so their leaderships don't focus on the topic and neither do their flocks.  In a lot of cases the flock has a general gut feeling that there is a leadership struggle between church and state and will be actually antagonistic to state sponsored efforts.  Probably mostly this will happen at a sub-conscious level.

A competent State leadership will recognize these dynamics and will deal with things not by open antagonism but by subverting the church leadership itself (when they have gained the power necessary to do so, and the U.S. passed that threshold some time ago.)  We have seen on this thread several instances of the state acting in this manner.  e.g., giving churches a tax break if their preachers will to preach 'green' stuff.