[Duke Leto]

I’m sorry, Brian, if you seriously believe that Ayers is a “mentor” of Obama, then you are getting your information from a source with an agenda. I might just as easily claim that Oral Roberts is a “mentor” to McCain because McCain spoke at his university during the campaign.

If you want to criticize Obama, and I admit to being a supporter of his, why not criticize the nascent cult of personality that’s developing around him? That makes me and Paul Krugman feel more than a bit uncomfortable. Why are you bothering to hammer on virtually non-existent ties to some penny-enny 60s radical who did most of his crimes when Obama was an 8 year old boy?

You a seem intelligent enough, but you are parroting talking points from American conservative talk radio on Obama and Global Warming as if they are gospel truth. You’re clearly not subjecting the information you are getting to any kind of rational test before taking it on board.

I see no reason to waste my time researching the rest of your assertions when that ludicrous Ayers canard is at the centerpiece of them.

[Duke Leto]

Yes… You are indeed a complete and utter loony.

[Duke Leto]

Energy Density of the solar input puts a maximum limit on what you can get out of a square foot of anything dedicated to catching and using solar energy. And every square foot of land or sea devoted to producing energy from solar power by whatever means is one that is taken away from making food or supporting the ecosphere.

I agree we will not be reaching peak oil soon. We passed through it last year and came out the other side, it helped to trigger the present Depressionary conditions as much as anything.

You know Brian, if you honestly believe that Obama is a foolish malignancy, I doubt there’s any point in my trying to argue that he isn’t with you.

[Duke Leto]

Granted Brian, but I think we can agree that unless Eric and the team succeed, there must logically BE a bottom, by virtue of the mere fact that Petroleum is finite and demand is increasing in the long term.

Sheer Malthusian nastiness predicates it.

[Duke Leto]

Don’t enumerate your poultry prior to their emergence from their ovoids.

[Duke Leto]

It’s gotta be approaching a floor.

[Duke Leto]

Based on everything you’ve said, it looks like coastal plants would still win out over the sea based platforms owing to shipping costs.

[Duke Leto]

Well this conversation is manifestly futile as neither of us is going to convince the other.

[Duke Leto]

You again miss the point. If the Ice Packs are as unstable an environment as you are claiming they must be, there could never be evolutionary incentive for a large predator to evolve with the adaptational traits specific to that environment.

[Duke Leto]

Re: 2-5 mil net for the distribution compantes. Metering isn’t free. And there are still the transformers on the poles to be looked after. And you yourself said that the there was a potential deflationary danger. Fat lot of good FF does us in the US in short the term if it sets off a debt default crisis.

Re: AGW, again I misspoke. My answers to the two questions I asked ought to have been no and yes.

What you are describing is a global climate, more particularly an Arctic climate, that is subject sudden changes from a highly iced cap to a lightly iced one in a matter of decades every few millennia.

So where are the black Polar Bears? The majority of polar bears are living on the Canadian and Alaskan coastlines now, and that population is not living on the pack ice and therefore has a considerable selection pressure for dark pelts to conserve albido heat absorption and not stick out like a sore thumb during the land based summers. If, as your theory necessitates, the Arctic vacillates between larglely Ice Bound and largely Ice Free conditions, ice pack Polar Bears must go extinct on the caps every few thousand years for a few thousand years before being recolonized from the continents once the pack ice is able to support them again.

But if this were the case, they would not BE Polar Bears. They would be Arctic Circle Bears with dark pelts mostly adapted to life on land. Some would live on the ice cap and thrive there when the opportunity arose, but they would not be specifically adapted to a year round on-ice environment. There would not be time to make the full adaptation every cycle.

P.S. I clearly do not think you are a cretin, or I would not be wasting my breath arguing with you. I think you’re an intelligent person who thinks he’s smarter than the scientific consensus. A rarer, but altogether different species from the workaday idiot.

[Duke Leto]

Ooops!

Decimal place error.

That ought to have read .20 to .50 cents, as in 2 or 5 mils.

Sorry.

[Duke Leto]

I was rolling up profits and economic productivity gains in the same package, Eric. Since the effective econ productivity gain is equal to the drop in cost of all comsumed energy, the question is how much of the econ productivity is translated to profits for the energy prodcuer and how much becomes the cost decrease, and consequent profit increase, of the consumers. To put that somewhat more clearly, the net increase in GDP is more or less fixed, who gets what piece of the now bigger pie is what’s at issue.

As to whether the distribtuion net owners in the US are going to charge a “transition cost” to recoup their investment, I always assumed they would just gleefully accept the role as a markup taking middleman for the FF Generator owners, fire 90% of their engineers working transmission lines, substations and other generators and then live off of a free 25-50 cents per kwh for just running the meters. If nothing else, they have the value of the land where the transmission lines currently are.

But you do have a point, I had never thought of the Blue Chip investment portfolios that have the Power Company stocks. Particularly those that pension plans and 401k mutual funds are invested in. Hmmmm… Oh well, other problems…

I wish I had your confidence that collaborative democratic management were possible, Eric. My own experience is that ships need captains. Democratically elected captains, but still someone to keep everyone from forming their own plan in a storm. The problem with American management, it seems to me, is that it seems to think that management ought to be hereditary and that salesmen make the best managers. (As opposed to the best petty thieves.)

[Duke Leto]

Uhhuh.

Punctuated Equilibrium in Climate, eh? Right.

The economic point is not that developing new technology wouldn’t be spiffy. It’s that betting worldwide planning on developing new technology is insane. You don’t know if the technologies you suggest will work or if they will fail, or if they will have some unforseen secondary effects.

Imagine it this way. Let’s say we’re playing draw poker and you have a 4 card flush but no pair, and I bet the size of the pot on my hand. You can fold or call, because the size of the bet is all the money you have. If you fold, you at least don’t lose everything now. If you call, you might double your stack, but only if you make your flush on the draw card, which is only about a 20% chance. Less counting the legitimate possibility that I’m holding a higher flush or better. So the only sane strategy is to fold. Now if we had a situation where the cost to find out if you get a flush were lower, say I had only bet one tenth the size of the pot, then calling would actually be sensible. Repeating the identical hand 100 times, you would 10 times your investment 2 out of 10 times.

Problem is that in this analogy, with the economic cost benefit analysis, you are calculating in an assumed ROI for research when you have no rational reason for thinking that there will be one for any given situation. You don’t know if it’s 5 to 1 we’ll hit something like FF or a runaraound against the photosynthetic ceiling, or 100 to 1. Or a million to 1. You also don’t know whether the threat of AGW is as bad as it is being represented. (The analogy to my hidden poker hand.) Maybe it is a bluff. Maybe it’s already so bad that we have to be prepared for an apocalyptic scenario and the resources thrown away on research would better be spent on canned food and ammunition. The point is that the lack of information on GW and future Energy resources strengthens the case for caution and conservatism in resource usage, NOT proceed as if nothing is wrong and hope that technology will bail us out.

I acknowledge this is an unfair attack on a strawman caricature of your argument, but I’m still in a bad mood about being a Stalinist.

[Duke Leto]

No I do not. I do not even disagree that applying Gore’s prescriptions would cause massive economic hardship, but as I see it so will AGW in the long term. Much more so. In fact Peak Oil will probably cause a depression and a World War if nothing is done on AGW or if any measures are taken, so long as no new energy source emerges. So as I see it FF is humanity’s and the US’s only real hope at this point.

But I do disagree with the Wegman criticism. Basically we have a statistician called in to criticize the conclusions of climate scientists by a Texas Republican house committee chairman to comment on a scientific finding that conservatives are politically opposed too. Lovely. Michael Behe has similar credentials. I’m not even going to bother looking at the findings of the British judge, as they are 100% irrelevant. Judges do not arbitrate science any more then chemists judge the merits of writs of appeal.

I looked at RealClimate’s contemporary response to the hearing. What amuses me in the whole discussion is that the GW critics are bitching about variations in the amplitude of the graphs, whether it was warmer before the little ice age then it is now and such. That isn’t the point. The point is the 1st and 2nd derivatives of the graph. Did the temperature changes in the past operate as FAST as they are now and does this indicate the appearance of a powerful new force in global climate? I fail to see how anyone can not answer yes to those two questions.

Plato supposedly wrote “I’ll admit no one who doesn’t understand Geometry” over the door of the Academy. Modern science ought to substitute Calculus. (Yes, Plato WAS an utter bastard.)

[Duke Leto]

I got the conclusion part of Dyson’s review. The principle being that one should gamble on the emergence of a technology suc h as FF.

With all due respect, that’s the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket on the principle that it is a sound investment. Making long term plans on the assumption of constantly improving technology is lunacy.

[Author]

Posts