Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!

[licker]

Originally Posted by Edi

I'll get back to licker's article tomorrow. It is a good one. G'night...

I hope you mean good as in interesting, not good as in haha

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

this is what the oil and auto want you to believe. although, it is actually very humanly natural to think in terms of technological determinism.

simply google "early electric cars" or better yet, if you have a university proxy to journal archives like JSTOR, you can read about the history of the car. further, if you have a university library with archived magazines from the late 19th century, you can see the trajectory of development of the car in the magazines and see the kind of propaganda adds ran by oil and auto. if you want to look up the work of Dan Lord, he is compiling and writing on all these things.

there is no practical reason to adopt oil, it was done simply for capitalistic motives. I'm not even so sure speed and range were practical benefits of oil at the time. they are today only due to the amount of investment put in this techonology. But even if it was, that may be why there was so much influence to create sprawling cities with suburbs and no mass trans or rail; this was needed to justify the rational for using oil.

also, if you read on the history of the car, you will see that suitable batteries for it had been developed a century earlier. if we had stuck with battery technology, rather than switching to internal combustion, then battery and electric engine technology would far surpass the alternatives now.

electricity and most of its production methods are too liquid. oil is something that can be easily controlled.

Wow. Conspiracy AND future telling.

I'll restrain myself to answering just a couple of points:

there is no practical reason to adopt oil, it was done simply for capitalistic motives

I would argue that adoption for capitalist reasons, by definition is the ultimate in adoption for practical reasons.

Eg., in the absense of govt or other forces, each person chose the best technology for themselves.

Of course, I suppose we *could* have put an incentive system in place for people to keep on using horse and buggies.

if we had stuck with battery technology, rather than switching to internal combustion, then battery and electric engine technology would far surpass the alternatives now

Well, since technological development is apparently only a matter of wishful thinking - please tell me when fusion warp drives will be invented.

Conspiracy nuts to the contrary - people that develop technology (you know, those nasty capitalists) choose the one that seems to have the best possiblity for success - eg., making money.

The general rule of thumb in VC circles is that something has to be *roughly* 10 times better than an entrenched technology to be worth the risk.

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

...What would it take to disprove my skepticism? ... my doubts would be irrefutably laid to rest if the other system inputs (solar energy) could be kept constant or decreased while CO2 rose, and temperature continued to rise as climate models predict[1]. Do that for, say, ten years, and show a consistent temperature rise, and I'll call the climate models validated. What we have so far looks more like over-fitting the data, to use the machine-learning term.

-Max

The problem here is manifold.

- It has been shown in excruciating detail that 10 year variance renders any such small sample size to be irrelevant, for better or worse, to the trend as a whole.

- If there is something to this (and that is a big IF to just disregard completely), then we really don't have much more time than that to start impacting the system, due to its enormity, and inertia.

- By the time your 10 year test is done, the world will be either destabilizing over direct supply/demand issues for oil, or will be near that point anyways, due to rate of oil field depletion, and increasing world population needs.

- Combine these factors and you see if we wait 10 years, not only will we have little useful data (beyond studies of direct atmospheric interactions), but we will be forced to change our methods of operation anyways.


Ultimately the human race is going to have to come to grips with our dilemma - in most large scale systems, the need to act is generally more pressing than our ability to sit around and do studies, and pilot projects, and propaganda wars.

[licker]

Jim-

Do you think the tipping point has not been reached yet? What do you think the tipping point is?

I've never disagreed that taking preventative and mitigative actions are a bad thing, but I'm curious to hear about what you think can be done (not should be done, CAN be done) on a global level, and how one determines the tipping point.

Clearly many proposed actions are nonstarters for the developing world.

[licker]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/1...n-the-rebound/

And an interesting article about glaciers in Alaska...

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/200...ks-in-history/

And a discussion of 'hockey sticks'. Interesting to read the comments.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by licker

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/1...n-the-rebound/

And an interesting article about glaciers in Alaska...

We can hope that's a temporary anomaly. If the new solar cycle has started, which we have reason to suspect it may have, it should start warming up again soon. I sure hope so, anyway.

-Max

[chrispedersen]

The problem here is manifold.

- By the time your 10 year test is done, the world will be either destabilizing over direct supply/demand issues for oil, or will be near that point anyways, due to rate of oil field depletion, and increasing world population needs.

Why do you suppose the world doesn't destabilize over, say, platinum? Or paladium, or uranium? What is it specifically about oil that makes it so inherently destabilizing?

Secondly, while I do agree that a tipping point for total oil production has been reached, I don't agree with the concept of world population needs.

Demand for any commodity is elastic. As price goes up, other alternatives become more attractive. Spurring the development of other alternatives. Free market economy in action.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Wow. Conspiracy AND future telling.

I'll restrain myself to answering just a couple of points:

I would argue that adoption for capitalist reasons, by definition is the ultimate in adoption for practical reasons.

Eg., in the absense of govt or other forces, each person chose the best technology for themselves.

Of course, I suppose we *could* have put an incentive system in place for people to keep on using horse and buggies.

Well, since technological development is apparently only a matter of wishful thinking - please tell me when fusion warp drives will be invented.

Conspiracy nuts to the contrary - people that develop technology (you know, those nasty capitalists) choose the one that seems to have the best possiblity for success - eg., making money.

The general rule of thumb in VC circles is that something has to be *roughly* 10 times better than an entrenched technology to be worth the risk.

your naivety is cute.

i'm sure nations suffering under things like Structural Adjustment Policy know all about capitalism and its practicality. they are also intimately familiar with its "best" choices of technology.

PS its not a conspiracy theory because it lacks any conspirators. Its a structure and systems theory that details how systems breed certain results.

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Omniziron

this is what the oil and auto want you to believe. although, it is actually very humanly natural to think in terms of technological determinism.

also, if you read on the history of the car, you will see that suitable batteries for it had been developed a century earlier. if we had stuck with battery technology, rather than switching to internal combustion, then battery and electric engine technology would far surpass the alternatives now.

This has nothing to do with determinism, but technology is indeed not anything goes. There are almost always technological reasons that make one solution more practical than the other.
Why is your calculator driven by solar and not by oil?
Because it's far more handy.
And you can't just expect all technologies to advance at the same rate if you just throw funds at them.

simply google "early electric cars" or better yet, if you have a university proxy to journal archives like JSTOR, you can read about the history of the car. further, if you have a university library with archived magazines from the late 19th century, you can see the trajectory of development of the car in the magazines and see the kind of propaganda adds ran by oil and auto. if you want to look up the work of Dan Lord, he is compiling and writing on all these things.

there is no practical reason to adopt oil, it was done simply for capitalistic motives. I'm not even so sure speed and range were practical benefits of oil at the time. they are today only due to the amount of investment put in this techonology. But even if it was, that may be why there was so much influence to create sprawling cities with suburbs and no mass trans or rail; this was needed to justify the rational for using oil.

electricity and most of its production methods are too liquid. oil is something that can be easily controlled.

Ok, I did.
From what I gather there was indeed some usage of electric cars, but that was (from my perspective) very impractical. The electric cars could drive about 100 miles and then had to be recharged for 8h.
With an oil based car - even if it has no better range - you just need to refuel for 2min and there you go again.
Combustion engines simply outdid electrical motors very quickly. Before that you had the competition.
Sure you can say electric cars had advantages, but from a buyers view these were mostly neglible compared to the disadvantages they had.
Where electricity works well there it has been adapted (for example suburban trains). Or look at military history - in WW2 Germany invested heavily into the development of electric submarines. But they still needed diesel engines to recharge. I'm pretty sure they didn't do that to remain dependent on oil.

I'm not saying that oil is the best thing, I'm actually in favor of using replenishing energy sources only, but there's no denying that oil is as of now still very useful and many problems have to be solved before we get away from it.

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Why do you suppose the world doesn't destabilize over, say, platinum? Or paladium, or uranium? What is it specifically about oil that makes it so inherently destabilizing?

Why indeed?
Might well be that we run out of other resources if we don't calculate into the future.

Demand for any commodity is elastic. As price goes up, other alternatives become more attractive. Spurring the development of other alternatives. Free market economy in action.

We don't need a shortage of oil to have crashes. Now I don't want to know what happens when some big oil company announces that they can't deliver anymore and we still have a demand as high as today's.

[Dragar]

I am yet to understand the fuss about electric cars, except for reasons of minimising localised air pollution.

Instead of burning petrol or LPG in a relatively simple engine to produce a lot of power and distance with quick and easy refueling, you are:
• burning coal (typically) in a power station remote from the vehicle
• generating electricity at probably 30-35% efficiency, except in the rare case of a combined cycle plant
• transmitting it through an expensive network where you will suffer further losses
• slowly charging a car battery which is expensive, likely hard to dispose of and with a relatively short life

If we were generating the electricity cleanly, if we had effective and economic carbon capture and storage at the power station, I would understand. As it is, with the exception of the benefits of regenerative braking, I have no idea why people want to use our highest grade of energy (electricity) for propulsion when a readily transportable and stored lower grade fuel of high energy density is available. Fundamentally we are just shifting where we burn our fossil fuels.

Any real gain needs to look at improved generation and reduced consumption. Consumption is technically the easiest to reduce (so many ways to use less energy), but that requires people to change how they behave, which is difficult and slow. I mean, why worry about new car technologies when we could make a huge differences just in our selection of conventional cars? From SUVs to small Japanese/korean vehicles there is a huge step change both in energy consumption and capital outlay. I forget the figures but methane production from cows is a huge greenhouse contributor – a cultural switch to meat from different animals (or the much tougher step to reduced meat consumption) would be highly effective if it could be done. The level of heating and cooling for inside climate control is likewise insane – in hot climate buildings are kept freezing cold and in cold climates they are ovens.. what level of benefit if every air temperature controller in the world was asked to do 2 degrees C less work? Would anyone really suffer for it? Miraculous scientific steps aren’t needed to drop our carbon footprint, but it’s so much easier to blame an oil company or a government for our problems than to change our behaviour.

On the energy generation side, coal power plants are the worst offender, and as they have a long life and are very unlikely to be mothballed within decades of being built we really need to focus on not building new coal plants. Unless carbon capture and sequestration proves itself to be effective, reliable and economic we really need to be pushing natural gas and nuclear as the best short to medium term alternates, with solar/wind/tidal etc in niche uses where applicable. They are not close to being able to be base-load energy providers.