Climate Change Denialists (who get all shy)


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  • #100115 Reply
    michael norton

      My maths is not very good.
      If there are 67 million people living in the united Kingdom, to pay for £4.5,000,000,000 interconnector
      is about seven thousand pounds per inhabitant, just to pay for the build out of this one bit of infrastructure.
      If you add the whole New Green Deal up, four Hinkley “C” plant, 25 billion a pop, that’s 100 billion.
      The build out of wind farms would probably be another 150 billion.
      How much would two million off street EV charging points cost, certainly hundreds of billions.
      This is going to end up costing each working adult more than than can earn in a lifetime, does not seem that sustainable?

      #100120 Reply
      Pigeon English

        What number is
        4.5000000000
        Is that 4 500,000,000
        4.5 Billion?
        67 Millions x £100= 6.7 Billion

        #100121 Reply
        michael norton

          I expect I got my noughts wrong.
          The proposed electricity interconnector from Peterhead in Scotland to Drax in Yorkshore was expected to cost 3 1/2 billion, now it is expected to cost four and a half billion pounds.
          £4,500,000,000
          There might be 67 million people currently residing in the United Kingdom.

          #100122 Reply
          ET

            Michael, your maths is out by a bit. 4.5 billion across 67 million people is approx £67 per person. UK total revenue was 1.1 Trillion for 2023/2024, thats 1100 billion. They could fund 244 such projects at 4.5 billion each. Of course, they have other things to be spending their money on and also borrow but in the scheme of things it seems all such large projects are costed in the billions range in this modern era. For cpmparison, a new childrens hospital in Dublin has cost over 2.2 billion.

            #100129 Reply
            Pigeon English

              ET

              I don’t want to sound as right wing supporter
              but we aren’t getting value for money.
              When I saw those numbers (1 trillion) a few months ago I didn’t believe they were right.
              Someone is taking the piss.
              No wonder we have started talking PPP GDP.

              Michael

              67 Millions x £1000 = 67 Billions x 7 = £469 billion. More than enough!

              I know those Russians and Chinese are coming, and let’s protect ourselves 😏

              #100131 Reply
              michael norton

                I would guess the New Green Energy Transition in the United Kingdom,
                would cost around a trillion pounds, by the time it is completed or roughly equivalent to one year of entire U.K. G.D.P.

                #100154 Reply
                michael norton

                  Electric Vehicles – parking fires
                  A good step is to know the manufacturer of the batteries and to know the chemistry of the batteries in each E.V.
                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLwbOQsdSNI

                  When vehicles are packed in close to each other in a parking place, it does not have to be an E.V. that starts the inferno. Once and E.V. in a multistorey parking lot takes hold, there are not many options other than for the fire brigade to keep the public away and watch the E.V. fires run their course.
                  Soon, even Ed Milliband will not be able to turn a blind eye.
                  What will happen when his two million on street E.V. charging points have been constructed?
                  We will need a bigger fire brigade.

                  #100172 Reply
                  AG

                    JACOBIN – Review of “Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change”, by M. V. Ramana (Verso, 2024)

                    (JACOBIN appear not only to be reporting like “any” news source but are propagating their own agenda in the climate debate, as far as I understood John Bellamy Foster a couple of months ago on Monthly Review. In how far one agrees or disagrees with that agenda is again a separate matter. But it´s helpful to know).

                    “For and Against Climate Progress in the Atomic Garden”

                    By Leigh Phillips

                    “A new book opposing nuclear energy unintentionally highlights how 1970s opposition was a dead end for the Left. By examining contemporary arguments, it becomes clear that this historic stance has hindered climate progress and energy reliability.”
                    https://jacobin.com/2024/08/climate-change-renewables-nuclear-energy
                    https://archive.is/lw4nS

                    #100186 Reply
                    Clark

                      AG, the Jacobin article by Leigh Phillips seems like a Centrist political polemic for the US Democrat Party. Phillips shows minimal awareness of the multifaceted crisis that industrialism is causing, and merely uses the climate aspect of humanity’s energy deficit to argue for the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (misrepresenting Just Stop Oil’s one political demand in the process).

                      Continued opposition to nuclear by much of the climate left — as well as other counterproductive and deeply unpopular positions such as degrowth, opposition to aviation, meat, and mining, and maximalist stances against cars, even electric vehicles — makes it even less likely that the IRA can be strengthened with future legislation.

                      – If we want to speed up decarbonization while delivering a prosperous, high-energy, egalitarian reindustrialization that will heal the economic wound that has driven the rise of global Trumpism, the Left must abandon outdated, evidence-free 1970s antinuclear ideology, neo-Malthusian degrowth rhetoric, and other eco-austerity politics. It is an insult to the millions of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck to be told by middle-class intellectuals that they consume too much. Instead, climate activists need to align with the industrial trade unions on the front lines of the clean energy transition, which strongly support nuclear energy and industrial policy for the high-quality, unionizable jobs they provide.

                      – Antinuclear politics, along with its technophobia, and antipathy toward industry, has been a colossal mistake. It’s time we return to the classic socialist, technology-positive stance of figures like Karl Marx, Sylvia Pankhurst, Leon Trotsky, and Harold Wilson. We need to rediscover the Left’s commitment to defending industrial modernity against counter-Enlightenment nostalgia and promising a far superior industrial modernity than capitalism could ever deliver.

                      Oh dear… It is very clear that Phillips has not the slightest realisation that industrialism (in which I include modern agriculture) has already gone way too far, increasingly depleting both the biosphere’s ability to support life, and the natural resources upon which it itself is dependent. Typically for this sort of argument, Phillips simply neglects to mention any problem but greenhouse heating, and thus contrives to propose a socialist industrial utopia powered by the magic bullet of nuclear electricity generation, without even sparing a single thought for the limited global reserves of uranium, the very first and most obvious constraint that should have come to mind.

                      This is simply not realistic. It is the ‘socialist’ (i.e. Centrist) face of human arrogance, a sense of invincibility that has become dangerously obese, fed by two centuries of (grossly unfairly distributed) fossil fuel energy abundance.

                      #100206 Reply
                      michael norton

                        The Greening of Planet Earth (1992)
                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep5ptrPN6ns&t=1251s

                        I know these are views for more than three decades ago but they all seem quite positive for more carbon dioxide in the air.
                        It is suggested that trees might grow three, four or more times as much with much greater volumes of CO2 in the air.
                        At some point, they speculate the trees will absorb so much Carbon that the continued increase in CO2 in the atmosphere
                        will level off. In the meantime the whole world will benefit from more abundant crops.

                        #100210 Reply
                        AG

                          “How much time will our civilization survive?
                          A conversation with historian Nasser Zakariya on “doomsday statistics” and other forms of scientific catastrophism”
                          from Alex Wellerstein´s Substack
                          https://doomsdaymachines.net/p/how-much-time-will-our-civilization

                          #100211 Reply
                          michael norton

                            A 2018 study has concluded that the Sahara Desert has become 8% smaller, over the previous third of a century, partially because of extra Carbon dioxide in the air.
                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGZ3zylUG2k
                            With modern techniques, much planting has been done, around the edges of the Sahara.
                            Extra CO2 allows for slightly less transpiration, meaning the plants can get by with a bit less water.

                            #100213 Reply
                            michael norton

                              I understand that some will be upset, that there does seem to be upsides to extra Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
                              Let us imagine that this 1.4 degrees Celsius increase in heat is almost all caused by the modern world.
                              Cutting down forests to grow cereals, building vast cities, using massive quantities of cement, heating our houses by natural gas, powering our electricity grids with coal, massive increases in petrol consuming vehicles, massive increases in fuel oil burning shipping and globalisation. Massive increase of global aviation, numerous wars. However, although some people do die from too much heat, about thirty times that number die from the cold. Since about 1900 the population of the Earth has quadrupled. This huge increase in population has happened in a time of increasing Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere? Part of the reason for the increase of human numbers is Coal, Oil and Methane. It does seem that although extra Carbon dioxide is rising very dramatically, temperature is only rising modestly?

                              #100219 Reply
                              AG

                                German area only:

                                from indie site NACHDENKSEITEN on the attempted switch to renewables by the German government:
                                “Economics Minister Habeck – climate protector or lobbyist?”

                                https://www-nachdenkseiten-de.translate.goog/?p=120243&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp

                                p.s. EEG in the above text means this: “German Renewable Energy Sources Act” German: Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz
                                see Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Sources_Act

                                #100227 Reply
                                Clark

                                  Michael, hardly anyone dies of cold; they die of poverty. And far from solving poverty, cooking the entire planet will make it much, much worse:

                                  No, more CO₂ won’t help us grow more food (about greening)

                                  I wasn’t worried about climate change. Now I am. Sabine Hossenfelder

                                  The two videos you linked are from denialist YouTube accounts. The second is from the Heartland Institute, probably the best known funder of climate change denial in the world, deliberately paying to corrupt science, funded by fossil fuel companies. They did the same for the tobacco industry:

                                  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute&oldid=1240385726#2012_documents_leak

                                  Michael, do you have any idea why you’re finding so much of this stuff? Companies have literally paid vast sums precisely to mislead people like you in this way. I’m not paid anything for trying to set the record straight, but I’m completely outgunned by companies with a fortune to spend on flooding the internet with lies. Do you ever clear your browser of cookies or try browsing from a private/incognito tab? You could have got stuck in a filter bubble.

                                  #100228 Reply
                                  Clark

                                    AG, sorry, I haven’t yet got the translation to work.

                                    #100229 Reply
                                    AG

                                      Clark

                                      May be archived version works?
                                      https://archive.is/gKigf

                                      One paragraph is blocked by graphics.
                                      It says:

                                      “(…)
                                      Heat pumps are not climate neutral per se

                                      Heat pumps require electricity to operate. In principle, they work like a standard refrigerator . A simple air-water heat pump can generate around 3.5 kilowatt hours of heating energy from one kilowatt hour of electrical energy by extracting heat energy from the environment. Just like a refrigerator, however, it is only climate-neutral if the electricity it uses is generated in a climate-neutral way. As long as the electricity consumed in Germany does not come 100 percent from renewable energies, heat pumps cannot in principle be climate-neutral. In 2023, the share of renewables in electricity generation in Germany was 51.8 percent , and the share of total final energy consumption was just 22 percent .

                                      In extreme cases, if a gas heating system with an efficiency of almost 100 percent is replaced by an air-water heat pump that gets its electrical energy exclusively from a lignite-fired power plant with an efficiency of 40 percent , its CO2 emissions can even be one and a half times higher than those of a gas heating system. When making the calculation, it must be taken into account that the CO2 emissions per kilowatt hour of electricity from lignite are twice as high as from natural gas. The same basically applies to electromobility.

                                      Doubtful economic viability of heat pumps – at least in the coming years
                                      (…)”

                                      In case, please keep in mind that this is not an academic or scholarly paper.
                                      It´s by Germany´s biggest alternative news site which is for average (often older) readers who are however critical and interested in these matters.
                                      Not expert researchers. But that´s why I put it here. To present a more popular example for a decent attempt of informing the public.
                                      But they usually do good work and this particular author had decent figures in past articles and refrained from wild political speculations. He remained factual in his style.

                                      #100230 Reply
                                      michael norton

                                        Multistorey car park solar roof, now too expensive

                                        “Worcester City Council said installing solar panels on the roof of its St. Martin’s Gate car park on City Walls Road would generate enough electricity to power lifts, lights and electric vehicle charging points at the site.
                                        But a report going before the authority estimated the cost of the project had jumped from £463,250 to £604,365.”
                                        Now on hold.
                                        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj08n4rv26no
                                        probably not a good idea to encourage E.V. in multistory car parks.

                                        #100231 Reply
                                        michael norton

                                          Clark, I reported that NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / NASA
                                          had claimed that the green leaf coverage of the Earth had greatly increased over the previous third of a century. I do not really think this is now disputed? People have gone on the theorise that the largest part of this greening most likely has been caused by the extra Carbon dioxide, now in our Atmosphere. This has some upsides.

                                          #100234 Reply
                                          Pigeon English

                                            Sabine is great and funny and great at communicating complex stuff.

                                            Michael
                                            Greening can also be more bushes but not trees.
                                            F.ex Island next to my childhood town is greener now. No sheep or goats and bushes are thriving and from the sky looks really green until you land.

                                            #100235 Reply
                                            shibboleth

                                              @ Michael Norton

                                              The plants and trees may be thriving from the abundance of CO2 – at least those trees we haven’t cut down for biomass or agriculture. But the majority of CO2 is absorbed by the oceans where little critters do their bit and eat the carbon. More oxygen is produced by phytoplankton than all the trees and plants combined – but too much CO2 to assimilate leads to acidification and goodbye little critters. Of course, we occasionally forget the oceans are our largest rubbish dump – especially for all the really nasty stuff we don’t want to see – and that will also have a detrimental effect on O2 production.

                                              Mammals can’t adapt to that kind of drop in O2 concentrations – try walking at 20,000 feet and see how far you manage. We can’t acclimatise in the time it takes to deplete O2 in the atmosphere – even if it takes 1,000 years.

                                              I suppose you might think this a good thing as there will certainly be some new opportunities. I’m sure Sainsburys will be stocking canisters of O2 (disposable of course) for daily use. No doubt the homes of the future will have their own O2 plant on the roof and ventilation ducts to every room. Think of the jobs, eh?

                                              #100236 Reply
                                              michael norton

                                                Quote shibboleth
                                                “We can’t acclimatise in the time it takes to deplete O2 in the atmosphere”

                                                I think I now have a fairly good grasp at what is happening.

                                                I think I now agree that for a little while the use of Carbon fuels and tech, have allowed the population of the Earth to increase from two billion to eight billion, over the last one and a quarter centuries. There are probably too many people currently alive to make all this long term livable.
                                                But who will get to choose who should live and who should die?
                                                Flooding the world with batteries and battery cars is not the answer to anything but it has already made Elon Musk very rich.

                                                #100238 Reply
                                                Clark

                                                  Michael – “Flooding the world with batteries and battery cars is not the answer to anything…”

                                                  I entirely agree.

                                                  “There are probably too many people currently alive to make all this long term livable. But who will get to choose who should live and who should die?”

                                                  Well it seems inevitable that humanity will crash land, so we should divert all our energies to arranging the softest landing possible. Stand by…

                                                  https://yewtu.be/watch?v=k1fhRtrC2Cw

                                                  #100239 Reply
                                                  shibboleth

                                                    “I think I now have a fairly good grasp at what is happening.”

                                                    Michael – if you can spare two hours, please listen to this interview with Bill Rees, published last weekend. I think he can explain in detail with simple language far better than most academics. It will be worth it.

                                                    https://youtu.be/GPmMeF0B4v4?si=UH-HNJ0B7LCabezH

                                                    #100261 Reply
                                                    AG

                                                      Bloomberg News via naked capitalism:

                                                      “How Japan Ignored Climate Critics and Built a Global Natural Gas Empire
                                                      Japan’s championing of gas minted it a $14 billion profit last year, while entrenching dependence on a fossil fuel as experts urge a faster shift to renewables.”

                                                      https://archive.is/04gsK

                                                      paywalled original:
                                                      https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-japan-natural-gas-lng-global-trade/

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