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My arms are hugging you Clark, know you’re a good guy but sadly can’t agree with you on some things. I’m not religious but respect many religious people have been totally on the ball for so long, must admit it’s from their using scripture to understand what’s happening.
I often promote such videos as many are so accurate regarding what’s happening. I’ll try one link which i think is unlikely to work:
https://odysee.com/@HumanitysVault:a/Early-Warning—1981-film:4
Looks like the links have failed to me, so i’ll post the name of the video which is available on Odysee.
Barry Smith on Revelation TV (2000)Checked the first link, it’s iffy for me so check out Barry Smith on Revelation TV (2000) which is available on Odysee
Demeter
Kindly stop posting links, which you don’t summarise or explain, that are unrelated to the title of the discussion thread. This is a discussion forum, not a posterboard for interesting links.
If you wish to talk about real world conspiracies, please create a new discussion.
Incidentally, the links don’t work when you post them as plain text, but this can be fixed on a case-by-case basis by moderators.
Thank you.
Appreciate u explaining and still posting my comments, you’ve been more than fair, cheers.
Natasha, I stumbled upon a source that may be very useful to you, and very relevant to issues you have raised in this thread, which you started:
https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php
– “Many factors have to be taken into account when trying to predict how future global warming will contribute to climate change. The amount of future greenhouse gas emissions is a key variable. Developments in technology, changes in energy generation and land use, global and regional economic circumstances and population growth must also be considered.”
Demeter, I have now caught up with the thread and I’m pleased and surprised by the tone of your replies; so many similar conversations have descended into accusations of stupidity and mendacity against me.
Michael Parenti appears a good commentator, though I expect he’d be scathing of sources such as the Express and the New York Post – however, to discuss his political commentary here would be to stray far from Natasha’s topic, as the moderator has said.
I also agree that evidence of real conspiracies should be posted under a forum topic of their own, not here. I’m sorry, but I probably wouldn’t contribute much. We’re already well off topic but I would like to give you my reasons. Secret conspiracies indeed happen, but (1) this has little bearing upon conspiracy theory (which is a mode of thought which, ironically, has very little to do with real conspiracies, but that’s for another thread), and (2, important to this thread) by their secret nature, conspiracies tell us little that helps us to judge real world events, unless they get reasonably well exposed.
For instance, secret conspiracies almost certainly have influenced the debate surrounding anthropogenic global heating, but we can’t just assume that they’ve concocted or sensationalised the issue, to increase taxes or whatever. What each secret conspiracy will have done will have depended upon whether they considered anthropogenic heating to be real or not, and that’s the very question under examination, so to assume that they’ve created the issue for nefarious ends is circular reasoning.
In fact, for each secret conspiracy four broad behaviours are possible: (1) the secret society assessed AGW to be real, and played it up for their own ends; (2) they considered AGW real, but it was in their interests to play it down or deny it; (3) the secret society assessed AGW to be untrue but influenced science and public debate to make it look true, and (4) they assessed AGW to be untrue, and it also suited their purposes to project it as untrue to the public.
So attempting to examine AGW (or any other issue) by considering conspiracies will tell us nothing about the issue; we have to consider the issue in its own right.
Demeter, expanding briefly upon my fifth paragraph above, my four examples define the extremes, or four corners, of a field of possibilities.
Corner 1 (AGW true, play it up) would include the positions of the environmentalists, but also the “Green Industrial Revolution” advocates and renewable power manufacturers, and the financiers who wish to commodify, own and trade ecosystem services such as pollination, photosynthesis and natural water purification. Note that these would be relatively new entities, battling against old economic giants, trying to forge a place for themselves in the economic system. Such entities have probably helped promote Greta Thunberg, and funded environmental activism.
Corner 2 (AGW true, play it down) is now well documented to be the position of Exxon and other fossil fuel companies etc.; more documentation emerges all the time. These are the “old economic giants” I referred to above.
Corner 3 (AGW false, but make it look true) could include any of the economic players of Corner 1 above, but not genuine environmentalists.
Corner 4 (AGW false, play it down) is presumably the position of some members of the Heritage Foundation, Donald Trump, the US religious right, and others of very limited scientific literacy.
I’m sure they all have their secret conflabs!
Of course the worst case scenario is that the argument polarises and the four groups congregate in the corners of the field, from where they throw their own faeces at each other like adolescent chimps.
Demeter,
what seems vanishingly unlikely is that the science we see is known to be false, and there’s some different, true science that’s only known to “the Elite”. Science is a massive, collaborative, interlocking effort, and it’s developed in public, in the scientific literature – albeit much of it behind paywalls, which is wrong, but it isn’t secret.
For instance, cosmology and astrophysics need nuclear physics for the understanding of stars, and for the relative abundance of the chemical elements produced in the Big Bang. Likewise, findings from astrophysics and cosmology feed back into nuclear physics. Quantum physics is needed to understand atomic structure, which in turn is needed for understanding the properties of the chemical elements, and hence chemistry. Astronomy and spectroscopy confirm the aforesaid findings of nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Experimental findings from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider etc. establish the unification temperatures of the four fundamental forces, which have to be consistent with nuclear physics, cosmology and the observations of astronomy. And so on. A finding in any one of these fields affects and has to be consistent with all the others.
Closer to the discussion we’ve been having, climatologists need the understandings of biology, present and past. The biology of the past is palaeontology; the study of the climate of the past is palaeoclimatology, and these of course help inform the climatology and biology of the present. And so obviously they all intertwine with microbiology, biological chemistry, genetics, evolutionary genetics and so on. Science may have been taught to us at school as separate subjects that seemed to impinge upon each other only minimally, but that’s not remotely how things are in practical modern science.
Some consequences follow from this.
It takes huge numbers of people to develop such a broad set of interlocking understandings; trying to do better with a much smaller number of people acting in secret, sharing their findings only with each other, really wouldn’t be able to compete. If “the Elite” want science and the multitude of advantages it provides, they have to turn to the public scientific community. The best a secret team could hope to achieve is a minor, temporary advantage in a limited field.
And when you personally say “oh I don’t think oil is a fossil fuel, it’s produced abiotically”, you really have no idea of the ramifications in all the other related and connected fields – and that’s in addition to having to find an explanation for Huppert’s work being correct, and oil wells drying up and oil companies giving up production of entire oilfields, and fracking etc. becoming commercially viable.
You say you’re a hippy type, and one hippy tenet is that reality is a unified whole; everything affects and is connected to everything else. Science indeed treats reality as a unified whole; science does of course use reductionism, but at the larger scales science is a genuinely holistic enterprise. That’s why the “univers” in “university”.
Clark,
XR’s demand for “a Citizens’ Assembly” chosen by sortition is idealistic at best.
Q: Who is going to inform those so chosen at random to make rational informed decisions without personal internal invisible bias?
A: The recent ‘Citizens Climate Assemblies’ (i.e. the UK national and one in Brighton etc), were completely broken and corrupted by special interest. Following XR’s civil disobedience action plan being unveiled in late 2018, I researched and wrote an answer to their question “What’s the plan?” It’s clear nuclear energy must be in the mix (to maximise the numbers of people who can survive whilst fossil fuels get too scarce and finally run out, but by then even nuclear energy will be severely limited). But those who chose the ‘experts’ failed entirely to invite anyone who could deliver this message to their Citizens Climate Assemblies’ members (aside from the other numerous anti-scientific bias on display).https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/
https://tinyurl.com/AtomicHumansThis spectacle alone renders XR at best a silly misleading joke, since XR themselves have shown that random selection is even more inferior than the current system!
The obvious way forwards is to simply admit out loud over and over again that we need to work out how to exclude psychopaths from ALL positions of power, not pretend they don’t matter via e.g. random selection sortition nonsense and other ways to be blind and deaf to the nefarious ways of psychopaths.
Clark, please just admit that: an organisation such as XR that has “no energy policy” except “reduce emissions as rapidly as possible, starting immediately” and then claiming this “is entirely consistent with weaning human systems off of fossil fuels” but then FAILING to point out to people like Greta Thunberg etc… that this means global populations much be cut or left to die by 80% in the next half dozen decades, is frankly child grooming by FAILING to address the question: who has to die and not have kids first?
You ask for “a transition to true democracy” and invite us to join “the campaign to transcend fossil fuels” but I submit that it is delusional to assume the XR etc… road map(s) can possibly deliver anything but future irrelevant chaos trying to celebrate their own ignorance.
Natasha, I find your comments very aggressive. I submit to your aggression, and admit all the things you demand. I apologise for my existence.
Natasha, what would be your plan to address the climate crisis? I’m not sure I like your condescending style of presentation but nonetheless you do make some valid points. Rather than just pointing out the deficiencies in current plans to replace fossil fuel dependence, how do you propose we proceed?
Clark, sorry, I’m a ‘Vulcan’ INTJ so tend to obsess until things are straightened out and finished, nothing personal intended. I went to the first few XR meetings and have studied under one of their original inspirations, Prof. Jem Bendal’s ‘Deep Adaptation’ paper and the 2015 ‘Money & Society’ MOOC / MA and Mathew Slater’s local currency work since. But those first XR meetings attracted the same old political careerists who thought they knew all they needed and I was literally banned for saying the ‘N’ word.
https://personalityatwork.co/personality-type/ENTP/vs/INTJ
Meanwhile, here’s some humour, whilst we ponder our guaranteed fossil fuel free future: Demeter, an ENTP and ENTP types share a lot of similarities. However, INTJs are usually much more intimidating than ENTPs (I’ll deal with the abiotic hydrocarbon myth in a later post if you’re still with us Demeter 😉 :
- Stand in front of a mirror and shut your eyes (If you just rolled your eyes or tch’d, you are probably a INTJ)
- Envision something relaxing. A lovely meadow on a gently warm spring day. Light breeze … birds chirping
- Open your eyes.
- If your face could curdle milk you are an INTJ.
- If you have a slight smile and a mischievous glint in your eye then you are an ENTP
- Do most people figure out when you are joking? – ENTP
- When you argue, do you always know that you are right (even when you are not)? – INTJ
- Are you comfortable with public speaking? – ENTP
- Like deep conversations into the wee hours of the morning – that could go either way. You talk out problems – ENTP
- People describe you as intellectual, serious, deep thinker, etc. – INTJ
- People describe you as cunning, mercurial, charming – ENTP
- Do you go to parties to lean on the wall and watch everyone else? -INTJ
- Do you go over to the person leaning on the wall and annoy them? – ENTP
- Do you have RBF?*
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-know-if-Im-an-ENTP-or-an-INTJ
Natasha, thank you. I am already very distressed by humanity’s crisis, and my personal feelings of powerlessness to get it addressed quickly enough.
It does not surprise me that the Citizens’ Assembly set up by the Westminster government had deep inadequacies, the most obvious of which was its remit, to examine (partial) decarbonisation by 2050, which is far too late, too slow. It does disappoint me that you linked to the Global Warming Policy Forum to criticise it; it’s a fake charity of rich old men, a political lobbying group for squandering fossil fuels as rapidly as possible in pursuit of short term profit, and I strongly suspect rather high on the psychopathy index! It promotes propaganda and deliberately manufactures public confusion, and it was never going to have a good word to say about any citizens’ assembly.
Westminster’s “Citizens’ Assembly Lite” certainly should have considered nuclear power, but you know what Westminster is like; so reflexively secretive they’re reluctant to tell newcomers the way to the toilet, let alone put unbiased information about anything nuclear in front of a body of ordinary citizens.
– “…but by then even nuclear energy will be severely limited”
Indeed; I assume you’re referring to the limited supplies of uranium ore of reasonably high concentration. “Oh, uranium can be extracted from seawater” – which is true… at experimental scales. As well as the time required to scale up to industrial quantities, it could turn out to be bad for marine ecosystems to filter thousands (millions?) of cubic kilometres of seawater to extract the trace amounts of uranium in it. I think the base of Earth’s food (and hence oxygen) chain may be somewhat more important than even a reliable electricity supply.
Big sigh. The history of nuclear power development is a tragedy. We could have been safely using abundant thorium by now if the reactor prototyping programmes hadn’t been shut down in the 1970s. “Alvin, if you’re so concerned about reactor safety, we think it’s time you left atomic power”. Thank you for that, President Nixon. It’s almost merciful that Alvin Weinberg didn’t quite live to see the Fukushima disaster.
Of course practical nuclear power can still be developed, but it again takes time we don’t have.
Hopefully I’ll address citizens’ assemblies soon.
Before I address citizens’ assemblies, I propose immediate rationing. It addresses the issues directly, and worked in WWII. Not compatible with neoliberalism though.
ET, Sorry about my “condescending style” – I’m simply trying to give as water tight a case as I can. Why? So I can relax, and just accept, which I have now largely done. 25 years ago I wrote, fought and lost several ET applications, but did win one very important one after over half a decade of intense stress. So please excuse my ‘INTJ’ Vulcan style, nothing personal.
ET asks ‘What would be my plan to address the climate crisis? And how do I propose we proceed?’ …
- Write posts like this to maybe help people see through the psychopathic grooming BS from so-called ruling elites corporations and the media. But as I noted earlier, I’ll be dead soon enough in less than the time scale of fossil fuel depletion (a small handful of decades) and was lucky enough (like I suspect most readers of Craig Murray’s blog & Forums) to be born into aprox. the wealthiest top 1% of those who ever lived, and want to enjoy it now as much as possible, so don’t really care what happens after I’m gone.
- However, until we get rid of Psychopaths in public office, all of the following, though necessary, will remain very far out of reach:-
- Allow Thermodynamics MMT and SEEDS energy economics modelling to dictate viable policy and financial space.
- Ditch ‘Neo-Classical’ / Neo-Liberal / Libertarian B.S. economic theory we currently are ‘ruled’ by.
- Nationalise everything that is a Natural Monopoly i.e. health, education, housing, infrastructure, transport, energy, land, air, water, minerals, forests, food production etc. etc.
- Invest in next generation nuclear electricity and process heat (see e.g. Russian & Indian Fast Breeders) and try to electrify industrial process as best we can to give humanity a few more decades to maybe come its senses and be nice to each other whilst we rapidly shrink our footprint as we fall down the ‘Seneca Cliff’ over the next half century or so in a more managed egalitarian way than we’re doing here today.
Meanwhile, this ‘Futurama’ clip sums up my best predictions !
If I were to use acronyms in writing medical notes I’d get whacked on the knuckles for doing so, they are open to (mis) interpretation. So, consequently, I am whacking you lot on the knuckles. If you’re going to use an acronym please at least once write it out in full so I and others don’t have to search for it.
Off topic rant over. Thank you all for your co-operation 😀
Natasha, thanks for your reply to ET, which gives me a much clearer idea of the person you are.
I support your list of suggestions. I still think we need civil resistance groups to achieve such objectives, especially in the short time available, and for me XR is one of the best such things I’ve encountered. But that’s my view from within the local groups; I’m not involved with anything above local level and wasn’t at any of the organisational meetings that preceded the first public actions in 2018. I like XR for the Ten Principles, and the practice of respect and attentive listening within groups, because these nurture a supportive atmosphere for people like me, and help build the resilient community connections that can help humanity through the escalating crisis.
Hoping this will give you some comfort, my pro-nuke arguments seem quite well accepted among ordinary XR members, and even anti nuclear weapons campaigners; they stimulate interest rather than provoking condemnation. Yes, Russian fast breeders seem reasonably promising, and the US IFR and French Superphénix should not have been cancelled. But it would be nicer not to produce plutonium and other actinides; from that perspective I would like to see more development of the thorium to U233 methods.
I think that screening out psychopathy would help, but I worry that corporate structure itself would undermine such efforts.
You have twice mentioned that you may have little time left to live. Words seem inadequate for such things, but I wish you happiness and contentment; all the more so if it’s a matter of a recent diagnosis or someone close who has died, or anything similar. Love and rage, Natasha <3
Oops, my comment crossed with ET’s.
XR = eXtinction Rebellion.
Natasha, something that worries me about nuclear power reactors is the toxic legacy they would leave should civilisation collapse, though I do understand that this also applies to many other industrial processes.
@ Demeter,
> The links i offered open doors to much greater information, which can be perused at ones’ own pace.
On an alternative reading, it looks like you’re misdirecting people to other people’s BS musings about tangential topics, and refusing to clarify the points you’re making or to argue in their defence when challenged, while remaining aloof from debate. You’re throwing up chaff, in other words.
>> “Demeter, you apparently ignored my request for clarification”
> Seriously think you want to obfuscate now Clark, posted many links for people info with open minds, your apparent need for clarification hides those comments
If people ask you for clarification, that isn’t obfuscating or obscuring what you’re linking to. Quite the opposite: it’s focusing critical attention on it. It’s the “critical” part you’re really baulking at.
If you post ideas (or links to ideas) that other people think are mistaken, you should be prepared for those ideas to be examined and criticised. Complaining about being asked for clarification does you no favours.
So yes, as you don’t seem to understand or accept the purpose of this discussion forum, I agree it would be an improvement if you stop posting here (at least in the feeble manner you’ve done so far).
> Disagree with left/right brained supposed functions, otherwise people like me are impossible. What’s interesting is children are initially left brained (*oops, meant children are rightbrained*), whichever hand they use, until they enter the conditioning process called school.
If you’re expressing suspicion of simple left-brain/right-brain dichotomies, you’re right to do so, as they’re often misused in pop psychology. But then you immediately proceed to make the same type of mistake.
Actually, the switch in hemispheric dominance has nothing to do with being taught to think that way at school – because it happens before they start school. Studies indicate children are naturally right-hemisphere dominant (finding patterns and making associations between sensory phenomena) until around the age of three, when they start to acquire syntactical language abilities due to the development of more complex compartmentalised neural structures in the left frontotemporal cortex.
It’s true that most traditional educational methods focus primarily on left-hemisphere dominant tasks: classifying phenomena and structuring thoughts with language or symbols. Other educational approaches are also available (e.g. Montessori), but the eventual outcome is much the same: children who are allowed to structure their own thinking end up acquiring similar linguistic and logical abilities to traditionally schooled children. Arguably some of them might enhance their creative, innovative or intuitive skills if they already tend that way, but any pedagogical effects on thinking style are swamped by individual differences and personality factors. And they’re still answerable to the same standards of critical thinking when making factual claims.
So in fact it is you who is obsfuscating – i.e. clouding the core issues by distracting attention with irrelevant nonsense. You’re throwing up chaff instead of engaging in a constructive discussion; so yes, you should drop out if you can’t shape up.
@ Clark, XR doesn’t seem to have a clear approach to nuclear power. They’re obviously advocating a carbon-neutral future, and are against pollution in general, but is nuclear power regarded as a candidate solution? If there’s no organisational position as such, but it’s for the members to debate and decide upon, then it’s vulnerable to bias because the membership isn’t representative of a typical cross-section of society. There’s a discussion about XR’s nuclear policy on Reddit, and the BBC page on XR’s goals seems to suggest the organisation is agnostic on the issue; but an XR spokesperson who favoured nuclear power apparently left the organisation, complaining of peer group pressure from traditional green environmentalists. Has XR been hijacked by a lobby group?
@ Dawg Thanks for your insightful inputs, much appreciated.
And thanks to every one for contributing to this thread.
And special thanks to the moderators for helpful edits / links and setting up this thread – brilliant!
@ Clark, thanks for your kind words too, what I was trying to express is some kind of philosophical ‘I feel at peace with how fast time seems to be the accelerating as I get older’ declaration when I wrote “I’ll be dead soon enough” – not that I am suffering in anyway 🙂 sorry I should have better clarified what I meant. I’m OK with the idea that on the grand scale of life on this planet my life is a tiny flicker that’ll be over in a mere instant. Meanwhile, I’d like to try to be at peace each day as best I can.
@ Clark,
re: citizens assemblies and the ‘shoot the messenger’ logical fallacy:
The GWP article I linked to was one of the most succinctly worded I found when I was researching citizens assemblies a year or so ago. There’s dozens and dozens of other papers and articles with more or less the same analysis. I also researched them when setting up our local ‘Transition Town’ assemblies nearly two decades ago.
If someone from the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWP) shouted “fire” running past your front door at the top of a block of flats, would you doubt them, and go back inside your flat for a quiet cup of tea? Or would you sniff about up and down the corridor checking out independently to corroborate whether there’s a fire or not?
The GWP are a messenger. No doubt they are guilty of all you criticise them for. But its fun to cite them, see how people react, since they have a lot of very robust outputs, which challenges the orthodox ‘Green’ policy space, but which ‘Greens’ will dodge using this same ‘shoot the messenger’ logical fallacy – e.g. Caroline Lucas MP has replied to me with almost exactly the same as your good self knocking the GWP to ignore my request they consider nuclear energy!
Nonetheless the particular message the GWP are delivering this time, is that ‘citizens assemblies are critically and fatally dependant upon their chosen advisors’ which practically everyone agrees with. Some then want to tinker to tune them up. Others, like me largely dismiss them as ‘catnip’ for narcissistic psychopaths, as this wikipedia link describes without using the ‘p’ word!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly#Disadvantages“citizens assemblies are critically and fatally dependant upon their chosen advisors’ which practically everyone agrees with.”
Couldn’t the same criticism be levelled at any decision or policy making entity, (or indeed any entity) that chooses its advisors? Therefore the fault is not inherent in citizens’ assemblies but inherent in the act of choosing advisors, a fault that applies everywhere that advisors are called upon to enlighten (or influence) a debate.
I noted in that wiki article that “A study comparing the debate quality of an Irish Citizen’s Assembly and an Irish parliamentary committee found that citizens showed a deeper cognitive grasp of the subject matter at stake (abortion).”We have a very similar system across the world that appears to function adequately in the jury system. Couldn’t all the criticisms of citizens’ assemblies be equally applied to juries even though we like to think that trial by jury is the most fair way to apply justice. Are not the judges similar to advisors in their role?
Dawg, 11:08 – as you might expect, there are a lot of long time environmental activists and campaigners in Extinction Rebellion, especially among the core of people who initiated it, and traditionally such people are anti-nuclear. There are also a lot of members who oppose the HS2 rail construction, for the similar reasons.
But XR as an organisation has Three Demands, is organised around Ten Principles, and none of these Demands or Principles even mention nuclear power, nor indeed any other forms of energy. The demands are, in essence: tell the truth about humanity’s crisis, act with urgency to decarbonise, and it is the population in general who must wield the power to decide upon those actions, ie. the decisions must be made as democratically as possible.
Incidentally, there are now a lot more people in Extinction Rebellion than the initiating groups, and they have diverse positions on nuclear power.
I have no reason to believe that XR has been taken over by any lobby groups, anti-nuclear or otherwise. No, er, directives or anything have turned up at any of the local groups I am involved with telling us that we’re to oppose nuclear power from now on – but XR doesn’t really work on directives or anything like that anyway. There are regional and national-level coordinating groups, who set dates for coordinated mass actions, and subdivide the space we’re going to occupy, allocating sections to various local groups, but really nothing much has changed since 2019; local groups still plan and carry out their own local actions, the Three Demands remain the same, as do the Ten Principles. It’s not up to members to formulate energy policy, and we never debate such matters – we’re demanding a Citizens’ Assembly to fulfil that function.
I think, rather, that the converse is true; Zion Lights has gone to work for Environmental Progress UK, which is primarily a pro-nuclear lobby group founded and presided over by Michael Shellenberger. It’s completely obvious why Shellenberger’s recommendations are so popular with the corporate media, which is funded by advertising, and why they gave so much publicity to Zion Lights’ rather critical exit from Extinction Rebellion, which causes trouble and disruption to the established order:
– “A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them. Shellenberger’s positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, who have called his arguments “bad science” and “inaccurate”. In contrast, his positions and writings have received praise from writers and journalists in the popular press, including conservative and libertarian news outlets and organizations. In a similar manner, many academics criticized Shellenberger’s positions and writings on homelessness, while receiving mixed reception from writers and journalists in the popular press”
Zion Lights is entitled to her opinion that “any rational, evidence-based approach shows that a strategy including nuclear energy is the only realistic solution to driving down emissions at the scale and speed required” (Dawg’s BBC link), but XR say that such matters should be for the general public to judge. If she’s right, they will presumably come to the same conclusion as her. If they disagree, she’s entitled to think that she knows better, but I hope she’ll respect democracy.
Natasha, I’m not ignoring your comment, but it is going to take me a while to catch up. For now, it’s more that I deployed a heuristic than made a logical fallacy; obviously GWPF might be entirely right about citizens’ assemblies, but time is limited and I expected them to be biased. Had you acknowledged their bias, but explained that this specific article of theirs was particularly clear and accurate (as you have since), I’d have been more inclined to read it than to criticise the GWPF.
Natasha, also to save time…
I agree that “citizens assemblies are critically dependant upon their chosen advisors” – I’ve deliberately left out the word “fatally” because it is merely polemic. This problem can be addressed in a number of ways, so the dependency is critical, but not fatal.
Dawg, returning to nuclear power briefly, I have some concerns.
Firstly, I love the high energy density of nuke. I’m a space exploration fan, and beings should never venture far from their home star without some decent nuclear reactors.
But us humans are not very nuke experienced yet, and we’re changing our biosphere very fast. France has run into big problems with its nuke fleet, firstly when rivers got too warm to serve as the cold end of the attached primitive and inefficient heat engines, and then even worse this summer when those same rivers actually dried up in the AGW-driven record-breaking drought.
Likewise, there are about 440 nuclear power reactors on Earth, and I think about 90% ie. 400 of them are near sea level. Most unfortunately, AGW is destabilising the polar ice sheets, sea level has already risen due to thermal expansion and the rise is accelerating, and the decade commencing in 2030 will see exaggerated tidal range due to orbital dynamics. A coastal US reactor nearly got flooded in one of the mega-storms a couple of years back; its roads were cut off and staff had to remain on site to tend it for several days. Nuclear weapon warheads each contain a few kilos of nuclear material whereas each power reactor contains tonnes, ie. one bad power reactor accident can have the contamination potential of an entire nuclear war.
And I do wish we didn’t put so much U238 in our reactors. It isn’t a fuel, it’s an impurity, and it’s included far more for political than engineering reasons. It gets irradiated and turns into actinides which we can’t destroy and don’t really know that we can dispose of safely – and can’t know, for several thousand years. Since U238 comprises about 97% of the “fuel” load (and the plutonium produced contributes only about 30% of the energy produced) we generate about 25 times more nuclear waste than we need to. And the nuclear “ashes” from proper fuel (U235 or U233) contain a tiny fraction of the actinides, so their radioactivity falls much faster presenting a far easier disposal problem with much lower risks. But we have two orders of magnitude less experience with this nuclear technology than the PWRs and BWRs that are already so beset with problems.
It’s best not to make plutonium and other actinides if we can avoid it; recommended reading: The Curve of Binding Energy by Ted Taylor, US wizard nuclear bomb designer turned anti-proliferation campaigner.
Finally, before reading Natasha’s links, I’d like to endorse ET’s comment at 15:21, and Natasha’s thanks to everyone contributing to the thread, including the moderators.
There. I’ve caught up!
Natasha, I’ve started reading your links, but in the mean time…
In reply to your GWPF raising an alarm, I counter that they have repeatedly cried “there’s no wolf” when there is in fact a wolf.
I don’t understand what you mean with your catnip remark. Do you mean that citizens’ assemblies are likely to include some psychopaths, and these will inevitably dominate them?
OK, that didn’t take long. The initial page at GWPF (which these days redirects to http://www.netzerowatch.com) is merely a polemic, by just one person, with no analysis whatsoever.
It links to a 38 page PDF, which repeatedly displays graphics depicting the citizens of the assembly as puppets. However, on PDF page 5, a quote of an assembly member shows him/her to be definitely no puppet. This is immediately followed on page 6 by yet another graphic of a puppet.
I don’t read glossy but self-contradictory **** like this, especially not as a first document about anything new to me. And it’s derogatory of ordinary people, so it can get stuffed.
Natasha, I’m more than happy to debate with you. But remember, had you served on this (I agree, probably badly convened) citizens’ assembly, the GWPF would have been depicting you as a rather simple-minded looking puppet. You are no such thing; you are my equal, and I welcome your debate.
Actually I did read some of the Global Warming Policy Forum’s PDF study of the Climate Assembly. Though I recognise and agree with some of the criticisms, it seems a confused document, due to its underlying objective being to argue that there is no mandate from the population for net zero emissions targets, and that such targets are driven purely by governments and lobby groups. The reality of humanity’s predicament and scientific assessment of how to address it barely get a mention. Furthermore, a large part of its reasoning is circular. I could go on to explain this latter point, but see my concluding sentence.
Also, even if it were a decent study, studying the Climate Assembly would tell us very little about proper citizens’ assemblies.
For these reasons I think there are more productive things we could be discussing than this study. It could possibly teach us a little about citizens assemblies, but we’d do better to examine decent ones, studied in their own right rather than to make some irrelevant and fallacious argument.
Returning to nuclear power reactors, there is a problem shared by all solid-fuelled reactors called the iodine pit or xenon poisoning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit
This means that reactor power output often cannot be varied at will, for instance in response to changes in demand, and attempting to compensate for it played a part in the Chernobyl disaster. But fluid-fuelled reactors overcome this limitation because xenon is a gas, which will just bubble out of fluid fuel, rather than being trapped within solid fuel rods.
(I’m getting a bit embarrassed about dominating this thread, but at least I’ve run out of relevant things to say. For now.)
Acronyms –
PWR = Pressurised Water Reactor.
BWR = Boiling Water Reactor.These two reactor types make up the majority of current nuclear power reactors. They are solid-fuelled reactors using water as the coolant. There is also CANDU, a Canadian design with a better safety record. It is a solid-fuelled design but uses (expensive) heavy water as the primary coolant.
Clark, that’s some interesting information you’ve posted, both about XR and about nuclear reactors. I would like to add come intelligent commentary and debate to help give the impression of a balanced conversation, but sadly this stuff is beyond my knowledge and above my head.
I appreciate learning about how XR works, as I know nothing about the movement beyond the snippets appearing in the mainstream news (where they’re portrayed as single-minded eco-terrorists) or on some oddball fringe forums (where they’re portrayed as a brainwashed death cult). So it’s good to know that they’re actually sensible, inclusive and democratic at the core.
Regarding the info about nuclear technologies, it’s not just a school day for me – it’s more like a packed schedule of university lectures: I’m not sure I know enough about it to understand what I’m being told. As I don’t have a mature view on the ethics of nuclear power or alternative technologies, I think I’m best not to proclaim a firm opinion on it. But if I ever need to look like I know what I’m talking about, I can tag this page to mug up on the subject – and rather than improvise my own opinion, I can simply borrow yours (sneakily uncredited, but who’s to know?) and try to bluff it out that way.
Much the same goes for Natasha’s contributions (and recently congenial attitude); I can try to synthesise a considered declaration on that too – at least to give the impression that I’m already aware of possible alternative stances, which I don’t need to debate in depth (and therefore risk exposure of my lack of comprehension).
It would be good to have another informed perspective on this, mind you. IIRC*, there was a commenter called “nevermind” who took a more radically anti-nuclear position and was pretty forthright in defending it. Is there any way to alert him to this discussion thread? (Maybe attach a link in response to one of his recent comments in the main blog?) Or if you’re already aware of his opinion, Clark, maybe you could represent it and expound on it – albeit on pain of being perceived to dominate the discussion even more.
* IIRC = If I Recall Correctly
Dawg, thanks for the compliment.
As things go, nevermind is someone I know in the real world, though he lives best part of a hundred miles from me. I texted him inviting him to this thread, and he just texted back that he’ll look in when he’s finished fixing his shed. As it goes, nevermind is one of the environmental activists to whom I have put pro-nuke arguments, though years before the start of XR.
I started learning about nuclear tech shortly after the Fukushima disaster. I commented here at Craig’s that “you shouldn’t build them things (PWRs); they’ll get too hot and blow up”. A commenter called Angrysoba (a westerner, I believe, living in Japan) took my comment to be irrational, and asked whether I would support nuclear power if it was perfectly clean and safe. I replied that of course I would, and started looking into it. That’s when I discovered the story of Alvin Weinberg, the Aircraft Reactor Experiment and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. I got fascinated with the whole topic.
You and everyone are welcome to ask questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll say so.
To learn more about XR, look up your local group and attend one of their meetings. I have heard of the odd cranky group but never encountered one.
Actually, the three reactors that blew up and melted down at Fukushima were BWRs rather than PWRs, but the principle is really very similar in both cases. From memory, PWRs circulate water at 150 atmospheres of pressure, whereas BWRs require “only” 75 atmospheres. Any breach of the coolant circuit and nearly all the water will instantly flash to steam, after which it is difficult to prevent meltdown. I find this inelegant.
Totally agree with your post Clark, very rare i say that, Knew you’re a good dude, keep shining me darling.
Meant your post on September 9, 2022 at 15:04, replied to that but my penultimate post to this one, showed up as a new post.
