Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the total sustainable catch is about 20% of what everyone is catching now (with some uncertainty of course) but that if current trends of increasing catches (about 2% a year) continue the resource would be depleted in short order. Faced with that prospect, the fishermen gather to decide what to do. The problem is made more complicated because some groups of fishermen are much more efficient than the others. The top 5 catchers, catch 20% of the fish, and the top 20 catch almost 75% of the fish. Meanwhile the least efficient 50 catch only 10% of the fish and barely subsist. Clearly, fairness demands that the top catchers lead the way in moving towards a more sustainable future.
The top 5 do start discussing how to manage the transition. They realise that the continued growth in catches – driven by improved technology and increasing effort – is not sustainable, and make a plan to reduce their catch by 80% over a number of years. But there is opposition – manufacturers of fishing boats, tackle and fish processing plants are worried that this would imply less sales for them in the short term. Strangely, they don’t seem worried that a complete collapse of the fishery would mean no sales at all – preferring to think that the science can’t possibly be correct and that everything will be fine. These manufacturers set up a number of organisations to advocate against any decreases in catch sizes – with catchy names like the Fisherfolk for Sound Science, and Friends of Fish. They then hire people who own an Excel spreadsheet program do “science” for them – and why not? They live after all in a free society.
After spending much energy and money on trying to undermine the science – with claims that the pond is much deeper than it looks, that the fish are just hiding, that the records of fish catches were contaminated by being done near a supermarket – the continued declining stocks and smaller and smaller fish make it harder and harder to sound convincing. So, in a switch of tactics so fast it would impress Najinsky, the manufacturers’ lobby suddenly decides to accept all that science and declares that the ‘fish are hiding’ crowd are just fringe elements. No, they said, we want to help with this transition, but …. we need to be sure that the plans will make sense. So they ask their spreadsheet-wielding “advocacy scientists” to calculate exactly what would happen if the top 5 (and only the top 5) did cut their catches by 80%, but meanwhile everyone else kept increasing their catch at the current (unsustainable rate). Well, the answers were shocking – the total catch would be initially still be 84% of what it is now and would soon catch up with current levels. In fact, the exact same techniques that were used to project the fishery collapse imply that this would only delay the collapse by a few years! and what would be the point of that?
The fact that the other top fishermen are discussing very similar cuts and that the fisherfolk council was trying to coordinate these actions to minimise the problems that might emerge, are of course ignored and the cry goes out that nothing can be done. In reality of course, the correct lesson to draw is that everything must be done.
In case you think that no-one would be so stupid as to think this kind of analysis has any validity, I would ask that you look up the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery. It is indeed a tragedy.
And the connection to climate? Here.
I’ll finish with a quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, one the founders of the original conservative movement:
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
See here for a much better picture of what coordinated action could achieve.
[Response: It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this, but I think you have a major misconception about the relevance of what Godel showed. His incompleteness theorem was based on creating mathematical statements that could be demonstrated to be unprovable using a finite set of axioms. This is fundamentally different from ‘incompleteness’ of a physical model because it doesn’t contain a certain set of aerosol micro-physics. I see no connection to Godel’s notion that is relevant to this. – gavin]
The connection is that mathematics is either incomplete or inconsistent. In a nutshell, some problems cannot be solved mathematically. If good physical theories are mathematical models, physics has problems that it can not solve as well. To make matters worse, mathematicians cannot tell if a problem is unsolvable or just really difficult to solve. Physics inherits all the problems of mathematics because it uses mathematics to describe observation. While it can be disappointing, mathematicians and physicists will always have work to do and great discoveries to make.
Allan Turing had a very interesting philosophy because he felt Godel’s theorem applied to human beings. Turing believed human beings were the same as computers, and he couldn’t see a distinction between the two. The philosophy causes many mathematicians to believe in a divine intuition that exists outside of mathematics. For example, Godel argued for intuition until the day he died because he couldn’t accept mankind as incomplete, and he believed mankind was more then machines.
If you can agree that ecological and climate factors play important roles in the ‘natural fertility’ of a region, then you have to include those factors in your economic modeling attempts. The question is how to do this consistently, so that side-by-side comparisons of different energy sources become something more than marketing tools for proponents of various technologies.
Take the recent decision by the California Air Resources Board to take ecological/climate factors into account in setting costs for biofuels – a very political decision, based on bad accounting, but it was the first time that an economic cost was calculated based on climate and ecological factors – probably a step in the right direction, but their main flaw was the failure to look at full life cycles for different sources of energy – for example, natural gas from Louisiana vs. natural gas from Alaska are not the same with respect to energy production costs.
If the California Air Resources Board wants to conduct an even-handed assessment of fossil fuel costs, they can’t treat all biofuels the same, nor can they treat all gasoline the same.
They’ll have to conduct a complete review of all energy imports. That includes:
1) Electrical grid imports – we have to tag on the costs of any southwestern coal-fired generation transmissions across state borders, and that also means the cost of the sulfur, nitrogen, mercury and arsenic emissions from pulverized coal power plants.
2) Natural gas imports – if Transcanada & Sempra want to import liquified natural gas from all around the Pacific, via Mexico, then the energy/carbon cost of converting gas to liquid will have to be included, and a 30% tariff must be placed on those imports relative to the market cost of gas from the central-northern gas fields.
3) Conventional petroleum imports – here, a wide variety of tariffs must be employed if you want a fair and balanced carbon cost program. If we take the lowest-carbon oil (in terms of production energy/carbon costs), that is mostly gone, with some deposits in the Middle East – such oils are low in sulfur, and made up of more light-chain hydrocarbons. At the other end of the scale are sulfur-rich heavy oils from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, which require large carbon/energy investments.
4) Unconventional shale oils, tar sands, and coal-to-liquid programs. Here, the tariffs will not be 30%, more like 300%. Ridiculous amounts of carbon/energy must be invested upfront, along with millions of gallons of water per truckload of fuel, with a side dish of massive environmental pollution. In fact, an outright ban on this sector makes a lot of sense.
5) More comprehensive biofuel carbon estimates – for example, biofuel from the new Sunflower Bioenergy program in Kansas must be given a big fat tariff, because they run their ethanol factories on coal-fired power. If Brazil is using bagasse (woody sugarcane residues) as the fuel source for distillation, their tariffs must be reduced – but bagasse produces biomass black carbon aerosols, so the best approach is to use solar or wind to power the biofuel factory.
The bottom line is that realistic analysis of path-dependent energy production processes produces a range of possibilities, not a single number. Ethanol production’s fossil fuel footprint can range from a 0:1 ratio to a 10:1 ratio (fossil fuel used:ethanol produced), for example, and the same goes for most technologies.
James in 498:
This gets back to my points to Jim Bullis, in regards to things like balancing energy and regulation — the current system of thermal generation is grossly inefficient above and beyond the energy losses associated with turning a fuel into heat into steam into electricity. Keeping the grid properly balanced is its own form of inefficiency, and as I explained to Jim (and others) it is one area where the “smart grid” and “stored energy” technologies in the pipeline beat the pants off the existing technologies.
As regards the 15% energy lost to something like pumped hydro, even if that were applied to coal fired power plants it would be a huge win as it would provide a way for converting bulk coal generation to something more suitable for fast-response load following as well as frequency regulation.
As regards flatness, water, hills and other such things, there’s also compressed air storage, which is another technology. In short, lots of technologies being looked at presently.
Gavin,
The summer meltback of the Artic ice cap is certain to bring tragedy to the climate commons. We do not know where, when and how.
The Catlin Arctic Survey finished a gruelling 10-week expedition to measure the thickness of sea ice.
The team revealed that over the length of the survey the average thickness of the sea ice was 1.774m.
Peter Wadhams, at the University of Cambridge, has brought forward his estimate for the demise of summer sea-ice in the Arctic.
He believes the ice, which has been a permanent feature for at least 100,000 years, is now so thin that almost all of it will disappear in about a decade. He says it will become seasonal, forming only during the winter.
Now that we have evidence of what we have been observing over the past decade, it is time we understand what the summer meltback will mean for timing and intensity of the Asian Monsoon and the temp and precip in Western North America.
Gavin, is there any attempt ongoing to find answers to the impact of the meltback on Asian monsoon and North American weather? These are critical questions and there may not be time to adapt to their likely ominous answers.
John McCormick
truth writes:
The knowledge is available to anybody willing to study the subject, and those who aren’t willing to study, a group which apparently includes you, are stuck having to listen to the scientists. Meanwhile, the idea that AGW deniers are somehow being suppressed is ludicrous. They chatter all day long on the internet, publish books, and own right-wing talk radio.
KevinB writes:
I’m denying it. To be a “trend” it has to be statistically significant. Do you understand what that term means?
Re #506, Lol, how many times has real climate and others explained this to everyone who has challenged this via articles in the media and them sites we do not name (WUWT and climateprogress and others). It takes 17 years (hope I am right about that) to be a trend and not since 2000/2001 (anyone get the millenium date right)etc.
I mean this argument is going around in circles and more circles. Its just like Gavins article in the UK newspaper the Guardian today which now has a number of people on their who have commented on Gavin being a climate alarmist (please!!) of all things. He only wanted toi state that a picture of science being done by scientists is worth a lot of words in the science on climate change. Its a sound article available online in the environment section of the newspaper.
#498 James
“I’d honestly be thrilled to discover that we really could supply all our energy needs from renewables at reasonable cost, and without unacceptable environmental impacts.”
The cost and environmental impact of not moving to zero-emission energy greatly exceeds the costs of doing so.
According to NASA, 2005 was the warmest year on record. The last 12 months have been warmer than the previous 12 months.
What kind of “down” trend is that?
I wonder with nuclear power, the reason that private companies dont want to invest in it but would like governments to subsidize building them, the profit is in the building, by the time they are built there may be cheaper alternatives for generating electricity and they could be mothballed, so no one wants to invest but they would happily build them if someone else wants to pay. I could be wrong, just the way it appears to me.
> Blue whale
Support your local government in protecting them, not the nitwits who think people working together to improve the world is immoral and we should all sit back as solitary individuals and buy what we need.
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/recovery/whale_blue.pdf
“The goals and objectives of the Plan can be achieved only if a long-term commitment is made to support the actions recommended here. Achievement of these goals and objectives will require the continued cooperation of the governments of the United States and other nations. Within the United States, the shared resources and cooperative involvement of federal, state and local governments, industry, academia, non-governmental organizations and individuals will be required throughout the recovery period.”
Well, mathematics as in number theory, i.e. a theoretical edifice built from a set of consistent axioms must contain undecidable propositions.
This has nothing to do with a finite set of mathematical expressions and relationships such as form a physical model. These aren’t statements about the underlying mathematics that one is trying to prove. They’re built from that set of things in the underlying system of mathematics that we *can* prove to be true.
Like “2+2=4”. Writ large.
Gavin’s right.
Of course, models of climate will always be incomplete in the physical sense, we’ll never have a model that works from the quantum mechanics level for every molecule in the earth-atmosphere system all the way up to climate-scale “stuff”.
This isn’t what incompleteness in mathematics means.
An interesting question to contemplate:
Which of the following energy technologies would you most WANT to see proliferated indiscriminately and without restriction to all nations and peoples around the world, without regard to their system of government or the stability thereof, or their ideology, or their military ambitions:
Nuclear
Solar
Wind
#498 James:
You’d be amazed at how flat hydropower can be. Think hydro and the Hoover Dam springs to mind, but turbines can be installed adjacent to locks (Allegheny River for instance) or in the case of my direct experience in places where you’d swear there was no useful topography at all (bits of central Texas). Yes, for pumped hydro there are tradeoffs regarding PE of the stored mass, we have to be careful about environmental impacts and in fact it is not a panacea. Nothing new there.
“The point I’ve been trying to make all along is that you can’t really make rational decisions about costs & efficiencies unless you have some idea of what those costs are.”
I don’t see insurmountable problems with necessary calculations. How many kilowatts are needed? How is that demand arranged over time? What do we have in the way of regional resources to make a contribution? We’ve done all that for the current grid so we’re not really looking at anything new. We have an array of resources to choose from, all of which are amenable to arithmetic.
“I’d honestly be thrilled to discover that we really could supply all our energy needs from renewables at reasonable cost…I just don’t think the numbers add up.”
Well, we have not done the math so it’s a little premature to write an obituary. In any case someone living a thousand years from now is probably going to have an entirely different take on that; ultimately “we” will be squaring up to the actual long term cost of energy capture.
My proclivity as a person partly concerned with maintaining engineered artifacts is to head as quickly as possible in the direction of whatever “solution” fulfills the objectives of my application and has the following list of features:
Ignore only if absolutely necessary and at own peril:
–Does not exceed or stretch our envelope of reasonable fabrication and operational abilities utilizing known-to-be-fallible human resources;
–Fails reasonably gracefully and reasonably safely when constructed or operated defectively or incompetently;
–Does not involve exceptionally rare or difficult to handle resources;
–Does not make a permanent or extremely expensive to mitigate or acutely dangerous mess.
–Is not fatally expensive.
After that, preferably:
–Has no moving or wearing parts or failing that involves the smallest possible number of moving or wearing parts;
–Such moving or wearing parts as are involved can be produced with manufacturing scaling benefits (are cheap to buy) and can be replaced without substantial production interruptions (are cheap to replace).
For what I work with this means we’ve gravitated toward PV for power generation but that’s strictly a matter of context. It’s not appropriate in other places, or only partly. We could also use wind but it fails the moving/wearing parts test compared to PV. Either solution is better in our context than running a diesel generator. An RTG pretty much fails when evaluated against my personal list even though strictly speaking it would “work”. My desire is to stay as far to the non-Rube Goldberg end of the continuum of engineering hubris as possible.
I’ve gotta say, nuclear plants are definitely Rube Goldberg contraptions. The level of redundancy provided is a tip-off, not to mention our valiant but futile efforts to maintain stringent design, construction and operation standards. Any engineering artifact that requires us to walk around on tiptoes and makes us always practice utmost, inhuman levels of vigilance has got to be looked upon as a stopgap measure, a waypoint to someplace better. Nuclear generating plants miserably flunk the basic complexity test. Even so, I think we’re going to find ourselves increasingly using them for a period because we’ve boxed ourselves in. I’d be really happy if we didn’t put them away in a forgotten mental box for 100 years as we did with coal generation systems.
Gavin – I found a link that may explain it better for scientist.
“In the standard positivist approach to the philosophy of science, physical theories live rent free in a Platonic heaven of ideal mathematical models. That is, a model can be arbitrarily detailed, and can contain an arbitrary amount of information, without affecting the universes they describe. But we are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead, we and our models, are both part of the universe we are describing. Thus a physical theory, is self referencing, like in Goedel’s theorem.”
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strings02/dirac/hawking/
EL writes:
Mathematics is probably infinite. A given mathematical system always includes at least one lemma which cannot be proved to be either true or false from the system’s other premises. That’s what Godel showed. That’s all incompleteness means. If you want to prove the lemma in question, you expand the set a bit, and then you’ve proved that one but have another one that isn’t proved.
No, some problems cannot be solved analytically, which is a different thing. You might want to read an introductory textbook on numerical methods. The Planck equation can’t be integrated, but you can get as close as you want with numerical integration to solve a specific problem with it.
They can certainly tell whether a specific problem is unsolvable or not. X + 3 = 5 is definitely solvable for X, for instance.
SecularAnimist Says (14 May 2009 at 12:40 PM)
“The MIT “Future of Nuclear Power” study that I cited above envisioned a scenario in which “the present deployment of 360 GWe of nuclear capacity worldwide is expanded to 1000 GWe in mid-century”. In other words, worldwide nuclear capacity would approximately triple by 2050 or so.”
I see that we may be discussing, if not apples and oranges, at least Red Delicious versus Cox’s Orange Pippin. I am not talking about a WORLDWIDE expansion of nuclear power, but increasing its use in the US & Europe. Getting into the whats, whys, and hows of that gets us off into discussing geopolitics, which is probably unacceptable here.
“And as I understand it, your response to concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation from such an expansion is simply to wave them away, or even to characterize such concerns as “a deliberate lie”.”
No, my response is that these entities already have nuclear weapons, or soon will if no action is taken. It’s pointless not to use the barn because there’s a risk the horse might be stolen, because that horse is already gone.
“The bottom line is that (1) there is no need for expanding nuclear power and (2) nuclear power is not a timely or effective way to reduce GHG emissions from electricity generation.”
You simply refuse to do the math, to consider the mistaken assumptions that go into studies such as Jacobsen, or to think about the environmental impacts of your preferred technologies.
CTG Says (14 May 2009 at 2:54 PM):
“The cost and environmental impact of not moving to zero-emission energy greatly exceeds the costs of doing so.”
Evidence? Facts, figures, even back-of-the envelope ballpark calculations? Unless you at least TRY to provide something of the sort, you’re doing nothing more than chanting the response to the catachism: “Credo in potentia viridis…” (If you’ll forgive some VERY rusty Latin.)
SecularAnimist Says (14 May 2009 at 3:12 PM):
“Which of the following energy technologies would you most WANT to see proliferated indiscriminately and without restriction to all nations and peoples around the world, without regard to their system of government or the stability thereof, or their ideology, or their military ambitions:”
Once again, who is suggesting spreading ANY technology indiscriminately? Not me, for sure.
Re #519, Lets put it this way the James, All three fossil fuels will peak this century, probably within 20 years for all three making them very expensive. Secondly we can call in the big guns and start extracting and using up second order fossil fuels, tar sands, oil sands, high carbon coal (we already do) etc. It will be more expensive to mine and extract making other power sources viable and needed as our energy needs will be growing by around 50% come 2030.
it aint really a brain teaser is it?
> Evidence? Facts, figures, even back-of-the
> envelope ballpark calculations?
You looked?
http://books.google.com/books?id=U-VmIrGGZgAC&dq=Stern+Report&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=9bqW2rmvjc&sig=1tBUTa0CRFX14i-DkyRvB8fNgrM&hl=en&ei=9pUMSujkJ4yItAPFoZX8Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521700801
Doug Bostrom Says (14 May 2009 at 3:23 PM):
“I don’t see insurmountable problems with necessary calculations.”
Nor do I. The problem is, nobody seems to bother to actually do them. The few attempts – for instance that Jacobsen study again – are front-loaded with assumptions (e.g. desert land is worthless) that force the outcomes. That’s one of the reasons I keep sticking in those (probably terminally boring to most readers) back-of-the-envelope calculations, in hopes that someday I’ll irritate someone into doing better.
“…someone living a thousand years from now is probably going to have an entirely different take on that; ultimately “we” will be squaring up to the actual long term cost of energy capture.”
On the other hand, if we diddle around trying to get a perfectly “green” energy supply, those coal-fired power plants may dump so much CO2 into the atmosphere that people won’t be living a thousand years from now.
For goodness sake, James, have you read anything on this site at all?
What will happen to sea levels if we continue with BAU emissions levels? Hint: they won’t go down.
Let’s pretend that is the only impact of warming (which it wouldn’t be). If the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, we would be looking at a 6m sea level rise. What proportion of the world’s population lives within 6m of current sea levels? How much do you think it would cost to relocate them?
There might be uncertainty as to when that would happen, but it certainly would happen sooner or later.
Even if it happens 100 years from now, and we started moving all the cities that are within 6m of sea level over the course of that 100 years, do you really think that would be cheaper than changing the way we produce electricity?
The only scenario that makes any sense is to drastically reduce (worldwide) CO2 emissions over the next 2 or 3 decades. Please do tell us how that is achievable without using wind, solar, hydro etc?
You prefer your “back-of-the-envelope calculations” which are never substantiated with any actual facts, to Jacobson’s detailed, quantitative, peer-reviewed study, and call the actual real-world data that he uses for — for example — planning, licensing and construction times for nuclear power plants, “assumptions”.
OK.
James wrote: “… in hopes that someday I’ll irritate someone into doing better.”
In fact, other commenters here have done better, and when you don’t like their conclusions, you dismiss them and return to your back-of-the-envelope guesstimates.
James wrote: “On the other hand, if we diddle around trying to get a perfectly ‘green’ energy supply, those coal-fired power plants may dump so much CO2 into the atmosphere that people won’t be living a thousand years from now.”
I’d say that’s a good characterization of your attitude towards concentrating solar thermal power plants.
517 – “Mathematics is probably infinite. A given mathematical system always includes at least one lemma which cannot be proved to be either true or false from the system’s other premises. That’s what Godel showed. That’s all incompleteness means. If you want to prove the lemma in question, you expand the set a bit, and then you’ve proved that one but have another one that isn’t proved.”
In a basic nutshell, any axiom cannot prove consistency within itself. You can use any axiom you want, but you will not prove consistency. All systems of mathematics fall under this restriction period. Physical theories are mathematical models, and they are subject to this limitation.
“No, some problems cannot be solved analytically, which is a different thing. You might want to read an introductory textbook on numerical methods. The Planck equation can’t be integrated, but you can get as close as you want with numerical integration to solve a specific problem with it.”
Godel proved an unprovable theorem in arithmetic. He proved a proposition of whole numbers to be undecidable.
HR2380 looks like a carbon tax people (but not most politicians) might support:
http://flake.house.gov/UploadedFiles/revenue-neutral-carbon-tax.pdf
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/what-a-carbon-tax-proposal-looks-like-5215
In a basic nutshell, incompleteness explicitly implies that no physical theory can guarantee completeness. In other words, An observation may be made outside the scope of the model. Since the observation is new, scientist would have to create a new model. The new model would again have the same problem. Scientists cannot make guarantees of a complete and consistent theory. It’s mathematically impossible to do.
Imagine what would have happened if the accounting profession had been regulated early on, like say medical doctors, instead of agreeing to self-regulation within the broad limits of “generally accepted accounting practices” — why we might know what the world costs and what it’s worth.
“… I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting. They are way too liberal in providing the kind of accounting the financial promoters want. They’ve sold out, and they do not even realize that they’ve sold out. ….”
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/05/interview-with-charlie-munger.html
#523 James:
“…in hopes that someday I’ll irritate someone into doing better.”
You’re doing fine, heh! Almost there, I’d say.
“On the other hand, if we diddle around trying to get a perfectly “green” energy supply, those coal-fired power plants may dump so much CO2 into the atmosphere that people won’t be living a thousand years from now.”
Something upon which I’m sure you’ll find lots of agreement.
As long as we don’t lose sight of the big picture, dig in our heels and arrest progress by preference of whatever emotional or financial attachment we have to one scheme or another progress is possible. That’s going to be very difficult, however, because human nature says we can expect more than one group or another find it irresistible to see things as a zero sum game where some “win” and some “lose”.
Look at what the distorting effect of our temporary endowment of hydrocarbons has done to our energy portfolio, and to our capability to respond to emerging need for change. It’s currently almost a monoculture and it has developed a set of entrenched players who feel very threatened when confronted with the possibility that consumers may have a choice about where to plug in their toasters. This has seriously retarded us in terms of developing any diversity of appropriate energy generation or capture systems to occupy different niches. It’s also trained most of us to expect the emergence of some new king technology to slip neatly into place, something that can’t happen.
One gauge of a healthy response to this challenge is witnessing the emergence of a diverse and reasonable array of combustion replacements. There are a plethora of options available to us, each with varying degrees of suitability to different requirements. The extent to which we see niches for these occupied will in part tell us the chances of our collective success in escaping our predicament
I’ll remain leery of the motives of anybody who takes an absolute stance regarding suitability of one relatively benign technology over another without theirr supplying powerful and exact justifications that are compelling in the face of an enormous threat.
But you don’t need a complete theory of life, the universe, and everything in order to build a model describing a small part of it.
That’s the point, and equating the two is your mistake.
Just like the fact that I can’t devise an algorithm that solves the Halting Problem doesn’t mean that I can’t create an algorithm that returns “true” if asked “does the turing machine consisting of the single instruction “Halt”, halt?”.
#515 Doug
#498 James
Occassionally there are some actions that seem to make sense. I am not sure that low head hydro, as it has been called some times in the past, is scalable to the degree needed. It might still be economically sensible.
One observation, subject to more authoritative information, is that a way to get the effect of pumped hydro is to simply hold the water power when other sources are strong, and release it for hydro electric production at other times. I realize that some hydro is cescribed as “run of the river” and there is no management possible. However, in California it appears that we produce hydro power on a continuous basis throughout the 24 hour day. It seems reasonable that the reservoirs could be trusted to hold water for part of the day to enable greater release at other times.
James, I think you should get credit for picking out the weak points in the quantitative arguments, and though calculations might be “back of the envelope” they still can be very important in providing perception of the real situation. Doing a complete analysis is quite a task, but it is still valid to be a good critic.
Doug, I think you might on first glance junk the Miastrada car concept (click my name) as Rube Goldberg, but on a second look you might find it quite simple. It certainly has very low cost implications. Generally, I have convinced myself that this and the accompanying cogeneration concept meet standards, similar to yours for practicality. Your comment about 100 years of power plant history suggests you would also appreciate the disaster, not only of coal, but also the fact that the very concept of centralized power plants incurred a cost in inefficiency of an extra 200%. That is, compared to a system of power plants located in ways that would enable the discharged heat to fill a useful purpose.
I don’t expect anyone to get excited about the appearance of the Miastrada car. It is widely recognized to be a very funny looking vehicle.
James @ 523:
What ever are you talking about?!? An imperfect “green” energy supply isn’t going to cause coal-fired plants to dump massive amounts of CO2 anywhere.
Do you know what “Balancing Energy” means? Do you understand that “Balancing Energy” is one of the critical problems which needs to be solved for renewables to work, and that “Balancing Energy” is a net-zero energy process if done properly? I’m glossing over a lot of details because this is a blog, but that’s this real problem that the storage technologies you attack can be used to solve to make the grid MUCH more green and much more tolerable of wind and solar.
Here — this is 16 hours of solar power. No added CO2 emitted due to all the spikes and imperfections.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/FurryCatHerder/CloudyDay.jpg
Kindly explain where all this extra CO2 was emitted.
#527 EL:
You’re wandering off into the weeds; Godel’s work does not have any practical effects in this arena. Your earlier remarks on population control were a lot more germane.
EL gets it TOO basic: “In a basic nutshell, incompleteness explicitly implies that no physical theory can guarantee completeness”
Nope.
1) It’s mathematics, not physics. All processes stop at some point.
2) The definition of completeness is a mathematical one, not a lexical one. Your completeness in a nutshell is misleading since it will often be taken as the everyday version. Which is incorrect.
And in 526 EL shows where he goes wrong.
“In a basic nutshell, any axiom cannot prove consistency within itself. You can use any axiom you want, but you will not prove consistency. All systems of mathematics fall under this restriction period. Physical theories are mathematical models, and they are subject to this limitation.”
Axiomatic completeness: correct.
Applies to a Physical theory: incorrect.
Why incorrect? Because physics uses as its basic axiom: every process seen can be explained. Where it cannot hold (religion, spirituality, “why are we here”, etc) it isn’t physics.
This is because although physics USES maths, it isn’t maths.
And that’s where EL goes wrong.
I’d be interested in comments about this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/may/09/green-your-home-solar-panels
The rewards of solar panels
Ashley Seager spent £8,500 on solar roof panels and is now reaping the rewards
(exerpt): “We have a 3kW peak system (about 4m by 3m) on the roof. It produced 2,703kW hours (kWh) in its second full year (to 5 April), only 1% lower than the 2,730 kWh it produced in the first year, and that in spite of a lousy 2008 summer.
That was about 80% of the 3,500 kWh we used, and our usage was up because we had builders do some underpinning, which meant lots of kettles and cement mixers on.
The previous year we – a family of four – used 3,000 kWh, so the solar system produced 92% of our needs, a figure we expect to return to in the coming 12 months.
The panels, made by Kyocera of Japan, come with a 25-year guarantee and should last a lot longer than that. What you effectively do when you buy a solar PV system is pre-buy decades of electricity at today’s price, thus shielding you from price rises. One great thing about a PV system is that it is “fit and forget” with little or no maintenance or noise. And they don’t have to go on a directly south-facing roof – ours points south-east and works very well.
So how do the figures work out? Well, buying 3,000 kWh of electricity normally would cost around £420, based on 14 pence/kWh with npower, our supplier. We end up saving almost £400 of that by producing nearly all our own.
On top of that, we were getting payments under the government’s Renewable Obligation Certification (ROC) scheme of around £35 per megawatt/hour, rounded to the nearest whole one. So that is £105, putting us about £70 in the black for the year.
Since 1 April, that ROC payment has doubled to £210, putting us about £175 in the black. That compares with £420 in the red without the panels – a gain of almost £600 a year.”
Gavin (494), thanks for the tip. I will look into it some more.
dhogaza
“But you don’t need a complete theory of life, the universe, and everything in order to build a model describing a small part of it.
That’s the point, and equating the two is your mistake.”
You can still build a model that describes the entire universe; however, you cannot guarantee the completeness and consistency at the same time. So your model is not necessarily true. If you try to model a small part of the universe, you still cannot guarantee completeness of the small part. If you can guarantee the small part, you can guarantee the whole.
James writes:
James, there’s this environmental problem called “global warming” which is very serious and which is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels. It’s so serious that the environmental degradation associated with wind or solar is trivial by comparison. Want numbers? Do the math. What’s the monetarized cost of losing, say, the Mojave Desert to photovoltaic, compared to the monetarized cost of losing the trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure tied up in dozens of coastal cities, a billion people in Asia and Latin America losing their fresh water supply due to glacier retreat, and the collapse of human agriculture due to out-of-control drought in continental interiors?
EL, Know any positivist philosophers of science? Neither do I. Positivism has kind of gone the way of the dodo. Philosophy of science has come a long way since Popper and Wittgenstein and Kuhn. You really ought to look into it.
504 John McCormick re Wadhams and the Arctic ice.
One of the Tragedy of the Climate Commons is the combination of imperfect information/knowledge mixed with the time lag entailed in matters of ‘fairness’ and giving people time to be ‘included’ in the process. This is OK if the response to the event is in serial with the consultation process, as the activity of the response can wait until a consensus has been reached.
But this is a one-dimensional view. In the case of AGW and its children the tragedy is that while we fiddle, Rome is burning regardless.
While we chat here, have a look at the recent days in:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html
I don’t know what combination of warming and winds is causing this bizarre melt through 90N (roughly on the 180-0 longitude line), but its not reflected in earlier years as far as I can see. Wadams’ pronouncements are in a similarly conservative vein as IPCC, and thats a sensible scientific style, but it does not make us duck the ‘spear’ of his opinion.
The climate commons are stuck considering a problem that does not generate any adrenalin. Standing in a food-queue with the lights out might.
On our small planet, environment depends as much on how we treat our world as how we treat each other. Climate change is a serious challenge that requires immediate action. We have the power – working collectively and individually at all levels of society – to take serious action to reduce the threats posed by climate change. It is a good idea to think of new ways to repair credit with the planet on Earth Day.
Read more http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/04/22/pay-earth-day/
530: “our temporary endowment of hydrocarbons … [is] currently almost a monoculture and it has developed a set of entrenched players who feel very threatened when confronted with the possibility that consumers may have a choice about where to plug in their toasters.”
Doug, you`ve correctly identified that SOMEONE feels threatened about where people plug in their toasters, but it ain`t the fossil fuel industry. but the so-called “public utilties”, which are NOT owned by fossil fuel producers, and have persuaded states to give them local monopolies and to wall them off from competition, in exchange for regulation of how rates are set.
Consumers get screwed all around, since they can`t purchase power from whom they want, by type of generating source, by time of day (peak v. off-peak), largely can`t easily monitor their own use, have limited ability to put back power to the utility, and because the utilities have no incentive to invest in long-range transmission (which would allow greater competition among generators) unless the local regulator is willing to allow cost recovery.
As the whole pent up demand for green energy is caused by the state/local grants of monopoly, perhaps environmentalists, rather than pushing for more government involvement, might consider asking for and end to public utility monopolies:
http://mises.org/story/2264
#438: “But Rene isn’t talking about incorporating private ownership as part of a management strategy, but rather selling off the resources and getting rid of any collective from-above management strategy altogether, from forbidding government managers from setting goals (for instance, sustainability) at all.
When these schemes work it is typically due to some sort of collective mechanism above and beyond the whim of the individual owner of a fishery or other stock.”
dhogaza, you persist in finding an enemy in every friend. Nowhere has Rene (or I) advocated ANY form of privatization scheme, much less insisted on one that eliminates all government oversight (which of course, for as long as governments exist, is impossible anyway). In any case, in all of the cases where open-access-type resources are centrally managed, we can only expect gradual steps away from that, as politicians like to maintain their positions as gatekeepers for favors and we rarely see bureaucrats volunteer to lighten their own oversight purview.
“We have exceptions where individual owners put long-term sustainabiliity and non-economic values as a priority (I mentioned Gilchrist lumber here in Oregon as an example). But these are notable precisely because they’re *exceptions*.”
I understand your concern about the timeframes in which humans act, but there is an irreducible difficulty in fashioning institutions with longer-term views, as they are all populated by people. Even resources in the hands of governments are subject to human whim, such as Cheney`s allocation of scarce water in Oregon in ways that favored Republican farmers over salmon, Native Americans and fishermen, and Bush`s widescale gas leasing in the Front Range, against the opposition of ranchers and hunters.
Further, you and others keep forgetting that many private owners lead the way in environmental protection; many state parks have their roots in privately preserved land that, in order to avoid the tax man, were subsequently handed over to the state. The Nature Conservancy (which represents its individual members) protects valuable parcels not by seeking government regulation, but by buying them (or conservation easements) outright.
Another problem you point to is that of conflicts between community interests and the interests of individual owner and interloping buyers (individuals or firms). It seems to me that the greatest problem relates not to the ownership of property, but to the willingness of giant corporations to listen to the communities in which they operate. Some do a better job than others, but I do think that the problems with corporations also has its roots in gifts by governments to relatively wealthy investors: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=limited. Many large firms are run in order to put money first in the pockets of executives, with employees and investors next, under circumstances that encourage risk-taking rather than truly conservative behavior (as can be seen from the financial crisis).
Every theory and model in science is constrained and necessarily so. Mathematics is a powerful tool which is of utmost importance as quantitative analysis must be cojoined at the hip with qualitative. Falsifiabilty is not even an issue for most of us; we accept it and look forward to making theories which explain and predict more effectively. Weather and climate are in real ways non-linear systems with climate trends being easier to graph and predict than weather, though climate stll has it own twizzles and puzzles. Saying that a scientific model of any type or definition is useless because they fail to explain everything or account for an uncertain future with 100% accuracy is just bad faith to coin Jean Paul Sartre. No one denies humans do things which humans do…scientists are human and we make errors, have prejudices, goof up data,amend theorirs, change hypotheses, and review what we did wrong. This is why there are basic tenents like: repeatability, validity of experiments-observations,error analyses,peer review,ethics overviews, and statistical tools to analyze the weight of a finding.
We can throw around Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Betrand Russell, David Hume,Immanuel Kant, Einstein’s personal beliefs, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,John Locke, George Berkely, and any number of current theorists all we wish. These musings do not change that we understand climate and weather quite well and that there is more we can and should be doing to reduce grenhouse gas emissions.
Debating about whether math is a Platonic idea, a man made metaphor relating to reality and logic,a unifying principle, or some blended tool of all the aforementioned maybe fun, but how does this change what must be done? You may ask, well, what must be done? Well, a serious overhaul of accounting procedures and economic theories for one. I for one love democracy or this republic and can appreciate the beauty of democracy.I think, however, under the circumstances in order to achieve what we are talking about there needs to be major investing in a new infrastructure, and not just in energy, but in how the US conducts business and promotes energy alternatives. Adam Smith was not completely wrong and neither was Ayn Rand or Alan Greenspan, however, there needs to be stricter government regulation to accomplish these goals. I am not a Marxist or promoting some sort of scoialsim per se, but there is a need for subsidies in addition to Government partnerships with corporate America to make green energy more profitable,and sustainable with proper controls. Get an independent energy/climatology/geology panel to oversee the implementation of such a huge project. Without getting too far off the beaten path into partsian politics, I do believe that the current president has begun this necessary process.
Wind energy can be very efficient and suplemental at first. It can grow into a true profitable industry and the engineering is available for those who utilize it correctly. I can see how it works and some iof you can to, judging from your posts and repective backgrounds. Rational self interest, however, depletes the money that could be better placed into proper design and placement of such machines. The economy is not doing well…Frank the truck driver wants the extra driving gigs and to get the most miles he can so he can support his wife and kids. Bill the mechanic who works on engines makes more money fixing internal combustion engines; if he were to be phased out by those who are better at working with electric motors and such he suffers a loss. There will be people left behind, there’s no doubt about it, however, many people can adapt and learn to work with newer technology.
Reality is what it is. We all anthropomorphize and analogize. There are not positive or negative charges in nature a wave/partcile duality describes behavior, but the wave is not really a wave. there is no photon like an ocean wave or atom in a literal sense as we imagine it or draw it in textbooks. Get off the model versus what actually is, or the isness. Of course that is true, but science and math gives us the best observable and measurable truths we can find with a certain margin of error and uncertainties.If US involvement is not enough to curtail global warming then we need to give avenues and incentives for other countries to join in this gloabl plight. India has an enormously well funded program to clean up the Ganges river and yet it has failed miserably. Corn based ethanol gasoline is a dismal failure; so too is beet sugar based fuel and other crop based alternatives. We need to target the plants for significant change. China needs a reason to make the transition…altruism does not apply and neither does a dim hope to save the planet with very difficult to understand climate models. (for most people)RC certainly does educate the masses who are willing to read and learn, but this activism we seek to do and currently do needs to become far more ambitious. There are many smart people who are educated who are still “denialists.” There are brilliant philosophers and even some physical scientists who are in the dark. We need to find ways to reahc them with more accessible data and compelling arguments than is the cat alive and dead or alive or dead. Look whether you consider your self a Logical Positivist, Democrat, Republican, or a giant sea otter, we should work together on this issue in more proactive ways. I am open to all suggestions…how do we combine these resources and minds with actions to affect change now?
#408: “The “climate commons” are the biggest ones of all. They cannot be contained, users cannot be easily left out. Even market-based solutions demand an international enforceable regulation to forbid, tax or at least know who´s emmitting how much, and who has to pay to whom for what.”
Alexandre, thanks for your comments; I largely agree.
The fact that the atmosphere is a global commons means no government can act effectively alone; that`s why Gavin`s metaphor of the multi-party international negotiations as a tragedy of the commons is apt. It`s also why fear of government “fiat” is rather misdirected, as in essence all major emmitting governments (and their chief constitutencies) have to reach a COMMON agreement. The situation is much like ranchers reaching terms of use on a range, and fishermen agreeing how to manage a fishery:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/07/14/are-pigovian-taxes-coasean-if-they-are-not-fixed-by-one-government-but-rather-the-product-of-negotiations-among-many.aspx
# 529 Hank Roberts…good point.# 528, what is your point in this discussion?
El,
Godel’s theorem makes no comment on physical systems or producing approximate models of physical systems, it applies to the limits and provability of mathematical systems.
“Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true,[1] but not provable in the theory.”
I think the last bit “…there is an arithmetical statement that is true,[1] but not provable in the theory.” is where you argument falls down. An empirically demonstrated physical phenomena may not be provable.
#484: “Tosh, to put it bluntly. The ratio of greenwash to real change is vast. Moreover, only retail businesses are subject to any significant consumer pressure even to undertake greenwashing. It has been legislation and in some cases international agreements that have mitigated damage from food adulteration, lead in fuel and paint, acid rain, and ozone-destroying chemicals.”
Nick, “tosh”? Now I`m really offended! ;)
I never argued that consumer pressure was by itself adequate in all cases. Presumably you agree that consumer pressure has proven to be useful, even as you downplay it. The fact of greenwashing is itself an indication that consumer opinion matters, even as people remain susceptibly to deception – which is why there remain entrepreneurial opportunities for certification organizations. consumer reporting, etc.
I would love to see some consumer boycotts of unsustainbly caught bluefin, in order to lead the way for regulatory/treaty changes that I certainly agree are needed, and the role of moral suasion and struggle for the moral high ground is not to be denied on the climate change issue (which is why Gore in some ways is a self-hamstrung figure – the man wouldn`t know a hairshirt if it hit him in the face).