I thought Reagan solved that problem by being inaugurated a week later.
In 1981, I predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 Democratic nomination. But I forgot to write it down.
I first heard about the greenhouse effect around 1983, from my girlfriend who learned about it a class she was taking at Michigan -- Biology and Human Affairs -- a class that was well-known as an easy way to fullfill your science requirement as long as you didn't mind a fair amount of leftist indoctrination.
It's a major plot point in Soylent Green.
On a happier note, the apocalyptic projections about how AIDS was going to wipe out half of the human race didn't come true, so there's that.
Never mind. We're all doomed anyway.
This is probably a good place to put my shameful "Everything's going to be okay" fantasy, right? Step 1: people actually develop practically useful fusion. Hey, it could happen, there have been a couple of claims that it's close recently. Step 2: that turns into power 'too cheap to meter'. Step 3: We set up enough fusion powered carbon sequestration plants to actually roll back the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to a pre-industrial level.
And then we still need to worry about habitat destruction and so on, but things are much better.
I remember claims that useful fusion was close back in 1981.
I have not even done any back of the envelope math to see if this is remotely plausible. But it helps me sleep.
7: Shutupshutupshutupshutupshutup.
Why does every woman I know long enough start to talk to me like my mother did?
6: That sounds like it could really help speed up the replacement of all humans with robots.
6: This was the year that solar power crossed the tipping point from being a curiosity and an "alternative energy" fantasy into being a large-scale player in the energy market. It's never going to replace everything oil did but it presents the possibility of a real shift away from a completely fossil fuel-dominated energy regime. I don't think "too cheap to meter" fusion is ever likely to materialize but I think a suite of alternatives is likely to make real change possible.
The downside is that it's probably another decade at a minimum before those trends really break the grip of oil on markets and economies. Maybe more in places traditionally dependent on oil for their livelihoods. But still, it is indeed going to happen... just, you know, not in time to do much more than ameliorate the very worst-case scenarios. If one is of the opinion that we're not already seeing the worst-case scenario.
6: That sounds like it could really help speed up the replacement of all humans with robots.
Then we can all have careers like Henry Kaiser's!
Why does every woman I know long enough start to talk to me like my mother did?
Pheromones.
Powerful enough to be communicated over the internet.
The Quayle-Bentsen debate also had a seemingly anachronistic exchange on global warming.
I don't think "too cheap to meter" fusion is ever likely to materialize but I think a suite of alternatives is likely to make real change possible.
Neither do I, partly because the people working on it spend too much time commenting on blogs. More seriously, fusion is likely to be great for when the wind is off and the sun is down, but even the people working on it admit it's not (at least initially) going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than coal.
On the plus side, there are some really creative and well funded efforts out there. Raising private money for fusion is no longer a joke.
6 - That would require the invention of not one but two revolutionary technologies and a massive replacement of massive parts of the infrastructure of every country on earth and all this in a situation where some of the most politically and economically powerful industries/corporations would be effectively shut down by succeeding at doing it.
And we'd have to do it fast, too. I mean, the thing about climate change is that the climate is huge - if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide right now, this second we'd still see decades of warming (at least). And right now we're already seeing massively social disruptions and breakdowns as a result of climate change*, which makes any attempt to make huge coordinated changes like the ones necessary even more improbable.
I say instead of optimism about technology go with optimism about some kind of huge, incredibly deadly pandemic to really just knock the human population down into the millions and force everyone to rebuild all the infrastructure and political institutions from scratch. I mean, we'd almost certainly rebuild the same exact problem, but maybe it's a better bet?
*e.g., all those refugees flooding Europe right now. That's climate change.
Cheap solar power will eventually drive fossil fuels out of the market (I'm sort of uncharacteristically optimistic about how quickly this will happen). In the meantime, and for the next several hundred years, geoengineering?
I have a lot to say about these issues, but I think it'll have to wait until I'm home from work. So, uh, stay tuned I guess.
You can't question me about this, because I am about to relate the entirety of my understanding and if you ask questions the answer will be: I dunno.
I am hearing that the reason California isn't hurting too bad from the lack of hydropower (which is a big piece of our power portfolio) this year is that solar power is coming online and making up the difference.
How far would fusion eliminating fossil fuel power plants in rich countries and China get you? You still have cars, planes, and cow farts to deal with. Would it already get you down to say 2 degrees C rise, or not? In other words, is one breakthrough enough for some hope, or do you really need 2.
Is there a price point for fusion where you eliminate the fossil fuel power plants but don't get at least a huge chunk of the cars? (Asking, because I really have no idea.)
I know next to nothing about climate change, but holy shit , this dust storm that's appeared out of nowhere and covered the whole country making it easy to imagine doomsday scenarios. I don't think I've experienced anything like this throughout my whole life. The streets are empty, the air is practically yellow and it's difficult to breathe. They estimate it's going to be two days of this.
Don't go out if you can help it, Awl. We've had a few dust storms here since I've been but they weren't nearly that bad. Though I heard there was a really bad one about a month or so before I moved that sounds like what you are experiencing now.
I think fusion would need to be substantially cheaper than gas to cause everyone to quickly switch over to electric cars. And fusion would drive down demand for gas, thereby making gas cheaper. There's also real issues with making enough batteries for everyone to have electric cars. Finally, building up the recharging station infrastructure would take a while.
What about fusion-->carbon-neutral synthetic fuel? (Hydrogen fuel-cells or something similar.) I don't know if that'd be an easier or harder switch than going directly to electric cars.
Or this sort of thing -- synthetic diesel.
27: Thanks. Yeah, I think I'll try and stay put.
30. Fuel from genetically modified algae is possible, it's another technology that has overpromised for a long time. But it's coming, and will be one more complementary replacement technology to current fossil fuel practiice.
Yeah, that's a second breakthrough (just a different second breakthrough from artificial trees).
Alternative energy sources are a slap in the face of all the animals who died to make our way of life possible.
Can we make more expensive fuel from non-modified algae? For the Whole Foods that have a gas pump out front.
24/etc. I think the big hurdle isn't even the development of a better power source - I mean, right now we could replace the all our power plants with some combination of solar, wind, hydro/tidal power, and nuclear plants to cover the baseline. But we don't in any concerted way. Adding one more in there would probably speed up the achingly slow process of switching out of fossil fuels, but not necessarily that much. And 2C is rapidly becoming an impossible target right now - we're still at the point where scientists think a combination of new/magical technology and a sudden and complete change in human nature a really aggressive move to implement it could keep us there. But each year their recommendations get more.. fanciful.
I mean assuming magic energy-out-of-nowhere power plants would still leave us having to choose between a huge world wide mandated public works project replacing all the current fossil fuel engines, power plants, etc.*, and allowing them to very slowly sort of age into place. Cars aren't that big of a fossil fuel thing, or at least not as much as they seem, but think about how many cars out there are ten to fifteen years old. Replacing even a large percentage of the cars on the roads with ones that worked differently - let alone planes, boats, etc. - would take decades if we just let it happen naturally. And that's ignoring the point in (the second sentence of) 28, which is a really significant one.
*And good luck with that - especially since there's a really blatant prisoner's dilemma here since the price of gas/coal/etc. would start to drop with each country that signs on to it. If, to pick a country at not at all random, the US egged everyone on and then suddenly didn't do anything we'd have the benefits of really cheap fossil fuels locked in and none of the added expenses of switching off them!
I think Ehrlich's population bomb is one of the more famous dire predictions that hasn't happened (yet).
Also while biodiesel-type alternative fuels are kind of appealing in a sustainable production sense it's not like they aren't actually carbon compounds or anything, just another way to snag some carbon, and whether or not that would end up being carbon neutral isn't obvious. (It looks like it should be! But our carbon output isn't just a matter of burning petroleum products and cutting down a bunch of forests to make more diesel isn't going to help us either.)
Ms LizardBreath mam - does this help? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/sunniest-climate-change-story-ever-read.html
Transportation is only a quarter of total energy use and electricity is 40%. Electricity is also where we burn almost all of our coal. Even if all cars and planes stayed petroleum-based, there are still a lot of carbon savings to be reaped.
Synthetic fuel is only carbon neutral if the electricity to make it is carbon neutral, since nearly all synthetic fuel comes from electricity (except algae or other biomass). If we got to the point that all electricity was renewable (solar, wind, water, nuclear), it might be cheap enough to make fuel from, but it might also simply be easier and cheaper to just burn the petroleum but only for transportation where you need the high energy density.
Maybe somebody could figure out how to turn-off whatever is happening under Centralia and save some carbon there.
Wow, Quayle really was a breathtaking lightweight. After Palin and Trump and whoever else, you try to comfort yourself with the idea that, once, long ago, Republicans didn't put morons in positions of power, but no, they've been doing it time out of mind.
39: Well if Jonathan Chait thinks that what really really looks like a slow-motion catastrophic nightmare is actually about to turn a corner and really soon things will be great and we'll feel silly for ever thinking they'd turn out badly....
Of course, the rosy future envisioned by Jonathan Chait is only possible if teachers' unions are destroyed and our children therefore become a race of super-geniuses.
37
True, but that is in part because China took his predictions seriously and substantially modified their birth rates. It might not have caused suffering in the west, but you would probably still have endemic malnutrition and periodic famine in china had they kept up TFR of 6.
Mao helped by making a completely avoidable famine.
42: Quayle was awesome! you could not hope for a more vapid halfwit a mere heartbeat away from the presidency right at the point where the USSR is falling apart. GHWB was a magnificent president compared to what Quayle might have done.
The problem is that about 25% of the US electorate, people who actually vote, are dumber than sheep with organic brain damage and a meth habit. The Republican party really needs these people, so we get Palins, Trumps, and Quayles.
The distribution of the votes of the truly stupid does skew Republican, but the absolute numbers of stupid people who vote Democrat is in the tens of millions. There is a certain amount of randomness inherent in stupid.
GHWB was a magnificent president compared to what Quayle might have done practically all the rest of 'em.
I mean, seriously, if you're going to go to war for oil -- cop and blow! Don't hang out getting your nuts blown off by IUDs for a billion dollars a day.
46
Yeah but then he balanced out all his hard depopulation work with pro-natalist policies.
What is Dan Quayle up to these days? Do you think he'd like to run for president on the Republican ticket?
Dan Quayle ranks high in searches for "potatoe" (once you tell Google you really meant "potatoe"). I assume he makes a living off of ads that target that keyword.
54: I've been dreaming of a Quayle/Palin ticket for seven years at least.
57
Only advanced geneticists would want to attempt crossing the most brainless specimens of a WASP/redneck hybrid.
OT: Can I complain about the utter suckitude of PBS? I like watching skiing, which is basically impossible to do in the US without premium cable. CBC and Eurosport have tons of skiing coverage, including full event streaming online, for free for Canadians and Brits, even though relatively speaking Americans are more slightly more dominant in intl skiing than the Canadians and way more than the Brits. Our state run teevee offers no sports whatsoever and most programs seem designed to be sleeping aids for old people.
26, 27: the euphemistically named "haze" is fucking killing me in narnia. I need to go to the doctor to get a scrip for something and yet can't motivate myself because I don't want to go outside. I can't see the buildings 2 km away clearly. bleh.
in re: quayle, when his young son went to st. alban's and my bro was a lad in the dorms, well, well, my brother used to wait at a window overlooking a narrow walkway for him to come into view and then throw eggs at him shouting, "quayle--hahahaha." my children think this is a sad story about how their beloved uncle used to bully someone. even when I ask them to imagine that dick cheney's granddaughter went to their shcool, for some reason they still aren't feeling it.
I am currently watching the biathalon world cup on youtube. I can't tell if it would be the official sport of Halfordismo because skiing + guns = awesome or if it would be banned because x-country skiing is a sissy Euroweenie sport on par with soccer penalty shootouts.
59
Does the haze come from China?
Successful state run television might lead to revolution. Regular fundraisers preserve the aura of crisis that surrounds all American public institutions.
We get haze from China up here sometimes. Not recently, though.
62
So when the haze rolls in from China, does that mean you can't see Russia?
I was recently reminded that Trump once sponsored an multi-day international cycling race in the mid-Atlantic states.
63: Well, yes, but that doesn't mean very much for this part of Alaska since you can't see it the rest of the time either.
Anyway, the thread's moved on, and people above said most of the things I was going to say about the climate change/energy stuff. I guess the main additional point I was going to make is that electricity generation is a very capital-intensive industry regardless of the specific generation technology, and there's no reason to think fusion would be any different if anyone ever gets it to work, so "too cheap to meter" is very unlikely. I do think a large-scale movement away from fossil fuels is still possible, but it will depend on many factors including the relative prices of fossil fuels themselves as well as those of alternatives, and there are a lot of non-trivial technical challenges to the transition even aside from the possibility of developing entirely new generation sources like fusion.
65. I predict that when and if fusion becomes practical ("in a decade") the same people who oppose fission power will oppose it too. It's likely to be very expensive to build and maintain, have waste issues (ISTR that the vessel in tokamak-style fusion gets radioactive, for example), and so on. Thorium+molten salt fission reactors seem much more likely to come into wide use, which is not to say "very likely."
There is no base-load power magic bullet, just a selection among imperfect alternatives. At least fission and ("in a decade") fusion are comparatively low carbon.
And don't get me started on carbon capture.
I maintain that stealing and burying the propane tanks from my neighbors' grills counts as carbon sequestration and thus provides an offset for when I steal propane tanks from their grills to cook some burgers.
66: The current crop of materials for fusion reactors are good about not getting too radioactive. The radioactivity decays fast enough that in 500 years it's no worse than granite. We know how to build containment devices that last 500 years. 100,000 years, not so much. The plan I've heard bandied about for retiring ITER is to fill the reactor vessel and the room it's in (the hot cell) with fancy cement, slap a big "do not fuck with" sign on it, and go home.
What I'm waiting for is the first big tritium leak. That will be a PR disaster.
I love the idea of putting a "do not fuck with" sign on one. I can't imagine anything more likely to end with someone in the hospital with radiation poisoning than that.
I get that a subset of people are enticed rather than repelled by such warnings. But I'm guessing the number of such people with the persistence to break up a bunch of cement is pretty small. They'll probably go drink bleach or something once it starts to look like drudgery.
68, 70: It's really a plan to kill off future archaeologists.
I love the idea of putting a "do not fuck with" sign on one. I can't imagine anything more likely to end with someone in the hospital with radiation poisoning than that.
Clearly the sign should read "Warning: John Kerry speeches inside" or something.
I dunno Moby - usually the relative difficulty of doing it is part of the thrill for them. The more work is involved the more appealing it is. I don't understand that either.
66.2 is the most honest thing about energy I've read in a long time. It's easily generalizable to "everything we want to do on a scale of 7 billion people is both beneficial and harmful on large scale and involves tradeoffs and hard choices", but no one wants to hear that.
Dust storm headed my way with chances of an accompanying thunderstorm. I wasn't planning on going outside today but if we get this thunderstorm I just might.
Woohoo! I can hear thunder. No rain yet though.
Dammit. As soon as I get dressed to go out into it the rain ended. No storm for me.
72: The "Whitey tape."
It wouldn't dissuade everyone, but the people it does entice, who cares?
It's really a plan to kill off future archaeologists.
"But surely, your Holiness, even if over the course of centuries of linguistic drift they forget that the carved inscriptions read "TEMPLE OF DOOM", once they've encountered the enormous carved skull at the door, the swinging blades, the poison darts, the trapdoors, the deadfalls and the big rolling stone ball, any future investigators will realise that this facility was built to house something extremely dangerous that shouldn't be removed. I mean, you're implying that they would, what, regard it as a challenge?"
(laughter)
"Good point, your eminence. OK, let's go ahead with the plan as per these blueprints. I have one final suggestion?"
"Of course, your holiness."
"The waste itself will be encapsulated somehow?"
"Yes, of course. It will be in the form of an ingot, plated with a highly non-reactive and inert metal to prevent corrosion and leaching."
"Excellent. Can we cast it into any shape we like?"
"Well, I suppose so. At the moment we'd just planned a sort of cylinder about a foot high, but that can be changed. What do you have in mind?"
"How about a little horrible deformed grinning figure? Something that just says 'EVIL' to any human of any culture? We don't want to run the risk of someone getting through the defences and stealing it as an ornament. Make it really ugly."
"Good idea, your holiness. Yep, no problem."