Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy) explains why climate science doesn’t persuade him so far.
He’ll never do lunch with NPR people again.
24 thoughts on “Wally Got A Job With NASA”
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Scott Adams is a freaking genius!
Adams went on record in 2015 predicting Trumps victory. I’m listening hard to what he has to say.
Back in the day, Adams was just about the only good thing Twitter had going for it.
Your visit to Adam’s piece won’t be complete without a trip through the comments. There is a female SSOLSEmery in there making a complete ass of herself, and she has no idea the snickering is directed towards her.
Heck, it may be Emery himself.
You read through all 1500 or so comments, Swiftee? You’re a glutton for punishment! :^)
Regarding Adams’ piece, well argued, but given that 90% of climate stations are misplaced, and given the numerous games have been played with other data, I’d put my personal confidence in the measurements down around 50%, and the confidence in the models at 2% or less. But that’s just me.
BB, I’ve seen the model code for some of the AGW models and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if we used models like that for semiconductors, the world would still be using mechanical calculators. They’re absolute crap and there’s a reason they don’t put realistic error bars on their predictions.
And any branch of science that feels the need to “adjust the data” and then makes sure that the original data disappears and is unrecoverable borders on a scam.
Nerd, WIDR, I think we crossed that border miles back. AGW is a scam peddled by rent seeking snake oil salesmen. It’s not the chaos and division they’ve created that bothers me so much, it’s the damage to the credibility of real scientists.
For the foreseeable future, we will always look at the motives behind the work, and that’s a damn shame.
Global warming is not a “reality.” Even the IPCC puts all of its predictions in terms of probabilities. And, when they describe how they determine that “high level of certainty” means “greater than 90% certainty,” one of the factors is “researcher judgment,” meaning something that is not quantifiable.
If it’s not quantifiable, it ain’t science.
The part of the analysis I found most helpful was breaking down the steps into discrete items. Even if the climate is changing, even if the measurements are accurate, even if mankind is causing it, so what? We’re not all going to drown – move to high ground and carry on.
The economic models are the ones that interest me. Can humanity afford to shut down all commerce to stop climate change? Maybe we’d be better of economically if we didn’t stop it, but instead embraced warmer temperatures and learned to exploit them? Since those are the models that have the lowest reliability, that’s where I need the most convincing.
Regarding the economics, they’d have a better chance of convincing me if all of their solutions weren’t summed up in “give more power to the government.” Sure, we’re going to prevent environmental disasters by….giving power to the guys who brought us Love Canal, Chernobyl, Lake Baikal……
“Can humanity afford to shut down all commerce to stop climate change?”
There is too much debt and poor people. All of their plans are foolish.
Per TFS’s point, we’d be handing over a lot more power who brought us not only the many environmental disasters of big government, but also the gulags, the Laogai, the killing fields….what could possibly go wrong?
Fossil fuels are very useful sources of energy because they are portable, energy-dense, and they can be stored for . . . ages.
Fossil fuels are also cheaper than the alternatives.
Energy is used as a substitute for human labor.
Labor is the means of production.
So if you have a supra-national body that can ration fossil fuel use, you can redistribute the production of wealth. India gets to use lot of fossil fuels with no carbon tax, while US industry pays a tax, so the US essentially pays more for fossil fuel use than India. India’s economic growth is augmented, while US economic growth is diminished.
The people in charge of rationing fossil fuel use will have the power to reorder the world economy.
But don’t worry! Most of the rationers will come from upper middle class backgrounds families and will be graduates of elite universities! So no problem!
Kim Norton crams her twitter feed with this crap. if you talk to her long enough she basically admits they are just ***forcing*** taxpayer money and ratepayer money (REGRESSIVE TAXATION) into this stuff in the hope that something good will happen. She can’t explain how any improvement will manifest. Since it’s a monopoly utility, the executives get paid the same for cooperating with Big Brother.
Forcing this stuff to be adopted before it’s economical just comes out of present human needs.
I wish ONE locality would figure out how to have a decentralized grid. That would put the fear of god into these idiots.
Mitch: You should get someone on like Dave Osmek to talk about this stuff.
The thing that gets me about the “solutions” the environmental left pushes is that they often pollute more than the ordinary alternatives. Solar panels used more energy to make them than you could possibly get from them until 2010–and even today, unless they’re optimally placed in the Mojave, you’re still substituting coal in China for natural gas here. Their asthmatic kids say something to us that rhymes with “duck shoe”, I’m told. Same thing with hybrid and electric cars, windmills, you name it.
Maybe we’d be better of economically if we didn’t stop it, but instead embraced warmer temperatures and learned to exploit them?
Renaissance happened during a warm spell following Dark Ages, which happened during mini ice-age. Hmm… Back to Dark Ages it is with climate scientologists. We always knew they were no renaissance men.
“The thing that gets me about the “solutions” the environmental left pushes is that they often pollute more than the ordinary alternatives. Solar panels used more energy to make them than you could possibly get from them until 2010–and even today, unless they’re optimally placed in the Mojave, you’re still substituting coal in China for natural gas here. Their asthmatic kids say something to us that rhymes with “duck shoe”, I’m told. Same thing with hybrid and electric cars, windmills, you name it.”
Exactly. This should make everyone insane with anger. Solar is going to ***contribute*** as long as the ***resource inputs*** stay affordable, i.e. stuff you dig out of the earth.
I wish Trump would spend a massive amount to study wind turbines and put a dagger in that crap if there is no potential. The capital involved vs. the useable out put is horrible right now.
“The thing that gets me about the “solutions” the environmental left pushes is that they often pollute more than the ordinary alternatives.
Ever considered cost of producing batteries for EV’s and hybrids, and their disposal (proper disposal) costs? And we all know how well ethanol worked out for all of us!
The capital involved vs. the useable out put is horrible right now.
Actually, wind turbines make a lot of sense. On a farm, at a point of use, for example. But not as part of a grid, as in wind farms. That is just moronic. But then GE, Warrren Buffet and TBone never saw a government handout they did not like.
The big thing to remember is, sending electricity over long distance always involves a ton of loss. People have to have electricity. We don’t have individual electricity plants at each home. Solar is competitive because it’s ON THE HOUSE and the costs continue to go down.
Wind turbines are going to be economical, how? There may be an explanation but I don’t see it unless the grid is decentralized.
When is gas and natural gas not going to be the superior transportation fuel? Not soon, IMO.
Actually, solar doesn’t even make sense on the house with lower transmission losses. I’ve priced it out, and the only way you get there is with subsidies.
And yes, I’ve also looked at the pollution of making batteries for hybrids and electrics, and done a back of the envelope calculation of energy to make a windmill vs. energy you get out of it. Suffice it to say that except in very rare situations, the taxpayer is paying to make the environment worse. I’m all in favor, as the son and grandson of power engineers (no kidding), of distributed electricity generation, but the current technologies simply aren’t going to get us there.
I just looked at Kim Norton’s twitter again. All of this stuff pencils out according to her.
The other thing is, they jam all this tax money and rate increases into this stuff and then brag about the jobs created.
For all the good AC did, maybe it is time to look at DC again. I do not know if recent innovations in superconducting materials and such have made transmission of DC more plausible, but hey, maybe it is time to look beyond the genius of Tesla.
They’ve got megavolt DC installed out west to tie western grids in with eastern without phase shift problems, actually. The big deal is simply conversion losses–when you get to mega-volts, obviously resistive losses plunge. And with DC, you lose a lot of the “lossy inductive and capacitive” losses, too.
But that said, if alternative energy is going to get going, it’s probably going to be integrated piecemeal into the current grid, or else form a parallel system to that with low voltage DC in individual buildings. I can imagine, with LED lights, running lighting and ceiling fans off low voltage DC, feeding that into either a DC/AC converter or even a battery storage system. If.The.Economics.Work.Out.
One thing against using solar, for example, for low voltage DC; the big loads when solar peaks are air conditioners, which run on AC in general. So it would have very limited application.