Monday, August 29, 2022

    DENIAL BLOG UPSTAGES PARIS REVIEW 

      Watts Lit Crit breakthrough  

             is title-free review of 

Jigokuenoshoutaijouwokirikizanndawake: Shingatakoronatowakuchinnikansurubunshoshu

While Amazon renders  author and former Richard Lindzen student Mototaka Nakamura's 42 syllable title as:          

Confessions of a climate scientist

WUWT 's review of the work by coal industry P-R flack Lars Schinkenau  dispenses with it entirely, referring only to:

"A short 30p book by MIT educated, Japanese climate scientist, climate modeler, and cloud specialist Dr Nakamura Mototak" (sic)      

and fails to mention that his major thesis is that climate communication is becoming as esoteric as the plot of The Matrix. 


"Climate models are NOT capable of modeling clouds. Their resolution is too low and clouds are too complex. Now it starts to make sense why future climate predictions based on climate models are so unhelpful and show far too much warming (Scafetta 2022)

A short 30p book by MIT educated, Japanese climate scientist, climate modeler, and cloud specialist Dr Nakamura Mototak explains this well (Amazon.com). Nakamura writes “gross model simplifications include:

  • Ignorance about large and small-scale ocean dynamics
  • A complete lack of meaningful representations of aerosol changes that generate clouds.
  • Lack of understanding of drivers of ice-albedo (reflectivity) feedbacks: “Without a reasonably accurate representation, it is impossible to make any meaningful predictions of climate variations and changes in the middle and high latitudes and thus the entire planet.”
  • Inability to deal with water vapor elements
  • Arbitrary “tunings” (fudges) of key parameters that are not understood”

Remember, that the modeled climate impact in 2100 is based on “average” climate models that 

(a) are fed scenarios which are far from reality,  

(b) use climate sensitivities which have proven to be too high 

(c) assume the world will not adapt

(d) dismiss CO2’s undisputed fertilization effects

(e) dismiss human’ non-GHG effects, and 

(f) cannot explain climatic changes prior to 1850 because they largely dismiss natural variability.

  • That they are not able to model clouds adds icing to the cake"

Saturday, August 27, 2022

  SCIENCE TURNS TURBINES INTO VEGAN GUMMY BEARS

Scientific American

The blades of a wind turbine are typically designed to be replaced about every 20 years… as wind energy becomes more popular, more and more of these hulking fiberglass structures will be discarded...

NEW YORK CITY'S MARCH TO NET ZERO BEGAN WITH STAY PUFT
“We’ve specifically designed a system with the end of life in mind,” says John Dorgan, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University

After being used for years... the resin can be used to make... a superabsorbent polymer used in diapers and the food preservative potassium lactate—which Dorgan used to make gummy bears that he then ate.

class="Apple-interchange-newline" /

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

         CRUSHING THE FOSSIL FUELS OF THE FUTURE WITH
                        REPRESENTATIVE COMIC PATHWAY 8.5

Extreme Mechanics Letters 
Compressive failure of a carbon nano-tesseract: Sci-Fi inspired materials & the strength of  Thanos

Abstract

Inspired by the super-materials of science fiction (“sci-fi”), here we probe the stability and strength of a proposed all-carbon nano-tesseract or hypercube projected into 3D space, a so-called hypercubyne

The nanostructure is compared to other, similar carbon geometries of similar size, including a fullerene, a hypercubane, and a pentatope. The hypercube configurations provide high compressive strength and elastic toughness with an open lattice structure. For the all-carbon hypercubyne, initial failure is characterized by a buckling instability. 

Using the ultimate strength of hypercubyne as a basis, we proceed to predict the lower bound of the strength of the supervillain Thanos, who has been depicted destroying the Tesseract in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Thanos has a minimum grip strength of over… 750,000 times that of a typical man… such comic-inspired analysis... sheds light into the behavior of future exotic carbon constructs and geometries, and illustrates the potential field of “sci-fi” inspired materials.


 

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

                   TOSS ANOTHER EDITOR ON THE COMPOST,
                          SOLARPUNK  IS COMING TO DINNER

How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism

"...They have had days like this before, when unknown animals have appeared…  Some are species that have somehow returned from extinction; some are mutations that have found their way to the city from nuclear waste dumps…"Arctic Iceberg

An iceberg in the Arctic, circa 1955. (Photo by Donald B. McMillan / Hulton Archive / Getty 

... As a work of solarpunk fiction, the story takes place in a world where cooperation and mutual aid have replaced the ruthless self-interest of capitalism, and where the decisive binary, and hierarchy, between humans and the nonhuman world has dissolved…  stories of women who are transformed into plants, and stories of plants that have consciousness, stories of people decaying into compost...  are neither weird nor false from an ecological viewpoint… in some ways—at least in this “ecological fact” kind of way—realer than realism.


Wilk... is not only able to characterize ways of knowing that fall outside of the bounds of our shallow and constrained view of rationality but also to begin to sketch out a longer history of these alternative epistemologies... the “new” awareness of ecological facts, such as interdependence, porousness, lack of bodily integrity and control, and the limits of human consciousness, ...

The appearance of medieval mystics in an essay about the New Weird raises the idea of a much longer history of the ecological  and it raises the prospect of an altogether different kind of cultural history—one of writers and artists who were working with the ecological viewpoint long before the climate crisis made it much harder for some people to deny. 

 

Friday, August 19, 2022

  DOES RCP 8.5's DECAY SIGNAL CLIMATE DENIAL'S DEMISE?

CRITICISM OF RCP 8.5 HAS DEPRIVED
FOSSIL FUEL APOLOGISTS OF A FAVORITE TARGET


SELF - STYLED "CLIMATE ALARMIST" DAVID WALLACE-WELLS STEPPED BACK FROM EXISTENTIAL  BRINKSMANSHIP  IN A  TLS PODCAST  LAST WEEK:

"AMONG  THE CLIMATE LEFT  THERE HAS BEEN  FOR A GENERATION  OR SO, A REAL CONCERN THAT  FEAR MONGERING  WOULD BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE …HAVING LIVED SOMEWHAT IN THAT WORLD FOR A FEW YEARS NOW… THE CLIMATE FUTURE LOOKS  A LOT MORE COMFORTABLE AND HABITABLE THAN IT DID JUST A FEW YEARS AGO…

NOT... EVERYBODY WHO WANTS TO GO TO A CLIMATE STRIKE OR HEAR GRETA SPEAK NEEDS TO SIGN UP FOR A MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY VANGUARD...

WE'RE  COUNTING  ON SOMEWHAT  SPECULATIVE … NEGATIVE  EMISSIONS TECHNOLOGIES, OR  CARBON  REMOVAL  TECHNOLOGIES IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE CENTURY, TO TAKE HUGE AMOUNTS OF  CARBON OUT OF THE ATMOSPHERE… I THINK WE WILL BE ABLE TO DO THAT… 

THERE IS NO CLIMATE DENIAL ANYMORE."




Wallace-Wells isn't alone on the climate left when it comes to carbon capture:

The Worker Must Have Emissions Cuts, but She Must Have CDR, Too

Some on the Left will be skeptical of this project, since carbon capture has been floated by fossil fuel companies as a way to maintain the coal- and gas-burning status quo. What I am proposing, however, is not a quick techno-fix to solve our climate problems without deep changes to our economy and society. Rather, climate repair is about acknowledging how much damage capitalism has done to our planet —... Demanding climate repair is the only just response to this hard truth.

Only Socialism Can Save the World

The nature of the problem already demands a socialist solution. As is always the question when it comes to climate change, we have to ask who is going to pay for this grand civilizational project… climate repair will require marshaling enormous resources and productive forces. We’ll need to build millions of DAC machines and millions of solar panels and wind turbines to power them. Without careful planning and regulation, this could be its own environmental disaster.

Socialists should follow the model of the Green New Deal and push for publicly owned and operated carbon removal infrastructure — a Tennessee Valley Authority or Works Progress Administration for climate repair. We could also seize fossil fuel firms and put them to work reversing the damage they’ve done.

 NOTE TO READERS ARRIVING VIA ATTP:

[Playing the ref. -W]

IS WILLARD'S EUPHEMISM FOR CANCELLING COMMENTS THAT CONTRADICT HIS, AS WHEN ONE REPLIES TO: 


"Russell, I invite you to drop But CAGW:

… Since it is the central square of the contrarian playbook, it might be hard.

So alternatively I invite you to drop the stick and move away from the horse."


WITH:


"Willard , that's not a contrarian stalking horse.

It's David Wallace-Wells pony, which he put down after  it  broke a leg stumbling into RCP 8.5


If the quote from his TLS  podcast pains you, please direct your indignation to the  editors :

letters@the-tls.co.uk


My apologies for playing the Editor. Now back to ClimateBall :


  WILL UN CONDEMN MINECRAFT CLIMATE COLONIALISM?




Wednesday, August 17, 2022

                                   IS  THE  NECROCENE
THE EXTENSION OF THE CAPITALOCENE BY OTHER MEANS?

                                                         


 

Accumulating  Extinction

Planetary Catastrophism  in  the  Necrocene


"Capital was born from extinction, and from capital, extinction has owed.  
Capital ... necrotizes the entire planet ...  producing overlapping historical, biological, and geological temporalities.  
Capital is the Sixth Extinction personified: it feasts on the dead, and in doing so, devours all life. 
The deep time of past cataclysm becomes the deep time of future catastrophe; the residue of life in hydrocarbons becomes the residue of capital in petrochemical plastics... 
What I wish to propose is that we recognize the Necrocene -or  “New Death” -  as a fundamental biogeological moment of our era  the Capitalocene."
                                       —     Justin McBrien    2017

"We live on a placid island in the midst of the black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.   
                                     —      H. L.  Lovecraft    1928

“The veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep,”       
                                     —  Victor Davis Hanson 2022

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

 ANTEDILUVIAN DIET MAY AVERT THE VEGAN APOCALYPSE

People Still Don't Get the Link Between
 Meat Consumption and Climate Change
"From scientific reports and articles in magazines, to viral Facebook videos to documentaries like Cowspiracy and Meat the Truth, the news about the exorbitant contribution of a carnivorous to the greenhouse problem is clearly spreading.

However... most people are still not aware of the full extent of meat’s climate impacts." 

Ken Ham's Ark Museum offers an alternative Vegan perspective   
 

Sunday, August 14, 2022

      OCEAN ACIDIFICATION : THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED
                     WITH RETRACTABLE TIPPING POINTS

 

NO ACCERESEARCH ARTICLE

Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting

corals and fishes: 

A tipping point that may limit reef recovery

SCSCIENCE
  22 Aug 2014
  Vol 345Issue 6199
pp. 892-897
Science, this issue p. 892; see also p. 879

Saturday, August 13, 2022

     AI ADVANCES ONE HARD DELETE AT A TIME

 

Hello Russell,

The ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields, is central to the process of innovation. And it is the premise behind our upcoming EmTech MITconference.

Since 1999, EmTech MIT has been MIT Technology Review’s annual conference exploring breakthrough technology and impactful business trends. We bring together the leading thinkers across a multitude of domains, to discuss the whys and why nots of innovation and leadership in a world driven by technology.

Some areas we’ll explore this year:

  • What can be learned from living and working on the International Space Station?
  • What would the internet look like if we designed it today?
  • What do the top minds in AI see as the path towards artificial general intelligence?
  • Which clean energy initiatives are truly going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
  • How are advances in genomic science going to tilt the playing field against disease?

Oh – and one more – we’re hosting a special hands-on workshop from the Google X team on the structured approach behind their moonshot process to deliver game-changing innovations.

XI GOES FOR WOKE WITH HISTORY OF WATER REWRITE

How my book on China and water was censored in China

Authors critical of the government find it a struggle to be published in China without restrictions

ByPhilip Ball 

The Yangtze River in China. Credit: Julia Hiebaum / Alamy

“I’m very glad to see your book The Water Kingdom  published in China last year. Congratulations!” This message from a colleague in China would have been delightful, had its content not been total news to me. I’d fervently hoped to see my 2016 book, a cultural history of China presented through its relationship with water, reach a domestic Chinese audience. I thought it might supply a useful mirror that revealed to Chinese people aspects of their culture perhaps too pervasive for them to notice. Xinran, the Chinese writer now living in the west, commented that the book “is one of the very few that will be respected both in the west and in China.”

But having now obtained a copy of the translated book, which has been published without my knowledge or consent, I find—as I’d feared—that, far from treating it respectfully, the publisher has, as far as I am concerned, censored it extensively. This includes the removal of a pivotal chapter explaining how China’s history of water management can help us understand its modern hydraulic mega-engineering, from Mao’s sometimes disastrous campaign of dam-building to the construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. I argue in the book that the ancient Chinese notion of a heavenly mandate to rule, arbitrated by the state’s ability to control the country’s unruly waters, remains a powerful determinant of governance even today.

If the book were ever going to appear within China under Xi Jinping’s repressive administration, some cuts were always inevitable. Yet I had hoped that judicious bargaining would enable the key message to survive: that we cannot understand the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party on matters such as environmentalism and climate, regional water resource management, and even the mobilisation of myth for state propaganda, without recognising the connections to the past.

Ironically, the publisher’s explanation (on being contacted by my agent) for the removal of the chapter on dams was because “in 2018 Xi Jinping spoke highly of the Three Gorges Project during the inspection of the project, describing it as a ‘national instrument,’ ‘an initiative in the history of Chinese water control,’ and ‘the century-old dream of the Chinese nation,’” rather proves my point. To this extent, the book is a plea for better cross-cultural understanding, and cautions against an overly simplistic imposition of western preconceptions on China’s goals and motivations. It tries to be both critical and culturally sympathetic.

This is why I think the censoring of The Water Kingdom exemplifies a broader issue than just the questionable practices in Chinese publishing, or even the intolerance of the Chinese government of anything that smacks of criticism. It shows how a state that spreads fear and suppresses history hides a country from itself and widens the gap between outsiders and those who seek to promote dialogue. 

WHOLE THING AT PROSPECT

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/how-my-book-on-china-and-water-was-censored-in-china