There are two inconvenient questions which matter to this subject, and which Slashdot will not cover, either editorially in the selection of stories or in the comments from the regulars.

Question One: what will the output from wind and solar be in Germany or the UK in December, at about 5pm on a weekday, during one of the usual stalled high pressure episodes that last a week or ten days every winter? And what percent of faceplate is this number?

Question Two: what sources of generation are you then going to use to meet demand?

Go look up the numbers - for the UK they are readily available on Gridwatch. So its easy to answer the first question. The second...? No-one knows, or if they do, they are keeping it secret. Like Slashdot and most commenters they are just calling everyone who asks 'deniers' and hoping something turns up.

This is intermittency, the insoluble problem for the net zero generation project. And no, you cannot run a country off batteries for a week or ten days in winter. Just do the numbers. You can neither afford them, buy them, nor commission and run them.

It may be that this is the hottest JUNE. But consider what this means. We take an arbitrary 30 days, average the temps, and come up with a number for this 30 day period as compared to other previous 30 day periods.

Is there anything special about this particular 30 day period as opposed to any other? No. Is there anything special about 30 as opposed to 45 or 60 days? No.

I could equally well say (though it would not be true) that this year is the warmest for the period: last two weeks of May + first two weeks of June. That would be just as valid (or invalid) indicator.

As an indicator of whether European summers are getting hot, or whether this summer is hotter than previous ones, this is meaningless. The climate does not care about our arbitrary divisions of the days into calendar months.

If you want to make a real comparison, the thing to do is compare this summer with the summer of 1976, which was a real scorcher. Fortunately someone has done that for us:

https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

There's not a lot going on. Its summer. In any summer you can take some arbitrary number of days, and compare that period with previous periods of the same days, and if you go through enough iterations you can probably often find periods which are, this year, warmer than the corresponding periods in earlier years. So what?

This is just the usual media hysteria about an ordinary summer, which we have now got used to expecting every year. Meanwhile in Europe the crowds are enjoying a warm dry summer, flocking to the beaches and parks in defiance of the hysterical health heat warnings. Realizing that they are having a series of great summers, but that it will not last, so make the most of them, and that next year the UK Met Office will be forecasting a heat wave and a 'barbecue summer', only for nature to deliver a cold wet one, and the next year too. Its chaotic, and sometimes you do get a string of reds or blacks. But that is all that is going on.

Bluesky is up -- no, Bluesky is down -- well, it's down since inception, but now it's "leveled off".

But who cares and why, though? Honestly. Do what you like. Engage with whom you like. Forget about whether something is "popular", that's never a good measurement. Death, for example, is "popular". 100% of people engage in it.

No worries about an invader killing your people, or a madman rounding up the sick and infirm in concentration camps to be disposed of. No, we'll just off ourselves and demand the government cover our expenses. In Canada one in every TWENTY deaths is medically "assisted". https://cbn.com/news/health/ca...

Ah yes, those philosophers who doubt their own existence (but hope you'll buy their books.)

I've just discovered Scottish common sense realism, an 18th century philosophy that was a reaction against some of the Enlightenment who had gone off the rails in this regard. It was very popular among the founders of the US (we get the phrase, "we hold these truths to be self-evident" in the Declaration of Independence from it.)

Thomas Reid's essay, "An Inquiry Into the Human Mind" has a great take-down of this approach:

Descartes found nothing established that could serve as a deep foundation; so he resolved not to believe in his own existence until he could give a good reason for it. He may have been the first person to make such a decision; but if he could have actually done what he resolved to do—if he could have become genuinely unsure that he existed—his case would have been deplorable, and there would have been no remedy for it from reason or philosophy. A man who disbelieves his own existence is surely as unfit to be reasoned with as a man who thinks he is made of glass. There may be physical disorders that can produce such absurdities, but they won’t ever be cured by reasoning.

Descartes wants us to think that he got out of this craziness through this logical argument: Cogito, ergo sum [= ‘I think, therefore I exist’]. But obviously he was in his right mind all the time, and never seriously doubted his own existence. That argument doesn’t prove his existence—it takes it for granted. ‘I am thinking’, he says, ‘therefore I am’; and isn’t it just as good reasoning to say, ‘I am sleeping, therefore I am’? or ‘I am doing nothing, therefore I am’? If a body moves it must exist, no doubt; but if it is at rest it must exist then too.

A sports journalist for the Washington Post engages with an LLM to discuss articles she herself had written, and is appalled both by the number of errors. When she confronts its bug-laden responses, it meekly apologizes but doesn't get any better. After repeating its smarmy apology for the umpteenth time, the author begins to suspect that the LLM is actually malevolent. The entire "conversation" is laid out for all to see.

Infuriating to read if you know anything about what an LLM is and how it works.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."

We see this logic everywhere now: if the government doesn't fund [insert favored program here], then it will cost taxpayers money." Really? So, how much money was being spent on the Direct File pilot? Would it surprise you to learn it was $24.6 million? Some 140,000 people used it.

Cost per user: $175.00

That's MORE than TurboTax, even with a State return added on.

So, yeah, the government "saved" SOME people the cost of using tax prep service, but it absolutely did NOT save taxpayers any money.

The kind of diversity one finds in a cord of multiple strands, all of which are load-bearing, but each of which have slightly different properties that can optimize the cord's strength in the work you want to put it to is, indeed a better rope than one made of all the same kinds of strands.

The problem is that if you choose a diverse cord just for diversity's sake, you could easily wind up with a cord that is actually completely unsuited to the work.

A diversity of WHAT is the key question to ask.

This is ridiculous and hysterical. Read the IPCC reports, the latest ones. Read some of the observational studies on the most likely warming scenarios. There is no justification for these doom laden fantasies.

You are correct about one thing: there is no likelihood that global CO2 emissions are going to fall. In fact, they will certainly rise. The world outside the West, which is doing 75% of global emissions, does not believe there is any climate crisis, and their approach to emissions is maximize economic growth and let emissions rise as they may. Their approach to COPs is to attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any mandatory targets. So we will see global emissions rise well north of 45 billon tons a year by 2040 or so. China probably north of 15 billion.

But this is not plausibly going to result in a 4C rise in average global temps by 2085. Though if it were, the appropriate policy response would not be to try to get to net zero in the US, UK, Canada, Australia by installing wind and solars. That will neither get to net zero nor have any effect at all on the global climate even if it does.

The right policy response is to make a rational assessment of local risk, and use the money currently being wasted in subsidizing wind and solar to protect whichever of our local populations are most at risk.

Try reading the paper. You'll find that there is no rational cause for alarm in it. Its just another of these pieces which tries to promote alarm without supplying any rigorous argument for it.

It may be that the fungi are properly modelled in their procedure. But what they do not show, don't even try, is to show that in particular environments any probable increase in local temperatures will lead to major expansion of them.

Modelling the fungi is probably a useful thing to do, an advance in scientific knowledge, of some value in itself, assuming they have done it right. Someone may use it someday for a useful purpose.

But the armwaving in the direction of global warming is without any sort of rigor, its just the more or less compulsory current nod to a prevailing meme.

There is no reason from this paper to think that any reasonably probable increase in global temperatures this century will lead to any alarming spreads of the fungi in any particular locations.

The slashdot moderation system is a broken-down piece of junk which gets abused ALL THE TIME, just as with this post. There is not the slightest troll-like thing about it.

A troll is someone who posts an INFLAMMATORY message with the intent of upsetting the reader. A troll is MALICIOUS.

This post is eminently reasonable. It has a moderate tone, not inflammatory in the least. It is interesting and clearly an opinion. It is sincere.

If you look at my ID, you will see that I have been a reader here for a very long time now. The quality of discussion here has always been a mixed bag, but moderation at least made it possible to quickly surface the interesting posts. Over the course of the last decade, however, moderation has been abused not to identify actually bad content, but to suppress disfavored content.

If you disagree with a post and you mod them down because of it, you are abusing your privilege. When you are a moderator, you are to judge the QUALITY of the conversation, not the CONTENT. No one elected you Chief Censor.

Slashdot desperately needs to add a feedback mechanism to report abusive moderation, and to ACT on that feedback by removing moderation privileges from abusers. Slashdot can still be interesting and worthwhile to read, but not if the site runners allow crap mods to proliferate like homeless drug abusers over-taking the sidewalks.

The interwebs are full of loons. LLMs are just vast rooms of cracked funhouse mirrors. Proceed accordingly.

"Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

So lets build some more wind turbines and install some more solar panels.

And then, since the data centers run 24 x 7, lets install some batteries for when its calm or night.

And then, we notice that some kind of inertia has to be provided, or the whole thing keeps falling over and its kind of difficult to do a black start. So we install a bunch of gas powered flywheels. Not a bunch, really a lot actually. In fact, enough plant to run the data centers except these are just flywheels with no generation attached.

Now it all works, and we have saved the planet and powered the data centers at the same time. That's good.

Until some bright spark wonders why don't we couple some generators to those flywheels as long as we are spinning them all the time....