Or actually invite reporters to secret chats.

.. a good thing?

Yeah. I couldn't help when I read the statement by the spokesperson talking back to them in my head to point out that they are talking about pesticides. i.e. substances that kill pests through ingestion or contact. Also known as poisons. Targeted poisons, sure, but poisons nonetheless. In fact, I can't help thinking about DDT and why that was such an issue. It was precisely the same potential problem as here, it persisted in the environment without breaking down easily. Of course DDT had Chlorine instead of Fluorine. They're both halogens though. So, the more I think about it, the more this seems like DDT all over again, but possibly worse.

Sorry. Slashdot's coal plant just went off line.

Just relocate Tata's and Amazon's Mumbai headquarters a few hundred meters downwind of the coal plants. Move the families presently affected into the vacated mahogany lined corporate offices.

Completely agree. Captain Planet is a prime example, but there are so many examples of fictional villains that I used to think of as childishly unrealistic. They were not just comically evil, but pointlessly comically evil. These days I have had to seriously rethink that opinion.

Gives a whole new meaning to "use it or lose it".

Active monitoring is for energy savings. A buildings HVAC is designed to meet air exchange requirements given designed occupancy levels regardless.

No, this is handled by HVAC system design to accommodate expected occupancy.

This is off by an order of magnitude.

This has nothing to do with CO2 levels. You are just making shit up.

If you mean by drawing some geometric shape around all of the wind turbines in a farm and then dividing the total power output by the area of that shape, I've already pointed out that it's nonsense. You also ignored the "means what in real world terms" part. Maybe you're not just selectively editing that out and you didn't know what I meant. To elaborate, the point is what is the actual significance of that number? What is the real world relationship between that number and, for example, how densely you can pack the wind turbines, or how much total available energy you can practically harvest, etc.? Why and how is this meaningful?

MacKay uses plenty of numbers, some are pretty wildly off, some are ballpark, some are accurate. He could hardly get away with fudging absolutely everything. There are plenty of parts where he didn't really need to, for example where he talked about efficiency in transportation. I will note of course that, even in that section, his numbers on, for example, electric cars do not match the performance of modern EVs because, once again, his data is old. He was writing using data that was, at best, as recent as 2007. I tried to find some data on EV car sales over time going back that far, but the best I could easily find was back to 2014 when worldwide BEV sales were ostensibly 108X less than 2024, except that it appears the 2014 numbers were being rounded up to the nearest 0.1 million, so it's probably even more. He devotes plenty of time to hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Critically, which maybe could be considered prescient, but the point is that today, hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is still a non-starter, so all of that is outdated. His estimate of world lithium reserves is a factor of 3X lower than current estimates. Overall, yes, the numbers, other data and understanding of the energy situation are out of date in his book since they are about two decades old

I explicitly pointed out though that the actual performance of wind turbines has not changed by a lot (although it has changed). My point about MacKay's book is that there are numerous reasons to avoid it as a source because of the outdated information and the errors, whether they are accidental or due to bias and intellectual dishonesty. If you need to use a source, use modern primary sources. You have already demonstrated that you can. You also have not addressed the question of whether the numbers have any meaning. Where his numbers were not wildly off, MacKay threw in a lot of "assumptions" that were pretty obviously cherry picked. He seems to arbitrarily decide how much land use is acceptable specifically to make it work out so that he could demonstrate in graphs that renewables are not able to produce enough power to meet the needs of the UK. How does that meaningfully apply to offshore wind today.

I will note also that you have not addressed the fact that you appear to have been conflating wind power per unit area in the vertical plane with wind turbine power generation by unit of horizontal area (whether or not you're basing that number on a method that is in large part arbitrary).

What are you talking about? In what way were they "fine"? Why are you pretending that you even addressed the fudged numbers? Current UK primary power needs work out to an average production of around 220 GW (164.4 million tones of oil equivalent per year at 11,630 kWh per ton of oil equivalent divided by 365.2422, divided by 24, then divided by 1 million to convert kW to GW). 195 kWh per person per day works out, with a population of 69.718 million to about 566 GW (195 kWh times 69.718 million divided by 24 hours, then divided by 1 million to convert kW to GW). MacKay's number is over by a factor of about 2.6X. How exactly is that "fine"?

As for the other factor that you say is "fine" that you have not actually addressed, it's the method of determining power density per unit of ground area for wind plants. Why is your crude geometric method of drawing a perimeter around the wind farm and dividing the total power produced by that method remotely valid given the confounding factors I have mentioned? You did not remotely address them, but you are acting as if you somehow not only addressed them, but as if you somehow proved their irrelevance? You seem to have skipped some steps.

Look, once again, you can make whatever argument you want about wind turbines and I can address it on the merits. If you use MacKay's book as the source though, you're going to end up having to defend your source. You should just use a modern primary source instead. MacKay's book is not academically rigorous (there's an extensive bibliography, for example, but next to no in-text citations), not properly peer reviewed, clearly biased (during the sections on nuclear power, he treats criticisms of nuclear power like personal insults). It has a pretension towards being neutral and factual to the degree that it puts on airs of being the only source that actually bothers using arithmetic and analysis to examine power issues. It is outdated. It has been critically reviewed with the numerous problems pointed out many times. MacKay himself, towards the end of his life, started abandoning the pretense and making his pro-nuclear bias abundantly clear.

Nothing fucking happened, BlueAnon clown.

So he was there.

Who said he wasn't?

It's on video, loser McCarthyite sucker of Satan's cock.

Microsoft counters with Notepad#.

Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms? The point of using it in his book was to tell the reader that a renewable uses X amount of land and that nuclear only uses some fraction of X land, therefore nuclear is better while ignoring that the land can be used for multiple purposes at the same time. He may well have had reasonable numbers for some things, but he fudged numbers for a lot of other things, so he's not a reliable source. Also, it makes no sense whatsoever for you to have used his book as a resource in the first place when you have actual, up to date references.

What land area? Are you simply ignoring that the wind farm does not actually consume the land between the limited footprints of the actual towers? It can still be farmed on, lived on, have factories built on it, have a solar farm built on it, etc., etc., etc.

Ok....? If I build four nuclear 1 GWe plants and call it a nuclear farm and build them in a square configuration with one at each corner and the linear distance of the sides of the square is about 200 km, then the Watts per square meter is You need to leave space between turbines...

Uh, yeah, of course you do. The point is that the wind turbines don't consume that space. The thing is, I'm not sure anyone in this discussion is talking about the same thing. For example, earlier in the conversation, you note that you think the w/m^2 in that article are high and you then cite MacKay. The problem is, MacKay is talking about land area, whereas the article you were criticizing there was clear that it was talking about the area of the VERTICAL PLANE (not yelling, just for emphasis). You're comparing apples and oranges and citing an old and clearly biased source. MacKay may have been a good with computer science, but the details of his career indicate that he was intellectually dishonest when it comes to energy in order to push his own agenda. The book and other details make it appear, from my opinion, that his intention was always to give lip service to renewables, but only to develop a following that he could then steer to the conclusion that only nuclear energy could work. Citing his book hurts anyone's argument for me. Why even cite him when you could have gone with primary sources?

Well, there was quite a lot of hot air in there really, both figuratively and literally since he was clearly a closet nuclear shill.

Well, technically, it has changed at the Earth's surface due to reduction in certain types of pollution. For all intents and purposes I suppose we can say it has not though.

Well, the change you state there is a 25% increase, so that's nothing to sneeze at. The panels have also certainly become cheaper.

Anyway, in the end, I stand by what I said, you selected, quite unnecessarily, a biased source that many have held up to a rigorous analysis and found lacking.