Solutionism?

Seriously?

How deprived of all faculity of thinking must a movement become to come up with the idea of "solutionism" as a critique? There is a problem and people think about solutions. Any solution would, of course, be reason for existential difficulties of the problem. But the problem is the basis of power of said movements. When the problem goes away, so does the power that came with it, when the movement came into existence and so does the only solution the movement sanctioned: complete austerity and refraining from any use of technology and any interaction with nature as much as in any way possible.

"Solutionism" is the latest, most ludicrous and hopefully last, attempt at defending the only solution "environmentalism" ever came up - by denying the adequancy of any solution of their problem whatsoever. Thus perpetuating their claim to power indefinitely - you know, the UNSOLVED PROBLEMS of technology.

Go and rot in hell.

This article is about one scientist and it is definitely fair to demand this from him, as he obviously did the very opposite.

As for the rest of climatologists, who are a large bunch of individuals, of course it is fair to demand the same from them. There are those among them who see this as natural and do inform people about both the contents and the limits of their knowledge.

Unfortunately, those are few and far between in the public debate and especially in the media, who dislike true scientists exactly for their habit (or should I say second nature?) of making very careful statments with lots of background to make sure their statments can be understood at all and a litany of ifs and buts, necessary to make it clear on what assumptions and which conditions their statements rest.

Hence, the media are filled with so-called-scientists willing to dispense with all scientific standards to the point of leaving the realm of anything resembling nature and giving the press a nice-to-read story instead. Do I think it is fair to extrapolate from TFA to those "scientists"?

Hell yes.

Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with

a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge and

b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.

Unfortunately, nothing of what you said stops people from rating my comment -1 troll ... as expected.

I'll quote Feynman on this one, because I couldn't say it any better:

"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."

You won't need a helicopter. There is a water pipe at the bottom, where you only need to plug in a fire pump to pump water up to the roof of the building and you're done. No high-pressure shenganians required to cool this one.

Actually, you need surprisingly little fuel.

Even for a modest exhaust velocity of 2000m/s of the rocket and a terminal velocity of 100m/s (the atmosphere does most of the breaking for you anyway), only about 5% of the total mass need to be fuel to land. That's about 20kg of fuel for a total mass of 300kg of the whole rig including the shaved ape. There's also a healthy safety margin for hovering and fooling around before touchdown, especially if you use somewhat better rocket fuel. (2000m/s isn't all that great).

If you had listened to the commentary after the launch, you would have heard the boss of OSC rattling down a laundry list of companies doing stuff for them - including external companies doing the ground systems and the separation systems (which I distinctly remember). Basically everything was done by somebody else.

The whole second stage is from ATK, made using the same factories where they usually build ICBMs. The first stage engines are 1970ies Soviet relics. The rest of the first stage (tanks, thrust structures etc.) was build by Yuzhmash a state-owned Ukranian rocket builder. The Cygnus spacecraft will be provided by Tahles Alenia Space, which itself stretches the definition of "private".

Ahh, a summary of all those thing that have been proven to be the worst in HINDSIGHT, neatly compressed. Just leaving out all those things that, at the time, did not point to the development and that led former fascists to defend their actions for decades afterwards.

Just because you don't take those apologists seriously anymore, does not mean they weren't taken seriously back in their day.

Absolutely. And it wasn't just the lockdown of the whole city, but also a "public safety exception" voiding the constitutional right to have a lawyer. I think we witnessed an object lesson in history. How did fascism take over Germany? One perfectly justifiable step after another. Why didn't people object? Only few did and all the others said "shut up".

It was a bleak day. That I won't forget.

Anything in html tags doesn't seem to count.
Nor do code blocks.

Just judging from the apperance of the post.

I would be much more interested in the role of convective heat transfer in the climate models he inspected. It is clear that this is much more important on the surface than radiative transfer and I'd certainly like to know whether they can make a decent job of modeling it or not.

It's not just subsidies. When Spain went broke and had to limit its feed-in tariffs from insanely high levels down to longterm sustainable levels, it took some 40% of worldwide demand for solar panels with it. Other countries faced similar problems. Only Germany maintained the insane feed-in tariffs (accounting for about $300bn on solar so far, resulting in the highest electricity prices worldwide).

But even in Germany the economic crisis reduced investment well below expectations. Excessive supply from factories build before the economic crisis hugely outstripped demand. Prices collapsed below cost and companies go broke.

Which is also the reason why solar power seems to be becoming cheaper. It's not the cost that is getting cheaper - everybody is still using the same old factories and the same old technology. It is merely the price being pushed down to unsustainable levels.

Wait for conspiracy theories that will be created, once prices start to rise again and the expected exponential fall of the cost of solar power doesn't happen.

What the fuck? People are being relocated FOR WINDMILLS in CANADA?

It is kind of understandable to relocated people for lignite stripmines in Germany - because people happen to live where there is lignite in the ground and everybody is against fracking and nuclear. But relocating people for windmills in a country with 1.5% the population density of Germany is just mind-blowing - mind you, Germany managed without relocating people despite having 240 people per sqkm, whereas Canada has a mere 3.7 people per sqkm.

If those people are upset, they are upset for good reason.