You have no right to make that decision, and neither does our Government. Its colonialism all over again where we in the first world assume we are superior to these people, and so we subjugate them by telling them what they can or can not do. You know what they say, those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it, and here you go.
If wind IS cheaper than coal, than we are getting ripped off by rich scam artists who are taking this subsidy money for their own enrichment...and that is something that we should put an end to. So what about it? Is Wikipedia lying to you and letting scam artists get off with subsidies? Or perhaps did they simply add in the subsidies and public assistance which wind receives without telling you to show that hey, the subsidies ARE making the costs line up with reality so that people WILL install wind turbines. We are talking billions of dollars in subsidies every year in Western countries, so this is not chump change. Its big money that we have to keep investing in wind and solar while since the 1970's the same story has been "wind will become economical in the future." The only thing we see is that the cost of subsidies increases every year and the price of electricity likewise increases ensuring that the poor people of our nations have less access to energy and are subjected to fuel poverty while the cost of the subsidies simply becomes a regressive tax where the poor are taxed for wind energy and pay more for energy while the rich pay less in taxes after they install several wind turbines and make money off of the poor. A truly regressive tax....And yet again someone like you posts an article which explains that the money we spend on subsidies for wind and solar are not actually part of the cost of these sources of energy, and so many people believe its true....
Yea, I am sure we can trust a site that does not take subsidies into consideration on the costs of energy production. That is the way to use your noggen.
But don't despair of wikipedia completely, I found this on another wikipedia page (probably written by someone different:)
A 2010 study by Global Subsidies Initiative compared global relative subsidies of different energy sources. Results show that fossil fuels receive 0.8 US cents per kWh of energy they produce (although it should be noted that the estimate of fossil fuel subsidies applies only to consumer subsidies and only within non-OECD countries), nuclear energy receives 1.7 cents / kWh, renewable energy (excluding hydroelectricity) receives 5.0 cents / kWh and biofuels receive 5.1 cents / kWh in subsidies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies So yea, that is three times the subsidies for renewable energy on average. Now why in the world would we hide these facts from the rest of us? Its either a scam like you claim or that wikipedia page is lying to you either through ignorance or on purpose because they are in fact vested in the renewable energy regressive tax. I will leave you to tell me which it is.
There is always far more going on than most people want to believe. The problem is figuring out what exactly is going on. Governments have become experts and indeed surgeons at obfuscation in general, and they cloud up every issue with so much information that the average person only remembers the vague details like how "people who state that the NSA is recording your every internet stop" as being "tinfoil nutters". This was what people stated before Snowden released the proof that the NSA was doing that.....And the Government wants to spin this incident as "nothing to see here, move along", when the truth is that the NSA has been taking a back-door to our constitutional rights and not telling us. Now they will continue to do this out in the public eye and appologize to no one. The very real fact that most of the people who were supposed to be playing "gate-keepers" in congress were on board with this tells us everything we need to know that the US Government is not going to stop spying on every single citizen anytime soon.
Look, you are absolutely right that this is one of the bad parts of the revelations, but the most troubling part of it has nothing to do with how we were lied to, the most troubling part is that this information is now in the public domain and nothing has changed and nothing is being done to change it. The only result is that our Government wants to shoot the messenger who told mommy on it. That is the most troubling aspect...in that our Government is either so incompetent or so full of shit that the best they can do to fix themselves is shoot the messenger. Or how they do not even attempt to fix problems, but instead shoot the people who tell on them or waste so much time on wasting money as with the IRS. The Government is dysfunctional, and has been for some time where instead of firing those who screw up, those who screw up are given promotions to keep their mouths shut. They are only mad at Snowden after all because he told on them.
There are countries that are better educated than in the US, but if you look at the facts, America is not all that far behind other countries. Some countries, like Japan stop secondary school at about the high school level for all but the brightest and the richest. This means that only the brightest fraction of children are taught past this level for the most part which means when you do standardized testing in those countries, the test scores far outpace the US. This is not to say that the American educational system is superior, but mainly that we do educate farther than those countries. You are basically comparing all American Children to the brightest Japanese children as a rule, and of course they come out looking better. As for the past, the trend has been other countries getting better at education and as such they start outperforming us when you start comparing like that. In that case, its the same as the example of your "friends who were taught in the old eastern schools". When you compare the brightest to everyone else, you tend to get much worse results. I don't think I have ever seen an apples to apples test that measures this at the secondary level. Most primary testing shows a rather complete picture, but past that its not really accurate. Especially as you get out of the developed world where some people don't get any education.
Personally, our education system for the most part is about the same as it was when we were "great". While other countries are doing better, we are stuck in the same old mold. And we can learn from their lessons and how they got better to better our own system, and that is just common sense.
It has nothing to do with a small American elite. Finland for instance has the same system where children go to school until the high school level where some children go into vocational training. What is the secret to their success and other countries? The most notable thing is that only the brightest teachers are allowed to teach by making an educational degree program as difficult as engineering and highly technical degrees are in the states. This means that teachers are respected (unlike in the US), they make good money, and they are the cream of the crop as far as intellectuals. As it is in the US, anyone can get an educational degree and as a rule everyone looks down on teachers as being the "dumb career choice." And so our education goes downhill in comparison simply because we do not set our priorities. The priorities for Americans has always been high tech, engineering, and high tech toys. Politically, the real solution to the problem is a non-starter because our different political groups are entrenched on other issues and like to kick the can down the road to the next politician.
I agree, no where does it mention that increased condensation is something that will be achieved or water efficiency itself will be increased, its only discussing the efficiency of the heat transport process. I read the article to figure out what he was talking about....and they did talk about a second application that does mention condensation as a power source.
But the finding also suggests another possible new application, Miljkovic says: By placing two parallel metal plates out in the open, with “one surface that has droplets jumping, and another that collects them you could generate some power” just from condensation from the ambient air. All that would be needed is a way of keeping the condenser surface cool, such as water from a nearby lake or river. “You just need a cold surface in a moist environment,” he says. “We’re working on demonstrating this concept.
And I am pretty sure this is what the first poster was mis-reading. The idea behind that second process is that in a MOIST environment with a cold surface, you can achieve power generation in this matter as long as you have the following:
large amounts of cold water AND moist air. The reason the first poster is wrong is that he states that this can be an application in arid regions, which as a rule have neither of the requirements.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/house-and-senate-bills-would-pay-federal-workers-for-shutdown-furloughs/2013/10/03/d2fc8096-2c58-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html
its already happening. So yea, they will get paid like always meaning the shut-down was nothing but a free vacation to the federal employees. The only losers will be the taxpayers who are paying the workers to do nothing. Something I have always wondered, if they are going to get back-pay anyway, why aren't they working? and if that is the case, why in the world do we call it a shut-down in the first place? Its such a farce really.
Oh, I honestly laughed out loud when I saw that you were using the failed idea of peaked oil to prove your disaster dream. You are just yet another person who does not understand that we do not explore for fossil fuels and/or oil until we need more. Not one geologist on this planet honestly has an idea of how much oil, or coal or any other substance that exists on this planet. All the predictions we have are based on recoverable resources which is "the oil we have found." And so we always have 10 years of oil left. We have had 10 years of oil left for the last 30 years. And that reason is like I said....because people only search for new sources of oil when we start to get low, and when they find it, they stop searching. Although in industry they generally hire enough people just to keep the future that far in check. That is the way its done in the real world anyway. If you had a way to estimate the total reserves on this planet, you might be onto something, but you are talking about a big planet with quite a few niches and holes that have never to this day even seen man. (Think Antarctica).
As for fresh water, no need to be scared. We have had this technology for a few decades now called desalination where ocean water can become drinking water. The naval crew of the US carriers for instance get their drinking water like this after 90 days at sea when the supplies run out. The only complain I remember hearing was that it tasted lousy. So no, fresh water is not in a danger of ever running out, cheap water is. In the future, humanity will have to pay more to obtain water. And than, I don't understand what you mean by synthetic fertilizer (as I assume you mean the stuff we mine from the ground to put back into the ground as fertilizer (Phosphate?) In that case, we have hundreds of years worth of supplies and that takes no more oil than anything else. (We have enough supplies that I know of to feed us for at least 200 years assuming our population doubles 3 times.)
And farm-land is not an issue. We can always grow crops indoors in multi-story buildings with grow lights if we wanted to. That might be a solution for the future so that we can set aside even more land for nature and rely a lot less on pesticides. I can't think of a thing we couldn't do with current technology today that is depended on your view of a catastrophe. Perhaps you have been reading too much literature by Paul Ehlrich who got everything he said incorrect. You are free to trust someone who was wrong about everything, but I am thinking the rest of us should trust in what we can see with our two eyes and not some esoteric future disaster dreamed up by scare mongers.
Great concept, in a world where anything we can imagine is possible through technology because our brains are amazing. I won't doubt our brains are amazing and that we are capable of quite a bit......but that is not reality my buddy. Reality is 6 billion souls all marching to their own tunes in their own directions most of the time contradicting the movements of other people. That is what humanity is, a pale shade of your imagination in that most of us are reinventing the wheel in parallel and each individual adds just a tiny bit to the pie. The truth is that our capability to learn is very depended on other humans and that we learn best by "monkey see, monkey do." Or perhaps the best way of looking at it is the old country song, one step forward, two steps back.
And so the only arrogance is from you still. You believe that your vision or perhaps the paradigm you view both humanity and yourself in is correct and have no reservations of your own limitations. You too could go much farther, but only when you realize that you are just one voice among many crying out in the wilderness for a deliverance from a planet that naturally inflicts harm on its people. And by crying out in the wilderness about how great the minds of humanity are, you completely missed through your own arrogance the crucial question that should be answered first: Why should we geo-engineer at all ? Why should we do more than that? Isn't our sentient existence great enough without playing Gods with things we probably do not understand well enough to do?
The law of unintentional consequences strikes the arrogant quite often. And that is because they believe they are correct no matter what evidence is presented and they will always (ALWAYS) double down and assume they are correct even with contradictory evidence. That is why the brightest minds of humanity have been open and not closed to the idea that we do not know everything...quite yet. And that is my great lesson for you today sir. Arrogance can derail the smartest minds we have because through that arrogance, people close their minds and close their minds to the possibility that the views of others might just be correct after all. Don't become another victim of arrogance. There is a reason this term applies to especially the most educated people in society.
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
IPCC says that there is no best estimate for climate sensitivity which for the lay readers means that no one knows what the actual effect of CO2 is going to be. Physics tells us 1.0 degree C per doubling. Sensitivity tells us by what we multiply that 1.0 times to get what the actual effect of CO2 forcing is going to be. Before this, the range was 2-5.5 C. Now its ?
So tell me, is that science?
"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different." -- Franco Spisani