And because where income is high, cost of living is high, and the marginal cost of children goes from "investment in the future" to "big hole I sink money into".

Here we are saying that most Americans have houses not very different from Alec Baldwin, and yet whenever electric vehicles are mentioned on slashdot, you can just bet comments are going to say "but half of America can't charge at home!"

Which is it? We all live like Alec Baldwin, or we can't even charge electric vehicles at home.

A typical nuclear plant is sited inside a keep-out area of roughly 1000 acres. That comes to 4 million square meters. So you're saying that solar panels don't take much more area than nuclear plants. OK.

As a quick comparison, about 800 million square meters of the United States are used for cattle grazing. That's three trillion square meters. Area really isn't the problem.

That's very little waste, since solar panels are recyclable. There isn't a very big market for recycling solar panels today because few solar panels have reached their end of life, but when it's needed, twenty or thirty years from now, the materials solar panels are made from are all recyclable.

That's like saying that oxygen is one of the most toxic substances known to man, in its modification known as ozone. Phosphorus is not toxic; it is in fact one of the essential elements for life. The backbone of DNA molecules are phosphates; no phosphorus, no life.

And the amount of phosphorus in solar panels is absolutely trivial-- it's a dopant, about 100 ppm in the emitter of the cell, a layer roughly a micron thick. It is not "white phosphorus".

That's a myth promulgated by the fossil-fuel industry.

The major components of solar panels, are, by mass: glass, aluminum (frames), silicon. All of these are recycleable; none of these are toxic. After that you have the polymer attaching the glass to the cells, and the wiring.

Compared to the amount of landfill that industrialized nations produce -- 2.13 billion metric tons annually, in 2020-- solar panels are trivial.

Ah, kids today, leaving out the degree symbol in Kelvins because all their friends do, too. In my day, children had respect,

https://nap.nationalacademies....

Can't go lower than 0 degrees Kelvin, and I'm sure you must have hit that already.

It may look like that from this side of the millennium, but no, the history is simply in the process of being forgotten. This was a big effort.

Pretty much ALL of the present solar technology we see in megawatt production today is an outgrowth of the old Large Silicon Solar Array ("LSSA") program of the late 70s/early 80s (although the University of New South Wales group led by Martin Green needs to get some credit, too).

The program was originally part of RANN ("Research Applied to National Needs") and transitioned to ERDA (the Energy Research and Development agency) which then became part of the Department of Energy. LSSA became LSA, and then got renamed FPSA ("Flat Plate Solar Array"-- distinguishing it from concentrator solar arrays). So it had a lot of names.

Of course not. It was paid for by taxpayers (from the rich nations.)

I was there. You weren't.

If you want more details, dig up any of the old IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists' Conference ("PVSC") proceedings from the 70s and 80s and look at the program summary papers, typically the plenary talks toward the beginning.

China makes solar cheaper because they invested in scaling up technologies developed by the west.

What's neglected here is that the rich nations have already done this, by funding a decades-long research and development effort which reduced the cost of solar panels from about $500 a watt in 1980 to under $0.5 a watt in 2025.

Sounds interesting. You forgot to paste the link, could you post it?

If people are using AI to review papers, they're getting what they asked for.

Incorrect.

Warming is proportional to the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration. This is the Arrhenius relationship; it's been know for over a century. (For reference, this is why climate sensitivity is expressed as degrees of warming per doubling.)

You could say that "that means that as CO2 increases the slope levels out", which is true, but we are still in the linear range.

An interesting paper (although not peer reviewed), basically re-doing Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 calculations but with updated spectral lines. Did you actually read past the first paragraph? Their conclusion was that for the one-dimensional adiabatic warming due to carbon dioxide, they calculate 2.3 Kelvin per doubling of CO2. Points to note:

1. they express warming as degrees per doubling: they are agreeing with the Arrhenius relationship that warming increases as the logarithm of the concentration.
2. Their calculated value of 2.3 K/doubling is within the error bars of the IPCC estimate (which is the average of many models), although on the low side of the average estimated climate sensitivity. But, it's a simplified one-dimensional model, so it's not expected to be identical to the full 3D models.

I can only repeat that nothing you said makes this a story that couldn't have been equally well reported in 2024, or 2014, or for that matter in 1974.

This is not news.

We seem to be talking about completely different things. Let me see if I can state what I said more clearly. My comment had been that there is nothing new about this "news" story. Your reply was "Not sure I agree. The increase is not linear."

The fact that the increase is not linear is not relevant to the fact that there is nothing new.

You continued "That makes milestones relevant, as it helps gauge the exponent of the function."

Nope. The "milestone" 430 ppm gives you no information whatsoever about "the exponent of the function".

This story is not news. The fact that the curve is exponential does not make it news.

You're really saying that deviations from linearity that happened fifty years ago are the reason that this story is news today?