OTOH if they say it is AI it ay very well be - I mean when mgmt decides that a method X is better they will try it. Chances are that the problems will show up too late to make the deciding body look stupid when it matters. Who like me spent decades in the corporate world knows that the decisions and consequences are decoupled for most of the mgmt stuff. These decisions were tech related and now the tech related decision may have human side consequences. The consequnnces are visible much much later and will be attributed to something else and if need be new people will be hired. Or possibly not. The work is created by humans and for humans and is quite a lot of like baron Munchausen sort of procedure. It can be that the current war was caused by agentic AI telling the monsters in charge that it was good idea.

It depends on the negative that you try to prove or else the formal logic would cease to exist in the for it is now. You can prove negatives if you can define the search space and have powerful enough tools.

Besides the difficulty to even tell what the consciousness is, what if the artificial system can simulate it so well that we cannot tell if it is or not conscious?

The so called IT crowd is usually above average intelligent, somewhat informed but usually (not always) lacks understanding of basic terms it uses. Not saying all do. Just that majority will fail even to recognize that we have no working definition of consciousness. Kind of similar to some other major problems of reality that the "intellectual elites" think they understand but fail at it really.

Have reach the temperatures that were common when the Roman republic was strong and it was not an empire yet? I think the climate changes all the time. Gosch there were even times where the polar caps had no ice and there were forests there. The dinos had to use a big stone to kill themselves with climate change which btw decreased the temperatures not increased them. I am not arguing for burning everything we can and not looking into the matter but the way it goes there is a lot of hysteria around this subject and relatively little reason and facts. But then again - I do not think I can convince you of anything , can I? You know the only truth that your faith allows.

Germany has pretty high cost of electricity while also having to use coal power plants etc when there is no wind. This applies to all places where the wind (and solar) are on average the main or dominant power source. You can go and check with the island of El Hierro - they have one of the most efficient systems for "reneweables" together with storage - they still have to use diesel generators.

As for birds I do not know. It seems anything we put out there that moves with some speed will do damage to the environment. The energy density of wind is low hence you need a lot of windmills. The are also costs not seen in the electricity bill - the damage to the environment (energy density!) because you have to build the roads and put sizeable concrete foot for each such construction. If there are too many in one place (energy density!) - they are steeling wind from the wind park downwind. Also the wings are build from stuff that is considered not very healthy if you inhale or eat it - the stuff is regularly worn and torn off from them by the elements. Then there is this other problem with it - less wind leeward means that the surface of earth is hotter etc. Lots of windmills (energy density!) means that you may be offsetting your meager win with the side effects of building them in the first place.

As for the birds again - the last few years taught me one thing: none of the media and most of the science is broken and bought. Meaning - if you cannot prove it yourself than you do not know it. It is not my fault. I did believe most of this nonsense too until I read IPCC report and got interested in weather modelling.

A windmill and/or solar panels plus a battery at home (if you could afford all these) are good for the emergency setup - a situation in which the electricity is probably the least of your problems however. Other than that if the energy market is not distorted you do better w/o but then where are such markets. Whether Germany's economy is destroyed by the transition to wind and solar I am not sure. We have the war and the mass migration plus somebody has to pay for the EU with its bureaucracy. But I am sure w/o energy transition we would have a better economic situation than it is now.

In other words I do not see the point but see many reasons for not doing so. The green haters can come now.

I mean such a good source and cheap and yet it produces mostly problems in the grid, destroy environment and is so "cheap" that any place where "renewables" are a significant portion of the mix has very high energy prices. There are "math" geniuses here who can juggle the statistics w/o effort and who claim that the "renewables" are cheaper than anything else. This may or not be but they still cannot explain the fact that the actual electricity price where the "renewables" are a significant part of the mix is higher than anywhere else. So simple minds like mine say that the juggling of stats does not help. It is not cheap.

Nuclear is usually cheaper than anything else - if you calculate all the costs. This is difficult for "renewables" because they for some reason do not have to pay for system costs of them being connected to the network. They also do not have to pay into recovery founds - when the wind turbine and its mast gets to the end of their life they should be removed - in Germany some corrupt officials declare them historical monuments. Alternatively the the community i.e. the state may do it.

This has been tried elsewhere and the result is - if you have a peak of solar (and/or wind) you usually have to pay the other grid (abroad) owners to take the electricity you produced. The reason is the grid stability. The prices go up when in winter there is no sun and no wind - you pay up huge cap over normal price because again - a lot of "renewables" in a grid means that that it requires complete backup in "normal production". This is the reason that makes "renewable" expensive for all besides the owners of the solar panels and wind parks. The gov keeps the system working by introducing laws forcing the grid owners to use this and supporting them with subsidies when it feels good. This whole system is not sustainable and to make it worse it is not only environmentally damaging but also has wrong impact on local temperatures as lower wind speeds cause rising temp. of the surface. The only thing this is good for is backup in times of blackout - for this you need to have an island solution and converter that can run on its own w/o the alternating current in the network (you can provide it with a battery run inverter too - these are usually able to produce alternating current on their own). This whole mess is caused by the unholy collaboration of ignorant Karens, highly educated and equally ignorant people (like the ones frequenting this site) that want to save planet and quite a few corrupt government officials and entrepreneurs. How big luck we have that such people exist in abundance.

Not sure about the study. However if this statement:

were true, then we would not have a problem with reproducing the results of the scientific studies. What you show is closed to scientism and I kind of understand why there is a term associated with this attitude. This statement:

is also funny - the higher education purpose was producing educated people. That was true when (20-30)% of the population got to have that and even then the higher education was not a guarantee that person can produce arguments based on facts and is able to retrospect on own statements to withdraw them if found to be incorrect. This ability is not common in modern "science" and is even less common within the folk advocating "science" to be the alpha and omega. Another side of this is that there are people that do not have formal higher education and were/are/will be scientists. As to climate science - I think we know very little and most of us know close to nothing to make a proper informed statement about it. Especially telling is a problem with the models that do not predict much and thus show how little we know. I may not be a scientist, may not have a clue about the climate but I read enough about the models used to study it (it is actually enough to look at IPCC report to say this much) - they are not worthless but they are useless for the purpose of predicting climate changes in the future. Note: I consciously avoided making statements about what I think about climate change. My point is - we know very little about it.

You have really no clue, do you?

1. this seems to be a tongue in cheek statement
2. if they have to produce, store and use ammonia then the its smell is inevitable around such installations
3. the efficiency of such schemes is ridiculous. Not only any device using hydrogen has a serious leakage problem which is of concern as the hydrogen is explosive in almost any concentration in the air, but also the ammonia is made of natural gas I actually should end here but let us assume that it is not a nonsense to jump this many hops instead of using gas directly - the production of "clean" hydrogen from water is expensive energy-wise, then you have to make ammonia and then you have to make hydrogen from it and then power the machine with it. On each this transitions there is a huge loss of energy. You can have what 20% of originally produced energy out of the wind electricity?

That is all so silly that I do not know what to say. I came to /. after a longer while away and I must say I am shocked with silliness that prevails here now. All woke/green propaganda and idiocy as far as the eye can see. My conclusion to this whole story is: in any case you will need a gov. subsidy to make it work. It will not do any other way. In other words you need some warlocks to make stuff for eloi. Try not to anger warlocks in a process or you get eaten.

This is what the glorious wikipedia (this time probably correct for a change) has to say about the sun exposure of Cyprus comparing with the rest of Europe:

In winter, Cyprus receives an average of 5–6 hours of sunlight per day, half of the 12–13 hours experienced at the height of summer. This is about double that of cities in the northern half of Europe; for comparison, London has 1,461 hours. However, in winter there can be more than four times more sunshine; for comparison, London has 37 hours[5] while coastal locations in Cyprus have around 180 hours of sunshine in December (that is, as much as in May in London).

Guardian has deteriorated significantly over the last few decades. It used to be lefty but it had some quality controls. The quoted article is I am afraid typical garbage spit by woke/green propagandists these day. Sad sad story for Guardian.

I am an electrician, from what they told me at school (and they had good arguments for that too) the demand and supply must always match - this means that that you produce more than you need and have to either sell outside (if you have to the price may be negative) or switch off the source. OTOH they talk 30 days but in the article they say max 6h which points to the problem with this whole nonsense - the och so cheap renewable energy requires not so cheap backups. If on the other hand they invested in say nuclear this would not be necessary. Take the newest concepts and you may even stop needing the storage for million of years as you may burn all fuel and you only have a need for medium term (200-300y) storage. But hey - pharaohs built pyramids that made no sense other than to show who has the longest d.k too, right?

The only current event in the quoted article is from Florida. From what I read about bleaching the Australian reef went on and off with it and is doing quite well apparently. Maybe I read the wrong news tho. The facts are nazi anyway. How did the reef survive the times when the earth was much warmer than now, I wonder? Must be aliens.

The IdeaVim plugin keeps me sane at work when I "have" to use an IDE due to the complexity of the software. I'm never going to stop using Vim modes/plugins as long as they are available.

Many people, especially in the Western industrialized nations, consume more carbohydrates than they need in everyday life,

How about not doing that in the first place?