No, I don’t think he’s suggesting rewriting everything. As with anything else, it’s the old 80/20 or 90/10 rule - rewrite the small amount of bloatware code where the computer spends most of its time into more efficient code (preferably non-interpreted). That doesn’t mean rewriting the entire application, either - just the part that’s slowing things down; such places almost always exist in any large application. This isn’t even anything new; we had plenty of interpretive software in production even back in the 70’s and 80’s, but since they weren’t used heavily they weren’t worth rewriting. It’s not an all-or-nothing choice, we’ve just forgotten that there even is a choice.

Since we’re talking about fleet vehicles and not private vehicles, you really should be aware that very many fleet operators (both public and private) have long had their own fueling stations at their fleet parking lots. So yes, the government does indeed build gas stations for their own use. Heck, even many (most?) middling sized farms have a fueling station so that the farmer doesn’t have to drive in to town every time he needs to fill up his tractor.

Except that most government fleet vehicles aren’t used for commuting to work, but rather in the course of their jobs. Examples are law enforcement, postal delivery, etc - while the vehicles may spend part of the workday in the fleet parking lot, much of the time they will be out in the community.

I don’t know offhand how many EV’s the government actually has in operation; for example, under Biden the Post Office was in the process of replacing their fleet of vehicles, many of which were going to be electric, but I don’t know how many were actually delivered and I assume that Trump directed that all of the new ones delivered under his watch were to be ICE. If the number of electric vehicles actually delivered under that program was negligible, then any chargers for them are superfluous. Similarly with other agencies; if there are not many EV’s in the service fleets then there’s not much point in having the chargers running - but if there are a lot of EV’s already in the service fleets, then turning off their chargers is yet another example of absurd government waste. Given how pigheaded he has been about EV’s (at least if they’re not Teslas), it wouldn’t surprise me if he directed that all government EV’s were to be sold off even if they were brand new and working well enough for their purpose, which would be an absurd waste of an already sunken cost, regardless of your opinion about the wisdom of purchasing them in the first place (It would be different if large numbers were not adequate for purpose, though I would think we would have heard about it if so).

The entire affair strikes me as nothing so much as absurd political theater: Claiming to be “saving money” while at the same time selling off brand new (and expensive) equipment at fire sale prices, just to make some kind of cheap political points with his fan base.

I don’t think it’s ludicrous, though it’s by no means guaranteed to produce the results they’re hoping for. You have no clue how science works.

Your information is significantly out of date. The current percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 0.0427%, not 0.03% as you claim - it's been rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, when it was about 0.028%; It hasn't been as low as +/- 0.03% since the 1950's. While there is a certain (small) amount of debate about how much CO2 was in the atmosphere during the Pleistocene era (2.58 million years ago up to about 11,000 years ago) because the proxy data that we have are not as reliable as modern instrumentation, we have pretty high confidence about the data gathered during the 20th and 21st centuries, and they show a consistent rise in CO2 levels that really started to take off around 1950 or so. Moreover the source of the bulk of this excess CO2 is clearly from fossil fuels, which can be demonstrated by the atmospheric carbon and oxygen isotope levels which precisely match what would be expected if the source of the excess CO2 was all ancient plant matter, and no other explanation (volcanism, etc) seems to fit the evidence. The quantities required also roughly match the amount of fossil fuels burned (there will of course also be some released from melting permafrost, which will have a similar isotope profile, but so far that's a secondary effect, and is in any event a knock-on effect).

This of course doesn't *prove* that the additional carbon is *causing* climate change, and the computer models are, like all computer programs, subject to bugs and incorrect assumptions and the like. There is no possible way to run multiple experiments on additional (real, non-simulated) Earths to see what effect different levels of CO2 have.

HOWEVER, we do have pretty unequivocal evidence that the global climate is warming up significantly. Probably the most obvious is the loss of ice from the poles, especially the Arctic. For a while it was thought that the same phenomenon was not happening in the Antarctic, and that there was a net increase of ice in some parts of the Antarctic, but that no longer appears to be the case. It is hardly a requirement that temperatures and effects increase by equal amounts all over the globe (!). Likewise the glaciers in high altitudes are almost universally retreating.

Another piece of evidence that is hard to explain any other way is that the global sea level is moving inexorably higher over the last 200 years. Not just at a few locations (which might be caused by other effects such as subsidence), but all over the globe. This is mostly because of the thermal expansion of the water in the ocean, not the melting of polar ice since so far most of that has been sea ice rather than land ice, and melting sea ice won't raise the water level. It's not very fast (less than 2.5 mm/year on average), but it is extremely consistent, and over a span of decades can put many low-lying coastal communities at risk.

And of course we have direct temperature measurements taken at thousands of locations around the Earth, though I'm sure you will want to discount them. While there is every effort made to ensure that the measurements are a good representation of average global temperatures, it is never possible to have one thermometer every square kilometer so that we can get a complete global picture, and there's always a small chance that the dataset is not fully representative. They too show a consistent rise in global temperatures.

Which brings us back to those pesky computer models. While there are always possibilities for errors in the models, the awkward fact is that we have several independent models, and they all show more or less the same thing: That the higher levels of CO2 are largely responsible for the observed warming effects. And when you run them on PAST levels of CO2, their predictions all agree fairly well with the historical data. It is difficult to explain why they would all be wrong on future predictions (and in the same direction) when they all work so well for the historical climate data. It may not be quite impossible, but it certainly strains credulity.

It was possible to have some reservations about the accuracy of the climate models 20 years ago or so, but it is getting harder every year to deny that their predictions should be taken seriously.

Yes, it would melt faster if the temperature warmed up. Most of the natural ice in the Arctic is from snowfalls, which are essentially pure water. The idea is to create enough of it such that it stays around longer than the ice that's there "naturally", and thereby increasing the albedo of the Arctic ocean, causing more sunlight to be reflected back out into space. Obviously there are a lot of interactions involved here, and the point of the study is to see whether it might be possible to force the system into a colder climate regime or at least to hold the line where it is rather than seeing significant warming in the Arctic and losing massive quantities of ice every year like we're seeing now.

Yes, in the worst case. But if they can manage to keep enough of the sea ice around, there would be some hope of cooling the Arctic and expanding the ice over time. (Over geologic time the sea ice has both increased and decreased, so it *is* possible to increase it, although it's difficult). Admittedly this would be a little like the mythological Sisyphus who was doomed to roll a huge boulder uphill for eternity, but if it can buy us some time to get our act together, so much the better.

I think they're trying to find out whether this has even a prayer of working, not to come up with an ideal long-term solution right away. As one researcher I used to work with liked to put it, "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." If you're trying to expand our knowledge of something, it often seems a bit like scrabbling around in the dark until you can find that interesting nugget you were looking for.

Yes, obviously the point is to increase the thickness of the ice and hopefully seeing lower losses of sea ice as a result, since it would take longer into the Arctic summer to melt the thicker sea ice. Since the albedo of the ice is fairly high and therefore reflects most of the incident light back out into space, the longer you can keep it around the longer you retain that high albedo. Water has a relatively low albedo, so it absorbs a lot more heat than does the ice, causing both it and the air to warm up. Your mistake is in thinking that the idea is primarily to protect the ice over land, which also has a low albedo, but the article does say that they're pumping the water *from the seawater below* which wouldn't work as well for ice sheets over land since you'd have to pump the water from a distance.

It might work, but it would probably take years to restore a significant amount of sea ice. You need to create enough ice to make headway against all the ice lost through heating of the ocean water and the land area in the Arctic, which are losing their ice cover rapidly (lowering their albedo and absorbing even more energy as a result). Still, anything that can buy us a little time could be critical to solving the climate problem without causing too much damage.

..But they only achieved this by filling in with energy generated on the Continent, which is problematic on several levels. First of all, some of that is undoubtedly produced by fossil fuels, so their effective carbon usage is higher than simply what they’re generating internally. Secondly, since the production is out of their control, they’re at the mercy of their suppliers who may at some point need to cut back as their own energy mix and usage evolves. And thirdly, that energy tends to be more expensive than domestically produced electricity, which is a major component of their high electricity prices. This is not a tenable situation in the long run.

There is no need to have every train stop in every city, and the California HSR plans include nonstop SF to LA trains as well as limited (a few stops) and local (all stops). This objection is a red herring. The lack of density in many US cities is a problem, but airports also suffer from this since it’s hard to get from the airport out in the suburbs to the central core or the other side of town. Moreover, there really aren’t many places left for new airports that are reasonably close to the cities they will serve, and many of the small-town airports are being shut down for lack of passengers, so it’s unclear if we have a path towards significantly increasing air travel other than on relatively long-haul routes, The US transportation infrastructure is a thorny problem which you don’t seem to fully appreciate.

Unfortunately China is losing population, rapidly, as a consequence of their one child policy (since abandoned, but the damage is done). There is no reasonable expectation that much of that real estate will ever be occupied - an example of a poor Chinese investment (as opposed to their rail network, which is at least an arguably reasonable one in order to promote economic growth). But much of the real estate debt is being borne by various developers, not the central government, and will be reflected in their stock market rather than government interest payments.

While I would hardly consider $1 trillion of debt to be a small amount, they ARE getting a modern high speed railway network for it. Contrast this with the US, where we have, what is it now, about $34 TRILLION of debt, largely to pay for entitlements, ie, something that has no long-term value in anything like the same way as hard infrastructure does. The wiser investment should be obvious.

You’re not wrong, of course, but problems with waste heat are hardly limited to geothermal power - any power plant using heat transfer has similar issues to a greater or lesser degree, including coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Even solar power systems that rely on solar energy to heat up a furnace will have to get rid of the heat somehow.

Geothermal also has the potential for producing waste water contaminated with sulphur, metals, or other pollutants that get brought up with the heat transfer process or during the drilling process itself.

Nothing is perfect, but if these and other issues (eg, cost) can be controlled, it has the potential to provide renewable energy base load power for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

The book is supposedly available for "NIS 98" - apparently New Israeli Shekels (about $30), though the more common symbol for that currency is ILS rather than NIS. The obvious inference is that the book is available in Israel, which likely means it's in Modern Hebrew - so the title of any English translation is less certain (it may not be a literal translation of the Hebrew title, for example, or an English translation may not yet be published or even planned). Regardless, I have also been unable to find that book - or indeed any other books - by him; none even show up on AbeBooks, which is often a good source for books not available from Amazon. Naturally many of his books may not have English translations, which will limit their availability on English language sites, but all this still seems odd even for a non-English language author with such an (apparently) illustrious past.