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Comment Re:Of only you could read ... (Score 2) 56

Granted, it is the most misleading term in science, since "big bang", but here we are.

Georges Lemaître actually called it the "Primordial Atom", but because he was a Jesuit, the atheist Fred Hoyle - a proponent of the Steady State theory who was philosophically opposed to the theory because it smacked of special creation - mocked it by calling it the "Big Bang". The name stuck, but Lemaître got the last laugh because he turned out to be correct. Hoyle then went on to further improve scientific discourse by developing the "junkyard tornado" argument used against abiogenesis by creationists...

Comment Re:Colourblind? (Score 1) 37

The current claim is that cephalopods are colour blind because they don't have rods and cones and we can't see how they can see in colour. Thing is octopuses can match their colour to their surroundings, something which is not possible without being able to perceive colour. Cephalopods also signal each other by changing the colour of their skin.

There are now theories on how they can perceive colour given their physiology, e.g.:
https://www.pnas.org/content/1...

But the claim that their colour blind clearly leaves open the question of how they successfully perceive colours...

They can perceive light polarization, so I was wondering if that was part of the experimental design.

Comment Re:"Us" (Score 1) 84

We could talk about the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, a partial list of recent North American extinctions is given here if you like. Most of us appreciate being part of the human race though and don't think that the actions of English speakers is fundamentally separate from speakers of other languages.

Passenger pigeons are an interesting case. Prior to Columbian contact, they were not very numerous as evidenced by archeology of Amerind middens. After the removal of that human keystone species, all kinds of ecological havoc ensued, inducing overbreeding of the pigeons. Eventually, the European immigrants started eating them and wiped them out.

Comment Re:What should we do about it? (Score 1) 249

In contrast, rooftop solar can be installed by any electrician after he reads a manual. If he's a slow reader, it might take a day. To address the problem in a short enough time span, we need solutions that can be scaled that quickly.

The trouble with Solar PV is that the full life-cycle costs are never included:

Two well-known indicators are proposed for a reference 2000 tons plant: net present value (NPV) and discounted payback period (DPBT). NPV/size is equal to 0.84 €/kg in a baseline scenario. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is conducted, in order to improve the solidity of the obtained results. NPV/size varies from 1.19 €/kg to 0.50 €/kg. The absence of valuable materials plays a key role, and process costs are the main critical variables.

This is just recycling and doesn't include the land use costs, pollution from extraction and manufacturing, and installer mortality (some of those are even hard to quantify).

Comment Re:The planet needs less people (Score 1) 201

You're wrong.

We need a lot more animals on the world's grasslands.

-jcr

Savory has been pushing this for a long time, but detailed academic studies say it is a pipe dream:

The highly ambitious claims made about the potential for holistic grazing to mitigate climate change are wrong.

For those without the patience to wade through 127 pages of academic analysis, there is also an 8 minute summary video

Comment Re:What are we supposed to do about it? (Score 1) 407

You seem to have the education to actually interpret the data yourself, so why believe anything? Take the data and analyze it.

I did that. It tells me that we solved the problem.

The solution is electricity from onshore windmills, hydroelectric dams, geothermal, and nuclear fission. For transportation fuels we will need synthesized hydrocarbon fuels from nuclear fission power. It has to be nuclear fission power because anything else cannot get hot enough to efficiently drive the process, costs too much to bother, or is a fossil fuel.

We have the technology already, it is cheaper than fossil fuels, all that is left to do is allow a free market to replace fossil fuels naturally.

It's not quite that simple. There are resource bottlenecks on all these solutions. For example, various metal bottlenecks probably limit world fission capacity to 1TW. Similar bottlenecks seem to exist for other resources, most notoriously for cobalt.

There are more complex solutions that seem tractable, and they have interesting implications:

  • Liquid fuels still need to be generated for air travel and a few other limited applications, but there is probably enough waste biomass to handle this.
  • The most cost-effective way to store surplus renewable generation appears to be electrolysis and gas synthesis
  • Syngas utilisation requires building out the natural gas infrastructure beyond current capacity
  • While the study did not model new fission plants, they did find that decomissioning the existing plant in the study area was not cost-effective

Comment Re:This is solar power (Score 1) 129

Without subsidies. Solar has been cheap enough to pay for itself subsidy free for getting on 20 years. It's just a question of having the up-front cash and being able to wait for the payback, which is getting faster all the time.

There are hidden subsidies in the form of externalised costs:

The researchers had investigated whether the pollutants used in the four main photovoltaic technologies are water-soluble. Contrary to previous assumptions, the result shows that pollutants such as lead or carcinogenic cadmium can be almost completely washed out of the fragments of solar modules over a period of several months, for example by rainwater.

They are starting to recycle panels in Europe, but the costs are not zero:

The costs imposed on these facilities are a burden to local government. Cost estimates for PV module disposal depend on the waste classification and distance traveled to recycling and disposal facilities. These estimates range from $0.05/W to $0.50/W. Depending on the hazardous waste determination, this translates into $5 to $100 per module - likely toward the lower end.

Those costs are probably manageable, but they are a significant fraction of the current cost, so I would call that a subsidy.

People in the industry are assuming that it will be cheaper to recycle with future technology, but I look at the lack of traction in glass and paper recycling over the last 20 years and remain skeptical.

I'd love for Solar PV to work, but these days I'm feeling a lot more sanguine about Solar Thermal. The technology is 19th century, it doesn't involve exotic minerals (including sand) and it avoid the disposal and other hidden costs of PV.

Comment Re:Sky isnâ(TM)t falling (Score 1) 164

I'm not sure where you are getting a lot of this. Most of what happened to the Amerind populations was a simple historical accident that could have easily gone the other way. See Charles C. Mann's 1491 for an overview. Some specifics inline:

An outcome that was near inevitable, regardless of if the Spanish came or not.

Europe, Africa, and Asia, all had their share of plagues over the centuries and millennia. This left them far more immune to disease than those on the American continent.

Studies of Amerind immune system genetics suggest that parasites were a bigger issue for them than zoonotic diseases, so it is not surprising that their immune systems were not tuned for this kind of assault. That doesn't make them inferior, just adapted to a different environment that changed suddenly.

Having access to beasts of burden, more easily accessible coal and oil, and other benefits of the geography and wildlife, meant they would advance more quickly in technology.

Claims of technological inferiority of the kind promoted by determinists like Jared Diamond may be somewhat biased because Amerind technology was quite different from Eurasian. For example, the Inka had the wheel but never used it for transportation because of the topography - they only used it for children's toys(!) They also had metallurgy but didn't use it for military purposes - they used it for decoration of public spaces, sometimes on a large scale. They had writing, zero. place-valued arithmetic, better/healthier agriculture, massive public buildings, better public sanitation (see the conquistadors' own writings if you don't believe me), poetry, and philosophy comparable to Greece. Modern population estimates are that Mexico City was larger than any city in Spain at the time.

One possible option for the American natives to have changed this was the possibility to domesticate a kind of horse or other large animals found in the area. Evidence shows they were hunted to extinction instead of being domesticated and used for beasts of burden.

This is controversial. Yes it happened a lot in other locales (e.g., Australia), but there is a fair bit of evidence that the American version was climatic. Plus the evidence from Andean coastal valleys strongly suggests that the population of the Americas happened much earlier than the extinction events.

Some tribes trained dogs to carry light loads, help with hunting, and as animals for battle. This was not unique to the Americas and therefore not an advantage to them when people from far off places came. People from far off places carrying metal swords and armor, and unfamiliar diseases, against people with wooden weapons and weak immune systems.

The population crash from disease killed 50% of the population and triggered a civil war among the Inka, which was the only reason Pizzaro succeeded. Despite his weapons and their population losses, the Inka fought an impressive rearguard action for decades. Oh and European guns at the time were barely functional and were pretty much on par with Amerin longbows in terms of penetration power (even against light armour.)

Oh, and the habits of some tribes to sacrifice the strongest among them to their gods didn't help in keeping a healthy gene pool.

European warfare actually had a higher death toll than the Aztec sacrificial body count. Both tended to take out "the strongest" so I don't see this at all.

There are many instances of Europeans coming to the Americas to find abandoned villages. They found empty homes and fields of crops left growing in the wild because the natives died from disease, long before the Europeans came, or wiped out from wars with neighboring tribes. Like it or not many of these cultures were hanging on by a thread. Anyone that came along would disrupt these fragile societies and bring them down. When unfamiliar cultures meet there will be conflict, and such conflict usually favors one far more than the other.

Any culture is "fragile" in the face of 95% population loss. I forget the references, but even 50% has been known to cause destabilisation and collapse in Eurasia.

Comment Re:Sky isnâ(TM)t falling (Score 2) 164

They didn't have weaker immune systems, they were just maladapted to intracontinental disease. Stuff like blood type distribution shows selective pressure from things like plague in Europe and so on. The reason for the abandoned villages was feral livestock spreading zoonotic disease ahead of the explorers. The lack of domestication in the Americas is why they had fewer adaptations to zoonotic illness: there were fewer. If left alone for longer eventually the alpacas and llamas and so on would've made their way on through and the disease landscape would've been more like the Old World, but it would've taken a while due to the geography.

Studies of Amerindian immune systems suggest that they had adapted to parasites instead of infections due to evolutionary pressures.

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