Ken Fabian

Thanks. I think that first paragraph of mine fell a bit short of the ABC I was after - accuracy, brevity and clarity - but I hope the meaning came through. Missed the time limit to edit or I'd have tried for more of the B and C. I do struggle with the B. I think stability is the optimum for the species including humans, that are around and doing well at the time. Not changing too much too quickly is much more "optimum" than any specific global average temperature especially if major and rapid climate changes are involved in getting there - but I note that (confirmed by the graphs provided) we were not in some cold part of natural cycles when we started burning fossil fuels in a big way, but were already at and just past peak of a natural warm period - so added warming doesn't take us back to a warmer "optimum" it takes us into territory not seen before, not unless looking at very long times ago, when conditions were too different to make any "better" or "worse" global climate comparisons. I'd call the argument a not actually relevant kind of wrong. The Holocence, the last 10,000 years or so, since the last Glacial Maximum had been unusually stable and there are good grounds to think that stability made it possible to get reliable food supplies from agriculture, enough for civilisations to arise and persist. Even the relatively small changes during that time saw rises and falls of civilisations. The warming isn't happening during a cold period, it is happening just after one of those peaks, one already different to what was happening before - warmer than prior peaks and persisting long after - (the red circling came with this graph, not mine, but finding one with the period before the Holocene wasn't so easy - not without log scaling that compresses the earlier times) - Whilst climate change will alter weather patterns many regions are that way because of geography that isn't going to change - changed intensities of what they already get appears more likely in most places rather than the wetter places turning dry or dry climates turning wet. eg Deserts with mountain ranges between them and oceans will mostly stay deserts, but the coastal sides can get wetter. Big atmospheric and ocean circulations get affected but not entirely overturned; lots of prevailing winds will still go the same directions, cross oceans and gather moisture - more water vapor than before. Where conditions suit that means more rain. For arid climates warmer air needs to have more water vapor content to reach saturation, in order to rain; they can get more rain from occasional extreme rain events that do reach further inland but outside those times get less. The impacts on people is kinda critical in this; for all that Environmentalists are concerned for natural ecosytems it is concern for the impacts on people, agriculture and infrastructure that drives most climate policy. All well and good if there is less desert and vegetation on average but the local impacts can still be overwhelming. I've heard it said that civilisation is just one famine away from collapse; some of the worst potential consequences aren't from the weather and climate and sea level, but from human mismanagement and responses to crisis, including corruption, blame shifting and conflict. If you live in a part of the world least affected by climate and weather impacts it could become the favored destination for a hundred million refugees; I don't see how any nation in a world that has become so interconnected and interdependent can isolate themselves from the impacts elsewhere.

@Airbrush Careful they don't wear you out working out why their arguments are wrong only to just shift to different wrong arguments whilst conceding nothing; those debates rarely change minds. If you want to know why those arguments are wrong (or not even wrong ie irrelevant) it will only be for your benefit; anyone who can't see the logical problem with evidence of instances where warming preceded CO2 and the CO2 amplified it implying CO2 cannot be the cause of warming now (but when we get enough warming, cause CO2 stores to be released and amplify it?) isn't going to be much open to logical arguments. And if someone thinks not being convinced means the science is wrong they are not being properly skeptical - if they don't know they cannot know that it is wrong. It may be better to shift the argument to one of whether and why to trust the institutions, practices and practitioners of climate related science - to trust in the studies and reports by science agencies and science teams tasked with working out what is really going on, versus "do your own research" on a point by point basis. Why for example is every Intelligence Agency, who's job is sorting truth from lies and uncovering nation damaging conspiracies, unable to find evidence of falsification in climate science? Or are they in on it? Some points (for your benefit) - graphs of CO2 vs temperature with 1,000 year increments can't really demonstrate the connection between temperature and CO2 over very short timescales, such as between 1800's to present, where CO2 has been preceding warming that shows very rapid response to it, measurable within decades - and it is an observation that the CO2 rise is a consequence of fossil fuel burning and not a response to warming from other causes, or what do they think comes out of exhaust pipes and smoke stacks? Just CO2 and temperature seems inadequate for arguing for other causes than CO2; they need to show the other causes, and then show how those causes are working now. Looking at too long to be relevant timescales is a common way people get misled or mislead themselves - just as too short time scales where internal climate variability dominates - where each year is not incrementally warmer than the preceding one, but over time averages to a clear warming trend (remember The Pause?) - is misleading. Effects of raised CO2 on plants in isolation from the full range of environmental changes - temperatures, rainfall, growing season length - is also likely to mislead. More crop growth with raised yields but reduced nutritional value (where all else is equal) needs to be put into the context where all else is not equal. And increasing global biomass (vegetation) isn't so easy to attribute to plant response to elevated CO2 - temperature change and rainfall change seem to be more significant factors, with overall increased global precipitation a major one. But that is not leading to increased rainfall everywhere; warmer air will hold more water vapor and deliver more rain where conditions suit, whereas in arid conditions warmer air needs higher levels of water vapor to rain at all. More tundra spending more time thawed (Arctic greening), some regions getting more rainfall (eg NW Australia) seems more directly significant to change in vegetation in those places. I don't mind people asking questions - feel free - but I am not a fan of being JAQed around by people who aren't interested in the answers.

I think energy technologies and what they can do are still in flux; the last thing we want is an inflexible plan that cannot take advantage of ongoing developments as they emerge. I think we need commitment to the goal of decarbonizing more than we need a detailed plan of how to get there; the planning is for the next few steps, not the final steps and must include support for clean energy R&D, on the basis that we can still do things better. When mainstream politics chose Doubt, Deny and Delay as response - with handing the issue to Environmentalists in "you care so much, you fix it" style - in order to NOT address it (as well as reinforce framing of the issue as driven by extremist fringe politics rather than about climate science and climate policy as about responsibility and accountability), no such plan (which likely would have had nuclear as the headline act) was possible. It is considered intolerable if any climate action or decarbonizing reduces profitability for fossil fuel investors, let alone requires any society wide reduction in spending power or actual sacrifice. Our forebears who faced great dangers and challenges with bravery and willing sacrifice would be ashamed.

@JohnDBarrow - Too broad for one topic, too many topics for one discussion. A lot of discussions of energy happen here, which you can contribute to, but no single discussion can cover it all. Most recently broad focus and narrow focus - The most recent "energy crisis" (as described widely by media, rather than the endless partisan political messaging) was an EU gas supply reliability problem for the supposed element of the energy system deemed most reliable. It sent fossil fuel prices globally into economy damaging territory and gave producers apart from Russian windfall profits, and not for the sake of the health of any economy or any greater good would they reduce those prices. The EU countries mostly redoubled commitment to RE after, no matter the efforts to paint the crisis as a failure of RE and failure to support and expand gas supply. Is that the sort of crisis you want to discus Or about climate and commitments to zero emissions? We would have a huge climate problem - a much huger climate problem - if we use them to depletion. But it is not possible to use them to depletion, just use them to uneconomical - quicker to uneconomical should the externalised costs like health, environment and climate impacts ever be made more explicit through carbon taxes and levies. Quicker too even without those due to energy R&D and entrepreneurship delivering Renewable Energy that is cost competitive, even with fossil fuels enjoying perpetual amnesty on climate accountability. Some uses will persist longer, some will be reduced - and should be given how serious destabilizing the planet's climate is. Some of those resource will still be important for lubricants, chemical feedstocks, apart from fuels. The relative costs of energy and relationship between changes to incomes, taxes, profit levels and inflation is enough to keep battalions of economics occupied. I don't see any new energy crisis that isn't already being given a lot of consideration and debate.

May have been more like a crayon stick in workshops and construction sites than used for writing on parchment or in wax or on papyrus. Thick enough to not bend. Being soft would make it easy to hammer a new point if necessary. If I were using them I'd want a wrap between fingers and lead but they may not have been aware of lead poisoning. Could have though; getting fingers gone shiny metallic from handling it would be obvious and I believe stone floors were polished with blocks of lead so successions of slaves doing it getting similar debilitation could have been noticed, so... use only cheap slaves? I suppose there could have been a lively interest in poisons as well as cures in some quarters.

In cold weather it will be more a case of cold air going in and colder air going out at the air source side of the system - the air doesn't have to be warm or hot in human terms - with the difference in heat content between cold and colder air delivered (in water heaters) to the water in the tank. If you install one inside in a heated space your HPHW will warm water quicker by parasitising the warmth in the air and cooling it, ie you will lose out on the space heating side. Better to put them outside or only in ventilated, unheated inside spaces. With systems suited to those temperatures. We have one (outside) and it does work very well for (is built for) Australian conditions - we rarely get below zero temperatures where we live and it only gets that cold overnight and early morning with daytime temperatures higher. We set ours to run on a timer from about mid-morning to mid-afternoon to take advantage of solar pv on our roof as well as warmer air temperatures; it is a rare day where that draws any power from the solar batteries and rarer still that we draw power from the grid because the batteries as well as PV are too low. Small household using a smaller unit that draws about 500W for 2-3 hrs a day in warm seasons and 4-5 hours in winter. But I'm not entirely convinced it will be better value for money compared to having enough more PV on the roof and running a regular resistance heater - the HPHW is a lot more expensive to buy and a lot depends on how long it lasts. (Still cheaper than "passive" solar hot water systems, the sort it replaced though). New solar installs tend to be signficantly larger than our older system - at less cost - and the panels can be expected to last beyond 30 years, where the HPHW probably do well to last more than 10 years. Upgrading the PV isn't as simple as adding more panels; wiring and inverter upgrades would be involved. Externet, I seem to recall a thread from you about use of stored hot water to supplement home heating (?) . Probably not what you had in mind - this is more about combining hot water and house heating using heat pump hot water that makes significantly higher temperatures and time shifting the heating load within each 24 hr period to take best advantage of when electricity prices are lowest. Also can do summer cooling. Taking advantage of heat pumps being more efficient during daytime is one of the parameters the system works with. I came across it here https://www.volts.wtf/p/heat-pumps-with-thermal-batteries (an interview - a bit of reading to get to the grit) The company's site - https://www.harvest-thermal.com/product#tank This isn't for off-grid although elements of it probably could be. For interseasonal heat storage it seems to me that borehole type ground source heat pumps offer the best option, but need costs to come down, especially the drilling costs.

I'm not impressed by the equivalency arguments. I think it is a false equivalence between things that cause human suffering for which no or only deeply inadequate solutions exist and with fusion to do what a range of technologies already do successfully, just to do it better, maybe, in a future far beyond the time frames we have for doing low emissions energy better. Medical science is not concentrated into a few programs and a few approaches; the advances come from wide ranging research, from fundamental science outwards, lots of which does get abandoned for not panning out within a timeframe and budget.

Technological progress has not been greatly diminished - or diminished at all - by the US not extending the Apollo space program.

Believing all will be lost if fusion programs get defunded sounds like spirited defense of the sunk cost fallacy. More than 70 years so far and still not even close. If any program were closing in on a working reactor then yes, breaking it up will put the overall goal behind, but that is not the case. And I do think fusion can be revisited, that other high energy particle physics and other research programs are closely enough related that developments can be, will be, relevant to prospects of future fusion. A decade retooling for a renewed program based on actual prospects of success - which may very well require a markedly different approach, which might be held back by reluctance to let go of what isn't working - isn't that unreasonable. And I suspect ever more such R&D will be virtual, computer modeled and AI assisted.

Yet the majority of new electricity generation being added globally is now RE by a very large margin. If you want the impression nothing much has changed look to existing generation stocks - and dismiss 29% as a small amount. But for projecting forward look at the relative rates of growth. It isn't primarily driven by climate concerns, though those are there, so much as driven by demand for electricity generation at least cost - a profound underlying change, a tipping point crossed where nothing is the same after. Not that long since almost no-one would've believed that was possible - with a lot of people who still don't, let alone get a sense of the significance of that. EU is above 40% RE electricity (44% last year). Here in Australia, around 35% - where almost nothing apart from RE is being added. And adding more has never been cheaper. Global solar cell production looks set to reach 1TW a year within the next two years - at 20% capacity factor (GWh terms) that much solar is like adding 200 1GW nuclear stations a year. And now there are growing fears Chinese makers are tooling up to flood the world with cheap EV's as well as cheap solar panels.

More than 70 years so far without success and still no emerging pathway to anything expected to work - a very different case to chasing better light bulbs from a starting point of light bulbs that already work but don't last long and trying various alternative materials. Without taxpayer funding. I think if it is so extremely difficult to do at all that doesn't auger well for doing it reliably at low cost; even if it can be made to work it may not be commercially viable. I don't agree that fusion research should be abandoned but I can understand how people could hold the view that it should and I admit to some ambivalence, given the high costs and ongoing lack of success. I wouldn't count as indicative of a general lack of support for science and R&D to suggest it may be better to divert that funding and support to improving fission is a reasonable position to take - modular reactors (a technology that has been demonstrated to work) that can take advantage of economies of scale through mass manufacture are decades overdue. Other high energy research would continue to have direct and indirect relevance - and deliver spin offs. And where those developments really can be turned to making fusion work it can be revisited with improved knowledge.

Until the clean energy problem is solved by other means? Well yes, looks like we have no choice but do that anyway because fusion still doesn't work, so absolutely we should not stint on other clean energy related research even, arguably, at the expense of fusion programs. But I think that in the bigger scheme of things what we spend on it, including energy consumed by it isn't that big. Still I sort of agree that it shouldn't be sacrosanct, when by most standards it is gets very well funded despite still no reasonable expectation of working reactors any time soon. Anything else but the fusion dream and we'd have dumped the whole thing as a failure long ago. Interesting use of the word "wait". I think we will be doing clean energy successfully before we get working fusion - more confident of the former than latter. (still short of high confidence though but not for technology limitations) We can never know for sure that it won't work - so can argue funding should never cease, ever. But falling for the sunk cost fallacy is expensive. There are spin offs from major R&D like that of course, but other kinds of R&D get them too and the funding pie is finite; it is reasonable to ask where we draw the line. It is even reasonable to put the case that fusion still has no reasonable pathway to deliver abundant low cost energy and that funding fusion gets on that basis should be diverted to more achievable objectives. But as I said earlier I think we can afford a serious fusion development program or two as well as fund other areas of research; spending more elsewhere rather than cutting fusion research back.

I haven't looked deeply into this but first impressions... too small sample sizes for one. Mostly I suspect there was a shift upward in population where agriculture and civilisation had taken hold raising the proportion of total human population with lower brain size (as response and possibly adaptation to changed diet and even out of some pre-existing regional genetic variations) whilst everywhere else brains remained much the same as before. Any suggestion the whole human population changed like that, simultaneously around 3,000 years ago lacks a global cause - which would not result in the same genetic outcomes; all turning out the same isn't how evolution works without selection or gene flow. Gene flow within that time to present - Middle East to Europe and Asia, Europe to Americas, Oceania - ought to be largely traceable through DNA, but I don't know that anyone has done those studies.

There are Lithium batteries all through our home now - phones, shavers, remote speakers, torches (lanterns), leaf blowers, push mower, ride-on mower, brushcutter, drills, grinders... oh, and solar batteries that are much more than all those added together, and I'm sure I've missed a few.* Not an EV yet but only until costs come down and/or the used EV market grows. Some are Lithium Iron Phosphate (solar batteries, ride-on mower) that don't catch fire - although every electrical appliance can potentially catch fire from electrical faults, which can go on to start battery fires. Seems to me keeping the quality high - having safety standards - is more important than any "free" market access to cheap low quality batteries and chargers. Or to EV's with batteries and chargers that don't meet minimum standards. Those standards are likely to keep getting reviewed and updated in light of real world incidents as well as testing regimes, as they should. Fears that China will flood the world with cheap EV's (can't make this stuff up) are seeing efforts to save ICE manufacturers (who got what they wanted and in Aesop's race style have rested on their ICE achievements) with big tariffs and import bans. But any imports into markets like US, Europe or here in Australia DO have to meet stringent safety standards - and Chinese manufacturers appear as capable as anyone else of meeting and beating them. *(Add on edit - missed the laptop I've been typing on; talk about missing what is right in front of me. 2 in use plus another older one, rarely used)

Not sure myself whether I was completely serious either. A question of to what extent people want to change themselves versus want others to change and treat them differently. Social anxieties have limited my potential but I still count myself fortunate and have led a good life; I can see how improving my social skills could have benefited me but better social skills of everyone else - a community wide improvement with others doing the work - is quite appealing. Easier.