exchemist

As you wish, Bwana.

I think the answers have already been given earlier in this thread. I'm not going to watch another crap YouTube video just to come to the same conclusion. These videos seem to come from the Far East: "She make free energy water pump..." etc. Makes a change from Western crap videos about free energy from magnets, but crap nonetheless.

Yes, we can hope - hope - he gets a short-term bounce in support that fades by November. The Trumpies are of course making hay with it, insinuating Biden was behind it, claiming Trump was saved from otherwise certain death by Almighdy Gaaad, etc, etc. But there is hope, I suppose, that such swivel-eyed lunacy is mainly preaching to the converted and won't sway the swing voters much. Fascinating, in a hideous way, to see how Trump is suggesting it is the will of God (!) that he, a known sex pest and crook, should be elected. Elmer Gantry on steroids.

Reagan, in 1981, got quite a poll bounce after the assassination attempt, I understand, though admittedly it subsequently faded. But whether it has worked before is not the sole criterion for assessing its likely effect this time. So far as I am aware the United States has never before been in the grip of a presidential personality cult like Trump. A personality cult works on emotion and the inculcation of a tribal sense of loyalty. One does not have to be a genius to see how those can be turned to advantage by an incident like this.

Let's hope. But half the country will probably think it just shows the Democrats too descending into conspiracy land, documentary evidence notwithstanding. For me as an outside observer, one of the most depressing features of the current US political scene is the degree to which Trump and the far right media have succeeded in making many people doubt the reliability of "mainstream" (i.e. professional) news sources, the idea presumably being that they should turn instead to The Leader and put their trust in him. I confess I am deeply depressed by what is unfolding. Trump has already undermined faith in the independence of the judiciary, he has been undermining faith in the news media, he has undermined faith in the democratic election process, he makes coded calls for violence, he relentlessly exploits and increases division in the country......and he faces, as a political opponent, an old man who seems to be losing his faculties (cf. Hindenburg). We saw all these elements in Europe last century. History never repeats itself exactly, but I am fearful. There is a risk people think this is just being alarmist, but that's what people thought in Germany in the 1930s too.

Thatcher warned the country the medicine to sort out the economy would be tough. Her political nickname was TINA: there is no alternative. Her last finance minister (Major ) even used the phrase "if it's not hurting it's not working.

He'll be able to pose as courageous and virile (compared to his opponent) , win sympathy, channelling JFK, and persuade another slice of the electorate that there are dark forces trying to stop him by fair means or foul.

Looks to me as if a win for Trump in November is now a racing certainty and our American friends will need to get a ready for a dose of: while we in Europe need to boost our defences urgently and prepare for the the world to have to deal with three major hostile authoritarian blocs. Once Trump is in, they'll never get him out until he dies and, once the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 is in train, it will take decades after Trump's eventual departure to get a properly functioning democracy back again.

That (in red) is not true. The politics of Margaret Thatcher, for example, did not involve such deception.

Yes I think this is the point: people are capable of holding two conflicting ideas at the same time, to suit their wishes, rather than acknowledging the connection that shows there has to be a trade-off between the two. Everyone wants low taxes and everyone wants good public services. If pollsters ask the right question, the answers show people do understand the connection, so it's not a matter of not getting it, but it's more a conflict in the mind between reason and a desire, or hope, if you like, that they can have both. When you have populist politics that falsely encourage that irrational hope, it can gain support, in the short term, since the consequence of the fraudulent promise take time to feed through. It seems to be only after such politics has ben tried in government, and seen to fail, that the public acquires the appetite for the rationality and the hard choices it requires, cf. Margaret Thatcher, Keir Starmer.

Yes, quite right, you are both insane and silly.

Exactly. Buffering is the term. There are processes that react to change by mitigating it, but which do not restore the system to quite the same state.

This is the point I find contentious about the Gaia hypothesis. There are so many inorganic processes which, so far as I can see, do not have any regulatory feedback mechanism, that I question the self-regulation hypothesis. I suspect it is something of a romantic myth. It seems to me we have an equilibrium point, set by the various levels of substances and the rates of the processes, but that any change to those will in general not result in a correction back to the same equilibrium level as before. The rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is a case in point. With a chemical equilibrium, the concentrations of reactants and products are linked, so that if you change one of them, or change the temperature, a new, different set of equilibrium concentrations of all of them will result. There is nothing that restores the levels to be the same as before the change was made. Whereas with biological homeostasis, there are processes that actively restore the levels to what they were before, in response to a perturbation.

OK I see. No, my comments were to express scepticism that the carbon cycle, especially the CO2 content of the air, was subject to homeostatic control just because plants grow faster with higher CO2 content etc. There are so many other elements: absorption of CO2 by the oceans, emission by volcanoes, the release of CO2 from plants back into the atmosphere when plants die, apart, that is, from those that get immured by geological processes, and so on and so forth. I don't believe it is self-correcting - and indeed the climate change experience strongly indicates it is not.

Well I admit I do write from the European perspective. Are your complaints about the USA specifically? If so I have to say I do not think you can simply blame financial interests. After all, there is good money to be made by investing in new infrastructure or creating markets for new types of consumer goods such as electric vehicles or heat pumps. In the US, though, you have an entire political party, commanding the allegiance of half the country, dedicated to belittling and ignoring climate change. It seems to me the problem is political populism that sees advantage in telling people a comforting story that they don't need to worry and it's all a conspiracy to control their lives by evil "socialists" etc. In Europe such views are fringe, not mainstream. I am speculating but I wonder if it is not all to do with the car-dependence of the American way of life. That car-orientation is something that struck me when I moved to Houston for a couple of years. Presidents can almost be hounded from office, it seems, because gasoline prices are too high.

I was talking about the carbon cycle specifically, as that seemed the planetary equilibrium most closely connected to the OP question. You seem to be addressing a different point - unless I have misunderstood.

I don't think hysteria gets us anywhere, certainly. Throwing one's hands up and saying everything is wrong is basically saying, like the Irishman: "If I were you I wouldn't start from here." Not helpful. One has to acknowledge that getting people to change their habits is a long process. It often requires either tangible effects, experienced by the man in the street, or else great persuasive power on the part of politicians and other leaders in society. Actually I think the tangible effects are starting to hit home. House insurance premiums in many places are rocketing up, for one thing, as the risk of fire, flood and hurricane increases. When people feel it in their wallets, it gets their attention. Investing in changes to the grid is obviously required, but will be some places be unpopular (more pylons across the countryside) and is obviously costly. The money will have to come from somewhere: either taxation or some kind of levy on energy use. But we are making progress, even if it is too slow, still. In Europe, most people get it now, at least in principle. However there is still some cognitive dissonance between understanding the issue and being willing to pay the price to deal with it. This is human nature. It requires political skills to address it.

No. What I said is while the carbon cycle is in near-equilibrium, that is not really "homeostasis", because that term applies specifically to biological systems with regulatory feedback. In this case I am not sure there is any regulatory feedback. We just have an equilibrium, reached at a particular level. If this were altered by increasing or reducing sources or sinks, the equilibrium would settle at a different point. I do not think there is any process to ensure the current level would be maintained.

Yes. but these are not the factors that lead to near-equilibrium in the carbon cycle, as there are so many other sources and sinks of carbon at work.

I have not heard of this guy. What are his qualifications and areas of expertise?

They are, overall (though not at all in the steps by which they are carried out), one reaction scheme: a redox reaction, which can be driven "uphill" (reduction) by the energy in sunlight and "downhill" (oxidation) by thermodynamic "gravity", as it were. Just about any chemical reaction can, in principle and rather trivially, be driven in either direction, so the mere fact of this is not in itself evidence of balance. My understanding is that homeostasis refers to a stable biological state that resists being changed, as a result of some regulatory feedback. There is no such regulatory feedback implied by the reversibility of this reaction. However if you were to expand the scope of the question to look at the Earth's carbon cycle, there is a kind of balance, with carbon sources and sinks more or less in equilibrium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle I'm not sure it is correct to call that homeostasis though, as many of the components involved are not biological.

The grid certainly needs to change a lot as we move from central to more distributed modes of generation. That will require a lot of investment. It seems to me a levy on fossil fuel consumption is the most rational way to fund this.

Yes, it will inevitably be a combination of technologies, just as has always been the case in fact. Regarding population, the world's population is forecast to reach a plateau in the middle of this century. Basically the birthrate goes down as societies educate and empower women, because then they start to exert more control over whether and when to have babies. But energy consumption is more about GDP than the pure number of people - see next para. Regarding efficiency of energy utilisation, there are some charts that show energy intensity, i.e. energy used per unit GDP output has more or les halved in the last 50 years, so we are getting better at our use of energy in driving economic growth, but the rate of GDP growth greatly outstrips that, so at the moment the trend in energy use is still upward, while the impact of low carbon energy use is still only showing a modest effect. There are some good charts here if you are interested in this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity

Well yes, all these are part of the mix. One you don’t mention is power from the tides. This, in places like the UK with a large tidal range, has real potential. This long list goes to show that there are many technologies in play, simultaneously. There is no special point in singling out any one of them, as the best choice depends on the location. For transport applications requiring a lot of power e.g ships, heavy duty trucks, or high power/weight ratio e .g aviation, an intermediate fuel, manufactured using green electricity, may be required. This could be hydrogen, or a closely related fuel such as ammonia, which is being seriously looked at for ships. In the meantime for ships, natural gas is starting to be used, as this emits a lot less CO2 per kWh than oil. I saw one of the new Brittany Ferries gas powered car ferries, last time I was in Portsmouth: She's a big ship: 41,000grt, capacity for 550 cars and sails between Portsmouth and Santander in Spain. So there is serious money going into these technologies. I stress again that all this is already happening, at a commercial scale, so we are way beyond just talking about the options. Except perhaps for hydrogen, which still suffers from the inefficiency of today’s electrolytic cells. That’s a problem. Time will tell which ones will get the biggest take-up, based on the economics. Again, this will depend on the location.

Yes I think we all got that it was sarcastic. What was stupid was that your sarcasm was seemingly intended to ridicule the practicality of non-fossil fuel energy sources. Casting doubt on the viability of these has been one of your themes ever since you showed up here. A number of us have tried to set you straight about that, but it seems to be an uphill struggle. On your battery question, yes battery storage is already done commercially and I have already commented on further battery developments. Other forms of storage of intermittent energy production include hydroelectric (pumped) storage and thermal storage - a sort of battery for storing heat, using the latent heat released when a substance changes phase. Here is one example I found at random on the internet:https://sunamp.com/en-gb/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/02/Thermino-Brochure-Digital-Artwork_Low_Res_aad-uk-th-br-v1.pdf On your question about how we should ideally move forward, I agree with others here that a "master plan" in detail may not be a sensible approach, partly due to the vicissitudes of politics and partly because the pace and direction of invention and commercialisation, in a free-market economy, is such that any plan would be quite likely to be overtaken by developments that were not foreseen when it was devised. However the elements that a government should pursue, as vigorously as public opinion will permit, must obviously include both incentives and support for more efficient use of energy (public transport, insulation, fuel economy, waste heat re-use) and incentives and support for moving away from fossil fuel based energy. The forms those incentives take, or should take, in practice vary from country to country. I'll give you one example. One absurdity in the UK is that electricity bills include a surcharge to help fund the development of the network to accommodate the shift to renewables. However gas bills do not, as gas uses a legacy network that is not being developed. It should be the other way round, so that legacy fossil fuel use funds the shift to renewables. That would make gas more expensive and electricity cheaper which would also be an incentive to shift over. But politically this is dynamite, as most people heat their houses with gas and for poor people, increasing their gas bills too much could make them unable to afford to heat them in winter, given that these people are the least able to invest in a new, electricity based, heating system. So this kind of thing has to be handled, politically, with kid gloves, even though the science is obvious.