Climate
A Serious Solution to Carbon Emissions
As I’ve made clear before, I remain skeptical that carbon emissions pose a significant marginal threat of climate change. The likely climate sensitivity to CO2 is substantially less than the natural variability over human timescales. Seeing as how temperature trends over geologic time scales are currently downward, I don’t think it’s worth wasting much effort on CO2 reductions.
However, let’s assume for a moment that I’m wrong. What should we do? I don’t think we can actually decrease our energy usage very much and support our civilization. So we have to find non-petroleum energy sources. Biofuel technology doesn’t look very good at the moment. Scaling will require major land use changes that I contend are probably a net negative environmental impact. The cost-benefit for solar does look better, especially in certain geographic areas. But it seems to me the only massively scalable solution at our current level of technology is nuclear fission.…
Micro -> Macro -> Micro, etc.
Kevin has a few threads regarding the effect that micro behaviors have when aggregated to macro behaviors:
- Society According to Kevin
- I May Have Been Wrong About Macroeconomics
- But I Was Probably Right About Climate Models
It occurred to me as I was reading this Huffington Post article that there is a reverse-emergent dynamic that occurs when countries (often through their leaders) send signals to other countries through word and action.…
Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"
This is a response to Kevin’s post responding to my post.
…Rafe makes an analogy to cells within a multicellular organism. How does this support the assertion that there will only be one superorganism and that we will need to subjugate our needs to its own? Obviously, there are many multicellular organisms. Certainly, there are many single-celled organisms that exist outside of multicelluar control today. So where is the evidence that there will be only one and that people won’t be able to opt out in a meaningful sense?
How Much Water Does it Take to…?
An eye-opening graphic from Wired’s cover this month on “Peak Water“:…