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michael sweet at 08:24 AM on 9 January 2025Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
Philippe Chantreau:
In the previous discussion I pointed out that France shuts down nuclear reactors on weekends because their power is not needed. David-acct challenged this fact and demanded proof, although he does not support most of his claims. Wikipedia says:
"France's nuclear reactors comprise 90 per cent of EDFs capacity and so they are used in load-following mode and some reactors close at weekends because there is no market for the electricity" source
I recall you posted to that discussion but since it was not on the nuclear thread it is hard to find.
From my standpoint, it is common knowledge that France nuclear reactors shut down on weekends.. People who don't know that need to read more background information. The Wikipedia article says France over built their reactors and are losing money since they are so expensive to run.
From where I stand it does not matter why France shuts down its reactors. If it is windy the reactors are not economic to run. Why would you think that in a future primarily renewable system that reactors would be economic when in France they are already uneconomic? Wind, solar and batteries are much cheaper than any system containing nuclear.
Now I want David-acct to finish our discussion of France reactors on the weekends
Moderator Response:[BL] Given that the comments in this thread jump 7 months in time, and it is not obvious what the "previous discussion" refers to, it is worth noting that there was a back-and-forth going on this thread, where it was becoming somewhat off-topic. The participants moved over here, but a reader finding this later may want to check that other thread for additional context.
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:52 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
nigelj @16,
In addition to the concerns you mentioned that could be motivating Meta’s leadership to change how helpful its platforms are at limiting harm done, the NPR Item I linked in my comment @15 includes the following edited string of quotes:
Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video Zuckerberg said the company's content moderation approach resulted too often in "censorship".
"After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth," Zuckerberg said. "But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S."
Meta set up one of the most extensive partnerships with fact checkers after the 2016 presidential election, in which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of falsehoods and misleading information.
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In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.
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The president-elect and other Republicans have long accused Silicon Valley of harboring anti-conservative bias that has muzzled their speech online. Trump has accused Zuckerberg personally of election interference and threatened him with life in prison.
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Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and longtime Meta observer, said it is distressing seeing business leaders "showing performative fealty" to the incoming administration.
"Meta clearly perceives a great deal of political risk of being targeted," Nyhan said in an interview. "And the way Zuckerberg presented the announcements, and the timing, was obviously intended to play to a Republican audience."
Some observers say Meta may be hoping for a lighter touch from regulators in the Trump administration.
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A sweeping antitrust case against Meta brought by the FTC and attorneys general from 48 states and territories during Trump's first term is set to go to trial in April. In a recent court filing, government lawyers wrote Mark Zuckerberg is expected to be among the first witnesses called to the stand.
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Research has shown that Republicans circulated more unfounded claims. One study also found that far right content was more engaging on Facebook, and that far-right sources known for spreading misinformation significantly outperformed non-misinformation sources. Data to definitively prove bias on a platform level is not available to researchers.
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The company's U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. The move should "help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams," Zuckerberg said.
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Fact checkers who have worked with Meta for years pushed back against Zuckerberg's accusation of bias.
"It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan," said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook's third party fact checker's program, which he left in 2020.
"Meta, up until this morning, has always appreciated the independence of fact checkers," Adair said. -
nigelj at 06:21 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
Regarding Zuckerberg being accused of censorship, and his decision to cancel facebooks fact checking programme. His decision doesnt make any sense. Facebooks doesnt censor content except content that infringes the law, such as inciting violence, or sharing information related to child sexual abuse and virtually nobody is complaining about that. Facebook does moderate hate speech but that is unrelated to the issue of fact checking as such and doesnt appear to be the issue.The "fact checking" consists of attaching warnings and ratings to information and reducing the extent of its spread, by changing how its algorithms work to distribute information. This is not censorship because nothing is prohibited or deleted. Refer:
https://www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/third-party-fact-checking-how-it-works
Some sources claim Zuckerbergs decision not to do fact checking is because he is scared that Trump will attack his company in some way andt costs.
Getting facebook users to fact check articles and rate them in some way could be chaos. They will probably end up with a list of different views and ratings all contradicing each other all written by amateurs and very hard for anyone to read them all or make sense of it.
Zuckerberg is letting himself get pushed around, and it wont stop until his platform removes all ratings even those posted by users, and and removes all criticism of Republicans or their comments, because republicans mistakingly believe criticism is the same as censoring their views.
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One Planet Only Forever at 04:11 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
michael sweet @10,
In addition to making-up misleading claims based on misunderstandings of raw data, David-acct has a history of claiming that efforts to help others learn about harmful misleading claims is a form of ‘censorship’ (Bob Loblaw @3 points this out). They try to redefine ‘censorship’ to include efforts to increase awareness and improve understanding. They also try to claim that efforts to increase awareness and improve understanding are also ‘misleading’ (David-acct @2 ends their misleading attack on “...the Wallace et al study 2022...” by incorrectly claiming that “It simply is another example of misinformation.”).
If misleading claim makers like David-acct fail to succeed in claiming that exposing their misleading promotion of misunderstanding is ‘censorship’ or ‘misinformation’, then they are likely to shift to making-up claims that freedom of speech includes ‘the freedom from having the effectiveness of misleading made-up claims reduced by people learning from logical and evidence-based presentations of information and corrections'.
Tragically, several popular communication platforms are shying away from responsibly justifiably exposing and correcting misleading claims (NPR item “Meta says it will end fact checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump” by Huo Jingnan, Shannon Bond, Bobby Allyn)
The likes of Meta and X leadership appear to mistakenly believe that ‘communities driven by emotion-triggering (viral) popularity that can be significantly overwhelmed by harmfully misleading made-up claims’ will be effectively corrected, including having harm done by misleading claims being effectively undone and neutralized, by that same ‘community driven by emotion-triggering (viral) popularity that can be significantly overwhelmed by harmfully misleading made-up claims’. Logically, the evidence indicates that it is more likely that logical evidence-based (boring and long-winded) understandings will be popularly misunderstood to be misleading or deserve to be dismissed.
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Philippe Chantreau at 02:54 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
The Eco2mix tool allows to look at up to 2 weeks of power generation by source. I do not see a consistent pattern of what Michael described on that particular week-end (not sure when that week-end was). Looking at a 2 week period in December 2024, it is apparent that the troughs tend to happen between 2 and 4 am and the spikes tend to be in the middle of the day between 1100 and 1400. Sometimes a secondary bump is seen in the 20 to 2200 period. in general, deep troughs in nuclear generation seem to correspond to night time when the wind share is high.
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Philippe Chantreau at 02:41 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
I am not sure which week-ends are being considered here and I know even less about what the reasons could be for modulating the power generation mix in the way it was. When looking at multi days and weeks through the Eco2mixx tool, it seems the variation in wind availability has a lot to do with how the mix changes. Solar is cyclical in nature, with variations. Wind varies sopmewhat less predictably. Nuclear takes time to ramp up, less time to bring down. I believe that gas can be ramped up and down quicker than nuclear.
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michael sweet at 01:29 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
My links are not working today. This is the link
https://skepticalscience.com//news.php?n=5726#141515
Moderator Response:[BL} Link linkified...
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michael sweet at 01:27 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
Somehow my link was incorrect.
Here is the original post to David-acct
Moderator Response:[BL} Link corrected (from following comment)
Not sure what is happening to your links. Do they look correct when you enter then into the pop-up box during link creation? (Chain link icon on "Insert" tab).
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michael sweet at 01:23 AM on 9 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
David-acct:
You have never responded to my analysis of raw data you provided that you claimed showed nuclear reactors in France did not shut down on the weekends. I asked these questions:
"Several question about this raw data occured to me.
1) You state clearly that the data shows no nuclear power stations were shut down. Please explain why the power generated on the weekend is so much less than the power generated on Thursday. How does this show that no power stations were shut down over the weekend? It appears to me that about 6 of 31 power stations (20%) were turned off.
2) On both days they are generating more power at night when power is generated at a loss than they are generating during the day when the price of electricity is much higher. Can you explain why the "always on" nuclear plants generate less power during the most expensive part of the day than they do when electricity is cheapest?
This example proves beyond doubt that examining cherry picked factoids without any analysis is a complete waste of time. Please do not cite raw data any more. You need to cite analysis of data that filter out gross errors"
In a scientific discussion you do not get to abandon the discussion when it is proven that your claims were simply uninformed BS. Please respond with your answers to my questions about your raw data.
I note that in the current discussion here you have again been shown to make false claims about " raw data". These examples prove that citing raw data is a complete waste of everyones time.
It appears to me that David-acct cites raw data hoping that no one will check his false claims since it is time consuming to analyze the data. Bob Loblaw had to read the citation and then read the supplementary data to find out that David-acct had made false claims. I also wonder if he is reposting misinformation from other sites.
David-acct often cites misinformation in his posts here at Skeptical Science.
Moderator Response:[BL] Link corrected here, too.
Yes, David-acct's habit of abandoning discussion when lengthy counter-arguments are presented is not indicative of a desire for open discussion.
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Evan at 23:03 PM on 8 January 2025Climate news to watch in 2025
Nigel, to be clear, I am in now way countering the idea that the decrease in aerosols is the primary driver of the current warming spike. But if the decrease in aerosols is the driver of the current spike in temperatures, it should provide a singular, short-term bump in the temperature record, whose duration is linked to the duration over which aerosol concentrtations decrease. However, an increasing acceleration of atmospheric CO2 concentration could singlea long-term increase in the rate of warming.
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Eclectic at 18:13 PM on 8 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
Fascinating , RedCloud/CallItAsItIs/et alia @877 :-
You certainly have concepts of concepts of a plan of explanation.
"Therefore, at altitudes above the extinction point [ = 10 meters high ] , the radiation reaching the detectors is only escaped IR that didn't cause one iota of atmosheric warming, and never will." [Unquote]
And so . . . "Escaped IR" cannot warm the atmosphere because it "escapes" from the sub-10 meter layer . . . and is not absorbed by local CO2 because it is above the 10-meter extinction altitude, where extinction means the IR does not exist. Makes perfect sense!
And then at Top of Atmosphere and at the stratosphere also, everything changes, and the high-altitude CO2 molecules regain the radiant abilities they did not have at lower altitudes in the troposphere. Also makes perfect sense!
Perhaps to explain this, we must hypothesize that each CO2 molecule (and H2O molecule) must possess a sub-atomic altimeter to inform the molecule whether (or not) it is permitted to radiate an IR photon. Yes, this also makes perfect sense! #At last, the Curtain is drawn back, and the scales fall from the eyes of physicists ~ who can now perceive a deeper layer of the Sub-Quantum Reality of Space-Time.
.... All thanks to the New Galileo.
[Moderator, please feel free to delete my garbled nonsense.]
Moderator Response:User RedCloud has joined the long list of banned sock puppets that have been polluting this thread with garbage for years.
Please stop responding to him, and give the moderators the time to deal with it.
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nigelj at 17:30 PM on 8 January 2025Climate news to watch in 2025
Evan, nice observations and you could be right that the acceleration of warming is a result of acceleration of acceleration of co2 concentration. The decrease in aerosols might also be a factor.
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Bob Loblaw at 08:09 AM on 8 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
One further bit of "due diligence" (for now).
David-acct said in comment 2 (emphasis added),
"Per capita death rates for Democrats exceeded per capita death rates for republics [Republicans?] in all categories in both states except for the 85+ age group in Ohio and Texas."
He cited eTable 1 in Wallace et al (2023).
- The three column titles in eTable 1 are Florida, Ohio, and Total.
- For Florida, ages 25-64, the death counts per capita (Panel B, Mortality data, divided by panel A, Voter age distribution) are:
- Democratic 0.009532 (0.9532%)
- Republican 0.009704 (0.9704%)
I am not a geographer (oh, wait, actually I am...), but I don't think that Florida and Texas are the same state. Mark one for attention to detail.
...and it looks like the per capita death rate for Republicans aged 25-64 is a smidge higher than for Democrats. Of course, if you round it off to one significant figure 0.009532 and 0.009704 both round to 0.01 (1%). David-acct (or the secondary sources he is using) may want to try argue that the difference is not significant, but it is misinformation to claim that the Democrats number exceeded the Republicans number for that age category in Florida.
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Eclectic at 07:43 AM on 8 January 2025Debunking 97% Climate Consensus Denial
Neutral 1966 @36 :-
In addition, your question is far too vague.
Also, who are the "you" in "you blacklist academics" ?
And who are these academics? ~ be specific, please. Were you being a Conspiracy Theorist who hand-waves at vast crowds of scientists cowering in the shadows, afraid to speak out because fearing ridicule or near-crucifixion?
My own impression ~ over many years ~ is that there's merely a handful or two of "climate-contrarian" scientists. And some of them have very non-scientific reasons for gainsaying the scientific consensus. Examples : Professor Lindzen who believes that Jehovah will ensure that Earth climate must remain near optimum. And Dr Spencer has rather similar Fundamentalist ideas (but surely you yourself acknowledge that there was a climate and an Earth before 6,000 years ago? ).
In addition, there are a few very elderly scientists (eminent in their own fields, but usually far from expert in the climate field) who speak out against the consensus. But they fail to provide evidence to back up their opinions. They seem to be motivated by an expansive lime-light-seeking ego plus somewhat extremist political views. A toxic combination, particularly when combined with that subtle intellectual deterioration which happens so often in the elderly [ present company excepted, of course! ].
Neutral 1966 , you really need to explain yourself ~ and not get confused between [A] the climate science, which is straightforward (but opposed by crackpots, who can't provide evidence) . . . and [B] the controversial and difficult politics of how best to tackle the ongoing climate-change problem.
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Bob Loblaw at 07:30 AM on 8 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
OPOF and nigelj:
Yes, the example provided by David-acct is an odd one. In comment 4, he says "Before you critisize my analysis, point to the specific math error I made.".
Yet, he has not actually provided any analysis or math - he has simply said that the data shows what he says it shows. His purely descriptive analysis is (from comment 2, but said much the same way in comment 4):
Per capita death rates for Democrats exceeded per capita death rates for republics in all categories in both states except for the 85+ age group in Ohio and Texas.
eTable 1 actually has several sections in it.
- Part A is "Voter registration data", and gives counts of Republican, Democratic, Other, and Total voters. It then gives a breakdown of Democratic and Republican voters by age distribution (four classes, starting at age 25).
- Part B is "Linked mortality data". It provides counts of voter deaths by age, broken down by Democratic/Republican categories and by the four age groups. It also provides mean age at death for each of Democratic and Republican voters, plus the mean age for the two categories combined.
Nowhere in eTable 1 is there any mention at all of "per capita death rates".
- In other words, in order to get "per capita" numbers out of eTable 1, you have to do some analysis. "Per capita" is not "raw data" from eTable 1.
I am beginning to wonder if David-acct has actually read the paper and looked at the table. His posting here resembles a common contrarian habit of reading an analysis somewhere else, accepting it because it tells the story they like, and not bothering to read the actual paper to see if it says what the contrarians' secondary source has claimed.
The "look at the raw data" ploy is often seen as part of the contrarian "they fudged the results" myth.
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One Planet Only Forever at 06:08 AM on 8 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
David_acct,
Thank you for (perhaps unwittingly) providing an example of an attempt “...to successfully produce misunderstandings through the presentation of misinformation...” that I referred to in my comment @1.
The real thank you goes to Bob Loblaw for diligently putting the effort in to justifiably criticize/expose the misunderstanding/misinformation you presented in the attempt to claim that there is 'an equivalent amount or degreee of misinformation presentation on both sides (of every issue)'.
I would supplement Bob’s detailed evaluations by simply stating that:
It is clearly misleading to claim that ‘an accurate interpretation of the per-capita death rates’ supports the conclusion that ‘the reported conclusions based on the evaluation of rates of excess deaths is incorrect and misleading’.
There is a significant amount of evidence clearly indicating that 'people who have developed interests opposed to, or resistant to, learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others' are more likely to try “...to successfully produce misunderstandings through the presentation of misinformation...".
Building on nigelj’s input @6 that “...climate denialists always look at the raw data and think they have found some sort of smoking gun that discredits what scientists are saying.”, other examples of this type of ‘misleading/misinformation claim making-up’ based on selective ‘accurate interpretations of information’ include:
- claiming that the slower rate of global warming after 1998 ‘proved that increasing CO2 had ceased to significantly increase the global average surface temperature’.
- claiming that a photon in the IR absorption band of CO2 being very unlikely to get more than 10 m above the surface before being absorbed ‘proves that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will not increase the surface temperature’.
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Neutral 1966 at 05:40 AM on 8 January 2025Debunking 97% Climate Consensus Denial
I need to ask one simple question:
Given that you blacklist academics who don't agree entirely with IPCC conclusions on climate change, how can you expect any scientist, who values his or her career and livelihood to do anything but agree with the consensus?
Moderator Response:[BL] Given that you:
- Don't specify who "you" is supposed to be.
- Don't provide any evidence of "blacklisting".
- Seem to be completely unaware of the many people that make very lucrative livings by spreading demonstrably bad and incorrect "science" on the subject of climate
...why should we pay any attention to what you say?
FYI, the myth that "climate scientists are in it for the money" is more properly debated on this thread:
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-in-it-for-the-money.htm
Don't forget to read the post before you start commenting. And don't forget to read the Comments Policy, too.
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nigelj at 04:36 AM on 8 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
I looked at etable 1 yesterday, and I noticed it wasn't broken up into the relevant time periods and I wasnt sure what exactly it was measuring, covid deaths or everything, so you have to be cautious jumping to conclusions about that table and its raw data. But I got a bit lost trying to anaylse the next table, so I gave up. Well done Bob for analysing the thing in such detail.
The climate denialists always look at the raw data and think they have found some sort of smoking gun that discredits what scientists are saying. But raw data mostly cant be taken at face value and has to be analysed.
And its very unlikely that the people doing the covid study would have made such a massive and basic maths mistake with numbers of democrat deaths v republicans, and this also not picked up in peer review. This tells me the raw data probably cant be taken at face value.
Really if David-acct disagrees with the findings of the covid study, he has to show a flaw in the analysis of the raw data. Such a thing requires a lot of expertise in statistics he might not have, and neither do I. At some point you have to trust the experts and the process.
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Bob Loblaw at 01:13 AM on 8 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
Oh, my. More assertions from David-acct.
First of all, let's look at "due diligence".
- You started your diatribe in comment 2 saying "calls to stop misinformation are essentially calls for censorship". The paper listed in the OP, quoted by OPOF does not call "to stop misinformation" - it calls for not ignoring it and acting as if it has no effect. It's even in the title of the paper: "Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored". Reading the paper, I see nothing that represents a call to "stop misinformation".
- You did not do due diligence to see if the paper actually called for stopping misinformation.
- You made the same mistake a month ago, in the thread I linked to in comment 3 - misrepresenting a call to counter misinformation as a call to suppress it.
- I'll respond with the same statement I made back then: Cries of "censorship!" are in reality attempts to silence counter-arguments. Typically, those that scream about censorship are the ones that want to suppress open discussion.
- You have now provided a link that can be used to find eTable 1, mentioned in your comment 2.
- First of all, that paper is not the same paper that was referenced in the Ecker paper listed in the OP.
- The paper you referenced is more appropriately referred to as Wallace et al (2023). It is published in a journal titled JAMA Intern Med.
- The paper listed in Ecker is from 2022, and it is an internal working paper for the organization that the authors (presumably) work at: the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- The published version is clearly a later version of the same analysis, but it is not the same paper.
- You have not done due diligence to make sure that the paper you referred to is the same paper that the Ecker group accessed.
- eTable1 is found in the Supplemental Content tab, but you need to download a PDF to get to it.
- eTable 1 is "death counts". It is not "excess deaths", which you referred to in your comment 2. Although you stated that eTable 1 provides "death rates", you then asked "How they could have possibly concluded republican excess death rates were higher than democrat excess deaths when the raw data shows otherwise."
- In order to assess excess death rates, you need to analyze the raw data.
- In order to understand how the authors came to their conclusions, you need to look at how they determined excess deaths.
- They provide some of this in eTable 2.
- They also list some of their results in the table provided in the 2023 paper, under the Figures/Tables tab. There, you see the breakdown of Excess Deaths in Florida and Ohio, broken down into the three time periods they used to assess the raw data: early covid, before open vaccine eligibility, and after open vaccine eligibility.
- In comment 4, you now talk about "per capita death rates". You are not looking at "excess death rates", which is a standard method of assessment when trying to isolate one factor from many.
- I stand by what I said in comment 3: It is quite possible that your interpretation of the "raw data" is using a biased pooling of the data that hides the relationship you don't want to see.
- By looking only at raw death rates, regardless of cause, you fail to isolate the cause that creates excess deaths above the normal background rate.
The "raw data" in eTable 1 does not show what you think it shows. It shows that more Democrats died in the 25-84 age classes from all causes. It does not provide a breakdown by time period (essential for evaluating the effects of different vaccine availability), and does not even mention the time period that the data covers (whereas other data in the paper tells us that they have broken the data down into different time periods).
You close with "You will be surprised how often I am correct when you perform a basic level of due diligence. "
- You have criticized Ecker et al for something they did not say ("calls to stop misinformation". )
- You have got the wrong version of Wallace et al when you referenced "raw data".
- You picked a "raw data" table that does not assess excess death rates.
Frankly, the level of "due diligence" that you have illustrated in your work is pretty poor. In comment 3, I closed by asking questions whether you were spreading misinformation. Now that I have further details on your level of "due diligence" and can see the data you are claiming supports your position, I can see that what you have said here does indeed represent misinformation.
...and yes - based on your history here - I would be very, very surprised to discover that you are "often correct". Nearly every time you comment, there are details you have left out that discredit your opinion.
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David-acct at 11:33 AM on 7 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
As I stated - The raw data does not support the conclusion of the study.
Both sides present misinformation. You cant call for stopping the othersides misinformation when both sides are guilty.
the raw data is in table eTable 1.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617
My second point is that you are accusing me of misrepresenting the data when you have not performed any level of due diligence on the raw data. The raw data clearly shows the per capita death rates for all age groups to be higher for democrats than republicans with the exception of the 85+ age group.
Before you critisize my analysis, point to the specific math errror I made. You will be surprised how often I am correct when you perform a basic level of due diligence.
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Bob Loblaw at 11:13 AM on 7 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
David-acct:
Ah,yes, the cry of "censorship!". You beat that drum a lot. It was your opening statement when you commented a month ago, on the "Interview with John Cook about misinformation..." post. In that case, it was pointed out to you that the video said nothing at all about suppressing misinformation - just countering it. You doubled-down on your misrepresentation of that video. Whenever you open a comment with that cry, it only serves to reduce your credibility even further.
I notice that you have not actually provided a link to the Wallace et al (2022) paper you are referring to. It is also not linked to in the quote that OPOF has included. Note that OPOF is quoting information from the first link in the OP. OPOF is not the one citing the Wallace paper - it is a cite in Ecker et al. For you to characterize it as OPOF's cite is misinformation.
When I follow the cite in Ecker, I find the Wallace paper here. I do not see anything labelled "eTable 1". Searching the PDF, the word "table" doesn't even appear in the paper. There are several links to various data sources in their "Supplemental description of methods and data", but I can only hazard a guess as to whether this is the paper you are talking about, and what data table you think tells us what you say it does.
When you say "...the raw data shows otherwise", you provide no data and no analysis of what you see in the "raw data". Data does not show anything. Data needs to be analyzed and interpreted. This is certainly true in science, and I suspect that even in accounting the "raw" data doesn't "show" anything until after someone looks at it and draws an interpretation from it.
After all, the raw data for the entire US population shows that the average American has one testicle and one breast. Do you think that this would be a reasonable interpretation?
FYI, in the abstract of Wallace et al, we get to see some of the interpretation that they applied to the "raw data" - interpretation that helps examine the question they have and avoid contamination from confounding variables:
We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.
I also note that in their Results section, they talk about "relative excess deaths". This would be a type of analysis that would take raw death rates and try to account for other variables besides Covid. They say:
This controls for differences in pre-COVID-19 death counts across calendar month, county of residence at time of voter registration, political party registration (Democrat or Republican), and age bins.
So, you are (as you often do) just putting your own spin on something, and attempting to assert a conclusion without providing a justification. It is quite possible that your interpretation of the "raw data" is using a biased pooling of the data that hides the relationship you don't want to see.
Have you done your own "due diligence" to analyze and interpret the "raw" data? Have you simply accepted the "findings" you read on some other web site about Wallace et al? Are you accepting some other person's opinion about Wallace et al because it fits your biased views?
Are you spreading misinformation?
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David-acct at 10:04 AM on 7 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
One planet - I agree that misinformation is a problem. However, calls to stop misinformation are essentially calls for censorship.
A classic example is the Wallace et al study 2022 you cited which showed republican excess death rates were higher than democrat excess death rates. Republicans and Democrats—which is now associated with a widening gap in mortality rates (Wallace et al., 2022)—
Fortunately, the study provided the raw data in eTable 1. Summary Statistics. The raw data devastates the study's conclusion. Did peer review even attempt to cross check the computation, or even do a simple math test?
Per capita death rates for Democrats exceeded per capita death rates for republics in all categories in both states except for the 85+ age group in Ohio and Texas. How they could have possibly concluded republican excess death rates were higher than democrat excess deaths when the raw data shows otherwise.
FWIW - I have seen this study posted several times on other websites, yet the advocates posting this study never seem to perform any level of due diligence and simply accept the findings because it fits their biased views. It simply is another example of misinformation. -
Evan at 07:35 AM on 7 January 2025Climate news to watch in 2025
nigelj, there is another way to look at this. Not based on temperature, but looking at what atmospheric CO2 concentrations are doing. It is no secret that CO2 concentrations have been accelerating upwards since David Keeling started measurements in the late 1950's. Accelerating is the term his son, Ralph Keeling, uses to describe the trend.
But CO2 may be more than accelerating upwards. If you take 10 year moving averages of CO2 from 1970 to 2005, it forms a smooth, upward curve depicting the upward acceleration. If you then use that curve to extrapolate forward to see where we should end up if the upward acceleration continued, what actually happens is that the concentrations for 2010, 2015, and 2020 lay above that already upward-accelerating curve!
This despite the Great Recession, the Covid Pandemic, and the recent, rapid growth of renewables and EVs. People focus on the rapid growth of renewable energy and the increasing deployment of EVs, but neglect to notice that fossil-fuel use continues to increase. Plus other second-order effects likely driven by environmental feedbacks.
Bob's reference is likely far more authoritative than my comments, but the graph I provide hints (there is too little data in the CO2 record to prove that CO2 is accelerating upwards) that the third derivative of CO2 concentration could be positive. CO2 would then not just be accelerating upwards, but the acceleration rate would be increasing.
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Bob Loblaw at 06:39 AM on 7 January 2025Climate news to watch in 2025
nigelj:
Tamino has recently (a month ago) discussed acceleration in the temperature record. He thinks there is acceleration, based on his method of adjusting temperatures for solar, SOI, and volcanic activity. Read his link for details.
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nigelj at 05:47 AM on 7 January 2025Climate news to watch in 2025
Regarding the graph of global surface temperatures from 1985 to 2024. There appears to be an acceleration in warming after approximately 2012, just eyeballing the graph. Is this confirmed in any proper analysis, or am I seeing things? (I still see an acceleration even without 2024)
Assuming there is an acceleration, its notable that China first started making serious efforts to reduce sulphate aerosols in 2010 which coincides nicely with an acceleration soon after that point. I just wonder if this might be the main factor behind the acceleration and also possibly one factor in the anomolously high temperatures in 2023 - 2024. Chinas aerosol history:
Reductions in shipping aerosols in the Atlantic might be a factor in 2023 - 2024 temperatures, although MAR posted a useful chart somewhere, showing that the Atlantic warming was widespread and didnt really coincide with the paths of shipping. That said it probably contributed something even if it doesnt fully explain the unusually high sea surace temperatures.
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Eric (skeptic) at 09:03 AM on 6 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Nigel, thank you for pointing out Reagan's energy deployment priorities. When I looked at the R&D budgets a few years ago, I saw numbers like these: https://visualizingenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/A67.01.png I agree that large subsidies to nuclear power have not been cost effective at all. I am always optimistic about nuclear but probably over-optimistic. However I view cutting nuclear's very large costs as a research problem.
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nigelj at 05:27 AM on 6 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Eric (sceptic)
"Reagan cut all of it, nuclear, fossil, and renewables. That's the actual symbology of the removal of those particular panels in my opinion. "
No he didnt: From The New York Times in 1981. "Nuclear power is the only major program the Reagan Administration has completely spared during its campaign to reduce Federal spending. And yesterday the President made clear his intention to bail out the ailing nuclear power industry. No energy program less deserves such favoritism.Growing public opposition, faltering Wall Street support, and mounting evidence that other energy sources will better promote the national welfare make nuclear power unworthy of Presidential rescue efforts.The special place that nuclear power occupies in President Reagan's heart was made abundantly clear during the first round of budget cuts this spring. Nuclear development was the only program - besides the military, of course - to receive a major funding increase for fiscal 1982."
www.nytimes.com/1981/10/09/opinion/nuclear-reaganomics.html
www.csmonitor.com/1981/0826/082634.html
Nobody really knows why Reagon removed the solar panels from the whitehouse roof. Reagon never said and there are no surviviing documents giving a reason. It was done quietly during roof repairs, so this isnt a very public symbolic gesture. But he didnt appear to hate solar power either.
"They were an experiment, not very successful, but much more cost effective than photovoltaic at that time. It pointed the way to more R&D which was critical at that time. It's still critical today as always."
Agreed, and that is what I was trying to say in my comment above thread. Experiments are usefull and often lead to amazing things eventually. The solar industry has certainly developed considerably. Carter was a visionary ahead of his time.
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Eric (skeptic) at 04:23 AM on 6 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Michael Sweet, need energy numbers (GWh or TWh) for solar hot water. For example China has 7.5% capacity factor (2022 numbers) for photovoltaic solar so their GW of capacity are about half as effective as ours. Also the regions mentioned for solar hot water are more sunny than Washington DC.
Bob, yes, solar thermal collects a lot more energy from the sun than solar voltaic. Despite that it needs to be deployed cost effectively, and it is throughout the Mediterranean region, desert and west coast of the US, etc.
One Planet, thanks for the carbon price perspective. I suspect Carter, who is now being reconsidered in historical context, knew more about the costs but had to be politically pragmatic and put money into synfuel and other fossil interests. But also his Navy speciality of nuclear power, plus renewables.
Reagan cut all of it, nuclear, fossil, and renewables. That's the actual symbology of the removal of those particular panels in my opinion. They were an experiment, not very successful, but much more cost effective than photovoltaic at that time. It pointed the way to more R&D which was critical at that time. It's still critical today as always.
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Bob Loblaw at 00:44 AM on 6 January 2025At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?
Thanks for that update, Charlie Brown.
I quick search over at PubPeer finds this short page with a few comments, including the retraction notice:
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Eclectic at 21:41 PM on 5 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
My apologies, Moderator.
For some mysterious reason (nefarious Romanians?) there was an unaccountably huge delay in my initial post showing up.
Please delete this and one of the "proper" posts above.
Moderator Response:Duplicate deleted. Will leave this one intact, so people can see the following advice:
When posting a comment, it is sometimes not obvious that it has appeared as the first comment on the next/new page of comments.
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Eclectic at 21:22 PM on 5 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
Schroeder/CallItAsItIs/et alia @874 :-
You are in danger of sounding like the hallucinational garbled nonsense produced by an un-monitored Artificial Intelligence.
Stop. Reflect. Think about the physical situation of a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere with CO2 and H2O molecules dispersed throughout. If (as is indeed the case) these CO2 & H2O molecules at altitude 50 meters or 1500 meters get "thermally stimulated" by other neighbouring air molecules, then some of those CO2 or H2O molecules will emit IR photons (as is indeed observed and measured).
And that IR emission activity (throughout the troposphere) means that your whole line of argument falls flat on its face.
So please ignore the rubbish coming from Tom Shula.
Moderator Response:It is most unfortunate that the user most recently using the Schroeder moniker keeps wasting time by creating new accounts, instead of using his time to good stead by actually learning some physics.
There is a parallel between him and Shula in that they both seem to think that emission of IR does not happen in the atmosphere until you get close to the TOA. It has been repeatedly pointed out that their "non-existent" IR radiation has been measured, but that never seems to stop them from trying to convince people otherwise.
Quoted in John Grant's Denying Science:
"The trouble with most folks isn't their ignorance. It's their knowing so many things that ain't so." - Josh Billings, but usually (in keeping with the observations) attributed to Mark Twain.
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MA Rodger at 20:16 PM on 5 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
Schroeder/CallItAsItIs @874
You are fooling no-one here. How can the Beer and Schwartzschild solutions be the same? Beer concerns only absorption and Schwartzschild considers both absorption and emission. If they were the same, it could only be through emission being zero, but that is not the case.
dIλ/ds = -μIλ ≠ dIλ/ds = nσλ[Bλ(t)-Iλ]
excepting Bλ(t) = 0
And it is because of this emission from CO2 that we see 15-micron IR upward (and downward) throughout the atmosphere. It is not "attenuated to near zero at an altitude of 10 meters." And your attempt to explain the existence of 15-micron IR emissiions from CO2 are nothing but garbled nonsense. Consider the MODRTAN model (which you appear to accept but perhaps don't understand), the IR emissions for a doubling of CO2 from the default values (400ppm to 800ppm) are calculated as falling from 298.52Wm^-2 to 295.191Wm^-2, a global forcing of +3.3Wm^-2. So MODTRAN is showing that the CO2 effect is not saturated.
Moderator Response:As yet another account created in violation of the Comments Policy, the user Schroeder that you are responding to has had all comments deleted and the account banned.
In order for emission to be zero, you need at least one of two things:
- The temperature equals absolute zero. Not likely.
- The emissivity equals zero. Since absorptivity is non-zero for greenhouse gasses, this would require that Kirchoff's Law be ignored. (Note that "emission" and "emissivity" are two different words - for a reason. Ignoring that difference is another path to insanity.)
All the ballyhoo about "thermal radiation" represents a special pleading that the IR radiation in question does not follow the laws of radiation transfer that all other forms of radiation follow.
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Eclectic at 21:58 PM on 4 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
MA Rodger @872 :-
Please don't bother to spend more of your own valuable time going through the Shula videos !
As you mentioned, they are very lengthy ~ much of what he says is paleo information which is not in dispute. Possibly that lengthy info is intended to camouflage the actual unscientific "clangers" which he comes out with, scattered here & there in his videos.
Also as you say ~ in that one video, in less than 5 minutes, he states boldly that "Gases do not emit thermal radiation". And I persisted for about one-third of the total video, in the hope that he was really going to quibble about the semantics of "thermal" . . . but it was not to be, for he was simply flat wrong in his understandings of the science.
Other red flags were Shula's use of a rather shonky Scotese paleo graph . . . and later Shula's use of a Holocene graph of global CO2 levels versus a temperature graph (without pointing out that the temperatures were Greenlandic not global) ~ from both graphs he casually asserted that there has been zero evidence of CO2/temperature linkage.
So, the Shula case is quite hopeless . . . but these modern videos are still coming out, and are misleading the unwary public (such as poster CallItAsItIs).
Viewing smaller amounts of other Shula ( +/_ colleague named Ott ) videos has not given any other new insights into the deniosphere claims that "CO2 effect is saturated".
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MA Rodger at 20:28 PM on 4 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
Eclectic @870/871,
Thomas Shula is a retired broker who did physics back in his university days.
As for the video, your "Youtube video in 2024, on the Tom Nelson channel" seems to be to a different to the one HERE (it stretches to almost 2 hours) which is basically a presentationt of a 26-page thesis posted HERE July 2024 and entitled 'The “Missing Link” in the Greenhouse Effect'.
The work is only co-authored by Shula along with one Dr Markus Ott, a german chemist who previously authored a whole book on the subject entitled 'Dismantling The CO2-Hoax'.I've only skimmed through this Shula/Ott stuff (so far) but note two rather odd-but-fundamental lapses of logic by these two gentlemen.
Their first lapse (which is very badly misrepresented by Shula in the video @0:3:23 when he boldly goes off script and states that emitting IR "is a property of condensed matter. Gases do not emit thermal radiation."): this first lapse is to agree that almost all IR absorbed by CO2 is 'thermalised' (because the average relaxation time required to emit IR is measured in tenths of a second while the disrupting impacts of fellow air molecules occur on average in microseconds) but then they entirely ignore the effect of these far-more-numerous molecular collisions causing the vast majority of CO2 population which is in the excited state and thus can (and so many of them that it does) emit the IR.
And the existence of such radiation is readily measured as the back-radiation at grond level. So it is a pretty silly error.The second lapse is to fail to grasp that their magic "missing link" would still work to give us AGW.
Their "missing link" is to suggest that, with the absorbed IR at 15-microns entirely 'thermalised' in the thick air at low altitude and in their version not re-emitted as IR, the energy in this 15-micron waveband is transmitted up to an altitude by means of convection, up to thinner air where (acording to them) 'thermalisation' is weakened enough to allow emitted IR. And at such altitudes the IR is emitted out into space. In my quick skim-through I've not spotted any reason why their replacing the 15-micron IR flux up through the atmosphere with their "missing" convection flux would mpact the level of TOA emissions and how, with an increasing altitude for such emissions with increasing CO2, why the flux wouldn't result in AGW (as it does). -
Charlie_Brown at 09:11 AM on 4 January 2025At a glance - Is the CO2 effect saturated?
The paper by Kubicki, Kopczyński, and Młyńczak., “Climatic consequence of the process of saturation of radiation absorption in gases,” Applications in Engineering Science, Vol. 17, March 2024 has been retracted by Elsevier. “After review by additional expert referees, the Editor-in-Chief has lost confidence in the validity of the paper and has decided to retract.”
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666496823000456
Not explained in the retraction, but according to my interpretation in addition to the previous posts, Kubicki, et al., describe the emitted intensity for one monochromatic transmittance line for methane at 3.39 microns. However, when they describe absorptance for CO2, the description changes from a single line to a spectrum. They do not integrate the intensity of single lines for all lines in the full spectrum, which is the straightforward approach used in atmospheric radiation models and climate models. Rigorous models use line-by-line calculations while simple models utilize narrow bands for calculation efficiency with minimal loss of accuracy. Instead, Kubicki, et al., introduce a definition of “saturation mass” that reaches 95% of maximum value of absorptance for a large band for an unspecified wavelength range. They support their concept by describing experiments for a detected value at the end of a tube. This experimental design does not account for re-radiation in any direction apart from a straight line.
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Eclectic at 07:58 AM on 4 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
[BL] @870 ~ thanks for the Addendum. My impression is likewise, that Tom Shula is unlikely to be poster CallItAsItIs et al., despite both having similar delusions.
The "CO2 is Saturated" argument depends on the concept of non-radiation of photons by GreenHouse gasses in the lowermost 10 meters of the troposphere . . . and yet Tom Shula admits that the same gasseous molecules can radiate at the uppermost level of troposphere. Go figure!
Digging shows that Shula did make an OP at WUWT in 2023, but his Youtube presentations have scored no more than 19,000 views to date (earliest was 4 years ago). #They are lengthy and complex, and largely correct apart from a few blatant misrepresentations.
His most egregious misrepresentation was the assertion that, once a molecule is in a gas, it is unable to emit photons. A truly remarkable assertion ~ considering that after sunrise every day, Tom Shula's own eyes can see the photons radiated by the gasseous molecules of the Sun.
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One Planet Only Forever at 06:17 AM on 4 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Eric (skeptic) @5,
Regarding your point that “Some cost per metric ton of CO2 seems appropriate.” There are many other ‘externalities’ to be considered in order for EROI evaluations to not result in unsustainable harmful developments. But I will limit my response to carbon pricing and include points regarding the 1970s.
The appropriate carbon pricing value depends on the circumstances being evaluated. An example evaluation is provided in the Queen’s Gazette’s: The Conversation - “Carbon pricing alone is not enough to meet Paris Agreement targets”: By Sean Cleary, Queen's University, and Neal Willcott, Queen's University, December 20, 2023. It includes the following:
“We found that while carbon pricing on its own could limit global warming to 2.4 C, the global price would have to rise dramatically and rapidly to accomplish this. The price would have to start at $223.31 per tonne in 2023 and increase to $435.55 per tonne by 2045.
“While such an abrupt global policy change is unlikely, the price would not need to be so high if it was accompanied by other measures, including regulations that provide clarity and stability regarding green investments, clean technology subsidies and financing mechanisms (such as those facilitating transition investing by companies).”
Note that the above pricing is in Canadian dollars. And the evaluation’s methodology would result in an even higher pricing, and/or more significant other measures, being needed to achieve a 1.5 C limit. For comparison, the IPCC evaluation indicates (based on Google’s current AI summary) that the carbon price required to limit the harm to 1.5 C is US$170 (~ CAN$230) by 2030 and US$430 (~ CAN$590) by 2050.
However, it is important to understand that a correction of what has developed is required. And earlier and more significant ‘effective harm limiting action’ reduces the required magnitude of future corrective actions. So, an appropriate carbon price for starting the correction in the 1970’s would be lower. However, it could be argued that in the 1970’s there was an understandable possibility of limiting the harm done to be below 1.0 C. And achieving a lower level of future harm would require higher pricing. And most important is understanding that to properly develop sustainable improvements the developed actions, and corrective actions, need to be effectively harmless. A related essential understanding is that reducing undeserved (obtained in ways that are harmful) perceptions of superiority or advancement is ‘not harmful’. That objective understanding would require even higher pricing and more significant ‘other measures’, even in the 1970s.
The real challenge is getting people to appreciate that what has been developed is massively harmful and undeniably unsustainable (proven by the Stockholm University: Stockholm Resiliency Centre’s evaluation of Planetary Boundaries - linked here). In many cases the developed perceptions of superiority are massively undeserved. And the magnitude and required rate of the required corrections of developed perceptions of superiority and advancement increases as the required corrections are delayed by successful misinformation campaigns promoting misunderstandings and limiting awareness.
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Bob Loblaw at 00:50 AM on 4 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
My recollection from decades ago was that direct solar water heating was much more efficient than using solar panels to generate electricity and then heat water electrically. This was for small installations in houses, where it did not take a lot of panel area to get enough heat to fill a standard hot water tank. Obviously, if everyone showers in the evening, there won't be any hot water in the tank until the next day, unless electric backup is used. Use patterns are important.
I would suspect that water heating may not scale well to commercial settings, but that is purely a guess on my part.
There would certainly be extra costs in installing panels on one building, taking them down, then installing them on another building. That would clearly be an inefficient use of labour costs.
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michael sweet at 12:21 PM on 3 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Eric,
You should Google subjects before you say incorrect information about them
This Wikipedia article says that in 2017 solar water heating provided 472 GW of heating worldwide. I have seen newspaper articles more recently that the capacity has increased a lot since then but my first Google didn't find it, there were too many advertisements for new systems.
When I lived in Australia 20 years ago solar hot water was common. I only remember using he electric back up once in two years. The USA is under the control of fossil fuel interests so they are not as common here as they should be.
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Eric (skeptic) at 11:47 AM on 3 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Bob and Nijel, thanks for your replies. I think the examples you give of electric cars and even cell phones show that there is improvement with technology. But those types improvements are difficult with thermal water heating, even when indirect. That's because moving the warm fluid can't optimize variables as compared to a hot water heat pump where the heat pump can be optimized for the conditions. At that point, typically, the solar water system reverts to electric resistor.
One Planet, I should have included the avoided external costs in my chart. Some cost per metric ton of CO2 seems appropriate.
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One Planet Only Forever at 08:51 AM on 3 January 2025Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2025
Thank you for continuing to compile and share this weekly summary of new research.
The first Open Notable, Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored, Ecker et al., American Psychologist:, is an informative presentation that should not have needed to be made.
It can be summarized by saying that: Many of the attempts to argue that misinformation can be ignored rely on the ability to successfully produce misunderstandings through the presentation of misinformation.
It is hard to deny that misunderstandings due to misleading presentations of misinformation lead to ‘avoidable conflicts of interest and can produce harmful results’.
The following quote from the article, from the section addressing ‘Argument 2: Misinformation Has No Significant Causal Impacts’, says it very well:
“The position that misinformation has no meaningful causal effects imagines that substantial segments of a population could form a false belief, such as the conviction that vaccines cause autism, either without being exposed specifically to the corresponding false claim or despite the exposure having no discernible consequence (Poland & Spier, 2010). On this view, the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and the partisan gap in COVID-19 vaccination rates between Republicans and Democrats—which is now associated with a widening gap in mortality rates (Wallace et al., 2022)—were unrelated to misinformation about a “stolen” election or the safety of vaccines (see Bolsen & Palm, 2022; M. H. Graham & Yair, 2024; Henricksen & Betz, 2022; Lee et al., 2022; Riley, 2022). This seems implausible (e.g., court documents suggested that the views of many of those arrested after the insurrection were shaped by election-fraud misinformation; McCarthy, 2021). To provide additional examples, the view further implies that multiple lynchings of alleged child abductors in India in 2018 were not causally related to the false abduction rumors spreading on WhatsApp locally at the time (Gupta & Wilkinson, 2018) or that the 2024 anti-immigration riots in the United Kingdom that mainly targeted Muslims were unrelated to the misinformation about the religion of the alleged perpetrator of the Southport child murders (Holden & Smout, 2024). A strict interpretation of the “no causal impact” argument would even suggest that a counterfactual world with no misinformation would look just the same as the world we find ourselves in, and the argument also implies that information consumption or exposure in general has no causal impacts. This is not a credible position.”
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:46 AM on 3 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Eric (skeptic),
A complete focus on EROI would have merit if the socioeconomic-political system is effectively governed by the pursuit of increased awareness and improved understanding of what is harmful and that constant learning is diligently applied to limit the development of harmful activities and to rapidly fully repair and make amends for any damage done. Also, the people penalized for benefiting from the harm done should not be able to influence how much they are required to do to repair and make amends for the harm done that they benefited from (they could potentially justifiably lose more than the benefit they obtained from the harm done). Note that people who did not benefit from the harm done would have their ‘repair and adaptation’ fully funded by those who benefited from the harm done.
The issue of climate change is a powerful example of what happens when ‘the system is not effectively governed by learning to be less harmful and more helpful to Others’. There has been an understandable massive failure of the ‘marketplace focused on EROI’ to effectively responsibly self-govern to avoid being harmful. Plus there has been an understandable failure of external governing of the marketplace to effectively limit harm done and make those who benefited the most from the harm done do the most mitigation and neutralizing of damage done. Also, there has been a failure to have those who benefited most from the unavoidable future damage done responsibly and equitably do the most to help all others adapt to the future harm.
The major problem is misunderstandings, especially the mistaken belief that the economic and political games produce better results when there is more freedom of action. The potential for success through misleading marketing and the related misunderstandings and lack of awareness make it very unlikely that ‘free-pure competition for perceptions of superiority’ will be effectively responsibly self-governed.
I would support EROI if all risks of harm are more than adequately included in the evaluation, and the evaluation is not done by the people who hope to benefit.
So, the bottom line is that I am very skeptical of a simple limited focus on EROI because the conditions required for that self-interested short-term narrow-view focus to not produce harmful results are highly unlikely to freely be developed and sustained. In fact, the evidence indicates that there is significant misleading marketing effort against the development of the required conditions.
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nigelj at 05:49 AM on 3 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Eric, criticising Jimmy Carters solar panels is pointless and baseless. Everything has to start somewhere often with primitive beginnings. The first ever mobile phone was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X launched in 1983, the size and weight of a brick and it cost about $4,000, and it would cost about 12,000 in todays money. It had a talk time of 30 minutes and took 10 hours to charge. Maybe some people bought it as a status symbol or as virtue signalling. But they still bought these phones, and they were useful. And look what is lead to. Eric youre a smart guy. Use some imagination .
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Evan at 02:22 AM on 3 January 2025Sabin 33 #8 - Will solar development destroy jobs?
I know that my comment is a little off topic, but one reason utilities like renewable energy is that costs are more predictable than for fossil-fuel plants. For renewable energy, the energy is free, even if more labor is required than fossil fuel plants. Fossil-fuel plants always have to be fed a product whose price goes through wild gyrations over the life of the plant. Whatever long-term average costs are, there is the uncertainty associated with what it will cost to feed your power plants.
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Bob Loblaw at 00:37 AM on 3 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Eric:
The technology has certainly changed since 1979, and in 1979 the economics may not have been all that favourable, but I'm not sure I would call that decision "virtue signalling". In the early development stages of any technology, there is often a "sell it at a loss" strategy to get the market going (and growing), with expectations that the technology and economics will both improve over time.
Even GM, with the Chevrolet Bolt, apparently expected to lose money on production in the first few years. According to this Wikipedia page (information not confirmed by GM), they expected to lose $8-9K per vehicle at the start, and only expected to reach profitability in 2025. (Feel free to speculate why they stopped production, or why they started production on a money-losing proposition).
...and Tesla did not make profit until 2020 (and didn't turn a profit, excluding Bitcoin and regulatory credits, until June 2021). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Finances). That's 15 years of losing money. Does Elon Musk strike you as someone that is into "virtue signalling"?
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Eric (skeptic) at 23:47 PM on 2 January 2025The forgotten story of Jimmy Carter’s White House solar panels
Solar panels were added to the White House grounds (an outbuilding) under George W Bush. The Carter "panels" were a water heater (as noted) but there was never any quantification of cost benefit. Drained in winter (no heat exchanger), they very likely had negative EROI after a 20 year service life (7 on the WH and 13 at Unity). That's probably true compared to gas heated water at the WH and certainly true at Unity. Unity spent over $150,000 on refurbishing and plumbing for half of the panels (16). They had room for all of them on the cafeteria roof. Links to references, and my attempt at quantification: followthedata.dev/wx/whp/whp.html
Yes, there is a positive symbolism expressed in the article. But there is also symbolism of virtue signaling and wasted resources which occurs in some renewable efforts. China, for example, has 7.5% capacity factor on their solar photovoltaic (2022 data). That will improve with demand shifting and batteries and they are certainly doing tremendous work on R&D on all of the above. But for deployment we need complete focus on EROI, not symbolism.
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Eclectic at 23:23 PM on 2 January 2025CO2 effect is saturated
As part of my New Year's Resolutions, I had wished to ask if SkS readers have any views or opinions on the AGW/CO2 ideas put forward by a Mr (or Dr ?) Tom Shula who allegedly has some physicist qualifications, yet who also qualifies as a science-denier apparently.
He strongly asserts that the 15-micron IR radiated upwards by the Earth's warm surface is totally absorbed by CO2 in the lowermost 10 meters of the troposphere. And that there is no re-radiation of IR by the CO2 molecules in that 10-meter layer ~ because, although molecules in solids and liquids can radiate photons, nevertheless it is impossible for molecules in the gasseous state to emit radiation.
At the same time, Tom Shula does say that Earth emits IR to space from the upper troposphere. Clearly Tom Shula suffers from cognitive dissonance . . . or I am failing to grasp the subtleties of his ideas.
IIRC, someone earlier in this thread has also claimed that "CO2 saturation" means that the 15-micron IR from the Earth's surface cannot rise above the 10-meter altitude (possibly that claimant was poster CallItAsItIs or his re-incarnations ~ but he has made so many posts in this thread, that it would be a tiresomely daunting task for me to go back and check & read through all of his comments ).
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The assertions by Shula were made in a Youtube video in 2024, on the Tom Nelson channel ~ a channel which is often bristling with Red Flags of Unscience.
Any thoughts? BTW, I am quite happy if this post today elicits no replies at all . . . for it is highly probable that Tom Shula's (and Tom Nelson's ) effusions are a waste of time for rational readers.
Moderator Response:[BL] This sounds waaay too much like the arguments being made many times here over the years by a series of banned users - most recently calling himself CallItAsItIs (then ReadItAndWeep, and finally LinusLucy).
The user that has made multiple identities here is clearly immune to logic and reason, and there is no point in discussing his hallucinations again.
[addendum]
After looking a bit more at what Tom Shula has been presenting, it seems unlikely that Tom Shula has been the person posting here. Consider them to be equally-deluded and sharing misinformation space, but probably not the same person.
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Bob Loblaw at 01:25 AM on 2 January 2025Sabin 33 #8 - Will solar development destroy jobs?
nigelj @ 8:
It is also worth noting that high labour requirements during installation would be considered as a one-time fixed cost in the context of a single project. In terms of economics, this would be a cost that should be amortized over the life of the project (or at least a period of time).
- If the project borrows money to pay the installation costs, then paying off the loan is spread over time, not paid up front.
- If the project pays directly, then the usual accounting practice is to consider it a capital cost and write off depreciation over time. This implies that the value of the capital investment drops over time. (Maintenance costs are an acceptable cost of keeping up the value of an asset.)
- Accounting for capital depreciation on your tax return will most likely use different rules from the internal "how much is what is left of my project worth today?" calculations that are reported to shareholders. (Within reason, law, and generally-accepted accounting principles - which a registered accountant is obligated to follow.)
...and the same issues are present for coal, nuclear, hydro plants, etc, which have huge capital costs associated with construction. Too often, the claims of "this coal/nuclear/whatever plant will create bazillions of jobs" include short-term construction jobs. Such construction jobs are only a permanent part of the economy as long as more and more production facilities are constructed on an ongoing basis.
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bbrowett at 00:59 AM on 2 January 20252024 in review - a bittersweet year for our team
Many thanks for your continued leadership. Great summary.
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nigelj at 06:17 AM on 1 January 2025Sabin 33 #8 - Will solar development destroy jobs?
David-acct said: "My statement was that more jobs per unit of production is an indication of less economic efficiency...."
This is only potentially true looking at labour productivity alone as BL points out. This doesnt mean renewables have poor overall economic efficiency. In fact we know renewables have higher overall economic efficiency than fossil fuels. This is because (simply put) while renewables require more labour inputs than fossil fuels, they have much lower running costs, that more than offsets the higher labour costs. We know this because renewables are lower cost per mwatt hour than fossil fuels.
I assume the high labour costs of solar power are related to installing all those panels. No problem. It gives people useful work, and this is important in economies facing high unemployment from automation and AI.
