Energy Crisis: Unleash 4th Generation Nuclear

Democratic opposition in the Senate to Biden’s hare brained energy plan, led by Democratic Senator Manchin who ridiculed Senator Sanders’ pleas to West Virginians to please head to the poor houses, and disaffected mines in which he intent them to live the rest of their miserable existences… So Biden would drop “clean” energy generation all together. In other words, Biden will drop the only thing that make a difference for the climate calamity. It’s not that there just no money for it. The very nature of the idea should be called into question. China right now builds one coal plant a week to make US solar panels. Also China produces most of the world’s lithium. China, having learned its lesson from Europe well is on a no-holds barred technological development path. It also helps much of the needed materials are from the largest cavalcade of austere and barren mountain ranges, most appropriately located among old opponents and occasional tormenters of the Han…. When Trump allowed a Native American approved lithium mine in Nevada, WASP ecologists suffered nervous fits: they don’t mind destroying China, the Congo, or Bolivia but they want to keep home pristine.

So Biden can’t finance clean energy. As it is, US citizens emit 18 tons of CO2 per capita per year… More than twice the European average… which includes Merkel’s increasing dirty Germany… with ten tons of CO2 per capita. The world’s average, per capita is 5 tons… which is also the French output. France achieves this with the biggest nuclear generation, per capita.  

Safely unleashing nuclear regulations is the way out for the USA and the world: it would cost nothing. Nuclear mitigation is our best choice. We are 1.1 to 1.3 C above the 1850 baseline. We will blow past 1.5C within a few years. The CO2 equivalent of ALL man-made greenhouse gases (NOx, CH4, etc.) is above 600ppm… not just the 420 ppm of CO2 we will hit in 2022.

We are on track for +7C by 2100.

The anti-nuclear ecologists behave exactly as if they were paid by the fossil fuel industry. Their uneducated anger and irrational phobia against nuclear power is equivalent to an advocacy of keeping the fossil fuel industry as a baseload.

It would take 750 years to bring down CO2 emissions to zero, using hydro, wind and solar. It can’t be done: we don’t have enough copper, semi-precious metals and rare earths to go all-electric with them alone. This way is too slow and the economics of carbon pricing are not necessarily positive… Indeed it costs a huge amount of energy and human life to sustain the pristine life style celebrity ecologists have achieved… And which we cannot all achieved.

Not being a celebrity ecologist or a corrupt politician, I live not far from a fossil fuel plant, a giant refinery. My car uses its products. It’s a state of the art gasoline car, it can go more than 750 miles on one tank of oil (1,200 kilometers). Its CO2 emissions is as low as it gets, including electric cars (which use fossil fuels sneakily). Would I want this dangerously polluting refinery to be replaced by a few state of the art safe fourth generation nuclear reactors? Yes. There is another refinery up the freeway. Together, the refineries had three uncontrolled raging fire infernos over the years, and to remind us of their potential for rage and destruction, they continually burn gas in ten meter long flames… A few miles away, there is often wind. Thousands of windmills were built, and then all taken down at Altamont Pass and in the Delta. 23 turbines can produce 57.5 megawatts of electricity per hour… when the wind blows, which is at most twenty percent of the day… However, the Golden Gate director of the Audubon Society (the major bird protecting society in the world) Glen Phillips says: “If we continue killing eagles at the rates that we have been … there will be no golden eagles left in 50 years or so. Wind energy is important, but there are lots of other places to develop it.”

So the “ecological” plan here is to exchange here a major alpha species, the Golden Eagle, for an energy production which is 1% of that of an average nuclear reactor? And some comical characters call that ecological? Auschwitz style elimination for Golden Eagles is ecological? No wonder the Nazis were very ecological… Some of it out of sincerity, some of it out of contempt for the weak, and the non-“Teutonic”, some of it as cover-up, some of it out of fear for the new world, some of it out of hatred for the human race… Several of these psychological traits are found in all too many of today’s self-described half mentally retarded celebrity ecologists…

Just as with most Nazis, most self-proclaimed ecologists seem ignorant of basic physics.

Anti-nuclear activists get furious about nuclear melt-downs. There have been 4 in the West, including three at Fukushima and one at Three Mile Island, in the USA, which produced only radioactive water inside the containment building… At Fukushima incredibly primitive 2nd generation, weapon oriented enormous nuclear reactors, designed to melt-down, and astoundingly badly managed, installed deliberately in the way of a giant tsunami which had already happened 12 centuries before, and without the mandatory backup electric emergency supplies… unsurprisingly melted down after being hit by a wave taller than them. Three of those reactors melted down, and they exploded spectacularly. Nobody died. And the beach was open, a decade later. Compare with fossil fuel installations, such as refineries, which kill many in their surroundings, year after year… Leaving the vegetation covered with soot up to many miles away…

So yes, I would prefer nuclear in the neighborhood… Melt-down potential can be completely avoided with a plant designed to prevent it. Indeed, fourth generation reactors can be made which will never melt down. From the physics. Also much greater efficiency than second generation reactors enables to radioactively exhaust the radioactive “waste”, and transform it into energy. 

It is certainly a mass extinction. Going the wrong way by trying to solve the crisis with hydro, wind and solar will bring war, because when the cataclysm is fully on, nations will fight for resources. Millions are already displaced by the climate emergency. Civilization will not be wiped out, but wars killing billions could easily happen as basic necessities supply routes get cut off. 4th generation nuclear power would enable us to make electricity, hydrogen and desalinate…actually Saudi Arabia is pursuing such a development… This is the sane thing to do. Argentina relaunched its nuclear program and is building a small energy producing reactor not far from Buenos Aires. To keep the air good, indeed, nuclear.

The Biden White House was reduced to beg OPEC+, the world organization of petroleum exporting countries to increase production: “While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.” PEC+ laughed. Putin added he would try to help Europe, if it really asked politely. “We are not using any weapons. Even during the hardest parts of the Cold War Russia regularly has fulfilled its contractual obligations and supplies gas to Europe.” Putin called such accusations “politically motivated blather” and there was “nothing to support the idea that we use energy as a kind of weapon.” On the contrary, he said, Russia was “expanding its supplies to Europe.” Next Biden went to beg US frackers to please increase output. The inertia here is six months, because it takes time to deploy the tech.

Meanwhile California has ambitious plan to shut down roughly 25% of its energy production, planning apparently to replace it by… blackouts?

The real solution to all this mess is to go on with fossil fuels while introducing a carbon tax, and a hefty one, to force efficiencies. Poor people could get direct check to compensate. Meanwhile giant governmental research programs both on distant energy (thermonuclear, ten times better batteries) and imminently deployable energy (Thorium, 4th generation nuclear and hydrogen) should be financed. Wind and solar should be deployed… accompanied with storage…

Patrice Ayme

Franco-CHINESE POWER: Power for more than three million homes from two nuclear reactors… Taishan 1 and 2 are the first two reactors based on the French EPR design. They form part of an EUR8.0 billion (US$ 10 billion) contract signed by Areva and CGN in November 2007. The Taishan project – 140 kilometres west of Hong Kong, 80 kilometers west of Macau and next to a one million inhabitant city – is owned by TNPJVC, a joint venture between CGN (51%), French utility EDF (30%) and the Chinese utility Guangdong Energy Group (19%). Unit 1 of the power plant started construction in 2009, followed by unit 2 in 2010. The 1750-megawatt EPRs entered commercial operation in December 2018 and September 2019, respectively. The EPR design in Taishan above was developed by Framatome. Although it is a French design, built by French engineering, it was build much faster than the EPRs in Europe… which are still NOT operating… being full of construction defaults, like poor welding.

So the question is why is European manufacturing so poor nowadays? The answer is lack of practice. The Chinese have been building one major power plant a week (generally coal, but ready to switch to Thorium). Europe, meanwhile, has been deindustrializing, overdoing the “energy transition” switch… With poorly reasoned alternatives…

To solve the climate calamity one has to do what China is doing, which is the exact opposite of what Europe has been doing: one has to RE-INDUSTRIALIZE. And with more power than ever, because there are eight billion people out there, not just 80 million Germans…

Capital Letter Racism: “Black” Versus “white”

Many US media systematically write “Black”, in contrast to “white”. Notice the capital with “Black”, the absence thereof with “white”. Two new systemic racist categories have appeared recently in the US media: “Asian” and “brown”. Of course most US “Blacks” are actually brown (as they tend to have some European ancestry). So do they deserve a capital letter, or not? Respect, or scorn? Identity or zilch?

The very fact US “Blacks” are actually brown, leads to schizophrenic analysis of what it means to be a US citizen… Kamala Harris for example descends from a slave and her owner. That’s typical. US citizens with partial Native American ancestry often descend from mass murdering white rapists and their victims. Or maybe not. In conjunction with identity politics, and the insistence that everybody has a single identity, the spirit of the times then produce individuals with fractured identities, hating themselves and thus others. 

The US has had a common story enforced by the strange glue of the humiliations it visited on minorities, and all those who deviated from the norms in power. And there were many of those, precisely. As the humiliations are themselves humiliated, a major common glue is dissolving.

The religion of sport teams is thus gaining in importance. So has Trump hatred, especially now that the Obama cult has revealed itself reduced to brown skin and little else besides. All those not subscribing to the various fake glues of the left feel somewhat humiliated, accused of racism, conspiracy, a coup, worshipping an orange maniacal magnate, being anti-science. Those shared humiliations may become a new glue which will lead Biden’s opponents to victory. 

Good old Nietzsche has an answer to everything…

Never wound bears you have to live with. Identity politics leads to a well deserved, thus ineluctable,  apocalypse.

***

[The preceding comment to an article of David Brooks was censored by the New York Times.]

I am not making this capital letter racism up. A little humiliation visited on non-“Black” readers everyday, whch is supposed to fool “Black” readers too. The NYT also does it. Here is a typical article of the PC media of “Black” versus “white”: 

Studies show that white people drive anti-Asian hate. So why are the ‘solutions’ targeting brown people?

…much of white America sleeps better at night knowing the lawless Black criminal narrative is thriving.

These people don’t want you thinking about how anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiments have shaped this country, or that it was our former white nationalist in chief, Donald Trump, who reignited them for the pandemic era. And forget the research by Wong and others showing that most known perpetrators of hate crimes, including those targeting Asian Americans, are white. Just keep sharing the handful of brutal viral videos depicting Black assailants. Never mind that brown neighborhoods are more likely to be under video surveillance…

Facts and context will just screw up a perfectly good lie — that the systems that created this problem are the ones to fix it….

Here in the oh-so-progressive Bay Area, this research gets ignored while traditional power structures push “solutions” that help them thrive: more policing in brown neighborhoods, not white ones, and a return to a “tough-on-crime” ’90s mindset that will jump-start the mass incarceration of Black and brown people in the 21st century.

HUMANITY IS A SINGULARITY. There Is Nobody Else. We Are The Only Masters Of Truth

Masters Of Truth Few In Milky Way.

We humans are masters of truth. 

Plutocrats are not, but then, by definition, are not truly human. 

The cult of Satan goes only that far. It lives a lie, that pain overrules all. Humanity will go much further. 

Prehistorically speaking, children need parents primordially. But, as adults, prehistoric people needed truth more than friends. This is how we humans became truth machines.

If there are masters, somewhere else in the galaxy,

They are also Masters of Truth, Wealth And Taste.

But they did not visit, so it’s only us,

And we have just one shot at it.

This is it.

So let’s not talk falsely now.

***

Where is everybody? … Said Enrico Fermi (Nobel for the neutron), seventy years ago, while considering the heavens and their lack of space alien civilizations. Since then the mystery, called the “Fermi Paradox” has thickened. Indeed many, if not most, single stars seem to have planets (however I think this is not clear for close binary systems, like Alpha and Beta Centauri [1]) .

    1) The same biological selection mechanism forcing the supreme species to become truth machines, would have occurred with any species which gave birth to civilizations… In other words any civilization is supremely intelligent. Mussels don’t a civilization make.

Civilization will tend to expand through the galaxy, because ecological exhaustion threatens any biological system, lest expansion is hard wired into its reality. Expanding in the galaxy would make a civilization successful forever. However: 

• 2) A civilization somewhere in the Milky Way would have spread:

Our giant galaxy is more than 10 billion years old. Let’s suppose a civilization had evolved somewhere in it. Let’s also suppose that all the technology we could deploy soon enough is all there is. Let’s not even suppose that a civilization could use antimatter propulsion… Although we could anticipate to have it some day soon (it consists into storing enough anti matter, and then slowly adding it to normal matter to obtain gigantic amount of energy).

But let’s assume that this civilization has nuclear propulsion…that can deliver a huge amount of power as the US NOVA project demonstrated… half a century ago. Nuclear propulsion should enable speed of the order of Earth to the Moon in one hour… For arbitrarily large vessels. 

So let’s say c/1000 is achievable. The galaxy is 100,000 light years across… So a civilization starting at one extremity could get to the opposite in 100 million years.

• 3) But Life evolved on Earth:

Another fact to ponder is that life evolved on Earth in a slow and very progressive fashion: there is no indication whatsoever of outside interference. Many species which turned into blind alleys are still found here and there, demonstrating that Earth was an in-house biological experiment; there is no need for transgalactic panspermia (although Earth life may have started on Mars) [2].

      4) Thus that there was no tinkering with terrestrial life, seems to imply, in first approximation, that there was, and probably there is, no other civilization in the entire galaxy. 

Granted, some civilization could have evolved somewhere in the last fifty million years and expanded at a snail pace, and we don’t know about it. But the probability of that is .5% (half a percent; just divide!)

To evolve its own life, endogenous life, sustainably, a planet needs to be big enough to have water… However, not so big that it is only an ocean

Some may object that civilization could well self-destruct on Earth before we expand among the stars. Well, a civilization which cannot expand beyond its home world will probably self-destruct, one way or another, so is it really a civilization? Is a destroyed creature still a creature?

***

Some will think of the “Prime Directive” of Star Trek: do not mess up with existing civilizations. Right. But the “Prime Directive” is not about primitive life forms.  Besides, Star Trek violates the Prime Directive all the time (interfering with the Borg, “Q”, etc.). 

So my point is this: few planets are as “goldilocks”, everything great and hospitable to life as Earth. If a civilization had expanded, it would have spotted Earth, and found it irresistible. To believe it would not have sojourned, and instead respectfully just withdraw away for three billion years and the apparition of the first sponges after a few bouts of great oxidations and snowball Earth… stretches credibility. Remember the putative extrasolar civilization would be extremely intelligent and into wealth and taste. It would not have passed Earth over. 

But it did.

So it does not exist [3].

*** 

Seriously: we took only 10,000 years between the first cities and expanding beyond the home world. In other words, 

HUMANITY HAS BEEN A SINGULARITY.  

We are singular in more ways than one.

We all need to meditate on what it means.

It means we have a single chance.

As it is, the singularity in consumption of various basic elements and features is a complete explosion at the geological time scale. We are peaking in our usage of fossil fuels, phosphates, countless metals, even… Uranium. We are also causing a mass extinction. I, yours truly, even claim the oxygen density is compromised (from combusting permafrost… while killing the seas with carbonic acid…).

We can do this, and we are doing it.

But we have to do it well.

That means we have to use the occasion, the occasion of the present singularity, to develop enough advanced science to become a multi-planet species.

This is why I am not criticizing the world’s wealthiest engineer, Elon Musk (I used to criticize him, more than a decade ago, when I thought he aimed too low technologically… He obviously changed that, by developing several advanced technologies that nearly nobody thought could be done…) 

More well financed technological adventuring is the solution… Torpedoing promising technologies is not. 

That real ecologists ask for perfect nuclear power is perfect. So am I, a real ecologist, so I ask for ecological perfection in nuclear matters. And it can be done.

Paradoxically, because it was not asked, it was not done. 

The fake ecologists, by shooting down nuclear, instead of calling to improve it, have made the Anthropocene’s ecological crisis much worse.

That ill-educated individuals earn respect by speaking about physics they can’t even imagine is contemptible,

But when, like Greta Thurnberg, powerful celebrities friendly with the most powerful, strike moral poses, while helping kill millions, with the fossil fuels they implicitly foster, they disrupt our singularity nefariously. We have to call nasty monkeys as they are, and so we do.   

We have had a singularity. With the help of the emerging science of the Quantum Computer, everything, and foremost our understanding of everything, is going to change much faster imminently. 

The singularity is upon us ever more.

We have to adapt to this singular ambiance.

Thus what, personally? It is high time for us to personally become more singular. 

Question Authority. Start with Identity and Identification.

You are what you are. Remember they cannot tell you who you are.

And that means how to debate. People like to debate, because people are, genetically, truth machines. Debate is how one can progress in understanding… Even if the debate is only with oneself… Real censorship kills the will to debate first. De-bate, beating thoroughly, is what we do with the universe… But out of beating the egg white comes a completely different geometrical and chemical structure, the meringue. So it is as we beat the universe completely: we create new structures… We better understand that, to create better structures… Some (nuns, Buddhists, despondent ecologists and their ilk) will suggest to do nothing. But doing nothing is still doing something… as long as one is not just feeding the worms…

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] 11 astronomical units, that is eleven times the Earth-Sun distance separate at their closest the two sun like stars Alpha and Beta Centauri (at their furthest, they are 33 AUs away, the closest distance of Pluto.). 11 AUs is the distance from the Sun to Saturn. But Beta Centauri is 10,000 times (very roughly) the mass of Saturn. Thus its disturbance would be 10,000 times greater, and it is imaginable that the putative planetary orbits would be 10,000 times less stable…. In other words the orbits would have to be, at the very least, in resonance. The existence of planets in close binaries needs investigation… Proxima Centauri, which is much further out, has at least two planets… 

***

[2] In “2001, A Space Odyssey” an extrasolar civilization messes up with primate evolution, creating humans. We know enough to know that this did not happen. However, intelligence did accelerate human evolution. Terrestrial intelligence: humanity’s own human intelligence self-selected for ever more human intelligence… No need for little green men… And yes, waging war successfully requires greater smarts…

***

[3] Mathematicians love this sort of reasoning, “ad absurdum“.

Identity Politics: A Pretext To Teach Children Tribal Fascism & Simplemindedness. Crime Too. Most Indecent Submission Sought.

Identity Politics: A Pretext To Teach Children Tribal Fascism & Simplemindedness

In “Here’s the Mind-Set That’s Tearing Us Apart”, Oct. 7, 2021, David Brooks observes that:

“The world is complicated, and our minds have limited capacity, so we create categories to help us make sense of things. We divide, say, the social world into types — hipster, evangelical, nerd, white or Black — and associate traits or characteristics with each.

These judgments involve simplifications and generalizations. But we couldn’t make sense of the blizzard of sensory data each day if we couldn’t put things, situations and people into some form of conceptual boxes. As our old friend Immanuel Kant argued, perceptions without conceptions are blind.

It becomes a serious problem when people begin to believe that these mental constructs reflect underlying realities. This is called essentialism. It is the belief that each of the groups we identify with our labels actually has an “essential” and immutable nature, rooted in biology or in the nature of reality. In the worst kind of case, it’s the belief that Hutus are essentially different from Tutsis, that Christian Germans are innately superior to Jews….

… Essentialists may see the world divided into Manichaean dichotomies, and history as a clash of group-versus-group power struggles — clashes that demand utter group solidarity and give life meaning.

America is awash in essentialism. As the New York University philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the Ethicist column for The Times Magazine, has noted, before World War II few thought about identities the way we do today. But now it feels that contemporary politics is almost all about identity — about which type of person is going to dominate.

At some level this is necessary. The great project of the past 70 years or so has been to right the injustices that historical essentialists imposed on groups they labeled and oppressed.

The problem comes when people replicate the mind-set they are fighting against. “

This replication is not an accident. It is a method to achieve supremacy.

People often replicate mentalities they claim to fight against, as a strategy of domination. Indeed the pulsion to appear to rebel against what one wants to reproduce is elementary Machiavellianism, with its own seduction. If you can’t beat them, join them while appearing to fight them, they will like that.

***

David Brooks published the following comment of mine:

In political fascism, a hierarchy of “leaders” orders everybody around. In intellectual fascism, a few ideas order all spirituality. “Essentialism” flows from “intellectual fascism”. Simplemindedness is what intellectual fascism brings. 

Pogrom Lviv 1941. From a film discovered by US Forces in 1945. Notice Child On the right beating the Jewish woman. This is what identity politics brings, as intended…

How does simple mindedness appear? Mental laziness is one factor. Now laziness in mental matters, as in physical matters comes from lack of exertion. So one may trace US simplemindedness to schooling where not enough mental exertion occurred early on.

My daughter, 11 year old, was informed by teachers that the primary vocation of a school was to respect my child’s “identity”… Now my child has an intensely complicated background, spanning the world genetically and culturally. The head of a school, a standard liberal, privileged middle age Politically Correct WASP blonde cannot even guess how different my child’s world is. And so it is: in places such as California, the background of most children is distant and complicated. Calling for an identity is calling for mutilating simplification.  

Why would teachers think that the  identity of a student trumps education and instruction? Giving primacy to “identity” is saying that what matters most is not education, but identification. That, per se, reinforces racism and simplemindedness, because instead of broadening minds with new concepts, one is supposed to find an ethnic box in which to fit. Instead of  boxing people into prepackaging, schools should identify ideas and concepts, teach how to breed them, create new ones, think out of boxes.

***

In general, elites in power, absent an external threat, privilege staying in power. That’s best accomplished by making people stupid, ignorant and aspiring to submission. All this classical fascist monotheism accomplished.

Christianism was created, and imposed under the penalty of death by torture, by Roman imperial fascism to justify its plutocracy with a devil in heavens, playing god, ordering people to kill their children, promising torture to death as redemption for imperfect submission. Islam put part of that on steroids… That’s called Abrahamism, and rests on the advertised willingness to kill one’s children, an old pathway of antique societies to prosperity (the fact a sheep was substituted at the last instant doesn’t matter: it is the heart that counts). A deplorable necessity 3,000 years ago has been turned into a calling, a willingness to commit the most horrific crime which binds best. 

Identity politics leads to crime, and this is why it is so appealing to the elites, as they typically end up ruling with evil means, and they need crimes that bind. Besides, the easiest way to conquest is division of the potential opposition (“Divide et impera“… Tradition attributes the origin of the motto to Philip II of Macedon, who did just that to Greece…).

Want war? Identify friend and foe. Search for identification, not union.

Patrice Ayme

Scary European Energy Cost Rise… From Fake Green Policies

The crazy energy policies of Europe are finally bringing the penury they carefully prepared… A Scary Energy Winter Is Coming. Don’t Blame the Greens… dissembles the New York Times. Indeed as I pointed out, many times, fake greenery is leading us into a very scary situation. Strategically erroneous so-called “green” policies, led by European and Californian “green” lobbyists, are leading the world into a fossil fuel abyss. India is running out of coal, its main energy source. India competes against buyers such as China, the world’s largest coal consumer, which is under pressure to ramp up coal imports amidst a severe power crunch.

Including nuclear, the world  went from 6% LOW CARBON PRIMARY ENERGY PRODUCTION, to 16%, in 50 years. And energy is only 72% of CO2 emissions. “Green” has been a joke narrated by stealthy fossil fuel advocates.  

Renewables without energy storage is a Trojan Horse for fossil fuels, including “natural gas”. Indeed what happens when the wind stops, the sun does not shine and the dams are empty? As the heating of the planet proceeds, the winds will shift north, bringing drought. No more wind, no more dams…

One has to develop storage. Electric motors and generators compete for the same rare materials: batteries are not feasible for mass storage. What’s left? Hydrogen. “Green” hydrogen generated from solar and wind. Hydrogen can use existing natural gas infrastructure. That was done in France for decades… 

Then, of course, to replace fossil fuels for base load, new technology safe nuclear reactors.

We have to go hydrogen and nuclear. 

Hard logic? The fundamental enemy of progress and understanding, let alone empathy, is simplemindedness. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.

The world is often propelled by Machiavellianism: crafty ones force some issues in such a way that the opposite effects are, in the end, obtained. 

In this light one may ponder Biden’s decision to give tons of Weapon Grade Uranium to Australia in the guise of submarines. HEU to Australia helps Iran and other would-be nuclear weapons states…

Europe, slave to Putin & coal, and US, nukes for all?

Technically the crisis is due to Europe making itself dependent upon world Liquid Natural Gas carried by ships. This LNG is disingenuously viewed as a “transition fuel”, whereas it is just a fossil fuel. And EUROPE CANNOT AFFORD IT ANYMORE, due to increased demand by Russia and especially, CHINA. So LNG addicted Europe is running out of gas. The Fossil Fuel Lobby Is Turning Fake Green Into Real Green, as in the color of the US Dollar… With the Complicity Of The Self-Described “Greens”

My comment above was published by the NYT, and brought a fierce debate… Most readers detesting what I wrote, of course, because they are electric sheep programmed by Google. Smilodon7 from Missouri came out of its prehistoric cave and snarled ignorantly that:

I have yet to hear of any nuclear technology that couldn’t have a melt down if enough things went wrong.  That and the waste problem would have to be solved first.  Nuclear waste is NOT green and ignoring it does not make it go away.

William Starr, from Nashua, New Hampshire correctly replied that: “Nuclear waste? Put. It. In. A. Hole. In. The. Ground.” My answer:

@Smilodon7: You should read more. Present nuclear tech was made to produce Plutonium, for bombs. Energy was secondary. The grotesque catastrophe at Fukushima resulted in no less than three nuclear meltdowns…. From the resultant loss of reactor core cooling brought by incredibly bad management… Yes, three nuclear meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions, and the release of radioactive contamination in Units 1, 2 and 3 between 12 and 15 March 2004. Still, no one died. Better an exploding Fukushima than a functioning refinery….

The Thorium reactor cycle solves the waste problem: its radioactive waste pollution lifespan is 1% (one percent) of the present U235 nuclear energy…. 

China is turning on the first Thorium reactor since 1959. With the aim of converting all their coal boilers to Thorium, if the tech works commercially.

We have a CO2 calamity and catastrophe of unparalleled proportions in 65 million years. Civilian nuclear energy in the West killed basically no one (even Fukushima’s spectacular disaster)… whereas fossil fuels kill a minimum of ten million humans a year, besides entire eco systems dying right now. In California, Giant Sequoias (Sequoia Giganticus) are threatened with immediate annihilation, more than 25% already died in the last 14 months alone… Apocalyptic fires in California show clearly that the anti-nuclear lobby works for the fossil fuels industry and its allies on Wall Street.

***

Alan Stanley from New South Wales Australia got completely confused: @Patrice Ayme Australian scientists found 20k sites on the east coast suitable for pumped hydro capable of supporting the entire Australian energy grid in partnership with variable green power sources. The USA probably has more capacity in the Rockies. And Europe in the French central massif and the Alps further east. So are we building cheap reservoirs with pumps and generators? Of course not, there  is more money to be made in big expensive batteries or bigger expensive nuclear plants. The governments and billionaires need to get on with building cheap stuff that works instead of promoting expensive stuff that stores up trouble for your grandchildren.

The poor Alan Stanley confused the existing small dams, 20,000 of them, with future dreamland.

An other Australian, Reuben, disagreed with Mr. Stanley:

@Alan Stanley “Australian scientists” are ideologically deluded, should it be true what you say: i.e., it is reasonable enough for some scientists to propose that it might be possible for “20k sites on the east coast” of Australia to be developed for “hydro capable of supporting the entire Australian energy grid in partnership with [other renewables]”; but any reasonable scientist should be willing to also acknowledge that is an extremely far-fetched claim, and therefore for “Australian scientists” to be truly scientific, it should be challenged by other scientists, to test the degree of plausibility. Reading between the lines of your comment, it seems unlikely that the claim has been challenged; and instead it has been accepted as dogmatic truth or gospel: that is, yes, Australia can go “green”, and primarily with hydro. Thus to be consistent with your comment, “Australian scientists” must think like a flock of sheep. The leading sheep, who presumably is the Prime Minister and/or Treasurer of Australia, has proposed spending a large amount of taxpayer money on hydro, and “Australian scientists” have followed his lead, and declared that yes, that is the way to go. Such behavior is inconsistent with scientific discipline.

@Alan Stanley: In California dams are so dry, they cannot be used as batteries as they were in the past. There is literally no more water. 

In France the 58 nuclear reactors’ operation have been often slowed down by low river flow, or even completely stopped. France is building “mico-centrales” everywhere, mini dams, with horrendous ecological consequences. Indeed, to give power, water has to be dropped, and that is done inside tubes. So nature is completely deprived of water, and all species which need water disappear. 

Moreover, as I said, the desertic belt is going towards the poles, so hydro is a myth. In equatorial regions dams created devastation, and turn into methane producing engines, as their fluctuation periodically blossom and rot CH4 producing vegetation… defeating the purpose for having them in the first place…

Hydro is fully tapped out. 20K dams in Australia? Those are small dams. They already exist. failure of small dams less than 15m high caused 88% of dam fatalities… Nuclear doesn’t kill, but dams do.

***

Meanwhile John D., “Out West”, discovered the distant past, when there was rain, calling it the future:

@Reuben: Alan Stanley was referring to pumped hydro storage (paired with renewables). Look it up. It’s a massive storage form of infrastructure. They’re big projects, but once in place, a game changer.

My answer:

@John D. Pumper hydro storage worked in California when there was water and several nuclear plants. Now, though, there is no more rain, no more water in the dams… And just ONE nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon… Diablo Canyon two reactors provide the state with 9% of its electricity and 23% of its low carbon energy! 

Hypocritical and secretly pro-fossil fuel Californian powers that be, plan to close the last nuclear plant. 

Meanwhile the Biden administration enabled California to go over the limits in producing electricity from fossil fuels (until November 2021). So we now have fossil fuel electric cars… The present governor, Newsom, made his fortune from the Gettys, once the world’s wealthiest family… from Getty oil, based in...

BIG IDEA In Climate Science: We Are Already Above A DOUBLING OF CO2

Abstract: The Physics Nobel 2021 Was Given To Climate Scientists. The “positive feedback loops” today’s 2021 physics Nobel prize laureate speaks about are ALREADY HERE. No wonder: we are already above the 600 ppm in CO2 EQUIVALENTS…

***

I never heard of the three 2021 Nobel Laureate in Physics. I have heard of more fundamental climate scientists, though, and the Nobel Committee did not mention them, because they are long dead, thus do not need money, and apparently money is everything: the Nobel money was divided in two, half was given to two eminent scientists, and professor Parisi from Italy got the other half. 

When prizes are given, presumably the top thought-givers should be rewarded. Or, at least, remembered. But the Nobel Committee seems determined to avoid this task, this historical examination… Which should not be so arduous. Remember Socrates saying the unexamined life was not worth having? Is the unexamined prize worth having? 

How do the prize committees evaluate the most important act of thought? (I know there are 900 or so physicists on the Nobel consulting committee or so… Half from the US… Not that diversified; but that’s not my main objection: there are not geographically diversified, historically thorough and causally explicit…) 

The top climate physicists rewarded by the 2021 Nobel all work for top establishment institutions, and presumably did detailed work.

However, as far as I am concerned, what counts is who got the main idea first. 

Actually I am not the first one to think of that: even the US Patent System works that way. Conception and Reduction To Practice. One cannot be an inventor if one just engaged in Reduction To Practice. When somebody makes a computer model of someone else’s major idea, it is a reduction to practice, not a conceptualization. 

***

I will write another essay on some of the historical main thought-givers of Climate Science, since the Nobel committee made such a bad job of it. A topmost mathematician (Fourier) figures prominently, so does a woman. 

But let me point out to a crucial idea: talking about CO2 all day long is not enough. Contributions to Radiative Forcing are also made by other MAN MADE greenhouse gases. And they are HUGE. Those can be acted upon more readily than on CO2 emissions themselves (actually many governments are aware of this point).

The contribution to PLANETARY HEATING from ARTIFICIAL MAN-MADE Greenhouse Gases is ENORMOUS, On TOP Of CO2…

Yes, CO2 is natural, much of it stuck in permafrost, and so is released during warming episodes caused by changes in Earth orbit which warm up the Northern Hemisphere (where most of the permafrost and warmable ground ice is). So during warming from orbital fluctuation happens, CO2 accentuates the warming. 

But the MAN MADE greenhouses released today are from human activity, and none are so striking as these gases which do not occur in nature.

And they contribution is enormous: around 60%, the IPCC/GIEC graph is clear (IPCC = International Panel Climate Change, the UN world experts commission).

Now we are at 420 ppm in CO2 (instead of 280 ppm in 1850). So, the total is well above 600 ppm of CO2 equivalent. That means a guaranteed rise of 2.5 degree Centigrade above the 1850 baseline (we are at 1.3-1.5 C above it right now).

***

Conclusion: Even in science, there is too much emphasis on celebrities, a form of fascism and tribalism, and thus fundamentally anti-intellectual. Instead of telling us three guys are bigger than big in climate science, a distortion of reality, one should focus on two ideas: artificial man-made greenhouse gases contribute for more than one-third of the greenhouse forcing and we have already achieved more than a doubling of CO2 in equivalent gases, making a 2.5 C rise unavoidable… That is a doubling of the temperature rise already observed, which should force the Earth average temperature from the present 15C to 16.5 C.

Teaching science and subtlety instead of unfair and unbalanced celebritism, would teach the world community how to think in a more complex fashion rather than just scoring celebrity points… and appreciation thereof.

Ironically enough, the 2021 Physics Nobel was given for complexity studies relating to climate… The fundamental enemy of progress and understanding, let alone empathy, is simplemindedness… And it does not matter where it comes from.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: Let’s use one of the newly anointed celebrities we are supposed to revere, Professor Parisi from Italy, who just got half of the 2021Physics Nobel:

Parisi was thankfully explicit in answer to a question from a reporter at this morning’s Nobel award announcement ceremony in Stockholm. “It is urgent that we make real, very strong decisions, and move at a very strong pace” to address climate change, Parisi said, “because we are in a situation where we can have positive feedback and that may accelerate the increase of temperature. It is clear that for future generations we have to act now in a very fast way, and not delay.”

It is not just question of future generations: entire ecosystems are now going up in smoke. I saw it from my very eyes… Running in smoke, dodging literally helicopters embarking dozens of tons of water in lakes, struggling in devastated forests where it is hard to move because collapsed tree trunks are all over…

The “positive feedbacks” show up as exponentials. Now the funny thing is that the temperature augmentation depends logarithmically on the CO2. Instead, we see temperature graphs which are clearly linear, if not already exponential. That means that the “positive feedback loops” are ALREADY HERE. So here we see why Parisi got a Nobel: he says it is “urgent” because we can have positive feedback and that may accelerate the increase of temperature. But of course if we have “positive feedback” we have “acceleration” and actually an exponential. So Parisi is underemphasizing the total emergency we are in… to the point of saying something nearly as silly as saying that shooting ourselves in the head may accelerate our demise. Yes, indeed.

Why The “Greens” Have Been Fake, So Far. In One Graph

The youngest member of the German Parliament is 23. A “Green”. She is studying in college to become the under-assistant of some theater for children (Jungen Schauspielhaus Hamburg Haus-Regieassistentin). Could she understand the graph below? Probably not. This is the most important graph, it shows our “green” policies in the last 50 years have been erroneous, a fraud and… masquerade. Yes, masquerade. What do the plutocrats who own our world intend to achieve by giving powers to the ignorant? Just the same as they would giving nominal powers to babies.

Yes, we went from 6% LOW CARBON PRIMARY ENERGY PRODUCTION, to 16%, WORLDWIDE, in 50 years..

Strange world… The first rise is attributable to the ramp-up in nuclear and major dams. Now, it turns out that major dams present serious ecological problems, even when used as batteries (filling them up at night with base energy, that is, nuclear energy). In any case, dams are limited… Although one could build elevated artificial lagoons next to off shore wind farms.

So we are going to be led by someone who is just a young comedian. Who else could be better qualified for kabuki style politics we presently enjoy? Maybe my dog should be candidate to leadership. The very idea of having a few leading others without us being able to show to them how stupid and ill-informed they are, is corrupt. But that corruption is precisely their motivation. One may as well reproach vultures to be into decaying corpses. Before I dig further into the corruption of the world leadership and its little aspirant dictators, let me roll out the graph: I had been incapable of finding it in a timely manner for the major essay, ANTI-NUCLEAR ECOLOGY IS FAKE Ecology.

Reason why I could not find that graph, although I knew it existed? Such a graph is deliberately buried under a morass of irrelevant and misleading graphs… A plot, or simply a public so conditioned to ask the wrong and insignificant questions, that what is most significant gets most buried? Probably both… There are companies the business of which is to move around the ranking of search results, in either directions…

Today I saw an idiotic young woman running in 90 degree heat, with a gator on her face, a sort of scarf demonstrated to transmit COVID five times more than no mask… Miles from roads, and there was nobody around, aside from me, also for miles. I will not point out that she was a blonde, probably with “Black Lives Matter” on her multi-million dollars lawn… That blonde is probably studying nothing… That qualifies her for Congress. But even medical doctors are affected by the nonsense: the US has by far the highest COVID death toll, propelled by so-called “experts”, some of whom likely financed the “Gain Of Function” at the Wuhan lab, because Obama had decreed they could not do in the good old USA… And still they pontificate, more mighty than ever [1]. 

This is not the first time that a so-called and self-described “left” or “progressives” go maniacally insane: contemplate Mussolini’s “socialists”, Hitler’s “national-socialists”, Stalin’s “Communists”… Or closer to us McCarthyism… which did not pretend to be left, right, but pretended to save the US way of life, when, actually, it was doing the opposite…

Fleeing from reality, common sense, but fighting COVID 24/7, miles from the closest human… With a gigantic scarf/mask hanging all over her face and chest…

No humans around? Let’s wear a mask!

Speaking of kabuki, the relatively new Japanese Premier observed that he had not been as competent as it should have been fighting COVID, in the last few months. Admitting his failure, he resigned. It would be nice to see the same in the rest of the West… And the so-called “experts” in command of various institutions should be the first, and other government than France should criminally prosecute their health ministers for completely erroneous orders, causing mass deaths…

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] It is amazing that the country with the worst COVID was the same which financed, and mostly elaborated the vaccines… However, on second look, the very fact that NIH financed GOF at Wuhan Virology Institute fits in that scheme: risk taking (plus a zest of greed). Trump, who financed no less than 20 vaccines worldwide (while France or Germany or Italy or Spain, or Japan, financed none, strictly NO vaccine, at least none coming in a timely manner…) is a notorious risk taker. And BioNTech (a couple of Germans of Turkish origin), Astra Zeneca led by a Frenchman, financed by Johnson and Trump, leveraged research at Oxford from women biologists… And Moderna, led by another Frenchman... Looks like the French have to flee…

Of course Russia and China also produced effective vaccines in a timely manner… Indicating they know also how to take smart risks… Trump used to ask whether Biden was sleeping… Don’t know about Biden, but clearly, Europe is sleeping.

Meanwhile China has started the construction of a small nuclear reactor, a type that passively stop if anything goes wrong: Europe threatened to develop these, more than 30 years ago already, but never did: too many fake ecologists crawling around. The new small nuclear reactor will power more than half a million homes on the island of Hainan. Maybe Europe could buy some? Also the Italian space agency, confronted with the failure of the Italian-European Arianespace launcher Vega C, has scrambled and the always helpful SpaceX offered them an immediate launch for their latest bus sized satellite: falling asleep has consequences…

“The second COSMO SkyMed Second Generation satellite (CSG-2) was planned to be launched with VEGA-C within 2021, but the launcher development has been impacted by the VV15 and VV17 failures and, above all, by the COVID pandemic. … it was not possible to have a European backup solution compliant with the CSG-2 schedule, thus an alternative solution with the US provider SPACE X has been adopted allowing to keep the CSG-2 launch within the current year.”

Italian Space Agency (ASI) – September 2021

And for those who wonder what this has to do with the initial subject: the strategy of developing “renewables” instead of nuclear, or both… Is a European strategy, and it is sleeping at the wheel while the biosphere is crashing…. Biden seems determined to adopt it… which makes sense as the US is the number one fossil fuel producer in the world, and that anti-nuclear, pro-renewable strategy is a fake-out. When renewables will have triumphed at not having that much of an impact, the US will be delighted to roll out their nuclear arsenal for the European nightmare…

Hot Dog God

God As A Dog In The Sky
Only god could know that god does not exist. But if god knows this, there is no god, and if she does not know that, she is no god either…

Perhaps the most important fact shown by the history of science is that people can believe in the most foolish things for the longest time, for no good reason whatsoever, except mental inertia or otherwise falling victim to the idle boredom minds cannot tolerate. We are most deluded creatures, deliberately so. But that’s OK, imagination should come first, and it makes our minds expand beyond anything: transhumanism, always going beyond humanism, is the definition of the genus Homo, the genius of the genus.

Error is most fruitful, and everywhere, and is more than recommended, as long as it is accompanied by error correction… Overall and ultimately.

That, too, the history of science shows abundantly.

Modern science shows that immense complexity can give astounding answers: little somethings somewhere can give tremendous effects of a completely different nature, somewhere else. We don’t necessarily have the god(s) causing spectacular miracles: science and complexities can enact miracles.

We simply do not need superstition to believe in miracles anymore…We can literally have effects at a distance we can’t even know about until a potentially very distant future… (Nonlocal effects in Quantum Mechanics.)

The science of anthropology shows the weirdest, most injurious beliefs have existed forever. In all societies, at all times. This is too systemic to be accidental.

A closer examination of history shows that this is no accident. Superstitious religions are follies that bind, precisely because they enabled to mass-kill, mass-injure, or mass-terrorize multitudes. Most of the known 400+ superstitious religions have gravely injured multitudes at one point or another, they are generally how oligarchies rule… through the minds.
But, some will object, is not there any virtue in organized religions? Of course there is, like there is virtue in the whiteness in the Arctic Bear’s coat, Ursus Martitimus.

Superstitious religions are watchdogs keeping souls in line… to better serve the masters as politely as needed to optimize their earthly repose.

Now, of course, all too secular religions such as nationalism, tribalism, gangsterism achieve the same sort of ganging up effects, and are also united by crime, if no other rituals…

All of these are example of mental, or intellectual, when not outright political fascism, which all appeal to the same satisfying feeling of doing much with a restricted instruction set… So, instead of attacking directly the faith into follies that bind, one should rather attack the meta-logy behind them. For example the fact so may people make a virtue of not been “distracted” by the tangential, where the details, and thus the devil, are to be found.

Wisdom lays in the tangential, off the thoroughly beaten common paths…

Patrice Ayme

ANTI-NUCLEAR ECOLOGY IS FAKE Ecology

6% IN 1974 TO 16% IN 2021 FOR THE PERCENTAGE OF ENERGY PRODUCTION FROM LOW CARBON SOURCES (including nuclear): 

WE WILL NOT SAVE THE WORLD THAT WAY!

Most of the noisiest ecology is a lie sneakily fed by the fossil fuel industry. What else?

Worldwide, gas production is at its maximum. World oil production is at its maximum. World coal production is plateauing close to its maximum. This is the “renewable” ecology as we have it, after half a century of hilarious denial by corrupt fools pretending to be ecologically minded… When all they want is to haunt the halls of power, as profiteers in rags, kicking around nuclear energy, as their fossil fuel fellow travelers want them to do. We may as well laugh at it!

Yes, we have augmented the low carbon (renewable plus nuclear) percentage of energy production by ONLY ten percent in half a century: at this rate, it will take another 500 years to produce all energy from renewable sources. We don’t have 50 years. We actually have no years: over enormous zones of the planet, the ecology is dying, when not outright burning away.

Even assuming that all energy production is from low carbon sources, 500 years in the future, the CO2 density in the atmosphere will keep on rising, because energy production is only 72% of total CO2 production. Agriculture is at 11%, deforestation at 6%, metal and cement production and other industrial processes at 6%, waste, etc.

Now of course once there is enough CO2 in the atmosphere, it “hangs around, for a long time: between 300 to 1,000 years”, says NASA.  During that time, temperatures will keep on rising. Moreover, rising temperatures may launch massive release of greenhouses gases from the melting permafrost and increased rotting from all the warm rains which should come as the whole planet turns into a hot wet jungle…

To stop the temperature rise one will have to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and go back down to 300 ppm before too much irreversible damage occurs: that will require huge amounts of energy, thus another energy source than fossil fuels….

Dominant ecological thinking in the last 40 years has been lying, stupid, and corrupt: its main axis has been anti-nuclear. And what did they want to replace nuclear by? Mostly Middle Age energy: wind and water.

And yet a miracle happened, through no fault of Middle Ages obsessed ecologists: solar photovoltaic. Yet it is still a fractionally baked miracle: 22% efficiency, needs the sun, and no storage… 

The result has been the greatest ecological crisis in 66 million years. One can accuse the financial-oil industrial complex, but that’s like accusing a lion to behave like a lion. That’s pointless, as long as the lion is next to you all day, and all night long… And you need the beast to do anything.

Ecological mobs got excited about stupid simplistic identities such as Hiroshima = Nuclear. Yes, right, and Hiroshima, plus Nagasaki ended the Second World War, which was killing at least 10,000 civilians each day, within a week. So?

Then politicians claiming to be strident ecologists accessed to some modicum of power, screaming against nuclear while jetting around the planet. Like Hannibal in Capua, they enjoyed the fruits of their victory, by sinking in an orgy of hedonistic greed and grab. This is why the world ecological strategy has been wrong since 1980.

What was decided then by self-described progressive in ecological matters has been to shot down the nuclear option. Instead it should have been embraced, yet criticized and educated. Not all nuclear options are equivalent, and the best have been left undeveloped… especially Thorium, which has much less drawback than Uranium 235 based nuclear… or then nuclear alternatives were inadequately financed, especially fusion.  So we were left with a version of the nuclear industry which was basically built to make Plutonium, that is… nuclear bombs. Worse: even in that nuclear version, inadequate governmental support prevented it from being as efficient as it could be. And appropriately modernized.  

A theoretician of conspiracies, especially those alive and well lurking in the shadows, would tell you that this is too many coincidences in striking incompetence: a deliberate plot is probably in the work. 

Around 1970, nuclear energy seemed poised to replace fossil fuels for electric generation. That did not happen.

As usual in conspiracy theory, one should suspect that those who profited from the crime are the main suspects.

In this case, who profited from the non-development of the nuclear options? …The fossil fuel industry.

Crime, which crime would bellow our friends, the cognitively challenged ecologists…. Is not having developed nuclear energy a crime, would they indignantly cry? Surely nobody died. Uninformed ecologists don’t even read the newspapers… Too busy probably doing Facebook among their circles of the frantically ignorant. 

Well, fossil fuels kill millions of people a year, worldwide, probably very much in excess of ten millions (10 millions is around the number suggest by the WHO).

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) a United States-based 501(c)(3) non-profit international environmental advocacy group says in 2021: Fossil Fuel Air Pollution Kills One in Five People.
The global toll of premature deaths attributed to the burning of coal, gasoline, and diesel is breathtakingly high, with new research doubling previous estimates.

Let’s now look at the sort of graph the propaganda fossil fuel industry, craftily disguised as fanatically obsessive anti-nuclear ecologists, is keen for the public not to appreciate… Because if the public knew and pondered this graph, the public would feel something strong has to be done, a four dimensional effort: solar-green hydrogen, new fission, Thorium, fusion. China, by the way is making huge efforts in all four (I rarely congratulate Xi and Al…. But this is very important…)

WE ARE (NEARLY) ALL FOSSIL FUELS, MORE THAN EVER: 

The renewables are hard to see in this graph: they are basically neglectable. There is no way our corrupt leaders are not so stupid as not to know this. And even their corrupt experts know the mighty way out of this rests on a combination of solar-green hydrogen, new fission nuclear, Thorium, and fusion (in order of difficulty)

How many people did the nuclear civilian industry kill in the West? Around zero [However read caveat [1]]. The incredible meltdown at Fukushima of three reactors crushed by gigantic fifteen story tall waves  killed nobody (more people died from forced and useless evacuation!) The tsunami killed 20,000, but even pseudo-ecologists recognize the nuclear industry has nothing to do with it… Now Fukushima made both Japan and Germany quit the nuclear industry, so they claimed.
In 2015, nuclear reactors in the U.S. alone generated as much zero-carbon electricity as all the wind turbines on the planet combined. And these reactors use obsolete nuclear technology, and are very old…

Germany instead developed massively lignite, the dirtiest coal, already used by Neanderthals, killing thousands of Europeans.. If not dozens of thousands… Well, as I have argued, killing people is the ultimate (dark) ecology… So it makes sense, but in a perverse way, because this was not necessary…  

***

Meanwhile, so much ice is melting that Earth’s crust is moving… Melting on the Greenland ice sheet is contributing to the sideways slip of Earth’s crust. Ice melt removes mass from Earth’s continents, a study published in Nature (and led by a woman) shows. Yes, an horizontal slip. Liberated from the overlying weight, land that was once covered by ice lifts up: that’s called orolift, and still affects Scandinavia. This vertical response is accompanied with the ground slipping horizontally

Between 2003 and 2018, ice melting from Greenland and from Arctic glaciers caused the ground to shift horizontally across much of the Northern Hemisphere, and by as much as 0.3 millimeters a year in much of Canada and the United States. In some areas, even far from the melting ice, the horizontal movement was greater than the vertical movement.

This is just the start. A worldwide temperature rise of 3 degrees centigrade (1.3 to 1.5 C so far) is quickly ahead. I personally predict 7 degrees rise centigrade by 2100 (from personal research focusing on small thermal inertia systems)… Except if emergency measures are taken (they will be).

Speaking of emergency, China, most craftily, is turning on the first large scale THORIUM nuclear reactor, the first Thorium reactor since 1969… China also has the foresight to equip its new coal plants presently much used to make solar panels for Bin Biden and his voters, in such a way that their coal furnaces can be replaced by Thorium reactors in the future…. 

Another note: giant efforts in wind power have been made. That’s stupid, to the extend it’s being done, neglecting the rest. A fundamental reason is that the wind can die, as it did in the North Sea in 2021, causing a worldwide natural gas and energy squeeze. In turn, that require to leave gigantic fossil fuels as backup (look at Germany!). But not just this. Under my own production, torrid heating is immediately ahead. What would that cause? The main terrestrial convection cells originate around the equator, where very hot and very wet air is lifted, and then, having nowhere else to go, head towards the poles, until it cools down and sink at the latitudes of the Mediterranean-desertic belt, then coming back towards the equator as “Trade Winds”. Closer to the poles, the Coriolis force caused by Earth’s rotation, shows up as “Westerlies”. In between, no winds…

Guess what? Each degree of planetary heating will bring the tropical belt north hundreds of kilometers, and thus, the no-wind belt… The giant off shore wind parks with their thousands of skyscraper turbines full of precious metals will become much more idle than expected… Soon, ladies and gentlemen, soon… 

Patrice Ayme  

P/S: Elon Musk, the top implementer of science fiction space and battery technology has turned decidedly pro-nuclear:

Musk added, as a closing thought:

“I’m also kind of pro-nuclear. And I’m sort of surprised by the public sentiment against nuclear. I’m not saying we should go build a whole bunch of new nuclear plants. But I don’t think we should shut down ones that are operating safely. They did this in Germany and had to create a whole bunch of coal power plants, and I don’t think that was the right decision, frankly.”

No, bad decision, except if what one wants is a world war preceded and accompanied with apocalyptic climate calamity: a 7 C rise in 80 years is simply unfathomable, but that’s what we will get… Absent cutting the crap about the present wind-solar-dams as all we need… Go jog down California’s empty reservoirs for edification…

***

[1] Caveat: Atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s mostly, seem to have increased mortality. That of course has nothing to do with Western civilian nuclear power. The Chernobyl explosion in the Ukraine which officially killed 31 (USSR) to 50 (UN) persons, caused probably many thousands of excess deaths. Official registries indicate that 600,000 people were granted liquidator status.

However that exploded nuclear plant was completely, and thoroughly unlawful in the West, using gas technology which had been found to be extremely dangerous, especially when operated at low power (as during the safety test which led to the explosion while operated by fools at 2 am…) And thus the graphite-gas nuclear tech was NOT developed by France and the US (they both studied it). And the plant exploded in the open air because it had no containment building… And that too is completely unlawful in the West. A compounding factor was the enormity, the sheer size, of that particular reactor type… Something also not authorized in the West… Nuclear power can be made very safe, that doesn’t mean any nuclear power is safe…  

TRUTH EXISTS. LOGIC IS EXISTENCE

What is the most important discovery science ever made?

That truth exists.

Science, logic, emotion, even truth, are all local. Whereas the universe, as far as we can see, extends without bounds shrouded in more mystery than we can guess. Truth is local, but shines and makes us, locally, divine. Most of what there is has to be revealed yet [1]. 

But for the most important: truth exists.

***

SCIENCE POINTS OUT EXISTENCE And CREATES IT:

Demonstrate, comes from what comes out (“de“) of showing (“monstrare“). Trying to temper my seemingly fanatical pro-science mood, as if one needed to be tempered in one’s thirst for knowledge, Sagal Tisqaad made an age-old objection:

“Science has only ever explained how things work. Not what they are.”

Right. Except that things are defined by how they look and how they work… Exactly as “science” does it. And “science” means (more or less) certain knowledge. No more no less. Being against it is being against brains. But then there is more… Is an explanation itself an… object? Yes it is!Let me explain after the contemplation of the tree of life…

Actually some of the basic Judeo-Christian texts evoke the “logic of life”.

LOGOS IS EXISTENCE, EXISTENCE IS LOGOS:

Explaining how something works, and what it means, to work, is itself an existentialist statement. If I proffer Proposition P,  there exists P. 

Some may whine that is just sophistry, a mind game. However, minds are real objects.

At least, so I claim.  I view the brain as a dynamic (sub) quantic object [2]… Made of patterns (neurons, axons, dendrites, neurohormonal topology, and the geometry and topology of structures we know nothing about yet, because they are too fine and dynamic for our present gross instruments of scientific inquiry to reveal; an example is the inner machinery of just one neuron, which is most certainly, in part, and among other things, a Quantum Computer, a sort of entity we barely know exist, and how to make it work a tiny bit… even with the the help of tremendous machinery…)

Ideas correspond to neural geometry-topological patterns, so to a proposition P is associated such a pattern, a pattern specific to P… which didn’t exist before, so came into being as the idea got formulated (one will generally utter the idea before really formulating it). 

“In other words, logic creates existence. As John had it in the Bible…

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” (John 1;1)

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος (En arkhêi ên ho lógos, kaì ho lógos ên pròs tòn theón, kaì theòs ên ho lógos.) The concept is already in Luke 1;2 and the Book of Revelation [3]…

Identifying God and Logic was explicitly done in the 11C by a prominent abbot to the fury of the Catholic church and its Pope. That was the beginning of the end of Christianism. 

How did antique thinkers realize that the logos (discourse, logic) entails existence? Well, introspection: when one has an idea or song in one’s head it can feel all too real… And could, in the end, move mountains… So exist it does…

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: If I put my hand on a red hot surface, what comes into being? Pain! Is pain a… logos… according to my conceptology above? Of course. Pain is logos, fresh or not. Pain is a pattern in the brain which comes into existence, with plenty of sense attached to it, and pain has to co-exist with the rest of pre-existing patterns in said brain…

***

[1] How can something exist locally and not globally? Casual observations show this is the case. Differential geometry is all about the interplay between local and global. That means there is a gigantic science of the interplay between local and global, which can be used… both globally and locally in various analogies, more or less valid or evocative…

*** 

[2] This does not depend on the first analysis, upon my SQPR, underlying CIQ (Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum). It could well be that ideas could be viewed as classical objects. 

***

[3] λόγος, logos is often mistranslated as “word” by churchmen, who, understandably enough, fear logic, the logos. In truth logos is not just the “word”, but words with sense attached, as in Category Theory… logos, the discourse, the logic. Oh, what is logic? No logician has a wide enough concept of “logic”. It is an open problem in logic, what logic is. What I propose is that logic is any brain arrangement which makes sense (by making sense, I mean a sense like x–>y… any chain of implications, as in Category Theory…)