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Author Topic:   Climate Change Denier comes in from the cold: SCIENCE!!!
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 518 of 944 (853509)
05-28-2019 10:43 AM
Reply to: Message 517 by Chiroptera
05-28-2019 10:30 AM


Re: Republicans' War on Reality Continues
So once again the Republicans show contempt for highly trained people who actually know what they're talking about.
And who saw it coming. As soon as Trump won the Electoral College, scientists in the EPA and NOAA and other government agencies started backing up all their data and research on servers outside the country in order to prevent its disappearance by the new administration.
The state of Florida has appointed a science officer whose job is to examine and explain the science that will be necessary to confront the problems facing Florida from the climate crisis.
Problems such as the disappearance of the entire state.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 517 by Chiroptera, posted 05-28-2019 10:30 AM Chiroptera has seen this message but not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 737 of 944 (884690)
03-03-2021 2:04 PM
Reply to: Message 735 by Phat
03-03-2021 10:54 AM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
Not that I am agreeing with the political ideologies of marc9000 but I think that his point is that we the people will never regress in history and become Quakers simply to "save the planet".
First, it wouldn't simply be a question of "saving the planet", but rather of ensuring our continued survival. It is far better and easier to prevent a disaster than it is to try to survive that disaster or even try to ignore the disaster (eg, lung/larynx/mouth cancer victims who have had their throat and half their face removed surgically and yet continue to smoke -- in Austria, I saw a pack of cigarettes whose health warning label was a graphic color photo of cancer surgical aftermaths).
A possible analogy might be your car. You just keep driving it without ever performing any maintenance on it, not even an oil change. Then when you're driving through the middle of nowhere (driven there, had no cell phone coverage) your car breaks down completely, basically just falls apart on you. Now you are faced with a big survival emergency and I'll bet that you didn't pack any kind of emergency kit or supplies either, did you? And yet if you had just done what you needed to do to maintain your car that would not have happened. An even worse scenario would be that your car would fail in such a manner as to cause catastrophic collateral damage including mass casualties. All because you were too selfish and penny-pinching to meet your responsibilities in maintaining your car.
Second, yes, there is always human nature. I want to share an image file, but to my knowledge I still cannot post images on this forum (Percy think's it's a http-v-https security issue and says he will try to fix it), so I'll provide the link to Ed Babinski's Facebook page where he posts it (if it doesn't work, go to that link): Update Your Browser | Facebook .
In the meantime, I will describe it to you (setting a good example which you will yet again refuse to even consider following). It depicts a climate summit in which the speaker has listed the many benefits of addressing the climate change problem. One person in the audience complains angrily to the person next to him: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
As we all witnessed in your adamant and intractable opposition to the clear teachings of Jesus, the only way to convince many people to do the right thing is to make it too expensive for them to continue to do the wrong thing. Too many people, especially Christians, are just too selfish and greedy and lacking in empathy or altruism.
Starting on page 30 of his book, The Authoritarians (2006 -- available for free or for cheap at The Authoritarians ), Bob Altemeyer describes a simulation game that his son ran in which the participants run world governments and have to deal with events and with each other (my son was in such an exercise for one of his public administration classes). Bob used that exercise for his own experiments to see how the game would run with all high-RWA (right-wing-authoritarians) or all low-RWA participants. Here are some excerpts from that book starting at page 30 (go there to read the entire account) -- actually, the entire account is so good and informative that we cannot find what to cut out, not unlike Biden's COVID bill:
quote:
Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference
By now you must be developing a feel for what high RWAs think and do, and also an impression of low RWAs. Do you think you know each group well enough to predict what they’d do if they ran the world? One night in October, 1994 I let a group of low RWA university students determine the future of the planet (you didn’t know humble researchers could do this, did you!). Then the next night I gave high RWAs their kick at the can.
The setting involved a rather sophisticated simulation of the earth’s future called the Global Change Game, which is played on a big map of the world by 50-70 participants who have been split into various regions such as North America, Africa, India and China. The players are divided up according to current populations, so a lot more students hunker down in India than in North America. The game was designed to raise environmental awareness, and before the exercise begins players study up on their region’s resources, prospects, and environmental issues.
Then the facilitators who service the simulation call for some member, any member of each region, to assume the role of team leader by simply standing up. Once the Elitesin the world have risen to the task they are taken aside and given control of their region’s bank account. They can use this to buy factories, hospitals, armies, and so on from the game bank, and they can travel the world making deals with other Elites. They also discover they can discretely put some of their region’s wealth into their own pockets, to vie for a prize to be given out at the end of the simulation to the World’s Richest Person. Then the game begins, and the world goes wherever the players take it for the next forty years which, because time flies in a simulation, takes about two and a half hours.
The Low RWA Game
By carefully organizing sign-up booklets, I was able to get 67 low RWA students to play the game together on October 18th . (They had no idea they had been funneled into this run of the experiment according to their RWA scale scores; indeed they had probably never heard of right-wing authoritarianism.) Seven men and three women made themselves Elites. As soon as the simulation began, the Pacific Rim Elite called for a summit on the Island Paradise of Tasmania. All the Elites attended and agreed to meet there again whenever big issues arose. A world-wide organization was thus immediately created by mutual consent.
Regions set to work on their individual problems. Swords were converted to ploughshares as the number of armies in the world dropped. No wars or threats of wars occurred during the simulation. [At one point the North American Elite suggested starting a war to his fellow region-aires (two women and one guy), but theytold him to go fly a kite--or words to that effect.]
An hour into the game the facilitators announced a (scheduled) crisis in the earth’s ozone layer. All the Elites met in Tasmania and contributed enough money to buy new technology to replenish the ozone layer.
Other examples of international cooperation occurred, but the problems of the Third World mounted in Africa and India. Europe gave some aid but North America refused to help. Africa eventually lost 300 million people to starvation and disease, and India 100 million.
Populations had grown and by the time forty years had passed the earth held 8.7 billion people, but the players were able to provide food, health facilities, and jobs for almost all of them. They did so by demilitarizing, by making a lot of trades that benefited both parties, by developing sustainable economic programs, and because the 32 Elites diverted only small amounts of the treasury into their own pockets. (The North American Elite hoarded the most.)
One cannot blow off four hundred million deaths, but this was actually a highly successful run of the game, compared to most. No doubt the homogeneity of the players, in terms of their RWA scores and related attitudes, played a role. Low RWAs do not typically see the world as Us versus Them. They are more interested in cooperation than most people are, and they are often genuinely concerned about the environment. Within their regional groups, and in the interactions of the Elites, these first-year students would have usually found themselves on the same page--and writ large on that page was, Let’s Work Together and Clean Up This Mess. The game’s facilitators said they had never seen as much international cooperation in previous runs of the simulation. With the exception of the richest region, North America, the lows saw themselves as interdependent and all riding on the same merry-go-round.
The High RWA Game
The next night 68 high RWAs showed up for their ride, just as ignorant of how they had been funneled into this run of the experiment as the low RWA students had been the night before. The game proceeded as usual. Background material was read, Elites (all males) nominated themselves, and the Elites were briefed. Then the wedgies started. As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth--7.4 billion people--and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.
When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for a United Nations meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements were reached.
At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but--perhaps because of the recent failure of the United Nations meeting--no one called for a summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems back home, Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the crises--take your pick--and nobody came.
By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world--although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.
The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together.
The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys that they care about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually push and shove for the bucks. That is, they didn’t care much about the long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth control. Advised that just letting things go would cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go.
Now the Global Change Game is not the world stage, university students are not world leaders, and starting a nuclear holocaust in a gymnasium is not the same thing as launching real missiles from Siberia and North Dakota. So the students’ behavior on those two successive nights in 1994 provides little basis for drawing conclusions about the future of the planet. But some of what happened in this experiment rang true to me. I especially thought, I’ve seen this show before as I sat on the sidelines and watched the high RWAs create their very own October crisis.
Edited by dwise1, : Removed footnote numbers from quoted section

This message is a reply to:
 Message 735 by Phat, posted 03-03-2021 10:54 AM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 738 by Phat, posted 03-03-2021 3:19 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(5)
Message 756 of 944 (884726)
03-05-2021 4:41 PM
Reply to: Message 746 by marc9000
03-04-2021 8:27 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
AZPaul3 writes:
Then you failed, Bunkie. The Texas situation had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with republican politics.
Republican politics didn't bring green, untested, solar and wind power to Texas in recent years, to the extent that it failed them last month. But increasingly liberal voters in Texas did. Where did they come from? I'm glad I pretended you asked that.
AZPaul3 is right and you and yours are dead wrong (with some having ended up more dead than others solely because of Republican politics and having nothing whatsoever to do with renewable energy).
The figures I heard are that only about 10% of Texan energy comes from green sources (eg, wind and solar) and that the remaining 90% comes from fossil fuels. The immediate and principal cause of much of the failure was that it had gotten too cold for natural gas to flow and thus the fuel source for much of the electrical grid.
So what did Gov. Abbott do? He went straight to the FAKE News Network to go onto serial liar Sean Hannity's show to lie out of his ass that it was entirely AOC and her Green New Deal that had caused Texas' catastrophic collapse -- despite the Green New Deal never having been implemented, let alone being promoted as legislature, and despite 90% of Texan energy being based on fossil fuels.
marc, you undoubtedly saw Abbott lie out of his ass on FAKE News and you made the mistake of believing him. After all the times that the Republicans have lied to you, you no longer qualify for the Gomer Pyle Immunity Clause ("Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."). It is solidly your fault for continuing to believe their lies.
The actual cause of this disaster is deregulation under Republican mis-administration of the power grid. Around 2011 there was another cold snap which exposed the vulnerabilities of Texas' power grid to cold weather. After a comprehensive study outlined everything that Texas needed to do to winterize its power grid in order to prevent failures in the next cold snap to come, Texas Republicans decided to suggest to the privatized utilities that they voluntarily do what they needed to do and, of course, those privatized utilities, being far more interested in making as much of a profit as possible despite how much that might endanger the public that they are supposed to serve, did nothing to prepare for that catastrophic winter (refer to the story of the ant and the grasshopper if that is more on your level).
Not only did they do nothing to winterize the power grid, but they also (with the help of Republican state government, no doubt) decided to isolate Texas' power grid from all other power grids primarily to avoid the federal regulation that that would have brought with it. Thus the Texas power grid had isolated itself from any kind of contingency emergency help. El Paso and eastern-most Texas (¿including Beaumont?) were both not on that isolated Texas power grid and so were able to draw power from the power grids of neighboring states and were able to survive.
Now, wind turbines work very well in cold weather when properly designed and maintained -- a viral photo that was supposed to be from Texas during this freeze showing a helicopter spraying de-icing on a turbine was actually from Sweden a couple years ago. And as I understand it, photo-voltaic solar panels actually work much better when it's cold because of electical conductors' resistances' positive coefficient of temperature (ie, a conductor's resistance increases as the temperature increases, which is why super-conductor applications require extremely low temperatures -- this is something that everybody with any degree of electronics training would know, so it should qualify as common knowledge). In case I have to start to draw pictures in crayon, pushing current through a resistance results in some of that energy being lost as heat (which in turn increases resistance which increases the amount of energy lost as heat, rinse and repeat (though it's not as bad as the avalanche breakdown of semiconductors due to their negative coefficient of temperature -- hence the need to include current-limiting resistances in semiconductor circuits)).
Now, why did that only happen to Texas? Why does everything work just fine in the rest of the country where it customarily gets far colder than in Texas? For example, I was stationed in the cold part of North Dakota -- the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales meet at -40° which I personally witnessed at least once. Yet our power grid never failed at the first hint of a chill (though a massive winter storm could, but even that would affect small communities and not everybody) and our heating fuel never failed us. Why would that be? Maybe because we knew what we needed to do to keep those systems operating and so we took care of that?
But in the case of Texas in 2021, they had known for a decade what they needed to do, yet they refused to do that because it would have reduced their profit.
How much is a human life worth? Ask a Republican and the answer would be: not much.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 746 by marc9000, posted 03-04-2021 8:27 PM marc9000 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 766 by marc9000, posted 03-07-2021 4:04 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 757 of 944 (884727)
03-05-2021 6:32 PM
Reply to: Message 751 by AZPaul3
03-04-2021 11:17 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
First act. Make coal illegal. Yesterday.
Yes, I fully agree that the time to have switched away from coal was a long time ago.
But managing the transition away from coal and other fossil fuels is a different and much trickier matter.
I've long thought of offering this US Navy damage control situation analogy to similar arguments. We've all seen that scene in the 1965 John Wayne movie, In Harm's Way where Damage Control is working frantically with shoring timbers to keep a bulkhead from giving way, opening the rest of the ship to the sea.
OK, so in this evolution what do you, in command of the DC team, decide to do? That bulkhead is full of cracks and leaks and needs a complete overhaul. So do you replace it right then and there with a serviceable bulkhead? Makes sense, right? But first you need to tear it out before you can replace it.
And what will happen when you tear it out? The sea will rush in and sink your ship. Viable solution?
OK, the best solution would have been to have started solving the problem long ago. That's like that protest slogan: "What do we want?" "Time Travel!" "When do we want it?" "Doesn't matter!"
So when you're in middle of everything going to sh*t, what do you do? You try to hold everything together that you possibly can until everybody else can finally get their sh*t together. That's where we are now, only far too far behind the curve.
The really big question is transitioning: how we are supposed to transition from the one situation to the other. In this case, how are we supposed to transition from carbon-fuel technology to carbon-free tech (or at the very least carbon-minimal)? A rather complicated problem which opponents seem to refuse to address.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 751 by AZPaul3, posted 03-04-2021 11:17 PM AZPaul3 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 758 by jar, posted 03-05-2021 7:06 PM dwise1 has replied
 Message 760 by AZPaul3, posted 03-05-2021 8:43 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 759 of 944 (884729)
03-05-2021 7:17 PM
Reply to: Message 758 by jar
03-05-2021 7:06 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
Good, some of the engineers are still awake.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 758 by jar, posted 03-05-2021 7:06 PM jar has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 761 of 944 (884734)
03-05-2021 11:57 PM
Reply to: Message 760 by AZPaul3
03-05-2021 8:43 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
OK, just woke up. Believe it or not, I intend absolutely no innuendoes here about anybody's sexual orientation. Seriously! For what it's worth, I'm a conscientious objector myself.
One of the big "Venus-Mars" thangs is supposed to be that he is always trying to figure out a solution to resolve her problem, whereas all she wants is for somebody to sympathize with her about her problem.
Case in point, there was a core of middle-aged, senior ballroom dance students (many of them couples) loyal to this one teacher about in his 30's/40's whom another teacher described as "a queen". He was very good as a dance teacher, though expressively he could go over the top a bit but everybody took that in stride. This may surprise those outside the dance community, but many "of that particular age" are engineers, physicians, or other highly technical professional types. Problem solvers.
So one night our teacher started expressing himself about a problem and I could see that every was getting ready to offer a solution while I wanted to tell all of them "he's not looking for a solution; he just wants to tell us how it makes him feel."
Try to understand the audience here. One night in particular, he tried an approach outside of standard dance angles (similar to Kendo's 8 directions: forward, forward wall, wall, backward wall, backward, backward center, center, forward center) and tried to describe an angular situation that must have made sense to him, but which was completely wrong in any engineering or reality based situation.
Lesson learned: don't even try to talk faulty tech with engineers.
 
Action that needs to be taken under emergency conditions. Always dire, or at least very inconvenient. Most people don't like inconvenient, especially non-veterans.
Funny thing about dire situations is that they pile up. The longer you take to deal with them, the worse they become and the harder it becomes to clean up after them. And the clean-up tab tends to grow exponentially.
 
There was a point in the past when we could have acted and averted disaster.
Later, we could still act and avert most of the disaster, but still incur some damage.
The longer we wait, the more damage we incur, needless to say. It can be so completely and utterly frustrating to observe the totally unnecessary delays.
 
But still, once we get to the actual implementation ... .
 
But then my inner Chief (or inner engineer) comes out. However late we finally respond and regardless of how much damage we're taking from our too-late actions, we do still need to try to keep everything working as much as possible while we switch over to sanity.
Edited by dwise1, : Minor editing.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 760 by AZPaul3, posted 03-05-2021 8:43 PM AZPaul3 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 762 by AZPaul3, posted 03-06-2021 4:37 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 772 of 944 (884785)
03-07-2021 5:01 PM
Reply to: Message 769 by marc9000
03-07-2021 4:19 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
Links? Warned by whom?
Linked to through the Wikipedia article, 2021 Texas Power Crisis:
quote:
Ten years previously, U.S. Federal regulators explicitly warned Texas[18] in a detailed report that its power plants would fail[19] in cold conditions that were likely to come.
Since you will undoubtedly refuse to click on that link (the better to avoid learning anything), here is the link to that report again, Report on Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February I-5 [sic], 2011 -- Causes and Recommendations prepared by the staffs of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
And since we know already and so have very good reason to assume that you still haven't followed that link to that document, here it is yet again as a bare link so that you can examine the URL itself: https://www.ferc.gov/...lt/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf
You can read the entire 357-page yourself and see for yourself what Texan Republicans in charge had been warned about and from that see how they had ignored those warnings.
There is plainly no excuse for how horrifically the Texan Republican gov't completely screwed this up and got people killed and worse.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 769 by marc9000, posted 03-07-2021 4:19 PM marc9000 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 774 of 944 (884793)
03-08-2021 3:52 AM
Reply to: Message 766 by marc9000
03-07-2021 4:04 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
DWise1 writes:
AZPaul3 is right and you and yours are dead wrong (with some having ended up more dead than others solely because of Republican politics and having nothing whatsoever to do with renewable energy).
Today, a few Republicans are somewhat more likely to cross the aisle and side with Democrats if the political winds blow them there. (pressure from their constituents can be an acceptable reason) Romney, Murkowski, Collins, McConnel, or the 10? who voted to remove Trump are examples. Other than possibly Joe Manchin, Democrats are more likely to follow orders from their leadership.
Trying to switch the focus to national politics and away from the complete and utter fiasco of state Republican politics. Stick to the subject! And stop trying to practice your typical deceptive trickery. I have about four decades experience dealing with creationist liars and they used the exact same tricks that you are trying to use here.
Some Texas Republicans caved to green energy demands sooner than they should have, contributing to the blackouts. Your "nothing whatsoever" claim is false.
And yet, green energy accounts for a very small percentage of energy production in Texas, whereas the vastly greater percentage is provided by fossil fuels. It is the failure of the fossil fuel distribution system that caused this disaster.
Please pull your head out.
Texas has a LOT of government incentives for wind and solar. They guarantee profits to big, often foreign companies and lead to market distortions, especially when the voters are brainwashed into accepting the lie that fossil fuels are easily replaceable.
And yet the inconvenient fact (OH! Did I just tap back into the original topic?) is that the vastly greater portion of Texas energy production which failed so utterly was firmly based on FOSSIL FUELS. AND THAT IS WHAT FAILED SO SPECTACULARLY!
"Too cold for natural gas to flow"? I wonder why it flows so well in Alaska and Canada.
Oh wow! Really?
It flows so well in Alaska and Canada (and other very cold places) because they know full well how do to that! Unlike in Texas where nobody knows how to do anything at all that works! Especially if you have to spend any money to get the job done. Because that would cut into profits. Profits over people is the Republican mantra.
Duh?!?!?!?
And it's not the physical properties of natural gas that's in question, but rather the ability of the machinery which moves it to function in the cold. Which that machinery failed to do in Texas because they were too cheap to winterize that system as they had been advised to do a decade ago! Because of Republican policies that placed profits over human lives and which eliminated necessary regulation.
It was Republican policies that killed those Texans, not green energy nor any other of your transparent and flimsy lies.
Before the grid frequency fell to dangerously low levels, some fossil fuel plants had to shut down to protect their equipment.
Please pay attention to your own lies. "fossil fuel plants". You just said it yourself. fossil fuel plants And in case you still cannot see it: fossil fuel plants
Are you still unable to see what you yourself just said or do I need to enlarge that even more?
Not "green energy", but rather fossil fuel plants.
So your failed attempts to blame green energy falls completely flat by your own admission that the power failure was due to fossil fuels.
Maybe Republicans in Texas were trying to save money, money that they need for their ever increasing problems. Like record numbers of illegals pouring over their southern border sporting Biden tee shirts, or an influx of Californians hoping their liberal ideas that are destroying California will somehow work differently in Texas.
"saving money"? No, raking in profits by refusing to do their job! It's not thriftiness that was in operation, but rather greed.
And there you are trying to shift the blame and change the subject, just like typical dishonest deceptive creationists! Have you ever tried to pilot a ship, a large ship? Those things don't turn on a dime, you should know. It takes a lot of time for any course change to take effect. The same holds true for a wide range of social changes like the economy and response to policy changes. Factors affecting the number of immigrants at our southern border go back many months, even years. You want to blame someone for the number of immigrants? Blame TRUMP! He's the one who was in charge when those immigrants went on the move.
Plus, you're just making that shit up. Cite actual figures! Or admit that you're just lying yet again.
They should try to accept Californians on one condition, that they don't let them vote!
There are over 230 bills being submitted by Republicans in state legislatures to keep people from being able to vote. They're reading the wrong message there. If nobody wants to vote for you, then you should try to find out why that is.
Considering the incentives for solar and wind, and the brainwashing that Texans and everyone else has that AOC is wiser than a tree full of owls, the GND really did have something to do with it.
Except that it didn't! As you yourself pointed out! You still have not learned the first rule of lying your ass off, which is that you must keep your lies straight.
And OBTW, AOC was in Texas helping Texans while Cruz was off vacationing in Cancún not caring the least bit about his constituents. By which she proved that she would make a far better senator for Texas than Cruz.
I didn't see Abbot on Hannity, I seldom catch Hannity. I'll have to circle back to you.
You can catch it on YouTube. You know how to STFW, so don't insist that we do that for you yet again.
What do you think of the lie, that all those products I listed in Message 722 can be made without fossil fuels? Or the lie by omission by the mainstream media, that illegals are now pouring over the southern border, many of them wearing Biden tee shirts?
Yet again, you cannot respond to the issues under discussion, so you try desperately to change the subject. Like a typical lying piece-of-shite creationist.
We already know what you are. You have demonstrated it far too many times already.
Maybe those Texas Republicans, caved to their constituents who believe the lies they are told by climate alarmists, that losing fossil fuels is no big deal.
Except that is not what had happened. The failure was in fossil fuels failing to deliver because of destructive Republican policies.
Do please try to pay attention.
I agree, there are three power grids, the eastern U.S., the western U.S. and Texas. Texas established their own to avoid federal meddling, the advantages of that for Texas have undoubtedly been many, but we can't tell, the mainstream media continues to lie by omission.
Which would have required Texas to properly winterize their systems as per that 2011 report (https://www.ferc.gov/...lt/files/2020-04/08-16-11-report.pdf , though I have absolutely no doubt that you still have refused to look at it, so precious is your ignorance to you). By keeping Texas separate and hence not subject to federal regulation, Texas Republicans ensured the failure of their power system and the deaths of Texans.
And yes, some of extreme west and east Texas are on the others, and didn't have as many problems. But the main reason wasn't because of all the additional federal involvement in the two big grids, it was because they are bigger and more diverse, and can divert and cover additional power in some comparatively small areas when needed.
And do please remind us why that would have been a problem for the rest of the state.
And another thing everybody should know, whether they believe climate alarmists lies or not, is that solar doesn't work at night. A Monday night was one of the key times when demand exceeded supply.
Wow! You anti-science idiots never fail to astonish with your stupidity. Do you really believe that all scientists and engineers are naïve fools who always overlook the obvious? Rather it is you anti-science idiots who are the naïve fools.
Ever hear of batteries? Apparently not! Every single solar power system ever conceived of has included ideas for storing energy for times of darkness. There's also a hydro-electric system in which you pump water up into a reservoir during the day time and then at night time run it through a turbine and generator. Scientists and engineers are actually smart people, unlike you and yours (according to your personal witness).
It's only natural that power generating equipment is better protected in central and northern climates, Texas isn't the only southern state that has some equipment outside rather than inside, since it seldom gets cold there.
Yes, which is why they pay out that extra expense to properly winterize that equipment. And that extra investment shows.
Texas was advised a decade ago that it needed to winterize its equipment. And it chose not to! That was not any kind of equipment failure, but rather a policy failure. A Republican policy failure which placed quick profit over the lives of the state's citizens.
Again, how much is a human life worth in Texas? And if you are also one of those "pro-life" wienies, why are you so much anti-life when it comes to Texans?
Alaska doesn't have much air conditioning either. Human error and spending decisions aren't always the fault of Republicans.
They are when those decisions cost lives, which is what happened in Texas.
It is what it is.
Can you provide examples where the scientific community and Democrats have, for the past 10 years, been warning them that they needed to IMPROVE THEIR FOSSIL FUEL CAPACITY? Or has it all been about spending more money on wind and solar?
What the fuck are you babbling on about there?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 766 by marc9000, posted 03-07-2021 4:04 PM marc9000 has replied

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dwise1
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Message 821 of 944 (884953)
03-16-2021 6:18 PM
Reply to: Message 738 by Phat
03-03-2021 3:19 PM


Re: An Inconvenient Truth -- still true
No, but it describes fairly thoroughly the differences between left and right wing thinking...at least in regards o Authoritarian tendencies. Each side tends to believe stereotypes about the other side.
Except that Bob Altemeyer, the author of The Authoritarians (downloadable for free as a PDF or for cheap in a few e-book formats, plus an easy and interesting read), was not in the least engaging in spinning stereotypes about high-RWAs (right wing authoritarians). Rather, you and yours are the ones prone to engaging in stereotyping.
[ Yes, we low-RWAs are also subject to stereotyping, but we also engage in much more independent thought than high-RWAs do. That is why we are so much more difficult to organize, kind of like trying to herd cats, whereas high-RWAs are so compliant that herds of sheep turn green with envy. ]
Here is what Altemeyer wrote (pp ):
quote:
The second reason I can offer for reading what follows is that it is not chock full of opinions, but experimental evidence. Liberals have stereotypes about conservatives, and conservatives have stereotypes about liberals. Moderates have stereotypes about both. Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion. And if you keep finding the same thing experiment after experiment, and other people do too, then that’s a body of facts that demands attention.3 Some people, we have seen to our dismay, don’t care a hoot what scientific investigation reveals; but most people do. If the data were fairly gathered and we let them do the talking, we should be on a higher plane than the current, “Sez you!”
Altemeyer, now retired, was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (AKA "The Peg"). He conducted four decades of actual research in authoritarianism, gathering data in the wild (well, from his students and their families) and analyzing it. He spent most of his PhD career studying authoritarianism and published several papers on the subject. Then shortly before retirement, he wrote The Authoritarians as a more accessible work on the subject (his articles were heavily laden with mathematics and hence virtually unreadable by laypersons) and motivated by the greatest authoritarian threat at the time, Dubya (he and John Dean have since co-written a second book dealing with Trump).
His entry into this specialization was almost by accident. From the introduction of The Authoritarians:
quote:
In the fall of 2005 I found myself engaged, most unexpectedly, in a heavy exchange of emails with the man who had blown the whistle on Watergate, John Dean. He was writing a book about "conservatives without conscience"--which the late Senator Barry Goldwater was to have co-authored. Dean, Goldwater, and others with solid Republican credentials had been alarmed by the capture of the Grand Old Party by the Religious Right and its seemingly amoral leaders. Dean was plowing through the social science literatures on conservatism and religion to see what perspective academics could offer his analysis, and eventually he ran across my name.
Who am I? I'm a nearly retired psychology professor in Canada who has spent most of his life studying authoritarianism. I got into this field by being lazy. When I took the exams for getting a Ph.D. at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1965, I failed a question about a famous early effort to understand the authoritarian personality. I had to write a paper to prove I could learn at least something about this research, which had gotten itself into a huge hairy mess by then. However, I got caught up in the tangle too. Thus I didn't start studying authoritarianism because I am a left-winger (I think I'm a moderate on most issues) or because I secretly hated my father. I got into it because it presented a long series of puzzles to be solved, and I love a good mystery.
Now, 40 years later, everyone who knows me would rather volunteer for a root canal operation at a school for spastic dental students than ask me a question about authoritarianism. My wife has never read a single page in any of my books. Few of my colleagues in the psychology department at the University of Manitoba have asked about my research since 1973. People I meet at parties, including folks in their 70s, inevitably discover they have to call the baby-sitter about three minutes after casually asking me, "What do you do?" You can't shut me up once I get going. Yet John Dean was reading everything I had written and pummeling me with insightful questions for months on end. I had died and gone to heaven. And since John's best-selling book, Conservatives Without Conscience had used my research to help explain how America was going to the devil, he thought I should write an easy-read, non-technical account of what I have found before I do die, and go to heaven or the devil. It will begin appearing on a screen near you soon.
He devised and perfected that tools of his craft, questionnaires, and collected data for the next four decades. He subjected all of his students to those questionnaires as well as those of their families whom he could get to volunteer. He also conducted diachronic studies, following those students throughout their lives to see how their attitudes and RWA ratings changed over time (eg, most arrived from being insulated in their families and communities with high RWA scores, then their experience in university lowered their RWA scores, but when then they had their own kids to raise their RWA scores went up, etc).
After having arrived at his subjects' RWA scores, he also administered questionnaires about their attitudes and beliefs. Thus his findings of what high-RWAs think and believe are based on his research and not at all on any stereotyping.
Just read the book. It's free and it is an easy and interesting read. And despite his joking that only masochists would read his footnotes, those footnotes contain the most interesting content.
In general,however, one group believs in caring for the group (of humanity on the planet) above their own self interests. The other side does not...but not simply because they are selfish or power hungry. The Hight RWA believe that it is detrimental to be forced to arrive at a consensus that impinges on personal freedom.
No, that's not really what he found. Rather, you have just offered some of the rationalizations used by high-RWAs.
High-RWAs operate on a daily basis in a heightened state of fear and hate (most of that hate generated by near paranoid fear). They tend to adopt a xenophobic world view of "them against us" in which "us" is a narrowly defined in-group. In that world view, those in the out-group are perceived as threats to your very existence.
A corollary that should be noted is not mentioned by Altemeyer. The limbic system (AKA "r-complex", "reptilian brain" since we share that with reptiles). That includes the amygdala which includes the processing of emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression) also known as "fight or flight" -- it is reported that brain scans of right and left wingers show the amygdalae of right-wingers to be enlarged. On top of our limbic system we have the mammalian cortex and then the primate neo-cortex, which we use for our rational thought processing. Blood flow to the brain is important and physical anthropologists discuss (at least in science popularizing) the metabolic and nutritional demands that our brains place on our bodies.
Punch line: Brain scans reportedly show changes in the distribution of blood in the brain (and hence greater or lesser brain activity) in response to different kinds of situations. When engaged in rational thought (eg, performing mental arithmetic), then blood flow is mainly to the neo-cortex. When responding to an emotional situation, especially to fear and anger, then blood flow to the neo-cortex is shut down and redirected to the limbic system, to a "fight or flight" response.
I am a military veteran with 35 years of service. Our most important evolutions were training evolutions (yes, Navy). Consider that military service, especially in war time, has been described as weeks of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror. In those minutes of sheer terror, all your brain's blood is redirected to your limbic system shutting down your neo-cortex (any hope of rational thought). So when the sh*t hits the fan, not only do you not have time to think, but you are also incapable of thinking. That is why you train constantly, so that in those emergency situations you don't have to think but rather your training kicks in and you do what you need to do to function and to survive and to do what you need to do.
How that relates to high-RWAs with their hyper-active amygdalae is that high-RWAs will tend to react emotionally with their right-wing propaganda kicking in without putting any thought into it, whereas low-RWAs will actually stop and think about things.
If you are an authoritarian wanna-be leader, then you would want to gather support from high-RWAs and to suppress the low-RWAs. High-RWAs are the actual "sheeple", ever ready to follow a leader, whereas low-RWAs are more like cats whose independent thinking makes them so difficult to herd as to spawn their own meme ("like herding cats"). As Altemeyer describes it (cannot find the actual text right now) when an authoritarian leader tells high RWAs that he believes what they do, then they believe him, but when he tells the same thing to low RWAs, they don't believe him and question his motives.
 
Another characteristic of high RWAs is their cruelty. Well, it's more a tendency to blame and want to punish the victim.
For example, when a hurricane hits a red state, then everybody, including those low-RWA Democrats, move immediately to help them recover. But when a blue state gets hit (eg, Hurricane Sandy hitting New York City) then the high-RWA Republicans work to block aid to the blue state.
We saw this in action at the start of the pandemic. The earliest outbreaks were in the ports of entry which are predominantly in blue states like New York, California, and Washington. So the Trump Administration, gleefully noting that blue states were being affected, did the best it could to completely f*ck up our response (including having FEMA steal PPE and ventilators from states' shipments, which led to the Maryland governor to smuggle supplies in from South Korea in a James Bond operation). In order to punish the blue states.
 
And starting from page 20 (but also read the preceding pages):
quote:
The last string of studies I want to lay before you regarding authoritarian
submission concerns authoritarians’ willingness to hold officials accountable for their misdeeds. Or rather, their lack of willingness--which catches your eye because high RWAs generally favor punishing the bejabbers out of misdoers. But they proved less likely than most people to punish a police officer who beat up a handcuffed demonstrator, or a chief of detectives who assaulted an accused child molester being held in jail, or--paralleling the trial of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley--an Air Force officer convicted of murder after leading unauthorized raids on Vietnamese villages.
The “Milgram experiment,” which we shall discuss at the end of this book,
offers another example of authoritarian followers “going easy” on authorities. In his famous study Stanley Milgram maneuvered subjects into a situation in which they were ordered by an Experimenter to inflict painful, and possibly lethal, electric shocks on another person (who in fact was not hurt at all). The subjects clearly did not want to deliver the shocks, but the Experimenter told them they had to. The Experimenter even said, if pressed, that he would accept responsibility for whatever happened. Yet Tom Blass of the University of Maryland at Baltimore found that high RWA students tended to blame the Experimenter less for what happened to the victim than most students did.15 Whom did they blame instead? I found, when I replicated the study, they blamed the poor devil who was ordered to deliver the shocks, and the victim, more than most others did.
If some day George W. Bush is indicted for authorizing torture, you can bet
your bottom dollar the high RWAs will howl to the heavens in protest. It won’t matter how extensive the torture was, how cruel and sickening it was, how many years it went on, how many prisoners died, how devious Bush was in trying to evade America’s laws and traditional stand against torture, or how many treaties the U.S. broke. Such an indictment would grind right up against the core of authoritarian followers, and they won’t have it. Maybe they’ll even say, “The president was busy running the war. He didn’t really know. It was all done by Rumsfeld and others.”
Authoritarian Aggression. When I say authoritarian followers are aggressive I don’t mean they stride into bars and start fights. First of all, high RWAs go to church enormously more often than they go to bars. Secondly, they usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. “Right” for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is (in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. “Might” means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob. It’s striking how often authoritarian aggression happens in dark and cowardly ways, in the dark, by cowards who later will do everything they possibly can to avoid responsibility for what they did. Women, children, and others unable to defend themselves are typical victims. Even more striking, the attackers typically feel morally superior to the people they are assaulting in an unfair fight. We shall see research evidence in the next chapter that this self-righteousness plays a huge role in high RWAs’ hostility.
Just read the fracking book already!
What would happen, for instance, if the majority was poor and needed a lions share of the funds shared? That does not sound fair and equitable to me, and I wouldn't automatically believe that Jesus would support it.
In such a situation as you describe, all of society would be on the verge of complete collapse. So there would be no optimal solution to save society.
Let's try an analogy. You are on the USS Arizona on 07 Dec 1941 at 0806 when the last bomb has hit it. What is the optimal solution to saving the ship? If you were in a position to help evacuate wounded shipmates, would you refuse to do so because that would detract from saving the ship which you already know is a lost cause?
In their opposition to social programs, Republicans bitch and moan that it's too expensive and, beside, there are those who cheat on those programs (Reagan's "welfare queens"). For one thing, evidence of cheating on these programs rank alongside "voter fraud" in that they constitute a very small percentage.
So is this the Army? If one soldier out of 1,000 does something wrong, do you punish the 999 other soldiers who did right because of that f*ck-up? I've been there in the Air Force at tech school. Since our basic electronics doctrine (BED) school was on the other side of the runway from the Keesler Triangle, we had to march there in formation. One morning in the pouring rain, one airman out of the entire formation had forgotten his raingear, so nobody could wear their own raingear. We were all punished for one troop's f*ck-up. As the CO of Reese's military school in Malcolm in the Middle would say, "Now I will leave the room so that you can all thank him."
Is that how we are supposed to run a social program? In the high-RWA mind, yes. In the rational mind, no.
So how much does it really cost? Watch Robert Reich's video, Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go, in which he breaks down the Discretionary Spending Budget :
Income Security spending, which includes food stamps: 6%
54% goes to defense, most of which goes to defense contractors.
So you want to argue that that 6% is going to destroy the economy, then you answer this one pressing question for me: What the hell have you been smoking?

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 860 of 944 (887570)
08-10-2021 1:22 PM


Climate Change on The Newsroom
From the HBO series, The Newsroom (2012-2014), here is the interview with an EPA official:
Basically, "that would have been great to have done 20, even 10, years ago. Now it's too late." That aired in 2014.
 
ABE:
One of the items he says we have to look forward to is mass migrations. Like the beginnings of starvation from crop failures in Central America which is part of what's driving their migration northwards to our southern border. This is part of the reason for our "immigration problem" and it's only going to get worse.
 
In 1989 James Burke, BBC science correspondent who also did the PBS series "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed", did a series, "After the Warming" which looked at the effects of global warming (YouTube search page: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=james+burke+... ).
The format is that he is reporting from the future that we are creating and describing how everything went down the tubes. He keeps hinting at their still awaiting data from the Atlantic. As we were all taught in elementary school (or a bit later), the Gulf Stream is a current of warm water running close to the surface which provides Europe with a temperate climate. What we were not taught is that as that warm water cools, it descends into the depths and then flows southwards to the Caribbean where it gets warmed and flows northwards again.
It is a circuit, like where the electrons from the battery flows out to the devices, but they all have to be connected to a common return path (to chassis ground in a car) in order to complete the circuit and allow the electrons to flow. Or the central forced-air heating in your house which blows heated air out the vents throughout your house, but there still has to be that return vent (which is where you replace the filter periodically) taking in the cooler air to be heated and forced out the vents. If that circuit is not completed, then then the flow stops.
In the Atlantic, that's referred to as a "conveyor system". Without that cold deep water returning south, you no longer have a Gulf Stream keeping Europe temperate. Now, that conveyor system depends on the sea water being a certain salinity, that it be salty enough. As the ice cap of Greenland melts, it dumps more and more fresh water into the northern seas, reducing the water's salinity. That is what will lead to the breakdown of that conveyor system which drives the Gulf Stream.
In "After the Warming", they have just discovered that that conveyor system has stopped.
Edited by dwise1, : ABE (not the Scottish ABE: "Anybody But England")

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 925 of 944 (895156)
06-09-2022 10:12 AM
Reply to: Message 924 by Percy
06-09-2022 9:51 AM


Re: a wee bit under
When you read "meters", think "yards". Should be close enough.
Part of a page I'm working on for my website, "How to Learn to Think in Metric".

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 926 of 944 (895157)
06-09-2022 11:11 AM
Reply to: Message 922 by AZPaul3
06-08-2022 3:12 PM


Re: Texas Toast
The great flud(s)?
According to research I did back when and posted on CompuServe in 1990 (GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF AN ANCIENT EARTH), the melting of the ice sheet at the end of the last ice age, the Wisconsinan Ice Age:
quote
As promised earlier:
      Question: "Is there any evidence of a single world-wide flood?"
      Answer: "YES, and it is still going on!"
During the ice ages, the sea level would subside due to the amount of water that would be trapped in the ice caps rather than being in the oceans. During the last great ice age, the Wisconsinan, the sea level was about 200 feet lower than it is now. This means that ocean bottom shallower than 200 feet was dry land and a number of land bridges, such as the one across the Bering Strait were open. Judging from my atlas, most of the Persian Gulf should have been dry land.
Then about 11,000 to 17,000 years ago, the Wisconsinan Ice Age ended, the ice melted, and the sea level rose, flooding the lowlands. Since human populations tend to concentrate along the shorelines and in the lowlands, this catastrophic flooding could not have gone unnoticed. Indeed, it would be very surprising NOT to encounter flood stories world-wide.
So not only do we have here an example of a single world-wide flood produced entirely by natural causes, but it is still going on; the flood waters have not subsided! Indeed, if the world climate warms up as we fear it will, then we would be faced with still worse flooding as the sea level rises another 150 feet (if the entire Antarctic ice cap were to melt).
ABE:
So we are still in the middle of that world-wide flood; the waters have not receded! And now the "flood waters" are getting even higher.
Since then, I learned of the Wallace Line in Indonesia:
quote
The Wallace Line or Wallace's Line is a faunal boundary line drawn in 1859 by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and named by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley that separates the biogeographical realms of Asia and Wallacea, a transitional zone between Asia and Australia. West of the line are found organisms related to Asiatic species; to the east, a mixture of species of Asian and Australian origin is present. Wallace noticed this clear division during his travels through the East Indies in the 19th century.
The line runs through Indonesia, between Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes), and through the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok.
Using Google Earth (which also displays sea depth), I found the depths of the Java Sea to be under 200 feet, similar to the depth of the Persian Gulf, which would be indicative of a land bridge during the Wisconsin Ice Age. However, between Bali and Lombok (through which the Wallace Line runs) sea depth is 2000 to 3000 feet deep, hence no land bridge for there. Same between Borneo and Sulawesi (about 5000 feet deep).
Also, on a "Discovery"-type channel, they reported about an ancient sea-side temple complex somewhere on the coast of India. It stands there half submerged about a quarter mile out from shore (if I recall correctly).

Edited by dwise1, : ABE


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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 931 of 944 (895288)
06-20-2022 5:18 PM
Reply to: Message 930 by nwr
06-20-2022 4:14 PM


Re: Texas Toast
So then he's pissed off for absolutely no reason?
And his point is ... ?

This message is a reply to:
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