2014 was hotter than 1998. 2015 data in yet?

Categorical nonsense. Each generation has, on the whole lived longer and better than the one before because of the increasing, accelerating emergence of new technologies that allow us to do more with less. The organized capture and application of energy was an enabler of this, but the paleobiological nature of this energy is not wholly responsible for this technological emergence. Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.

You are responding to this statement of mine: My statement is correct, your misinterpretation of it notwithstanding. Technology has increasingly allowed human civilization to do more with less.We can now circle the planet in an hour in small rockets made of advanced materials. In the 1800s, it took a much larger steel steamship two weeks to circumnavigate the planet. That's doing more with less: accomplishing the same task in less time with less material.I don't need to belabor the obvious: we have the increasing capability to do more with fewer square inches of material.But you're ignoring my main point: that our present socioeconomic dependence on paleobiological energy is a contingency of history; there is no fundamental chemical or physical reason why we must have a reliance on fossil fuels.

If you're talking about cheaper in a monetary sense, that's not exactly relevant to the "more with less" thesis. The price of goods, material, and labor is subject to the vicissitudes of the sociopolitical environment. Money is an industrial tool -- an artifact of human ingenuity -- which is only one way of measuring the total value/cost of an endeavor. Sure it is. It's the task of getting a member of our species to begin at one point of the earth, circle around it, and arrive back at that approximate point. But, if this example doesn't do it for you, then the "more with less" narrative can be extended to aircraft instead of rockets. With way more resources as measured by mass? Do you have empirical evidence to validate the idea that more mass was required on the back-end to engineer the first rocket that orbited the planet than the mass required to engineer the first steel steamship to circumnavigate the earth? It doesn't even have to be empirical evidence; I'm just curious why you think that "more resources" (as measured by mass, 'cause that's what "more with less" is all about) were required for the rocket than for the ship. It's not really political, though.

You don't understand the thesis. The thesis is that advancing technology has enabled us to do more with less per unit of mass. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether civilizations subsequently scale their use of some technology. It's still doing more per unit of mass than previous technologies allowed us to do. The key phrase here is "per unit of mass."So no. Your example only confirms the thesis. Watt's engine allowed the English to do more per unit of mass with arguably less energy. That the English subsequently used this technology to great extent has nothing whatsoever to do with the thesis.So I wonder, again, why you're harping on this. The point I was making was this: that this general technology-enabled trend of doing more (per unit of mass) has permitted the growth of civilization; it is not the paleobiological nature of the energy used that allowed this advance. Easy stuff. Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.Edited by Genomicus, : No reason given.