Science

Now perhaps there are people here who think they care about the environment, but disregard data, from say, the International Energy Agency as "misinformation."

Every year the International Energy Agency publishes the World Energy Outlook (WEO) and I generally refer to each issue throughout the year.

My most recent entry on this topic, referring to the 2023 WEO released just two weeks ago is here:

The 2023 World Energy Outlook Has Been Released. 632 EJ, 15 EJ from Solar and Wind in 2022.

Excerpted:

Now if one is so busy patting one's self on the back for owning a solar array - which will be electronic waste for which future generations will have to deal in less than 25 years - for producing 80,000 kWh of unreliable electricity over a period of 9 years one may not be paying much attention to the world beyond.

80,000 kWh over 9 years works out to 288 billion joules, or 32 billion joules per year. Humanity was consuming, according to the WEO which may be represented as "misinformation" by anyone embracing delusional dogma, in 2022, 632 Exajoules of energy, where the Exa prefix refers to 10¹⁸, or one billion billions. Thus 32 billion Joules (32GJ) represents a fraction equal to 0.000000032 of the world energy supply. It follows, even if we ignore the consequences of the 2nd law of thermodynamics as battery assholes do all the time to deal with the issue of "night," that we'd "only" need close to 20 billion solar set ups like the one described in this thread to meet the world energy supply.

I also track, regularly the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide and its concentrations in the planetary atmosphere.

A recent, among many posts in my journal here is this one:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record (Provisional) Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 424.63 ppm.

An excerpt:



In my experience, as a scientist, I am acutely aware that people who refuse to have their lazy dogma challenged refer to facts as "misinformation." We saw it a great deal during the Covid crisis, but actually, in terms of consequences, energy dogma is much worse, because climate change is killing the future for all coming generations and Covid only killed a few million people.

As it happens, while all our "solar will save us" heroes spend time patting themselves on the back for their nobility, 19,000 people die every day from air pollution while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come. Covid never killed as many as 19,000 people in a single day, even on its worst day.

Ref: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

Excerpt from the reference:



Now over the years here, 21 of them as of later this month, I've heard lots of bull from people who claim to care about the environment but not so much as to look in any detail at it. It's all handwaving and chanting with these types.

Since the week I joined DU, the concentration of the dangerous and deadly fossil fuel waste, as of this week, has risen by 46.48 ppm. In May of 2024, assuming I'm still alive, which I may not be, we will pass the 50 ppm mark in my tenure.

All the while people have been hyping solar and wind energy, which remains trivial, useless, and unsustainable, doing nothing more than to entrench the use of dangerous fossil fuels, about which solar and wind advocates couldn't care less.

As for whining about "wringing hands in defeat," I am very proud of the fact that I raised a son who is working on a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering.

He's certainly not sitting on his ass repeating self congratulatory pablum about "doing something" which in fact amounts to doing nothing and worse, cheering for doing nothing.

He and his colleagues consider that they are doing what can be done to save what is left to save and restore that which can be restored.

If one cares about the environment for real one will know what's going on. One get's off one's ass and looks into the matter, the numbers that matter, not just some trivial numbers in some personal provincial setting, but in the world at large.

The planet now burns in summers. People die in the streets from extreme heat and indoors when the air conditioning fails. Vast ecosystems are collapsing. Extreme weather rips all around the world The glaciers on which billions of people depend for their water supply are disappearing.

In general I encounter people all the time who claim to care, but actually haven't even a trace of knowledge about what is happening.

It is, indeed, regrettable how many there are. They, like the "solar and wind will save us" bullshit they hand out are what I said they are in the OP, tiresome.

Have a wonderful day tomorrow.