Group effort to study the mathematical sciences for “saving the planet.”
azimuthproject.org
azimuthproject.org
It's gotten so bad that utilities are fighting the problem of drying out pipes and have to spend money unplugging clogged sewer lines that don't have enough water in them. But no amount of reasoning helps, the people see stories of thirsty children in Africa and decide the best thing they can do is to take shorter showers, and re-use water from cooking to gardening. Meanwhile Germany only uses 2.7 percent of its available drinking water. When asked why they do this, answers range from "It's for the environment. And the children." to "I feel sorry for the water."[1]
So on the long list of crazy things that people do to "save the planet", studying math is quite beneficial.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-too-much-water-in-german...
Germany had 9 out of the ten last seasons net-dry. It lost 700,000 acres of forest in the last three years due to lack of water. Spruces in lower-lying regions are pretty much done for Shipping on the river Rhine had to be restricted due to low water.
Germany is mostly still OK - you see most of the effects in regions with sandy soils, where water isn't retained long enough. (E.g a lot of the eastern parts) And, like everywhere around climate change, the "consumer efforts" are mostly existing to distract from the major sources of problems. (For water, in Germany, that would be electricity generation and the need for coolant)
The "water masochism" is a deflection by politicians, rooted in a real problem.
You know the WSJ is lying when their sublede contains "criticized by some". It's the traditional unattributed quote that's mostly made up.
Refusing to take a longer bath is not going to increase rain in a specific area. Nor is the insistence on letting 97% of the drinking water run into the sea going to save a single tree in Germany.
And nobody is letting "97% of the drinking water run into the sea". 70% of potable water is groundwater in Germany. That's kind of not really jamming with the 97% claim, is it?
You seem to think that a non-sequitur is factually false statement, when it is a statement that does not follow. Like when I say, Germany is saving water when it has a surplus, and you say "oh but some trees died of drought on that hill". Or if I say "this company earned a huge profit" and you say "How can that be when revenue for this product is 5% lower than last year?"
> 70% of potable water is groundwater in Germany. That's kind of not really jamming with the 97% claim, is it?
As to my source for the 3 percent figure:
"Water is not scarce in Germany, except for occasional localized droughts. Public water utilities extract only 3 percent of total renewable water resources in Germany, or 5.4 billion cubic metres out of 182 billion cubic metres annually.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
As to your claim that if 70% of that 3% comes from ground water, then it is impossible that the water extracted be only 3% of the total, I would merely point out this is another non-sequitur.
FYI, ground water is just water from aquifers fed by rain as it enters more porous rock. Sometimes the water stays on the surface and you get a river. Sometimes the water seeps into the rock and you have an aquifer. The majority of rain enters aquifers.
Now it is completely irrelevant whether you are taking water from a river or an aquifer as both are fundamentally the same thing. Most nations take water from aquifers. That does not mean that the water is non-renewable or not coming from rain.
What matters is whether the total new water coming in is less than the water being taken out. The remainder will fill up the aquifer, and when the aquifer is filled, it will wash out to the sea or exit underground somewhere else. And the way you can measure these things is if the aquifers are increasing or decreasing or staying the same. Guess what the situation is in Germany? Yup, you have more frequent flooding as aquifers are saturated, meaning that they are not even able to absorb above average rains very well. This means people are dying in order to feel righteous for saving water. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flooding-in-germany-europe-deat...
https://www.isciences.com/blog/2021/09/22/europe-water-surpl... Summer 2021 has been Germany’s wettest in a decade according to the nation’s weather service. Precipitation in July was 40 percent above the 1961-1990 average and 25 percent over 1991-2020 for the month, resulting in flooding and landslides that claimed 180 lives.
Ground water rising to dangerous levels in Berlin: https://www.economist.com/europe/2014/04/05/the-moisture-dow...
"Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the groundwater level has risen by over half a meter." This is because, amongst other reasons, former East Berliners, price-shocked by the market rate for water and looking to save their money, and former West Berliners, motivated to conserve resources in the name of environment stewardship, both cut back quite drastically on their daily usage. Indeed, contemporary Berliners are now using only two-thirds of what they should be."
As long as the aquifers are not being depleted, then the nation as a whole has a surplus of water. That is true for Germany. A huge surplus. This is true even if the total coming in is variable (shocker!) and that variability causes variability in vegetation (another shocker!). It's still true that Germany has a huge, huge surplus. Every year.
Seriously, is this hard to understand? The world doesn't follow principles of empathetic magic, where people need to punish themselves each time they hear about something bad on the news. There is zero benefit to curtailing water consumption in a water-rich nation, and in fact this causes real harms in damaging the water delivery system:
https://www.dw.com/en/german-water-conservation-impairs-sewa...
"Germans' well-intentioned efforts to use less water at the household level are causing problems for some of the country's sewage treatment authorities. Water conservation has been so effective that there's not enough water being flushed through sewage pipes, meaning that the system often becomes clogged and pipes tend to corrode due to the air in them."
"In Cologne we have major problems because it is a very flat city," he said. "Water has to flow for very long distances, so by the time it gets to the treatment center, it is already very stagnate." Disinfecting this water requires heavy use of energy and chemicals, which in turn disturbs the ecological balance. So in end effect, saving water can actually defy the purpose of preserving the environment, said Weyand."
We seem to live in a world where wishful thinking often overrules facts to our detriment. Yours is a good example that if we want to optimize our actions to promote environmental goals, we need to properly consider those goals and not substitute how we feel about an issue. Thanks for pushing back!
This doesn't change that concern about water usage matters in Germany. And to spell it out for you, lest you miss it again: This is not about usage in private households. This is about commercial water usage. We're in agreement that private household changes have little influence.
That goes for your numbers as well - the 3% usage is specifically personal household usage. That isn't what I'm arguing about.
Also, you might want to correct your assumption that all unused water flows back into the ocean. Evaporation is where ~65% of the annual rain goes. (Hence my objection to "97% of it flows back into the ocean unused". It really doesn't)
And that has implications for the "renewable resource" idea, because that evaporation matters to climate overall. It's not water used by humans right now, but it's not on the table as an exploitable resource without shifting local climate either.
Then there's the fact that seasonal variability matters a lot when you talk about agriculture. The lack of spring/summer rain is a large problem, even if the net amount of rain stayed the same. (It didn't for 12 of the last 13 years, so citing 2021 is especially disingenuous)
If you're interested in annual drought patterns, here's a pretty decent visualization of annual patterns reaching back 7 years https://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=40990
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/complex-adap...
If you read journal articles, etc. you'll find a truly surprising number go out of their way to mention climate change, green initiatives, etc. when they lack good reason to do so. In particular, these words will take places of honour in the abstract or even the title while the rest of the article pays them scant and passing notice.
Why do this? Funding. Every generation of science has it's magical buzzwords. Most recognize them for what they are but, when the people with money can't decide on a difference in merit between what you're doing and what your competitors are doing, buzzwords can make the difference.
Is this another case of buzzword fund-farming? I'm not qualified to say, and you'd probably need to ask the participants in this initiative to track down somebody who is. That's why this sort of thing is so hard to stop.
We can't necessarily make a mathematical model useful for understanding the processes that happen during the manufacturing and operation of solar cells/batteries. In fact in many cases determining just what processes are happening is a problem in and of itself. We don't necessarily understand how batteries degrade or why adding a certain component or using a certain process makes batteries degrade less. Determining this often can only be done with real world experimentation.
One problem relevant to making organic solar cells is determining how organic constituents crystallize. A talk I saw looked into doing this computationally, but claimed it to be intractable. The problem was that the same compound, but with a different isotopic composition crystallized completely differently. This meant that nuclear motion mattered and that the already computationally expensive crystallization sim being done needed to be made orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to get useful results.
This isn't to say that math isn't useful, it's just that math isn't necessarily as useful when real world experimentation is necessary. That being said, math can still be quite effective in the natural sciences.
> We don't necessarily understand how batteries degrade or why adding a certain component or using a certain process makes batteries degrade less.
It sounds like you're saying that better mathematical models can't possibly help because our current mathematical models aren't good enough. Huh? Isn't better theory exactly the answer to "how" and "why" questions? Why would you not want to improve the theory because the theory isn't good enough? Better theory is how you explain and guide real-world experimentation. Plenty of completely intractable problems have suddenly become quite tractable with better math.
It is my impression that, at least on the topic of climate modelling, climate change denialism (which, frankly, is less and less common among educated population) was sustained by the rhetoric about models not being certain about linking anthropic change and its effects.
So at least here I see that better understanding (accuracy/reliability) about the climate system (which the azimuth group claims to have contributed to, if I remember correctly) might have a direct effect on, at least, social perception of the uncertainty surrounding science...
What does this have to do with "saving the planet"?
I’m like 95% joking.
Also, from the people at MIT: https://forum.azimuthproject.org/categories/mit-2020%3A-lect...
From my experience in the field,
Milewski is fine, but Fong/Spivak are the kind of people that usually overpromise/underdeliver, so this seems to me like someone's effort to attract grant money and not much more.
These contracts are going to live in a very complex environment and have network effects which approximate a semantic web or a global narrow AI. My own angle on this stuff is collecting environmental information from bird calls heard by smartphones. This could alert us to sudden ecological changes.
[1] https://math.ucr.edu/home//baez/theoretical/theoretical_web....
In my view John is an exceptional educator, inspiring, energetic and accommodating to many people.
I do think, however, his 'save the planet' efforts are misplaced. I think the mathematical tooling and theoretical machinery to help technical initiatives in planet saving -- exists.
What does not exist is honesty in country/world wide policy making.
Every crook wants to be viewed as 'idea generator', planet-saving-angel -- as long as tax money get diverted to whatever causes -- through their 'sinks and facets' of control.
I am not advocating to give up -- I am advocating to use talents that these folks have to figure out how to achieve transparency in political, contractual system of incentives.
If they would work with investigative journalism to find who the crooks are, how they divert public money, how they have selective outrage against one entity, but not another doing similar things -- that were the focus should be.
Then you can predict a crisis with your esoteric model, use that to justify forcing your political choices on others, and shame anyone who disagrees!
This does not mean one shouldn't study category theory; but one should study it for its own merit, not under the illusion that it is an effective way to "save the planet."
After all marketing is all about making the masses move a certain way..
All this to say: some social attractors are way more attractive than others (that's why they are "dark" patterns). Only physical constrains will do the trick, I'm afraid.
People are followers, I firmly believe that the minute another model of society pops up, population will flip "overnight".
Also about your stimulus issue.. I also firmly believe that non modern life creates a stronger deeper and stabler set of stimuli. We just forgot.
That's the only thing that can save the planet (besides enabling space exploration and colonization of Moon and Mars)