The polar vortex is hitting the brakes
climate.gov
climate.gov
This part seems really handwavey. Could someone explain what they mean with "warmer part of the year" if not air temperature? Increased warming through more sunlight?
I read this pretty simply as "March is warmer than January". More hours of daylight, more direct angle, etc. Anyone living closer to the tropics knows that feeling of "it's cold but the sun is out" compared to being further away in winter.
But if they mean, there are other seasonal factors - such as daylight - that counteract the cold spell, which aren't there in winter, it makes more sense.
There a few different heat transfer mechanisms, with conduction and radiation being the big ones we care about here. Cold air impacts heat transfer via conduction, but temperature of surrounding surfaces (like buildings and the ground) impacts radiative heat transfer, which makes us a significant portion of your bodies heat transfer into it’s surrounding environment. Which is the reason why a clear night is colder than an overcast night. The clouds above reflect a significant amount of radiant energy back at you on a cloudy day, and on a clear night you’re directly exposed to cold emptiness of space which will radiate effectively zero heat back at you.
Good place to experience the difference between conduction and radiative heat, is being near a camp fire on a cold night. The camp fire doesn’t really warm the air around your body, but the emitted IR has a huge impact. Hence you end up with a very warm front, while still having a very cold back.
It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov… is that a reputable source?
The silver lining is that understanding of this disrepute is nearing universality.
In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.
In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant compilation of interviews about fire management practices of indigenous nations in California; the degree of documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined prior to reading.
https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-pr...
Are these the journalists you have an issue with for reporting on it?
https://apnews.com/article/gsa-federal-buildings-doge-fbi-do...
I'm all for free media but the legacy outlets currently screaming about cuts are primarily upset because THEY just lost a ton of government funding but that's good because I don't want government run news, even if it comes in a bunch of brand names, and it's funny that all the "reputable" outlets just happen to be the ones with the closest relationships to the CIA and FBI and historically have covered for their worst injustices.
no, I do not shed a tear for what is happening to the old government controlled legacy media.
One probably sponsored by the Russian government: https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...
For a journalistic perspective, when events are moving fast, you report what is known at a given time.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and no doubt there are some cases like you point out. However, are you sure that those are the only cases? The fact that the govt is scrambling to hire back fired people would suggest otherwise.
The desire to impute political bias to everything is not a useful way of viewing the world.
This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings. Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know you're just gonna be fired again?
Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support your claim.
It's not a productive comment, it doesn't invite discussion, it doesn't add useful information.
If you doge it, you can sell a private version.
Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop protecting its own interests.
"Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1]
and from Bayer:
"To mitigate some of the risks of such investments ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.
only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings
Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility
Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution
If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3]
[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.”
He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly."
That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3439-c1
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/scibx.2011.416#pre...
It’s kind of like saying “solar panels are only 20% efficient, so are you sure the sun is critical for the solar energy industry?”
25% is crazy low, but 11% is even lower. If someone told you things and 90% of the time they were wrong, you'd stop listening.
Solar panels having low effectiveness would actually be a good argument against them, because although the solar industry needs solar panels the correct comparison is with the energy industry overall, which doesn't.
Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent.
You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on.
Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
No, they’re not. Biotech VC has been bigger than tech VC in terms of absolute funding for decades (based on annual data from the Venture Capital Association). Most years its not even close.
Pharmaceutical companies do depend on NIH funding but indirectly: most of their products are now acquired rather than developed in house. Universities spin off their NIH funded projects as biotech startups that are funded by VCs and public investors (biotech startups usually IPO long before they have any revenue, which is one of the reasons there’s so much money in biotech VC) and the small fraction that are most successful in clinical trials are acquired by the pharmaceutical industry.
https://nvca.org/document/q4-2024-pitchbook-nvca-venture-mon...
If you go to "Deals x Sector" and then scroll down they split out deals by dollar value by sector and software alone is $89.2B vs $25.3B for pharma last year. But software isn't all of the tech industry, they also have a row for IT hardware startups which is $8.2B. Adding it up the tech industry sees 4x more money flowing into it than pharma despite that most tech startups are selling optional nice-to-haves to people who buy from their own pocket, vs pharma who sells stuff that might be life-critical to people who socialize the costs via insurance.
In theory, pharma should dwarf tech. You can't say no to a life saving drug if you need it: it should be easy money. In practice, the VCs interviewed in my source seem to have it right - pharma VC is much less competitive overall.
Most big corps are run for the short term. Management's biggest concern is how the market will react to results in the next few quarters.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/25/second-trump-term-0...
Based on the way things have been going, that seems to be the goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presiden...
Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the playing field a bit too level for private companies. They don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA so it makes their product less valuable.
A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra endurance events. After our first event using them I checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was far less accurate than weather.gov.
Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2025/03/21/wea...
Climate.gov’s Polar Vortex Blog is written, edited, and moderated by Amy Butler (NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory) and Laura Ciasto (NOAA Climate Prediction Center), with editorial and graphics support from the Climate.gov team (NOAA Climate Program Office). These are blog posts by subject matter experts, not official agency communications; if you quote from these posts or from the comments section, you should attribute the quoted material to the individual blogger or commenter, not to NOAA or or Climate.gov.
Or is there some distinction I'm missing?
Back in university we would publish news entries for all our publications without any input from the university. But for some papers there was also an official press release by the university. That came both with additional restrictions (length, language level, flashiness) but also with additional reach (getting picked up by newspapers directly). I assume that pre-Trump this would have been a similar setup. No guess as to now though
Some have been wondering that for years already.
Nope, the firings will continue until America is made great again.
The goal is coercive power over a culture. Firings are just one tool in the toolbox.
______________
Tangentially, loyalty-oaths are another case where the purpose goes beyond the immediate effect.
Fascists presenting an allegiance-or-else choice aren't extending any of their own trust to affirmative pledges. They know it's coerced, and the fact that everybody else knows it too is a feature, not a bug.
Why? Because the real goal is not to create trust for themselves, but to destroy it for everyone else. To survive the purge, victims must scar their own reputations, making it harder for anybody--even other victims--to trust them in the future.
Ex: Even if I'm totally certain Mr. Smith was lying to the fascists when he pledged loyalty to keep his job, there's a "damaged goods" aspect: Would he lie to me if his job was threatened again? What other compromises might he make to other threats from authority?
In the article there's this figure: https://www.climate.gov/media/16838
The March 13th 10hPa forecast with the wind reversal and lobe is visible on measured data: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2025/03/13/2100Z/wind/isobaric...
Seems vanishingly unlikely to me, on the face of it, but I admit I am not read up on all the possible doomsday scenarios.
Human extinction seems very unlikely, but the collapse of the infrastructure that allows creation of the infrastructure that allows modern life? That could be much more likely, particularly when you factor in military conflicts as well as purely climate-based changes and losses.
It's quite hot around there. Wet bulb temperatures often near the edge of survivability outdoors.
It's worse now with 1-1.5C warming. If we don't stop, and we get to 3-5C warming, this could lead to large scale migration to Europe in pursuit of liveable climate. And warming won't stop unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases.
We are killing for guzzoline.
The world is running out of water.
Now there's the water wars.
Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous cause.
My name is Max. My world is fire and blood.
I don't understand why this is always breought out when farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the "killer app" for temperature scales.
curiously, nothing in the southern hemisphere?
I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.
The Polish city of Gdańsk, of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was also born there at the time. [1]
> He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.
Nope. It was neither about the temperatures in Gdańsk, nor about the temperature of his wife, btw. ;) [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gabriel_Fahrenheit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FahrenheitIf you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps, why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.
If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.
I wonder if using a lower resolution scale dulls the senses like other forms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself between two rooms with one degree difference. I just don't think this is a useful granularity—I typically move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.
The percentage of global population where the 0F..100F range is not a reasonable approximation of the temperature range they will experience is small. It's not perfect - no such range could, when humans live almost everywhere on the planet. But it's not bad ...
Neither 0F nor 100F are anything special for humans. It's "very cold" long before 0F and "very hot" long before 100F. 50F is nothing special either.
Room temperature is 72F.
I guess it depends on the cows
20 is nice.
10 is cold.
0 is ice.
Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans typically perceive temperature.
I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/
(On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava beans.)
US units are pinned to Metric standards anyway. We're just using the most creative ratios. :)
It was a dream once I got a metric tape measurer and realized that using centimeters eliminates the need to do annoying conversions.
Remembering is more about what you are used to here.
I suspect you wouldn't notice if it changed by a degree.
On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot.
Or you’ve got from 0-45. Where 0 is “meh” cold and 45 is incredibly warm.
So you’ve got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are going to experience just living that goes from very cold to very hot.
Or you’ve got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being really cold below that, and anything really greater than 50C only has practical applications in cooking.
The further away from room temperature, the less we can distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.
0 = ice 100 = steam
That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy comfortable room temp is about 25
I guess it doesn’t happen often, but I saw some upper-90’s temperature in the Portland, Oregon area. It feels relatively mild actually, compared to New England 90’s, I’m pretty sure because it is so dry. The lighter air just carries the heat away, rather than having it stick to you.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/202501/html/IDCJDW6136.202...
This is in the cooler south west corner of a large state ( 3x size of Texas )
[0] Apparently the story is disputed.. But the way I was taught it was: 100F == typical healthy human and 0 F == lowest temperature in Danzig in the winter 1708/1709. This makes it (by construction) a more natural fit to human experience (especially one in northern Europe) https://web.archive.org/web/20131015045624/http://www.deutsc...
What we really need is a new system of units...
A metre is much the same as a yard or an adult arm span. Not a problem.
Pretty much all carpentry and cabinet making is done in mm alone, the width of a fat pencil mark.
1400mm is shy of a metre and a half (1500mm), cross piece spacing might be 300mm (about a foot).
No need to have feet, inches, quarters and thirds mixing up the page, just use mm everywhere.
A gram is fine for small mass measurements, a kilogram is a good unit for heavier masses - very human scale being the same as a litre of water and more or less a litre of milk.
It really comes down to familiarity, there's nothing intrinsically difficult about metric (and much that is more intuitive than odd imperialial units and the whacky intra unit conversion factors).
E.g. can picture lumber expressed in cm or mm very easily. E.g., if you work with beams that are 48mm / 5 cm or 98mm / 10cm a lot then those sizes becomes second nature. Just as easy to picture as 2 inch, 4 inch, 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch etc that is in use in US.
And saying that something is 200m away is exactly as intuitive as however many feet that is. A large meter has a usecase.
I feel square metres for houses is very natural unit and square feet sounds awkward (each patch of house area is so small you can do nothing with it, a square metre gets you somewhere..).
Making yet another system of units sounds like massive pain and as someone who are used to metric I see no advantages.
As a kid, one of my science educators spoke about the many benefits people gain from becoming familiar with basic units. I bought in and did so during the big metric push that happened around that time.
I ended up more familiar with Imperial units.
Then, later in life, I entered a young industry, with strong users of metric, Standard International units.
So I did the work to build familiarity just as I did long ago. Took half a year and today I enjoy the benefits.
And those are:
Ease of understanding unit values meaning in my daily life.
Ease of expression of same to others.
Greater accuracy estimating.
Easier computation and unit checks.
And so on...
It goes by the name "two four" here as well informally due to long tradition (and yes, I once did wonder why 2-by-4 is smaller than 2 by 4 inches and looked it up), but you will not see it written anywhere, in writing it is always in mm after planing.
The oral words for lumber dimensions before planing is the only context as an adult I have met inches except in US.
Wouldn’t it be nicer if a litre, a gram and a cubic metre of water were equal, rather than 1 cubic metre, 1000 litres, 1,000,000 grams?
Side note that in Europe drinking products are often labelled in centilitres whereas Australians use millilitres. I wonder whether this indicates some difference in the way the two groups think about volume, or maybe it is just the fallout of some other constraint, like translations limiting the space available.
Still, the ergonomics seem to be on the side of Metric, taking into account the ease of conversion between units when all are base ten.
If they used an absolute scale like Kelvin, then sure it would be an objectively better standard, but Celsius has been defined via the Kelvin scale for over 70 years now, the same as Fahrenheit.
What is overhyped is the actual “savings” that they are producing with all of this.
I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stability standpoint it’s really not.
Do you have proof of this? Otherwise you are spreading propaganda and lies. “We need to cut stuff because the party I support says so” isn’t proof of a financial apocalypse and is only fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s the very hysteria lying in which you refer.
Do we need specific evidence about how debt interest works?
Sorry for how snarky this sounds but your response sounds like you don’t believe that the interest on over 33 trillion dollars is a big deal (and it’s growing…)
Please educate me if that’s not how interest or debt works (again I am dead serious here) but it seems disingenuous to claim that some sort of proof is required to point at the debt and say “Ah that’s not a problem unless you PROVE it’s a problem”
Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
Were I concerned about fiscal balance, I wouldn't view cutting as the best way to solve the problem, I would raise high-end taxes.
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Insofar as that’s true, it is a direct result of the actions taking thus far this administration, not something they are correcting—and not through fiscal imbalance causing wider problems but by a broad economic collapse directly (which, because the broad economy drives revenue, has fiscal balance problems as a second order impact.)
Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out.
Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pretty much zero achieved. Focusing less on projecting power, and more on self-defense might deliver better returns.
Of course the military budget can't (and wont) be cut because it's not about the military. It's a carefully controlled jobs program that moves money from the federal piggy bank to pretty much every district in the nation. So it becomes a game of "cut x, but not y, because y is made in my district. It's easier to cut less-specific programs (like Medicare) because that isn't district specific.
Then again maybe the tide has turned, and they could cut military spending. The CHIPS act funneled tons of money to Florida and yet Floridians hated it.
I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the house on February 5th by Arizona rep David Schweikert. He makes a really compelling case about the dire state and future of the government’s financial position. If indeed I have been hoodwinked as other comments seem to think, I am open to being convinced otherwise. But this talk is well documented, and seems like a plea from a man who is desperate to sound the alarm so we can prevent disastrous consequences for millions of people in this country.
However I will point out that the goal of the current "effeciency drive" has nothing to do with the deficit. I confidently predict that the deficit will be larger, not smaller, at the end of this administration. Primarily driven by tax cuts on the aristocracy.
While personally I don't think the deficit number is terribly concerning (it behaves very differently to personal debt) its interesting to note that Republicans, not Democrats are responsible for most of it.
It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.
The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.
But the reality is that time is not of the essence. Infinitely growing government debt does seem kind of unsuistainble long term, but the scale of the debt combined with the lack of any specific immediate forcing function would seem to favor actions that are drastic in scale but that can be spread over time. In other words the government needs to significantly increase revenue and/or decrease spending, but it doesn't need to do it tomorrow. It's nearly the complete opposite of what's going on now, where making cuts yesterday is considered vastly more important than actually getting to a place where spending and revenue are aligned long term.
Much like household debt doesn't matter beyond it's relationship to household income?
Presumably it goes to some sort of goods and services. The employees pay income taxes. The businesses pay corporate taxes. And so on.
Similarly, when a business lays off 10,000 people, it's not their problem anymore. Whereas from a macroeconomic policy perspective, "everybody" is the government's responsibility.
Nothing. Tax the billionaires.
What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
Doing so by lowering the active income rate wouldn't raise more money, and doing so by raising the passive income rate would kill investment and job creation and send us into a depression.
The people you get your news from are lying to you, trying to get you to sell out your future to their profit.
The economic issues we’re facing right now were created by the current administration installing heavy taxes on imports while simultaneously creating a nationwide shock with federal spending. This is like declaring that you should save money and doing so by not paying your rent, skipping the doctor, and pushing your car into the sea.
If we rolled back to January 19th, when the economy had been growing steadily and all signs projected that trend to continue, the long-term problems still weren’t catastrophic. The primary problem was that Republicans broke our balanced turn of the century budget when they cut tax rates and started a couple of recreational wars, setting a pattern which has continued where we’re told that we have to give up things the public benefit from because the alternative of rich people paying taxes a few points higher is too miserable to even consider. That debt is a concern, but not as a fraction of the massive American economy – it’s like the difference in medical concern between noticing that you’re gaining 10 pounds a year versus 10 pounds in the last week.
The reason the lying about the crisis has ramped lately is that some of the tax cuts which racked up trillions of additional debt in Trump’s first term expire this year and others in 2028, but the Republicans want to cut taxes even further. It’s mathematically impossible to do that without unpopular cuts to things people like, such as Medicaid or children’s health insurance (CHIP), which is why they’re trying to distract with gross exaggerations of the currently-negative DOGE savings and trying to manufacture this air of impending disaster so people don’t think there’s a choice. While the choice is no longer as easy going back to Biden’s economic growth, it could simply be letting tax rise to the levels we had 20-30 years ago when the economy was thriving.
A few dudes firing a bunch of people entirely through executive action has absolutely nothing to do with the financial problem you're worried about. The federal payroll is not a significant cost, and the executive branch doesn't control the budget.
It is no different than a magician doing misdirection. It's up to you whether you want to buy the act.
Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.
Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.
A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).
No you don't know that, because it is outright wrong.
We could hold this level of debt for decades and safely reduce it over a long time frame. Plenty of other countries have done that plenty of other times. Christ, most of Europe only just got done paying us off for WW2!
Indeed, we had almost no debt at the turn of the millennium, after Congress during Clinton's admin cut a bunch of stuff after significant PUBLIC DEBATE, but Bush got us into multiple outright false wars to drop bombs in the desert for two decades and now all of a sudden the republicans are concerned about fiscal responsibility?
Fuck right off.
> At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK
That's literally what they are doing. The proposed budget is just more tax cuts for billionaires. Stop being so goddamned gullible.
I’ve been saying for years that we’d know when governments were finally getting scared of climate change because we’d see real, very fast moves to install nuclear and, if possible, enhanced geothermal.
We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal). So coal ends up emitting a ton of radioactive waste because uh when you dig up the ground you also dig up radioactive uranium (there's no 100% pure carbon deposits).
It's also only a self-inflicted problem. You can technically re-use the waste until it only needs to be stored for ~300 years before it decays to "normal" levels. The US doesn't allow you to do that though while say France does.
Oh yes. Having fucked up this badly with long chain hydrocarbon combustion, lets do it all over again with fission, because ... well, we did it once already, right?
Hanford has a standing legacy problem of fissile waste from both weapons and energy work.
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
* https://www.icanw.org/hanford_s_dirty_secret_and_it_s_not_56...
Human activity aside, every valley with a substantial amount of granite rock about the planet pools with radon gas on a daily basis until the wind clears it out.
While this is just one of those things that's a risk on the order of a pack a day smoking habit to those who live there, radon is a fission by product from the breakdown of the uranium within the granite.
I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being. And not just a new problem, but one that would last longer than any human civilization has ever lasted.
So, to me, you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
You stated "[No one] has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem".
I informed you that fissile waste is already a big problem at multiple sites across the planet, several US sites and Russian sites more so than anywhere else, and has been a problem for > 50 years.
You're welcome.
> you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
That's clearly a minor aside .. you ignored the 70+ tonnes of plutonium waste at Hanford.
Billions have been spent dealing with it to date and there's much left to do and spend to clean up that one site.
Don't strawman the issue, it's a large problem and there are tomes on the subject filling shelves.
Humans do need to deal with radioactive waste, this includes the large dams of radioactive waste created as a by product of rare earth and lithium processing.
Perhaps consider that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on what is "meant" by third party forum comments and we are all limited to what is clearly written.
If you are truly concerned by the fate of the earth should it become covered in vast tracts of radioactive waste from some yet to be determined mystery source, then perhaps ask yourself could it be worse than when the earth had numerous surface level natural fission reactors?
Radiological material that decays after tens of thousands of years is not a unique new problem, for three reasons.
First, half life is inverse to radioactivity. The longer the half life, the less radioactive it is. There are isotopes with a half life of a billion years. Human biology requires potassium and natural potassium is radioactive, but it doesn't kill you because the half life is so long.
Second, the material with ten thousand year half lives doesn't actually have to be stored for ten thousand years. Nuclear reactors convert elements into other elements. You put it back into a reactor and it turns it into something with a shorter half life. Meanwhile that process produces energy with which to generate electricity. It's absurd that we're not already doing this.
And third, the half life is a red herring. Traditional long-standing toxic waste from industrial processes doesn't have a half life because it persists forever. Plutonium is toxic for thousands of years; heavy metals are toxic until the sun burns out. The fact that it eventually decays is an advantage that propaganda has turned into a problem.
Years don't matter if climate change puts an end to human civilization.
Likely hundreds of millions to a few billion will die that need not have died, wars will be fought, relocation and migration will be of unprecedented scope and scale, there will be hunger and disease ... but "human civilization" will persist through all of that. Thats not a reason to celebrate, it's just a reason to describe the risks and outcomes accurately.
You can look at it this way.
Or you could can look at it as we reduced radioactive emissions by switching to nuclear from coal.
Everything has trade-offs. It's not like solar has no side-effects.
Waste storage is a problem for once climate change is solved. Worst case is local degradation of environment.
A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France. A grid almost-fully powered by renewables for a full year in an industrialized country is yet to be seen. Renewables do work well when combined to fossil fuels, but we need to get off them.
The Republicans programs for electricity is completely insane and renewables is a much better alternative than drilling more fossil fuels. Nuclear is more realistic but the political will is not there unfortunately.
> Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
One can be supportive of Democrats and liberals while not agreeing with one policy point.
* Renewable energy sources collectively produced 75% of South Australia's electricity generation in 2023, and are expected to provide 100% of state electric power production from 2027.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark
- https://reneweconomy.com.au/from-zero-to-100-pct-renewables-...
> Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030.
This doesn't say anything about how much of Denmark's consumption this covers, only their production
It turns out they import a bunch of their electricity from neighbors
This is a sneaky way to pretend you don't consume fossil fuels
The capital of South Australia is some distance from the border, even further from the Victorian capital (Melbourne) and is weakly linked compared to EU countries.
In South Australia, the current connection to Victoria allows for just 25 per cent of its maximum demand to imported or exported.
“So what that means for South Australia is we have to be a lot more self reliant. And ultimately, South Australia is the test lab for the whole NEM (National Electricity Market,”
The stats are no more misleading than the GP claim this is in response to, namely "A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France."
France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
I don't have a gas powered generator attached to my house. Therefore, if I put a solar panel on my house, then my property would have a 100% renewable supply of electricity
Unfortunately that solar panel wouldn't meet my house's electricity demand, so I would have to import the difference from my local power company. But that doesn't change the fact that on my property the supply is 100% renewable
> Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the neighbouring state.
Peak generation hours are almost never aligned with peak demand hours. Unless those battery farms are capable of meeting the supply during their peak demand (very unlikely, I don't think there is any country with this sort of battery capacity built), then they must be re-importing electricity from those same neighbors who are still burning fossil fuels (or have other more consistent power supply like nuclear or hydro)
A breeder reactor plus reprocessing means there is no waste in the first place, and also gives us 100 to 1000 times as much usable uranium.
It literally isn't. There are two known solutions already. The stupid way, which is to put it in a dry hole in a geologically stable desert, and the smart way, which is to use it as fuel because it isn't actually waste anyway.
Neither of these things are currently happening for only one very specific reason: The global fossil fuel industry (including Russia) lobbies against them because they want to retain a piece of political rhetoric to argue against replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
But that's a self-solving problem, because if you actually do replace fossil fuels with nuclear then the fossil fuel industry goes away, stops lobbying against anything, and then you can use either of the known solutions. Which means we'd only have to store the material for a few decades until that happens. The solution to that is what we're already doing at existing reactors, which is largely to keep the spent fuel rods at the power plant.
It may also give you some indication of the scale of the problem to realize that you can hold all of the spent fuel ever generated by a reactor that has been in operation for decades on the site of the reactor itself.
But it isn’t a competition. I’d be just as happy if things were going the other way. Having a clear mental model of the world is just useful. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.
China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.
Dwarfs is the most apt description. (~250x)
You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.
And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.
The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.
Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.
Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).
And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.
> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.
It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.
There is a root cause for this: both solar PV and battery storage can be mass-produced in factories, and current nuclear tech can't. If nuclear can get onto a similar growth trajectory, we'll be cooking.
Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.
About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.
(This does not mean we'll succeed. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. But any approach that doesn't have this shape is a disaster.)
If you actually care about this problem, the actual question is: how do we get nuclear onto that same exponential pathway that renewables are on? Fiddling around with our existing legacy nuclear plants is so inadequate to our emissions pathways right now that it's equivalent to surrender.
China needs everything it can build and more. It's not much the what but rather where, when and how much that is crucial.
Solar and wind are only cheap because a foreign nation makes the parts (if they were made domestically they wouldn't be cost-competitive, obviously). So in 20 years, when your PV panels are degrading and your turbines are wearing out, that foreign country's going to be able to charge you a lot more to replace it.
And if you want to see the results of cheap industrial inputs becoming expensive one only need look at the post-Nordstream German/European economic forecast. Even the poor should be able to afford to keep the lights on and the A/C running once the sun has set.
Solar panels won't start degrading in 20 years. Their degrading is linear and starts when you install them. As a very rough guide you can think of it as 1% per year.
The 20-year horizon therefore is not fixed. It's just a round number. There's a point at which it makes sense to add panels (or replace them if you are space constrained.)
Once large numbers of panels start getting replaced you may see them reused in space-available places, or potentially 'reconditioned' to extend their life. Think of it as similar to second-hand cars.
Of course if the price keeps dropping these avenues are less attractive. And if you are space constrained there are already space improvements that may make changing desirable well before 20 years.
Finally, lots of things we use are made elsewhere. And we make things others use. By trading our excess for their excess we create a trading relationship where both sides operate in good faith because it is in their advantage to do so.
The current climate, where the US operates in bad faith, and seems intent on damaging trade relationships, does not encourage other countries to behave well in the future (regardless of the motivations you (project? expect?) from them in the future.
Your fashion sense is awesome; however, this is engineering, and we need as many options as we can get. There is zero sense in playing favorites here.
It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much space before even getting into the fact that neither solution can work anywhere at any time.
Nuclear got a bad rap, but it is way too essential to ignore in this problem we’re facing. When the focus shifts, you can tell people are getting serious. Simple as that.
Edit: I did not realize this had somehow become a conservative viewpoint? I am a leftist.
I agree that it’s clear we need more nuclear, but could you explain why solar and wind are dangerous compared to nuclear? Did you mean that all the attention on solar and wind, which can’t be scaled fast enough and must be paired with grid storage, has screwed us when it comes to addressing climate change?
Also, calling solar and wind inefficient isn’t precise enough. By what metric are you judging them to be inefficient?
When I say more dangerous, it’s just a pretty simple calculation - per watt of energy, how many people have been injured/killed when producing energy via a given source. Coal is incredibly dangerous, as is gas by this metric. Nuclear is far and above the safest when calculating in this specific way.
Solar and wind are inefficient, by my definition, because they require large portions of land and cannot run with highly predictable outputs at all times. As a result, you need other solutions to complete the story - larger farms, more farms, large batteries, grids that easily transfer energy long distances, etc.
Nuclear is able to sidestep all of those problems, especially with the relatively recent advent of small modular reactors (SMRs).
In many cases, if you look at the complainants it’s also reasonable to question whether they’re fully honest about their motivations. For example, the big Martha’s Vineyard project was backed by the biggest environmental group in the area but by the opposition were people like commercial fishermen and various rich cranks like RFK Jr. and the Kochs who thought the change in view would affect their property values but do not otherwise live lives full of obvious strong environmentalist views.
I suppose I could use their terminology, though: responsibly sited, balancing conservation priorities, and protecting local communities.
I recall, in my college years, being told how Real Communism hadn’t been tried yet. It seems that Real Communism never did get tried and no matter who tries Communism they never try the good Real variety. After years of watching top environmental organizations repeatedly oppose nuclear power as a whole and renewables often, I think I have to say: Real Environmentalism Hasn’t Been Tried Yet. No True Environmentalist Would Do What These Guys Do.
They take quite a toll on both wild life and people living in the area.
And are often abandoned as soon as they don't generate enough profits/are too expensive to maintain, with no one wanting to pay for cleaning up the area.
> They take quite a toll on ... people living in the area.
I can assure you that it's very real, and very harmful on a daily basis.
Personally I liked the sound. But we only had 1, so maybe different with many more. Though never heard the wind farms I've stopped by.
I find both annoying to live with daily.
And it's not like its a problem that couldn't be solved; I like the idea of wind turbines, just not at any cost.
While people who have a lot to gain from hiding problems with wind turbines are telling the truth.
Isn't that always how it works?
Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who have much to gain from public perception & policy?
(I have no opinion, but find it mildly suspicious given that I happen to sometimes drive through Germany, and the country seems to be currently less insane than, say, US)
It’s striking how many wrong things are packed into that paragraph. Science isn’t trustworthy because of the institution, but because it challenges its theories and anyone can review and repeat it. In contrast, the claims being made here started from someone’s belief that they have a financial benefit to not having windmills nearby and work backwards to construct a supporting narrative.
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist.
More accurately, we’re asking for those measurements so anyone else can review them. We’re asking for the methodology so anyone else can review or replicate it. Emotional reactions like yours tend to be a great sign that someone has a strong interest in a particular outcome and humans are notoriously bad at critically evaluating things they want to be true. Scientists are no different, which is why they put so much effort into looking for ways to test their work.
A great similar example are the “electromagnetic hypersensitive” people who claim to have all kinds of health problems caused by wifi or cellular signals. They’ll claim that they’re not being taken seriously because they’re starting backwards from the position that their health issues are caused by EMF and anyone who disagrees is “suppressing” them. The problem isn’t “lying eyes and ears” — their headaches or sleep problems are real - but that they have made a wrong explanation part of their self-identity and are unwilling to reconsider that. Repeated double-blind studies have shown that these people can’t identify EMF at better than chance, and that they’ll report health issues caused by EMF which never existed, and that’s a tragedy because there is a real cause they’d likely be able to find if they were willing to give up on that theory. Many of the wind power opponents are arguing in bad faith trying to make their aesthetic tastes sound scientific but I’m certain that some of these people have real, non-psychosomatic medical issues which are not caused by turbines but could be localized if they put their effort into broader investigations.
This as a sarcastic rallying cry of conspiracy theorists has always amused me.
You ARE aware of visual and auditory illusions right? Or the various ways your brain outright lies to you in order to save a few calories worth of thinking?
How much of your vision is real? Do you know? Can you prove it?
I also got a cat (against my will, but gotta take care of her) who wakes me up around 4:30-06:00. :|
I cannot stand the noise pollution. It makes me want to live by the countryside even more.
In fact, this might help explain the concept of fake spring in general. The final collapse of the vortex is ultimately caused by warming of the northern hemisphere as spring kicks in. This implies that the pattern of "get pretty warm, then the polar vortex collapses, then you get one more surge of winter weather, and then you get real spring" is actually typical.