It’s at the highest level since Ronald Reagan was elected.
Not surprising. The people who've had their jackboots on small business's neck for the past decade have been completely removed from power. https://t.co/LIKJKZYRTt
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 10, 2017
It’s getting more cost effective, but it will always need load leveling. But I found this amusing:
Looking even further ahead, if we want a stable climate, humanity must bring net carbon emissions to zero.
There is no good reason to believe bringing net carbon emissions to zero is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for a “stable climate.” This planet has never had a stable climate, and it’s delusional to imagine that we know how to give it one now.
Speaking of which, Professor Curry has some thoughts on “skin in the game.”
If you are a weather forecaster in the private sector, you will quickly lose your clients if your forecasts are consistently wrong. Daily forecasts are evaluated daily; seasonal forecasts are evaluated several times each year. Clearly weather forecasters have skin in the game in terms of their forecasts.
With regards to climate projections, the predictions being made now will be irrelevant in 2100, which is their target prediction date. In fact, the forecasts become obsolete every 5 years or so, as new model versions are implemented. Recent attempts to evaluate climate model projections in CMIP5 during the early 21st century have shown striking discrepancies between model projections and observations.
Defenders of the climate models and climate model projections argue that climate models shouldn’t be expected to verify on decadal time scales.
In other words, climate modelers have no skin in the game in terms of losing something if their forecasts turn out to be wrong. In fact, there is actually a perversion of skin in the game, whereby scientists are rewarded (professional recognition, grants, etc.) if they make alarming predictions (even if they are easily shown not to comport with observations).
Let’s give them more money!
Henry Vanderbilt is retiring from putting on the annual Space Access Conference. The good news is that it accomplished a lot of its goals, as we enter a new era of lower-cost launch, and likely destined to continue to see prices fall. I hope that someone else can take up the torch.
The latest on the issue.
It’s a pointless discussion, because it presumes it’s going to be a government program: Apollo back tot the moon again, or Apollo to Mars. We need to be developing capabilities to go wherever we want, affordably. Then let the people paying for it decide.
Related: Howard Bloom says that NASA needs to get out of the rocket business, and start working on an actual superhighway in space. I’m not sure I want Marshall in charge of that, though. To put it mildly.
It’s not so glorious.
I suspect history will judge harshly. And of course, in doing so, it will be racist.
I usually write these sorts of things, but I’m on vacation, and Mike Wall has ten. I think that the Bezos announcement of New Glenn and New Armstrong are as big as Elon’s Mars announcement though. I consider Bezos both more ambitious, and more credible, in the sense that he is spending his own money, and not lobbying the government for it.
The Chinese are claiming they’ve successfully tested it on orbit.
I remain skeptical.
Has it already started?
Earth’s new climate will affect much more than the energy sector. Abdussamatov leaves us with a dire warning.
“The world must start preparing for the new Little Ice Age right now. Politicians and business leaders must make full economic calculations of the impact of the new Little Ice Age on everything — industry, agriculture, living conditions, development. The most reasonable way to fight against the new Little Ice Age is a complex of special steps aimed at support of economic growth and energy-saving production to adapt mankind to the forthcoming period of deep cooling.”
An overheated planet has never been a threat, say climate skeptics, not today, not ever in human history. An underheated planet, in contrast, is a threat humans have repeatedly faced over the last millennium, and now we’re due again.
To me, the evidence is quite a bit more compelling than it is for warming. He’s relying on history and empirical data, not computer models.
Bob Zimmmerman speculates on what the Trump administration might do in civil space policy.
…from the outside. Thoughts from Scott Adams, with an interesting idea:
…what if the worst-case scenario is really, really likely, as in the case of climate change disaster? In that case, shouldn’t you manage to the worst case? Well, yes, but only if you are sure the risk is as high as you think. And I don’t see any way a non-scientist could be exposed to both sides of the argument and assign a risk to it.
Given the wildly different assessments of climate change risks within the non-scientist community, perhaps we need some sort of insurance/betting market. That would allow the climate science alarmists to buy “insurance” from the climate science skeptics. That way if the climate goes bad at least the alarmists will have extra cash to build their underground homes. And that cash will come out of the pockets of the science-deniers. Sweet!
But if the deniers are right, and they want to be rewarded by the alarmists for their rightness, the insurance/betting market would make that possible.
It would also be fascinating to see where the public put the betting odds for climate science. Would people expose themselves to both sides of the debate before betting?
The smart ones would.