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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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The rot runs deep.

Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:

It is incorrect to consider tidal power as renewable energy. Harnessing tidal energy will pose more severe problems than using fossil fuels. This study provides quantitative estimates to show how using tidal energy can destroy the environment in a short amount of time. Tides are induced by the rotation of the Earth with respect to the gravity of the Moon and Sun. The rotational energy of the Earth is naturally dissipated by tides slowly. Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth. Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years. As a consequence, one side of the Earth would be exposed to the Sun for a much longer period of time than it is today. The temperature would rise extremely high on that side and drop extremely low on the other side. The environment would become intolerable, and most life on Earth could be wiped out.

Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient: the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.

The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:

  • If the NYT picked up this story, do you think they'd have the nuance to highlight the shall we say questionable assumptions in this paper? Or would they just blare a giant headline stating "TIDAL POWER WILL KILL US ALL!" (Sub-heading: solar and wind the only way forward...)? Would they even link to the original paper? I think the world's complexity has surpassed the abilities of the average MSM reporter/editor/reader. Even if journalists are perfectly honest and impartial, they are too susceptible to manipulation to be trusted. Barring a drastic change in our media, the information content of the typical news article is now capped at zero.
  • How far can we extrapolate from this example? This guy's apparently a professor at Stanford and apparently he's been teaching there for some time (the paper refers to a grad-level class in 1993). And it's... pretty easy to find garbage papers. Here's another one. For a broader perspective, consider the replication crisis, accounts like this one, and digging back to the ancient year of 2009, Climategate. This is why for example I think Global Warming/Climate Change/etc... is nonsense. That we have the tools to model the Earth's climate at all is (imo) an outlandish claim (it's a complex dynamical system the size of the planet with billions of poorly understood interactions!). That we can project this model forward a hundred years (with all of its many intrinsic dependencies on other complex systems like human civilization) is another outlandish claim. And that we should restructure all of society based on these projections is yet another outlandish claim (with a side-helping of massive conflicts of interests). And at the bottom of it all are people like our dear Dr. Jerry.

1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...

This is so idiotic I don't even know where to start. I genuinely wouldn't be against seeing this dude get shot on live television pour discourager les autres.

Just like how there is an upper limit to how much solar energy we can generate in a day on earth (surface area of planet *maximum amount of energy falling on each unit area per hour*24 hrs), there is an upper limit to how much tidal energy we can generate because we don't have any way to make the tides stronger (and thus pull energy from the earth's rotation into the movement of seawater). This upper limit doesn't give a shit about us needing to grow energy consumption at 2% per year. It is a physical fact, nothing to do with humanity or its needs. When we reach this limit we're straight up not going to be able to generate more energy via tidal methods and will have to switch to something else. What will it be? I don't know but so far humanity has a very good track record in finding alternatives when they become necessary. And this upper limit is so low that it will be many millions of years before there is even a slight impact on the length of a sidereal day.

As a result of this limit we can spend eons harvesting tidal energy and it won't make any significant difference to the earth's rotation. In fact, it's going to slow the earth's rotation just as much as if we harvested literally 0 tidal energy. This is because the earth loses rotational energy when it gets converted into the movement of water (as the tide goes up, water needs to move to that area), not when we harnass that water movement to create electricity. At the moment all this energy is being converted into heat and sound as the water of the tide comes in and rubs against the land/the aligned directional movement of the water molecules gets replaced with random movement though entropy, thereby increasing water temperature. Diverting a portion (any portion, up to 100%) of this energy into electricity is going to do literally nothing to how much the tides are slowing down the earth.

Tides are already slowing down the earth's rotation, harvesting tidal energy won't speed up or slow down this rate at all.

Let's not casually talk of violence when a writer hasn't thought as deeply about an issue as you.

It's the duty of a scientist to think deeply about the things he writes about. People will assume that, because he is a scientist, he has in fact thought deeply about the subjects of the papers he publishes. Scientists who don't think deeply about their areas of study need to be discouraged from being scientists, lest they use their institution's prestige to convince people of things that aren't true.

There are probably more humane and effective ways of discouraging someone from being a scientist other than a live televised broadcast of their firing squad.

Humane, sure. Effective? Hard to beat a bullet.

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