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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26600 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...

Consuming tidal energy further reduces the rotational energy, accelerates the energy loss rate, and decelerates the rotation of the Earth.

I hate how people are ridiculously long-termist when it comes to trivial nonsense like this. If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion. The very idea is sillier than the urban planners who despaired about cities drowning in horse shit (then we invented the car). At least horse manure was a pressing problem in the 19th century! We do not need to care about extremely long-term issues since our circumstances change. There was litigation in the US about storing waste for a million years:

The court ruled that EPA's 10,000-year compliance period for isolation of radioactive waste was not consistent with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations and was too short.

From 10,000 to one million years, EPA established a dose limit of 100 millirem per year. EPA's rule requires DOE to show that Yucca Mountain can safely contain wastes, considering the effects of earthquakes, volcanic activity, climate change, and container corrosion, over one million years.

Who cares? These people do apparently... but what does it matter what the radioactive waste will be in 10,000 years or more when the US isn't even competent enough to create a centralized nuclear waste storage site? The whole, farcically administrated Yucca waste dump was cancelled anyway. Right now it's sitting in containers next to power plants! That's obviously not secure for 100 years, 10,000 or a million. Does the government just assume that civilization is going to collapse and so nuclear waste must be secured for the benefits of Mad Max style looters and gangsters?

And at the same time, when there's actually a good reason to be longtermist (on important matters like population growth, or colonizing the universe), nobody cares. The cretins who spent serious time and money on this nonsense should be forced to copy out Bostrom's 'Astronomical Waste' by hand so they can begin to understand the scale of their folly and perverseness.

If we found that tidal power was slowing the rotation of the Earth, we could simply stop using it and switch to fusion.

The same way we've found coal power is causing problems and we can "simply" stop using it and switch to fission?

We did have a good run of switching away from coal, then the greenies got upset about realistic alternatives so we switched back. Also a war broke out.

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