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Forum nameGeneral Discussion
Topic subjectI'm a mathematical physicist.
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=4&topic_id=13316337&mesg_id=13316536
13316536, I'm a mathematical physicist.
Posted by stravinskian, Wed Feb-27-19 02:53 PM
Astrophysicist more precisely, and a college professor.

>Any recommendations on sources/links/whatever for someone that
>doesn't have a scientific background?

I don't know that there's really even a source to follow nowadays. The science is totally, completely settled. All that goes on now is fretting over the fact that a certain political party is in the business of ignoring the science.

For a long time I followed this blog:

realclimate.org

It still appears to be pretty active. I liked it because it's run by working academic climate scientists who know the situation as well as anyone else in the world. It still appears to be run by the same people, so I can only assume it's as good a source as ever, at least with respect to what little is going on these days.

I was watching it around the time of the IPCC report and all the controversy over the "hockey stick graph." They explained it all and cleared away the misinformation better than anyone I'd ever seen.

>Also, to really sum up your opinion- your preferred option is
>Nuclear energy?

Not exactly. Nuclear is a necessary ingredient of anything I'd take seriously. If someone is reflexively against nuclear it's a strong cue that they aren't taking the problem seriously.

But nuclear alone won't be enough. You can calculate how much energy is available in wind and solar power (which are also crucial, BTW), and even optimistically, if you subtract that from optimistic projected usage levels and you want to turn the remainder of the gas, petroleum, and coal power to something carbon-free by, say, 2050, then you find that we'd need to open something like two nuclear power plants per year in the US to eventually fill that gap. We haven't built a single nuclear plant in decades, for reasons that are understandable even if irrational. So even if we fully jumped on the nuclear train, it wouldn't do the job.

Ten years ago, I would have argued for a MASSIVE PR campaign to get people to change their minds about nuclear, but that ship has sailed, for now.

That said, research in fusion, which has kind of been a joke in the past (the technology has been "ten years away and holding" for about 60 years now), really has been gaining some traction lately, despite complete neglect from government funding agencies. If sustained fusion ever does happen, it really could change everything.

>Anything else?

Wind and solar really are immensely important. But people often assume we've overcome their fundamental weakness (the sporadic and localized nature of the sun and wind), and we haven't. Wind power can work great *while* the wind is blowing, *if* you actually live in Iowa. Solar can work great *while* it's sunny, if you live in the desert. But apart from these somewhat restrictive conditions, these methods need an enormous amount of power transport, which dissipates a lot of the energy, and storage, which usually means large batteries, which usually means more dissipation as well as hard-to-find rare-earth materials and very serious local pollution.


To be honest, the question about "how to get our power" would have had to have been resolved fifteen years ago if we were gonna stop serious climate change. At this point, it IS happening, whether we like it or not. We need to spend more efforts now on mitigation strategies, preparing for the humanitarian crises to come, and as far as technology goes, we need to be working on geoengineering --- intentionally altering the climate *more* in the hopes of counteracting the damage that we've done. Ten years ago people were saying we shouldn't be talking about geoengineering because it would weaken people's understanding of the urgency of climate change. But that ship has sailed. People will not know the urgency until the world is drastically different. Now is the time to prepare for THAT.