I don't have RSS on my blog either, whoops
750 karma · joined March 22, 2019
Follow up: https://guzey.com/follow-up/
What to do with your life: https://guzey.com/personal/what-should-you-do-with-your-life...
How to make friends online: https://guzey.com/how-to-make-friends-over-the-internet/
You should start a blog: https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/
(In fact, the latter has convinced me to begin posting more of my writing publicly on my own blog)
Pat Collison [1] (Co-founder, CEO Stripe) doesn't blog often, but is one of the most interesting and insightful people I have ever read
I don't know much about Alexey Guzey [2] yet, but he also has some very good posts (he writes more often and more long form, and is more similar to Gwern and SSC, in part because I think those two blogs have influenced him heavily)
Nuclear, solar, hydro, even natural gas are all better solutions in the ways that matter. Wind is the least reliable resource of out of them all and we seriously shouldn't be generating our energy from intermolecular kinetic interactions, that is the lowest level of density. There's a reason the whole world adopted fossil fuels - the breaking of chemical bonds allowed us to harness unprecedented amounts of power.
Not to mention wind turbines, as the industry stands right now, rely on an increasingly ridiculous amount of sulfur hexafluoride being placed in effective GHG landmines, posing an unknown threat to global temperatures.
They also aren't exactly safe to humans. People die trying to fix burning wind turbines.
The physics are bad, the economics are bad, and the tech is bad. We really don't need wind.
No, there are a finite number of particles in a finite space making up the Earth's climate.
> The climate isn't that simple. It's unfathomably complex.
Nothing is simple unless you simplify it.
A baseball is an unfathomably complex collection of billions of billions of particles interacting with the entire universe until you abstract it to a simple Newtonian point mass, but you'll still make all the relevant predictions to >99% accuracy.
Global warming can be accurately modeled by a very simple system:
There is the atmosphere, the ocean, the Earth itself, and the rest of the universe.
Over any finite time period there is a simple real number change in the temperature of these 4 subsystems modeled by thermodynamics, and there can be no net change in temperature due to conservation laws.
Can we predict these changes as accurately as we can predict simple Newtonian systems? No. But we can still predict them to a good degree of accuracy in the short term.
While it will definitely happen faster with government effort, the main point of my comment was that we can do all of these things in the free market.
In fact, we already are well on our way to doing all these things in the free market.
So, I wouldn't consider this a political extreme. My policy is simply to allow entrepreneurs to acquire private funding and test out their ideas. We already do that.
> ... "Core Transformation Process" ...
This is an interesting idea, I do think it is a fairly difficult issue to figure out how we can make meaningful political progress in today's world. It seems like the gears of democracy are slowing down more and more every year.
The good news is our emissions are so high that if we do get to net zero, it will be relatively easy to go a bit into the negative from there.
This is a really great analogy.
Pumping more and more GHG into the atmosphere is the stupidest experiment ever. Like poking a sleeping lion harder and harder.
> what science is at the core (i.e. making repeatable observations to establish fact)
These "facts" are predictions about what will happen in the future.
Physics tells us what will happen to physical systems, e.g. our understanding of gravity tells us what will happen to a system of masses in the future.
Chemistry tells us what will happen to chemical systems, e.g. our understanding of reactions tells us what will happen to interacting chemicals.
Medical research tells us what will happen to your body and disease when some agent is introduced to the system.
Climate science tells us what will happen to the climate, and it is based on the same concepts as the most fundamental and rigorous science: thermodynamics. If more heat enters than leaves a system, the temperature will increase. There is nothing unscientific here.
We can reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions through profitable enterprise and without lowering quality of life / stopping economic growth / enforcing strict veganism or whatever else extremists propose. In fact, we can do so far ahead of the IPCC SR15 1.5C scenario requirements. How?
Firstly, don't disregard technologies without understanding their merit. Hydrocarbons are a big part of the problem, yes, but please note that natural gas is about 4x cleaner than coal and has actually been the largest contribution to lowering emissions in the energy sector (~75% natural gas reduction on a large chunk of energy consumption is far more significant than the ~95% renewable reduction on a much smaller portion of energy consumption thus far)
Our world relies on these technologies at the moment and a good climate change solution must include not only a smooth transition away from fossil fuels but also an increase in fossil fuel cleanliness.
Now, climate change is primarily driven by net emissions from 6 things:
- Energy (electricity, fuels, heat etc.)
- Transportation (cars, planes, boats etc.)
- Industry (steel, concrete, plastic etc.)
- Commercial (buildings, appliances, etc.)
- Agriculture (mostly beef, other meats, etc.)
- Carbon sequestration (deforestation, other tech)
Here's how we can solve the problem in all of these areas in a mutually beneficial, profitable way:
1. Nuclear fission is currently the cleanest, safest, and most fuel abundant energy source we have. Most people don't know this. It is also only at a very small fraction of its potential in efficiency and relies on the least common nuclear fuel of the 3 naturally occurring isotopes (U235 vs. Th232, U238)
With some relatively small investment in this space, we can both increase the world's total energy supply by several factors in order to accommodate growth in developing nations and decrease energy sector emissions by >99%, over the course of a few decades.
We can also provide enough cheap electricity to help with the other 5 areas:
2. Electric cars are physically more efficient, faster, and simpler than ICE cars. Same concept applies long term to all transport with the exception of orbital rockets (those which operate in a vacuum), and it is entirely possible that we can shift the entire transportation industry to a mix of (a) fully electric transport and (b) carbon-neutral fuels derived from sequestration techniques, all within a few decades.
3. High grade heat allows us to shift the emissions of steel manufacturing from the plant itself to the energy source. New nuclear fission technologies operating >600 degrees Celsius will allow us to shift the steel industry to net-zero emissions. Bill Gates recently also posted some notes about green concrete https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Buildings-are-good-for-peo...
Also, cross laminated timber offers a new technology that can be made stronger, cheaper, safer, and more psychologically beneficial than steel and concrete in most buildings, including skyscrapers. This and other biological materials science solutions can help shift away from steel, concrete, and plastic production.
4. Same concept from transportation applies here. Electric things are more efficient and will be cheaper long term across the board, and allow us to shift emissions to the energy sector (which is by far the easiest to reduce emissions in)
5. Agriculture is complicated, and feeding 10 billion people will be hard. But there are a lot of great options and innovations here as well. Indoor farming can be made significantly more reliable, productive, and efficient than regular farming if we have good access to electricity and water. Lab-grown meats, cultural shifts to vegetarianism/veganism, and alternative protein sources all offer options to reduce agricultural emissions by >95%.
6. There are many great companies working on sequestration technologies, and several of these not only remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere but also provide useful byproducts like clean hydrocarbon fuels. YC has recently funded such companies.
The technological shifts I proposed in sections 4 and 5 will allow us (and/or force us) to start fixing our land and replanting healthy forests.
Every single one of these solutions can realistically be widely implemented by the year 2040/2050, and if we really wanted to (although this is not realistic from a societal perspective) we could really get there by 2030. Every single one of these solutions can improve quality of life and support a growing global economy in a profitable way.
I believe we are going to reach net-zero emissions a lot faster than you might expect.
Please, don't fall for the fear mongering. (and obviously, also don't fall for denialism)
Climate change is real, but it is something we can solve, and we don't have to destroy society or adopt a political extreme across the board to do it. I've got hope for humanity, I hope you do too.
Clocks, motors, stuff like that?
As I don't remember the name of everybody I read about, it would take significant effort to go find the source.
It's much simpler to prove the concept logically:
Any time you're communicating on a service provided, programmed, and updated by at least one third party, it is fundamentally impossible to guarantee E2EE without being omniscient of what they're doing.
This is simply because the unen/decrypted data is in the software at some point in time, and the third party controls the software.
> Oh, this is a downright insane, dishonest argument. Perfection is impossible, so we shouldn't even try!
I did not say or imply this in any way, and no it is neither an insane nor dishonest argument, it's just a consequence of allowing a third party to control your data.
History := the recorded past (in this case I mean the last few hundred years)
> Desertification is currently increasing
Okay, you're right about this based on the link you sent. In my head I was considering arctic regions / tundra as desert as well, as their recent forestation rate is much faster.
> temperature rise dries out a lot of places
This is true but it also causes other places to become more humid. Higher temperature climate has more liquid water + more entropy ==> more active water cycle on global average. (This is a gross oversimplification but my point is that the increase in temperature is an increase in chaos, and so water that is currently frozen somewhere will be moving around.)
--
The important idea to note here is that we can't just ask "does global warming cause more X"? Because the answer can be yes in some areas and no in others, and an increase in X somewhere does not mean a net increase globally.
No, there isn't nearly that much water.
> will evaporate water and dry the world
How would this work? Either the water is on the ground or it is in the air, neither case is a dry world. Where would all the water go to "dry the world"?
We only need 2 decades to fix the energy part of emissions, and the IPCC has given us 3.
> and there is no motion toward greater enforcement.
Enforcement isn't needed to get to net zero emissions. It's profitable long term to swap to clean energy and electrified vehicles and appliances, they're more efficient. Also fossil fuel abundance will eventually drop to the point where prices rise.
Free markets will solve our emissions problem, I'm not sure why you are worried about enforcement or the type of governments when it comes to this.
Will be fixed in a week or so.
We can, and we are. That's why I do what I do.
You're absolutely right, it is much cheaper to avert climate change than deal with the consequences. It's also necessary to transition to sustainable energy eventually because we will run out of fossil fuels regardless of what happens with the climate.
The solutions to climate change are being worked on right now by many talented people around the world. I'm confident we will reach the IPCC SR15 1.5 degree Celsius goals.