Yale Climate Connections

This is great, but also hopelessly naive for a very important reason. Check out this graph from the article:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b31a8b0-c1bd-4d94-801d-4bbd0cf4b40e_1600x1130.png

Note the trend line intersecting with the x axis in 1980. Now this:

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-story-of-jimmy-carters-white-house-solar-panels/

The world was set to do everything we're doing today in the 80s. Except that the powers that be decided to extract every last dollar from fossil fuels, regardless of consequences like global warming. Decades of government subsidies for everything except solar and wind followed, creating a long tail of glacially slow price reductions for renewables. So we accept evolution and reject revolution because we can't see the strings controlling the marionette. <- writing this on a site dedicated to hacking around barriers is especially painful

I wrote about stuff like heat pumps and carbon capture in long emails to my friends in the 2000s, complete with prices and sources. Then had to wait 20 long years for the world to manifest those ideas in its own time. Which hinged on political close calls like Obama's reelection, which provided a brief safety net for electric car manufacturers among other things, and almost didn't happen. It took almost no time for his successor the former president to impose a 30%…

There is some dispute about whether other, supposedly higher recorded temperatures were actually valid readings. Original long-form blog post here[1], and a summary taken from here[2] reads as follows:

"Burt wrote a detailed 2016 blog post at Weather Underground challenging the 1913 record at Death Valley, explaining that official readings of 134, 130, and 131 degrees Fahrenheit taken on July 10, 12, and 13, 1913 were likely the result of an inexperienced observer. In order for the 1913 Death Valley record to be decertified, though, an official World Meteorological Organization investigation committee would have to be assembled to look into the matter, a years-long process for which there is currently no motivation.

The only other temperature of at least 130 degrees Fahrenheit officially recognized by the World Meteorological Organization is a 131-degree reading at Kebili, Tunisia, set July 7, 1931, which is considered to be Africa’s hottest temperature.

Burt disputed this record: “I mentioned to the WMO about the Kebili temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit back in 2012, when asked what I thought the next hottest temperature in Africa (after Al Azzia) might be, since that was the only temperature over 130 degrees Fahrenheit that had an actual date attached to it. However, the Kebili ‘record’ is even more bogus than even the Al Azzia record, and I said so. Kebili is a relatively cool spot in Tunisia (an oasis) and never since the 1930s ever again recorded a maximum…

Yes, I recall the California study was marred by fairly obvious problems - it was looking for the infection rate of a population. The population was known to have a low infection rate and the test had a high false positive rate. He got a result that indicated a ~1-2% infection rate but which was compatible with 0% infection rate and thus was essentially worthless.

He's push covid denialism in every conceivable forum open to him and aligned with overtly right wing ideological institutions like the Hoover Institute and the American Institute For Economic Research.

This stuff has been gone over so much by now it has skidmarks on it but I'll dust off the file I keep this stuff:

A nice article describing the similarity of Covid-denial and Climate-change-denial: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/

An article on the effort to spin the Santa Clara tests befor e they were even release: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating-california-2019-bunk.html

What's on with Ioannidis: https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-rate-critics/

Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, another Stanford Connected "minimizer" https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration

A summary of several related minimizers, with a similar program:…

For those saying they should give these people services as well as housing - the problem is that they refuse services, but are given housing anyway.

I just finished reading Sanfransicko by Michael Shellenberger, who is a critic of housing first.

He doesn't seem like the most trustworthy author, especially after reading parts of his other book, Apocalypse Never, this scathing review of it (https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-science-and-bad-arguments-abound-in-apocalypse-never/), and Shellenberger's really poor defense (https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2020/8/3/bad-science-and-bad-ethics-in-peter-gleicks-review-of-apocalypse-never-at-yale-climate-connections)

However I think what Shellenberger is saying makes a lot of sense: you shouldn't give free housing to people without asking for something in return like getting off of drugs or taking antipsychotic meds. Shelters, yes, apartments, no. Addicts go into these places, overdose, and die, because there is no one around to help them when they overdose. It is also just a huge waste resource-wise and might even make the problem worse, because you are enabling people to live these lifestyles that they need to get out of.

Water-based shipping is extremely efficient. (However, they should be forced to install pollution controls on their internal combustion engines instead of just injecting raw exhaust into the ocean.)

Of course, reducing their carbon footprint would also be good, but it's currently only 3% of global emissions:

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/maritime-shipping-causes-more-greenhouse-gases-than-airlines/

The carbon impact of the stuff on the ships is likely much higher. For instance, this BBC article breaks it down for food, and, for ocean-shipped stuff, the carbon emissions of transporting the food is rounding error:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-benefits-of-veganism-and-vegetarianism

The only real exceptions to the rule involve highly-perishable food that has to be flown in next day, but that doesn't have anything to do with ocean transport.

As far as I can tell, carbon offsets are a complete scam (vs. putting the money directly into stuff that reduces carbon production).

If anyone knows how to pay an existing company to extract carbon from the atmosphere, and store it in a biologically inactive form for > 1000 years, then I'd love to hear about it.

I'm disheartened there's no mention of carbon footprint or sustainability. With all the great focus in our community on sustainable land transport (Tesla), data centers, solar and neo-nuclear power, etc., here we have a startup that markets this:

"imagine leaving New York in the morning, making afternoon meetings in London, and being home to tuck your kids into bed."

That is a terrible thing to enable from an environmental impact standpoint. While air travel can be somewhat more efficient per mile than driving alone in a gas car[1], the distances it enables you to travel are vastly greater. Further upping the convenience factor would no doubt encourage more "binge flying".

Perhaps Boom is more efficient than typical airplanes. Perhaps it's less efficient. Perhaps it could make planes that travel at the same speed but at half the carbon footprint. We wouldn't know from this. It's not part of the story.

Let's change that. Let's make sustainability as important a consideration with airplanes as it is with cars.

[1] http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/