Saving Us
A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World
Katherine Hayhoe Central 363.73874 H419s 2021
Climate scientist, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, public policy professor at public policy professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock
Attitude change is endogenous, not imposed. Dr. Hayhoe's message is about learning about the person you wish to convince, and learning about where that person can go from where they are now. Learning about them, their beliefs, their values, their desires and their worries, then learning how to make an attitude shift desirable to that particular person.
p030, warming stripes, I want a scarf with this pattern:
p171, Dr. Hayhoe has her own climate-threatening attitudes:
But while safe, affordable, waste-free, widespread nuclear fusion may be part of our long term future, it is not likely to happen anytime this century --- and despite recent technological advances, nuclear fission isn't the all-encompassing antidote its enthusiasts often make it out to be.
I agree with the fusion dismissal, not because of delay, but because of the intrinsic environmental cost. Fusion leaks neutrons, perhaps 100 times as many neutrons per kilowatt hour compared to fission. Fusion will result in vastly more radioactive waste per watt generated than fission, and unlike a gen4 reactor, that waste cannot be "bred and reprocessed" until it is close to radiologically inert.
OTOH, the fission enthusiasts I know (including myself) do not think of fission (or any single technology) "all-encompassing antidote". Fission is merely the second best way to make terrestrial grid energy with minimum ecological destruction (the best way is not wasting energy, doing more with less). And fission, as practiced in the 21st century, is the best way to destroy nuclear weapons - 20% of our grid electricity is powered by that destruction.
p164: "In 2019 over 70% of new electricity installed around the world was clean energy" International renewable Energy Agency, Renewable Capacity Statistics 2020 page 3 "But even then, renewables represented 72% of total capacity additions in 2019, continuing to outpace fossil fuels by a wide margin."
This sentence is not supported by a citation. There is a huge difference between peak and sustained capacity - a peaking hydro plant produces oodles of power, but not 8766 hours per year. Renewable energy production is important when nature cooperates, but it isn't yet the all-encompassing antidote its enthusiasts often make it out to be.
My own focus is on information manufactured from energy - big computations like product design, climate models, video synthesis. A binary bit can be stored with ln(2)kT energy, 18 milli-electron volts, or 3e-21 Joules, or 8e-28 kilowatt-hours. A Dual Layer Blu-Ray video disk is 800 gigabits, so 100% efficient data transmission of a Blu-Ray is (hypothetically) 6.4e-16 kilowatt hours. The U.S. city average power cost is $0.16 per kilowatt hour, hence 100 trillion Blu-Ray videos received per penny. Practically free, even after including the vastly larger energies required to move bits into an optical fiber and back out again.
In real life, moving the data is far less expensive than creating it; emphasis on "create", a process that now requires thousands of skills, and tens of thousands of computer hours to assemble the final video product. Computation can displace some of that skill; sets and "extras" can be simulated, flubs and defects removed. Video synthesis computation consumes vast amounts of electricity, which is all converted to heat, over the course of many months. A long wait, made longer by the finite supply of electricity available.
For "portable" tasks like computation, vastly more energy is available, mere light-seconds above our heads. Compute chips are practically weightless, direct-bandgap photovoltaics can be close to that. "Thinsats" at the Earth-Moon Lagrange positions might mass one kilogram per photovoltaic kilowatt captured, and radiate waste heat into the interstellar void; round trip signal transit times will be less than three seconds, a miniscule fraction of the time needed to synthesize a movie or calculate a global climate/weather model. Future technologies can export a significant fraction of the energy demand and waste heat caused by our exponentially growing demand for information and computation.
p236 Climate Outreach's helpful manual Talking Climate 2023/2 local download pdf