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When would one decide to abandon a city ? Where would you start rebuilding? Given that this is happening in every part of the country as well as the world what is it doing to our industrial capacity ?
The underlying economy and the reality that control has shifted from engineers, scientists etc to accountants and non-technical managers.
Back in ye olde days, the gas company had an Engineer in charge. So did the electricity company. So did the railways. So did every other company of a technical, scientific or engineering nature. Now they're run by all sorts of people - most of whom know little about gas, power or trains. And whereas the Cheif Engineer saw the goal as making sure every home had gas and electricity and the trains were running, the goal of the CEO is purely short term financial profit.
Back in the old days, if the previous year's profit was deemed too high then they'd just cut prices, thus benefiting the broader economy and growing the gas / electricity or whatever business in the long term as a result. Everyone wins except those wanting a quick gain. You'll never see such thinking applied today now that the goal is short term profit without regard for the long term.
There's a lot of things that we could easily do but don't, simply due to the shift in thinking away from the pursuit of technical goals in favour of what is commonly known as economic rationalism.
not viable under current thinking.
Witness the struggles of .... the aim is to match the profits available through the financial industries.
If we still thought the way we thought 50 years ago then this thread would not exist, period. We'd just engineer our way out of the energy problem and spread the cost, with a modest return on investment, over the 25, 40, 60 or 100 year life of the renewable energy systems we built. Problem fixed. The only thing stopping us is the insistence that nothing can be done if it's not the single most profitable option available in purely financial terms.
but it's the crux of the problem we have. We can do it, but it doesn't make sense to do so if we're only looking at a short term period and counting every cent. The problem is a financial / accounting issue, not a technical one.
The subversion distilled in the above post, Staggering.... That moderators allow this blasphemy beggars belief.
Alert yourselves All to this brazen 5th column.
But fear not my friends, tune to the Fox network and News Corpse and know that god is in his plushly appointed boardroom, while the many spend years of their life's stuck in traffic commuting from drudge to a hopefully financially solid domestic dream. Because remember, to question may bring about inconvenient and uncomfortable (for the questioners) answers.
to the Fellows of the republic I say...to get rich is glorious.
To the moderators of this thread, imagine in a jovial kind of way..... pockmarked walls.
Sleep well.
Best regards 'The Dear Leader'
I could distill it even further....
Current way of thinking = how much money will this make in the short term?
Older way of thinking = what is the long term potential of this in a practical sense, and how can we build a viable long term business based upon it that will be profitable in due course?
The thing about renewable energy is that with very few exceptions it involves virtually all costs being incurred up front, followed by production over the following decades. Quite simply, this business model sits very well with the "old" way of thinking but not with today's.
Doesn't this comment prove Smurf's point? The payback will come over the decades that the renewable energy generators incur no costs for fuel.This would make a good Alan Jones rant but not sure how it lines up with reality given the amount of Government money that's been spent on renewable energy ideas with middling results.
So, after the IPCC report, which bit of the world are you prepared to lose?
When people say we should adjust to climate change, do they understand what that actually means?
George Monbiot
‘It’s not only the Stern review that’s been forgotten, but also the floods which have so recently abated.'
To understand what is happening to the living planet, the great conservationist Aldo Leopold remarked, is to live "in a world of wounds … An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."
The metaphor suggests that he might have seen Henrik Ibsen's play, An Enemy of the People. Thomas Stockmann is a doctor in a small Norwegian town, and medical officer at the public baths whose construction has been overseen by his brother, the mayor. The baths, the mayor boasts, "will become the focus of our municipal life! … Houses and landed property are rising in value every day."
But Stockmann discovers that the pipes have been built in the wrong place, and the water feeding the baths is contaminated. "The source is poisoned … We are making our living by retailing filth and corruption! The whole of our flourishing municipal life derives its sustenance from a lie!" People bathing in the water to improve their health are instead falling ill.
Stockmann expects to be treated as a hero for exposing this deadly threat. After the mayor discovers that re-laying the pipes would cost a fortune and probably sink the whole project, he decides that his brother's report "has not convinced me that the condition of the water at the baths is as bad as you represent it to be".
The mayor proposes to ignore the problem, make some cosmetic adjustments and carry on as before. After all, "the matter in hand is not simply a scientific one. It is a complicated matter, and has its economic as well as its technical side." The local paper, the baths committee and the business people side with the mayor against the doctor's "unreliable and exaggerated accounts".
Astonished and enraged, Stockmann lashes out madly at everyone. He attacks the town as a nest of imbeciles, and finds himself, in turn, denounced as an enemy of the people. His windows are broken, his clothes are torn, he's evicted and ruined.
Today's editorial in the Daily Telegraph, which was by no means the worst of the recent commentary on this issue, follows the first three acts of the play. Marking the new assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Telegraph sides with the mayor. First it suggests that the panel cannot be trusted, partly because its accounts are unreliable and exaggerated and partly because it uses "model-driven assumptions" to forecast future trends. (What would the Telegraph prefer? Tea leaves? Entrails?). Then it suggests that trying to stop manmade climate change would be too expensive. Then it proposes making some cosmetic adjustments and carrying on as before. ("Perhaps instead of continued doom-mongering, however, greater thought needs to be given to how mankind might adapt to the climatic realities.")
....When our environment secretary, Owen Paterson, assures us that climate change "is something we can adapt to over time" or Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian today, says that we should move towards "thinking intelligently about how the world should adapt to what is already happening", what do they envisage? Cities relocated to higher ground? Roads and railways shifted inland? Rivers diverted? Arable land abandoned? Regions depopulated? Have they any clue about what this would cost? Of what the impacts would be on the people breezily being told to live with it?
This would make a good Alan Jones rant but not sure how it lines up with reality given the amount of Government money that's been spent on renewable energy ideas with middling results.
Doesn't this comment prove Smurf's point? The payback will come over the decades that the renewable energy generators incur no costs for fuel.
The IPCC has released it's latest CC report which interestingly enough focuses on risks and risk management. I thought George Monbiot came up with the most insightful analysis of the choices we face and the situation we have ended up in.
Really worth a read and a think.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/ipcc-report-world-lose-habitats-climate-change
Original is here: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/...e-of-gst-revenue/story-fnihsrf2-1226875116928Looking overall at Australia, our engineers, architects, scientists, teachers, planners, police, firemen, defence forces, inventors, farmers, fishermen and environmentalists have done a fantastic job over the past 100 years or more, just look at what they have achieved. At the same time, looking at the results achieved, our politicians, judges, lawyers and accountants have done an appalling job, they have created an absolute shambles while feathering their own nests to the extreme. We really need to make some radical changes in the way these sectors operate
An alarming abuse of scientific method by climate alarmists.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/...-access-to-lewandowsky-poll-data/#more-106903
Thats so interesting... and apposite.
The IPCC releases its latest report on the progress of global warming and its effects on the earth. The report is effectively signed off by all significant countries representatives who tacitly agree with its findings. And as George Monbiot points out we are left with deciding just which parts of the world we are prepared to sacrifice.
Meanwhile the real "scientists" (Monckton, Carter, Watt and co) are arguing about a paper which identifies how far denialists have buried their heads in the sand or up their collective bums.
And that is their contribution to the debate.
.
Moonbat is an idiot, and the IPCC report id nothing but a collection of weasel words, incidentally, at odds with the original long version report.
So this is the new way to do science basilio? We make some obnoxious untenable hypothesis and then hide all the purported data?
Come on, not even you could fail to be embarrassed by such tosh.
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