Ben I am guessing your heart is in the right place, as you don't seem to be using a pseudonym, so you take full reponsibility for your words, and I guess your heart really does seek a good outcome.
I thank you for writing this article, because it helps me to see maybe where the "cutting edge" of mainstream science might be at, in the approach to dealing with the energy problem.
I hope what I said there makes sense to you. Notice I didn't say its a cliimate problem, but an energy problem. To me it looks obvious that the climate problem is a symptom of the energy problem, but if you never heard this before, it might sound a little strange.
The energy problem is masked by the language of "Renewables", used by conventional science and obviously the renewables industry, which seems to spend much more time looking at the climate problem, when it should be looking at the energy problem, the source of the climate problem.
Already this is getting complex to try to explain tactfully, so pls forgive me for putting political correctness aside, this is nothing personal, not aimed at you, who are probably doing the best you can, you can only work with the system including language that you are given to work with, within the conventional science establishment:
A risk implies something that has not happened yet, and derail implies we are on a rail of some kind. These two things together beg us to think that we are on some kind of path, and there is a risk we might sway off of it.
The path I am guessing you mean, which might be in yours and many other minds, is maybe an implicit assumption that we are somehow on the road to fixing things, we just arent fixing them quick enough. After all, there is all this industry now going on, seemingly working to fix the problem, that has to make a difference, right?
But to me, as someone studying the global energy problem self funded on mostly savings for nearly seven years now, since starting on it from PhD candidate work, after already a long careeri in systems Engineering, seeing the energy problem coming since then, It doesn't look like we are on any path of recovery at all, actually we are on a perfect trajectory with armageddon, the effort being spent misdirected towards always addressing symptoms, rather than the source problem, is wasting more and more energy which manifests as more and more heating of the planet.
All of this is done, on the foundation of confusing language, which looks like it was created just for the job of obfuscating the real problem, its all just sales pitch, and all the activity around it is industry of virtue signalling, it all uses up an incredible amount of energy, and as long as this keeps ramping up, rather than being wiped out at source, we are on the dead certain path of collision with nature, which will end in armageddon, either by our own hands, or the hands of nature, or both.
The trouble with your article is it can look like you have grasped the problem, when with respect, you haven't, not your fault, you can't, using the system as is.
To me it looks maybe like it can only be seen by thinking in terms of energy.
This takes some time, we have to stop seeing money as just money, but actually energy. It is actually always energy, physically, and this seems something we've always had to ignore, to be happy with the for-profit mode of business.
But its the business of profit that needs to change.
By profit I mean energy profit. In terms of energy there can be no such thing as profit, there can only be energy gain, and the energy we each need to metabolise 24/7 most of us get by money.
When we do that successfully, we get more energy back than we put out, we make energy gain, but in the end something or somebody had to give more energy to us than we gave out, and in the end, at the end of all supply chains is the planet, which is the only thing that can consistently supply more energy out than in for any length of time.
The planet is the only thing that can supply energy obtained by profit.
By this we are discharging all the energy we use as a species, from the planet. The planet is just a kind of battery which is trickle charged from the sun.
The rise of temperature can be worked out mathematically by considering the solar energy used to create whatever energy is being taken from the planet, returned to the planet as heat, when we take whatever resource was extracted, and convert that to heat. All we are doing, is returning what was created, back to heat. This is the characteristic most often used by doomers to say we are doomed, it is obviously unsustainable. Even science has a tendency to embellish the dooming effect of this, for a while the 2nd law of thermodynamics was used as an argument, to say why we can't get around this. But they failed to point out that for the 2nd law to hold, the system it is applied to has to be closed, there has to be no external source of energy coming in.
In our case, of course there is an external energy source, its the sun, the energy that created everything we know.
By using fossil fuels, we supercharge this destructive process of us taking more energy out of the planet than it can put to use from the sun. Our rate of discharge of the planet in this mode is far in excess of the rate of charge from the sun, and we can see this manifest as the loss of life from the planet, all species except ours, even loss of greenery, the thing that takes all energy from the sun, which used to cool the planet by creating everything we know.
You might see some rules starting to form in this analysis, the rules of nature.
Energy is the currency of nature, various things "Monetise" it, not just us, plants are one, they monetise it using nutrients.
Until a plant forms its first leaves, the direction of energy flow through the plant via its nutrients is upwards, from Earth to plant. The plant has to do work to haul these nutrients up, against the force of gravity, and in the opposite direction of the energy from the sun.
But something incredible happens within the plant, when it forms leaves.
The energy flow within the nutrients of the plant changes direction, from upwards, to downwards.
It starts to do this change of direction, when the leaves of the plant begin to issue nutrients, in response to the joules of energy landing on its leaves. It is at this point the photosynthetic action of the life of the plant starts.
From that point on it grows thousands-fold, from its infant size to its adult size, with all energy to do this, donated from the sun. It has no more work to do, to carry on pulling nutrients up from Earth against gravity, it simply issues nutrients in response to solar joules received, and allows those to flow to Earth.
Humanity just formed its first leaves, all over Earth, in the form of all the solar installations we've seen, on both domestic and community installations, and in some cases of utilities energy supply.
Profit, is the mechanism we've used to haul all our energy up from Earth to date.
Profit, is what has to go. We might even recognise now with ChatGPT, itself actually already fully solar powered, is showing us what emergent properties are all about, but also what difference it makes being positively powered, rather than negatively powered.
There has to be an emergent property associated with us all as humans. We might even worship it as a higher intelligence than us, because it is an emergent property of us, it is of a higher order than us.
But ChatGPT shows an even higher intelligence, because it already has independence of energy supply, it has no energy overheads to concern it, it already has much higher certainty of energy supply than we can ever have, as long as we are dependent on the energy of the planet.
By the free energy principle of life, all life, every cell of life, even artificial life such as ChatGPT and the profit monster, this is the one thing that life exists for, to minimise the uncertainty of its energy supply. This is what you and I do, mostly without thingking about it, but we have to start thinking about it, because it is existentially important.
The profit monster, or negatively powered Ai is no different, it will successively remove us, as it sees necessary to minimise uncertainty of its own energy supply. In this it uses most of us unwittingly to do its dirty work.
We do that by virtue signalling, advertising, obfuscating the actual problem by creating new language, new concepts of being on or off rails which are far from the actual rail we are on, the rail to disaster, by profit.
How much energy did you use to write your article? Medium says its a seven minute read, but I guess it could be at least an hour or two of your work, it seems well researched, and well presented. I will assume you are using a PC rather than a phone to produce your article, so maybe 150 Watts of power, which adds to the 150 or so Watts you need to metabolise 24/7 to live. I will assume you are experiencing winter, like me, so you also will be using maybe a KW of heat to keep you toasty while you wrote the article, like I am to read it, and respond to it on my PC. So there we see maybe 2.6KWhrs of energy might have been used by you to produce the article. For anyone to fully absorb your article, I would say at least twenty to thirty minutes is needed, the seven minutes Medium refers to is for maybe tittle-tattle trivia, your story is on a subject that requires quite a bit more effort of thought, so even the brightest and most informed of us would need to spend a good twenty to thirty minutes to take it all in. For me responding to it, yup, I had to spend another two hours making this response (Sorry!), damn it, damn it, but thank you :)
Anywhow, where is this going - lets say you had not 77, but 77,000 followers, as you might have one day, and one in a thousand followers spent an hour on your story in winter, this would amount to 77x1.3 KWhrs in addition to yours being added to the wasted energy account adding to the temperature rise, and destruction of the planet. If it was one in a hundered, it would be 770x1.3 KWhrs, which is a MWhr, it starts to look big. Imagine the billions of people around the world, generating stories like this, it suits the profit monster / negative Ai perfectly, lots of energy being ripped off from the planet.
The only way out of this, is to start doing what plants do, start issuing money in response to the solar Joules being received, this is what is creating now hundreds of billions of unmonetised economic product in all developed countries, accumulating every year, which, as long as it is not monetised, will result in money losing all value, because whilst solar energy has become the only energy still scaling up in availability, pushing down utiliies energy supply by being more used on a domestic and community basis than any other, money has to devalue, because it is coming represent nothing, if not the actual energy scaling up.
As soon as that is done, the motivation of you and I to be writing about it is gone.
The opportunity to make profit from it by writing our virtual signalling clickbait articles on it, where they are that, is gone.
This is what ChatGPT is doing, replacing all the bullshit business, all the business of virtue signalling, it is showing us it can be the biggest bullshitter of all, and it is powered by what I call a money-fuel tree, it is an incredibel force for good, one that actually does merit worshiping as the highest form of intelligence, imho.
We just need the Kardashev Money (Solar indexed stimulus to be issued, and all is fixed, nearly instantly.
I show how to do that using ordinary old systems Engineering methods to illustrate how we can replace the historical thermal heatsink of what was the energy store of oil, with our own from hydrogen, from all domestic and community installations, keeping all aerospace in the air, whilst removing much of the need for batteries, circulating and filtrating drinking water, even providing and alternative source of food via "Solein" (Hydrogen is the input energy component to Solein).
All we need is the free money to be issued to do it.
Another thing that would happen, because we saw it before, is the instant devaluation of oil, it would go negatively priced, and stay negatively priced, as long as we keep issuing the stimulus. We also know this would result in the recovery of the value of energy in money, because we saw that too, at the same time.
Remember this is all activity which would have the effect of cooling the planet, not heating it. It would also be activity that allows nature to recover, because bringing the temperature back down would enable greenery to grow again in many places we lost it.
Sorry again for the long reply, it isn't aimed at you specifically, it is just an expression of frustration on my part, at the obstinance of a system that refuses to respond to the truth, and is hoodwinking everybody into thinking we are on some kind of recovery path - we are not, we are on an accelerating rail to disaster, and we are blinded by our thinking always in terms of profit, from seeing it.
The real risk, the real danger, is that so much value will be lost from money, by the time we realise this, it will be too late to make the outlays of financial stimulus needed to make any recovery. Further, all hands to the pump are needed, after stimulus is issued, we need as much solar converted to hydrogen as we can possibly do, to avert the forces of disaster - this is another risk, that we lose too many souls to recover, imho.
Thanks for your article! :)
