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| Kincardine’s breakwall awash in the waves |
This is the second half of a post that I cut in two because it was just too long (6000+ words). If you haven’t read the first half yet, it would be a good idea to do so—what follows will make more sense that way.
That first half finished with a discussion of the problems with fossil fuels as an energy source for our civilization. It’s last paragraph is repeated below. Today, we’ll go on from there, looking at other inputs that are problematical for our civilization.
Energy, renewable sources
But, you may say, if fossil fuels are no good what about renewable energy sources? There are large amounts of energy available from sources like hydro, biomass, wind, solar and so forth. And they don’t involve adding more CO2 to the atmosphere—even biomass is only adding CO2 that was recently taken out of the atmosphere and will be taken out again as more biomass grows. A great many people today believe that renewables can replace fossil fuels and solve both our surplus energy and climate change problems. In fact, it has become very unpopular to challenge that idea, but I am afraid I must do just that.
The problems with switching over to renewable energy sources can be divided into three areas.
- the political will to do so
- the economic means to do so
- the technical feasibility of doing so
Political Will
It is clear that we will have to switch to renewable energy sources if we wish to become sustainable. But it is also clear that, as we’ll see in a moment in the section on technical feasibility, renewable energy sources will not be able to support the level of growth and consumption that many of us are accustomed to, and they certainly won’t be able to extend that level of prosperity to the poorer parts of the world.
For the overwhelming majority of people, lifestyle is not negotiable. And our current lifestyle demands continued growth and ever increasing prosperity—consumption, convenience, comfort and entertainment. I haven’t noticed anyone rioting for the sort of austerity measures that I believe a switch away from fossil fuels would require. So, any plan that can’t provide continued material progress is unlikely to be seriously considered, much less implemented. Yes, of course, I realize that we could change our lifestyle, and indeed circumstances may well force us to do so. My point is that most of us don’t want to change the way we live, and will resist any attempt to get us to do so.
Plans like the “Green New Deal”, which promise to create jobs and stimulate economic growth while switching over from fossil fuels to renewables, are intended to be more palatable. But there is good reason to think they are not economically or technically possible. And, if they were seriously undertaken, they might well make things worse, requiring the consumption of even more fossil fuels in the huge construction project that this switch over would require. This would mean further increases in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and would make climate change even worse, bringing about collapse even more quickly. Certainly not what the Green New Deal promises, but what it is likely to deliver.
The Economic Means
The surplus energy problem that I spoke of last time, and the resulting continued economic contraction that is going on, make it seem unlikely that we will have the wherewithal for such a major construction project in the years to come—we are looking at spending trillions of dollars building solar panels, windmills, storage facilities and an enhanced grid. Most of which will only make the surplus energy problem worse.
Technical Feasibility
For me, this is the real deciding factor. Let’s consider the technical problems with renewable energy sources in general and then have a look at the issues with specific types of renewables. This will make it clear why I think a switchover to renewables is simply not doable, without drastic changes to our lifestyle.
The current fossil fuel infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas wells, shipping, rail cars, pipelines, refineries, storage, distribution and retail facilities, and the equipment we have set up to use those fuels—is actually quite compact, owing to the concentrated nature of those fuels. They contain a lot of energy in a small, light package, and this has been the key to their success.
Renewables are more diffuse and require extensive infrastructure to gather and concentrate them to the point where they are useful. Already we are seeing what I call “energy sprawl” spreading across the countryside in the form of wind turbines and solar panels. But the amount of energy we are getting from this sprawl is tiny compared to our total energy use.
The renewable energy that is being proposed as a solution (wind and solar, mainly) comes largely in the form of electricity. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the energy we use today is used in the form of electricity. The rest is used directly in the form of refined fossil fuels to power transportation and to supply heat for industrial processes, space heating and so forth. The two biggest obstacles are electrifying heavy transportation (trucks and ships), and using renewable power to provide heat for manufacturing things like steel and concrete.
Switching over to renewables not only requires us to build huge amounts (5 times more than we currently have) of electrical generation, all of it powered by renewable energy sources, but also that we switch our transportation fleets and industrial infrastructure over to use electricity instead of fossil fuels as a power source.
This a big job that the “powers that be” don’t really seem very interested in undertaking, and there are large chunks of it that we don’t even know how to do as yet. I’ll borrow a term from the nuclear industry here: “paper reactors”. Solutions that so far only exist on paper have a tendency to take longer than predicted to implement, and cost a lot more money than expected. Time and money are two things that we don’t have in great supply these days.
The power grid, which in most areas is just barely coping with peak loads, will also have to be beefed up by a factor of five to cope with the switch over to an all electric economy. But using the electricity from renewables presents some significant problems for the grid. Our civilization treats the power grid as an infinite source of energy which is available 24/7. In order to provide this, the grid needs energy sources that are “dispatchable”. That is, energy sources can be turned on and off at will and ramped up and down as needed to cope with varying loads. This is usually done using a combination of coal, oil, natural gas and hydroelectricity, all of which are to some extent dispatchable.
But wind and solar are anything but dispatchable. The wind blows when it will, and there are often long periods without any wind at all over large geographic areas. The sun shines only during the day, except when there is cloud cover, and solar panels are often be covered with snow in the winter. None of these variations corresponds in any way to the normal variations in load that the grid experiences. In fact, to make even small amounts of intermittent renewable energy fit into the grid, highly dispatchable energy sources like combustion turbines (jet engines connected to generators, burning jet fuel) must be left spinning on standby, ready to compensate instantly when renewables falter.
This hardly makes the grid any “greener” at all. One solution would be to have a way of storing electrical power which could then be used to fill in when renewables let us down. Pumped storage of water is one alternative that is a mature technology. Water is pumped uphill to a reservoir when surplus power is available and then runs down hill through turbines to generate power when extra is needed. The problem is scalability—there are limited locations where reservoirs exists at the top a large change in elevation and near a supply of water. Batteries or compressed air on the scale that is needed here so far only exist on paper, and further development seems likely to run up against some fundamental physical limits.
Even if all these issues can be solved, we’d end up with a grid that is less resilient and more complex—more susceptible to failure.
It should also be noted that equipment like wind turbines, solar cells and batteries have a limited life. This poses two problems—when they wear out, they have to be replaced, and the old equipment has to been gotten rid of. Hopefully recycled, but more likely just disposed of.
A late addtion: Bev, one of my regular readers, pointed out in the comments below something that I had failed to make clear: while the energy from renewables is renewable, the equipment itself is built with largley non-renewable materials, and using up the quantity of materials we are talking about will no doubt lead to new resource depletion problems. It also takes fossil fuels to build, deliver, install, operate, maintain, repair and eventually decommision that equipment. Someday we may be able to power some of those steps with renewables, but initially and for the foreseable future, it’s hard to see if there is really any net reduction in the use of fossil fuels when you look at the whole process.
And finally, even if all the technical problems could be solved, wind and solar do not have very good EROEIs, and would make our surplus energy problem even worse.
To bring this all home, let’s take a look at the specific forms of renewable energy that we might turn to if we want to get off fossil fuels.
Power from biomass, basically firewood, is a very mature technology, and it has many advantages. While it is produced only during the growing season, it can be harvested and stored for use during winter. It is quite dispatchable and its EROEI is reasonably high, depending on how far it has to be hauled from the forest to where it is going to be used. Unfortunately, it is not highly scalable, since it competes with agriculture for land at a time when we are struggling to grow enough food for the world’s growing population.
Hydroelectric power is another mature technology, with good dispatchability and a high EROEI. It is somewhat seasonal and it is not very scalable since most good locations are already in use. Developing the few remaining feasible locations would mean flooding large areas of land with environmental consequences that we should likely see as unacceptable.
Wind power is quite scalable, but intermittent and not dispatchable at all. It’s EROEI is in the high teens, which is borderline for our needs, and probably lower if you take storage facilities into account.
Solar power is quite scalable, but intermittent and not dispatchable at all. It’s EROEI is quite low, in the mid single digits, less if storage facilities are included in your calculations.
Nuclear fission power is not really a renewable since it relies on finite supplies of fissionable fuel. If a nuclear powered economy is to keep growing, it will run out of fuel in a surprisingly short time, even if spent fuel from the current generation of reactors can be processed for use in newer reactors. Nuclear has limited dispatchability, being best suited to supply base load. It has pretty good scalability, except that it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, and we would need a lot of them to replace fossil fuels. We must also overcome many political and safety issues before starting to build more nukes. Lastly, the EROEI of nuclear is around 9, largely due to the complexity and safety features involved, so it only makes the surplus energy problem worse.
Nuclear fusion power isn’t renewable either, though it’s fuel is much more common than fissionables. But it is a “paper technology”— usable fusion reactors have been “just thirty years in the future” since the middle of the twentieth century, and will likely always be so. If we did somehow find the money to finish developing this technology, it would be very expensive to build, and its EROEI would likely be very low due to its high degree of complexity.
All in all, this is not an encouraging picture. You can see why I am so doubtful about switching from fossil fuels to renewables. One the one hand we desperately need to get off fossil fuels to get climate change under control. On the other hand we desperately need fossil fuels (or the elusive “something equivalent”) to supply surplus energy to maintain our growing economy and the lifestyles it enables.
I have no confidence that we will even try to address this seemingly unresolvable conflict, and that is one more reason that I am expecting collapse.
Further, as the weighted average of the EROEIs of all a civilization’s energy sources declines it is not just economic growth that suffers, but also the ability to maintain infrastructure. This includes the ability to build high tech equipment, including things like solar panels and wind turbines. At some point, as our industrial civilization continues to collapse, we will find ourselves restricted to low tech renewables and unable to maintain a large scale power grid. We’ll be forced to drastically reduce our consumption of energy, and to adapt our use of energy to the intermittency of the sources, rather than the other way around.
So far I have only addressed the problems with energy inputs to our civilization, but there are other inputs that also present significant challenges.
The Ecosystem, and ecosystem services
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| Figure 2, from my last post |
The circle enclosing industrial civilization in the diagram above is misleading in that it would tend to suggest there is a boundary separating civilization from the environment, when it is really just another part of the environment. I have use a dashed line, hoping to indicated that many things flow freely between our civilization and its environment. There is a whole category of such things—inputs to our civilization—that we are absolutely dependent upon. Often referred to as “ecosystem services”, these inputs are things we tend not to be aware of, in much the same way as fish are not aware of water.
They include breathable air, potable water, a reliable climate and moderate weather, arable soil, grasslands, forests and the animals living on/in them, waters and the fisheries they provide, and so on. These things are available to us free of charge and we would simply could not do without them.
It is important to understand that the ecosystem can only supply its services at a certain maximum rate—its carrying capacity. If we use those services at a higher rate, the ecosystem suffers and that carrying capacity is reduced. Many of the waste outputs of our civilization can also damage the ecosphere, again reducing its carrying capacity. And we continue to convert nature into farms, roads and cities, yet again reducing its carrying capacity.
This has created the current situation where we are temporarily in “overshoot”, using more than 100% of the planet’s carrying capacity. We are able to do this because there is a certain amount of stored capacity within the system. Drawing on that capacity has lulled us into a false sense of security. But rest assured, the situation is temporary and shortly the damage to the ecosphere will become obvious, and its declining ability to support us will have disastrous consequences.
To put some numbers on this, in the early 1970s when The Limits to Growth was published, we were using about 85% of the planet’s carrying capacity. There was, at that point, at least hypothetically, an opportunity to put the brakes on economic growth and start living sustainably. Of course, we did not do so and now we are using around 165% of that carrying capacity. If we bring the poorer part of the world up to a standard of living similar to that of the developed nations, it would take about 500% of that carrying capacity to support the human race. Many suggest we should do exactly that, as a matter of social and economic justice.
It is hard to disagree with that, in and of itself. But long before this happens, of course, the ecosphere will have collapsed and suffered a drastic decrease in its carrying capacity.
Three factors are involved in our impact on the ecosphere: population, affluence (consumption) and technology. This can be represented by the equation I=PAT.
Population and affluence are politically sensitive subjects, so many people have focused on using technology to reduce our footprint. This is known as “decoupling”, since the aim is to decouple rising population and consumption from their effects on the ecosphere, to allow growth to continue without having harmful effects. It turns out decoupling has not yet even begun and is very unlikely to ever be achieved. It is largely a myth. Here are a couple of links (1, 2), to articles that go into this in detail.
In addition to promoting myths about decoupling, those who do not wish growth to stop quibble about exactly what the planet’s carrying capacity actually is and just how far into overshoot we currently are. This accomplishes nothing, since whatever that carrying capacity actually is, continued exponential growth will quickly take us past it into overshoot.
So it would seem we should do something about population and/or affluence. Population is such a hot button issue that one can hardly discuss it in polite company. Understandably so, since reducing population must involve either reducing fertility or increasing the death rate. Indeed people have been accused of being “eco-fascists” because they see the need to reduce our population, and look to the most populous areas as the first place to take action. I think “eco-fascist” is a reasonable term, since the most populous areas are also the poorest places on the planet and our impact on the ecosystem is the product of both population and affluence. In the developed world our consumption is so high that even though we have far fewer people, our impact is much larger than that of the poorer parts of the world.
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| Figure 3 |
As this chart (Figure 3) shows, the richest 10% of the planet’s population does close to 60% of the consumption. The richest 20% does over 75% of it (17.6+59=76.6). So, reducing consumption in the more affluent parts of the world would be a good start to coping with our problems because it would immediately take us out of overshoot and give us some breathing room to address the damage we’ve been doing to the ecosystem.
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| Figure 4 |
As this revised consumption chart (Figure 4) shows, if we could reduce our consumption by 50%, it would reduce our ecological impact down to 82.5% of the planet’s carrying capacity, while actually increasing the consumption level of the lowest seven deciles of the population, and only reducing the consumption levels of the top three deciles. This would seem to satisfy our yearning for social and environmental justice and significantly delay, if not prevent, collapse. But since the most affluent people, those in the tenth decile, are also in control of the situation, it seems unlikely that we’ll make a serious attempt to implement that solution unless we are forced to do so by events beyond our control that bear a strong resemblance to collapse.
You may say that our population problem exists because our capacity to provide food has increased and our capacity to reproduce has responded, not the other way around. I don’t disagree, but I don’t think it is very useful to point that out. Deliberately cutting back on food production and letting people starve in order to reduce our impact on the ecosystem is morally repugnant. It is also not particularly effective since the poor would be effected first and they are not the major contributors to our impact on the ecosystem.
It has also been observed that as countries get richer, their birthrate goes down. Extrapolating current trends (including continued development in the developing nations), the UN calculates that our population will top out around 10 billion late this century and then begin to decline. They would tell you that all we have do is hang on until then and all will be well. But again, I disagree. Long before our population reaches 10 billion, especially if nothing is done to reduce our rate of consumption, the ecosystem will collapse and its carrying capacity will crash down to a level that can support only a tiny fraction of our present population. I think 10 to 20% would be an optimistic prediction.
Overuse of Fossil Water
This post is already quite a bit longer than I usually aim for, and I have only covered what I see as the most urgent input and output issues. There are many other areas that I haven’t begun to cover, and which I will have to leave for another day. But there is one more input issue that I just can’t leave out, and that is the depletion of fossil water.
Many of the important agricultural areas around the world rely on irrigation, and water for that irrigation is pumped out of fossil aquifers. That is, underground reservoirs that took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate. The current rate of use is many times greater than the current rate of replenishment, and it is only a matter of time, and not much time, until they run dry.
The consequences for agriculture will seriously debilitate our civilization’s ability feed us.
Summing it all up
We have seen again and again, from the start to the finish of this post, and the previous one, that resource depletion of various sorts, and depletion of the sinks into which we dispose of our wastes, seriously threaten our civilization. Any one of these issues is enough, all on its own, to compromise that civilization’s ability to provide us with the necessities of life. In other words, to bring about collapse. And many of them interact in ways that just make the situation worse.
But inputs and outputs are not the whole story. The interior workings of our civilization are replete with issues that threaten its ongoing survival. Next time, we’ll have a close look at some of those issues.
makati1 on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:44 am
Long article. The diner was a good site until it’s owner had to go to rehab. Sigh!
Theedrich on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 2:46 am
The Democrat warmongers will now take over.
World War Three will be so glorious as the virtue-signalling Left completes the White genosuicide that previous overlords have started. Hooray for the military-industrial complex and the Davos elites.
Cloggie on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 4:48 am
Interesting storage development in Britain based on liquid air:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2020/11/06/renewable-energy-storage-in-liquid-air-for-5-cent-kwh/
In Manchester a 250 MWh facility is being built that could compete with pumped hydro storage, at reasonable efficiency and potentially at a storage price of 5 cent/kWh, which is decent. They already have a 15 MWh demo-plant working.
Cloggie on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 6:50 am
First hydrogen district heating in the Netherlands:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2020/11/06/hydrogen-district-hoogeveen/
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 7:34 am
Hydrogen in the form of town gas has been used for heating, cooking and even transport (think gas bag vehicles) since the 19th century. Much of the infrastructure was dismantled in the 1970s when North Sea natural gas was developed.
It was stored and distributed as a gas at close to atmospheric pressure.
https://stilllondon.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/gasometers-a-photo-series/
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 8:58 am
Theedick, was it only US white liberals who chose to make less babies so they could have more consumer goodies & ‘experiences’?
White people don’t have many babies these days (cont’d)
“The basic story of demographics in the United States over the past couple of decades is that non-Hispanic whites have had smaller and smaller families, which means that the proportion of people who are some other ethnic or racial group keeps growing.”
https://granitegeek.concordmonitor.com/2020/07/13/white-people-dont-have-many-babies-any-more-contd/
The white people have spoken.
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:08 am
A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/large-portion-electorate-chose-sociopath/616994/
proof that chinks are master race Muslim Pupils in Berlin Support Beheading of French Teacher… on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:11 am
chinks take care of these pesky issues
proof that chinks are master race Egypt Suspends Professor for Not Caring Enough about the Quran… on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:12 am
speaking high english or high egyptian doesnt mean squat
Abraham van Helsing on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:21 am
InfamousScammer, loves to pretend he cares about the environment, but which he merely uses for his real motivation: attacking white civilization where he can, gloats at the idea that white people are to be replaced with darkies, of which there can never be enough. He will never attack them for having too many babies.
The InfamousScammer is representative for the attitude of the majority of international jewry. Whites have dominated the planet between 1492-1945 and jews want to replace them at the top of the pecking order since early 20th century. The usual will for power, a universal principle throughout history. They aspire it because they can, because they have clueless Americans at their disposal to carry out the job. Splendidly so between 1939-1945, when Germany, the core strength of the white race, was intentionally pushed into war, using the good services of the UK war party and useful idiot Poland and somewhat destroyed Germany (today they are the largest exporter in the world).
Sadly for infamousscammer, it was all downhill after 1970, with Korea, the Vietnam -debacle, Russia-2000, Iraq, Syria. In 2016 they even lost the presidency. Holywood meanwhile is now owned by the Chinese. Even the infamousscammer himself admitted last week that the US and its empire had no future. He now takes some courage from the fact that perhaps Biden will taken over the presidency from Trump in January. But the national polarization remains and could come back with a vengeance, for instance after a president Harris would attempt to disarm the American population, after some mass shooting, engineered or otherwise.
Interestingly, it remains to be seen how strong the jewish influence in the US deep state still really is?
https://www.infowars.com/posts/israeli-minister-warns-of-war-in-middle-east-if-biden-wins/
“Israeli Minister Warns of War in Middle East if Biden Wins”
The idea that darkies and jews are natural allies have been repeatedly shown to be not true. Yes, the jews are willing to lead them against the hated whites, but the darkies see jews as “rich white guys”. That’s not going to fly. It could happen that there will be a power shift from the jews, towards darkies. That makes for an interesting powder keg.
#Beer&Popcorn!
zero juan on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:22 am
Dumbfuck JuanP is up
proof that chinks are master race Egypt Suspends Professor for Not Caring Enough about the Quran… said speaking high english or high egyptian doesnt mean…
proof that chinks are master race Muslim Pupils in Berlin Support Beheading of French Teacher… said chinks take care of these pesky issues
FamousDrScanlon said Theedick, was it only US white liberals who chose…
FamousDrScanlon said What happened to the MAGA-tards, militias, proud-g…
Abraham van Helsing on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:38 am
View from the “reasonable left”:
NOVEMBER 3, 2020
America’s Gettysburg Moment: Even If Defeated Trumpism Will Not Vanish
BY PATRICK COCKBURN
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/03/americas-gettysburg-moment-even-if-defeated-trumpism-will-not-vanish/
Yet the very fact that it has taken the coronavirus to defeat Trump is evidence, unfortunately, that he is not the aberration or parenthesis that his opponents think him to be. Conviction that he is stems from wishful thinking by many Americans – and a majority of commentators – who detest him as a satanic figure whose rise to power is a horrible historic joke. But such an interpretation, understandable though it may be, underestimates the strength of the forces that backed him and seriously misreads American history.
“America will never be destroyed from the outside,” Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying. “If we falter and lose our freedom, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
Douze points, Abe!
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:40 am
Correia: “F**kery Is Afoot”
Authored by Larry Correia via MonsterHunterNation.com,
I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like we’ve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and they’re eternally fucked. And now, however this shakes out in court, that’s exactly what half the country is going to think. People are pissed off, and rightfully so. Before I became a novelist I was an accountant. In auditing you look for red flags. That’s weird bits in the data that suggest something shifty is going on. You flag those weird things so you can delve into them further. One flag doesn’t necessarily mean there’s fraud. Weird things happen. A few flags mean stupidity or dishonesty. But a giant pile of red flags means that there’s bad shit going on and people should be in jail. If you think this is all a coincidence you’re an idiot. These are statistical impossibilities. https://t.co/dmnSIJgnC5 — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 6, 2020 Except for in politics, where apparently all you have to do to dismiss a bunch of red flag is be a democrat and mumble something about “fascist voter suppression” then you can do all sorts of blatant crime and get off. I’ve been trying to keep up with the firehose of information about what’s going on during this clusterfuck of an election. Last night I was on Facebook talking about the crazy high, 3rd world dictatorship level voter turnout levels in the deep blue areas of these swing states was very suspicious. Somebody gas lighted me about how “I’d have to do better than that”, so this was my quick reply, listing off the questionable bullshit I could think of off the top of my head: The massive turn out alone is a red flag. But as for doing better… The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads are a red flag. The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag. The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag. The ratios of these vote dumps favoring Biden more in these few battlegrounds than the ratio for the rest of the country (even the bluest of the blue) red flag. Biden outperforming Obama among these few urban vote dumps, even though Trump picked up points in every demographic group in the rest of the country, red flag. The poll observers being removed. Red flag. The counters cheering as GOP observers are removed, red flag. The fact that the dem observers outnumber the GOP observers 3 to 1, red flag (and basis of the first lawsuit filed) The electioneering at the polls (on video), red flag. The willful violation of the court order requiring the separation of ballots by type, red flag. USPS whistleblower reporting to the Inspector General that today they were ordered to backdate ballots to yesterday, red flag. The video of 2 AM deliveries of what appear to be boxes of ballots with no chain of custody or other observers right before the late night miracle spikes, red flag. Any of those things would be enough to trigger an audit in the normal world. This many flags and I’d be giggling in anticipation of catching some thieves. And it isn’t that I have to do better. I’m just an gen pop observer who happens to be a retired auditor with a finely tuned bullshit detector. This is going to the courts.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2020/11/05/the-2020-election-fuckery-is-afoot/
proof that chinks are master race Egypt Suspends Professor for Not Caring Enough about the Quran… Speaking high english or high egyptian doesnt mean squat on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:44 am
3gd croaking soon water 174.5m, 175m max
poor master race chinks
i hope they’re ok
Abraham van Helsing on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 9:52 am
Europe is quietly defecting from the US empire:
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/us-wahl-2020-reaktionen-aus-deutschland-und-europa-der-populismus-lebt-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000173898743
“”Keine Rückkehr zum alten Normalzustand””
(“No return to normalcy”)
Remember that after WW2, the USSR and China were ideological twins and at a certain point they flirted with a merger. It never happened. Power is more important than shared ideology.
The EU has 440 million whites, the US only 180 million, with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (200 million whites) anxious to join. Draw your conclusions about the possible upcoming weak Biden presidency. Even if the joint stays together, its power is waning.
https://www.rt.com/news/387313-us-losing-leadership-eu-mogherini/
“‘US losing world leadership, Europe can replace it’ – EU top diplomat Mogherini”
The Nationalist on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:09 am
Europe is noisily defecting from common sense and being invaded by mass Muslim immigration.
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:12 am
Abraham van delusional, do you have a quote from me ‘caring about the environment’ or advocating that the cancer chimps should slow down or change? No & you never will.
Why not? Because cancer chimps are incapable of changing their core behaviours. You might as well advocate for Great White sharks going vegan. Perhaps you can guilt them into changing their programming.
The humans neither created themselves or are in the drivers seat. You’re a product of evolution which in turn is driven by thermodynamics. You & the rest of the Mega-Cancer muppets ain’t in charge of shit. Bio robots. Meat puppets with your strings being pulled by the Maximum Power Principle & your evolutionary programming.
We’re all here to reduce gradients. That’s our purpose.
The purpose of life is to disperse energy
The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality.
Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature’s “efforts” to grab more and more of the sun’s flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations.
Ecology has been summarized by the pithy statement, “energy flows, matter cycles. ” Yet this maxim applies equally to complex systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life’s origins.”
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674
The Natural Science Underlying Big History
Abstract
“Nature’s many varied complex systems—including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society—are islands of order within the increasingly disordered Universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological, or cultural evolution, which together comprise the grander interdisciplinary subject of cosmic evolution. A wealth of observational data supports the hypothesis that increasingly complex systems evolve unceasingly, uncaringly, and unpredictably from big bang to humankind. These are global history greatly extended, big history with a scientific basis, and natural history broadly portrayed across ∼14 billion years of time. Human beings and our cultural inventions are not special, unique, or apart from Nature; rather, we are an integral part of a universal evolutionary process connecting all such complex systems throughout space and time. Such evolution writ large has significant potential to unify the natural sciences into a holistic understanding of who we are and whence we came. No new science (beyond frontier, nonequilibrium thermodynamics) is needed to describe cosmic evolution’s major milestones at a deep and empirical level.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4086236/
I know you can’t really help but believe in your primitive fictions, clog, but the view from tribal central is very limited & has zero explanatory power. It’s pure emotion which is obviously beneficial for survival, but useless for big picture viewing & thinking.
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:25 am
“I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like we’ve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and they’re eternally fucked.”
Quite so. If Trump had won a second term, I doubt that much would have changed. And he would have been done by 2024, too old to stand again. The fact that he was cheated out of power by a candidate who is clearly corrupt and weak, is far more valuable to white America than any Trump victory.
About 100 million heavily armed Americans now believe that their vote doesn’t count. And when faith in democracy dies, white America is far more likely to depose its Jewish tormentors using guns and bullets. This was their only recourse anyway, at least they know it now.
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:31 am
Trump may have broken his own record for most dangerous lies in one speech
( at least the Fat Boy is doing something record breaking)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/05/trump-record-lies-us-election
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:32 am
Equilibrium is Death’
Energy, Entropy, Evolution and the Paradox of Life’s Complexity
“Non-equilibrium makes life possible. Without gradients to be reduced nothing of interest could or would ever arise in the first place, they argue convincingly.
What makes this approach interesting is that it looks to be more relevant for biological complexity than the usually rather abstract complexity sciences, which have a mathematical basis. It is not so much “order” they are after, but “organization”, the hallmark of biological complexity. Other than complexity scientists such as Kauffman (whom Wilber sometimes presents as an ally) they argue that energy flows or gradients are paramount in creating the conditions for complex life. Not only does life thrive because of a constant flow of energy, they maintain, it arose in the first place to “reduce” or minimize the differences set up in gradients. “Nature abhors a gradient” is their maxim. So far from life going against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it fully works in accordance with that Law. Thus, the paradox is solved in which complexity seems to increase when all of Nature tries to undo it in a state of sterile equilibrium. It turns out that a local increase in complexity is very well possible within a global trend towards entropy (or increasing disorder).”
http://www.integralworld.net/visser90.html
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:34 am
Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics
“Species which survive in ecosystems are those that funnel energy into their own production and reproduction and contribute to autocatalytic processes which increase the total dissipation of the ecosystem. In short, ecosystems develop in ways which systematically increase their ability to degrade the incoming solar energy.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0895717794901880
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:38 am
The Fat Lady is warming up——-
The sociopath is on his way out.
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:42 am
The Maximum Power Principle
“The maximum power principle(MPP) in ecology states that self-organizing systems, especially biological systems, capture and use available energy to develop network designs that maximize the energy fluxes through them, which are compatible with the constraints of the environment, and that those systems that maximize the throughput will endure. Thus, the MPP governs expediencies or efficiency in both the ecosystems functional and structural development. In this way, MPP can be used as a macro-level alternative model to interpreting evolution as a process whereby elements within an ecosystem are selected based upon their contribution to the processing of energy through the ecosystem, thus working to maximize the overall energy throughput.”
https://complexitylabs.io/glossary/maximum-power-principle/
OVERSHOOT LOOP: Evolution Under The Maximum Power Principle
“The rush to social collapse cannot be stopped no matter what is written or said. Humans have never been able to intentionally-avoid collapse because fundamental system-wide change is only possible after the collapse begins.
What about survivors? Within a couple of generations, all lessons learned from the collapse will be lost, and people will revert to genetic baselines. I wish it weren’t so, but all my experience screams “it’s hopeless.” Nevertheless, all we can do is the best we can and carry on…
Organisms evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power. With greater power, there is greater opportunity to allocate energy to reproduction and survival, and therefore, an organism that captures and utilizes more energy than another organism in a population will have a fitness advantage.
Individual organisms cooperate to form social groups and generate more power. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure.
“Politics” is power used by social organisms to control others. Not only are human groups never alone, they cannot control their neighbors’ behavior. Each group must confront the real possibility that its neighbors will grow its numbers and attempt to take resources from them. Therefore, the best political tactic for groups to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off and take resources from others[5].
The inevitable “overshoot” eventually leads to decreasing power attainable for the group with lower-ranking members suffering first. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain it. Meanwhile, social conflict will intensify as available power continues to fall.
Eventually, members of the weakest group (high or low rank) are forced to “disperse.”[6] Those members of the weak group who do not disperse are killed,[7] enslaved, or in modern times imprisoned. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone-Age societies died at the hands of other humans.[8] The process of overshoot, followed by forced dispersal, may be seen as a sort of repetitive pumping action — a collective behavioral loop — that drove humans into every inhabitable niche of our planet.
Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:
Step 1. Individuals and groups evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power, which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural resources (overshoot), whenever systemic constraints allow it. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure.
Step 2. Energy is always limited, so overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power available to the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.
Step 3. Diminishing power availability creates divisive subgroups within the original group. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain power.
Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share of the remaining power.
Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new territory, are killed, enslaved, or imprisoned.
Step 6. Go back to step 1.
The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that we were evolving[9]. This behavior is inherent in the architecture of our minds — is entrained in our biological material — and will be repeated until we go extinct. Carrying capacity will decline[10] with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will cause human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the Pleistocene.”
http://www.jayhanson.org/loop.htm
Clearly the humans have taken step 3 & have lifted their leg for step 4.
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:48 am
“Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics”
That is kind of stating the obvious. Any system that develops complexity, can only do so by exporting entropy, typically in the form of infrared photons. The evolution of the universe’s 92 natural elements in stars and supernova, occurred by converting stored nuclear potential energy in hydrogen into lower grade photonic background radiation. Life is no exception to the second law of thermodynamics.
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:49 am
Hint:
“Long term, the only lasting vaccine against this onslaught of poisonous fictions is to improve our societal critical‐thinking skills.”
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:58 am
Islamic scholar: When a Muslim beheaded a man over a cartoon, it was a ‘great honor for him and all Muslims’
only chinks can fix this
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:05 am
It will be a relief not to wake up each day to some new horror or angry, monstrous tweet from an unbalanced sociopath?
But with vote totals, the scum in society is obvious.
As capitalism fades in the rear view mirror, what will emerge?
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:08 am
Antius – “Life is no exception to the second law of thermodynamics.”
Indeed, but I’ve seen a great many argue passionately that life is an exception.
A New Physics Theory of Life
An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.
“Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/
.
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life
Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.
“The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/
Any whiff of determinism & the believers go run & hide in their religion & ideology’s skirts.
I AM THE MOB on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:23 am
Putin suffered brain damage caused by the Russian COVID vaccine.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
LOL
Jew world order FTW!
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:29 am
“So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”
—-Thunberg
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:35 am
Dims facing reality:
“We wanted to show the rest of the world that America wasn’t a country of racist idiots. We wanted to strike a blow against the stupidity. We wanted to send a message that Trumpism was a fluke, that we were Obama’s America, not Trump’s. But Trumpism was not repudiated.”
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:43 am
Why Capitalism Was Destined to Come Out on Top in the 2020 Election
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/richard-wolff/93741/why-capitalism-was-destined-to-come-out-on-top-in-the-2020-election
zero juan on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:14 pm
Ppee juan, your not famous, you are stupid:
FamousDrScanlon said Antius – “Life is no exception to the…
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak said Islamic scholar: When a Muslim beheaded a man over…
FamousDrScanlon said The Maximum Power Principle “The maximum pow…
FamousDrScanlon said Life as a manifestation of the second law of therm…
FamousDrScanlon said Equilibrium is Death’ Energy, Entropy, Evolution a…
Zion said There is also https://www.kombo.co/ which allows y…
FamousDrScanlon said Abraham van delusional, do you have a quote from m…
The Nationalist said Europe is noisily defecting from common sense and…
proof that chinks are master race Egypt Suspends Professor for Not Caring Enough about the Quran… Speaking high english or high egyptian doesnt mean squat said 3gd croaking soon water 174.5m, 175m max poor mast…
Anonymouse on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:16 pm
The idiot FamouseDrScanlon doing more plagiarism:
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 11:08 am
“Antius – “Life is no exception to the second law of thermodynamics.” Indeed, but I’ve seen a great many argue passionately that life is an exception. A New Physics Theory of Life An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.”
Anonymouse on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:18 pm
Come on FamousDrScanlon you are doing more plagiarism:
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 10:42 am
The Maximum Power Principle
https://complexitylabs.io/glossary/maximum-power-principle/
OVERSHOOT LOOP: Evolution Under The Maximum Power Principle
bochen787 on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:21 pm
These democrates are as dirty as the CCP!
GOP Analyst Raises $170K To Purchase Data, Conduct Deep Dive On Voter Fraud
GOP political analyst and former Trump Data Chief Matt Braynard believes he can detect voter fraud by comparing absentee ballots and early voters to the Social Security Death Index and the National Change of Address Database. Braynard – former analyst for pollster Frank Luntz – is the president of Braynard Group, which provides services for voter targeting, polling and fundraising. In order to accomplish this, Braynard will need up to $100,000 to purchase databases from data vendors. In a Thursday Twitter thread, he outlined his plan to audit the election in key states and launched a GoFundMe page which is currently under review (“Getting nuked still a possibility,” he says).
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/gop-analyst-raises-170k-purchase-data-conduct-deep-dive-voter-fraud
The Board on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:28 pm
Davy ID Theft and Sock Puppetry:
zero juan on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:14 pm
Anonymouse on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:16 pm
Anonymouse on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:18 pm
bochen787 on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:21 pm
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak Islamic scholar: When a Muslim beheaded a man over a cartoon, it was a ‘great honor for him and all Muslims’ only chinks can fix this on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:45 pm
UK Charges 7 “Men” with Raping Girls, Ages 12 to 16…
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:48 pm
Cameroon: 60 schools shut down after wave of jihad suicide bombings by women and children
only chinks can fix this
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:49 pm
‘Obese Turtle on His Back Flailing in the Hot Sun’
Lets be fair to turtles— comparing them to the Fat Boy is pretty low.
https://www.thewrap.com/anderson-cooper-calls-trump-an-obese-turtle-on-his-back-flailing-in-the-hot-sun-video/
dratrepus tak if you think the real dratrepus tak is not croak u need to invest in bridges on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:51 pm
Cameroon: 60 schools shut down after wave of jihad suicide bombings by women and children
Pakistan: 13-year-old Christian girl rescued from her 44-year-old abductor and rapist ‘husband’
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:53 pm
Counties with worst coronavirus surges overwhelmingly voted Trump
Darwin at work, getting rid of the less fit.
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/11/05/breaking-news/counties-with-worst-coronavirus-surges-overwhelmingly-voted-trump/
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:54 pm
‘Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.’
That is fascinating and if true, it does indeed have profound implications. It would mean that we should not be surprised to find the remnants of life on Mars, living deep underground where temperatures are still warm; the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and even within the slushy ice mantles of Kuiper belt objects like Pluto. Life could literally be everywhere. A profound discovery to be sure. If it is true.
Another twist that I would add to England’s argument: the more complex the lifeforms, the narrower the range of conditions under which it could thrive. Simple, single cellular life has been present on Earth since the Hadean period, essentially 4 billion years ago, shortly after the moon was blasted out of Earths mantle. But multicellular life did not appear until the Earth developed oxygen in its atmosphere, about 2 billion years ago. Even dinosaurs did not arise until a few hundred million years ago, a mere 10% of the age of the Earth.
Whilst bacteria and even simpler replicators may evolve wherever there is organic chemistry and an energy source; complex life capable of arising intelligence, requires a far more specific environment. An oxygen atmosphere, water with the right range of salinity, a narrow range of temperatures, etc.
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:00 pm
“zero juan on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 12:14 pm
Ppee juan, your not famous, you are stupid:
FamousDrScanlon said Antius – “Life is no exception to the…
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak said Islamic scholar: When a Muslim beheaded a man over…
FamousDrScanlon said The Maximum Power Principle “The maximum pow…”
Is that Davy?
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:02 pm
Hint:
“Religion is poison”
-Mao
zero juan on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:03 pm
Dumbfuck JuanP shit
dratrepus tak if you think the real dratrepus tak is not croak u need to invest in bridges said Cameroon: 60 schools shut down after wave of jihad…
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak said Cameroon: 60 schools shut down after wave of jihad…
mandate from heaven for master race chinks dratrepus tak Islamic scholar: When a Muslim beheaded a man over a cartoon, it was a ‘great honor for him and all Muslims’ only chinks can fix this said UK Charges 7 “Men” with Raping Girls,…
The Board said Davy ID Theft and Sock Puppetry: zero juan on Fri,…
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:05 pm
““So ridiculous. Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”
—-Thunberg”
How dare you! You have stollen my hopes, you have stollen my dreams! I used to dream of living in a freezing, dark cabin in Sweden, starving to death with no food! How dare you deprive me of that future!
🙂
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:11 pm
“Dumbfuck JuanP shit”
I have been away from this board for months, but I see that Davy is alive, if not quite ‘well’.
Seriously man, you need to see a shrink. How many years of your life have you wasted away on this board, posting unintelligible carbage about JuanP?
Antius on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:37 pm
This is quite funny in hindsight.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-voter-fraud-organization-video-gaffe
We cannot claim to be surprised. He told us all months ago that he had the created “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics”.
Now we are seeing its handiwork.
Duncan Idaho on Fri, 6th Nov 2020 1:46 pm
Biden will have a challenging time moving into the White house—
Getting the smell and trash out will take some time.
But Obama did it, so Biden can also.
The smell will probably be the main issue?