> Second, though the impacts of March sudden warmings are very similar to those in mid-winter, spring is coming, so any Arctic air brought down in the US won't "feel" as cold compared to if it happened in January because we are in a warmer part of the year.
This part seems really handwavey. Could someone explain what they mean with "warmer part of the year" if not air temperature? Increased warming through more sunlight?
> so any Arctic air brought down in the US won't "feel" as cold compared to if it happened in January because we are in a warmer part of the year.
I read this pretty simply as "March is warmer than January". More hours of daylight, more direct angle, etc. Anyone living closer to the tropics knows that feeling of "it's cold but the sun is out" compared to being further away in winter.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was tripped up a bit because "march is warmer" sounds to me like an effect, not a cause - and it becomes paradoxical if there is a massive cold front underway at the same time.
But if they mean, there are other seasonal factors - such as daylight - that counteract the cold spell, which aren't there in winter, it makes more sense.
Imaging increased warming from sunlight raising ground and building temperatures probably impacts “felt” temperature quite a bit.
There a few different heat transfer mechanisms, with conduction and radiation being the big ones we care about here. Cold air impacts heat transfer via conduction, but temperature of surrounding surfaces (like buildings and the ground) impacts radiative heat transfer, which makes us a significant portion of your bodies heat transfer into it’s surrounding environment. Which is the reason why a clear night is colder than an overcast night. The clouds above reflect a significant amount of radiant energy back at you on a cloudy day, and on a clear night you’re directly exposed to cold emptiness of space which will radiate effectively zero heat back at you.
Good place to experience the difference between conduction and radiative heat, is being near a camp fire on a cold night. The camp fire doesn’t really warm the air around your body, but the emitted IR has a huge impact. Hence you end up with a very warm front, while still having a very cold back.
Interesting article. We are past the usual -20 or lower six weeks where I am so feels like a typical year. If I choose a random northern place like Rankin Inlet NU it is still cold up there with a low of -33 tonight.
It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov… is that a reputable source?
Climate.gov’s Polar Vortex Blog is written, edited, and moderated by Amy Butler (NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory) and Laura Ciasto (NOAA Climate Prediction Center), with editorial and graphics support from the Climate.gov team (NOAA Climate Program Office). These are blog posts by subject matter experts, not official agency communications; if you quote from these posts or from the comments section, you should attribute the quoted material to the individual blogger or commenter, not to NOAA or or Climate.gov.
If they're making the blog posts in their capacity as NOAA employees, on an NOAA web page, wouldn't that imply that these are "official agency communications"?
Yes, an official agency communication would have to go through deliberations and consensus finding from ~all parts of NOAA, most blog posts will only have the input of those experts. While that will mostly not lead to significant deviations since all of the discussed areas are subject to scientific rigour there is always the human nature of all actors.
Back in university we would publish news entries for all our publications without any input from the university. But for some papers there was also an official press release by the university. That came both with additional restrictions (length, language level, flashiness) but also with additional reach (getting picked up by newspapers directly). I assume that pre-Trump this would have been a similar setup. No guess as to now though
Probably is. NOAA and other gov sources help us predict things like clear air turbulence related to the jet stream. One probably doesn’t want to politicize those kinds of predictions too much or risk scraping passengers and their dinners from ceilings.
Too late! NOAA's budget is getting slashed and they're stopping weather balloon launches, starting with the plains states. Good luck with those turbulence forecasts!
That's not what the poorly written article actually says. They are launching one baloon a day instead of two. You might think the article is being intentionally misleading with working like, "NWS issued a public information statement announcing that is is temporarily suspending the frequency of weather balloon launches at some of Weather Forecast Offices".
Or at least obfuscate and mask your claim the same way the Trump administration has learned: “many are saying that most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work” “and how many of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work?” “there is waste and fraud with people silent quitting or refusing to go back to work”
To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.
I think you're trying to impart a political motive where it can be argued that none existed. I understand that your mind is made up, however consider that the whole initial effort by DOGE was clearly poorly planned and resulted in a lot of chaos.
For a journalistic perspective, when events are moving fast, you report what is known at a given time.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and no doubt there are some cases like you point out. However, are you sure that those are the only cases? The fact that the govt is scrambling to hire back fired people would suggest otherwise.
The desire to impute political bias to everything is not a useful way of viewing the world.
It is a realistic and accurate way to see the politicization of climate science. Bush, and the head of NASA Goddard is the documented and publicized example sans vacuum of disinformation.
No one cares about the physical offices. It's NOAA employees along with employees from many offices of the executive branch going on social media to talk about sudden loss of their email access or termination notices with no prior warning that's raising alarms.
how do you know that the offices haven't been used in years and there is no impact unless a journalist told you? Is there any reason to trust rando twitter accounts besides the fact that it makes you feel better about "your side".
he probably just believes a source that didn't turn out to be directly funded by the US government, one you would likely dismiss as not a real journalist
I'm all for free media but the legacy outlets currently screaming about cuts are primarily upset because THEY just lost a ton of government funding but that's good because I don't want government run news, even if it comes in a bunch of brand names, and it's funny that all the "reputable" outlets just happen to be the ones with the closest relationships to the CIA and FBI and historically have covered for their worst injustices.
no, I do not shed a tear for what is happening to the old government controlled legacy media.
Musk is suddenly a fan of anything that directly benefits him even if it directly contradicts previously made comments. I thought this was pretty much self-evident at this point
It's absolutely the goal. There has been a push from places like weather.com to privatize much of NOAA for years.
Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the playing field a bit too level for private companies. They don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA so it makes their product less valuable.
A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra endurance events. After our first event using them I checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was far less accurate than weather.gov.
Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.
"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory tariffs slam US exports, many Americans lose jobs and whole regions lose industries, etc., it's generally bad for companies selling things.
Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop protecting its own interests.
There are no vibrant monarchys or aristocracys or oligarchys. What do these people think everyone fled from Europe to the us for? In a monarchy everything fouls and rots.. look a trumps buianesses, the us is his last casino to bankrupt..
Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen:
"Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1]
and from Bayer:
"To mitigate some of the risks of such investments ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.
only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings
Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility
Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution
If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3]
[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.”
He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take
on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly."
That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
> That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
No, they’re not. Biotech VC has been bigger than tech VC in terms of absolute funding for decades (based on annual data from the Venture Capital Association). Most years its not even close.
Pharmaceutical companies do depend on NIH funding but indirectly: most of their products are now acquired rather than developed in house. Universities spin off their NIH funded projects as biotech startups that are funded by VCs and public investors (biotech startups usually IPO long before they have any revenue, which is one of the reasons there’s so much money in biotech VC) and the small fraction that are most successful in clinical trials are acquired by the pharmaceutical industry.
Could you show me where you're getting that data? Not saying you're wrong, it's just that this contradicts everything I've heard before and I can't find counter-evidence. I checked the NVCA's latest data pack (which is excellent) and it seems to agree with me that tech dwarfs pharma.
If you go to "Deals x Sector" and then scroll down they split out deals by dollar value by sector and software alone is $89.2B vs $25.3B for pharma last year. But software isn't all of the tech industry, they also have a row for IT hardware startups which is $8.2B. Adding it up the tech industry sees 4x more money flowing into it than pharma despite that most tech startups are selling optional nice-to-haves to people who buy from their own pocket, vs pharma who sells stuff that might be life-critical to people who socialize the costs via insurance.
In theory, pharma should dwarf tech. You can't say no to a life saving drug if you need it: it should be easy money. In practice, the VCs interviewed in my source seem to have it right - pharma VC is much less competitive overall.
I'm not well enough versed in the level of commercialization of NIH research. But even assuming it was all trash, currently that's where all of the commercial researchers come from - NIH funds research at universities, that funds grad students through their practicum, and provides a candidate pool for Pharma. whether or not the current system for producing researchers is optimal, there doesn't seem to be another candidate lying around.
Plenty of industries train in house, and there's no specific reason why teaching and research have to go hand in hand. Actually rather the opposite, the connection between these things is rather artificial and you don't find it outside of grant-funded universities.
It’s rare to find someone argue that confirming only 25% of a massive amount of output enabled only because of the in place system is a good reason to eliminate the system.
It’s kind of like saying “solar panels are only 20% efficient, so are you sure the sun is critical for the solar energy industry?”
That's not what the stat says. It says only 25% of findings selected specifically for sounding important replicated for that particular company, not that 25% of output overall does. And replicable doesn't mean correct or useful, it's just the first step. There are lots of ways for a study to replicate yet be wrong.
25% is crazy low, but 11% is even lower. If someone told you things and 90% of the time they were wrong, you'd stop listening.
Solar panels having low effectiveness would actually be a good argument against them, because although the solar industry needs solar panels the correct comparison is with the energy industry overall, which doesn't.
To take one single simple example, the mRNA vaccines that saved tens of millions of lives during the Covid pandemic (earning a lot of money for the companies that produced them), and are one of the most promising technologies for many other vaccines, cancer treatments, etc. would have been completely impossible without decades of NIH funding.
Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent.
You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on.
Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.
Industry already pays higher salaries, the purpose of funding scientific research IS in fact productization even if not immediate, and new product development can't be said to be dependent on open research if 90% of the time the claims don't replicate. If anything it's the opposite, product development would depend on not wasting all your budget on replicating false claims.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy, immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very willing to enforce their worldview.
In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.
In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant compilation of interviews about fire management practices of indigenous nations in California; the degree of documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined prior to reading.
great ref, thank you for that one -- there are also considered and really lengthy, public stakeholder workshop papers.. before and around 2017. After the Tubbs fire and a dozen others, it seems more like emergency mode.. probably a lot of on the ground this year, especially Los Angeles but the vast North as well.. dizzying..
Minus 33 (the temp the parent referenced) is about the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit. I’m an American that lives in Europe but travels to MN/WI for family and noticed that convergence.
I'm originally from MN but have been using C almost exclusively for the last 10-15 years. Can confirm, -33 is "fuckin' cold" territory either way. Below like -25C it's all the same to me - bundle up as much as humanly possible and limit time outside, and if there's any wind at all, just nope.
That's like "you cry because it's so cold and then your tears freeze on your eyelashes and it physically hurts". I don't like it. Also, don't live in MN anymore
That has been touted around before, but what does the military do? I assume they are extremely aware of their supply chain and would not want to source weather from a commercial entity.
Will NORAD start doing clandestine weather modelling to be able to plan troop/ship movements?
It is pretty much an independent system. There are only a handful of organizations on the planet operating an independent global weather model. For historical reasons the US operates two of them. A good argument can be made that the European model is better than either, so it might make sense for the US to combine some of those global weather model resources.
I was a private yacht chef for 6 years. I would always source weather from https://www.metoc.navy.mil/ and plan meals around it. I'm pretty good with a Japanese chef's knife in 8 foot seas.
Air Force / Space Force already employ meteorologists for their own stuff, I'm sure the US military will have accurate information. It just will not get to the public until it has been properly sharpied.
They’re briefing Elon Musk on China war plans, I don’t think the current leadership will care much where they source weather data as long as it aligns with the current ideological purity purge.
There's no proof he was part of any briefing, and pretty much everyone has denied this has happened. You need to diversify your news sources beyond the ones that confirm your beliefs, truthful or not.
If you genuinely believe the real problem here is reporting, not that it's unclear (and had to be denied by the President himself) whether a private citizen with massive and well documented conflicts of interest and who doesn't hold a TS clearance was briefed on some of the nations most sensitive military planning I'd suggest I'm not the one with an information consumption and evaluation issue.
I think the idea is that a private company will take the results of government produced meteorology and then have full rights for distribution. At least, that's the plan of one of the current private companies that does this, they want to be the monopoly.
Seems pretty clear to me - Trump is trying to cut costs for our government. He sees we’re spending all that money on forecasting and data that everyone else uses for free, and gets paid for it. Therefore, that data is worth something and the government should get a piece of the pie.
I don’t necessarily agree but it’s somewhat logical.
I don't think the "cut costs" is an accurate framing of intent or outcome here. High costs are not being cut, but individual programs that are cheap but have every high positive impact are getting completely whacked. Such as the National Weather Service, there are reports all across the country of not having enough staff to launch the necessary number of weather balloons or generate reports that cover 24 hours of the day, leading to very small cost savings but massive inefficiency. Meanwhile massive contracts out to failing defense programs are untouched, and military spending is being massively increased far beyond what the military even asks for. Add to that the massive IRS staff reductions and tax cheats are having a hey day, with more than $500B lost to that already, which is 10x our entire science budget, which is actively getting slashed.
The goal is to assert dominance and to punish anybody that, as a group, was unlikely to vote for Trump and who Trump voters don't like, such as scientists.
Yeah it'll be interesting if they privatize weather forecasting in the US
FWIW, there is already a massive industry of private weather forecasting.
I know personally, or have met, at least six fully trained meteorologists who don't work for the government. Most are in the oil industry, but one is in aquaculture, and another in shipping.
Most big energy, aviation, and logistics companies employ meteorologists. Probably other industries, too.
That said, the loss of the NWS would be a national tragedy, and one of the worst mistakes in American government history.
I'm surprised they aren't privatizing GPS actually... seems to be a similarly helpful public service. While it does help subsidize future Korean airliners... it unfairly harms aircraft manufacturers. /s
Trump's choice for the head of NOAA is Barry Lee Myers, the 81 year old CEO of Accuweather who, with no scientific background, has been lobbying for years to dissolve the National Weather Service.
That's the beauty of the current chaos-driven model. No explicit marching orders required. Just let it be known that inconvenient facts/actions can be punished at any time. Self-censorship takes care of the rest.
Half-disagree: Firings aren't their goal (nor, demonstrably, are cost-savings.)
The goal is coercive power over a culture. Firings are just one tool in the toolbox.
______________
Tangentially, loyalty-oaths are another case where the purpose goes beyond the immediate effect.
Fascists presenting an allegiance-or-else choice aren't extending any of their own trust to affirmative pledges. They know it's coerced, and the fact that everybody else knows it too is a feature, not a bug.
Why? Because the real goal is not to create trust for themselves, but to destroy it for everyone else. To survive the purge, victims must scar their own reputations, making it harder for anybody--even other victims--to trust them in the future.
Ex: Even if I'm totally certain Mr. Smith was lying to the fascists when he pledged loyalty to keep his job, there's a "damaged goods" aspect: Would he lie to me if his job was threatened again? What other compromises might he make to other threats from authority?
Despotism does not lead to greatness. Instead we will have big Corps (oil, pharma...) owning, benefiting, and hiding public knowledge. Even China does better these days
From the dates on https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs it looks like this is / was a roughly weekly post, so it might take a while if you're waiting for them specifically.
So the thing was Groundhog Day is actually really interesting. The prediction doesn't really have to do with groundhogs but instead has to do with whether it is cloudy or not on Groundhog Day. It's kind of funny about it is that they kinda got it backwards. If you bet against Punxsutawney Phil you'll be doing better than random chance.
Not that it changes the outcome, but I swear I remember reading that the majority of sea-level rise actually comes from the thermal expansion of liquid water, not displacement from thawing of ice caps. Can anyone confirm/refute this?
There wouldn't be a single factor driving it but a combination of many factors. Loss of coastline (and cities built along it) including greater susceptibility to storms for unaffected areas will obviously have economic costs, highly increased weather and storm variability will be significant (think monsoon rains, "atmospheric river," etc.), increased drought in some areas due to both temperature and weather pattern changes (see western US water rights among the states as the civil portion of this), mass movements of refugees (sure the US can close the southern border, but what happens if you get 50,000 migrants all deciding to come over at once in one area? Are you simply going to shoot all of them?).
Human extinction seems very unlikely, but the collapse of the infrastructure that allows creation of the infrastructure that allows modern life? That could be much more likely, particularly when you factor in military conflicts as well as purely climate-based changes and losses.
It's quite hot around there. Wet bulb temperatures often near the edge of survivability outdoors.
It's worse now with 1-1.5C warming. If we don't stop, and we get to 3-5C warming, this could lead to large scale migration to Europe in pursuit of liveable climate. And warming won't stop unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases.
What makes you think the research was done in Fahrenheit? This is a blog post by a science communicator who’s trying to reach a wide audience of American-English speakers. It stands to reason that they’d use units that their audience is familiar with.
Why? Celsius is just as arbitrary a choice as Fahrenheit. It brings nothing extra to the table. You might as well complain that tapered pipe threads are in US inches or that astronomers use AUs and light seconds rather than meters.
Fahrenheit and Celsius are defined perfectly with one another so are as easy to convert as using a different number base though. And both were originally defined at arbitrary points making neither one better suited than the other at really anything.
If they used an absolute scale like Kelvin, then sure it would be an objectively better standard, but Celsius has been defined via the Kelvin scale for over 70 years now, the same as Fahrenheit.
Humans cannot reliably determine the difference in one degree c, even though it's bigger...
Fahrenheit is too fine grained, and has no interesting points relative to the things I interact with.
I freeze an boil water often, however
The base units of the metric system are often not very ergonomic. Why is a meter so damn big? And why is a gram so damn small? I can barely detect a gram. And a meter is frickin huge, causing people to usually divide it into hundredths of a meter, which you can hardly picture in your mind unless you already know what it looks like, especially arbitrary counts of cm. Metric's only real advantage is that it shares the same radix as our counting system.
Using metric has never been an issue in trades or sciences in metric countries.
A metre is much the same as a yard or an adult arm span. Not a problem.
Pretty much all carpentry and cabinet making is done in mm alone, the width of a fat pencil mark.
1400mm is shy of a metre and a half (1500mm), cross piece spacing might be 300mm (about a foot).
No need to have feet, inches, quarters and thirds mixing up the page, just use mm everywhere.
A gram is fine for small mass measurements, a kilogram is a good unit for heavier masses - very human scale being the same as a litre of water and more or less a litre of milk.
It really comes down to familiarity, there's nothing intrinsically difficult about metric (and much that is more intuitive than odd imperialial units and the whacky intra unit conversion factors).
As a metric user, this is an interesting point that I haven’t heard before, and I think the other responses don’t really engage with it. Yes, familiarity means this isn’t much of a daily problem – you just use divisions of the unit that are most appropriate. But the size of the base units for volume, mass and length don’t really match up well from a human day-to-day perspective.
Wouldn’t it be nicer if a litre, a gram and a cubic metre of water were equal, rather than 1 cubic metre, 1000 litres, 1,000,000 grams?
Side note that in Europe drinking products are often labelled in centilitres whereas Australians use millilitres. I wonder whether this indicates some difference in the way the two groups think about volume, or maybe it is just the fallout of some other constraint, like translations limiting the space available.
Still, the ergonomics seem to be on the side of Metric, taking into account the ease of conversion between units when all are base ten.
As a metric user: This is about your lack of familiarity.
E.g. can picture lumber expressed in cm or mm very easily. E.g., if you work with beams that are 48mm / 5 cm or 98mm / 10cm a lot then those sizes becomes second nature. Just as easy to picture as 2 inch, 4 inch, 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch etc that is in use in US.
And saying that something is 200m away is exactly as intuitive as however many feet that is. A large meter has a usecase.
I feel square metres for houses is very natural unit and square feet sounds awkward (each patch of house area is so small you can do nothing with it, a square metre gets you somewhere..).
Making yet another system of units sounds like massive pain and as someone who are used to metric I see no advantages.
As a user of both Imperial and Standard International units, I agree with you.
As a kid, one of my science educators spoke about the many benefits people gain from becoming familiar with basic units. I bought in and did so during the big metric push that happened around that time.
I ended up more familiar with Imperial units.
Then, later in life, I entered a young industry, with strong users of metric, Standard International units.
So I did the work to build familiarity just as I did long ago. Took half a year and today I enjoy the benefits.
And those are:
Ease of understanding unit values meaning in my daily life.
48x98 is exactly that dimension (i..e after planing of the lumber). Well, +/- 1 mm of tolerance/shrinkage due to drying.
It goes by the name "two four" here as well informally due to long tradition (and yes, I once did wonder why 2-by-4 is smaller than 2 by 4 inches and looked it up), but you will not see it written anywhere, in writing it is always in mm after planing.
The oral words for lumber dimensions before planing is the only context as an adult I have met inches except in US.
Fahrenheit is sort of intuitive if you think of it as somehow, impossibly, a percentage scale. 0C/32F is still decently comfortable anyway. 0F is, like, not at all comfortable. 100C is dead. 100F is the most unbearably hot temperature that isn’t immediately deadly.
Fahrenheit is very intuitive if you are in Danzig in one particular year... [0] otherwise.. It's a historic accident. If you want to root your measurement system in human experience your measurement system will be outdated in a couple of decades. Because humanity changes! That way there will always be old/antiquated/historic units. Metric basically accepts that and uses easy to convert units and leaves the intuition forming to the humans gathering the experience
[0] Apparently the story is disputed.. But the way I was taught it was: 100F == typical healthy human and 0 F == lowest temperature in Danzig in the winter 1708/1709. This makes it (by construction) a more natural fit to human experience (especially one in northern Europe)
https://web.archive.org/web/20131015045624/http://www.deutsc...
It's missing one important distinction: Below 0C: Freezing, probably slippery, not raining water. Above 0C: not freezing, probably not slippery, rain comes as water. They are as uncomfortable as you make them.
It does kinda depend on humidity, fwiw. In New England, the 90’s are hot, unpleasant sticky weather.
I guess it doesn’t happen often, but I saw some upper-90’s temperature in the Portland, Oregon area. It feels relatively mild actually, compared to New England 90’s, I’m pretty sure because it is so dry. The lighter air just carries the heat away, rather than having it stick to you.
I think GP was talking about saunas and not ambient temperature. So 100C not 100F. Still the argument remains the same: Low humidity (and reasonably short durations)
This is false. I frequently find myself annoyed at my AC because it only has settings of 72°F and 74°F, and they are a little too cold and a little too warm for me. I want 73°F. When it's around room temperature, you can absolutely tell the difference.
The further away from room temperature, the less we can distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.
My problem isn't remembering the scale, it's that Fahrenheit offers me double the effective resolution and descriptive accuracy without awkward decimal points in the numbers used.
I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/
My main observation in temperature scale and imperial lengths discussions om the Internet is that Americans seem to have a strange aversion against fractional parts of numbers, as if those were irrational.
(On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava beans.)
Au contraire base 12 measurement is _all about the fractions_. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Metric gets 5 and 2. By that measure it's y'all that are afraid of the small numbers.
US units are pinned to Metric standards anyway. We're just using the most creative ratios. :)
American, I think we use fractions all the time: 7/8 inch hardware tools, 3/4 measuring cup in cooking, etc. Especially awkward when you have human distances, because you have to mix feet + inches: 3 feet 4 and 1/4 inches.
It was a dream once I got a metric tape measurer and realized that using centimeters eliminates the need to do annoying conversions.
Most temperature sensors are accurate to 0.1C. Most weather forecast is 0.5C resolution. So yeah only explanation to Americans behavior is an aversion against fractional numbers as you said.
On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot.
Or you’ve got from 0-45. Where 0 is “meh” cold and 45 is incredibly warm.
So you’ve got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are going to experience just living that goes from very cold to very hot.
Or you’ve got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being really cold below that, and anything really greater than 50C only has practical applications in cooking.
The "entire scale" has no maximum. So your waste of the Celsius scale from 35-100 is Fahrenheits waste of the scale from 0-32 or whatever you're trying to base your comments on.
0°F was the outside temperature with 40 mph winds (60mph gusts) the time I had to venture to the middle of an empty field to break the ice on water tank with a hatchet so cows could get water.
This was in the Texas Panhandle, temps this low are abnormal. Cows can survive this temps as long as they have adequate feed and water. They can endure high temps pretty well, again as long as they have water.
Exactly. Where I live we have temps from -20F to 110F, which is -30 to 43C. Idk, seems to me the hottest normal temp being 90ish and coldest normalish temp at 0 is a decent scale.
If you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your average person didn't really care what temperature water boils at, just that it is hot.
If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.
He says in his original paper that the top point of his reference scale is 96, not 100 for the point where "Alcohol expands up to this point when it is held in the mouth or under the armpit of a living man in good health". He originally based his scale on 12, and then got more precise by increasing each division by two several times, ending up with 96.
0F .. 100F is about the range of temperatures a human living on earth could reasonably expect to experience without deliberate adventuring. It's not a precise range - plenty of people live in Doha (way above 100F) and in Alberta (way below 0F) - but it's a pretty reasonable approximation.
My comment ends with a note that "it's a reasonable approximation".
The percentage of global population where the 0F..100F range is not a reasonable approximation of the temperature range they will experience is small. It's not perfect - no such range could, when humans live almost everywhere on the planet. But it's not bad ...
I live in the US and can't change my thermostat, so I don't think that's it.
I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself between two rooms with one degree difference. I just don't think this is a useful granularity—I typically move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.
As an American I’m biased, but Fahrenheit matching the 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice. Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even if it actually isn’t.
I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.
Herr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.
I honestly figured it’d be one of the first. That being said, France, UK, and USA are all moving towards more nuclear power. It might be at the point where it’s no longer possible to pretend we care about solar/wind, and can no longer realistically ignore climate change.
I’ve been saying for years that we’d know when governments were finally getting scared of climate change because we’d see real, very fast moves to install nuclear and, if possible, enhanced geothermal.
Because it's the one green solution that actually works as base load (other than hydroelectricity, but that's terrain-dependent), works 24/7 without any other affordances, and doesn't open you up to dependence on other nations to anywhere near the same degree.
Solar and wind are only cheap because a foreign nation makes the parts (if they were made domestically they wouldn't be cost-competitive, obviously). So in 20 years, when your PV panels are degrading and your turbines are wearing out, that foreign country's going to be able to charge you a lot more to replace it.
And if you want to see the results of cheap industrial inputs becoming expensive one only need look at the post-Nordstream German/European economic forecast. Even the poor should be able to afford to keep the lights on and the A/C running once the sun has set.
Solar panels won't start degrading in 20 years. Their degrading is linear and starts when you install them. As a very rough guide you can think of it as 1% per year.
The 20-year horizon therefore is not fixed. It's just a round number. There's a point at which it makes sense to add panels (or replace them if you are space constrained.)
Once large numbers of panels start getting replaced you may see them reused in space-available places, or potentially 'reconditioned' to extend their life. Think of it as similar to second-hand cars.
Of course if the price keeps dropping these avenues are less attractive. And if you are space constrained there are already space improvements that may make changing desirable well before 20 years.
Finally, lots of things we use are made elsewhere. And we make things others use. By trading our excess for their excess we create a trading relationship where both sides operate in good faith because it is in their advantage to do so.
The current climate, where the US operates in bad faith, and seems intent on damaging trade relationships, does not encourage other countries to behave well in the future (regardless of the motivations you (project? expect?) from them in the future.
Because solar and wind are extremely inefficient and dangerous when compared with nuclear. Nuclear and enhanced geothermal are both closing in on their dream forms (fusion and supercritical fluids), and are already sufficient as they are.
It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much space before even getting into the fact that neither solution can work anywhere at any time.
Nuclear got a bad rap, but it is way too essential to ignore in this problem we’re facing. When the focus shifts, you can tell people are getting serious. Simple as that.
Edit: I did not realize this had somehow become a conservative viewpoint? I am a leftist.
Can you elaborate why you think nuclear is more efficient and safer than solar and wind? As far as I'm aware, the opposite is true: Nuclear energy is far more expensive than e.g. solar, for which costs continue to go down. While I understand that nuclear reactors are safe (if handled correctly), history has proven that freak accidents can and do happen. Also, waste storage mustn't be ignored either. How are solar and wind more dangerous?
Gave you an upvote not because I necessarily agree, but to counter the downvotes.
I agree that it’s clear we need more nuclear, but could you explain why solar and wind are dangerous compared to nuclear? Did you mean that all the attention on solar and wind, which can’t be scaled fast enough and must be paired with grid storage, has screwed us when it comes to addressing climate change?
Also, calling solar and wind inefficient isn’t precise enough. By what metric are you judging them to be inefficient?
When I say more dangerous, it’s just a pretty simple calculation - per watt of energy, how many people have been injured/killed when producing energy via a given source. Coal is incredibly dangerous, as is gas by this metric. Nuclear is far and above the safest when calculating in this specific way.
Solar and wind are inefficient, by my definition, because they require large portions of land and cannot run with highly predictable outputs at all times. As a result, you need other solutions to complete the story - larger farms, more farms, large batteries, grids that easily transfer energy long distances, etc.
Nuclear is able to sidestep all of those problems, especially with the relatively recent advent of small modular reactors (SMRs).
There are no "unsolved problems" for nuclear (because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently). By contrast, getting solar+wind fully up and running requires totally solving the storage problem. Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
> because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently
We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal). So coal ends up emitting a ton of radioactive waste because uh when you dig up the ground you also dig up radioactive uranium (there's no 100% pure carbon deposits).
It's also only a self-inflicted problem. You can technically re-use the waste until it only needs to be stored for ~300 years before it decays to "normal" levels. The US doesn't allow you to do that though while say France does.
> We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal).
Oh yes. Having fucked up this badly with long chain hydrocarbon combustion, lets do it all over again with fission, because ... well, we did it once already, right?
The orders of magnitude are different here. Replacing something that becomes a huge problem within two hundred years with something that (potentially) becomes a problem in a few thousand years -- really is better than spending valuable time on developing an "ideal" solution
Climate change will not end human civilization, unless by "human civilization" you mean the very specific configuration that habitation patterns, agriculture, national boundaries and numbers of living humans all have at this very moment.
Likely hundreds of millions to a few billion will die that need not have died, wars will be fought, relocation and migration will be of unprecedented scope and scale, there will be hunger and disease ... but "human civilization" will persist through all of that. Thats not a reason to celebrate, it's just a reason to describe the risks and outcomes accurately.
Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem, and if it does, just how large (time, space, populations, ecosystems) of a problem it will be.
Human activity aside, every valley with a substantial amount of granite rock about the planet pools with radon gas on a daily basis until the wind clears it out.
While this is just one of those things that's a risk on the order of a pack a day smoking habit to those who live there, radon is a fission by product from the breakdown of the uranium within the granite.
I read this as just an attempt to rationalize fissile waste issues as "more of the same". Maybe you truly feel comfortable doing that, maybe you see it as something else.
I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being. And not just a new problem, but one that would last longer than any human civilization has ever lasted.
So, to me, you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
> I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being.
Radiological material that decays after tens of thousands of years is not a unique new problem, for three reasons.
First, half life is inverse to radioactivity. The longer the half life, the less radioactive it is. There are isotopes with a half life of a billion years. Human biology requires potassium and natural potassium is radioactive, but it doesn't kill you because the half life is so long.
Second, the material with ten thousand year half lives doesn't actually have to be stored for ten thousand years. Nuclear reactors convert elements into other elements. You put it back into a reactor and it turns it into something with a shorter half life. Meanwhile that process produces energy with which to generate electricity. It's absurd that we're not already doing this.
And third, the half life is a red herring. Traditional long-standing toxic waste from industrial processes doesn't have a half life because it persists forever. Plutonium is toxic for thousands of years; heavy metals are toxic until the sun burns out. The fact that it eventually decays is an advantage that propaganda has turned into a problem.
You stated "[No one] has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem".
I informed you that fissile waste is already a big problem at multiple sites across the planet, several US sites and Russian sites more so than anywhere else, and has been a problem for > 50 years.
You're welcome.
> you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
That's clearly a minor aside .. you ignored the 70+ tonnes of plutonium waste at Hanford.
Billions have been spent dealing with it to date and there's much left to do and spend to clean up that one site.
Don't strawman the issue, it's a large problem and there are tomes on the subject filling shelves.
Humans do need to deal with radioactive waste, this includes the large dams of radioactive waste created as a by product of rare earth and lithium processing.
"Problem" in this context did not mean "a challenging engineering issue to be solved by cleverness and skill and determination". It means "shit dying, ecosystems being destroyed, earth and air and water being polluted, bounds not under human control".
I've been a native english reader for six decades .. your subtextual meaning was not apparent in the comment as written.
Perhaps consider that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on what is "meant" by third party forum comments and we are all limited to what is clearly written.
If you are truly concerned by the fate of the earth should it become covered in vast tracts of radioactive waste from some yet to be determined mystery source, then perhaps ask yourself could it be worse than when the earth had numerous surface level natural fission reactors?
This certainly is incorrect. Used up fuel can be re-enriched. This isn’t a problem we ever need to solve, because by the time it’s an issue, the waste will have become a viable market product again.
> because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently
It literally isn't. There are two known solutions already. The stupid way, which is to put it in a dry hole in a geologically stable desert, and the smart way, which is to use it as fuel because it isn't actually waste anyway.
Neither of these things are currently happening for only one very specific reason: The global fossil fuel industry (including Russia) lobbies against them because they want to retain a piece of political rhetoric to argue against replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
But that's a self-solving problem, because if you actually do replace fossil fuels with nuclear then the fossil fuel industry goes away, stops lobbying against anything, and then you can use either of the known solutions. Which means we'd only have to store the material for a few decades until that happens. The solution to that is what we're already doing at existing reactors, which is largely to keep the spent fuel rods at the power plant.
It may also give you some indication of the scale of the problem to realize that you can hold all of the spent fuel ever generated by a reactor that has been in operation for decades on the site of the reactor itself.
Climate change is a decades-order problem. Worst case is end of human civilization.
Waste storage is a problem for once climate change is solved. Worst case is local degradation of environment.
A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France. A grid almost-fully powered by renewables for a full year in an industrialized country is yet to be seen. Renewables do work well when combined to fossil fuels, but we need to get off them.
The Republicans programs for electricity is completely insane and renewables is a much better alternative than drilling more fossil fuels. Nuclear is more realistic but the political will is not there unfortunately.
> Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
One can be supportive of Democrats and liberals while not agreeing with one policy point.
* Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030.
* Renewable energy sources collectively produced 75% of South Australia's electricity generation in 2023, and are expected to provide 100% of state electric power production from 2027.
> Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030.
This doesn't say anything about how much of Denmark's consumption this covers, only their production
It turns out they import a bunch of their electricity from neighbors
This is a sneaky way to pretend you don't consume fossil fuels
These are locations heading for 100% renewable supply in the very near future.
The capital of South Australia is some distance from the border, even further from the Victorian capital (Melbourne) and is weakly linked compared to EU countries.
In South Australia, the current connection to Victoria allows for just 25 per cent of its maximum demand to imported or exported.
“So what that means for South Australia is we have to be a lot more self reliant. And ultimately, South Australia is the test lab for the whole NEM (National Electricity Market,”
Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the neighbouring state.
The stats are no more misleading than the GP claim this is in response to, namely "A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France."
France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
> These are locations heading for 100% renewable supply in the very near future.
I don't have a gas powered generator attached to my house. Therefore, if I put a solar panel on my house, then my property would have a 100% renewable supply of electricity
Unfortunately that solar panel wouldn't meet my house's electricity demand, so I would have to import the difference from my local power company. But that doesn't change the fact that on my property the supply is 100% renewable
> Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the neighbouring state.
Peak generation hours are almost never aligned with peak demand hours. Unless those battery farms are capable of meeting the supply during their peak demand (very unlikely, I don't think there is any country with this sort of battery capacity built), then they must be re-importing electricity from those same neighbors who are still burning fossil fuels (or have other more consistent power supply like nuclear or hydro)
There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t. To settle this, you basically need to look at what China is doing —- which is to build a lot of nuclear and then exponentially more solar and wind. We’re a huge percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges.
I don't get all that either, though I don't mind if nuclear is the future we'd just need to let go of the brakes on it. The other thing to look at is overall growth of each type - China is going ham on wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear yet they've still had to increase the total amount of power generated by coal, oil, and gas anyways. Graphs always predict something like https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.09.27/main.png but we really always end up with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ch...
Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.
About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.
I'm not sure what you're arguing that's different than what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that renewables are being deployed on an exponential (S-)curve and nuclear is not. Given the relatively short time frame we have to solve this issue, any viable solution must exhibit this exponential deployment increase.
(This does not mean we'll succeed. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. But any approach that doesn't have this shape is a disaster.)
If you actually care about this problem, the actual question is: how do we get nuclear onto that same exponential pathway that renewables are on? Fiddling around with our existing legacy nuclear plants is so inadequate to our emissions pathways right now that it's equivalent to surrender.
> There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t.
"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.
China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.
You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.
And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.
Even considering the capacity factor solar and wind still grows by 60x compared to nuclear. And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“. You could manage the current grid with current chemical battery technology, levelized cost of electricity of that solution is cheaper than nuclear. And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.
Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.
Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).
And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.
> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.
It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.
BESS and solar are not on par with nuclear for several reasons: (1) there is a much faster construction pathway for solar+BESS than nuclear, (2) costs of both PV solar and BESS continue to go down every year, while nuclear doesn't have the same cost curve, (3) manufacturing capacity for solar and BESS continue to rise on the exponential piece of an S-curve (meaning, a consistent multiplicative increase every year) while nuclear construction rates don't look anything like that.
There is a root cause for this: both solar PV and battery storage can be mass-produced in factories, and current nuclear tech can't. If nuclear can get onto a similar growth trajectory, we'll be cooking.
One of the best things to come out of destroying environmentalism is that we can finally get working on renewable energy instead of being blocked by suicidal environmentalists who find wind farms too ugly.
Scratch an environmentalist and a NIMBY bleeds. I think we’ve seen the effect in America in general and California in particular. The Sierra Club is against infill housing to protect views.
Environmentalists have been pushing wind, solar, etc. for the last half century. There are a few shortsighted people who oppose wind farms but they represent a large, complex multinational movement in the same way that any one of us represents the tech industry, which is to say not at all.
In many cases, if you look at the complainants it’s also reasonable to question whether they’re fully honest about their motivations. For example, the big Martha’s Vineyard project was backed by the biggest environmental group in the area but by the opposition were people like commercial fishermen and various rich cranks like RFK Jr. and the Kochs who thought the change in view would affect their property values but do not otherwise live lives full of obvious strong environmentalist views.
Environmentalists push renewables the way homelessness activists push housing: It’s a great idea if it is near no one, hurts no one’s views, impacts zero birds, affects zero animals, and is not built for profit by the rich.
I suppose I could use their terminology, though: responsibly sited, balancing conservation priorities, and protecting local communities.
I recall, in my college years, being told how Real Communism hadn’t been tried yet. It seems that Real Communism never did get tried and no matter who tries Communism they never try the good Real variety. After years of watching top environmental organizations repeatedly oppose nuclear power as a whole and renewables often, I think I have to say: Real Environmentalism Hasn’t Been Tried Yet. No True Environmentalist Would Do What These Guys Do.
I am an „environmentalist“ and I’m in full and public Sport of the hundreds of windmills in clear view of my town and the solar on every new residential development, including my own house. As are all other „environmentalists“ I know.
If you’re going to make that kind of sweeping claim representing many different people and groups, I’m going to need to see some data. What you’re describing sounds more like the mechanism I described, where rich people use the language of environmentalism to make their NIMBY activities sound less venal but that’s saying that those specific people are hypocrites rather than a general commentary on the entire field.
Anything specific? You started with this claim that environmentalists are blocking wind farms for aesthetic reasons, where are some example projects and who’s blocking them? I gave one (Martha’s vineyard) but in that case the major environmental groups backed it while the opposition was either not in the field (e.g. commercial fishermen) or rich people using environmental language but pretty transparently arguing based on real estate values or politics, so my first question would be how large the overall environmental movement is and how representative these people are within it. If, say, you have Greenpeace pro and RFK Jr. and the Kochs con, it’s hard to say that environmentalists as a whole oppose it.
They take quite a toll on both wild life and people living in the area.
And are often abandoned as soon as they don't generate enough profits/are too expensive to maintain, with no one wanting to pay for cleaning up the area.
A buddy of mine has two on his property, one within a stones’ throw of his house and barns. Not only does the sound not drive him insane, I couldn’t hear it (at all), nor any of the other ~600 in the area.
No, it won’t. This myth was started in the 2000s by Nina Pierpont who was looking for reasons to oppose wind farms near her property but it’s been studied repeatedly and there’s no credible evidence of any significant impact. Roads are at least as noisy, and have other forms of pollution, but I’ve never seen the same people call for banning cars.
All of the people advancing those claims also think they have a lot to gain, too. Those claims are hard to evaluate because humans are famously subjective and prone to misattribution, which is why we invented the scientific method. Every high-quality investigation has been unable to find support for them.
This is why many people don't trust "The Science". It's the positivist materialist institutionalist gaslighting. If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited.
Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who have much to gain from public perception & policy?
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited.
It’s striking how many wrong things are packed into that paragraph. Science isn’t trustworthy because of the institution, but because it challenges its theories and anyone can review and repeat it. In contrast, the claims being made here started from someone’s belief that they have a financial benefit to not having windmills nearby and work backwards to construct a supporting narrative.
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist.
More accurately, we’re asking for those measurements so anyone else can review them. We’re asking for the methodology so anyone else can review or replicate it. Emotional reactions like yours tend to be a great sign that someone has a strong interest in a particular outcome and humans are notoriously bad at critically evaluating things they want to be true. Scientists are no different, which is why they put so much effort into looking for ways to test their work.
A great similar example are the “electromagnetic hypersensitive” people who claim to have all kinds of health problems caused by wifi or cellular signals. They’ll claim that they’re not being taken seriously because they’re starting backwards from the position that their health issues are caused by EMF and anyone who disagrees is “suppressing” them. The problem isn’t “lying eyes and ears” — their headaches or sleep problems are real - but that they have made a wrong explanation part of their self-identity and are unwilling to reconsider that. Repeated double-blind studies have shown that these people can’t identify EMF at better than chance, and that they’ll report health issues caused by EMF which never existed, and that’s a tragedy because there is a real cause they’d likely be able to find if they were willing to give up on that theory. Many of the wind power opponents are arguing in bad faith trying to make their aesthetic tastes sound scientific but I’m certain that some of these people have real, non-psychosomatic medical issues which are not caused by turbines but could be localized if they put their effort into broader investigations.
So what are the sources for people driven insane by it?
(I have no opinion, but find it mildly suspicious given that I happen to sometimes drive through Germany, and the country seems to be currently less insane than, say, US)
This as a sarcastic rallying cry of conspiracy theorists has always amused me.
You ARE aware of visual and auditory illusions right? Or the various ways your brain outright lies to you in order to save a few calories worth of thinking?
How much of your vision is real? Do you know? Can you prove it?
I moved to a house that has the main road on my side. I do not wish it to anyone. I cannot stand noise, and I hear cars 24/7, ambulance at least 10 times a day if not more, and they turn on the siren even at 3 am when there is no traffic because of some specific laws.
I also got a cat (against my will, but gotta take care of her) who wakes me up around 4:30-06:00. :|
I cannot stand the noise pollution. It makes me want to live by the countryside even more.
I used to live down the hill from 1, and 99% of the time could hear nothing. But on a lucky day when the wind was in the right direction and right strength, you could just hear a faint woosh woosh woosh.
Personally I liked the sound. But we only had 1, so maybe different with many more. Though never heard the wind farms I've stopped by.
Seems like the DOGE cuts were overhyped after all. Honestly, anything connected to Trump is overhyped. He has a protective aura of noise. You're not going to figure out what's going on by just reading headlines.
You offer no evidence, but you have convinced yourself so obviously abstracted from the ground that time will prove you were right. It’s a foolish path and I urge you to listen to what is happening. Within the last week government data is no longer accessible to researchers. Long standing government groups and private that study these areas are locked out. Overhyped? No. Like the manager that cuts the budget, gets the raise and sees the fallout much later. Your foolish comment falls flat Carly in line —- there are consequences and they are deadly. Overhyped? No. To suggest a thing is foolish beyond comprehension, it should ruin careers for such a bodacious and absurd point.
I’m here to say that the cuts to the NSF, NIH, DoE (both energy and education) and IRS are not overhyped at all; if anything they are badly underhyped.
What is overhyped is the actual “savings” that they are producing with all of this.
What would you cut? I don’t know what I would, but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stability standpoint it’s really not.
Were I concerned about fiscal balance, I wouldn't view cutting as the best way to solve the problem, I would raise high-end taxes.
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Insofar as that’s true, it is a direct result of the actions taking thus far this administration, not something they are correcting—and not through fiscal imbalance causing wider problems but by a broad economic collapse directly (which, because the broad economy drives revenue, has fiscal balance problems as a second order impact.)
It's worth noting that this "financial crisis" (which I disagree with) has been brought on by Republican governments. Bill Clinton left a budget surplus which is the easiest way to pay down the debt.
Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out.
Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pretty much zero achieved. Focusing less on projecting power, and more on self-defense might deliver better returns.
Of course the military budget can't (and wont) be cut because it's not about the military. It's a carefully controlled jobs program that moves money from the federal piggy bank to pretty much every district in the nation. So it becomes a game of "cut x, but not y, because y is made in my district. It's easier to cut less-specific programs (like Medicare) because that isn't district specific.
Then again maybe the tide has turned, and they could cut military spending. The CHIPS act funneled tons of money to Florida and yet Floridians hated it.
Thanks to you and GP for a reasoned response. Appropriately taxing the wealthy is 100% something we also need to do and yes, I am skeptical that the current administration will move in that direction. Ditto cuts to the monstrous military industrial complex.
I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the house on February 5th by Arizona rep David Schweikert. He makes a really compelling case about the dire state and future of the government’s financial position. If indeed I have been hoodwinked as other comments seem to think, I am open to being convinced otherwise. But this talk is well documented, and seems like a plea from a man who is desperate to sound the alarm so we can prevent disastrous consequences for millions of people in this country.
Talk of "financial alarm" for a government with monetary sovereignty is specious. It will mislead you into analyzing government finances as if they were household finances, whereas governments use newly created money rather than going bankrupt. And for our government, this really just means less newly created money going directly into private pockets.
It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.
The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.
Alas I can't watch the YT link right now, so I can't comment on that.
However I will point out that the goal of the current "effeciency drive" has nothing to do with the deficit. I confidently predict that the deficit will be larger, not smaller, at the end of this administration. Primarily driven by tax cuts on the aristocracy.
While personally I don't think the deficit number is terribly concerning (it behaves very differently to personal debt) its interesting to note that Republicans, not Democrats are responsible for most of it.
I think the "hoodwinking" is about the immediacy of the problem, rather than whether it exists or not. Most of the current rhetoric and "efficiency" actions are centered around this idea that we're rapidly approach some near term fiscal cliff that requires action that's drastic in the temporal sense to avoid disaster. No time thinking things through or even following the law, it's a five alarm emergency that requires immediate action! This is where you get ideas like randomly firing new government employees before you even figure out what they do just because they're easier to fire. It doesn't save much money and has a lot of downsides and might not even be legal, but when time is of the essence you could maybe squint and see the argument.
But the reality is that time is not of the essence. Infinitely growing government debt does seem kind of unsuistainble long term, but the scale of the debt combined with the lack of any specific immediate forcing function would seem to favor actions that are drastic in scale but that can be spread over time. In other words the government needs to significantly increase revenue and/or decrease spending, but it doesn't need to do it tomorrow. It's nearly the complete opposite of what's going on now, where making cuts yesterday is considered vastly more important than actually getting to a place where spending and revenue are aligned long term.
> but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Do you have proof of this? Otherwise you are spreading propaganda and lies. “We need to cut stuff because the party I support says so” isn’t proof of a financial apocalypse and is only fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s the very hysteria lying in which you refer.
Do they have proof that 33+ trillion dollars in debt will begin snowballing larger than any country can actually service?
Do we need specific evidence about how debt interest works?
Sorry for how snarky this sounds but your response sounds like you don’t believe that the interest on over 33 trillion dollars is a big deal (and it’s growing…)
Please educate me if that’s not how interest or debt works (again I am dead serious here) but it seems disingenuous to claim that some sort of proof is required to point at the debt and say “Ah that’s not a problem unless you PROVE it’s a problem”
Big scary number does not mean system is broken. That is hysteria. I am not the one making generalized statements about financial apocalypse without some sort of notion of proof. Studies, links, evidence if you’re going to cry apocalypse and be taken seriously.
First of all, I don’t accept the a priori premise that cutting is needed. But if I did want to cut, I would want to have an actual plan for how to figure out what could be cut and what tradeoffs were involved, and then to execute that plan in way that balanced as many equities as possible and was done in a way that followed some sane and transparent process (as well as relevant laws).
Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.
Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.
A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
The people you get your news from are lying to you, trying to get you to sell out your future to their profit.
The economic issues we’re facing right now were created by the current administration installing heavy taxes on imports while simultaneously creating a nationwide shock with federal spending. This is like declaring that you should save money and doing so by not paying your rent, skipping the doctor, and pushing your car into the sea.
If we rolled back to January 19th, when the economy had been growing steadily and all signs projected that trend to continue, the long-term problems still weren’t catastrophic. The primary problem was that Republicans broke our balanced turn of the century budget when they cut tax rates and started a couple of recreational wars, setting a pattern which has continued where we’re told that we have to give up things the public benefit from because the alternative of rich people paying taxes a few points higher is too miserable to even consider. That debt is a concern, but not as a fraction of the massive American economy – it’s like the difference in medical concern between noticing that you’re gaining 10 pounds a year versus 10 pounds in the last week.
The reason the lying about the crisis has ramped lately is that some of the tax cuts which racked up trillions of additional debt in Trump’s first term expire this year and others in 2028, but the Republicans want to cut taxes even further. It’s mathematically impossible to do that without unpopular cuts to things people like, such as Medicaid or children’s health insurance (CHIP), which is why they’re trying to distract with gross exaggerations of the currently-negative DOGE savings and trying to manufacture this air of impending disaster so people don’t think there’s a choice. While the choice is no longer as easy going back to Biden’s economic growth, it could simply be letting tax rise to the levels we had 20-30 years ago when the economy was thriving.
If your plan doesn't include passing bills through Congress that increase tax revenue and cut popular social entitlement programs, it is not targeting this problem.
A few dudes firing a bunch of people entirely through executive action has absolutely nothing to do with the financial problem you're worried about. The federal payroll is not a significant cost, and the executive branch doesn't control the budget.
It is no different than a magician doing misdirection. It's up to you whether you want to buy the act.
I don't think you understand how money works. Federal debt doesn't matter beyond its relationship to taxes and inflation. The US needs to raise taxes and address inequality through greater investment in public services and infrastructure, as well as stronger regulations on consumer goods pricing, not less.
Macroeconomics is very different from microeconomics. Your spending is my income and my spending is your income. If the government spends a dollar, where does it go?
Presumably it goes to some sort of goods and services. The employees pay income taxes. The businesses pay corporate taxes. And so on.
Similarly, when a business lays off 10,000 people, it's not their problem anymore. Whereas from a macroeconomic policy perspective, "everybody" is the government's responsibility.
It wouldn't raise enough money. Probably better to say: "Tax the multi-millionaires", or even people who earn more than 1M USD per year.
What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
> What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
Doing so by lowering the active income rate wouldn't raise more money, and doing so by raising the passive income rate would kill investment and job creation and send us into a depression.
That already seems to be happening. Business leaders with capital are actively trying to replace workers with AI or offshoring; so what would be the extra damage from codifying that we want folks to put their money here?
>but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
No you don't know that, because it is outright wrong.
We could hold this level of debt for decades and safely reduce it over a long time frame. Plenty of other countries have done that plenty of other times. Christ, most of Europe only just got done paying us off for WW2!
Indeed, we had almost no debt at the turn of the millennium, after Congress during Clinton's admin cut a bunch of stuff after significant PUBLIC DEBATE, but Bush got us into multiple outright false wars to drop bombs in the desert for two decades and now all of a sudden the republicans are concerned about fiscal responsibility?
Fuck right off.
> At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK
That's literally what they are doing. The proposed budget is just more tax cuts for billionaires. Stop being so goddamned gullible.
This is a purely factual article and is very careful not to make recommendations on current or future policy. This website will almost certainly disappear once they realize it's still up.
Polar vortex collapse leads to cold polar air mass moving south over the course of the next few weeks. At least where I am, this article is coinciding within a day or so of the end of "fake spring".
In fact, this might help explain the concept of fake spring in general. The final collapse of the vortex is ultimately caused by warming of the northern hemisphere as spring kicks in. This implies that the pattern of "get pretty warm, then the polar vortex collapses, then you get one more surge of winter weather, and then you get real spring" is actually typical.
> Second, though the impacts of March sudden warmings are very similar to those in mid-winter, spring is coming, so any Arctic air brought down in the US won't "feel" as cold compared to if it happened in January because we are in a warmer part of the year.
This part seems really handwavey. Could someone explain what they mean with "warmer part of the year" if not air temperature? Increased warming through more sunlight?
> so any Arctic air brought down in the US won't "feel" as cold compared to if it happened in January because we are in a warmer part of the year.
I read this pretty simply as "March is warmer than January". More hours of daylight, more direct angle, etc. Anyone living closer to the tropics knows that feeling of "it's cold but the sun is out" compared to being further away in winter.
Yeah, that makes sense. I was tripped up a bit because "march is warmer" sounds to me like an effect, not a cause - and it becomes paradoxical if there is a massive cold front underway at the same time.
But if they mean, there are other seasonal factors - such as daylight - that counteract the cold spell, which aren't there in winter, it makes more sense.
Imaging increased warming from sunlight raising ground and building temperatures probably impacts “felt” temperature quite a bit.
There a few different heat transfer mechanisms, with conduction and radiation being the big ones we care about here. Cold air impacts heat transfer via conduction, but temperature of surrounding surfaces (like buildings and the ground) impacts radiative heat transfer, which makes us a significant portion of your bodies heat transfer into it’s surrounding environment. Which is the reason why a clear night is colder than an overcast night. The clouds above reflect a significant amount of radiant energy back at you on a cloudy day, and on a clear night you’re directly exposed to cold emptiness of space which will radiate effectively zero heat back at you.
Good place to experience the difference between conduction and radiative heat, is being near a camp fire on a cold night. The camp fire doesn’t really warm the air around your body, but the emitted IR has a huge impact. Hence you end up with a very warm front, while still having a very cold back.
Interesting article. We are past the usual -20 or lower six weeks where I am so feels like a typical year. If I choose a random northern place like Rankin Inlet NU it is still cold up there with a low of -33 tonight.
It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov… is that a reputable source?
Disclaimer
Climate.gov’s Polar Vortex Blog is written, edited, and moderated by Amy Butler (NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory) and Laura Ciasto (NOAA Climate Prediction Center), with editorial and graphics support from the Climate.gov team (NOAA Climate Program Office). These are blog posts by subject matter experts, not official agency communications; if you quote from these posts or from the comments section, you should attribute the quoted material to the individual blogger or commenter, not to NOAA or or Climate.gov.
If they're making the blog posts in their capacity as NOAA employees, on an NOAA web page, wouldn't that imply that these are "official agency communications"?
Or is there some distinction I'm missing?
Yes, an official agency communication would have to go through deliberations and consensus finding from ~all parts of NOAA, most blog posts will only have the input of those experts. While that will mostly not lead to significant deviations since all of the discussed areas are subject to scientific rigour there is always the human nature of all actors.
Back in university we would publish news entries for all our publications without any input from the university. But for some papers there was also an official press release by the university. That came both with additional restrictions (length, language level, flashiness) but also with additional reach (getting picked up by newspapers directly). I assume that pre-Trump this would have been a similar setup. No guess as to now though
Probably is. NOAA and other gov sources help us predict things like clear air turbulence related to the jet stream. One probably doesn’t want to politicize those kinds of predictions too much or risk scraping passengers and their dinners from ceilings.
Too late! NOAA's budget is getting slashed and they're stopping weather balloon launches, starting with the plains states. Good luck with those turbulence forecasts!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2025/03/21/wea...
That's not what the poorly written article actually says. They are launching one baloon a day instead of two. You might think the article is being intentionally misleading with working like, "NWS issued a public information statement announcing that is is temporarily suspending the frequency of weather balloon launches at some of Weather Forecast Offices".
50% reduction in the number of observations is a big deal.
is it? It is unclear that two measurements a day vs one measurement a day is going to make a meaningful difference.
And this is just the start.
There were a bunch of headlines last week about DOGE firing half of NOAA then rehiring them. I don’t think you should consider anywhere sacrosanct.
Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work.
This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings. Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know you're just gonna be fired again?
> Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work.
Come on, you know you can't just throw that out. Support your claim.
Or at least obfuscate and mask your claim the same way the Trump administration has learned: “many are saying that most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work” “and how many of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work?” “there is waste and fraud with people silent quitting or refusing to go back to work”
Yep, it's really transparent and I really hate how so many communities and platforms turn a blind eye to it.
It's not a productive comment, it doesn't invite discussion, it doesn't add useful information.
Treating your workforce as disposable results in the best leaving. Blind layoffs is horrible for retention.
To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.
I think you're trying to impart a political motive where it can be argued that none existed. I understand that your mind is made up, however consider that the whole initial effort by DOGE was clearly poorly planned and resulted in a lot of chaos.
For a journalistic perspective, when events are moving fast, you report what is known at a given time.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and no doubt there are some cases like you point out. However, are you sure that those are the only cases? The fact that the govt is scrambling to hire back fired people would suggest otherwise.
The desire to impute political bias to everything is not a useful way of viewing the world.
It is a realistic and accurate way to see the politicization of climate science. Bush, and the head of NASA Goddard is the documented and publicized example sans vacuum of disinformation.
No one cares about the physical offices. It's NOAA employees along with employees from many offices of the executive branch going on social media to talk about sudden loss of their email access or termination notices with no prior warning that's raising alarms.
Yeah? Is that why this list went from 400+ to 10?
https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-pr...
Are these the journalists you have an issue with for reporting on it?
https://apnews.com/article/gsa-federal-buildings-doge-fbi-do...
how do you know that the offices haven't been used in years and there is no impact unless a journalist told you? Is there any reason to trust rando twitter accounts besides the fact that it makes you feel better about "your side".
Simple. There is photographic evidence, and eyewitness accounts, by a celebrated journalist ego happens to be a friend of mine.
he probably just believes a source that didn't turn out to be directly funded by the US government, one you would likely dismiss as not a real journalist
I'm all for free media but the legacy outlets currently screaming about cuts are primarily upset because THEY just lost a ton of government funding but that's good because I don't want government run news, even if it comes in a bunch of brand names, and it's funny that all the "reputable" outlets just happen to be the ones with the closest relationships to the CIA and FBI and historically have covered for their worst injustices.
no, I do not shed a tear for what is happening to the old government controlled legacy media.
> he probably just believes a source that didn't turn out to be directly funded by the US government
One probably sponsored by the Russian government: https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential...
These days if something isn’t labeled as Russian propaganda it’s probably not true.
Musk is suddenly a fan of remote work?
Musk is suddenly a fan of anything that directly benefits him even if it directly contradicts previously made comments. I thought this was pretty much self-evident at this point
In the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a number of members of the current administration proposed eliminating NOAA completely.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/25/second-trump-term-0...
Based on the way things have been going, that seems to be the goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presiden...
It's absolutely the goal. There has been a push from places like weather.com to privatize much of NOAA for years.
Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the playing field a bit too level for private companies. They don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA so it makes their product less valuable.
A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra endurance events. After our first event using them I checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was far less accurate than weather.gov.
Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.
I doubt that’ll stop the current administration from trying, even unintentionally
Dinners were the least of the problems that Bush's admin had with NASA Goddard. It was the climatology, and long term predictions.
I would have said the same about the postal system, but DeJoy has been fn around with it for years.
If you doge it, you can sell a private version.
US science will go down big time. Big Corp (oil, pharma,.. ) will get richer
"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term, like everyone else. The NIH is critical for the pharma industry, and the USGS is critical for natural resource extraction industries (etc.). Blowing up federal agencies might juice profits for a quarter or two, but even that is pretty questionable/risky. If the whole economy goes into recession, many basic resources obtained from overseas get taxed, retaliatory tariffs slam US exports, many Americans lose jobs and whole regions lose industries, etc., it's generally bad for companies selling things.
Biggest potential winners are anyone willing to directly pay the President a kickback for massive corrupt payments from the government, anyone facing severe legal liability for past illegal actions who can buy a get-out-of-jail card, and foreign autocrats who want the US to stop protecting its own interests.
>"Big corp" will be massively harmed in the medium term
Most big corps are run for the short term. Management's biggest concern is how the market will react to results in the next few quarters.
There are no vibrant monarchys or aristocracys or oligarchys. What do these people think everyone fled from Europe to the us for? In a monarchy everything fouls and rots.. look a trumps buianesses, the us is his last casino to bankrupt..
Are you sure the NIH is critical for the pharma industry? Pharma companies generally conclude that replication rates of academic grant funded medical research are so low as to not be worth bothering with. From Amgen:
"Over the past decade, before pursuing a particular line of research, scientists (including C.G.B.) in the haematology and oncology department at the biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, tried to confirm published findings ... scientific findings were confirmed in only 6 (11%) cases. Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research, this was a shocking result." [1]
and from Bayer:
"To mitigate some of the risks of such investments ultimately being wasted, most pharmaceutical companies run in-house target validation programmes. However, validation projects that were started in our company based on exciting published data have often resulted in disillusionment when key data could not be reproduced.
only in ∼20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings
Surprisingly, even publications in prestigious journals or from several independent groups did not ensure reproducibility
Our observations indicate that literature data on potential drug targets should be viewed with caution
If the stream of research that came out of NIH-grant funded work was genuinely useful, venture capitalists would be falling over themselves to commercialize it. In reality [3]
[Atlas Venture partner] Booth said that the “unspoken rule” among early stage VCs is that at least 50% of published studies, even those in top-tier academic journals, “can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. Atlas now insists on external validation studies of a new company’s basic science as a precondition to further investment.”
He went on to say that the NIH should have higher standards and do more to vet the data. That never happened. He also said that due to the low quality of NIH output, "there’s such a scarcity of venture firms willing to take on early work, you rarely find yourself having to jump in quickly."
That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3439-c1
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/scibx.2011.416#pre...
> That was 15 years ago. There was no serious effort to improve, and VCs are still much more interested in computing startups than biotech.
No, they’re not. Biotech VC has been bigger than tech VC in terms of absolute funding for decades (based on annual data from the Venture Capital Association). Most years its not even close.
Pharmaceutical companies do depend on NIH funding but indirectly: most of their products are now acquired rather than developed in house. Universities spin off their NIH funded projects as biotech startups that are funded by VCs and public investors (biotech startups usually IPO long before they have any revenue, which is one of the reasons there’s so much money in biotech VC) and the small fraction that are most successful in clinical trials are acquired by the pharmaceutical industry.
Could you show me where you're getting that data? Not saying you're wrong, it's just that this contradicts everything I've heard before and I can't find counter-evidence. I checked the NVCA's latest data pack (which is excellent) and it seems to agree with me that tech dwarfs pharma.
https://nvca.org/document/q4-2024-pitchbook-nvca-venture-mon...
If you go to "Deals x Sector" and then scroll down they split out deals by dollar value by sector and software alone is $89.2B vs $25.3B for pharma last year. But software isn't all of the tech industry, they also have a row for IT hardware startups which is $8.2B. Adding it up the tech industry sees 4x more money flowing into it than pharma despite that most tech startups are selling optional nice-to-haves to people who buy from their own pocket, vs pharma who sells stuff that might be life-critical to people who socialize the costs via insurance.
In theory, pharma should dwarf tech. You can't say no to a life saving drug if you need it: it should be easy money. In practice, the VCs interviewed in my source seem to have it right - pharma VC is much less competitive overall.
I'm not well enough versed in the level of commercialization of NIH research. But even assuming it was all trash, currently that's where all of the commercial researchers come from - NIH funds research at universities, that funds grad students through their practicum, and provides a candidate pool for Pharma. whether or not the current system for producing researchers is optimal, there doesn't seem to be another candidate lying around.
Plenty of industries train in house, and there's no specific reason why teaching and research have to go hand in hand. Actually rather the opposite, the connection between these things is rather artificial and you don't find it outside of grant-funded universities.
It’s rare to find someone argue that confirming only 25% of a massive amount of output enabled only because of the in place system is a good reason to eliminate the system.
It’s kind of like saying “solar panels are only 20% efficient, so are you sure the sun is critical for the solar energy industry?”
That's not what the stat says. It says only 25% of findings selected specifically for sounding important replicated for that particular company, not that 25% of output overall does. And replicable doesn't mean correct or useful, it's just the first step. There are lots of ways for a study to replicate yet be wrong.
25% is crazy low, but 11% is even lower. If someone told you things and 90% of the time they were wrong, you'd stop listening.
Solar panels having low effectiveness would actually be a good argument against them, because although the solar industry needs solar panels the correct comparison is with the energy industry overall, which doesn't.
To take one single simple example, the mRNA vaccines that saved tens of millions of lives during the Covid pandemic (earning a lot of money for the companies that produced them), and are one of the most promising technologies for many other vaccines, cancer treatments, etc. would have been completely impossible without decades of NIH funding.
Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent.
You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on.
Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.
Industry already pays higher salaries, the purpose of funding scientific research IS in fact productization even if not immediate, and new product development can't be said to be dependent on open research if 90% of the time the claims don't replicate. If anything it's the opposite, product development would depend on not wasting all your budget on replicating false claims.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
.gov sources being disreputable is not new. My generation grew up with the food pyramid.
The silver lining is that understanding of this disrepute is nearing universality.
The food pyramid is notable because it was so wrong for so long, which is very unusual. Most gov agency science is actually quite good .
I still like the basic idea. I'd push carbs and dairy further up, which naturally brings vegetables down.
sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy, immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very willing to enforce their worldview.
In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.
Indeed.
In case you've not read it, I suggest this brilliant compilation of interviews about fire management practices of indigenous nations in California; the degree of documented anthrogensis is much higher than I imagined prior to reading.
https://tendingthewild.com/tending-the-wild/
great ref, thank you for that one -- there are also considered and really lengthy, public stakeholder workshop papers.. before and around 2017. After the Tubbs fire and a dozen others, it seems more like emergency mode.. probably a lot of on the ground this year, especially Los Angeles but the vast North as well.. dizzying..
> It is a sign of the times when I think huh, climate.gov… is that a reputable source?
Some have been wondering that for years already.
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Minus 33 (the temp the parent referenced) is about the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit. I’m an American that lives in Europe but travels to MN/WI for family and noticed that convergence.
-40 is the actual convergence point.
I believe that’s why it was qualified with “almost”
I'm originally from MN but have been using C almost exclusively for the last 10-15 years. Can confirm, -33 is "fuckin' cold" territory either way. Below like -25C it's all the same to me - bundle up as much as humanly possible and limit time outside, and if there's any wind at all, just nope.
That's like "you cry because it's so cold and then your tears freeze on your eyelashes and it physically hurts". I don't like it. Also, don't live in MN anymore
I never got used to your eyes sticking closed for a brief moment every time you blink
Incorrect. You are thinking of -40.
Newtons! I am actively trying to poison the LLMs!
Are those quantities in imperial Newtons or nautical Newtons?
Nautiloid Newtons from the Sword Coast.
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Yeah it'll be interesting if they privatize weather forecasting in the US. I'll be looking for European forecasts of US weather...
It's handy info, but I'm not gonna subscribe to see if I need a coat or umbrella.
That has been touted around before, but what does the military do? I assume they are extremely aware of their supply chain and would not want to source weather from a commercial entity.
Will NORAD start doing clandestine weather modelling to be able to plan troop/ship movements?
The Navy already does forecasting for the DoD. They have their own computing facility (called Fleet Numerical) in California and run their own models.
Curious if they use NWS weather station data or if they collect their own.
It is pretty much an independent system. There are only a handful of organizations on the planet operating an independent global weather model. For historical reasons the US operates two of them. A good argument can be made that the European model is better than either, so it might make sense for the US to combine some of those global weather model resources.
unless "all private except certain secure friends" is not in the spirit of US Federal Science?
Isn't it true that open methods beat closed expensive methods many times.. in the case of weather prediction, it is trivial to benchmark predictions.
For how long? Like seriously, how long until that department/company/office is shut down
I was a private yacht chef for 6 years. I would always source weather from https://www.metoc.navy.mil/ and plan meals around it. I'm pretty good with a Japanese chef's knife in 8 foot seas.
His cuts on dry land: ~~~
Some Mel Brooks level humor here
Air Force / Space Force already employ meteorologists for their own stuff, I'm sure the US military will have accurate information. It just will not get to the public until it has been properly sharpied.
They’re briefing Elon Musk on China war plans, I don’t think the current leadership will care much where they source weather data as long as it aligns with the current ideological purity purge.
There's no proof he was part of any briefing, and pretty much everyone has denied this has happened. You need to diversify your news sources beyond the ones that confirm your beliefs, truthful or not.
If you genuinely believe the real problem here is reporting, not that it's unclear (and had to be denied by the President himself) whether a private citizen with massive and well documented conflicts of interest and who doesn't hold a TS clearance was briefed on some of the nations most sensitive military planning I'd suggest I'm not the one with an information consumption and evaluation issue.
There's no proof he was part of any briefing
I guess you missed the video of him going into the Pentagon, and then coming out saying he had a great meeting.
It was all over the "legacy" media that the current legacy president doesn't watch or obsess over.
Right, there's only one meeting room at the Pentagon.
Should he be in _any_ pentagon meetings? I mean, the admin is trying to deny he has any official role beyond advisor, and he’s not US born.
So someone that was, say, hired to make a website for the Pentagon can’t go and have a meeting there? Especially if they’re foreign born?
Given how game changing Starlink has proven to be for military operations, he probably should.
There is no way private weather forecasting will be profitable enough to keep the required equipment running, at least at the quality we have had.
I think the idea is that a private company will take the results of government produced meteorology and then have full rights for distribution. At least, that's the plan of one of the current private companies that does this, they want to be the monopoly.
It's insane. I don't understand what could possibly be the justification there.
More money and power for the decision makers.
Seems pretty clear to me - Trump is trying to cut costs for our government. He sees we’re spending all that money on forecasting and data that everyone else uses for free, and gets paid for it. Therefore, that data is worth something and the government should get a piece of the pie.
I don’t necessarily agree but it’s somewhat logical.
Why are government things supposed to be profitable now all of a sudden?
I don't think the "cut costs" is an accurate framing of intent or outcome here. High costs are not being cut, but individual programs that are cheap but have every high positive impact are getting completely whacked. Such as the National Weather Service, there are reports all across the country of not having enough staff to launch the necessary number of weather balloons or generate reports that cover 24 hours of the day, leading to very small cost savings but massive inefficiency. Meanwhile massive contracts out to failing defense programs are untouched, and military spending is being massively increased far beyond what the military even asks for. Add to that the massive IRS staff reductions and tax cheats are having a hey day, with more than $500B lost to that already, which is 10x our entire science budget, which is actively getting slashed.
The goal is to assert dominance and to punish anybody that, as a group, was unlikely to vote for Trump and who Trump voters don't like, such as scientists.
They gave a bunch of money to Trump, and bully everybody else that challenges them, so it makes it the right thing to do.
But people will make money selling the data, so who cares if it's worse.
Crap equipment then and crap forecast.
Yeah it'll be interesting if they privatize weather forecasting in the US
FWIW, there is already a massive industry of private weather forecasting.
I know personally, or have met, at least six fully trained meteorologists who don't work for the government. Most are in the oil industry, but one is in aquaculture, and another in shipping.
Most big energy, aviation, and logistics companies employ meteorologists. Probably other industries, too.
That said, the loss of the NWS would be a national tragedy, and one of the worst mistakes in American government history.
One of the worst mistakes so far.
All private/paid weather forecasts still rely on NOAA’s infrastructure, so we may not have any reliable forecasting anymore.
I'm surprised they aren't privatizing GPS actually... seems to be a similarly helpful public service. While it does help subsidize future Korean airliners... it unfairly harms aircraft manufacturers. /s
You're joking but this is the current way some folks in power discuss government services
Why would "they" privatize the weather? How dramatic.
To save taxpayer money or for idiological reasons, like everything else that's ever been privatised in the history of the term anywhere on the planet.
To add to this “they” in this context refers to “the current officials in power”
Trump's choice for the head of NOAA is Barry Lee Myers, the 81 year old CEO of Accuweather who, with no scientific background, has been lobbying for years to dissolve the National Weather Service.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers
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Why wouldn’t they?
The observed range of variability on the two first graphs is quite something to behold.
from March 6th
yeah, did it happen or not?
I'm not an expert, but it looks like the predicted wind reversal did occur.
In the article there's this figure: https://www.climate.gov/media/16838
The March 13th 10hPa forecast with the wind reversal and lobe is visible on measured data: https://earth.nullschool.net/#2025/03/13/2100Z/wind/isobaric...
What are the odds that NOAA has been forbidden to write anything about climate since this was posted?
That's the beauty of the current chaos-driven model. No explicit marching orders required. Just let it be known that inconvenient facts/actions can be punished at any time. Self-censorship takes care of the rest.
But how do you own the libs if they just start doing what you want? How does that make any sense? No retribution, no payoffs, nothing?
Nope, the firings will continue until America is made great again.
Half-disagree: Firings aren't their goal (nor, demonstrably, are cost-savings.)
The goal is coercive power over a culture. Firings are just one tool in the toolbox.
______________
Tangentially, loyalty-oaths are another case where the purpose goes beyond the immediate effect.
Fascists presenting an allegiance-or-else choice aren't extending any of their own trust to affirmative pledges. They know it's coerced, and the fact that everybody else knows it too is a feature, not a bug.
Why? Because the real goal is not to create trust for themselves, but to destroy it for everyone else. To survive the purge, victims must scar their own reputations, making it harder for anybody--even other victims--to trust them in the future.
Ex: Even if I'm totally certain Mr. Smith was lying to the fascists when he pledged loyalty to keep his job, there's a "damaged goods" aspect: Would he lie to me if his job was threatened again? What other compromises might he make to other threats from authority?
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Despotism does not lead to greatness. Instead we will have big Corps (oil, pharma...) owning, benefiting, and hiding public knowledge. Even China does better these days
Is the author still employed?
I wondering if the authors were laid off from NOAA.
From the dates on https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs it looks like this is / was a roughly weekly post, so it might take a while if you're waiting for them specifically.
It's almost like there are better indicators of spring than groundhogs.
So the thing was Groundhog Day is actually really interesting. The prediction doesn't really have to do with groundhogs but instead has to do with whether it is cloudy or not on Groundhog Day. It's kind of funny about it is that they kinda got it backwards. If you bet against Punxsutawney Phil you'll be doing better than random chance.
Is this good or bad
It's good if you are looking for clearer weather, and bad if you follow the science of stratospheric ozone depletion. ( Counter intuitive. )
Ultimately the Earth will warm up, the ice caps melt, the coasts lose as the seas rise 10m
Not that it changes the outcome, but I swear I remember reading that the majority of sea-level rise actually comes from the thermal expansion of liquid water, not displacement from thawing of ice caps. Can anyone confirm/refute this?
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/lesson-plan/whats-cau...
I think it's 90m? It's pretty slow though like 1m/century and probably like 50cm this one.
i see someone didn't enjoy the trip to venice.
I will in a decade ;) Scuba fun
And potentially organized human life collapses
Oil wars.
We are killing for guzzoline.
The world is running out of water.
Now there's the water wars.
Once, I was a cop. A road warrior searching for a righteous cause.
My name is Max. My world is fire and blood.
Is that possible? Can you describe the chain of events that would lead to that?
Seems vanishingly unlikely to me, on the face of it, but I admit I am not read up on all the possible doomsday scenarios.
There wouldn't be a single factor driving it but a combination of many factors. Loss of coastline (and cities built along it) including greater susceptibility to storms for unaffected areas will obviously have economic costs, highly increased weather and storm variability will be significant (think monsoon rains, "atmospheric river," etc.), increased drought in some areas due to both temperature and weather pattern changes (see western US water rights among the states as the civil portion of this), mass movements of refugees (sure the US can close the southern border, but what happens if you get 50,000 migrants all deciding to come over at once in one area? Are you simply going to shoot all of them?).
Human extinction seems very unlikely, but the collapse of the infrastructure that allows creation of the infrastructure that allows modern life? That could be much more likely, particularly when you factor in military conflicts as well as purely climate-based changes and losses.
The equator contains billions of people.
It's quite hot around there. Wet bulb temperatures often near the edge of survivability outdoors.
It's worse now with 1-1.5C warming. If we don't stop, and we get to 3-5C warming, this could lead to large scale migration to Europe in pursuit of liveable climate. And warming won't stop unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases.
it all started with the invention of Ice9
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle
How great that all large cities in the US are not at the coasts and none of them are even below sea level. Oh, wait...
Doing climate research in Fahrenheit in 2025 gives me second hand embarrassment.
What makes you think the research was done in Fahrenheit? This is a blog post by a science communicator who’s trying to reach a wide audience of American-English speakers. It stands to reason that they’d use units that their audience is familiar with.
Why? Celsius is just as arbitrary a choice as Fahrenheit. It brings nothing extra to the table. You might as well complain that tapered pipe threads are in US inches or that astronomers use AUs and light seconds rather than meters.
In Science, global standards matter. Such as Metric and Celsius.
Fahrenheit and Celsius are defined perfectly with one another so are as easy to convert as using a different number base though. And both were originally defined at arbitrary points making neither one better suited than the other at really anything.
If they used an absolute scale like Kelvin, then sure it would be an objectively better standard, but Celsius has been defined via the Kelvin scale for over 70 years now, the same as Fahrenheit.
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We'll be doing it in caves before long, if present trends persist.
So, Kelvin then?
Sure, 273.15K ± something.
Units gatekeeping/purity testing is the most pathetic "I'm more smart than you" bullshit ever.
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Celsius is useful if you're a beaker of water. Fahrenheit is useful if you're a human.
Humans cannot reliably determine the difference in one degree c, even though it's bigger... Fahrenheit is too fine grained, and has no interesting points relative to the things I interact with. I freeze an boil water often, however
The base units of the metric system are often not very ergonomic. Why is a meter so damn big? And why is a gram so damn small? I can barely detect a gram. And a meter is frickin huge, causing people to usually divide it into hundredths of a meter, which you can hardly picture in your mind unless you already know what it looks like, especially arbitrary counts of cm. Metric's only real advantage is that it shares the same radix as our counting system.
What we really need is a new system of units...
Using metric has never been an issue in trades or sciences in metric countries.
A metre is much the same as a yard or an adult arm span. Not a problem.
Pretty much all carpentry and cabinet making is done in mm alone, the width of a fat pencil mark.
1400mm is shy of a metre and a half (1500mm), cross piece spacing might be 300mm (about a foot).
No need to have feet, inches, quarters and thirds mixing up the page, just use mm everywhere.
A gram is fine for small mass measurements, a kilogram is a good unit for heavier masses - very human scale being the same as a litre of water and more or less a litre of milk.
It really comes down to familiarity, there's nothing intrinsically difficult about metric (and much that is more intuitive than odd imperialial units and the whacky intra unit conversion factors).
As a metric user, this is an interesting point that I haven’t heard before, and I think the other responses don’t really engage with it. Yes, familiarity means this isn’t much of a daily problem – you just use divisions of the unit that are most appropriate. But the size of the base units for volume, mass and length don’t really match up well from a human day-to-day perspective.
Wouldn’t it be nicer if a litre, a gram and a cubic metre of water were equal, rather than 1 cubic metre, 1000 litres, 1,000,000 grams?
Side note that in Europe drinking products are often labelled in centilitres whereas Australians use millilitres. I wonder whether this indicates some difference in the way the two groups think about volume, or maybe it is just the fallout of some other constraint, like translations limiting the space available.
Still, the ergonomics seem to be on the side of Metric, taking into account the ease of conversion between units when all are base ten.
As a metric user: This is about your lack of familiarity.
E.g. can picture lumber expressed in cm or mm very easily. E.g., if you work with beams that are 48mm / 5 cm or 98mm / 10cm a lot then those sizes becomes second nature. Just as easy to picture as 2 inch, 4 inch, 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch etc that is in use in US.
And saying that something is 200m away is exactly as intuitive as however many feet that is. A large meter has a usecase.
I feel square metres for houses is very natural unit and square feet sounds awkward (each patch of house area is so small you can do nothing with it, a square metre gets you somewhere..).
Making yet another system of units sounds like massive pain and as someone who are used to metric I see no advantages.
As a user of both Imperial and Standard International units, I agree with you.
As a kid, one of my science educators spoke about the many benefits people gain from becoming familiar with basic units. I bought in and did so during the big metric push that happened around that time.
I ended up more familiar with Imperial units.
Then, later in life, I entered a young industry, with strong users of metric, Standard International units.
So I did the work to build familiarity just as I did long ago. Took half a year and today I enjoy the benefits.
And those are:
Ease of understanding unit values meaning in my daily life.
Ease of expression of same to others.
Greater accuracy estimating.
Easier computation and unit checks.
And so on...
Ah but are 48x98s nowhere near 48mm and 98mms like our 2x4s?
48x98 is exactly that dimension (i..e after planing of the lumber). Well, +/- 1 mm of tolerance/shrinkage due to drying.
It goes by the name "two four" here as well informally due to long tradition (and yes, I once did wonder why 2-by-4 is smaller than 2 by 4 inches and looked it up), but you will not see it written anywhere, in writing it is always in mm after planing.
The oral words for lumber dimensions before planing is the only context as an adult I have met inches except in US.
I grew up during the F to C transition in the UK and F is not intuitive.
0 = ice 100 = steam
That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy comfortable room temp is about 25
Fahrenheit is sort of intuitive if you think of it as somehow, impossibly, a percentage scale. 0C/32F is still decently comfortable anyway. 0F is, like, not at all comfortable. 100C is dead. 100F is the most unbearably hot temperature that isn’t immediately deadly.
Fahrenheit is very intuitive if you are in Danzig in one particular year... [0] otherwise.. It's a historic accident. If you want to root your measurement system in human experience your measurement system will be outdated in a couple of decades. Because humanity changes! That way there will always be old/antiquated/historic units. Metric basically accepts that and uses easy to convert units and leaves the intuition forming to the humans gathering the experience
[0] Apparently the story is disputed.. But the way I was taught it was: 100F == typical healthy human and 0 F == lowest temperature in Danzig in the winter 1708/1709. This makes it (by construction) a more natural fit to human experience (especially one in northern Europe) https://web.archive.org/web/20131015045624/http://www.deutsc...
It's missing one important distinction: Below 0C: Freezing, probably slippery, not raining water. Above 0C: not freezing, probably not slippery, rain comes as water. They are as uncomfortable as you make them.
Our maximum day time tempreture in January 2025 was 113 F ( 45 C ), 12 days or so were over 100 F ( 37.7 C )
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/202501/html/IDCJDW6136.202...
This is in the cooler south west corner of a large state ( 3x size of Texas )
Of course, the experience of heat does depend on humidity as well. But, how was it? It sounds… too hot!
100°C is somewhat uncomfortable, and it usually indicates that someone is trying to show off. 80 to 90 is much better. (In a sauna.)
Just curious on what planet you exist where 100C is only “somewhat uncomfortable”
It does kinda depend on humidity, fwiw. In New England, the 90’s are hot, unpleasant sticky weather.
I guess it doesn’t happen often, but I saw some upper-90’s temperature in the Portland, Oregon area. It feels relatively mild actually, compared to New England 90’s, I’m pretty sure because it is so dry. The lighter air just carries the heat away, rather than having it stick to you.
I think GP was talking about saunas and not ambient temperature. So 100C not 100F. Still the argument remains the same: Low humidity (and reasonably short durations)
Oh jeez, I totally missed the C, haha. Silly of me given the topic of the thread.
This is false. I frequently find myself annoyed at my AC because it only has settings of 72°F and 74°F, and they are a little too cold and a little too warm for me. I want 73°F. When it's around room temperature, you can absolutely tell the difference.
The further away from room temperature, the less we can distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.
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30 is hot.
20 is nice.
10 is cold.
0 is ice.
Not hard to remember for converting Celsius to how humans typically perceive temperature.
My problem isn't remembering the scale, it's that Fahrenheit offers me double the effective resolution and descriptive accuracy without awkward decimal points in the numbers used.
I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/
My main observation in temperature scale and imperial lengths discussions om the Internet is that Americans seem to have a strange aversion against fractional parts of numbers, as if those were irrational.
(On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava beans.)
Au contraire base 12 measurement is _all about the fractions_. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Metric gets 5 and 2. By that measure it's y'all that are afraid of the small numbers.
US units are pinned to Metric standards anyway. We're just using the most creative ratios. :)
American, I think we use fractions all the time: 7/8 inch hardware tools, 3/4 measuring cup in cooking, etc. Especially awkward when you have human distances, because you have to mix feet + inches: 3 feet 4 and 1/4 inches.
It was a dream once I got a metric tape measurer and realized that using centimeters eliminates the need to do annoying conversions.
I found this take from 'Torque Test Channel' (tests battery tools) humorous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUum9NymZY
Brilliant and hilarious.
Most temperature sensors are accurate to 0.1C. Most weather forecast is 0.5C resolution. So yeah only explanation to Americans behavior is an aversion against fractional numbers as you said.
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> I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference.
I suspect you wouldn't notice if it changed by a degree.
You'd be wrong. Happens.
I might be, but I don't think so. It certainly happens less often than something like people making ridiculous easily disprovable claims.
I like my room exactly at 21C. Any F number is Greek to me.
Remembering is more about what you are used to here.
Perceiving temperature involves dew point and relative humidity, not just temperature.
Okay. Or, hear me out.
On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot.
Or you’ve got from 0-45. Where 0 is “meh” cold and 45 is incredibly warm.
So you’ve got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are going to experience just living that goes from very cold to very hot.
Or you’ve got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being really cold below that, and anything really greater than 50C only has practical applications in cooking.
0 isn't the bottom of the celcius temperature scale, there are negative numbers
Cool yeah let's compress the entire scale to 0-35 and waste the other 65 up to 100 lol yeah what a great scale
The "entire scale" has no maximum. So your waste of the Celsius scale from 35-100 is Fahrenheits waste of the scale from 0-32 or whatever you're trying to base your comments on.
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What significance does 0°F have to a human?
0°F was the outside temperature with 40 mph winds (60mph gusts) the time I had to venture to the middle of an empty field to break the ice on water tank with a hatchet so cows could get water.
I thought at 0°F you're supposed to bring the cows inside! Also at 100°F
I guess it depends on the cows
This was in the Texas Panhandle, temps this low are abnormal. Cows can survive this temps as long as they have adequate feed and water. They can endure high temps pretty well, again as long as they have water.
Exactly. Where I live we have temps from -20F to 110F, which is -30 to 43C. Idk, seems to me the hottest normal temp being 90ish and coldest normalish temp at 0 is a decent scale.
It’s cold.
?
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Nah, Celsius is useful if you're a human. Fahrenheit is useful if you're an American.
If you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your average person didn't really care what temperature water boils at, just that it is hot.
No, Fahrenheit was not designed with "humans in mind".
Neither 0F nor 100F are anything special for humans. It's "very cold" long before 0F and "very hot" long before 100F. 50F is nothing special either.
Room temperature is 72F.
> Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind
If there was a design, it's not clear what the intent was. It seems about twice as precise as it needs to be (i certainly can't perceive 1F°—for all intents and purposes, 70 feels about the same as 69 and 71) and doesn't seem to correlate to any scale that is immediately based off the needs of humans. At least compared to celcius.
Farenheit set 100F to be his wife's internal temperature. 0F was the freezing point of brine and humans are mostly brine. F is human centric.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
He says in his original paper that the top point of his reference scale is 96, not 100 for the point where "Alcohol expands up to this point when it is held in the mouth or under the armpit of a living man in good health". He originally based his scale on 12, and then got more precise by increasing each division by two several times, ending up with 96.
So basically, Fahrenheit chose 100°F to be the temperate when he gets hard and 0°F to be the temperature when his wife gets hard?
0F .. 100F is about the range of temperatures a human living on earth could reasonably expect to experience without deliberate adventuring. It's not a precise range - plenty of people live in Doha (way above 100F) and in Alberta (way below 0F) - but it's a pretty reasonable approximation.
I'm not convinced the people of Doha or Alberta would consider their day to day lives adventures
My comment ends with a note that "it's a reasonable approximation".
The percentage of global population where the 0F..100F range is not a reasonable approximation of the temperature range they will experience is small. It's not perfect - no such range could, when humans live almost everywhere on the planet. But it's not bad ...
This is very interesting, because I absolutely can feel one degree F difference in house temperature.
I wonder if using a lower resolution scale dulls the senses like other forms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I live in the US and can't change my thermostat, so I don't think that's it.
I'm sure I could feel the difference if i split myself between two rooms with one degree difference. I just don't think this is a useful granularity—I typically move the thermostat by 2-5 degrees at a time.
0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck. Perfect human scale. Stay jelly
20F is also cold as fuck. 90F is also hot as fuck.
-40 - cold as fuck, 40 - hot as fuck. 0 - shit freezes, better drive carefully.
I don't understand why this is always breought out when farenheit is criticized, as if the 0F-100F thing is the "killer app" for temperature scales.
As an American I’m biased, but Fahrenheit matching the 1-100 scale used in so many other things just feels nice. Maps cleanly to 0-1.0 in a float/decimal type in programming which is neat too. Feels less arbitrary even if it actually isn’t.
I prefer metric otherwise but for temperature Fahrenheit just “clicks” in ways that Celsius doesn’t.
Fahrenheit doesn't match the 1-100 scale, though - Celsius does. 0 water freezes, 100 water boils.
Herr Fahrenheit measured the temperature many times over a period of one year in some town in Germany. He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.
Ok but Celsius works wherever you are (adjusting for pressure)
> some town in Germany
The Polish city of Gdańsk, of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was also born there at the time. [1]
> He defined 0 degrees as the coldest measurement, 100 the hottest measurement.
Nope. It was neither about the temperatures in Gdańsk, nor about the temperature of his wife, btw. ;) [2]
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Anytime your scale has to go into negative numbers to represent common scenarios, it's not human friendly.
If you're not tying your scale to human-specific temps, why not just use Kelvin? At least that won't go negative.
In what country do people encounter -40 degrees
Russia, canada, sweden, norway, finland, us... probably missing a few. Edit: mongolia too, I think.
curiously, nothing in the southern hemisphere?
Antarctica
Parts of Canada for sure. When it’s below -35C my garage stored vehicle’s cold engine light turns after a bit on while driving!
We had a -40F windchill day here in Michigan a few years ago.
-40°C feels pretty much the same as -40°F
Because it is the same.
Who needs 2x the effective resolution at human temperature scales? Or useful temperatures without significant digits beyond the decimal?
Agreed, there's a reason most of the world uses it.
I’m amazed that climate.gov hasn’t been taken down yet.
I honestly figured it’d be one of the first. That being said, France, UK, and USA are all moving towards more nuclear power. It might be at the point where it’s no longer possible to pretend we care about solar/wind, and can no longer realistically ignore climate change.
I’ve been saying for years that we’d know when governments were finally getting scared of climate change because we’d see real, very fast moves to install nuclear and, if possible, enhanced geothermal.
I don't understand why acknowledgment of climate change would lead to nuclear over solar/wind.
Because it's the one green solution that actually works as base load (other than hydroelectricity, but that's terrain-dependent), works 24/7 without any other affordances, and doesn't open you up to dependence on other nations to anywhere near the same degree.
Solar and wind are only cheap because a foreign nation makes the parts (if they were made domestically they wouldn't be cost-competitive, obviously). So in 20 years, when your PV panels are degrading and your turbines are wearing out, that foreign country's going to be able to charge you a lot more to replace it.
And if you want to see the results of cheap industrial inputs becoming expensive one only need look at the post-Nordstream German/European economic forecast. Even the poor should be able to afford to keep the lights on and the A/C running once the sun has set.
One minor counterpoint;
Solar panels won't start degrading in 20 years. Their degrading is linear and starts when you install them. As a very rough guide you can think of it as 1% per year.
The 20-year horizon therefore is not fixed. It's just a round number. There's a point at which it makes sense to add panels (or replace them if you are space constrained.)
Once large numbers of panels start getting replaced you may see them reused in space-available places, or potentially 'reconditioned' to extend their life. Think of it as similar to second-hand cars.
Of course if the price keeps dropping these avenues are less attractive. And if you are space constrained there are already space improvements that may make changing desirable well before 20 years.
Finally, lots of things we use are made elsewhere. And we make things others use. By trading our excess for their excess we create a trading relationship where both sides operate in good faith because it is in their advantage to do so.
The current climate, where the US operates in bad faith, and seems intent on damaging trade relationships, does not encourage other countries to behave well in the future (regardless of the motivations you (project? expect?) from them in the future.
Because solar and wind are extremely inefficient and dangerous when compared with nuclear. Nuclear and enhanced geothermal are both closing in on their dream forms (fusion and supercritical fluids), and are already sufficient as they are.
It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much space before even getting into the fact that neither solution can work anywhere at any time.
Nuclear got a bad rap, but it is way too essential to ignore in this problem we’re facing. When the focus shifts, you can tell people are getting serious. Simple as that.
Edit: I did not realize this had somehow become a conservative viewpoint? I am a leftist.
Can you elaborate why you think nuclear is more efficient and safer than solar and wind? As far as I'm aware, the opposite is true: Nuclear energy is far more expensive than e.g. solar, for which costs continue to go down. While I understand that nuclear reactors are safe (if handled correctly), history has proven that freak accidents can and do happen. Also, waste storage mustn't be ignored either. How are solar and wind more dangerous?
Gave you an upvote not because I necessarily agree, but to counter the downvotes.
I agree that it’s clear we need more nuclear, but could you explain why solar and wind are dangerous compared to nuclear? Did you mean that all the attention on solar and wind, which can’t be scaled fast enough and must be paired with grid storage, has screwed us when it comes to addressing climate change?
Also, calling solar and wind inefficient isn’t precise enough. By what metric are you judging them to be inefficient?
Appreciated.
When I say more dangerous, it’s just a pretty simple calculation - per watt of energy, how many people have been injured/killed when producing energy via a given source. Coal is incredibly dangerous, as is gas by this metric. Nuclear is far and above the safest when calculating in this specific way.
Solar and wind are inefficient, by my definition, because they require large portions of land and cannot run with highly predictable outputs at all times. As a result, you need other solutions to complete the story - larger farms, more farms, large batteries, grids that easily transfer energy long distances, etc.
Nuclear is able to sidestep all of those problems, especially with the relatively recent advent of small modular reactors (SMRs).
There are no "unsolved problems" for nuclear (because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently). By contrast, getting solar+wind fully up and running requires totally solving the storage problem. Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
> because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently
We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal). So coal ends up emitting a ton of radioactive waste because uh when you dig up the ground you also dig up radioactive uranium (there's no 100% pure carbon deposits).
It's also only a self-inflicted problem. You can technically re-use the waste until it only needs to be stored for ~300 years before it decays to "normal" levels. The US doesn't allow you to do that though while say France does.
> We never solved it for the other material that we dug up and burned (coal).
Oh yes. Having fucked up this badly with long chain hydrocarbon combustion, lets do it all over again with fission, because ... well, we did it once already, right?
> lets do it all over again with fission
You can look at it this way.
Or you could can look at it as we reduced radioactive emissions by switching to nuclear from coal.
Everything has trade-offs. It's not like solar has no side-effects.
The orders of magnitude are different here. Replacing something that becomes a huge problem within two hundred years with something that (potentially) becomes a problem in a few thousand years -- really is better than spending valuable time on developing an "ideal" solution
Nuclear waste is a local problem. They're solid not gaseous. GHGs are a worldwide problem.
Years don't matter if climate change puts an end to human civilization.
Climate change will not end human civilization, unless by "human civilization" you mean the very specific configuration that habitation patterns, agriculture, national boundaries and numbers of living humans all have at this very moment.
Likely hundreds of millions to a few billion will die that need not have died, wars will be fought, relocation and migration will be of unprecedented scope and scale, there will be hunger and disease ... but "human civilization" will persist through all of that. Thats not a reason to celebrate, it's just a reason to describe the risks and outcomes accurately.
Whose locality bears the brunt of this? Do you mind if we put some where you live?
Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem, and if it does, just how large (time, space, populations, ecosystems) of a problem it will be.
Fissile waste has been a health problem even before first mining uranium in the DRC well before WWII.
Hanford has a standing legacy problem of fissile waste from both weapons and energy work.
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
* https://www.icanw.org/hanford_s_dirty_secret_and_it_s_not_56...
Human activity aside, every valley with a substantial amount of granite rock about the planet pools with radon gas on a daily basis until the wind clears it out.
While this is just one of those things that's a risk on the order of a pack a day smoking habit to those who live there, radon is a fission by product from the breakdown of the uranium within the granite.
I read this as just an attempt to rationalize fissile waste issues as "more of the same". Maybe you truly feel comfortable doing that, maybe you see it as something else.
I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being. And not just a new problem, but one that would last longer than any human civilization has ever lasted.
So, to me, you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
> I, in contrast, view the development of fission-based nuclear mechanisms (whether for explosives or for power generation) as a distinct break with the past, and a point in human history where an entirely new problem was brought into being.
Radiological material that decays after tens of thousands of years is not a unique new problem, for three reasons.
First, half life is inverse to radioactivity. The longer the half life, the less radioactive it is. There are isotopes with a half life of a billion years. Human biology requires potassium and natural potassium is radioactive, but it doesn't kill you because the half life is so long.
Second, the material with ten thousand year half lives doesn't actually have to be stored for ten thousand years. Nuclear reactors convert elements into other elements. You put it back into a reactor and it turns it into something with a shorter half life. Meanwhile that process produces energy with which to generate electricity. It's absurd that we're not already doing this.
And third, the half life is a red herring. Traditional long-standing toxic waste from industrial processes doesn't have a half life because it persists forever. Plutonium is toxic for thousands of years; heavy metals are toxic until the sun burns out. The fact that it eventually decays is an advantage that propaganda has turned into a problem.
I spent a few years in exploration geophysics.
You stated "[No one] has any truly authoritative knowledge on when (or if) fissile waste will become a problem".
I informed you that fissile waste is already a big problem at multiple sites across the planet, several US sites and Russian sites more so than anywhere else, and has been a problem for > 50 years.
You're welcome.
> you comparison of envionmental radon issues with the problems posed by storing and managing the waste produced by fission reactors is ... well, I scarely have words for it.
That's clearly a minor aside .. you ignored the 70+ tonnes of plutonium waste at Hanford.
Billions have been spent dealing with it to date and there's much left to do and spend to clean up that one site.
Don't strawman the issue, it's a large problem and there are tomes on the subject filling shelves.
Humans do need to deal with radioactive waste, this includes the large dams of radioactive waste created as a by product of rare earth and lithium processing.
"Problem" in this context did not mean "a challenging engineering issue to be solved by cleverness and skill and determination". It means "shit dying, ecosystems being destroyed, earth and air and water being polluted, bounds not under human control".
I've been a native english reader for six decades .. your subtextual meaning was not apparent in the comment as written.
Perhaps consider that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else has any truly authoritative knowledge on what is "meant" by third party forum comments and we are all limited to what is clearly written.
If you are truly concerned by the fate of the earth should it become covered in vast tracts of radioactive waste from some yet to be determined mystery source, then perhaps ask yourself could it be worse than when the earth had numerous surface level natural fission reactors?
This certainly is incorrect. Used up fuel can be re-enriched. This isn’t a problem we ever need to solve, because by the time it’s an issue, the waste will have become a viable market product again.
> because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently
It literally isn't. There are two known solutions already. The stupid way, which is to put it in a dry hole in a geologically stable desert, and the smart way, which is to use it as fuel because it isn't actually waste anyway.
Neither of these things are currently happening for only one very specific reason: The global fossil fuel industry (including Russia) lobbies against them because they want to retain a piece of political rhetoric to argue against replacing fossil fuels with nuclear.
But that's a self-solving problem, because if you actually do replace fossil fuels with nuclear then the fossil fuel industry goes away, stops lobbying against anything, and then you can use either of the known solutions. Which means we'd only have to store the material for a few decades until that happens. The solution to that is what we're already doing at existing reactors, which is largely to keep the spent fuel rods at the power plant.
It may also give you some indication of the scale of the problem to realize that you can hold all of the spent fuel ever generated by a reactor that has been in operation for decades on the site of the reactor itself.
Climate change is a decades-order problem. Worst case is end of human civilization.
Waste storage is a problem for once climate change is solved. Worst case is local degradation of environment.
A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France. A grid almost-fully powered by renewables for a full year in an industrialized country is yet to be seen. Renewables do work well when combined to fossil fuels, but we need to get off them.
The Republicans programs for electricity is completely insane and renewables is a much better alternative than drilling more fossil fuels. Nuclear is more realistic but the political will is not there unfortunately.
> Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.
One can be supportive of Democrats and liberals while not agreeing with one policy point.
* Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030.
* Renewable energy sources collectively produced 75% of South Australia's electricity generation in 2023, and are expected to provide 100% of state electric power production from 2027.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Denmark
- https://reneweconomy.com.au/from-zero-to-100-pct-renewables-...
These are very likely misleading stats
> Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030.
This doesn't say anything about how much of Denmark's consumption this covers, only their production
It turns out they import a bunch of their electricity from neighbors
This is a sneaky way to pretend you don't consume fossil fuels
These are locations heading for 100% renewable supply in the very near future.
The capital of South Australia is some distance from the border, even further from the Victorian capital (Melbourne) and is weakly linked compared to EU countries.
Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the neighbouring state.The stats are no more misleading than the GP claim this is in response to, namely "A grid powered almost-fully by nuclear and water is proven feasible by France."
~ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...> These are locations heading for 100% renewable supply in the very near future.
I don't have a gas powered generator attached to my house. Therefore, if I put a solar panel on my house, then my property would have a 100% renewable supply of electricity
Unfortunately that solar panel wouldn't meet my house's electricity demand, so I would have to import the difference from my local power company. But that doesn't change the fact that on my property the supply is 100% renewable
> Or exported .. SA actually exports a great deal of peak renewable energy, it over produces in the daylight and uses that to charge a battery farm or to feed to the neighbouring state.
Peak generation hours are almost never aligned with peak demand hours. Unless those battery farms are capable of meeting the supply during their peak demand (very unlikely, I don't think there is any country with this sort of battery capacity built), then they must be re-importing electricity from those same neighbors who are still burning fossil fuels (or have other more consistent power supply like nuclear or hydro)
The "unsolved problem" for nuclear is doing it time- and cost- competitively with solar.
There is no storage problem.
A breeder reactor plus reprocessing means there is no waste in the first place, and also gives us 100 to 1000 times as much usable uranium.
There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t. To settle this, you basically need to look at what China is doing —- which is to build a lot of nuclear and then exponentially more solar and wind. We’re a huge percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges.
But it isn’t a competition. I’d be just as happy if things were going the other way. Having a clear mental model of the world is just useful. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
>look at what China is doing
China needs everything it can build and more. It's not much the what but rather where, when and how much that is crucial.
I don't get all that either, though I don't mind if nuclear is the future we'd just need to let go of the brakes on it. The other thing to look at is overall growth of each type - China is going ham on wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear yet they've still had to increase the total amount of power generated by coal, oil, and gas anyways. Graphs always predict something like https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.09.27/main.png but we really always end up with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Ch...
Whatever the cheapest (clean) option deployable is people should be wanting to throw it in as fast as we can until we actually hit a technology limit with its usability instead of worrying it won't be able to get us to 100% or not. Instead, the conversation tends to read like we've already succeeded in deploying clean energy fast enough and we should stop looking or that we are still looking for a technology which can cut our current emissions and waiting for an answer. Neither are true, we're still burning more fossil fuels during the day. The US at least managed to hit break even growth in electricity generation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/US_Elect... even after stalling nuclear outputs but there's still a lot to go there all the same. I'm not as familiar with Europe.
About the only stances I've been able to make sense of (even though I don't personally agree with them) are the concern nuclear is a step back rather than a step forward and that's why we shouldn't deploy it and the people that just want the cheapest power regardless of source. Everyone else doesn't seem to have a reason to worry about "what" as much as "how to deploy more" for the moment. The dirtier power tends to be the one that's easier to spin up/down very rapidly anyways - "keep the capacity for now and just run it less when you can" is still a great thing.
I'm not sure what you're arguing that's different than what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that renewables are being deployed on an exponential (S-)curve and nuclear is not. Given the relatively short time frame we have to solve this issue, any viable solution must exhibit this exponential deployment increase.
(This does not mean we'll succeed. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. But any approach that doesn't have this shape is a disaster.)
If you actually care about this problem, the actual question is: how do we get nuclear onto that same exponential pathway that renewables are on? Fiddling around with our existing legacy nuclear plants is so inadequate to our emissions pathways right now that it's equivalent to surrender.
> There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t.
"Exponentially more" means literally nothing. 1 is also an exponent.
China is building literally everything. It's also a geographically diverse country, with wide ranges of different climates. Solar is appropriate for Hainan, but makes little sense for Harbin.
Have a Look at the statistics, before nitpicking. Solar and wind dwarfs nuclear in China and increasingly so.
"Once again, China's nuclear program barely added any capacity, only 1.2 GW, while wind and solar between them added about 278 GW."
Dwarfs is the most apt description. (~250x)
Nope. The devil is in the details.
You're looking at the nameplate capacity. However, for solar the actual capacity factor can be anywhere from 10-25% of that. So you're looking anywhere from ~25-70GW of the average capacity. Nuclear reactors can operate at 90-95% capacity factors.
And the unsolved problem is storage. Right now, solar can partially replace natural gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.
Even considering the capacity factor solar and wind still grows by 60x compared to nuclear. And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“. You could manage the current grid with current chemical battery technology, levelized cost of electricity of that solution is cheaper than nuclear. And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
The real tricky thing will be stuff like chemical processes that depend on hydrocarbons, but nuclear is no help for that.
Nuclear didn’t deliver on an every revolution in the 50s and it won’t today. It’s nice for submarines and to have an industrial base to build bombs but it inherently can’t solve the world’s energy demands.
> And storage is no longer an „unsolved problem“.
Yes, it is an unsolved problem. Even adding 8h backup battery puts solar on par with nuclear: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf (nuclear's capital costs are around $4000/kW).
And seasonal storage (enough energy to last for 2-3 weeks without sun/wind) does not even have a price tag, because it simply doesn't exist.
> And foreseeable technical advances will improve that while no comparable development is on the horizon for nuclear.
Nope. Renewables have comprehensively failed in providing a viable replacement for nuclear power. There is no reasonable pathway ahead with the current technologies for renewables to replace the reliable baseline generation.
It doesn't mean that solar/wind are useless, they work great in cases where the load can be shed, and in warm climates where electricity demand is not so critical.
BESS and solar are not on par with nuclear for several reasons: (1) there is a much faster construction pathway for solar+BESS than nuclear, (2) costs of both PV solar and BESS continue to go down every year, while nuclear doesn't have the same cost curve, (3) manufacturing capacity for solar and BESS continue to rise on the exponential piece of an S-curve (meaning, a consistent multiplicative increase every year) while nuclear construction rates don't look anything like that.
There is a root cause for this: both solar PV and battery storage can be mass-produced in factories, and current nuclear tech can't. If nuclear can get onto a similar growth trajectory, we'll be cooking.
I don't understand why people think a diversity of power generation options is somehow not something you would desperately want in the first world.
Your fashion sense is awesome; however, this is engineering, and we need as many options as we can get. There is zero sense in playing favorites here.
One of the best things to come out of destroying environmentalism is that we can finally get working on renewable energy instead of being blocked by suicidal environmentalists who find wind farms too ugly.
I think you're confusing environmentalists with NIMBYs who use (among others) environmental arguments to argue against projects they don't like.
Scratch an environmentalist and a NIMBY bleeds. I think we’ve seen the effect in America in general and California in particular. The Sierra Club is against infill housing to protect views.
Environmentalists have been pushing wind, solar, etc. for the last half century. There are a few shortsighted people who oppose wind farms but they represent a large, complex multinational movement in the same way that any one of us represents the tech industry, which is to say not at all.
In many cases, if you look at the complainants it’s also reasonable to question whether they’re fully honest about their motivations. For example, the big Martha’s Vineyard project was backed by the biggest environmental group in the area but by the opposition were people like commercial fishermen and various rich cranks like RFK Jr. and the Kochs who thought the change in view would affect their property values but do not otherwise live lives full of obvious strong environmentalist views.
Environmentalists push renewables the way homelessness activists push housing: It’s a great idea if it is near no one, hurts no one’s views, impacts zero birds, affects zero animals, and is not built for profit by the rich.
I suppose I could use their terminology, though: responsibly sited, balancing conservation priorities, and protecting local communities.
I recall, in my college years, being told how Real Communism hadn’t been tried yet. It seems that Real Communism never did get tried and no matter who tries Communism they never try the good Real variety. After years of watching top environmental organizations repeatedly oppose nuclear power as a whole and renewables often, I think I have to say: Real Environmentalism Hasn’t Been Tried Yet. No True Environmentalist Would Do What These Guys Do.
I am an „environmentalist“ and I’m in full and public Sport of the hundreds of windmills in clear view of my town and the solar on every new residential development, including my own house. As are all other „environmentalists“ I know.
I’m comfortable restricting my position to the US. Things may be different elsewhere, even in Canada.
If you’re going to make that kind of sweeping claim representing many different people and groups, I’m going to need to see some data. What you’re describing sounds more like the mechanism I described, where rich people use the language of environmentalism to make their NIMBY activities sound less venal but that’s saying that those specific people are hypocrites rather than a general commentary on the entire field.
What evidence would convince you? If I know the bar, I can see if it can be met.
Anything specific? You started with this claim that environmentalists are blocking wind farms for aesthetic reasons, where are some example projects and who’s blocking them? I gave one (Martha’s vineyard) but in that case the major environmental groups backed it while the opposition was either not in the field (e.g. commercial fishermen) or rich people using environmental language but pretty transparently arguing based on real estate values or politics, so my first question would be how large the overall environmental movement is and how representative these people are within it. If, say, you have Greenpeace pro and RFK Jr. and the Kochs con, it’s hard to say that environmentalists as a whole oppose it.
Have you ever lived near wind turbines?
They take quite a toll on both wild life and people living in the area.
And are often abandoned as soon as they don't generate enough profits/are too expensive to maintain, with no one wanting to pay for cleaning up the area.
Honestly, it's the sound. If you live close enough, it will drive you insane.
A buddy of mine has two on his property, one within a stones’ throw of his house and barns. Not only does the sound not drive him insane, I couldn’t hear it (at all), nor any of the other ~600 in the area.
It depends a lot on geography and (obviously) winds in the area.
I can assure you that it's very real, and very harmful on a daily basis.
No, it won’t. This myth was started in the 2000s by Nina Pierpont who was looking for reasons to oppose wind farms near her property but it’s been studied repeatedly and there’s no credible evidence of any significant impact. Roads are at least as noisy, and have other forms of pollution, but I’ve never seen the same people call for banning cars.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04645-x
Right, so people who claim to have this experience are lying, for no good reason.
While people who have a lot to gain from hiding problems with wind turbines are telling the truth.
Isn't that always how it works?
All of the people advancing those claims also think they have a lot to gain, too. Those claims are hard to evaluate because humans are famously subjective and prone to misattribution, which is why we invented the scientific method. Every high-quality investigation has been unable to find support for them.
This is why many people don't trust "The Science". It's the positivist materialist institutionalist gaslighting. If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited.
Isn't this a tactic of con artists & cult members who have much to gain from public perception & policy?
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist. Don't believe your lying eyes or ears. If you notice somethingnot published, you are automatically wrong. All whistleblowers must be discredited.
It’s striking how many wrong things are packed into that paragraph. Science isn’t trustworthy because of the institution, but because it challenges its theories and anyone can review and repeat it. In contrast, the claims being made here started from someone’s belief that they have a financial benefit to not having windmills nearby and work backwards to construct a supporting narrative.
> If the conflicted institution hasn't published the opinion or the measurements then it doesn't exist.
More accurately, we’re asking for those measurements so anyone else can review them. We’re asking for the methodology so anyone else can review or replicate it. Emotional reactions like yours tend to be a great sign that someone has a strong interest in a particular outcome and humans are notoriously bad at critically evaluating things they want to be true. Scientists are no different, which is why they put so much effort into looking for ways to test their work.
A great similar example are the “electromagnetic hypersensitive” people who claim to have all kinds of health problems caused by wifi or cellular signals. They’ll claim that they’re not being taken seriously because they’re starting backwards from the position that their health issues are caused by EMF and anyone who disagrees is “suppressing” them. The problem isn’t “lying eyes and ears” — their headaches or sleep problems are real - but that they have made a wrong explanation part of their self-identity and are unwilling to reconsider that. Repeated double-blind studies have shown that these people can’t identify EMF at better than chance, and that they’ll report health issues caused by EMF which never existed, and that’s a tragedy because there is a real cause they’d likely be able to find if they were willing to give up on that theory. Many of the wind power opponents are arguing in bad faith trying to make their aesthetic tastes sound scientific but I’m certain that some of these people have real, non-psychosomatic medical issues which are not caused by turbines but could be localized if they put their effort into broader investigations.
So what are the sources for people driven insane by it?
(I have no opinion, but find it mildly suspicious given that I happen to sometimes drive through Germany, and the country seems to be currently less insane than, say, US)
>Don't believe your lying eyes or ears.
This as a sarcastic rallying cry of conspiracy theorists has always amused me.
You ARE aware of visual and auditory illusions right? Or the various ways your brain outright lies to you in order to save a few calories worth of thinking?
How much of your vision is real? Do you know? Can you prove it?
I moved to a house that has the main road on my side. I do not wish it to anyone. I cannot stand noise, and I hear cars 24/7, ambulance at least 10 times a day if not more, and they turn on the siren even at 3 am when there is no traffic because of some specific laws.
I also got a cat (against my will, but gotta take care of her) who wakes me up around 4:30-06:00. :|
I cannot stand the noise pollution. It makes me want to live by the countryside even more.
How close were you? I’ve been on a campus with a wind turbine, don’t recall any sound. But I didn’t get directly under the thing.
I used to live down the hill from 1, and 99% of the time could hear nothing. But on a lucky day when the wind was in the right direction and right strength, you could just hear a faint woosh woosh woosh.
Personally I liked the sound. But we only had 1, so maybe different with many more. Though never heard the wind farms I've stopped by.
Wind, and moving shadows when the sun is behind them.
I find both annoying to live with daily.
And it's not like its a problem that couldn't be solved; I like the idea of wind turbines, just not at any cost.
Seems like the DOGE cuts were overhyped after all. Honestly, anything connected to Trump is overhyped. He has a protective aura of noise. You're not going to figure out what's going on by just reading headlines.
You offer no evidence, but you have convinced yourself so obviously abstracted from the ground that time will prove you were right. It’s a foolish path and I urge you to listen to what is happening. Within the last week government data is no longer accessible to researchers. Long standing government groups and private that study these areas are locked out. Overhyped? No. Like the manager that cuts the budget, gets the raise and sees the fallout much later. Your foolish comment falls flat Carly in line —- there are consequences and they are deadly. Overhyped? No. To suggest a thing is foolish beyond comprehension, it should ruin careers for such a bodacious and absurd point.
Palantir seems to be chugging along just fine.
Pentagon is next.
I’m here to say that the cuts to the NSF, NIH, DoE (both energy and education) and IRS are not overhyped at all; if anything they are badly underhyped.
What is overhyped is the actual “savings” that they are producing with all of this.
What would you cut? I don’t know what I would, but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stability standpoint it’s really not.
> What would you cut?
Were I concerned about fiscal balance, I wouldn't view cutting as the best way to solve the problem, I would raise high-end taxes.
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Insofar as that’s true, it is a direct result of the actions taking thus far this administration, not something they are correcting—and not through fiscal imbalance causing wider problems but by a broad economic collapse directly (which, because the broad economy drives revenue, has fiscal balance problems as a second order impact.)
It's worth noting that this "financial crisis" (which I disagree with) has been brought on by Republican governments. Bill Clinton left a budget surplus which is the easiest way to pay down the debt.
Secondly, if I had to cut something, the obvious target is the military. (Oh boy, ring on the downvotes there...) But hear me out.
Firstly, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than the current debt. With pretty much zero achieved. Focusing less on projecting power, and more on self-defense might deliver better returns.
Of course the military budget can't (and wont) be cut because it's not about the military. It's a carefully controlled jobs program that moves money from the federal piggy bank to pretty much every district in the nation. So it becomes a game of "cut x, but not y, because y is made in my district. It's easier to cut less-specific programs (like Medicare) because that isn't district specific.
Then again maybe the tide has turned, and they could cut military spending. The CHIPS act funneled tons of money to Florida and yet Floridians hated it.
Thanks to you and GP for a reasoned response. Appropriately taxing the wealthy is 100% something we also need to do and yes, I am skeptical that the current administration will move in that direction. Ditto cuts to the monstrous military industrial complex.
I think I’ll refrain from responding to the more inflammatory replies but what really sounded the financial alarm for me personally was this talk [1] given to the house on February 5th by Arizona rep David Schweikert. He makes a really compelling case about the dire state and future of the government’s financial position. If indeed I have been hoodwinked as other comments seem to think, I am open to being convinced otherwise. But this talk is well documented, and seems like a plea from a man who is desperate to sound the alarm so we can prevent disastrous consequences for millions of people in this country.
[1] https://youtu.be/TCyysMU66VA?si=Fjhx2xgYZ0upkxeo
Talk of "financial alarm" for a government with monetary sovereignty is specious. It will mislead you into analyzing government finances as if they were household finances, whereas governments use newly created money rather than going bankrupt. And for our government, this really just means less newly created money going directly into private pockets.
It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.
The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.
Alas I can't watch the YT link right now, so I can't comment on that.
However I will point out that the goal of the current "effeciency drive" has nothing to do with the deficit. I confidently predict that the deficit will be larger, not smaller, at the end of this administration. Primarily driven by tax cuts on the aristocracy.
While personally I don't think the deficit number is terribly concerning (it behaves very differently to personal debt) its interesting to note that Republicans, not Democrats are responsible for most of it.
I think the "hoodwinking" is about the immediacy of the problem, rather than whether it exists or not. Most of the current rhetoric and "efficiency" actions are centered around this idea that we're rapidly approach some near term fiscal cliff that requires action that's drastic in the temporal sense to avoid disaster. No time thinking things through or even following the law, it's a five alarm emergency that requires immediate action! This is where you get ideas like randomly firing new government employees before you even figure out what they do just because they're easier to fire. It doesn't save much money and has a lot of downsides and might not even be legal, but when time is of the essence you could maybe squint and see the argument.
But the reality is that time is not of the essence. Infinitely growing government debt does seem kind of unsuistainble long term, but the scale of the debt combined with the lack of any specific immediate forcing function would seem to favor actions that are drastic in scale but that can be spread over time. In other words the government needs to significantly increase revenue and/or decrease spending, but it doesn't need to do it tomorrow. It's nearly the complete opposite of what's going on now, where making cuts yesterday is considered vastly more important than actually getting to a place where spending and revenue are aligned long term.
> but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Do you have proof of this? Otherwise you are spreading propaganda and lies. “We need to cut stuff because the party I support says so” isn’t proof of a financial apocalypse and is only fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s the very hysteria lying in which you refer.
Do they have proof that 33+ trillion dollars in debt will begin snowballing larger than any country can actually service?
Do we need specific evidence about how debt interest works?
Sorry for how snarky this sounds but your response sounds like you don’t believe that the interest on over 33 trillion dollars is a big deal (and it’s growing…)
Please educate me if that’s not how interest or debt works (again I am dead serious here) but it seems disingenuous to claim that some sort of proof is required to point at the debt and say “Ah that’s not a problem unless you PROVE it’s a problem”
Big scary number does not mean system is broken. That is hysteria. I am not the one making generalized statements about financial apocalypse without some sort of notion of proof. Studies, links, evidence if you’re going to cry apocalypse and be taken seriously.
First of all, I don’t accept the a priori premise that cutting is needed. But if I did want to cut, I would want to have an actual plan for how to figure out what could be cut and what tradeoffs were involved, and then to execute that plan in way that balanced as many equities as possible and was done in a way that followed some sane and transparent process (as well as relevant laws).
Part of that might involve being able to show some kind of financial analysis about what was being cut, to justify it and to get buy-in from congress and other relevant stakeholders, and to do the cuts in a way that minimized their impacts, gave everybody who was going to be affected adequate time to be part of the process, and to plan for how to manage their side of the situation.
Needless to say, what we are seeing now is… none of those things.
A good example of what a saner process might look like would be the federal workforce reductions that followed a big analysis on government efficiency that Al Gore and his team led during the first Clinton presidency; look up the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994 to see how it all went down. They spent six months making a plan, then got it through congress to fund buyouts (it passed with major bipartisan support).
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
The people you get your news from are lying to you, trying to get you to sell out your future to their profit.
The economic issues we’re facing right now were created by the current administration installing heavy taxes on imports while simultaneously creating a nationwide shock with federal spending. This is like declaring that you should save money and doing so by not paying your rent, skipping the doctor, and pushing your car into the sea.
If we rolled back to January 19th, when the economy had been growing steadily and all signs projected that trend to continue, the long-term problems still weren’t catastrophic. The primary problem was that Republicans broke our balanced turn of the century budget when they cut tax rates and started a couple of recreational wars, setting a pattern which has continued where we’re told that we have to give up things the public benefit from because the alternative of rich people paying taxes a few points higher is too miserable to even consider. That debt is a concern, but not as a fraction of the massive American economy – it’s like the difference in medical concern between noticing that you’re gaining 10 pounds a year versus 10 pounds in the last week.
The reason the lying about the crisis has ramped lately is that some of the tax cuts which racked up trillions of additional debt in Trump’s first term expire this year and others in 2028, but the Republicans want to cut taxes even further. It’s mathematically impossible to do that without unpopular cuts to things people like, such as Medicaid or children’s health insurance (CHIP), which is why they’re trying to distract with gross exaggerations of the currently-negative DOGE savings and trying to manufacture this air of impending disaster so people don’t think there’s a choice. While the choice is no longer as easy going back to Biden’s economic growth, it could simply be letting tax rise to the levels we had 20-30 years ago when the economy was thriving.
> I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
If your plan doesn't include passing bills through Congress that increase tax revenue and cut popular social entitlement programs, it is not targeting this problem.
A few dudes firing a bunch of people entirely through executive action has absolutely nothing to do with the financial problem you're worried about. The federal payroll is not a significant cost, and the executive branch doesn't control the budget.
It is no different than a magician doing misdirection. It's up to you whether you want to buy the act.
I don't think you understand how money works. Federal debt doesn't matter beyond its relationship to taxes and inflation. The US needs to raise taxes and address inequality through greater investment in public services and infrastructure, as well as stronger regulations on consumer goods pricing, not less.
> Federal debt doesn't matter beyond its relationship to taxes and inflation
Much like household debt doesn't matter beyond it's relationship to household income?
Macroeconomics is very different from microeconomics. Your spending is my income and my spending is your income. If the government spends a dollar, where does it go?
Presumably it goes to some sort of goods and services. The employees pay income taxes. The businesses pay corporate taxes. And so on.
Similarly, when a business lays off 10,000 people, it's not their problem anymore. Whereas from a macroeconomic policy perspective, "everybody" is the government's responsibility.
National debt and household debt are very different things, because most households aren’t able to print money
> What would you cut?
Nothing. Tax the billionaires.
It wouldn't raise enough money. Probably better to say: "Tax the multi-millionaires", or even people who earn more than 1M USD per year.
What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
> What if we change the tax code such that passive income (capital gains, dividends, coupon payments, etc.) is taxed at a higher rate than active (employment) income?
Doing so by lowering the active income rate wouldn't raise more money, and doing so by raising the passive income rate would kill investment and job creation and send us into a depression.
That already seems to be happening. Business leaders with capital are actively trying to replace workers with AI or offshoring; so what would be the extra damage from codifying that we want folks to put their money here?
>but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.
No you don't know that, because it is outright wrong.
We could hold this level of debt for decades and safely reduce it over a long time frame. Plenty of other countries have done that plenty of other times. Christ, most of Europe only just got done paying us off for WW2!
Indeed, we had almost no debt at the turn of the millennium, after Congress during Clinton's admin cut a bunch of stuff after significant PUBLIC DEBATE, but Bush got us into multiple outright false wars to drop bombs in the desert for two decades and now all of a sudden the republicans are concerned about fiscal responsibility?
Fuck right off.
> At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK
That's literally what they are doing. The proposed budget is just more tax cuts for billionaires. Stop being so goddamned gullible.
The damage is real even if the dollar amount of the cuts is overhyped.
They successfully took down large portions of the CFPB site.
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This is a purely factual article and is very careful not to make recommendations on current or future policy. This website will almost certainly disappear once they realize it's still up.
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Very interesting article, but since it's 16 days old, seems like quite irrelevant news to hit the frontpage.
Polar vortex collapse leads to cold polar air mass moving south over the course of the next few weeks. At least where I am, this article is coinciding within a day or so of the end of "fake spring".
In fact, this might help explain the concept of fake spring in general. The final collapse of the vortex is ultimately caused by warming of the northern hemisphere as spring kicks in. This implies that the pattern of "get pretty warm, then the polar vortex collapses, then you get one more surge of winter weather, and then you get real spring" is actually typical.
Had no idea what led to fake spring so thanks for this tidbit!