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Open access notables It s always a special pleasure to note an article including Skeptical Science s founder John Cook in the author roster. Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy includes not only Cook as a collaborator but also a cast of other familiar authorities on human cognition in connection with climate science, in particlar how our mental equipment struggles with following a continuous thread of truth through a tangled knot of disconnected confusion in the form of misinformation. We re not necessarily very good thinkers in the best of circumstances. We often fail to think clearly when we re in the presence of misinformation or synthetic ignorance, especially when it s calculated and crafted exactly for the purpose of paralyzing competent thinking. In their abstract the authors note Democracy relies on a shared body of knowledge among citizens, for example trust in elections and reliable knowledge to inform policy-relevant debate. One can extend that ....
Open access notables Among five items in this week s government/NGO section is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory s annual report Utility-Scale Solar, 2023 Edition, chock-a-block with statistics and graphs quantifying an explosion of installed permanent energy sources. Photovoltaic deployment is accelerating and now outpacing wind as costs have rapidly plunged. Given the natural properties of wind and solar energy supplies, reserve power storage is very much in frame. Current battery storage capacity is about 22GWh, what a sizeable nuclear plant could deliver over the course of 10 hours or so. There s of course much more to be done but it s also true that we re only now beginning to seriously tackle the job of energy modernization. ....
Open access notables Net zero is only a distraction— we just have to end fossil fuel emissions. The latter is true but the former isn t, or not in the real world as it s likely to be in the immediate future. And just just doesn t enter into it; we don t have a simple problem on our hands. Net zero is afflicted by various carpetbaggers and the fossil fuel industry itself— plus plain old human nature in the form of wishful thinking. But fully eliminating hydrocarbon fuels and non-fuel CO2 emissions from key industrial processes spanning from agriculture through production of concrete and on to manufacture of steel is going to be a long process. Likely we ll never be able to eliminate GHG side-products from our culture. Quite arguably we re not going to stop eating and using concrete and steel, and equally it s arguable that if we want to keep global warming contained to survivable limits then it s better not to embrace a fantasy and instead maintain our grip on ....
Open access notables Included in this week s government/NGO section the World Meteorological Organization has released its annual retrospective of our previous year s climate situation, State of the Climate in 2022 (pdf): ....