I flagged this as off-topic, but I feel strongly enough about climate change that I want to point out that although Booker doesn’t go out of his way to explain that he is a significant figure in climate change denial, he wrote one of the most elaborate climate change skeptics' treatises. It’s reviewed by the guardian which basically explains that most of Booker’s arguments are the same awkward shape as everyone else's–"Well, last summer was cold, so the world couldn’t be warming,“ for example.
In particular, the “fiddling” that he accuses the scientific community of doing is generally considered a best practice. It’s not nefarious, and it’s not trying to mislead people. It’s done with the assumption that taking a measurement in a suburb will end up with a different result from taking a measurement in an urban area, and for those of us who have spent time in San Francisco, we know that even neighborhoods that are next to each other can have vastly different climates. The alterations that are regularly made are to make the data more accurate–imagine you’re measuring temperature data from several different points in San Francisco, and you use a combined set of data to form your conclusions.
Not explaining why scientists do these adjustments is a kind of intellectual dishonesty.
Before you can start turning off coal plants, you need an alternate source of baseline power.
Hydro? The environmental damage can be huge (just looking at the flooded land, never mind its effects on the rest of the river ecology). And there are only so many suitable rivers, often inconveniently placed.
Solar? Vastly uneconomic, and the materials needed to manufacture photovoltaics are nasty stuff. There are some promising non-PV approaches (IIRC California had some sort of mirrors-heating-water approach?), but nothing that’s “consumer-ready”.
Nuclear? It works, and it’s what China’s doing where they don’t have to worry about voter approval. But good luck getting that to fly in the west.
I flagged this as off-topic, but I feel strongly enough about climate change that I want to point out that although Booker doesn’t go out of his way to explain that he is a significant figure in climate change denial, he wrote one of the most elaborate climate change skeptics' treatises. It’s reviewed by the guardian which basically explains that most of Booker’s arguments are the same awkward shape as everyone else's–"Well, last summer was cold, so the world couldn’t be warming,“ for example.
In particular, the “fiddling” that he accuses the scientific community of doing is generally considered a best practice. It’s not nefarious, and it’s not trying to mislead people. It’s done with the assumption that taking a measurement in a suburb will end up with a different result from taking a measurement in an urban area, and for those of us who have spent time in San Francisco, we know that even neighborhoods that are next to each other can have vastly different climates. The alterations that are regularly made are to make the data more accurate–imagine you’re measuring temperature data from several different points in San Francisco, and you use a combined set of data to form your conclusions.
Not explaining why scientists do these adjustments is a kind of intellectual dishonesty.
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Before you can start turning off coal plants, you need an alternate source of baseline power.
Hydro? The environmental damage can be huge (just looking at the flooded land, never mind its effects on the rest of the river ecology). And there are only so many suitable rivers, often inconveniently placed.
Solar? Vastly uneconomic, and the materials needed to manufacture photovoltaics are nasty stuff. There are some promising non-PV approaches (IIRC California had some sort of mirrors-heating-water approach?), but nothing that’s “consumer-ready”.
Nuclear? It works, and it’s what China’s doing where they don’t have to worry about voter approval. But good luck getting that to fly in the west.