Comment by raptor99
14 hours ago
Whew, very glad that a leading scientific voice like DiCaprio is speaking of this to world leaders. Solid foundations.
14 hours ago
Whew, very glad that a leading scientific voice like DiCaprio is speaking of this to world leaders. Solid foundations.
> Whew, very glad that a leading scientific voice like DiCaprio is speaking of this to world leaders.
General public does not know the scientists by name. When they say something, few people listen. When a famous person says the same thing, many more people listen. That is the world we live in.
I'll take DiCaprio or any famous person promoting a good cause any day.
Mark Jacobson for example proposes “low-cost solutions to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of WWS [wind, water and solar power] across all energy sectors in the continental United States between 2050 and 2055”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1510028112
This proposal uses unrealistic assumptions, for example it uses "copper plate model" to model electric grid of United States - it assumes that the future electric grid could transmit electric energy without any capacity limitations and the buildout of this grid would be cheap.
The proposal assumes gigantic buildout of hydropower to be used as backup solution for the times when solar and wind could not generate enough electricity. To be precise: increasing hydro capacity by 13x, which would result in water discharges that would regularly dwarf historic 100-year floods and wash away population centres on America's major river systems.
With unrealistic assumptions you can get any result you want.
Mark Jacobson has done PhD research on the role of black carbon and other aerosol chemical components on global and regional climates, under atmospheric scientist Richard P. Turco - who developed and popularized the science of nuclear winter. Because of this I think Jacobson is trying to get world of nuclear weapons, nuclear technology and nuclear power by any means necessary, even if this means publishing unrealistic proposals.
Jacobson's push toward 100% WWS is not a realistic solution to decarbonize world, it's just way to give politicians and celebrities arguments against nuclear power. "We don't need nuclear technology anywhere in the world, because in future we will have 100% wind, water and solar power energy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solutions_Project
Jacobson should say load and clearly the truth: I don't have realistic proposal to decarbonize world, I just want the world to get rid of nuclear bombs.