David P. Goldman (aka Spengler) has identified that the USA and China are in a war of innovation.
Goldman says problem is NOT what the Chinese are doing, but we [the USA] AREN’T doing.
The U.S. government now spends just 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product on research and development, much of which funds the previous administration’s pet projects in alternative energy. Under Reagan, the US spent 1.2% of GDP on federal R&D. Today only 8% of American college degrees awarded are in engineering, vs. 31% in China. America cannot break out of its long secular stagnation and productivity slump if our high-tech industries continue to atrophy.
Spengler believes that China cannot innovate nearly as well as the United States.
Spengler Recommends
1. We need to tilt incentives to STEM education, just as the Eisenhower Administration did after Sputnik in 1957.
2. We need to focus resources on game-changing technologies (quantum computing, materials science, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, semiconductor manufacturing, and others). We can complain all day about China subsidizing its industries but we can’t really stop it from happening. What we CAN do is target innovations that will ruin China’s massive investments in existing technologies.
3. We need to FORCE the whole supply chain for sensitive defense technologies onshore. That will cost plenty. But national security is like J.P. Morgan’s proverbial yacht: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.
4. We need to persuade the biggest corporations to restore their R&D capacity, by a combination of sticks and carrots. That may not be good for their stock price in the short term. But General Electric is a horrible example of what happens when “shareholder value” through financial engineering replaces fundamentals.
Any STEM education revival will take ten or more years to have a major impact. It would still be good but it is a long-term plan.
Restoring R&D corporate capacity is also a long-term strategy which may not work. Many companies have tried and failed to launch R&D centers.
Focusing on game-changing technologies requires investing in all of them or picking winners. China is competing in all of these areas. The US has a five to ten-year lead in semiconductor technology but other countries narrowed the semiconductor gap.
It is not certain that the US will win with quantum computing and materials science. It is also not clear any edge or dominance would translate into a broad lead in technology or innovation.
SpaceX has Shown Massive Research Productivity
The US has not provided enough support to SpaceX. SpaceX represents a massive leap forward in rockets to fully reusable rockets. It will also enable low-earth orbit satellites that can go beyond 5G communication. China is working to emulate SpaceX but the US has not thrown its full support into SpaceX.
SpaceX rocket development has gotten more return than 20X the research return than money spent on Boeing and Lockheed SLS rockets. A lead in space technology would be useful for broad lead in communications, sensors and military technology.
Constant Factory Re-invention
Elon Musk has also identified constant innovation and re-innovation of factories as a productivity goal. This has not been achieved but would be a superior approach to innovation. Instead of just trying to ratchet up R&D to a trillion dollars.
In 2016, Elon Musk floated the idea of remaking his factories every two years. The goal was to achieve ten times the productivity within ten years. Elon had to step back from that objective with production problems with the Tesla Model 3. However, a larger national research goal should be to constantly re-invent supply chains and factory productivity.
What really matters to accelerate a sustainable future is being able to scale up production volume as quickly as possible. Elon wanted to transition to focus heavily on designing the machine that makes the machine — turning the factory itself into a product. A ten-fold improvement in efficiency is possible.
Develop the Best NASA NIAC Innovations – Advanced lithium-ion drive, Antimatter and Fusion
There are breakthrough innovations in space from NASA NIAC. The leading edge of research should have strategic development funding.
JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) will be testing a 50000 ISP lithium ion thruster within 4 months. This is part of a NASA NIAC phase 2 study to use lasers to beam 10 megawatts of power to new ion drives. This could enable space travel all over the solar system at over 1 million mph.
There is also development of a new approach to antimatter propulsion.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Establishment Science [ES] is proven to be nothing but Institutionalized Grant Whoring Fraud, period.
And ES is to blame for that. 100%.
Totally agree with you on this.
In fact, I think that the states or better yet, the feds, should offer up $-for-grades in needed fields.
So, for engineering, if somebody gets 4.0, they get 100% of their tuition/room/board ‘returned’. Normally, that would simply flow to the next semester.
If you get 3.0, then you get say 75%.
If you get 2.0, then you get 25%.
This would be ONLY for needed fields. So, Chem, Physics, Math would be the same.
For something like Microbiology, it is not as much needed, so start lower. 4.0 pays 75% and then continue downward.
OTOH, loads of unemployed business and liberal arts. So, nothing in those arenas. The idea is to encourage ppl to not only move to these fields, but also to do well in them. After all, in businesses, we normally get paid for success.
You want STEM graduates then you should give 100% scholarships to qualified students for US economy needed STEM areas (sorry Dino lovers). STEM degrees are hard and the jobs you get are often narrow and demanding. Many with STEM degrees left these fields since they start high but go no-where or are no longer considered employable once they at 50. That is a lot of risk. Get rid of the additional risk of needing to pay for a STEM degree in the first place.
I like and agree with everything you just said. A global killer with a 10-20 year ETA is just a resource if you have the infrastructure to harness it.
“as well as sticks for nations that steal IP” Exactly. Hard to build a company to build the future if people steal your hard work. Elon Musk would not have SpaceX if someone stole his reusable launcher technology and mass produced his work without having to worry about the cost of developing it. The penalties should be severe, immediate and really has already started. If this issue is not resolved soon, the penalties will accelerate. Donald Trump is a first shot, not the end of this issue. Our politicians are waking up to the fact that if they do not take steps to address this, they will not have jobs.
We had plenty of socialism instead of privatization in the 1960’s and still had innovation is I believe what he meant, that education is more important. I am definitely against (most) socialism and an overdeveloped government, but he did raise some very good points. +1 like for him.
Try doing a search for “Dusty Plasma Based Fission Fragment Nuclear Reactor”; The file you’re looking for is “aiaa05.pdf”
The idea is that you have fuel suspended in a plasma in the form of charged dust. The dust particles are small enough that the fragments from each fission event escape the dust particle without losing significant energy. So the dust is constantly dumping high energy particles into the plasma.
It’s the fission fragments that are dumped as reaction mass, or used to generate power from MHD. The fuel is retained.
I would be more interested in dusty plasma fission reactors; They have the potential to go to much higher temperatures than solid state or molten salt reactors, with appropriately higher thermodynamic efficiency. Efficiencies upwards of 90% are possible with this approach.
Probably more feasible for use in space, because the much higher thermal efficiency minimizes the size of heavy radiators, and they can also be used directly for propulsion.
Fission is past the need for breakthroughs, all it needs now is incremental improvements.
There’s always talk about fusion breakthroughs, because without some massive developments, fusion isn’t working.
Current temperature trends largely support the models, where “largely support” means, the models are still within the 95% confidence level of “corrected” measurements, but just barely, and all on the warm side of the data. But only after the data has been manipulated. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but it’s getting pretty blatant here in the US. Most of the warming in the US comes from the readings being “corrected”.
A quick search does suggest it’s happening in other countries, too.
No one is talking about going Venus although of course Eocene temperatures were very hot.
Current temperature trends largely support current models so if you disagree fundamentally with the way the models have been designed, the evidence is against you.
Being so sure of yourself though, I assume you’ve published a paper arguing your gut feelings a little more rigorously??
You forgot step 5.5; The very slight warming due to CO2 is supposed to cause more evaporation, and the H2O is a *much more powerful* greenhouse gas.
Warming based on CO2 is uncontroversial, but is also limited to trivial levels, because CO2 already almost completely blocks the frequencies it effects. Diminishing returns, you know, the response to added CO2 is logarithmic.
My problem with this is it assumes that the climate system has a very, very strong positive feedback built into it, (Because warming due to H2O ought to increase evaporation, too!) right on the verge of thermal runaway. Now, I suppose it’s possible we just happen to be living at the one moment in planetary history where the planet is on the verge of going Venus, but hasn’t quite done it yet. But I’m dubious about that, it would be quite the coincidence.
“A functioning, cheap, exportable molten salt reactor” does not cause a single moment of shocking news headlines that can turn public beliefs, and hence government policies, around and set them in a new direction.
That needs a single, incontrovertible, easy to understand, impossible to deny event that is simple enough for even the MSM to understand and explain.
Otherwise, the French nuclearization of most of their power grid in one decade would have already have achieved that.
Remember that “global warming” is not a single concept or claim. It is several concepts in a row.
1. Some common gases allow light to pass through, but absorb strongly at some infrared frequencies.
2. As a result they let the sun’s energy through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface, but reduce the amount that escapes.
3. As a result the Earth’s surface is warmer than it would otherwise be (also Venus, and Mars)
4. Mass use of fossil fuels and changes in land use have greatly increased the CO2 content of the Earth’s atmosphere.
5. As a result more energy is trapped on Earth than would otherwise be the case.
6. This will change the climate that we experience
7. On net these changes will be very negative.
8. The only way to prevent this is wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels and modern land use practices.
9. The only way to achieve that is by handing vast amounts of money and power to the very people telling us this story.
These all get lumped together as “global warming”. But it’s clear that these range from hard science that can be proved in a lab through controlled testing, through to almost as hard science that is based on external measurements, through to models that try to simplify complex systems, through to pure politics.
If someone disagrees with “global warming” they could be arguing with points 6, or 7, or 9. But it’s very tempting to assume they disagree with 1, 2 or 3 and so people start going on and on about “proven science”.
The reverse is also true. Some people disagree with points 8 and 9, so they assume that this means the earlier stages are also rubbish because they are always told that this is all the same “science of global warming”.
It’s not necessarily about technological advances. Science is a methodology and so it underlies every field of research. Evolutionary research or climate science are no different to other fields of research when it comes to the integrity of the process. The same methodology is applied and the same review and publishing processes operate. So if you attack one field you are in effect attacking all fields since they share the general methodology and process.
Even considering technology, evolutionary principles for instance have been adopted widely in computer science for optimisation problems so there are indeed many technological spin offs.
Also, what defends climate change fundamentally is not activists or politicians. It is the scientific literature. Any review of climate science in a reputable journal demonstrates this, with the biggest review being the IPCC reports. Hence again it is science that is under attack when non-climate scientists deny it.
Lastly, it is simply not logical to conflate policy responses with the scientific conclusions regarding the causes of warming. There is no necessity to deny the later just because you don’t like the former. And yet I do believe that is why most people do deny the later.
Astronautrics.
Ad astra!
“Maybe if the Chinese set up a moon base? Or landed a man on Mars first? ”
China is nowhere near either of those.
A functioning, cheap, exportable molten salt reactor though could happen.
“Increase NASA’s annual budget to $30 billion a year (~$10 billion increase)”
Why would you do that? So they can waste money on SLS faster? NASA should be a R&D shop that works to get things to Technological Readiness Level 6 and then work with industry to get it in to use.
Cancel ISS, cancel SLS, take $10 billion/year from NASA’s budget and move it to colonization of LEO/Moon. You will have a thousand lunar colonists in five years if you say that you are willing to pay $4 million per colonist for the first thousand people.
Knowing that there is a starting bounty of $4 billion dollars to put 1,000 people on the moon will kickstart a colony.
S: winning
T: winning
E: winning
A: losing
M: winning
1. We need to tilt incentives to STEM education, just as the Eisenhower Administration did after Sputnik in 1957.
STEM education is impacted. Too many students for too few teachers and classrooms. Best advice: universities should fire humanities professors and hire more STEM teachers. I’m sorry but modern humanities at most universities teach students to be perpetually aggrieved. If college degrees result in higher unemployment rates than people who didn’t go to college then cancel the major. It just saddles students with debt.
2. We need to focus resources on game-changing technologies (quantum computing, materials science, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, semiconductor manufacturing, and others). We can complain all day about China subsidizing its industries but we can’t really stop it from happening. What we CAN do is target innovations that will ruin China’s massive investments in existing technologies.
US is doing great in quantum computers.
US is doing great in missile defense (ABM, lasers, etc).
US is doing great in semiconductor manufacturing.
Might help to identify some areas where private sector and military aren’t world leaders (e.g. nuclear power)
3. We need to FORCE the whole supply chain for sensitive defense technologies onshore. That will cost plenty. But national security is like J.P. Morgan’s proverbial yacht: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.
Well duh. Need to focus on security for defense contractors as well as sticks for nations that steal IP.
4. We need to persuade the biggest corporations to restore their R&D capacity, by a combination of sticks and carrots. That may not be good for their stock price in the short term. But General Electric is a horrible example of what happens when “shareholder value” through financial engineering replaces fundamentals.
If companies won’t “just restore” their R&D spending then up to government to put grants out there and to make it clear that the Fed won’t get in the way of doing things. I get the feeling that half the reason why nobody does anything with nuclear power is that the expect the Fed to quash their attempts at making anything.
If you were a physician diagnosing my health, I would seek a second opinion. It’s NASA and the congressional cabal who are engaging in corporate socialism. By the way, what country do you harken from? It’s always good to know where these punish the minority and working class ideas are coming from
” Invest in education, not privatization, which has no real evidence of working once you strip out the expulsions and other tricks designed to goose test results (or even test results already, which are often no better than public schools in good neighborhoods). ” <– Sorry, Leftist propaganda doesn’t cut it anywhere but in their echo chambers.
For that matter…
No longer worshiping “stupid” and regaining core competency in institutions requires privatization en masse, and where something must remain a government function, it must be handed over to institutions created by voluntary compacts among the states unless the constitution explicitly states it is a national government function. Politics as they are exist to permit politicians to profit materially and in “favors” in return for arbitraging rents and graft.
Does worrying about climate change really correlate with attitude to government?
A few decades ago Milton Friedman, a small government advocate, advocated pollution taxes to get people to cut emissions. This was before most people were aware of CO2 as a problem so he was thinking of pollutants like SO2. He figured that a tax on emissions would get people to use the cheapest way to cut emissions.
The real killer development here is Von Neumann machines, replicators. Because of the lack of a pre-existing biosphere to live in, development of the solar system beyond Earth is extremely infrastructure intensive. With self-reproducing factories, it becomes easy.
I’m convinced that we’re closer to being able to create self-reproducing factories than most people realize. Sure, they won’t be compact, they’ll be city sized. But we could pull it off if we really tried.
We ought to try.
Oh wait, that’s Goldman Sachs xD
Isn’t Goldman the reason why the US doesn’t have the public funds to spend on R&D?
We, the US, are too busy debating whether “we” are diverse enough. Too fixated on everyone getting their fair share. We cannot choose winners anymore; All are, in some way or another. Probably have lost the ability to collectively discern what the face of a winner looks like.
“Arts”; Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math.
It’s the touchy-feely foot in the door, to turn STEM back into just the general curriculum again.
Frankly, the Creationism/Evolutionism debate is a red herring. It’s not like great advances in technology are showing up as a result of applying Darwinian concepts to biological systems; it’s mostly a question of who gets to control the narrative in classrooms. In any case, the whole fact that we have such an aberration as “Creation Science” is proof that even the religious hold science itself in high enough regard to attach the term to their narrative.
Regarding climate change ideologues, the folks defending climate change are more likely large government defenders, not small government. After all, you can’t impose a carbon tax with small government.
I agree with your views on applied vs. basic science, though.
What’s the “A” in “STEAM”? Administration? Architecture? Agronomy? Arts & Crafts?
The industrialization of the solar system is the long term end game. The actor that wins that race will dominate. The amount of resources and energy available outside Earth dwarfs everything.
It makes sense to stimulate that development to speed it up. Doing it through militarization of LEO and GEO zones is probably the most cost effective solution. This will utilize the US delta-v superiority and budgets don’t have to be increased. Money can be re-routed from other military branches.
Launch and deploy solar panels, lasers, space telescopes, particle accelerators, space interferometers, moon bases, mining equipment, fuel stations, orbital tugs, rotovators, hotels etc.
Maybe some future corporation will break free from national states on Earth. At some point, it would be hard to prevent. A system with more lawyers than engineers will not conquer space. It looks as if China will be the only state trying to seriously stay in control. However, things can change quickly due to unexpected events.
Just imagine what would happen if we detected a global killer with 10 – 20 years ETA.
Or first contact…
We’d have to do several things to bring back the innovation of the 1960s, when we literally had a “Moon Shot.”:
1. Eliminate most or all corporate buybacks through higher taxation of capital gains and other disincentives for corporate buybacks, which used to be illegal until 1980. The economist William Lazonick has built his career around what corporations do with their money, and he says over 90% of profits go to buybacks and dividends, which leaves precious little for R&D or even expansion; it does add to corporate debt, though. He cites Amazon as a counter-example of how fast a company can grow without buybacks in this recent NY Times article: “The Secret of Amazon’s Success.” Most of this year’s tax break fueled $800b buyback surge will go down as an historic waste of money when the market corrects, as may already be starting.
2. Invest in education, not privatization, which has no real evidence of working once you strip out the expulsions and other tricks designed to goose test results (or even test results already, which are often no better than public schools in good neighborhoods). Colleges should be held to account to produce productive citizens and not just collect money (gov’t or student) for producing diplomas; they should lose funding if they can’t produce proficient graduates. STEAM (not just STEM) emphasis, of course.
3. The U.S. has to stop worshiping “Stupid.” Our media, politicians, celebrities, etc. all cater to Stupid as if that’s a way of hurting elites, when it just hurts everyone instead.
4. Regain Core Competency in every public agency. The military spends more than the next 9 put together and is barely better than China or Russia. We spend 2X the average on health care as OECD countries and get the worst outcomes. Much of the problem is outsourcing to the point where the agencies don’t even know what they’re doing. This gets into campaign finance reform too.
I know something about this (and have even written to Elon Musk) because I and my Engineer partner spent 3,000 hours modeling the most innovative building in the world, a 23,000,000sf arch over the East River. 3-minute Fly-through Video & summary details here: http:// bit.ly/2OKN2UM. Energy neutral with 5 off-grid energy sources, unique elevators (based on inverted elevators like in the St. Louis Gateway Arch), provides 7,250 apts at all levels. Of course, the biggest obstacle is getting permission from moribund bureaucracy, zoning laws, and NIMBYism. Major A&E firms and Developers say it can be built…but will we be allowed to? Currently being shopped to China, where it may wind up being built first instead of crowded downtown Manhattan-Brooklyn, which needs it as much or more.
One more thing: NBF should re-enable links! Innovation thrives on sharing. NBF can set an example.
yes
First, what “new approach to antimatter propulsion”
China has one man rule. So does Spacex.
True innovation is almost universally the product of one man, or one woman. Even if it’s simply that that one person defines a goal, clears a path and, through genius or fear, compels others forward.
1. Increase NASA’s annual budget to $30 billion a year (~$10 billion increase) which would still be less than 1% of annual Federal expenditures (Elon Musk thinks NASA’s budget should be at least 1% of the US annual budget). This would also allow a lot more funding for private companies such as Space X, the ULA, and Blue Origin. There is no doubt in my mind that such an increased budget would have an enormous innovative impact on the US economy.
2. Create an astronaut corp for the Space Force with at least a $2 billion annual budget for sending Space Force astronauts into space aboard private commercial spacecraft.
3. Allow the TVA to become a national (instead of regional) public power company specializing in nuclear and renewable energy production. The TVA should purchase commercial nuclear sites that intend to shut down and replace those nuclear reactors with the new generation of small nuclear reactors. TVA reactors should also start using some of the new thorium fuels that utilize plutonium from spent fuel. The TVA should sell all of its coal assets and convert all of its natural gas power plants into methanol burning power plants that can use renewable methanol produced from the pyrolysis urban and rural biowaste.
4. The Navy and the Department of Energy should be allowed to purchase at least 8 underwater nuclear reactors from France (FlexBlue) for the production of renewable synfuels from the pyrolysis of garbage shipped from coastal towns and cities from around the world and from the Navy’s new synfuel from seawater technology in the Wake Island EEZ area. Of course, there should be incentives for domestic US companies to manufacture similar under nuclear reactors. The mass production of small underwater nuclear reactors and floating energy barges using synfuel produced from remotely sited nuclear reactors in remote American EEZ territorial waters would revitalize America’s ship building industry while allowing the US to quickly transfer from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable nuclear synfuel economy.
Marcel
There are a number of impediments to science in the US. From the religious attacking it because of evolution, to small government ideologues attacking it because of climate change, to the misconception that you can get away with funding applied and not fundamental science.
China is a long overdue wakeup call. Drop the ideology and let scientists do what they’re best at.
Anti science America, Woo. Yep, When all your intelligent people are laughed at and ridiculed, you know you are living in America Which spends under 1% of its budget on schooling, instead, republicans be like WOOOOHOOO GUNS GUNS GUNS XANAX AND VIAGRA WOOOHOOO WE GOT THE GOVERMENT BY THE BALLS!
I haz a plan for STEM excellence in the USA. First, we depopulate most of California of virtually everyone who is not an engineer, a scientist, mathematician, technician, machinist, designer or… a busty blond / brunette / red head woman. And we allow really good chefs to remain for the free restaurants. We set up California as a STEM paradise 10 gorgeous women for every geek. Open it up to EVERY STEM specialist on Earth. Within a year. There would be no scientists left in China… or anywhere. And we could rule the world.
Total innovation will be achieved with the breakup of the Mega society. Designs will be placed on line ready for production by 3D machines available to a civilization of small egalitarian communities and anyone will be able to improve on them. Naturally the end result will be self sufficiency as we will progress to a point where it is very easy to produce almost anything from the ground, water air and the vegetation around us. There will be a method to sort out the better designs and incentivize the designers, but it will be of a currency way more aligned with the natural way people are meant to thank each other.
America needs another Sputnik.
Maybe if the Chinese set up a moon base? Or landed a man on Mars first?
Or… if North Korea set up a nuclear cannon and put a 5000 tonne satellite in orbit. It doesn’t have to actually DO anything (Sputnik 1 just beeped IIRC), but even just a steel cylinder that was the orbital mausoleum to hold the body of Dear Leader or something would kick every major power into a serious reevaluation of their entire approach to space.
You want STEM graduates then you should give 100% scholarships to qualified students for US economy needed STEM areas (sorry Dino lovers). STEM degrees are hard and the jobs you get are often narrow and demanding. Many with STEM degrees left these fields since they start high but go no-where or are no longer considered employable once they at 50. That is a lot of risk. Get rid of the additional risk of needing to pay for a STEM degree in the first place.
I like and agree with everything you just said. A global killer with a 10-20 year ETA is just a resource if you have the infrastructure to harness it.
“as well as sticks for nations that steal IP” Exactly. Hard to build a company to build the future if people steal your hard work. Elon Musk would not have SpaceX if someone stole his reusable launcher technology and mass produced his work without having to worry about the cost of developing it. The penalties should be severe, immediate and really has already started. If this issue is not resolved soon, the penalties will accelerate. Donald Trump is a first shot, not the end of this issue. Our politicians are waking up to the fact that if they do not take steps to address this, they will not have jobs.
We had plenty of socialism instead of privatization in the 1960’s and still had innovation is I believe what he meant, that education is more important. I am definitely against (most) socialism and an overdeveloped government, but he did raise some very good points. +1 like for him.
Try doing a search for “Dusty Plasma Based Fission Fragment Nuclear Reactor”; The file you’re looking for is “aiaa05.pdf”
The idea is that you have fuel suspended in a plasma in the form of charged dust. The dust particles are small enough that the fragments from each fission event escape the dust particle without losing significant energy. So the dust is constantly dumping high energy particles into the plasma.
It’s the fission fragments that are dumped as reaction mass, or used to generate power from MHD. The fuel is retained.
I would be more interested in dusty plasma fission reactors; They have the potential to go to much higher temperatures than solid state or molten salt reactors, with appropriately higher thermodynamic efficiency. Efficiencies upwards of 90% are possible with this approach.
Probably more feasible for use in space, because the much higher thermal efficiency minimizes the size of heavy radiators, and they can also be used directly for propulsion.
Fission is past the need for breakthroughs, all it needs now is incremental improvements.
There’s always talk about fusion breakthroughs, because without some massive developments, fusion isn’t working.
Current temperature trends largely support the models, where “largely support” means, the models are still within the 95% confidence level of “corrected” measurements, but just barely, and all on the warm side of the data. But only after the data has been manipulated. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but it’s getting pretty blatant here in the US. Most of the warming in the US comes from the readings being “corrected”.
A quick search does suggest it’s happening in other countries, too.
No one is talking about going Venus although of course Eocene temperatures were very hot.
Current temperature trends largely support current models so if you disagree fundamentally with the way the models have been designed, the evidence is against you.
Being so sure of yourself though, I assume you’ve published a paper arguing your gut feelings a little more rigorously??
You forgot step 5.5; The very slight warming due to CO2 is supposed to cause more evaporation, and the H2O is a *much more powerful* greenhouse gas.
Warming based on CO2 is uncontroversial, but is also limited to trivial levels, because CO2 already almost completely blocks the frequencies it effects. Diminishing returns, you know, the response to added CO2 is logarithmic.
My problem with this is it assumes that the climate system has a very, very strong positive feedback built into it, (Because warming due to H2O ought to increase evaporation, too!) right on the verge of thermal runaway. Now, I suppose it’s possible we just happen to be living at the one moment in planetary history where the planet is on the verge of going Venus, but hasn’t quite done it yet. But I’m dubious about that, it would be quite the coincidence.
“A functioning, cheap, exportable molten salt reactor” does not cause a single moment of shocking news headlines that can turn public beliefs, and hence government policies, around and set them in a new direction.
That needs a single, incontrovertible, easy to understand, impossible to deny event that is simple enough for even the MSM to understand and explain.
Otherwise, the French nuclearization of most of their power grid in one decade would have already have achieved that.
Remember that “global warming” is not a single concept or claim. It is several concepts in a row.
1. Some common gases allow light to pass through, but absorb strongly at some infrared frequencies.
2. As a result they let the sun’s energy through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface, but reduce the amount that escapes.
3. As a result the Earth’s surface is warmer than it would otherwise be (also Venus, and Mars)
4. Mass use of fossil fuels and changes in land use have greatly increased the CO2 content of the Earth’s atmosphere.
5. As a result more energy is trapped on Earth than would otherwise be the case.
6. This will change the climate that we experience
7. On net these changes will be very negative.
8. The only way to prevent this is wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels and modern land use practices.
9. The only way to achieve that is by handing vast amounts of money and power to the very people telling us this story.
These all get lumped together as “global warming”. But it’s clear that these range from hard science that can be proved in a lab through controlled testing, through to almost as hard science that is based on external measurements, through to models that try to simplify complex systems, through to pure politics.
If someone disagrees with “global warming” they could be arguing with points 6, or 7, or 9. But it’s very tempting to assume they disagree with 1, 2 or 3 and so people start going on and on about “proven science”.
The reverse is also true. Some people disagree with points 8 and 9, so they assume that this means the earlier stages are also rubbish because they are always told that this is all the same “science of global warming”.
It’s not necessarily about technological advances. Science is a methodology and so it underlies every field of research. Evolutionary research or climate science are no different to other fields of research when it comes to the integrity of the process. The same methodology is applied and the same review and publishing processes operate. So if you attack one field you are in effect attacking all fields since they share the general methodology and process.
Even considering technology, evolutionary principles for instance have been adopted widely in computer science for optimisation problems so there are indeed many technological spin offs.
Also, what defends climate change fundamentally is not activists or politicians. It is the scientific literature. Any review of climate science in a reputable journal demonstrates this, with the biggest review being the IPCC reports. Hence again it is science that is under attack when non-climate scientists deny it.
Lastly, it is simply not logical to conflate policy responses with the scientific conclusions regarding the causes of warming. There is no necessity to deny the later just because you don’t like the former. And yet I do believe that is why most people do deny the later.
Astronautrics.
Ad astra!
“Maybe if the Chinese set up a moon base? Or landed a man on Mars first? ”
China is nowhere near either of those.
A functioning, cheap, exportable molten salt reactor though could happen.
“Increase NASA’s annual budget to $30 billion a year (~$10 billion increase)”
Why would you do that? So they can waste money on SLS faster? NASA should be a R&D shop that works to get things to Technological Readiness Level 6 and then work with industry to get it in to use.
Cancel ISS, cancel SLS, take $10 billion/year from NASA’s budget and move it to colonization of LEO/Moon. You will have a thousand lunar colonists in five years if you say that you are willing to pay $4 million per colonist for the first thousand people.
Knowing that there is a starting bounty of $4 billion dollars to put 1,000 people on the moon will kickstart a colony.
S: winning
T: winning
E: winning
A: losing
M: winning
1. We need to tilt incentives to STEM education, just as the Eisenhower Administration did after Sputnik in 1957.
STEM education is impacted. Too many students for too few teachers and classrooms. Best advice: universities should fire humanities professors and hire more STEM teachers. I’m sorry but modern humanities at most universities teach students to be perpetually aggrieved. If college degrees result in higher unemployment rates than people who didn’t go to college then cancel the major. It just saddles students with debt.
2. We need to focus resources on game-changing technologies (quantum computing, materials science, missile defense, anti-submarine warfare, semiconductor manufacturing, and others). We can complain all day about China subsidizing its industries but we can’t really stop it from happening. What we CAN do is target innovations that will ruin China’s massive investments in existing technologies.
US is doing great in quantum computers.
US is doing great in missile defense (ABM, lasers, etc).
US is doing great in semiconductor manufacturing.
Might help to identify some areas where private sector and military aren’t world leaders (e.g. nuclear power)
3. We need to FORCE the whole supply chain for sensitive defense technologies onshore. That will cost plenty. But national security is like J.P. Morgan’s proverbial yacht: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.
Well duh. Need to focus on security for defense contractors as well as sticks for nations that steal IP.
4. We need to persuade the biggest corporations to restore their R&D capacity, by a combination of sticks and carrots. That may not be good for their stock price in the short term. But General Electric is a horrible example of what happens when “shareholder value” through financial engineering replaces fundamentals.
If companies won’t “just restore” their R&D spending then up to government to put grants out there and to make it clear that the Fed won’t get in the way of doing things. I get the feeling that half the reason why nobody does anything with nuclear power is that the expect the Fed to quash their attempts at making anything.
If you were a physician diagnosing my health, I would seek a second opinion. It’s NASA and the congressional cabal who are engaging in corporate socialism. By the way, what country do you harken from? It’s always good to know where these punish the minority and working class ideas are coming from
” Invest in education, not privatization, which has no real evidence of working once you strip out the expulsions and other tricks designed to goose test results (or even test results already, which are often no better than public schools in good neighborhoods). ” <-- Sorry, Leftist propaganda doesn't cut it anywhere but in their echo chambers. For that matter... No longer worshiping "stupid" and regaining core competency in institutions requires privatization en masse, and where something must remain a government function, it must be handed over to institutions created by voluntary compacts among the states unless the constitution explicitly states it is a national government function. Politics as they are exist to permit politicians to profit materially and in "favors" in return for arbitraging rents and graft.
Does worrying about climate change really correlate with attitude to government?
A few decades ago Milton Friedman, a small government advocate, advocated pollution taxes to get people to cut emissions. This was before most people were aware of CO2 as a problem so he was thinking of pollutants like SO2. He figured that a tax on emissions would get people to use the cheapest way to cut emissions.
The real killer development here is Von Neumann machines, replicators. Because of the lack of a pre-existing biosphere to live in, development of the solar system beyond Earth is extremely infrastructure intensive. With self-reproducing factories, it becomes easy.
I’m convinced that we’re closer to being able to create self-reproducing factories than most people realize. Sure, they won’t be compact, they’ll be city sized. But we could pull it off if we really tried.
We ought to try.
Oh wait, that’s Goldman Sachs xD
Isn’t Goldman the reason why the US doesn’t have the public funds to spend on R&D?
We, the US, are too busy debating whether “we” are diverse enough. Too fixated on everyone getting their fair share. We cannot choose winners anymore; All are, in some way or another. Probably have lost the ability to collectively discern what the face of a winner looks like.
“Arts”; Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math.
It’s the touchy-feely foot in the door, to turn STEM back into just the general curriculum again.
Frankly, the Creationism/Evolutionism debate is a red herring. It’s not like great advances in technology are showing up as a result of applying Darwinian concepts to biological systems; it’s mostly a question of who gets to control the narrative in classrooms. In any case, the whole fact that we have such an aberration as “Creation Science” is proof that even the religious hold science itself in high enough regard to attach the term to their narrative.
Regarding climate change ideologues, the folks defending climate change are more likely large government defenders, not small government. After all, you can’t impose a carbon tax with small government.
I agree with your views on applied vs. basic science, though.
What’s the “A” in “STEAM”? Administration? Architecture? Agronomy? Arts & Crafts?
The industrialization of the solar system is the long term end game. The actor that wins that race will dominate. The amount of resources and energy available outside Earth dwarfs everything.
It makes sense to stimulate that development to speed it up. Doing it through militarization of LEO and GEO zones is probably the most cost effective solution. This will utilize the US delta-v superiority and budgets don’t have to be increased. Money can be re-routed from other military branches.
Launch and deploy solar panels, lasers, space telescopes, particle accelerators, space interferometers, moon bases, mining equipment, fuel stations, orbital tugs, rotovators, hotels etc.
Maybe some future corporation will break free from national states on Earth. At some point, it would be hard to prevent. A system with more lawyers than engineers will not conquer space. It looks as if China will be the only state trying to seriously stay in control. However, things can change quickly due to unexpected events.
Just imagine what would happen if we detected a global killer with 10 – 20 years ETA.
Or first contact…
We’d have to do several things to bring back the innovation of the 1960s, when we literally had a “Moon Shot.”:
1. Eliminate most or all corporate buybacks through higher taxation of capital gains and other disincentives for corporate buybacks, which used to be illegal until 1980. The economist William Lazonick has built his career around what corporations do with their money, and he says over 90% of profits go to buybacks and dividends, which leaves precious little for R&D or even expansion; it does add to corporate debt, though. He cites Amazon as a counter-example of how fast a company can grow without buybacks in this recent NY Times article: “The Secret of Amazon’s Success.” Most of this year’s tax break fueled $800b buyback surge will go down as an historic waste of money when the market corrects, as may already be starting.
2. Invest in education, not privatization, which has no real evidence of working once you strip out the expulsions and other tricks designed to goose test results (or even test results already, which are often no better than public schools in good neighborhoods). Colleges should be held to account to produce productive citizens and not just collect money (gov’t or student) for producing diplomas; they should lose funding if they can’t produce proficient graduates. STEAM (not just STEM) emphasis, of course.
3. The U.S. has to stop worshiping “Stupid.” Our media, politicians, celebrities, etc. all cater to Stupid as if that’s a way of hurting elites, when it just hurts everyone instead.
4. Regain Core Competency in every public agency. The military spends more than the next 9 put together and is barely better than China or Russia. We spend 2X the average on health care as OECD countries and get the worst outcomes. Much of the problem is outsourcing to the point where the agencies don’t even know what they’re doing. This gets into campaign finance reform too.
I know something about this (and have even written to Elon Musk) because I and my Engineer partner spent 3,000 hours modeling the most innovative building in the world, a 23,000,000sf arch over the East River. 3-minute Fly-through Video & summary details here: http:// bit.ly/2OKN2UM. Energy neutral with 5 off-grid energy sources, unique elevators (based on inverted elevators like in the St. Louis Gateway Arch), provides 7,250 apts at all levels. Of course, the biggest obstacle is getting permission from moribund bureaucracy, zoning laws, and NIMBYism. Major A&E firms and Developers say it can be built…but will we be allowed to? Currently being shopped to China, where it may wind up being built first instead of crowded downtown Manhattan-Brooklyn, which needs it as much or more.
One more thing: NBF should re-enable links! Innovation thrives on sharing. NBF can set an example.
yes
First, what “new approach to antimatter propulsion”
China has one man rule. So does Spacex.
True innovation is almost universally the product of one man, or one woman. Even if it’s simply that that one person defines a goal, clears a path and, through genius or fear, compels others forward.
1. Increase NASA’s annual budget to $30 billion a year (~$10 billion increase) which would still be less than 1% of annual Federal expenditures (Elon Musk thinks NASA’s budget should be at least 1% of the US annual budget). This would also allow a lot more funding for private companies such as Space X, the ULA, and Blue Origin. There is no doubt in my mind that such an increased budget would have an enormous innovative impact on the US economy.
2. Create an astronaut corp for the Space Force with at least a $2 billion annual budget for sending Space Force astronauts into space aboard private commercial spacecraft.
3. Allow the TVA to become a national (instead of regional) public power company specializing in nuclear and renewable energy production. The TVA should purchase commercial nuclear sites that intend to shut down and replace those nuclear reactors with the new generation of small nuclear reactors. TVA reactors should also start using some of the new thorium fuels that utilize plutonium from spent fuel. The TVA should sell all of its coal assets and convert all of its natural gas power plants into methanol burning power plants that can use renewable methanol produced from the pyrolysis urban and rural biowaste.
4. The Navy and the Department of Energy should be allowed to purchase at least 8 underwater nuclear reactors from France (FlexBlue) for the production of renewable synfuels from the pyrolysis of garbage shipped from coastal towns and cities from around the world and from the Navy’s new synfuel from seawater technology in the Wake Island EEZ area. Of course, there should be incentives for domestic US companies to manufacture similar under nuclear reactors. The mass production of small underwater nuclear reactors and floating energy barges using synfuel produced from remotely sited nuclear reactors in remote American EEZ territorial waters would revitalize America’s ship building industry while allowing the US to quickly transfer from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable nuclear synfuel economy.
Marcel
There are a number of impediments to science in the US. From the religious attacking it because of evolution, to small government ideologues attacking it because of climate change, to the misconception that you can get away with funding applied and not fundamental science.
China is a long overdue wakeup call. Drop the ideology and let scientists do what they’re best at.
Anti science America, Woo. Yep, When all your intelligent people are laughed at and ridiculed, you know you are living in America Which spends under 1% of its budget on schooling, instead, republicans be like WOOOOHOOO GUNS GUNS GUNS XANAX AND VIAGRA WOOOHOOO WE GOT THE GOVERMENT BY THE BALLS!
I haz a plan for STEM excellence in the USA. First, we depopulate most of California of virtually everyone who is not an engineer, a scientist, mathematician, technician, machinist, designer or… a busty blond / brunette / red head woman. And we allow really good chefs to remain for the free restaurants. We set up California as a STEM paradise 10 gorgeous women for every geek. Open it up to EVERY STEM specialist on Earth. Within a year. There would be no scientists left in China… or anywhere. And we could rule the world.
Total innovation will be achieved with the breakup of the Mega society. Designs will be placed on line ready for production by 3D machines available to a civilization of small egalitarian communities and anyone will be able to improve on them. Naturally the end result will be self sufficiency as we will progress to a point where it is very easy to produce almost anything from the ground, water air and the vegetation around us. There will be a method to sort out the better designs and incentivize the designers, but it will be of a currency way more aligned with the natural way people are meant to thank each other.
America needs another Sputnik.
Maybe if the Chinese set up a moon base? Or landed a man on Mars first?
Or… if North Korea set up a nuclear cannon and put a 5000 tonne satellite in orbit. It doesn’t have to actually DO anything (Sputnik 1 just beeped IIRC), but even just a steel cylinder that was the orbital mausoleum to hold the body of Dear Leader or something would kick every major power into a serious reevaluation of their entire approach to space.