As an amateur astronomer, one measure of quality of life (or at least viewing), is how little artificial lighting a region has. I would consider turning off this stuff off as a huge improvement to my quality of life!

Watson: Maybe I got a different view, being a physics major. It was math math math, and then more math math math. Far more effort and attention expended to give the students the necessary math, than the actual science specific stuff anyway. Perhaps for students who aren’t on the graduate school track, that isn’t true? Or perhaps it has changed since the early seventies? It was certainly true that the science courses for non science majors track avoided math when possible.

And of course the nonsense economics found at sites like this one has this assumption deeply embedded in it, when it attempts anything more than snark.

Oh dear: just as some economists have recommended using the amount of light one can see from space as a method of judging economic development in a region.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15199

“GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures.”

That’ll certainly put that measure into reverse.

This just isn’t true. At an undergraduate level particularly, science is typically taught with a minimally acceptable degree of rigor, and as little mathematics as can possibly be managed for the subject. Which leaves us with a lot of practicing scientists
later running into limitations due to their own lack of statistics and mathematics, but that’s a different story (I’ve had many friends and colleagues lament this later in their careers).

You are quite right that this is a problem in popularization in particular, but it isn’t a problem of too much rigor, so much as a problem of any at all.

Communicating science results that are not intuitively obvious to the layman is clearly a very difficult thing. And I think we are only close to beginning of grappling with how to deal with this issue.

Almost no one ever underlines this point. Even people who accept the idea of global warning sometimes slip into thinking that the uncertainty, if any, will probably make things less bad instead of worse.

It’s because the present state is taken as the norm, and global warming is taken as a possible deviation from the norm, and the predicted answer is interpreted as “as much as x” rather than as “x or even greater”.

To put it differently, people subconsciously mislocate the uncertainty. Instead of thinking that “2, +/- 2” means 2 to 4 degrees higher, they slip into interpreting it as “+/- 2” simply, i.e. 2 higher or 2 lower.

I’m not sure that ill will or even stupidity is always involved, just the careless reading of statistics.

Clearly onshore wind is taking the best sites first. This might be counterproductive, as there is an impediment to tearing down old low efficiency turbines hogging the best locations. I see this everyday on my commute over the Altamont pass. The highest ridges are littered with barely functioning first generation windmills, while the newer stuff, is located far down the hillside. But, for solar, there is no danger of using up the good sites, just about anywhere that the cloudiness is not high will do.

But, of course any rational plan would involve a lot of scaling back of our current wasteful usage. Things that come to mind, outdoor lighting, open frozen foods displays at grocery stores. Using high capacity heating and cooling systems in lieu of better insulation in our building. A decent medium term mix to shoot for:
(1) Perhaps a quarter nuclear, as a rock solid background level.
(2) Enough renewables that at least during good generating periods nuclear and renewables can cary the day.
(3) Natural gas turbines combined with storage capability for natural gas (which can be supplemented with bio-gas) for swing capacity.
(4) A healthy dose of demand management.
(5) Where available hydro, and hydro storage. But, don’t kid yourself, only a few regions will have enough
This doesn’t take us all the way to carbon neutral, as we will eventually need to get to, but it should take us at least 75 percent of the way. Certainly sufficient for the first twenty to twenty five years of transition.

As opportunities, and needs change with time, what is best to do after say 2035, can best be answered later on.

Some technical notes. Solar thermal is promising. I doubt it will be economical to use thermal storage to cover more than perhaps a single cloudy day. And winter/summer insolation varies substantially. So it is not ideal. But, when fossil fuels runs out (or are outlawed), we will have little choice but to live within the means of the power generating system we can afford.

Remember, MacKay is writing primarily about the UK, where solar is not likely to be very useful. There will be some regions without good renewable opportunities. Luckily the bulk of the world population doesn’t live in high latitude cloudy climates such as Northern Europe.

Uranium resources and waste are not serious problems because fuel is so very low a part of the total cost of nuclear, and waste storage is a solved problem – sticking it under mountains until people come to haul it back out for the eventual breeders is a perfectly acceptable solution, and infinitely less hazardous than the deaths we currently accept from coal.

Of course, we gotta go whole hog for efficiency. We will also have to transition to a paradigm which allows considerable load management (i.e. certain energy intensive industry can only operate when the sun shines or the wind blows).

Incidentally 450-550 was chosen, because it is concievable we could reach it, not because there is some known tipping point that that would magically avoid. Besides the target is for the maximum atmospheric concentration, not the long term average. Once emissions stop, the CO2 concentration should begin going down, as non-atmospheric reservoirs (such as the oceans) catch up with the atmospheric concentrations. If we add carbon sequestering geo-engineering, it will go down a bit faster.

2: Like one, but much faster (10 years). Pick a design, build several hundred reactors with government money and planning power, close down the coal/gas fired stations asap, regardless of how new they are.
Cost: this writes off the economic value of the existing generating plant. (note that any plan that cuts emmisions quickly will do this) which is somewhere in the region of a trillion dollars.
3: like one, but with renewables in place of nukes. Given the relative price of nuclear and renewable electricity + storage.. This will cost somewhere in between 5 and 10 times what plan two would. And, note, still take 30-40 years!

One take-home point: we need to reduce our use of fossil fuels so substantially that it’s as near as dammit to eliminating them entirely.