Papageorgakopoulos

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@StefanosTyros Το πρόβλημα με αυτούς τους χάρτες είναι οτι δεν λαμβάνουν υπόψιν τους τυχόν αναδασωμένες εκτάσεις (φυσικές ή μη). Θα ήταν πολύ ενδιαφέρον να είχαμε αυτή την πληροφορία.

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@BlacklionCTA Mechanical failure first. Emptied tanks. Emergency landing, then fire. That s the sequence

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@Isabel_Schnabel It seems Greece and Spain labels are mixed-up on the primary surplus chart?

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@dampedspring Many thanks 🙏!!

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

I got lots of request to fact check the below claim

More art than science, but I reckon the US consumed ~68 billion tons of coal 1850 to 2025 (that's 175 years)

China will consume roughly the same amount from 2015 to 2029 (that's 15 years). So not quite a "decade," but almost!

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Japan has the highest rate of housing construction in the OECD and the lowest rate of housing prices in the OECD

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I’m warning for some time now that in the case of a supra-regional blackout, utilities may not have enough „rotating mass“ to easily re-start the EU synchronous grid. Nobody is prepared for that.

Stop RES expansion & bring back those German nukes - now! Grid security requires power plants, not hobby electricity. Avoid the wrath of people while u can.

@_FriedrichMerz @c_lindner @vonderleyen

[Deutsch Explains @DeutschExplains]

The controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman.

And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster, because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little.

So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die. Now, the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate.

It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee.

Hence, we need a stance of problem fixing, not just problem avoidance. It's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches.

If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either. The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature and with plans to live at the higher temperature, and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply.

Some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They're not central to the human effort to face this problem or problems in general.

And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right, not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely, is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So, take two stone tablets and carve on them, on one of them, carve, problems are soluble. And on the other one, carve, problems are inevitable.

@DavidDeutschOxf

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

CHART OF THE DAY: As the 2024-25 harvest gets underway in Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean, **wholesale** olive oil prices have crashed.

Retail olive oil prices will follow down very soon (they have already in origin countries like Spain / Italy) #oliveoil #aceitedeoliva

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

In the past decade I have seen the media rewriting history by declaring that:

(a) the fossil fuel industry "knew" of climate change already in the 1970s and yet those bad people kept the secret from us and that

(b) climate scientists have said all along along that carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming

This rewriting of history is bad because it prevents us from correctly identifying our mistake.

First, note that those two narratives (a) and (b) don't agree with each other. If climate scientists knew a century ago what carbon dioxide emissions would do, how come that the fossil fuel industry could keep that secret from us?

Answer: Everyone who was paying attention knew the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there was no evidence to back up the idea that fossil fuel emissions were causing temperature changes.

I repeat: THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE. NO ONE HAD ANY EVIDENCE. Neither the scientists in academia nor those in the fossil fuel industry. No one could have known in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s that the models were correct.

If you think they could have "known" just from model projections -- at which point did we stop asking for evidence to back up models?

Second thing to notice is that the fact that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere was so widely known that I learned of it in middle school in the 1980s. So much about it being a big secret or something.

The reality is much more complicated: Scientists -- both in academia and in the fossil fuel industry -- developed a set of increasingly good models for the climate. However, few scientists had confidence in these models -- that goes both for those in the industry as well as in academia.

As a physicist I would say of course the models were correct because it's just physics and physics trumps. But fact is that most scientists back then didn't have high confidence in their own models.

You don't need to take my word for this, you can just look at the published literature. Or maybe you are old enough to remember. This is why there was for decades so much talk about natural variability and so on.

This is why the IPCC in its first report did very carefully state that "The observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability".

This is why Michael Mann in his book explains why his PhD adviser Barry Salzman "was unconvinced in the early 1990s that we could establish the human impact on our climate" and that "this was a tenable position then".

The fossil fuel industry did its best to pretend the evidence took longer to come in than it actually did. Around the mid 1990s they started spreading the idea of "unsettled science" and so on. But that didn't work well, and they soon switched to claiming that while climate change is real it's actually beneficial.

To make a long story short: Blaming the fossil fuel industry for supposedly "knowing" that their product causes climate change and not telling us is nonsense. They knew as much or as little as the scientists, and that knowledge was long in the public record anyway.

I am not a fan of the fossil fuel industry but that scientists in the fossil fuel industry reproduced what those in academia said was not the main problem. The problem was that no one listened to the scientists!

If you are one of those people who like to blame the supposedly evil fossil fuel industry, you have fallen for a myth that the media has created probably to excuse why they themselves weren't covering climate change as much as they should have.

The reason this matters is that by rewriting history we are misattributing the mistake.

So please stop repeating this stupid idea that the fossil fuel industry "knew" something that the rest of the world didn't. It's not what happened.

Oh, and also stop the idiotic accusation that I am being paid by fossil fuel industry. I have no sympathy for the fossil fuel industry and it's obvious that they tried to obfuscate the science. (If not very successfully.) I am just not willing to accept a false narrative even if that aids a party I dislike.

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

1/5
I haven't seen this confirmed elsewhere, but Antara reports that "Indonesia will soon impose up to a 200-percent import tariff on Chinese goods to mitigate the effects of the ongoing trade war between China and the United States."

https://t.co/dGSV37Z78u.

[MrBeast @MrBeast]

I’m gonna give 10 random people that repost this and follow me $25,000 for fun (the $250,000 my X video made)

I’ll pick the winners in 72 hours

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@BickerinBrattle George, how is Habermas philosophy related to theEu project? I fail to see the link here. Could you explain your reasoning?

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

I've been working on a video about net zero -- what is it, how will we get there, how far are we along the way, etc. Just finished recording. Research has been extremely depressing.

In an nutshell, every serious source (incl the IPCC) agrees that there's no way we'll reach net zero without substantial and fast investment into extensive carbon removal. We're talking about an increase by at least a factor 100 (!) by 2050. Yet this carbon removal doesn't even exist in plans. That's right, even if you add up all the plans that have been put forward -- which I'd say are a pie in the sky already -- it wouldn't work.

The cherry on the rotten tart of net zero are environmental groups (infamously, Greenpeace) who are opposed to carbon capture and storage (CCS) at fossil fuel plants, and since most people can't tell the difference between CCS and carbon removal, it's getting in the way of net zero. Like with nuclear power, it's increasingly the so-called "environmentalists" who are in the way of protecting the environment.

I'm not a fan of offshore drilling either, but complaining about CCS is broken logic.

I'll have more details about this in the upcoming video (will be out in in a few weeks) but the more I think about it, the more I feel like the origin of this problem is presumably well-meaning activists (let's not name names) whose we-can-do-it attitude has made people think reaching net zero is much easier than it really is.

These are all difficult topics with many nuances, but if I was in charge of running the world I'd quit. Sorry, I meant to say if I was in charge of running the world, my course of action would be:

(a) Nuclear power everywhere it's geographically safe enough. I know that no one really likes nuclear power, but it's the least bad option to decarbonize energy intensive industry quickly.
(b) Bio energy with carbon capture and storage everywhere there's large amounts of quickly re-growing biomass available, it would make sense for rich countries to finance such facilities elsewhere
(c) Expand and modernize the electric grid asap because without that nothing else will work -- according to a recent IEA report there's 3000 GW (!) of renewable energy power plants waiting to be hooked up onto electric grids that can't cope
(d) electric vehicles (the world is actually doing quite well with that one, if it wasn't for point (c))
(e) synthetic fuels produced with renewable energy -- it's energetically hugely inefficient but realistically the only way to decarbonize aviation quickly, you may want to do this in regions with reliable sunshine (Australia, Africa)

The reason I didn't say anything about wind and solar is not that those are unimportant but that those are faict going fine.

My twitter feed has been greatly enriched by @EliotJacobson who is as doom as doom gets which I think is the appropriate reaction in the current situation.

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@LivreVenir Το επάγγελμα ειναι φύσει συντηρητικό παντως, αλήθεια ειναι αυτό αλλά η πηγή του κακού προέρχεται απο την κτηνώδη απαιτούμενη χαρτούρα, τους δεκάδες εμπλεκόμενους φορείς κ την απίστευτη πολυνομία.

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@LivreVenir Οχι, οικείο μου πρόσωπο κ παρακολουθώ την ταλαιπωρία τους χρόνια.

[Η ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙΝΗ @Kathimerini_gr]

Τι θα συνέβαινε αν έπεφτε στην Αττική βροχή ανάλογη με εκείνη που έπεσε στη Θεσσαλία; Πόσος κόσμος θα μπορούσε να εκτεθεί σε κίνδυνο; Κι όμως, το ερώτημα αυτό πλέον έχει απαντηθεί
https://t.co/2qmqxnjK6d

[Papageorgakopoulos @Aristomenis]

@dampedspring @dopamine_uptake Understood. Many thanks for your quick reply. Always greatly appreciate your takes and your investment framework, Sir