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Last edited Sun May 3, 2026, 07:43 PM - Edit history (2)
It's not from a cute video from any source or paper working to justify the squandering of investment in so called "renewable energy" of 5.689 trillion dollars for no result. It's not "spin;" it's not cheering for obscene and frankly depressing destruction of wilderness shown in the opening picture of the video that I am far too disgusted to watch. It's not about applauding land developers, copper mines, batteries or any other of that useless junk, spreading fragile glass over vast stretches of land, or about cows grazing under solar cells.
It's from, again, data.
Now.
The data is obtained from a single variable, time, yielding a single dependent variable, concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide. As noted in the OP for any one with a modicum of reading comprehension:
As I always remark in this series of posts, if one looks, one can see that the rate of accumulation recorded at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory is a sine wave superimposed on a roughly quadratic axis:
It refers to this graph, again always produced, every damn time I post about these new terrifying records, every spring, every year, for how ever many years I've been at it:
I would expect a competent high school student - I'm sure my son could have done this when he was 15 years old - to be able to generate a quadratic equation by simple integration of the data, as I described here in 2022:
When I joined DU in 2002, I believed that solar and wind were important tools for addressing climate change. I was supportive of money spent on the infrastructure and research devoted to this theory. Of course, when I joined DU in November of 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 372.68 ppm. For the last week for which Mauna Loa data has been posted as of this writing, the week beginning July 3, 2022, that measurement was 419.73. I trust - hopefully not naively - that people can add and subtract. The first derivative, the rate of change of CO2 concentrations as measured by 12 month running averages of weekly Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory data, in November 2002 in the week I joined DU, was 1.66 ppm/year. Given the last data point as of this writing, it has reached 2.45 ppm/year.
Let's do something very, very, very crude, just as an illustration with the understanding that it is unsophisticated but may be illustrative:
As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.
Let's do something very, very, very crude, just as an illustration with the understanding that it is unsophisticated but may be illustrative:
As of this writing, I have been a member of DU for 19 years and 240 days, which works out in decimal years to 19.658 years. This means the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of change is 0.04 ppm/yr^2 for my tenure here. (A disturbing fact is that the second derivative for seven years of similar data running from April of 1993 to April of 2000 showed a second derivative of 0.03 ppm/yr^2; the third derivative is also positive, but I'll ignore that for now.) If these trends continue, this suggests that “by 2050,” 28 years from now, using the language that bourgeois assholes in organizations like Greenpeace use to suggest the outbreak of a “renewable energy” nirvana, the rate of change, the first derivative, will be on the order of 3.6 ppm/year. Using very simple calculus, integrating the observed second derivative twice, using the boundary conditions – the current data - to determine the integration constants, one obtains a quadratic equation (0.04)t^2+(2.45)t+ 419.71 = c where t is the number of years after 2022 and c is the concentration at the year in question.
A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes. The boundary conditions in the text above were those of 2022, when the post about the lifetime of Danish wind junk was written.
The spreadsheet I use to keep track of the data produced by the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory updates the boundary conditions determined by the data of the simple 2nd order differential equation that again, a reasonably precocious high school student in 10th or 11th grade should be able to solve to model the quadratic axis, two simple integrations.
It gives a crude, but reasonably accurate, I think model for the data. (It would probably be instructive for a kid to learn about modeling using this very, very, very, very simple case. It beats the shit out of the leaky bucket problem they gave when I was in high school.)
It predicts 500 ppm in January of 2045, and about 513 ppm in 2050.
I'm sure in 2050, antinuke "renewable energy will save us" cults will still be predicting a so called "renewable energy" nirvana. No amount of data, no amount of information can change the dogma of a cult, not a burning world, destabilized weather of alternate droughts and floods, extreme heat, dead rivers, failed crops. I mean here we are and still we hear this shit.
Or alternatively, in a world strewn with the wreckage of obscene solar and wind junk, all of the world's most valuable mines played out, the forests burned, sunken cities, they'll be no time or resources for cults.
If there is history still, perhaps its practitioners in whatever academies that remain will wave angry fingers at the people responsible for these literally earth shattering - destructive on a planetary scale - delusions.
By the way, there is no inflection in the data, none at all, on inspection for the onset of the mining and wilderness destroying expenditure of that more than 5 trillion dollars beginning in 2015. It's unchanged.
On inspection.
I repeat my only real exercise in soothsaying:
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Hand this video to someone more credulous than I'm willing to be, cheering for the grazing cows under solar cells. I'm not buying it.
Have a nice week.
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